LessWrong 2.0 Reader

I'm not sure about the off-topic rules here, but how about this:

Why are some of the drinks so expensive, given that all of them are mostly water?

Sometimes we use the phrase "given that" to mean, "considering that". Here, we do not mean, some of the drinks are not mostly water but we are not talking about them. We mean that literally all the drinks are mostly water.

So glad to hear!

Huh, I just realized there are two different meanings/goals of moderation/censorship, and it is too easy to conflate them if you don't pay attention.

One is the kind where you don't want the users of your system to e.g. organize a crime. The other is where you want discussions to be disrupted e.g. by trolls.

Superficially, they seem like the same thing: you have moderators, they make the rules, and give bans to people who break them. But now this seems mostly coincidental to me: you have some technical tools, so you use them for both purposes, because that's all you have. However, from the perspective of the people who want to organize a crime, those who try to prevent them are the disruptive trolls.

I guess, my point is that when we try to think about how to improve the moderation, we may need to think about these purposes as potential opposites. Things that make it easier to ban trolls may also make it easier to organize the crime. Which is why people may simultaneously be attracted to Substack or Telegram, and also horrified by what happens at Substack or Telegram.

Maybe there is a more general lesson for the society, unrelated to tech. If you allow people to organize bottom-up, you can get a lot of good things, but you will also get groups dedicated to doing bad things. Western countries seem to optimize for the bottom-up organizations: companies, non-profits, charities, churches, etc. Soviet Union used to optimize for top-down control: everything was controlled by the state, any personal initiative was viewed as suspicious and potentially disruptive. As a result, Soviet Union collapsed economically, but the West got its anti-vaxers and flat-Eathers and everything. During the Cold War, USA was good at pushing the Soviet economical buttons. These days, Russia is good at pushing the Western free speech buttons.

Huh, maybe the analogies go deeper. Soviet Union was surprisingly tolerant of petty crime (people stealing from each other, not from the state). There were some ideological excuses, the petty criminals being technically part of the proletariat. But from the practical perspective, the more people worry about being potential victims of crime, the less attention they pay to organizing a revolution; they may actually wish for more state power, as a protection. So there was an unspoken alliance between the ruling class and the undesirables at the bottom, against everyone in between. And perhaps similarly, big platforms such as Facebook or Twitter seem to have an unspoken alliance with trolls; their shared goal is to maximize user engagement. By reacting to trolls, you don't only make the trolls happy, you also make Zuck happy, because you have spent more time on Facebook, and more ads were displayed to you. It would be naive to expect Facebook to make the discussions better; if they knew how to do that, they do not have the incentive; they actually want to hit exactly the level of badness where most people are frustrated but won't leave yet.

Finding the technical solution against trolls isn't that difficult; you basically need invite-only clubs. The things that the members write could be public or private; the important part is that in order to become a member, you need to get some kind of approval first. This can be implemented in various ways: a member needs to send you an invitation link by an e-mail, a moderator needs to approve your account before you can post. A weaker version of this is the way Less Wrong uses: anyone can join, but the new accounts are fragile and can be downvoted out of existence by the existing members, if necessary. (Works well against individual accounts created infrequently. Wouldn't work against hundred people joining at the same time and mass-upvoting each other. But I assume that the moderators have a red button that could simply disable creating new accounts for a while until the chaos is sorted out.)

But when you look at the offline analogy, these things are usually called "old boy networks", and some people think they should be disrupted. Whether you agree with that or not, probably depends on your value judgment about the network versus the people who are trying to get inside. Do you support the rights of new people to join the groups they want to join, or the rights of the existing members to keep out the people they want to keep out? One person's "trolls" are other person's "diverse voices that deserve to be heard".

So there are two lines of conflict: the established groups versus potential disruptors, and the established groups versus the owners of the system. The owners of the system may want some groups to stop existing, or to change so much that from the perspective of the current members they become different groups under the same name. Offline, the owner of the system could be a dictator, or could be a democratically elected government; I am not proposing a false equivalence here, just saying that from the perspective of the group survival, both can be seen as the strong hand crushing the community. Online, the owners are the administrators. And it is a design choice whether "the owners crushing the community, should they choose so" is made easy or difficult. If it is easy, it will make the groups feel uneasy, especially once the crushing of other groups start. If it is difficult, at least politically if not technically (e.g. Substack or Telegram advertising themselves as the uncensored spaces), we should not be surprised if some really bad things come out of there, because that is the system working exactly as designed.

In case of Less Wrong, we are a separate island, where the owners of the system are simultaneously the moderators of the group, so this level of conflict is removed. But such solutions are very expensive; we are lucky to have enough people with high tech skills and a lot of money available if the group really wants it. For most groups this is not an option; they need to build their community on someone else's land, and sometimes the owners evict them, or increase the rent (by pushing more ads on them).

If you are a free speech absolutist, or if you believe that the world is not fragile, the right way seems kinda obvious: you need an open protocol for decentralized communication with digital signatures. And you should also provide a few reference implementations that are easy to use: a website, a smartphone app, and maybe a desktop app.

At the bottom layer, you have users who provide content on demand; the content is digitally signed and can be cached and further distributed by third parties. A "user" could be a person, a pseudonym, or a technical user. (For example, if you tried to implement Facebook or Reddit on top of this protocol, its "users" would be the actual users, and the groups/subreddits, and the website itself.) This layer would be content-agnostic; it would provide any kind of content for given URI, just like you can send anything using an e-mail attachment, HTTP GET, or a torrent. The content would be digitally signed, so that the third parties (mostly servers, but also peer-to-peer for smaller amounts of data) can cache it and further distribute. In practice, most people wouldn't host their own servers, so they would publish by on a website that is hosted on a server, or using their application which would most likely upload it to some server. (Analogically to e-mail, which can be written in an app and sent by SMTP, or written directly in some web mail.) The system would automatically support downloading your own content, so you could e.g. publish using a website, then change your mind, install a desktop app, download all your content from the website (just like anyone who reads your content could do), and then delete your account on the website and continue publishing using the app. Or move to another website, create an account, and then upload the content from your desktop app. Or skip the desktop app entirely; create a new web account, and import everything from your old web account.

The next layer is versioning; we need some way to say "I want the latest version of this user's 'index.html' file". Also, some way to send direct messages between users (not just humans, but also technical users).

The next layer is about organizing the content. The system can already represent your tweets as tiny plain-text files, your photos as bitmap files, etc. Now you need to put it all together and add some resource descriptors, like XML or JSON files that say "this is a tweet, it consists of this text and this image or video, and was written at this date and time" or "this is a list of links to tweets, ordered chronologically, containing items 1-100 out of 5678 total" or "this is a blog post, with this title, its contents are in this HTML file". To support groups, you also need resource descriptors that say "this is a group description: name, list of members, list of tweets". Now make the reference applications that support all of this, with optional encryption, and you basically have Telegram, but decentralized. Yay freedom; but also expect this system to be used for all kinds of horrible crimes. :(

My opinion is that whatever value of epsilon you pick should be low enough such that it never happens once in your life. "I flipped a coin but it doesn't actually exist" should never happen. Maybe it would happen if you lived for millions of years, but in a normal human lifespan, never once.

Yes, the soon-to-be-here "human level" AGI people talk about is for all intent and purposes ASI. Show me one person who is at the highest expert level on thousands of subjects and that have the content of all human knowledge memorized and can draw the most complex inferences on that knowledge across multiple domains in seconds.

If it works, maybe it isn't slop?

I was about to delete my message because I was afraid it was a bit much but then the likes started streaming in and god knows how much of a sloot i am for internet validation.

Maybe our disagreement is that I'm more skeptical about the legislature proactively suggesting any good legislation? My default assumption is that without leadership, hardly anything of value gets done. Like, it's an obviously good idea to repeal the Jones Act, and yet it's persisted for a hundred years.

If you don't think it relates to the question at hand, why did you brought up the point in the first place?

I think you are too much focused on Trump (likely because the media likes to focus on Trump) and not on how a successful campaign to repeal the act would look like. It's unlikely that Trump makes it his agenda, but that's not required given that the legislature is independent from the executive.

I'll describe my general thoughts, like you did.

I think about transness in a similar way to how I think about homo/bisexuality.

• If homo/bisexuality is outlawed, people are gonna suffer. Bad.
• If I could erase homo/bisexuality from existence without creating suffering, I wouldn't anyway. Would be a big violation of people's freedom to choose their identity and actions (even if in practice most people don't actually "choose" to be homo/bisexual).
• Different people have homo/bisexuality of different "strength" and form. One man might fall in love with another man, but dislike sex or even kissing. Maybe he isn't a real homosexual, if he doesn't need to prove it physically? Another man might identify as a bisexual, but be in a relationship with a woman... he doesn't get to prove his bisexuality (sexually or romantically). Maybe we shouldn't trust him unless he walks the talk? As a result of all such situations, we might have certain "inconsistencies": some people identifying as straight have done more "gay" things than people identifying as gay. My opinion on this? I think all of this is OK. Pushing for an "objective gay test" would be dystopian and suffering-inducing. I don't think it's an empirical matter (unless we choose it to be, which is a value-laden choice). Even if it was, we might be very far away from resolving it. So just respecting people's self-identification in the meantime is best, I believe. Moreover, a lot of this is very private information anyway. Less reason to try measuring it "objectively".

My thoughts about transness specifically:

1. We strive for gender equality (I hope). Which makes the concept of gender less important for society as a whole.
2. The concept of gender is additionally damaged by all the things a person can decide to do in their social/sexual life. For example, take an "assigned male at birth" (AMAB) person. AMAB can appear and behave very feminine without taking hormones. Or vice-versa (take hormones, get a pair of boobs, but present masculine). Additionally there are different degrees of medical transition and different types of sexual preferences.
3. A lot of things which make someone more or less similar to a man/woman (behavior with friends, behavior with romantic partners, behavior with sexual partners, thoughts) are private. Less reason to try measuring those "objectively".
4. I have a choice to respect people's self-identified genders or not. I decide to respect them. Not just because I care about people's feelings, but also because of points 1 & 2 & 3 and because of my general values (I show similar respect to homo/bisexuals). So I respect pronouns, but on top of that I also respect if someone identifies as a man/woman/nonbinary. I believe respect is optimal in terms of reducing suffering and adhering to human values.

When I compare your opinion to mine, most of my confusion is about two things: what exactly do you see as an empirical question? how does the answer (or its absence) affect our actions?

Zack insists that Blanchard is right, and that I fail at rationality if I disagree with him. People on Twitter and Reddit insist that Blanchard is wrong, and that I fail at being a decent human if I disagree with them. My opinion is that I have no comparative advantage at figuring out who is right and who is wrong on this topic, or maybe everyone is wrong, anyway it is an empirical question and I don't have the data. I hope that people who have more data and better education will one day sort it out, but until that happens, my position firmly remains "I don't know (and most likely neither do you), stop bothering me".

I think we need to be careful to not make a false equivalence here:

1. Trans people want us to respect their pronouns and genders.
2. I'm not very familiar with Blanchard, so far it seems to me like Blanchard's work is (a) just a typology for predicting certain correlations and (b) this work is sometimes used to argue that trans people are mistaken about their identities/motivations.

2A is kinda tangential to 1. So is this really a case of competing theories? I think uncertainty should make one skeptical of Blanchard work's implications rather than make one skeptical about respecting trans people.

(Note that this is about the representatives, not the people being represented. Two trans people can have different opinions, but you are required to believe the woke one and oppose the non-woke one.) Otherwise, you are transphobic. I completely reject that.

Two homo/bisexuals can have different opinions on what's "true homo/bisexuality" is too. Some opinions can be pretty negative. Yes, that's inconvenient, but that's just an expected course of events.

Shortly: disagreement is not hate. But it often gets conflated, especially in environments that overwhelmingly contain people of one political tribe.

I feel it's just the nature of some political questions. Not in all questions, not in all spaces you can treat disagreement as something benign.

But if there is a person who actually feels dysphoria from not being addressed as "ve" (someone who would be triggered by calling them any of: "he", "she", or "they"), then I believe that this is between them and their psychiatrist, and I want to be left out of this game.

Agree. Also agree that lynching for accidental misgendering is bad.

(That's when you get the "attack helicopters" as an attempt to point out the absurdity of the system.)

I'm pretty sure the helicopter argument began as an argument against trans people, not as an argument against weird-ass novel pronouns.