betulaster
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There is a Russian saying (it's frequently ascribed to Saltykov-Shchedrin, and sounds to me like something he'd write, but I'm not able to properly source this) to precisely that effect... but not in the way you imagine. Roughly translated, it goes like this - "In Russia, the severity of the laws is compensated by the non-neccesity to obey them".
(I don't have too much time for this, so apologies for shoddy sources down in the answer. Please let me know if you'd like more proper ones, I'll be sure to come back to that later.)
My personal model of Russian corruption maps very well onto Banfield's amoral familism. In a nutshell, the model is... (read 698 more words →)
One thing that seems important to note: nuclear warfare need not occur in a vacuum. If countries possessing nuclear weapons are trading all-out strikes, as in your model, they probably are in a state of (World?) war already, and either have fought with other weapons prior to the nuclear exchange, or plan to continue to do so after it. This may include use of non-nuclear weapons with high collateral damage, like chemical or biological agents, or saturation bombardment targeting high-population areas. I wonder if that skews the assessment of damage in any meaningful way.
This is not really erisology in any way, but I think specific topics of discussion/interactions with specific people may very well become Ugh Fielded if you have an initially bad experience.
Since you address "how likely meeting a certain politically charged event would be", I assume your question is focussed on what I've called "Polling 2", which concerns itself with predicting future events.
Yes, you're right, and I should have been more clear - thanks for pointing that out.
The best way to put the matter into quantitative terms may be to ask the interviewee what odds he would give in a bet on the event occuring
I don't know if I'm convinced that would work. I think that most people fall into two camps regarding betting odds. Camp A is not familiar with probability theory/calculus and doesn't think in probabilistic terms in their daily life... (read 396 more words →)
I don't have good data to back this up, but I have a feeling that people are thinking in more binary terms than you expect. More specifically, I conjecture that if you were to ask someone for how likely meeting a certain politically charged event would be, they would parse your question as a binary one and answer either "almost certainly" or "very unlikely" - and when pressed for a number, would give you either between 90-100%, or 0-10% respectively.
I don't have a full answer, but here's what seems important to consider - in my experience, the baseline for the level of confidence in speech that is associated with competence and authority is a lot lower in intellectual circles like LessWrong, compared to the general public.
This is because exposure to rationality and science usually impresses into someone that making mistakes is "fine" and an unavoidable component of learning, and that while science has made very impressive progress there is still a lot to learn and understand about the world. On the other hand, the real world and social opinion usually very closely associate mistakes with failure and the ensuing moral penalties... (read more)
How do people read LessWrong? I subscribe to the RSS feed of the front page, but that tends to be suboptimal, as some posts aren't that well-aligned with my interests or are questions/discussion starters as opposed to being mid/longform reads that I'd mostly want to read LW for.
Illustration from Michael Haddad for Wired. It was originally commissioned for an article about biohackers, but I find that it captures the spirit of agency and self-improvement that is well-aligned with some of rationalist values.
Hah, thanks. At the risk of stroking my ego one too many times - can I ask you to speculate on why that might be the case?
What I mean is - I'm sure what I wrote has some meritoric value (I would've kept it to myself otherwise), but I expected this post to do similarly to how other comparable posts do on LW (first-time post, political topic, not a lot of hard analysis and abstraction, not a lot of sources linked to). Hearing that... (read 938 more words →)