All of DirectedEvolution's Comments + Replies

How in-depth have you looked at the studies about declining performance in doctors with age? An obvious alternative hypothesis is that doctors gain skill as they age, and therefore tend to take on higher-risk patients and procedures with worse outcomes. I am not saying that's what's going on here - I'd just like to know if this is something you've looked into.

5lynettebye14h
I considered that early on during my exploration, but didn't go deep into it after seeing Scott's comment [https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/skills-plateau-because-of-decay-and/comments] on his post saying: Now, after seeing that the other fields also match the same pattern of decline, I'd be somewhat surprised by evidence that taking on harder cases explained the majority of skill plateaus in middle age for doctors. 

The big difference between AI and these technologies is that we're worried about adversarial behavior by the AI. 

A more direct analogy would be if Wright & co had been worried that airplanes might "decide" to fly safely until humanity had invented jet engines, then "decide" to crash them all at once. Nuclear bombs do have a direct analogy - a Dr. Strangelove-type scenario in which, after developing an armamentarium in a ostensibly carefully-controlled manner, some madman (or a defect in an automated launch system) triggers an all-out nuclear attac... (read more)

1Noosphere891d
This is, to a certain extent, the drawing out of my true crux of a lot of a lot of my disagreements with the doomer view, especially on LW. I fundamentally suspect that the trajectory of AI has fundamentally been a story of a normal technology, and in particular I see 1 very important adversarial assumption both fail to materialize, which is evidence against it, given that absence of evidence is evidence of absence, and the assumption didn't even buy us that much evidence, as it still isn't predictive enough to be used for AI doom. I'm talking about, of course, the essentially unbounded instrumental goals/powerseeking assumptions. Indeed, it's a pretty large crux, in that if I fundamentally believed that the adversarial framework was a useful model for AI safety, I'd be a lot more worried about AI doom today. To put it another, this was hitting at one of my true rejections of a lot of the frameworks used often by doomers/decelerationists.

No, but it and its competitors do somehow exist... Why isn't there something similar for paywalled websites?

Good thoughts in general, I'm about where you are - VR is overall headed in a direction where I'm really excited to use it.

Disagree on the device looking cool. It looks like a snorkeling mask, which is still better than the blindfolded look of the Meta Quest.

What it might achieve is being acceptable in public. Google Glass failed because people perceived wearers as potential perverts, photographing people surreptitiously. If Apple can make people perceive the AVP as people who are "having more fun than you are on the plane" - i.e. get people intrigued about other people's use of the technology rather than intimidated by it - that will be a win for the company (and its customers).

I am sort of surprised that there's no equivalent of "spotify for websites." It's easy for me to imagine a service offering an ad-supported and paid subscription that streams otherwise-paywalled websites to you, distributing the revenue as a fraction of clicks or something like that, and only displaying ads on the websites to the ad-supported tier of users. Is there some enormous technological or security hurdle that makes this much harder to do for streaming websites than for streaming music?

2ChristianKl1d
The big websites make more money by selling ads directly than by selling them over a federated system. If you pay the New York Times directly for your ads and the New York Times writes a story that annoys you, you can call the New York Times to complain. On the other hand, if the New York Times wouldn't sell ads directly but instead use some federated ad system, ad buyers couldn't do that. We currently don't really have bands you have their own homepage where you can listen to the music of the band and the band makes money with selling ads.  There's Apple News+ that gives you one paid subscription and then allows you to access a bunch of otherwise-paywalled websites. 
2the gears to ascension2d
Well, spotify isn't profitable in the first place, for one.

I’d also add that female labor force participation rates will move these numbers around some. Their calculations assume all countries have 50% female participation when calculating income, when it actually varies from 11%-85% or so.

1SimonM3d
Yeah, and it doesn't adjust for taxes there either. I thought this was less of an issue when comparing rents to owning though, as the same error should affect both equally.

Just wanted to chime in and say that for weeks before reading your post, I'd also been interpreting Tyler's behavior on AI in exactly the same way you describe here. Thanks for expressing it so well.

(3) isn't about AI so I don't think Zvi's model explains that. If we ignore (1) and (2), then the one example we're left with (which may or may not be badly reasoned) isn't good enough evidence to say that somebody "just consistently makes badly-reasoned statements."

3Liron4d
I encourage you to look into his firm's Web3 claims and the reasoning behind them. My sibling comment has one link that is particularly egregious and recent. Here's another badly-reasoned Web3 argument [https://medium.com/bloated-mvp/chris-dixons-crypto-claims-are-logically-flimsy-a26cc8906b3f] made by his partner, which implies Marc's endorsement, and the time his firm invested over $100M in an obvious Ponzi scheme [https://twitter.com/liron/status/1540035327665967105].

The whole point of capitalism is that the people who have and direct money are the ones who can make good decisions about how it should be used. When you see firsthand that high-level decision-making is a farce, where does that leave you?

I actually don't see capitalism as being fueled primarily by good decision-making in the C suite. Instead, I think that there's significant uncertainty around decisions at all levels of the company, and many limitations to their courses of action. Many, many businesses fail because of this.

But an existing company has been ... (read more)

1bhauth4d
Those investors tend to invest specifically in locations near themselves. That's a big part of the centralizing dynamic I'm trying to explain. It's easier to get bought out when you're located closer to the buyer. And mergers often lead to the purchased company moving. Rather than saying US executives are "dumb" I'd say that they're specialized in things that society doesn't want them specialized in, like playing political games with other executives. Also, my experience is that "normal" people are far more impressed by MBA-speak and MBAs than engineer-speak and engineers. You mean...longer posts with more links in them? Here? Or what? It's not really possible to do studies on this, so all I could do is point at a bunch of anecdotes, and then readers could still just say that's cherry-picking. So, people have to estimate base rates from their personal experiences, which are biased but known not to be adversarially picked. Or, readers could assume that what's reported by journalists/pundits is a consensus and thus more reliable. All I felt that I could do was set up a framework for people who already had evidence from their experiences. That's certainly understandable. At the same time, I kind of have other things to do, such as actually thinking about technology.

Relatedly, Bill Gates’ article wasn’t that bad.  Sure, there’s some inaccuracies if you’re reading it strictly.  But it’s not meant to be read strictly.  It’s basically marketing material aimed at a very large crowd, which, as discussed above, requires using phrasing that gets the point across, not phrasing that is scientifically accurate when dissected.

 

There are inaccuracies in the article, period. It would be embarassing for an engineer to make the mistake of conflating Celsius and Kelvin when comparing boiling point ratios, as in th... (read more)

but rather to lay out an opposing position

I understand that this is your aim. I guess what I am saying is that it does not seem like a good aim to me relative to the aim of countering specific, quotable arguments and generally making an effort to contextualize your arguments in some specific strain of discourse. I.e. cite something and respond to something.

One important reason why is that your argument is not specific or evidence-backed or carefully defined enough to agree or disagree with it, without asking you lots of additional clarifying questions. The... (read more)

Can you say more about your experirences that led you to have your view of job creation? It's not often that I talk to people who've had the chance to personally observe the behavior of big investors and powerful executives sufficient to overturn the fundamentals of economics. It might be interesting to hear some of those stories - it's hard for me to envision how the personal observations of an individual could provide such powerful evidence against basic market economic principles that they'd overturn one's whole worldview. I haven't had this experience, and nobody I know has either, so from my point of view you are an individual with a very unusual point of view based on very unusual experiences.

3bhauth5d
Most of them are covered by a NDA, and with Guidepoint I can't even say who I was hired by. And of course, insulting specific people I've worked with isn't good business sense. Here is a comment I made [https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wNewjcQxecuT7wYdC/what-new-technology-for-what-institutions?commentId=Wp5SPTFgaoeY2v4xZ] explaining why a post by Bill Gates is dumb. I have heard much dumber things than that, in conference calls and on Zoom, by people responsible for deciding what to do and by very wealthy investors deciding their investment plans. Yes, there are public articles that say dumb things - here's a search [https://www.google.com/search?q=%22emerging+technologies%22+%22cloud%22+%22blockchain%22+%22iot%22] that will find some examples. But until you experience it in person, you naturally want to fool yourself into thinking it's just some kind of act, that people don't really think like that. I also have some acquaintances in Amazon who were around for the PowerPoint ban, and got to hear about executives who were literally incapable of reading or writing memos with complex concepts. Why do you think PowerPoint slides with 5-word phrases are so common? Because that is all that many executives are able to understand about non-interpersonal object-level things. I'd also suggest reading Moral Mazes [https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/45mNHCMaZgsvfDXbw/quotes-from-moral-mazes]. The whole point of capitalism is that the people who have and direct money are the ones who can make good decisions about how it should be used. When you see firsthand that high-level decision-making is a farce, where does that leave you?

Well, it's hard to know what specifically you're objecting to if you won't link to them. Citing the arguments you're criticizing is a pretty basic norm of discourse, unless you want to make an argument that these arguments are so well known that the source doesn't matter. But I don't think that is the case here, and even if it were, you still have to lay out your version of those arguments cleanly and clearly.

The part that I'm most skeptical of is your claim about the dynamics of job creation. You offer a vision in which a fixed number of rich people creat... (read more)

1bhauth5d
While the title says "anti-YIMBY" what I'm trying to do here isn't counter specific pro-YIMBY arguments, but rather to lay out an opposing position. If there are specific pro-YIMBY arguments that people then feel effectively counter that position, I can respond to those in that context. Every notable economist situationally rejects econ 101. It's not that I started out with this view due to some natural tendencies, if that's what you're wondering. I was initially more of a libertarian and had more faith in the people running the economy. What changed my mind was observation. Getting close enough to big investors and powerful executives to see how dumb they really were. Seeing how much of the work at corporations is fake. Seeing the moral mazes. Seeing how much wealth concentration there really is. Seeing how much of the economy is driven by the whims of the ultra-wealthy, and by providing luxury services to the people who provide luxury services to them. And so on.

I think it's great that you took a stand to present your independent observations and relay some information people here may not have encountered on the subject, especially since political discourse is a minor LW taboo. This is good for epistemics IMO.

The key argument for why we'd predict 18+ Western fascisms in the next decade is that we should by default extrapolate current trends, while rejecting the appearance of stability.

I find this contradictory. Why are current derivative of fascism something we should view as "stable" and likely to hold constant o... (read more)

I think it would be helpful if you supplied specific YIMBY articles and quoted from them to illustrate your disagreements. As it is, I have so many "what do you mean by this, exactly"-type questions about your original article that I wouldn't know where to start.

1bhauth5d
If there are some particular things you think need clarification, that would be good to know too. I think of Matt Yglesias and Noahpinion as being canonical examples of YIMBY pundits, but I'd prefer not to link to them.

What kind of feedback are you interested in receiving for this article?

1bhauth5d
* implications of this model I hadn't thought of * a counterargument more competent than the YIMBY articles I've seen * people saying they changed their mind about something

The reason mosquito bites itch is because they are injecting saliva into your skin. Saliva contains mosquito antigens, foreign particles that your body has evolved to attack with an inflammatory immune response that causes itching. The compound histamine is a key signaling molecule used by your body to drive this reaction.

In order for the mosquito to avoid provoking this reaction, they would either have to avoid leaving compounds inside of your body, or mutate those compounds so that they do not provoke an immune response. The human immune system is an adv... (read more)

Epistemic activism

I think LW needs better language to talk about efforts to "change minds." Ideas like asymmetric weapons and the Dark Arts are useful but insufficient.

In particular, I think there is a common scenario where:

  • You have an underlying commitment to open-minded updating and possess evidence or analysis that would update community beliefs in a particular direction.
  • You also perceive a coordination problem that inhibits this updating process for a reason that the mission or values of the group do not endorse.
    • Perhaps the outcome of the update would
... (read more)
4Vladimir_Nesov6d
When communicating an argument, the quality of feedback about its correctness you get depends on efforts around its delivery whose shape doesn't depend on its correctness. The objective of improving quality of feedback in order to better learn from it is a check on spreading nonsense.

The V-Dem Institute's tracker shows that, after widespread growth in democracy during the 1980s and 90s, many more countries are now becoming autocratic than democratic, especially weighted by population:


The V-Dem tracker you show doesn't show "widespread growth in democracy during the 1980s and 90s." It shows a giant explosion all of a sudden starting in 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, and then an equally sudden reversion from about 2000-2004.

It's tracking autocratization, the sign of the direction of change, rather than the magnitude of autocracy ... (read more)

When I'm reasoning about a practical chemistry problem at work, I'm usually thinking in terms of qualitative mechanisms:

  • Ethanolamine reacts with epoxides on magnetic beads so that other molecules we introduce later won't react with the epoxides. This is called "blocking" the epoxides.
  • But at physiological pH, the secondary amine the ethanolamine introduces is protonated and will be positively charged. This gives the entire bead surface a substantial positive charge.
  • The nucleic acids in our solution are negatively charged, so they will form ionic bonds with
... (read more)
4rhollerith_dot_com7d
Thinking about the qualitative mechanism is causal reasoning, which humans prefer to statistical reasoning. Causal knowledge is obtaining by making statistical observations (and not necessarily big datasets of statistical observations).

Models do not need to be exactly true in order to produce highly precise and useful inferences. Instead, the objective is to check the model’s adequacy for some purpose. - Richard McElreath, Statistical Rethinking

Lightly edited for stylishness

3Vladimir_Nesov7d
With SSL pre-trained foundation models, the interesting thing is that the embeddings computed by them are useful for many purposes, while the models are not trained with any particular purpose in mind. Their role is analogous to beliefs, the map of the world, epistemic side of agency, convergently useful choice of representation/compression that by its epistemic nature is adequate for many applied purposes.

I use ChatGPT as a starting point to investigate hypotheses to test at my biomedical engineering job on a daily basis. I am able to independently approach the level of understanding of specific problems of an experienced chemist with many years of experience on certain problems, although his familiarity with our chemical systems and education makes him faster to arrive at the same result. This is a lived example of the phenomenon in which AI improves the performance of the lower-tier performers more than the higher-tier performers (I am a recent MS grad, h... (read more)

I pasted your question into Bing Chat, and it returned Python code to export your PredictionBook data to a CSV file. Haven't tested it. Might be worth looking into this approach?

Over the last six months, I've grown more comfortable writing posts that I know will be downvoted. It's still frustrating. But I used to feel intensely anxious when it happened, and now, it's mostly just a mild annoyance.

The more you're able to publish your independent observations, without worrying about whether others will disagree, the better it is for community epistemics.

1JNS8d
I kinda feel the same way, and honestly I think it’s wrong to hold yourself back, how are you going to calibrate without feedback?

Changing a person's strongly-held belief is difficult. They may not be willing to spend the time it would take to address all your arguments. They might not be capable of understanding them. And they may be motivated to misunderstand.

An alternative is to give them short, fun intros to the atomic ideas and evidence for your argument, without revealing your larger aim. Let them gradually come to the right conclusion on their own.

The art of this approach is motivating why the atomic ideas are interesting, without using the point you're trying to make as the m... (read more)

If I want to change minds...

... how many objections will I have to overcome?

... from how many readers?

... in what combinations?

... how much argument will they tolerate before losing interest?

... and how individually tailored will they have to be?

... how expensive will providing them with legible evidence be?

... how equipped are they to interpret it accurately?

A: “If I were going to Paris, where would be the best place to get a baguette?” B: “Oh! You’re going to Paris?”

I've done B's conversational move plenty of times, and I am fully capable of understanding conditionals!

If A is asking me this, the most plausible inference is that this is a playful way of telling me that they're going to Paris, and they want to get my opinions on what I enjoyed while I was there. My first reaction might be surprise to learn that (plausibly) they are planning a trip there, so I want to establish that with more certainty. This is ... (read more)

2mako yass10d
Yes, if I did B, I might even say something like "I'm not sure what you mean" (though not in those words, but others might), but what I mean is I'm not sure what your intentions are in asking, and I am way more interested in that than guessing about baguettes. The mismatch in interest is so acute that if you don't answer my question I don't think it would be especially mean of me to decline to answer yours.

That's true! However, I would feel weird and disruptive trying to ask ChatGPT questions when working alongside coworkers in the lab.

Here is a quote from the same text that I think is more apt to the point you are making about apparent shortcomings in ET Jaynes' interpretation of more general agentic behavior:

Of course, for many purposes we would not want our robot to adopt any of these more ‘human’ features arising from the other coordinates. It is just the fact that computers do not get confused by emotional factors, do not get bored with a lengthy problem, do not pursue hidden motives opposed to ours, that makes them safer agents than men for carrying out certain tasks.

To readers of this post, I would like to note that a small number of people on the forum appear to be strong-downvoting my posts on this subject shortly after they are published. I don't know specifically why, but it is frustrating.

For those of you who agree or disagree with my post, I hope you will choose to engage and comment on it to help foster a productive discussion. If you are a person who has chosen to strong-downvote any of the posts in this series, I especially invite you to articulate why - I precommit that my response will be somewhere between "thank you for your feedback" and something more positive and engaged than that.

Thoughts on Apple Vision Pro:

  • The price point is inaccessibly high.
  • I'm generally bullish on new interfaces to computing technology. The benefits aren't always easy to perceive until you've had a chance to start using it.
  • If this can sit on my head and allow me to type or do calculations while I'm working in the lab, that would be very convenient. Currently, I have to put gloves on and off to use my phone, and office space with my laptop is a 6-minute round trip from the lab.
  • I can see an application that combines voice-to-text and AI in a way that makes it fe
... (read more)
2rhollerith_dot_com11d
Sure, but an audio-only interface can be done with an iPhone and some Airpods; no need for a new interface.
2[comment deleted]11d
2[comment deleted]11d

Conservatism says "don't be first, keep everything the same." This is a fine, self-consistent stance.

A responsible moderate conservative says "Someone has to be first, and someone will be last. I personally want to be somewhere in the middle, but I applaud the early adopters for helping me understand new things." This is also a fine, self-consistent stance.

Irresponsible moderate conservatism endorses "don't be first, and don't be last," as a general rule, and denigrates those who don't obey it. It has no answers for who ought to be first and last. But for ... (read more)

While I agree with you that Jaynes' description of how loss functions operate in people does not extend to agents in general, the specific passage you have quoted reads strongly to me as if it's meant to be about humans, not generalized agents.

You claim that Jaynes' conclusion is that "agents with similar goal specifications are in conflict, because the specified objective (for food, energy, status, whatever) binds to an agent's own state, not a world-model." But this isn't true. His conclusion is specifically about humans.

I want to reinforce that I'm not ... (read more)

4Zack_M_Davis11d
Thanks. We don't seem to have a "That's fair" or "Touché" react (which seems different and weaker than "Changed my mind").

I’m anticipating writing several posts on this topic in the coming weeks on the EA forum. I just want to flag that I think your questions about how to think about and value reputation are important, that the EA community is rife with contradictory ideas and inadequate models on this too if, and that we can do a lot better by getting a grip on this subject. I don’t have all the answers, but right now it seems like people are afraid to even talk about the issue openly.

1jenn14d
I share your sense that EAs should be thinking about reputation a lot more. A lot of the current thinking has also been very reactive/defensive, and I think that's due both to external factors and to the fact that the community doesn't realize how valuable an actually good reputation can be - thought Nathan is right that it's not literally priceless. Still, I'd love to see the discourse develop in a more proactive position.

I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of EAs see my takes here as a slippery slope to warm glow thinking and wanton spending that needs to be protected against.

 

I didn't have this reaction at all. The four lessons you present are points about execution, not principles. IMO a lot of these ideas are cheap or free while being super high-value. We can absolutely continue our borg-like utilitarianism and coldhearted cost-benefit analysis while projecting hospitality, building reputation, conserving slack, and promoting inter-institutional cooperation!

But I do t... (read more)

9Scrooge Mcduck13d
Agree little could be done then.  But since then, I've noticed the community has an attitude of "Well I'll just keep an eye out next time" or "I'll be less trusting next time" or something.  This is inadequate, we can do better. I'm offering decision markets [https://manifold.markets/group/crypto-exchange-risk] that will make it harder for frauds to go unnoticed, prioritizing crypto (still experimenting with criteria).  But when I show EAs these, I'm kind of stunned by the lack of interest.  As if their personal judgment is supposed to be less-corruptible at detecting fraud, than a prediction market.  This has been very alarming for me to see. But who knows -- riffing off the post, maybe that just means prediction markets haven't built up enough reputation for LW/EA to trust it.
7jenn15d
Thanks for your super thought out response! I agree with all of it, especially the final paragraph about making EA more human-compatible. Also, I really love this passage: Yes. You get me :')

The most common anti-eugenics stance I encounter is also opposed to epilogenics. From this point of view, parents choosing to select for desirable traits in their offspring using advanced medical technology is wasteful, immoral and gross. They have roughly the same feelings about epilogenics (including for intelligence) as they have about cosmetic plastic surgery. To them, a natural and traditional trajectory of healthy human lifespan is ideal - we should maintain our health via diet and exercise, try not to care too much about superficial traits like appe... (read more)

I think that if there is an objective morality, then you can use your concern about self-congratulatory narratives as a starting point. What moral view is leading you to think there’s any problem at all with enjoying a self-congratulatory narrative? Once you’ve identified it, you can figure out what other moral positions it might imply.

1ymeskhout16d
It's not any specific moral view that causes me concern, but rather how the entire edifice is organized. There's likely no end to the specific moral principles I can cite which hit me on a visceral level which I, purportedly, feel very strongly about. This includes the revulsion against slavery, which in my case partly extends even to consensual labor arrangements that have a significant imbalance of power (this is most prominent for the hospitality industry in poor countries serving a much richer clientele). But when I contemplate how genetically identical I am to people from just a few hundred years ago, and when I see what those people felt strongly about, it's reasonable for this to generate some pause on my end. Because what it demonstrates to me is that even the core visceral disgust I reflexively feel can't be trusted. Nevertheless, I still rely heavily on this disgust reflex but it's with the understanding that I'm engaging in fiction but have no better alternative.
2TAG17d
It doesn't have to be a moral objection. It's circular argumentation, so it already goes against epistemic norms.

Even that .69%-acceptable statistic may be a political maneuver. I found a meta analysis a year or two ago of AI healthcare diagnostics that found about this level of acceptability in the literature.

Where it becomes political is that a prestigious doctor friend unsympathetic to AI diagnosis used this statistic to blow off the whole field, rather than to become interested in the tiny fraction of acceptable research. Which is political on its own, and also has to make you wonder if researchers set their quality bar to get the result they want.

Nevertheless it IS discouraging that about 276/40000 papers would be acceptable.

I think it's a complex question. For example, people debate whether porn is harmful or helpful:

  • Morally or practically
  • In the short vs. long term
  • To the actors
  • Directly to the viewer
  • To the viewer's partner
  • To culture as a whole
  • For intrinsict reasons or because of how it intersects with the rest of our culture
  • Universally, on average, or in specific circumstances
  • Whether it's actually harmful/helpful or just a suboptimal/better way to express sexuality

If you get specific enough about these questions, it may be possible to ask meaningful scientific or moral questio... (read more)

8sanxiyn17d
As an example of question specific enough to be answerable by science, there is Is Pornography Use Associated with Sexual Difficulties and Dysfunctions among Younger Heterosexual Men? [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25816904/] (2015). It begins: The answer is no. As far as I know, this was among the first study powerful enough to answer this question. Well done, science! Of course, nobody listens to science. Compare the introduction above with another introduction written 4 years later, from Is Pornography Use Related to Erectile Functioning? [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30621919/] (2019). The shift in tone is palpable, and you can just feel the powerlessness researchers feel about the situation.

Yes, I agree that if "practical problem in your life" did not include "looking good" or "goes with my other clothes" as design parameters then you'd probably end up in a situation like that. I succeeded at avoiding this problem because I specifically set out to find pants that were good for biking and looked like professional work pants (fortunately I already had some that did). This can be useful: it puts a sharp constraint on the shirts I buy, requiring them to look good with these specific pants. That limitation can be helpful in making the overwhelming number of choices manageable.

I agree with the perspective you're laying out here. These days, I take a slightly more concrete approach to choosing my wardrobe. It still fits the perspective, but the thought process is different.

To decide what to buy, I think about a specific purpose in my life for which I need clothes, and I try to get as specific as possible.

For example, I just started a new job, and I wanted to buy some new clothes for it. Because I already had plenty of suitable shirts, I started to think about the requirements for optimal pants for this application.

  • I bike to work,
... (read more)
4Gordon Seidoh Worley18d
This is how I used to buy clothes. At least in my case I got some hard advice from a friend: I was picking pieces of clothes that were fine in isolation but didn't really come together to create a look/fit that was me and made me look unintentional and thus less good. It also made it too easy to optimize for function at the expense of form to the point of picking things that met great functional requirements but looked bad, like technical hiking pants that met tons of needs other than looking good or fitting my body well. In order to actually look put together I realized that I needed to take a more global approach to my clothes optimization.

I understand your point is that material circumstances control the moral ideas prevalent in a culture, and that these cultural ideals in turn control individual beliefs and actions. Our morality and that of our ancestors is therefore determined largely by material circumstances.

Alongside this deterministic framework, you are arguing for a Dawkins selfis meme-based explanation for which cultural ideas survive and flourish. Specifically, you are arguing that historical material circumstances favored the survival of a pro-slavery, pro-war morality, while mode... (read more)

3ymeskhout17d
Thank you for your reply, you accurately summarized my argument. Regarding "objective" morality, I honestly would have no idea where to start, especially as an atheist. I was hoping my post would prompt some responses pushing back on this particular point. I'm not opposed towards working to discover what this "objective" morality would be, but given my argument above there should be significant caution that we're not just slumbering into yet another self-congratulatory narrative. Along that same line, nothing I wrote above should imply that I lack curiosity, hopefully I established quite the opposite.

Many commenters seem to be reading this post as implying something like slavery and violence being good or at least morally okay... I read it as a caution similar to the common points of "how sure are you that you would have made the morally correct choice if you had been born as someone benefiting from slavery back when it was a thing" combined with "the values that we endorse are strongly shaped by self-interest and motivated cognition"

 

I don't agree with your characterization of the post's claims. The title is synonymous with "morality is arbitrary... (read more)

5ymeskhout18d
Kaj_Sotala's interpretation of my post is absolutely correct. There's an obvious reason I did not encourage anyone to view themselves as the victims; my assumption is that no one needs any convincing to agree being raped and murdered is awful. The second reason I did not focus on that perspective is because my argument was about how memeplexes achieve dominance, which means that the opinions of the historically oppressed is by definition irrelevant.

Based on the evident historical record, without the environmentally deleterious bounty fossil fuels facilitated, most of us would be conjuring up creatively compelling excuses for why forcing your neighbor to work for free is the Moral thing to do.

 

I can't speak to every era, but in the middle ages, about 75% of us would have been serfs: not tradeable individually, but bound to a plot of purchaseable land. No way most of us would have been spending our time innovating arguments for the moralilty of slavery.

Arguments for the morality of slavery come do... (read more)

Another UI note - the scrollbar is so thin it is hard to use.

2Measure22d
Also, when scrolled fully to either end, there remains a large space of the background color that makes it look like the bar is not fully at the end.

I'm honestly not sure if this system would be:

  • Harmful, mostly replacing high-quality comments with modest-quality reacts
    • Very harmful, with interest in the site draining away as commenting becomes abnormal
  • Helpful, with silence or low-quality comments (which could include inflammatory comments) replaced with modest-quality reacts
    • Very helpful, as the continuum of ability to engage escalates people into interactions they'd otherwise have skipped, as authors see that apparently unseen comments actually have a lot of eyeballs on them, and leading to a positive f
... (read more)

Just noting a point of confusion - if changing minds is a social endeavor having to do with personal connection, why is it necessary to get people to engage System 2/Central Route thinking? Isn’t the main thing to get them involved in a social group where the desired beliefs are normal and let System 1/Peripheral Route thinking continue to do its work?

1Seth Herd21d
I think you are absolutely correct that getting someone involved in a social group where everyone already has those ideas would be better at changing minds. But that's way harder than getting someone to have a ten-minute conversation. In fact, it's so hard that I don't think it's ever been studied experimentally. Hopefully I'm wrong and there are limited studies; but I've looked for them and not found them (~5 years ago). I'd frame it this way: what you're doing in that interview is supplying the motivation to do System 2 thinking. The Socratic method is about asking people the same questions they'd ask themselves if they cared enough about that topic, and had the reasoning skills to reach the truth.
7AnthonyC21d
If I understand correctly I think it's more that system 1/peripheral route thinking can get someone to affectively endorse an idea without forming a deeper understanding of it, whereas system 2/central route thinking can produce deeper understanding, but many (most?) people need to feel sufficiently psychologically and socially safe/among friends to engage in that kind of thinking.

I would pay about $5/month for a version of Twitter that was read-only. I want a window, not a door.

1Pat Myron22d
https://github.com/zedeus/nitter [https://github.com/zedeus/nitter]
2Viliam22d
I could imagine this functionality implemented as a simple browser plugin or script. Just hide the input box. (No idea whether it already exists.) Would be useful for many social networks.

And I’m not sure about the scales being an icon for “seems borderline.” Some sort of fuzzy line or something might be more appropriate. Scales make me think “well measured.”

4Measure23d
I would like something like a block pushed halfway off a ledge.
3mako yass24d
I think a tilde would do better, yeah.
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