LessWrong 2.0 Reader

Regarding this

Such as the moms in the abusive partners example above: each one could acknowledge her self-deception once it was safe for her abusive partner to know too. She got enough power (financial or social) to protect herself and her child, making the telepathic scan no longer a dire threat.

I would add that most abusive people don't really like crushing their loved ones and it is sometimes easy to get them to stop, eg by having a peer of the abuser get a private word with the two parties separately. I think it is common for there to be simple miscommunication/misunderstanding — the abuser does not typically actually benefit from the accusative situation.

Why haven't abuser & abusee already talked and figured this out? Well there is some force field where you can't have a normal conversation with someone who is hitting you (or you are hitting) about the hitting. Although I don't know how to put it in your terms here from this post.

My takeaway from the US elections is that electoral blackmail in response to party in-fighting can work, and work well.

Dearborn and many other heavily Muslim areas of the US had plurality or near-plurality support for Trump, along with double-digit vote shares for Stein. It's notable that Stein supports cutting military support for Israel, which may signal a genuine preference rather than a protest vote. Many previously Democrat-voting Muslims explicitly cited a desire to punish Democrats as a major motivator for voting Trump or Stein.

Trump also has the advantage of not being in office, meaning he can make promises for brokering peace without having to pay the cost of actually doing so. 

Thus, the cost of not voting Democrat in terms of your Gaza expectations may be low, or even negative.

Whatever happens, I think Democrats are going to take Muslim concerns about Gaza more seriously in future election cycles. The blackmail worked - Muslim Americans have a credible electoral threat against Democrats in the future.

What gaslighting goes on in math class?

IDK, fields don't have to have names, there's just lots of work on these topics. You could start here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_anthropology and google / google-scholar around.

See also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tz-L2Ll85rM&list=PL1B24EADC01219B23&index=556 (I'm linking to the whole playlist, linking to a random old one because those are the ones I remember being good, IDK about the new ones).

This model also seems to rely on an assumption that there are more than two viable candidates, or that voters will refuse to vote at all rather than a candidate who supports 1/2 of their policy preferences.

If there were only two candidates and all voters chose whoever was closest to their policy preference, both would occupy the 20% block, since the extremes of the party would vote for them anyway.

But if there were three rigid categories and either three candidates, one per category, or voters refused to vote for a candidate not in their preferred category, then the model predicts more extreme candidates win.

I'm torn between the two for American elections, because:

• The "correlated preferences" model here feels more true to life, psychologically.
• Yet American politics goes from extremely disengaged primaries to a two-candidate FPTP general election, where the median voter theorem and the "correlated preferences" model seem to predict the same thing.
• Voter turnout seems like a critically important part of democratic outcomes, and a model that only takes the order of policy preferences into account, rather than the intensity of those preferences, seems too limited.
• Politicians often seem startlingly incompetent at inspiring the electorate, and it seems like we should think perhaps in "efficient market hypothesis" terms, where getting a political edge is extremely difficult because if anybody knew how to do it reliably, everybody would do it and the edge would disappear. In that sense, while both models can explain facets of candidate behavior and election outcomes, neither of them really offers a sufficiently detailed picture of elections to explain specific examples of election outcomes in a satisfying way. 

Thanks!

What's the ect? Or do you have links for where to learn more? (What's the name of the field?)

(I thought wikipedia would give me a good overview but your list was already more useful to me.)

I am impressed with how far you thought this through. Amend the constitution, including the constitution amendment section

The opposing states in the coalition will simply declare war against the defectors. It's surely worth keeping your own army to keep being a swing bloc.

Yes, I agree it's worse. If ONLY a better understanding of statistics by Phd students and research faculty was at the root of our cultural confusion around science.

I want this to be a board game