tenlier

Sorry, Gwern, I may be slandering you, but I thought I noticed it long before that (I've been reading, despite my silence). Another thing I have accused you of, in my head, is a failure to appropriately apply a multiple test correction when doing some data exploration for trends in the less wrong survey. Again, I may have you misidentified. Such behavior is striking, if true, since it seems to me one of the most basic complaints Less Wrong has about science (somewhat incorrectly).

Edited: Gwern is right (on my misremembering). Either I was skimming and... (read more)

This is going to be yet another horrible post. I just go meta and personal. Sorry.

I don't understand how this thread (and a few others like it) on stats can happen; in particular, your second point (re: the basic mistake). It is the single solitary thing any person who knows any stats at all knows. Am I wrong? Maybe 'knows' meaning 'understands'. I seem to recall the same error made by Gwern (and pointed out). I mean the system works in the sense that these comments get upvoted, but it is like. . . people having strong technical opinions with ver... (read more)

Not just going meta for the sake of it: I assert you have not sufficiently thought throught the implications of promoting that sort of non-openness publicly on the board. Perhaps you could PM jsavaltier.

I'm lying, of course. But interesting to register points of strongest divergence between LW and conventional morality (JenniferRM's post, I mean; jsalvatier's is fine and interesting).

"Indeed, I cannot think of any high school scholarship that is used primarily to collect information for the sponsoring organization (is this really the case?). However, there is good reason for this – no one else is interested in reaching the same group of high school students. SI is the only organization I know of who wants to reach high school students for their research group."

I find this place persistently surprising, which is nice. Try to imagine what you would think if a religious organization did this and how you would feel. It's alrigh... (read more)

The day to day life bit is irrelevant. The volitional aspect is not at all. Take the exact sacrifice you described but make it non-volitional. "torturing yourself working at a startup" becomes slavery when non-volitional. Presumably you find that trade-off less acceptable.

The volitional aspect is the key difference. The fact that your life is rich with examples of volitional sacrifice and poor in examples of forced sacrifice of this type is not some magic result that has something to do with how we treat "real" examples in day to day life. It is entirely because "we" (humans) have tried to minimize the non-volitional sacrifices because they are what we find immoral!

Was there any reason to think I didn't understand exactly what you said the first time? You agree with me and then restate. Fine, but pointless. Additionally, unimaginative re: potential value of torture. Defending lack of imagination in that statement by claiming torture defined in part by primary intent would be inconsistent.

Manipulative phrasing. Of course, it will always seem worth torturing yourself, yadda yadda, when framed as a volitional sacrifice. Does your intuition equally answer yes when asked if it is worth killing somebody to do etc etc? Doubt it (and not a deontological phrasing issue)

Do you really have that preference?

For example, if every but one of trillions of humans was being tortured and had dust specks, would you feel like trading the torture-free human's freedom from torture for the removal of specks from the tortured. If that were so, then you just are showing a fairly usual preference (inequality is bad!) which is probably fine as an approximation of stuff you could formalize consequentially.

But that's just an example. Often there's some context in which your moral intuition is reversed, which is a useful probe.

(usual cavea... (read more)

Thanks. That's very interesting to me, even as an anecdote. I've heard the opposite here too; that's why I made it a normative statement ("everyone already should know"). Between the missing money and the publication record, I can't imagine what would make SI look worth investing in to me. Yes, that would sometimes lead you astray. But even posts like, oh: http://lesswrong.com/lw/43m/optimal_employment/?sort=top

are pretty much the norm around here (I picked that since Luke helped write it). Basically, an insufficient attempt to engage with ... (read more)

Sorry, I'm not quite understanding your first paragraph. The subsequent piece, I agree completely with and think applies to a lot SI activities in principle (even if not looking for small donors). The same idea could roughly guide their outlook to "academic outreach", except it's a donation of time rather than money. For example, gaining credibility from a few big names is probably a bad idea, as is trying to play the game of seeking credibility.

On the first paragaph, apologies for repeating, but just clarifying: I'm assuming that everyone al... (read more)

That was my half my initial reaction as well,the other half:

The critique mostly consists of points that are pretty persistently bubbling beneath the surface around here, and get brought up quite a bit. Don't most people regard this as a great summary of their current views, rather than persuasive in any way? In fact, the only effect I suspect this had on most people's thinking was to increase their willingness to listen to Karnofsky in the future if he should change his mind. Since the post is basically directed at LessWrongians as an audience, I find a... (read more)