Coding day in and out on LessWrong 2.0. You can reach me at habryka@lesswrong.com
Yeah, the current phrase feels confusing to me. If a human takes something else as a subject that... feels like it has some different connotations. In my mind the two opposing phrases are "being subject to" (passive) and "taking as object" (active).
Yep, that's fine. I am not a moral prescriptivist who tells you what you have to care about.
I do think that you are probably going to change your mind on this at some point in the next millennium if we ever get to live that long, and I do have a bunch of arguments that feel relevant, but I don't think it's completely implausible you really don't care.
I do think that not caring about how people are far away is pretty common, and building EA on that assumption seems fine. Not all clubs and institutions need to be justifiable to everyone.
Hmm, I do think I honestly believe that behavioral scientists might be worse than the average politician at predicting public response. Like, I am not totally confident, but I think I would take a 50% bet. So this strikes me as overall mildly bad (though not very bad, I don't expect either of these two groups to be very good at doing this).
I don't know, I think it's a pretty decent argument. I agree it sometimes gets overused, but I do think given it's assumptions "you care about people far away as much as people closeby" and "there are lots of people far away you can help much more than people close by" and "here is a situation where you would help someone closeby, so you might also want to help the people far away in the same way" are all part of a totally valid logical chain of inference that seems useful to have in discussions on ethics.
Like, you don't need to take it to an extreme, but it seems locally valid and totally fine to use, even if not all the assumptions that make it locally valid are always fully explicated.
Yeah, that makes sense. Will be more careful with moving old historical posts to the frontpage for this reason.
Can you paste the link of the RSS feed? We've recently moved a bunch of old sequences post to the frontpage that we missed when we did our initial pass in 2017, so that seems like the most reasonable cause, if you are subscribed to a feed that filters only on frontpage posts.
Yeah, I really want to get around to this. I am sorry for splitting the feature-set awkwardly across two editors!
Woah, at least one of those summaries seems really quite inaccurate. Bad enough that like, I feel like I should step in as a moderator and be like "wait, this doesn't seem OK".
I am not very familiar with ESR's opinions, but your summary of "white people at BLM protests should be assumed to be communists and shot at will" is really misrepresenting the thing he actually said. What he actually said was "White rioters, on the other hand, will be presumed to be Antifa Communists attempting to manipulate this tragedy for Communist political ends;", with the key difference being "white rioters" instead of "white people". While there is still plenty to criticize in that sentence, this seems like a really crucial distinction that makes that sentence drastically less bad.
Topics like this tend to get really politicized and emotional, which I think means it's reasonable to apply some extra scrutiny and care to not misrepresent what other people said, and generally err on the side of quoting verbatim (ideally while giving substantial additional context).
Lukeprog wrote some related posts a while ago: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/x8Fp9NMgDWbuMpizA/rationality-lessons-learned-from-irrational-adventures-in
In particular the stuff on fashion.
I have 2-3 friends I know about who lost $5k+ on Mt. Gox going down, and didn't hold crypto anywhere else.