Coding day in and out on LessWrong 2.0
one of the LW 2.0 admins has stated that it's fine to post about politics here, they'll just stay as "personal blogposts" (unfortunately I can't find that comment now).
That's roughly correct. The important caveat is that we do want to avoid the site being dominated by discussion of politics, and so are likely going to reduce the visibility of that discussion somewhat, in order to compensate for the natural tendencies of those topics to consume everything (I am not yet really sure how precisely we would go about that, since it hasn't been an issue so far), and also because I really want to avoid newcomers first encountering all the political discussion (and selecting on newcomers who come for the political discussion).
Done! Daniel should now be able to edit the post.
You should be able to already. When you add a picture you can drag on its left and right edges to resize it.
Most estimates for heritability would still be significant even in a genetically identical population (since cultural factors are heritable due to shared family environments). You can try to control for his with twin adoption studies, which controls for shared family environment, but still leaves a lot of different aspects of the environment the same. You could also adjust for all other kinds of things and so get closer to something like the ”real effect of genes”.
I am not fully sure what Donald Hobson meant by “effect of genes” but more generally heritability is an upper bound on the effect of genes on individuals, and we should expect the real effect to be lower (how much lower is a debate with lots of complicated philosophical arguments and people being confused about how causality works).
From Wikipedia:
In other words, heritability is a mathematical estimate that indicates an upper bound on how much of a trait's variation within that population can be attributed to genes.
Heritability != genetic components!
There were also something like 10 who didn't spend their full vote-ballot, so my guess is that optimality concerns aren't a super big deal for many users, though I generally think that we should align the natural interaction with the system with the one that also spends your points most effectively, since anything else just weirdly biases the results towards people who either just vote differently naturally, or are thinking more about meta-level voting strategies, neither of which seems like a particularly good bias.
We have written some things about our motivation on this, though I don't think we've been fully comprehensive by any means (since that itself would have increased the cost of the vote a good amount). Here are the posts that we've written on the review and the motivation behind it:
The first post includes more of our big-picture motivation for this. Here are some of the key quotes:
In his LW 2.0 Strategic Overview, habryka noted:
We need to build on each other’s intellectual contributions, archive important content, and avoid primarily being news-driven.
We need to improve the signal-to-noise ratio for the average reader, and only broadcast the most important writing
[...]
Modern science is plagued by severe problems, but of humanity’s institutions it has perhaps the strongest record of being able to build successfully on its previous ideas.
The physics community has this system where the new ideas get put into journals, and then eventually if they’re important, and true, they get turned into textbooks, which are then read by the upcoming generation of physicists, who then write new papers based on the findings in the textbooks. All good scientific fields have good textbooks, and your undergrad years are largely spent reading them.
Over the past couple years, much of my focus has been on the early-stages of LessWrong's idea pipeline – creating affordance for off-the-cuff conversation, brainstorming, and exploration of paradigms that are still under development (with features like shortform and moderation tools).
But, the beginning of the idea-pipeline is, well, not the end.
I've written a couple times about what the later stages of the idea-pipeline might look like. My best guess is still something like this:
I want LessWrong to encourage extremely high quality intellectual labor. I think the best way to go about this is through escalating positive rewards, rather than strong initial filters.
Right now our highest reward is getting into the curated section, which... just isn't actually that high a bar. We only curate posts if we think they are making a good point. But if we set the curated bar at "extremely well written and extremely epistemically rigorous and extremely useful", we would basically never be able to curate anything.
My current guess is that there should be a "higher than curated" level, and that the general expectation should be that posts should only be put in that section after getting reviewed, scrutinized, and most likely rewritten at least once.
I still have a lot of uncertainty about the right way to go about a review process, and various members of the LW team have somewhat different takes on it.
I've heard lots of complaints about mainstream science peer review: that reviewing is often a thankless task; the quality of review varies dramatically, and is often entangled with weird political games.
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Before delving into the process, I wanted to go over the high level goals for the project:
1. Improve our longterm incentives, feedback, and rewards for authors
2. Create a highly curated "Best of 2018" sequence / physical book
3. Create common knowledge about the LW community's collective epistemic state regarding controversial posts
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Longterm incentives, feedback and rewards
Right now, authors on LessWrong are rewarded essentially by comments, voting, and other people citing their work. This is fine, as things go, but has a few issues:
The aim of the Review is to address those concerns by:
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Common knowledge about the LW community's collective epistemic state regarding controversial posts
Some posts are highly upvoted because everyone agrees they're true and important. Other posts are upvoted because they're more like exciting hypotheses. There's a lot of disagreement about which claims are actually true, but that disagreement is crudely measured in comments from a vocal minority.
The end of the review process includes a straightforward vote on which posts seem (in retrospect), useful, and which seem "epistemically sound". This is not the end of the conversation about which posts are making true claims that carve reality at it's joints, but my hope is for it to ground that discussion in a clearer group-epistemic state.
I expect we will write some more in the future about some of the broader goals behind the review, but the above I think summarizes a bunch of the high-level considerations reasonably well.
I think one way one could describe at least my motivation for the review is that one of the big holes that I've always perceived in LessWrong, and the internet at large, is the focus on things that are popular in the moment, and that it's hard for people to really build on other people's ideas and make long-term intellectual progres. The review is an experiment in creating an incentive and attention allocation mechanism that tries to counteract those forces. I am not yet sure how much it succeeded at that, though I am broadly pleased with how it went.
I wonder whether there is a way to take someone's vote and infer a more optimal allocation of the votes, and then scale that up to use the full available points, so that we could potentially estimate the size of the impact of this.
Promoted to curated: This is a bit of an odd curation, but my guess is that the vote results are of interest to many people, and many will be happy to have read them, so it seems like a good curation target. Less curated for the statistics or the writing, and more curated to establish common-knowledge of the vote results.
Oops, looks like we commented at the same time. You basically said the same thing I did, so I am glad we're on the same page.