Drake Morrison

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I think what you are looking for is prediction markets. The ones I know of are:

  1. Manifold Markets - play-money that's easy and simple to use
  2. Metaculus - more serious one with more complex tools (maybe real money somehow?)
  3. PredictIt - just for US politics? But looks like real money?

I don't see all comments as criticism. Many comments are of the building up variety! It's that prune-comments and babble-comments have different risk-benefit profiles, and verifying whether a comment is building up or breaking down a post is difficult at times. 

Send all the building-comments you like! I would find it surprising if you needed more than 3 comments per day to share examples, personal experiences, intuitions and relations.

The benefits of building-comments is easy to get in 3 comments per day per post. The risks of prune-comments(spawning demon threads) are easy to mitigate by only getting 3 comments per day per post. 

Are we entertaining technical solutions at this point? If so, I have some ideas. This feels to me like a problem of balancing the two kinds of content on the site. Balancing babble to prune, artist to critic, builder to breaker. I think Duncan wants an environment that encourages more Babbling/Building. Whereas it seems to me like Said wants an environment that encourages more Pruning/Breaking. 

Both types of content are needed. Writing posts pattern matches with Babbling/Building, whereas writing comments matches closer to Pruning/Breaking. In my mind anyway. (update: prediction market)

Inspired by this post I propose enforcing some kind of ratio between posts and comments. Say you get 3 comments per post before you get rate-limited?[1] This way if you have a disagreement or are misunderstanding a post there is room to clarify, but not room for demon threads. If it takes more than a few comments to clarify that is an indication of a deeper model disagreement and you should just go ahead and write your own post explaining your views. ( as an aside I would hope this creates an incentive to write posts in general, to help with the inevitable writer turn-over)

Obviously the exact ratio doesn't have to be 3 comments to 1 post. It could be 10:1 or whatever the mod team wants to start with before adjusting as needed.

  1. ^

    I'm not suggesting that you get rate-limited site-wide if you start exceeding 3 comments per post. Just that you are rate-limited on that specific post. 

If you feel like it should be written differently, then write it differently! Nobody is stopping you. Write a thousand roads to Rome

Could Eliezer have written it differently? Maybe, maybe not. I don't have access to his internal writing cognition any more than you do. Maybe this is the only way Eliezer could write it. Maybe he prefers it this way, I certainly do.

Light a candle, don't curse the darkness. Build, don't burn. 

I used this link to make my own, and it seems to work nicely for me thus far. 

This sequence has been a favorite of mine for finding little drills or exercises to practice overcoming  biases.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gBma88LH3CLQsqyfS/cultish-countercultishness

Cult or Not-Cult aren't two separate categories. They are a spectrum that all human groups live on. 

I agree wholeheartedly that the intent of the guidelines isn't enough. Do you have examples in mind where following a given guideline leads to worse outcomes than not following the guideline?

If so, we can talk about that particular guideline itself, without throwing away the whole concept of guidelines to try to do better. 

An analogy I keep thinking of is the typescript vs javascript tradeoffs when programming with a team. Unless you have a weird special-case, it's just straight up more useful to work with other people's code where the type signatures are explicit. There's less guessing, and therefore less mistakes. Yes, there are tradeoffs. You gain better understanding at the slight cost of implementation code. 

The thing is, you pay that cost anyway. You either pay it upfront, and people can make smoother progress with less mistakes, or they make mistakes and have to figure out the type signatures the hard way. 

People either distinguish between their observations and inferences explicitly, or you spend extra time, and make predictable mistakes, until the participants in the discourse figure out the distinction during the course of the conversation. If they can't, then the conversation doesn't go anywhere on that topic. 

I don't see any way of getting around this if you want to avoid making dumb mistakes in conversation. Not every change is an improvement, but every improvement is necessarily a change. If we want to raise the sanity waterline and have discourse that more reliably leads to us winning, we have to change things. 

Whether you are building an engine for a tractor or a race car, there are certain principles and guidelines that will help you get there. Things like:

  • measure twice before you cut the steel
  • Double check your fittings before you test the engine
  • keep track of which direction the axle is supposed to be turning for the type of engine you are making
  • etc.

The point of the guidelines isn't to enforce a norm of making a particular type of engine. They exist to help groups of engineer make any kind of engine at all. People building engines make consistent, predictable mistakes. The guidelines are about helping people move past those mistakes so they can actually build an engine that has a chance of working

The point of "rationalist guidelines" isn't to enforce a norm of making particular types of beliefs. They exist to help groups of people stay connected to reality at all. People make consistent, predictable mistakes. The guidelines are for helping people avoid them. Regardless of what those beliefs are. 

As always, the hard part is not saying "Boo! conspiracy theory!" and "Yay! scientific theory!"

The hard part is deciding which is which

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