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And even as scientific consensus on climate did eventually appear, most countries have done little of substance in response, because their incentives to ignore the consensus outweigh the perceived risk.

To clarify, the scientific consensus on climate change is that it's emphatically not an extinction risk, abundant misleading media presentations notwithstanding.

I think much of woo in general has the same combination of “makes clearly nonsensical claims about reality, even as many of their practices have clear value and just lack legible mainstream explanations”.

How much value, though? The claim that any popular variety of woo provides some positive utility for its practitioners is, on the one hand, plausible, but on the other, unexciting. Meanwhile, woo-meisters tend to promise all sorts of crazy benefits, which is what mainly attracts (and repels) people.

Trying things out is good and all, but there's always t... (read more)

Interesting. How do actual top players deal with this, have private competitions based on honor system?

What is surprising to me is that despite being partially divorced from the narrative coherence, this coherent mind is, once recognized, still very legible and human-like.

I'd say that it's even more human-like than a character entirely circumscribed by some idealistic narrative. "The face presented is not the whole model mind, and the model is the unit under selection in training" is entirely applicable to humans as well, after you swap "model" for "organism".

If I was reasonably confident I knew better than you, how you should live, under what basis do I have the obligation to take away your agency to elect override your own preferences?

Under the norms of your society/culture. They obviously aren't static, and can e.g. fade away, having lost to external competition (like vikings had), or change in response to internal critique (like how colonialism became discredited). If you would rather operate under some hypothetical perfect rules derived from first principles, then you will likely be disappointed, seeing how philosophy has for millennia utterly failed to discover those.

I think a better way of presenting it is in a different order:

• I think insect suffering might cause a million times more suffering than human suffering

But that's not the important rhetorical point that the claimant likely intends to make in this case. EAs know that insect suffering sounds obviously crazy to the uninitiated, so the likely target audience here are people who already think that animal suffering charities of some sort (e.g. factory farming-related) satisfy the "effective" criterion, which is equivalent to thinking that animal suffering ... (read more)

I think that Palestinians are basically screwed regardless of what they do, but insofar as their goals include weakening/isolating Israel, they have achieved success beyond their wildest dreams (but at a grievous cost).

I don’t know that this is as true as it is in the popular mindset. A lot of the Weathermen, who were one of the most prolific terrorist organizations in American history, now hold positions of power, including very in-demand university sinecures.

Not to mention that a movie that's at least ambivalent towards that sort of thing has literally just won the Best Picture.

Also, being a full-throated Hamas apologist doesn't disqualify people from many positions of influence these days.

I think I buy some of this—some ‘moral progress’ is increasing wealth allowing us to afford more luxuries.

But I think I’m mostly interested in a different sort of progress—the kind where someone’s idea of what ‘the good’ is changes.

But these are largely the same. We are now rich enough to eschew slavery, so we can afford the "luxury" of banning it (and calling it utter evil). It's plausible that we'll soon be rich enough that eschewing animal meat will no longer be onerous, et cetera.

There’s a concept that sometimes gets used of ‘technological comp

In particular, one of the reasons I think progress happens is that some things are pinned down by reality.

Indeed. To put it another way, what we call progress is mainly adaptation to changing material circumstances. So, there are uncountably many greatly diverging counterfactual moral endpoints, similarly to how there are uncountably many possible configurations of matter. Of course, some possibilities are more likely than others, in either realm.

Often, beliefs are adopted not because of their truth value but because they allow a person to do something they wanted to do.

I was mainly going of off this, the perceived implication being that there is a widely-applicable truth value in the uncorrupted idea.

If you mean that NVC hasn’t managed to completely take over the world, bring world peace and reshape everyone’s language, that’s of course true.

No, I thought that's what you thought about its potential (minus the comedic exaggeration), if everybody got the uncorrupted message. If you simply meant that ten million might benefit instead of one million, I have no objections.

Well, I do agree that either an especially benign new religious movement or an especially benign communist dictatorship might be the way forward, but that still leaves more questions than answers.

Here's a more cynical take: if a seemingly good "social idea" retains this status for a long time without making much progress beyond its most passionate proponents, it's strong evidence that the idea isn't good enough even in its "uncorrupted" form to be widely applicable.

It's similar to how everybody and their grandma know all about cognitive biases these days, and yet they mysteriously refuse to go away even so - they're there for a reason. Likewise, I'd imagine that there are good reasons for why people communicate "violently" by default, and unilatera... (read more)

Is it an attainable counterfactual, though? The only positive counterexamples you presented were a centuries-old Ottoman practice, and the aftermath of the worst war ever. These days, though, it doesn't seem like anybody anywhere in the world does meritocracy better than the US, however faint a praise this might be, so clearly the problem is far from trivial.

What exactly leads you to believe that, under such repression, China could never reach the level of development enjoyed by the United States? Why not consider what might happen if the repression were relaxed?

My impression is that things are as relaxed as they are going to get, and the trend these days seems to be in the direction of increasing repression.

Well, I mean, congrats on your choice, but why are your numbers more indicative than mine? Looks to me like you’re just cherrypicking. Everyone can cherrypick.

I'm not claiming that they're more indicative, but I do claim that they aren't obviously less indicative. Since everyone can cherrypick, it's not clear in what way are objective numbers better than vibes anyhow.

Ok, cool, imagine China becomes as rich per capita as the US.

IMO CCP-led China will never come close, and the level of repression is an important factor of that. Small-ish petrostates aren't relevant here.

You’ve got to choose some objective numbers that reflect reality.

Fair. I choose the number of legal oppositional parties and the number of peasants prevented from migrating to cities by the hukou system.

the repression in today’s China is much lower than these historical examples, and not obviously worse than in the US

The former is obvious, the latter is a spicy take. Of course, the US isn't exactly having its best moment these days, but I still doubt that the percentage of Americans who would prefer living in China would be even within one order of magnitude of that of hopeful Chinese immigrants.

They are: how many people the country represses internally, and how many people the country kills in foreign wars. These are the topline metrics for a government being good domestically and being good internationally. For example, Nazi Germany had horrible repression internally and started horrible aggressive wars, and that’s the entire reason we think it was bad. Well, today’s US has much higher incarceration rate than today’s China and also kills much more people in foreign wars, so there’s that.

Is your claim that non-imprisoned Chinese should be considered non-repressed, or at least comparably repressed to Americans?

Second, deep learning works in practice, using a reasonable amount of computational resources; meanwhile, even the most efficient versions of Solomonoff induction like speed induction run in exponential time or worse.

But doesn't increasing the accuracy of DL outputs require exponentially more compute? It only "works" to the extent that labs have been able to afford exponential compute scaling so far.