Tyrrell_McAllister

Replying toDon't take the organizational chart literally

Don't take the organizational chart literally

I just saw this post today. I was a little worried that I'd somehow subconsciously stolen this concept and its name from you until I saw your link to my comment. At any rate you definitely described it more memorably than I did.

Replying toWhat Failure Looks Like: Distilling the Discussion

Tyrrell_McAllister4y

What Failure Looks Like: Distilling the Discussion

Giving up this new technology would be analogous to living like a quaker today

Perhaps you meant "Amish" or "Mennonite" rather than "quaker"?

Replying toA non-magical explanation of Jeffrey Epstein

Tyrrell_McAllister4y

A non-magical explanation of Jeffrey Epstein

Nice article all around!

Another error that conspiracy-theorists make is to "take the org chart literally".

CTists attribute superhuman powers to the CIA, etc., because they suppose that decision-making in these organizations runs exactly as shown on the chart. Each box, they suppose, takes in direction from above and distributes it below just as infallibly as the lines connecting the boxes are drawn on the chart.

If you read org charts literally, it looks like leaders at the top have complete control over everything that their underlings do. So of course the leader can just order the underlings not to defect or leak or baulk at tasks that seem beyond the pale!

This overly literal reading of the org chart obscures the fact that all these people are self-interested agents, perhaps with only a nominal loyalty to the structure depicted on the chart. But many CTists miss this, because they read the org chart as if it were a flowchart documenting the dependencies among subroutines in a computer program.

Replying toDeflationism isn't the solution to philosophy's woes

Tyrrell_McAllister5y

Deflationism isn't the solution to philosophy's woes

LW is academic philosophy, rebooted with better people than Plato as its Pater Patriae.

LW should not be comparing itself to Plato. It's trying to do something different. The best of what Plato did is, for the most part, orthogonal to what LW does.

You can take the LW worldview totally onboard and still learn a lot from Plato that will not in any way conflict with that worldview.

Or you may find Plato totally useless. But it won't be your adoption of the LW memeplex alone that determines which way you go.

Replying toTo listen well, get curious

Tyrrell_McAllister5y

To listen well, get curious

Also, your empathy reassures them that you will be ready with truly helpful help if they do later want it.

Replying toGlobally better means locally worse

Tyrrell_McAllister5y

Globally better means locally worse

I agree that a rich person won't tolerate disposable products where more durable versions are available. Durability is a desirable thing, and people who can afford it will pay for it when it's an option.

But imagine a world where washing machines cost as much as they do in our world, but all washing machines inevitably break down after a couple years. Durable machines just aren't available.

Then, in that world, you have to be wealthier to maintain your washing-machine-owning status. People who couldn't afford to repurchase a machine every couple of years would learn to do without. But people who could afford it would consider it an acceptable cost of living in the style to which they have become accustomed.

Replying toMsg Len

Tyrrell_McAllister5y

Msg Len

Did your really need to say that you'd be brief? Wasn't it enough to say that you'd omit needless words? :)

Replying toEverything I Know About Elite America I Learned From ‘Fresh Prince’ and ‘West Wing’

Tyrrell_McAllister5y

Everything I Know About Elite America I Learned From ‘Fresh Prince’ and ‘West Wing’

It seems unlikely that joining a specific elite is terminally valuable as such, except to ephemeral subagents that were built for instrumental reasons to pursue it.

It seems quite likely that people seek to join whatever elite they can as a means to some more fundamental ends. Those of us who aren't driven to join the elite are probably satisfying our hunger to pursue those more fundamental ends in other ways.

For example, people might seek elite status in part to win security against bad fortune or against powerful enemies. But it might seem to you that there are other ways to be more secure against these things. It might even seem that being elite would leave you more exposed to such dangers.

For example, if you think that the main danger is unaligned AI, then you won't think of elite status as a safe haven, so you'll be less motivated to seek it. You'll find that sense of security in doing something else that seems to address that danger better.

Replying toOn Destroying the World

Tyrrell_McAllister5y*

On Destroying the World

I've played lot of role-playing games back in my day and often people write all kinds of things as flavour text. And none of it is meant to be taken literally.

This line gave me an important insight into how you were thinking.

The creators were thinking of it as a community trust-building exercise. But you thought that it was intended to be a role-playing game. So, for you, "cooperate" meant "make the game interesting and entertaining for everyone." That paints the risk of taking the site down in a very different light.

And if there was a particular goal, instead of us being supposed to decide for ourselves what the goal was, then maybe it would have made sense to have been clear about it?

But the "role-playing game" glasses that you were wearing would have (understandably) made such a statement look like "flavor text".

Replying toWhy is Bayesianism important for rationality?

Tyrrell_McAllisterSep 01, 2020*

Why is Bayesianism important for rationality?

I wrote a LessWrong post that addressed this: What Bayesianism Taught Me

Good arguments against "cultural appropriation"

Tyrrell_McAllister

[Originally posted to Facebook.]

I'm collecting steel-man arguments that the concept of "cultural appropriation" describes a real problem. Below are three arguments that seem somewhat reasonable to me in some cases. They seem to point to plausibly real costs of cross-cultural sharing and re-interpretation.

(Just to lay my cards on the table: I currently think that the benefits of cross-cultural sharing so often outweigh these cost that cultural appropriation as such should not be stigmatized.)

I'll abbreviate cultural appropriation as CA from here on out.

1. Some CA is taken to be a kind of mockery. Such CA is thought to result in diminished status and power for people in the "appropriated" culture. Alleged examples are... (read 568 more words →)

Moving Factward

Tyrrell_McAllister

In the legendarium of J.R.R. Tolkien, the land of the gods is known as "The Uttermost West." For the world was originally created flat, and the gods took the westernmost region of this flat world for their dwelling place.

On our globe, of course, there is no westernmost point. And yet it is still the case that, at each position on the equator, some direction is objectively "westward". The objectivity of "westward" doesn't assume that there is some ultimate West by which the west-ness of all other positions is measured.

Analogously, there is no such thing as a "bare uninterpreted fact". "Just the facts" is not a realizable ideal.

And yet we can still recognize... (read more)

Sam Harris and the Is–Ought Gap

Tyrrell_McAllister

Many secular materialist are puzzled by Sam Harris's frequent assertion that science can bridge Hume's is–ought gap. Indeed, bafflement abounds on both sides whenever he debates his "bridge" with other materialists. Both sides are unable to understand how the other can fail to grasp elementary and undeniable points. This podcast conversation[1] with the physicist Sean Carroll provides a vivid yet amicable demonstration.

I believe that this mutual confusion is a consequence of two distinct but unspoken ways of thinking about idealized moral argumentation. I'll call these two ways logical and dialectical.

Roughly, logical argumentation is focused on logical proofs of statements. Dialectical argumentation is geared towards rational persuasion of agents. These two different approaches... (read 1561 more words →)

Intrinsic properties and Eliezer's metaethics

Tyrrell_McAllister

Abstract

I give an account for why some properties seem intrinsic while others seem extrinsic. In light of this account, the property of moral goodness seems intrinsic in one way and extrinsic in another. Most properties do not suffer from this ambiguity. I suggest that this is why many people find Eliezer's metaethics to be confusing.

Section 1: Intuitions of intrinsicness

What makes a particular property seem more or less intrinsic, as opposed to extrinsic?

Consider the following three properties that a physical object X might have:

The property of having the shape of a regular triangular. (I'll call this property "∆-ness" or "being ∆-shaped", for short.)
The property of being hard, in the sense of resisting deformation.
The

... (read 1758 more words →)

Globally better means locally worse

Tyrrell_McAllister

Home appliances, such as washing machines, are apparently much less durable now than they were decades ago. [ETA: Thanks to commenters for providing lots of reasons to doubt this claim (especially from here and here).]

Perhaps this is a kind of mirror image of "cost disease". In many sectors (education, medicine), we pay much more now for a product that is no better than what we got decades ago at a far lower cost, even accounting for inflation. It takes more money to buy the same level of quality. Scott Alexander (Yvain) argues that the cause of cost disease is a mystery. There are several plausible accounts, but they don't cover all the... (read 382 more words →)

Buckets and memetic immune disorders

Tyrrell_McAllister

AnnaSalamon's recent post on "flinching" and "buckets" nicely complements PhilGoetz's 2009 post Reason as memetic immune disorder. (I'll be assuming that readers have read Anna's post, but not necessarily Phil's.) Using Anna's terminology, I take Phil to be talking about the dangers of merging buckets that started out as separate. Anna, on the other hand, is talking about how to deal with one bucket that should actually be several.

Phil argued (paraphrasing) that rationality can be dangerous because it leads to beliefs of the form "P implies Q". If you convince yourself of that implication, and you believe P, then you are compelled to believe Q. This is dangerous because your thinking about... (read 290 more words →)

Why is the A-Theory of Time Attractive?

Tyrrell_McAllister

11y

I've always been puzzled by why so many people have such strong intuitions about whether the A-theory or the B-theory¹ of time is true. [ETA: I've written "A-theory" and "B-theory" as code for "presentism" and "eternalism", but see the first footnote.] It seems like nothing psychologically important turns on this question. And yet, people often have a very strong intuition supporting one theory over the other. Moreover, this intuition seems to be remarkably primitive. That is, whichever theory you prefer, you probably felt an immediate affinity for that conception of time as soon as you started thinking about time at all. The intuition that time is A-theoretic or B-theoretic seems pre-philosophical, whichever... (read 832 more words →)

Rationality Quotes October 2014

Tyrrell_McAllister

11y

Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
Provide sufficient information (URL, title, date, page number, etc.) to enable a reader to find the place where you read the quote, or its original source if available. Do not quote with only a name.

238

Link: How Community Feedback Shapes User Behavior

Tyrrell_McAllister

11y

This article discusses how upvotes and downvotes influence the quality of posts on online communities. The article claims that downvotes lead to more posts of lower quality from the downvoted commenter.

From the abstract:

Social media systems rely on user feedback and rating mechanisms for personalization, ranking, and content filtering. [...] This paper investigates how ratings on a piece of content affect its author’s future behavior. [...] [W]e find that negative feedback leads to significant behavioral changes that are detrimental to the community. Not only do authors of negatively-evaluated content contribute more, but also their future posts are of lower quality, and are perceived by the community as such. In contrast, positive feedback does not carry similar effects, and neither encourages rewarded authors to write more, nor improves the quality of their posts.

The authors of the article are Justin Cheng, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, and Jure Leskovec.

Edited to add: NancyLebovitz already posted about this study in the Open Thread from September 8-14, 2014.

Rationality Quotes June 2014

Tyrrell_McAllister

12y

Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
Provide sufficient information (URL, title, date, page number, etc.) to enable a reader to find the place where you read the quote, or its original source if available. Do not quote with only a name.

283

LESSWRONG
LW

LESSWRONG
LW

What Bayesianism taught me

Sam Harris and the Is–Ought Gap

Good arguments against "cultural appropriation"

Buckets and memetic immune disorders

Tyrrell_McAllister

Good arguments against "cultural appropriation"

Moving Factward

Sam Harris and the Is–Ought Gap

Intrinsic properties and Eliezer's metaethics

Globally better means locally worse

Buckets and memetic immune disorders

Why is the A-Theory of Time Attractive?

Tyrrell_McAllister

What Bayesianism taught me

Sam Harris and the Is–Ought Gap

Good arguments against "cultural appropriation"

Buckets and memetic immune disorders

Tyrrell_McAllister

Good arguments against "cultural appropriation"

Moving Factward

Sam Harris and the Is–Ought Gap

Intrinsic properties and Eliezer's metaethics

Globally better means locally worse

Buckets and memetic immune disorders

Why is the A-Theory of Time Attractive?

Abstract

Section 1: Intuitions of intrinsicness