LESSWRONG
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Wikitags

Arbital claims are significantly more useful* when they are fairly well-specified and unambiguous**

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[-]Ted Sanders9y*80

(My first comment on Arbital. Hopefully it contributes.)

As someone who has traded on prediction markets for years, I agree with the sentiment.

Unfortunately, this claim itself seems really ambiguous. I voted neutral because I'm having a difficult time evaluating what the claim means. I appreciate the attempted clarification of 'at least 30% more valuable to people sharing models', but it leaves me confused. How is value measured? How would I be able to distinguish 20% more valuable from 40% more valuable? And who are these people sharing models? When and where are they doing their sharing?

I think we all agree that language will always have some wiggle room for uncertainty and interpretation. But in this particular case, I have no idea how to distinguish worlds where this statement is true from worlds where this statement is false. That's why I voted neutral.

I wish I could give a more constructive suggestion of how this claim could be reworded. I've spent a few minutes thinking about it but I don't have anything great. If anything, I'd remove the first asterisk.

Reply4
[-]Timothy Chu9y*50

This doesn't seem like a controversial of a claim (be specific and not vague is one of the most timeless heuristics out there), but does seem worth highlighting.

I would like to add that my favorite claim so far ("Effective Altruism's current message discourages creativity") was not particularly well-specified. ("creativity" and "EA's current message" are not very specific imo).

Reply1
[-]Andrea Gallagher9y*10

If claims are primitives, then all the interesting conversations will be at a parent level, which will need to stitch claims together to make an argument and form a perspective. I think many of the claims I'm seeing now are not actually primitives, and really need discussion around them to hash out the meaning.

I would love to see some mechanism to break a claim into both it's definitions of terms and supporting arguments (cruxes, if we want to use that term).

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[-]alexei9y*50

Sometimes ambiguous claims can be good too. Just to get a quick sense of where people are at. And for some claims, it might be really hard to operationalize them. Like this one, "At least 30% more valuable to people sharing models" doesn't make much sense to me.

Reply4
[-]Satvik Beri9y*160

I think a good litmus test is "could two people both strongly agree (or strongly disagree) while actually holding opposing views?"

I also think it makes sense to err on the side of overly unambiguous claims, at least initially: the more restrictive you are, the easier it is to create good discussion norms.

Reply3
[-]alexei9y*30

Yeah, I think more comments and claims should be driven by cruxes..

Reply2
[-]Eric B9y*20

Yep, there's at least high variability. Especially if the things it could be taken to mean are things people generally have similar credence for.

And, nods, this was partly a test of trying to disambiguate a claim, and I found it harder than expected / think I did not do very well. Maybe just words would have been better rather than numbers, and more of them. Or maybe doing a simple version and having other people see where it was ambiguous rather than trying to clarify in a vacuum is easier?

Reply1
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