betulaster

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 no... (read more)

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 ... (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. 

I may attempt a more comprehensive analysis to suggest some tests later (although I'm not sure that would be very successful  - my rationality skills feel like they are nascent at best), but from a superficial read, it seems to me that points A13 and B10 are essentially the same - both deal with stupidity becoming more widespread as a matter of consumerist/capitalist politics/market foces. That could be opposed by noticing that B10 deals with actually smart individuals who pretend to be stupid to reap the benefits, and A13 deals with actually stupid i... (read more)

Of course, you have to modulate that by the possibility that allowing people to live off their UBI or blow it on frivolous spending will cancel out those good effects. That question is beyond my pay grade, and I suspect nobody really knows

This makes me think of something. Can't we look at what people who experienced windfall gains spent their newfound money on? Looking into lottery winners seems like an easy enough to obtain sample, although not unproblematic - it takes a certain kind of person to participate in a lottery in the first place. But if we can ... (read more)

This is interesting. I wonder how this would apply to the literature on investing mistakes (esp. amateur investors like people who get burned on Robinhood). 

If your idea is correct, IMO people then must be thinking about investing money using priors, concepts and feelings from their own spending experience. Maybe some patterns of systemic bias/mistakes associated with trying to use the "feeling for what N dollars buys and feels like spending" can be teased out.

Eventually - sure. But for that eventuality to take place, the "electrical shock tyranny" would have to be more resilient than any political faction we've known of and persist for thousands of year. I doubt that this would be possible.

Sorry if I wasn't clear enough. My critique refers to your point about scenarios where humans evolve like a dystopia not being applicable because if it were, suffering should be a rare occurence - if I understand you correctly, you're stating that if we could evolve to like dystopias, by this point in time we would have evolved to either avoid or like any source of suffering. My counterpoint to this is that there is a massive sub-multitude of sources of suffering that do not affect evolution in any way because they are too transient to effect any serious selection pressure.

You could perhaps engineer scenarios where humans will genuinely evolve to like a dystopia

I think that this kind of misrepresents the scale on which evolution happens - it's not one generation, or two, it's hundreds and thousands, and it's taken relatively good care of the sources of suffering that are fundamental enough to persist and keep the selection pressure on across that time frame - we're pretty good at not eating things that are toxic, breeding, avoiding predators and so on. The problem with evolution is that a significant n... (read more)

This post reminds me of an insight from one of my uni professors.

Early on at university, I was very frustrated with that the skills that were taught to us did not seem to be immediately applicable to the real world. That frustration was strong enough to snuff out most of the interest I had for studying genuinely (that is, to truly understand and internalize the concepts taught to us). Still, studying was expensive, dropping out was not an option, and I had to pass exams, which is why very early on I started, in what seemed to me to be a classic instance o... (read more)

I understand that this may be well outside the scope of your writing, but still - any chance you could actually post some epistemic defense decks for Anki? Or are there any good ones already available?

(Apologies if the question is stupid, I'm somewhat new to LW)

Disclaimer: this comment includes a lot of speculation on philosophy and art movements that I myself don't have an in-depth understanding of. Please take this with a grain of salt. If anyone reading this understands the matter better and sees me saying BS, please correct me.

I think that one thing that can be helpful to examine is postmodernism. As Jean-Francois Lyotard had originally described it in the late 70s, it is "incredulity towards metanarratives". For Lyotard this meant rejecting the idea that the world is described or describable b... (read more)

Thanks for the reply and sorry I couldn't get to this for some time! Hope you're still interested in the discussion.

I expect that politics in most places, and US Congressional politics especially, is usually much more heavily focused on special interests than the overall media narrative would suggest

This is really interesting and you probably have a good point. Do you think there's a more reliable way (for an outsider like myself, who's not able to, I dunno, go and ask people in a dive bar what they think) to get the lay of the politi... (read more)