LessWrong 2.0 Reader

That is not a citation.

Let me dig up that list of a hundred US and Russian papers from the 1970s...

Please do. A single citation pointing to that list ought to suffice.

So it seems like if you want the decision to be made by those who have the most skin in the game, who are affected the most by its outcome, then private ownership of productive capital seems like actually extremely misaligned with that

There's a VERY difficult temporal problem with that framing. That is, whether you're talking about cumulative PAST investments as "skin in the game" or just the future rewards/value. I worry about the decision to have a factory in the first place AT LEAST as much as whether to replace the factory with an apartment or mall or whatever.

Online rule number one: never engage a gish galloper and never engage a person who insists that you 'refute' someone.

I broke it when I came here, but I can learn from my mistakes. Please excuse me from further conversation.

(Example: LessWrong deliberately doesn't show users the view-count of their posts. We already have the entire internet as the control group for what happens if you give people view-counts – they optimize for views, and you get clickbait. Is this patronizing? Yeah. Am I 100% confident it's the right call? No. But, I do think if you want to build a strong intellectual culture, it matters what kinds of Internet Points you give [or don't give] people, and this is at least a judgment call you need to be capable of making)

One could argue that view counts aren't view counts - they're click counts.

And people still have a metric they can optimize: the number of comments the post received.

FWIW, I think of Eliezer's essay Methodology of Unbounded Analysis as the standard ref here. (But, it has not yet been ported over to Alignment Forum or LW.)

Let me dig up that list of a hundred US and Russian papers from the 1970s...

This is the sort of lore that gets passed down within physics departments, but it is described in more oblique terms within the pages of Nature and Science. You have to be party to the oral tradition of physics and be able to read between the lines to be able to pass the stories on. I am giving this story to you. You are welcome. Analyze it for self-consistency with other things you know and do what you will with it. Write your thesis on it, for goodness sake.

Yeah, (poor) context isolation is is a recurring theme I've observed in my discussions and debates. Here's a typical scenario:

There's an original topic, X. Then we talk back and forth about it for a bit: C1, D1, C2, D2, C3, D3, C4, D4. The C messages are me and D is the other guy.

Then I write a reply, C5, about a specific detail in D4. Often I quote the exact thing I'm replying to or explain what I'm doing (e.g. a statement like "I disagree with A because B" where A was something said in D4.).

Then the person writes a reply (more of a non sequitur from my pov) about X.

People routinely try to jump the conversation back to the original context/topic. And they make ongoing attempts to interpret things I say in relation to X. Whatever I say, they often try to jump to conclusions about my position on X from it.

I find it very hard to get people to stop doing this. I've had little success even with explicit topic shifts like "I think you're making a discussion methodology mistake, and talking about X won't be productive until we get on the same page about how to discuss."

Another example of poor context isolation is when I give a toy example that'd be trivial to replace with a different toy example, but they start getting hung up on specific details of the example chosen. Sometimes I make the example intentionally unrealistic and simple because I want it to clearly be a toy example and I want to get rid of lots of typical context, but then they get hung up specifically on how unrealistic it is.

Another common example is when I compare X and Y regarding trait Z, and people get hung up b/c of how X and Y compare in general. Me: X and Y are the same re Z. Them: X and Y aren't similar!

I think Question-Ignoring Discussion Pattern is related, too. It's a recurring pattern where people don't give direct responses to the thing one just said.

And thanks for the link [LW · GW]. It makes sense to me and I think social dynamics ideas are some of the ones most often coupled/contextualized. I think it’s really important to be capable of thinking about things from multiple perspectives/frameworks, but most people really just have the one way of thinking (and have enough trouble with that), and for most people their one way has a lot of social norms built into it (because they live in society – you need 2+ thinking modes in order for it to make sense to have one without social norms, otherwise you don’t have a way to get along with people. Some people compromise and build fewer social norms into their way of thinking because that’s easier than learning multiple separate ways to think).

I suggest a Tribalism tag, and adding (analogy) or (metaphor) at the end of the current Blues and Greens tag

Right, i agree. so L4 would be pointing wherever, whether there's something there or not (no need to pretend there is, it's only about the act of pointing)

As the end of the paragraph suggests, property can also be immaterial, but I agree that sentence should be tightened up a bit.

As far as I understand, property comes with varying degrees of excludability and are sometimes not excludable at all (e.g. public property, common property).

A lens on public property is that it's where the public uses its right to exclude others from taking ownership of the thing. As Sherlock Holmes is in the public domain, I can't say "Sherlock Holmes is my IP!", whereas I could say that about characters I invent that aren't in the public domain. And the public domain doesn't just extend to things that are currently known; there are whole swaths of intellectual effort where society has decided discoveries cannot be patented.