joshuabecker
38
11
22
joshuabecker has not written any posts yet.
joshuabecker has not written any posts yet.
it occurs to me that 'rudeness' in this framework is a sort of protective charm; by casting the person as rude, you discount their credibility and therefore don't have to update your beliefs.
that can end up feeling like the information makes your cooking worse; because you update your belief about your cooking after receiving the information.
i'm not sure the simulacrum model is quite necessary to understand people's responses to information. particularly in the first 3, i think the responses can be explained by cognitive dissonance. in 1 & 3, the hearer holds the belief "i offer a good product" and is confronted with the information "someone is not satisfied with my product." in the gym example, the alternatives (skipping entirely, 10-minute self-warmup) are easily explained by "this person is busy." in 2, you perhaps hold the belief "i am a good person who does not destroy library materials" and are confronted with the information "i might be destroying library materials." in these... (read more)
Location: South Loop Strength & Conditioning (thanks Todd!)
Topic: This time, we'll be selecting readings at the meetup itself. Please come with articles you want to discuss!
I’m pulling three “no preparation required” activities from the “Rationality Meetup Cookbook”
- “Shallow Questions”
- “Deep questions”
- “Reading Discussion (no prep)”
See http://tiny.cc/rationality_cookbook for details
Perhaps it is possible in practice/process to disentangle value alignment issues from factual disagreements. Double-crux seems optimal at reaching consensus on factual truths (e.g., which widget will have a lower error rate?) and would at least *uncover* Carl's crux, if everybody participates in good faith, and therefore make it possible to nonetheless discover the factual truth. Then maybe punt the non-objective argument to a different process like incentive alignment as you discuss.
I absolutely love this, and it leaves me wondering about the role of social in the sabbath. This post mentions early, "Most want more social events, but coordination is hard and events are work. Now there’s always Friday night," but the subject does not come up again. And yet with regard to the historical referent, sociality is baked deeply into the sabbath. For the orthodox version, the minyan rule (plus the no driving rule) requires that people live close together and that they see each other once a week.
On the one hand, community has the potential to enhance the sabbath from the perspective of this article, which... (read more)
** NEW TIME: 11:30am **
Chicago Athletic Association is a hotel, we meet in the bar area (whoever's there first finds a good spot) on the 2nd floor.
TOPIC: Arrow's Impossibility Theorem
Thanks Noah for suggesting the following readings & podcast!
1. https://www.princeton.edu/~cuff/voting/theory.html
2. https://www.electionscience.org/commentary-analysis/voting-theory-podcast-2012-10-06-interview-with-nobel-laureate-dr-kenneth-arrow/
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theorem
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibbard%E2%80%93Satterthwaite_theorem
but that just kicks the can down the road, leaving the question: "Could I have wanted X?"
LOCATION TBD—EXPRESS OPINIONS HERE:
http://tiny.cc/chicago-meeting-places (google doc)
BACKUP LOCATION (SCHELLING POINT)—Chicago Athletic Association (Hotel) bar/lobby, 2nd floor.
TOPIC & READING (Critical Phase Transitions in Social Behavior)
1. On critical thresholds and cultural/scientific diffusion: https://www.meltingasphalt.com/interactive/going-critical/
2. A second reference on critical thresholds: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/360/6393/1116
3. Look up the definition of "phase transition"
Food potluck! Bring food/drinks/etc.
Game potluck! Bring rationalist-sphere games (maybe not ones that take hours of intense concentration---short games would be good, or games that people can drift in and out of.)
This is Todd's gym. Be respectful!
ROOM: 5th Floor South
TOPIC: Free Will
WHAT TO READ? It's your choice.
Here are some of the infinite possibilities:
a) Rationalist: Yukdowski (I'd grab the last few posts):
- https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Free_will_(solution)
- https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Mc6QcrsbH5NRXbCRX/dissolving-the-question
(b) Rationalist-ish?: Dan Dennett
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joCOWaaTj4A
(c) Libertarian:
- Bryan Caplan: http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/freewill
- Michael Humer: http://www.owl232.net/papers/fwill.htm
(d) Moral/Societal implications of
- Determinism (no free will), Non-Determinism/Free Will, Compatibilism (free will and determinism are mutually compatible https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatibilism)"
(e) pragmatism, or, "its not a real question" (William James)
- http://www.authorama.com/pragmatism-4.html (from the section "Let me take up another well-worn controversy, THE FREE-WILL PROBLEM")
- or the Yudkowsky version: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XzrqkhfwtiSDgKoAF/wrong-questions
(f) existentialism, i.e. Kierkegaard:
- episode #079 of the podcast "Philosophize This" (~25 mins)
reading all this has led me to think a lot about using MMOs as a testing ground for sociology
i think you are on the right track---a google scholar search reveals an enormous amount of social science conducted on virtual worlds including topics like teamwork, economics, and religion. don't know about governance systems though.
NOTE TIME CHANGE!
This month's meeting is a field trip to a workshop organized by Better Angels, a group dedicated to political depolarization---you can think of it as restoring some rationality to public discourse.
10am - 1pm @ Catalyst Ranch (9:30 pre-workshop snacks and socializing)
YOU MUST PRE-REGISTER (please)
I find myself wondering about disagreements (or subcomponents of disagreements) where appealing to objective reality may not be possible.
It seems like this is a special case of a broader type of process, fitting into the more general category of collaborative decision-making. (Here I'm thinking of the 5 approaches to conflict: compete, collaborate, avoid, accommodate, and compromise).
In the explicit product-as-widget case, there may always be an appeal to some objectively frameable question: what will make us more money? But even this can ignite debate: which is more important, short-term revenue or long-term revenue? I can imagine two people (perhaps one very young, and one... (read more)
Harold Washington Library
6th floor South study room
BYO Snacks
This is a line of thinking that seems to be operating in the background during a lot of discussions in effective altruism circles. Is it persuasive? If not, what is missing?
5-minute Explanation from Julia Galef
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqBl50TREHU
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/repugnant-conclusion/
Somewhat related slatestarcodex take:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/03/04/a-series-of-unprincipled-exceptions/
Harold Washington Library 6th Floor North Study Room
BYO Snacks
Thanks Shannon for the topic selection!
TRADITION -vs- MODERNITY
When it is worth sacrificing "traditional" ways of doing things in the name of modernity, progress, clarity or efficiency?
Do you tend to side with valuing "time-tested" traditions, or you are more sympathetic to "reformers" and in what situations/contexts?
1. SSC's review of "Seeing Like A State"
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/book-review-seeing-like-a-state/
2. Chesterton's Fence principle
https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Chesterton%27s_Fence
3. Tradition is smarter than you are
https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2018/08/tradition-is-smarter-than-you-are.html
[ 6th Floor North Study Room // BYO snacks ]
We will read two (very short) academic papers describing how Bayes rule can be used to extract objective truth from fallibly human survey data. The first paper is fairly technical, so I (Joshua) recommend reading only certain selections (defined below, with a link to an annotated PDF) that give a high-level conceptual overview. The second paper is very short and conceptual. While we will get into the mathematical proof of these concepts--otherwise, how could we believe they really work?--Joshua has volunteered to walk us through that process, and promises that the math is really quite simple,... (read 237 more words →)
Saturday, March 2, 12pm-3pm
Harold Washington Library, 6th Floor North Study Room
BYO SNACKS
Are fallacies entirely bad or can they be understood as weak evidence?
http://lesswrong.com/lw/aq2/fallacies_as_weak_bayesian_evidence/
We'll be running through this list, or a similar one: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Logical_fallacy
I read "At Home In The Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self Organization and Complexity" which is a very accessible and fun read---I am not a physicist/mathematician/biologist, etc, and it all made sense to me. The book talks about evolution, both biological and technological.
And the model described in that book has been quite commonly adapted by social scientists to study problem solving, so it's been socially validated as a good framework for thinking about scientific research.
sounds awesome!!