LessWrong 2.0 Reader

A community that can accept "nazis" (in the vegan sense) cannot also accept "resistance fighters" (in the vegan sense). Either the "nazi" deserves to exist or he doesn't. But to test this dichotomy, somebody has to out themselves as a "nazi."

This doesn't seem true. It seems like it's saying that the directly opposing views on this cannot both exist in a "community" (to the extent LW is a community), but they just do.

(quoting the comment [LW(p) · GW(p)] by @Richard_Kennaway [LW · GW] that started this thread since it's 2 years old, and plausibly some will see my comment from the 'new' section and be confused by what I write next otherwise)

I eat meat and wear leather and wool. I do think that animals, the larger ones at least, can suffer. But I don’t much care. I don’t care about animal farming, nor the (non-human) animal suffering resulting from carnivores and parasites. I’d rather people not torture their pets, and I’d rather preserve the beauty and variety of nature, but that is the limit of my caring. If I found myself on the surface of a planet on which the evolution of life was just beginning, I would let it go ahead even though it mean all the suffering that the last billion years of this planet have seen.

Bring on the death threats.

So as an example of the 'directly opposing view', they seem to directly endorse evil and I think the world would be better without them, but for the same reason stated in this other comment [LW(p) · GW(p)], this does not warrant 'death threats'; killing them would be a waste of one's life, when there are much better ways to prevent the harm (e.g. solving alignment saves all the animals in one go).

IMO, most of the problems with Precise Bayesianism for humans are mostly problems with logical omnisicence not being satisfied.

Also, one the arbitrariness of the prior, this is an essential feature for a very general learner, due to the no free lunch theorems.

The no free lunch theorem prohibits 1 prior from always being universally accurate or inaccurate, so the arbitrariness of the prior is just a fact of life.

One reason to assume good faith is to stop yourself from justifying your own hidden motives in a conflict:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/e4GBj6jxRZcsHFSvP/assume-bad-faith#Sc6RqbDpurX6hJ8pY [LW(p) · GW(p)]

Quick take: this is probably interpreting them over-charitably, but I feel like the plausibility of arguments like the one in this post makes e/acc and e/acc-adjacent arguments sound a lot less crazy.

I think this post is quite good, and gives a heuristic important to modeling the world. If you skipped it because of title + author, you probably have the wrong impression of its contents and should give it a skim. Its main problem is what's left unsaid.

Some people in the comments reply to it that other people self-deceive, yes, but you should assume good faith. I say - why not assume the truth, and then do what's prosocial anyways?

Yes. But also, I'm afraid that Anthropic might solve this problem by just making less statements (which seems bad).

Making more statements would also be fine! I wouldn't mind if there were just clarifying statements even if the original statement had some problems.

(To try to reduce the incentive for less statements, I criticized other labs for not having policies at all.)

To the extent you think Anthropic is a good actor, you shouldn't be pressuring good actors like them to take actions that will make them differentially less competitive than worse actors

I think an important part of how one becomes (and stays) a good actor is by being transparent about things like this.

Anthropic could at least avoid making substantially misleading statements

Yes. But also, I'm afraid that Anthropic might solve this problem by just making less statements (which seems bad). Still Yes

Politicians announce all sorts of things on the campaign trail, that usually is not much indication of what post-election policy will be.

For my own students (I'm getting certified to teach high school business courses) I recommend Sophia learning (https://www.sophia.org/) to get a head start on gen ed college courses.

I would say: don't ignore the feeling. Calibrate it and train it, until it's worth listening to.

there's a good book about this: "Sizing People Up"