Open & Welcome Thread - June 2020

I don't know much about nationally, but I know that locally there's been none to indetectable rioting, some amount of looting from opportunistic criminals / idiot teenagers (say, 1 per 700 protesters) and a less than expected but still some cop/protester violence that could look like rioting if you squint.

Welcome Yitz!

I'm glad you're trying, and am sorry to hear it is so hard; that sounds really hard. You might try the book "How to have Impossible Conversations." I don't endorse every bit of it, but there's some good stuff in there IMO, or at least I got mileage from it.

Do you think that having your kids consume rationalist and effective altruist content and/or doing homeschooling/unschooling are insufficient for protecting your kids against mind viruses? If so, I want to understand why you think so (maybe you're imagining some sort of AI-powered memetic warfare?).

Eliezer has a Facebook post where he talks about how being socialized by old science fiction was helpful for him.

For myself, I think the biggest factors that helped me become/stay sane were spending a lot of time on the internet (which led to me discovering LessWrong, effective altruism, Cognito Mentoring) and not talking to other kids (I didn't have any friends from US public school during grades 4 to 11).

Opening the Heart of Compassion outlines the Buddhist model of 6 deleterious configurations that people tend to fall into. On top of this I would add that much of the negative consequences of this come from our tendency towards monism: to find one thing that works and then try to build an entire worldview out of it.

Are you most concerned that:

1) they will believe false things (which is bad for its own sake)
2) they will do harm to others due to false beliefs
3) harm will come to them because of their false beliefs
4) they will become alienated from you because of your disagreements with each other
5) something else?

It seems like these different possibilities would suggest different mitigations. For example, if the threat model is that they just adopt the dominant ideology around them (which happens to be false on many points), then that results in them having false beliefs (#1), but may not cause any harm to come to them from it (#3) (and may even be to their benefit, in some ways).

Similarly, depending on whether you care more about #1 or #4, you may try harder to correct their false ideas, or to establish a norm for your relationship that it's fine to disagree with each other. (Though I suspect that, generally speaking, efforts that tend to produce a healthy relationship will also tend to produce true beliefs, in the long run.)

I don't have children, and my upbringing wasn't especially good or bad on learning rationality.

Still, what I'm noticing in your post and the comments so far is the idea that rationality is something to put into your children.

I believe that rationality mostly needs to be modeled. Take your mind and your children's connection to the universe seriously. Show them that thinking and arguing are both fun and useful.

Do you mean how to teach them critical thinking skills? Or how to get them to prize the truth over fitting in?

I'm going to assume you're not a radical leftist. What if your 16 year old kid started sharing every leftist meme because they've really thought about it and think it's true? What if they said "it doesn't matter if there's pressure to hold these political opinions; they're as true as gravity!"

Would you count that as a success, since they're bold enough to stand up to an authority figure (you) to honestly express their deeply-considered views? Or a failure? If the latter, why?

My daughter is 2. Everything we do with her is either indoctrination or play; she doesn't have enough language yet for the learning-begets-learning we naturally assume with older kids and adults.

I was in the military, which is probably the most successful employer of indoctrination in the US. I believe the key to this success rests with the clarity of the indoctrination's purpose and effectiveness: the purpose is to keep everyone on the same page, because if we aren't our people will die (where our people means the unit). Indoctrination is the only tool available for this because there isn't time for sharing all the relevant information or doing analysis.

I plan to capture these benefits for my daughter by being specific about the fact that I'm using indoctrination and why indoctrination is a good tool for the situation instead of how we think or feel about it, when she inevitably has questions.

The bearing I think this has on the question of mind viruses is that she will know what indoctrination looks like when she sees it. Further, she will have expectations of purpose and impact; political indoctrination fails these tests, which I hope will trigger rejection (or at least forestall overcommitment).

How are you handling the problem that rationality will often pay negative if not over a critical mass (e.g., it often leads to poor signaling or anti-signaling if one is lucky)?

Re hedging, a common technique is having multiple fairly different citizenships and foreign-held assets, i.e. such that if your country become dangerously oppressive you or your assets wouldn't be handed back to it. E.g. many Chinese elites pick up a Western citizenship for them or their children, and wealthy people fearing change in the US sometimes pick up New Zealand or Singapore homes and citizenship.

There are many countries with schemes to sell citizenship, although often you need to live in them for some years after you make your investment. Then emigrate if things are starting to look too scary before emigration is restricted.

My sense, however, is that the current risk of needing this is very low in the US, and the most likely reason for someone with the means to buy citizenship to leave would just be increases in wealth/investment taxes through the ordinary political process, with extremely low chance of a surprise cultural revolution (with large swathes of the population imprisoned, expropriated or killed for claimed ideological offenses) or ban on emigration. If you take enough precautions to deal with changes in tax law I think you'll be taking more than you need to deal with the much less likely cultural revolution story.

People I followed on Twitter for their credible takes on COVID-19 now sound insane. Sigh...

Are you saying that you initially followed people for their good thoughts on COVID-19, but (a) now they switched to talking about other topics (George Floyd protests?), and their thoughts are much worse on these other topics, (b) their thoughts on COVID-19 became worse over time, (c) they made some COVID-19-related predictions/statements that now look obviously wrong, so that what they previously said sounds obviously wrong, or (d) something else?

I saw this "stopped clock" assumption catching a bunch of people with COVID-19, so I wrote a quick post [LW · GW] on why it seems unlikely to be a good strategy.

People I followed on Twitter for their credible takes on COVID-19 now sound insane. Sigh...

Are they still good sources on biology?

I don't know the US situation firsthand, but it seems like it could get worse toward the election. Maybe move to Europe?

What/who does #1 refer to? I've changed my mind a lot due to reading tweets from people I initially followed due to their credible COVID-19 takes, and you saying they sound insane would be a major update for me.

Or you can use Bypass Paywalls with Firefox or Chrome.

If you use Firefox, there is an extension called Temporary Containers. This allows you to load a site in a temporary container tab, which is effectively like opening the site in a fresh install of a browser or on a new device. For sites with rate limited pay walls like the NYT, this effectively defeats the paywall as it never appears to them that you have gone over their rate limit.

The extension can be configured so that every instance of a particular url is automatically opened in its own temporary container, which defeats these paywalls at very little cost to convenience.

You can often find articles in the Wayback Machine even if they're paywalled.

I recall a [SEQ RERUN] in the past, yes. You are also allowed to comment on old posts. LessWrong shows "recent discussion" on its front page, so these do get replies sometimes. There was also talk of a book group.

There are certainly a lot of people here interested in the same topic! Jeff (https://www.lesswrong.com/users/jkaufman [LW · GW]) is probably the most prolific poster on raising children, though his kids are still quite young. Good luck and have fun!

Welcome limestone! And feel free to leave comments here or ping the admins on Intercom (the small chat bubble in the bottom right) if you run into any problems!

Thanks for commenting. So, the latest admin-UI is that we have decide which core tags to give a post before deciding whether to frontpage it, which is a trivial inconvenience, which leads to delays. At the minute I do care a fair bit about getting the core tags right, so I'm not sure what the best thing to do about this is.

I was wondering about this, too. (If the implicit Frontpaging queue is "stuck", that gives me an incentive to delay publishing my new post, so that it doesn't have to compete with a big burst of backlogged posts being Frontpaged at the same time.)

I think various discussions on LessWrong are probably your best bet. A lot of LessWrong discussion is distributed over a large number of posts and platforms, so things end up less centralized than for SSC stuff, which has benefits and drawbacks.

For an experience similar to an SSC Open Thread, I think the LW Open Threads are your best bet, though they are definitely a lot less active than the SSC ones.

I think something like "market inefficiency" might be the word. Disclaimer - I'm not an economist and don't know the precise technical meaning of this term. But roughly speaking, the situations you describe seem to be those where the law of supply and demand is somehow prevented from acting directly on the monetary price, so the non-monetary "price" is increased/decreased instead. In the case of the apartments, they'd probably be happy to increase the price until they've got exactly the right number of applicants but are kept from doing it by rent control or reputation or something, so they incur moral costs on the applicants. In case of hiring, they're probably kept from lowering their wages through some combination of: inability to lower wages of the existing employees on the similar positions, wages not being exactly public anyway, and maybe some psychological expectations where nobody with required credentials will agree to work for less than X, no matter how good the conditions are (or alternatively they're genuinely trying to pick the best and failing, than it's Goodheart's law). And in the case of the dating market there simply is no universal currency to begin with.

"throwing the baby out with the bathwater"?

Conservation of thought, perhaps. The root problem is having more options than you can handle, probably amplified by bad premises. Or the other hand, if you're swamped, when will you have time to improve your premises?

"Conservation of thought" is from an early issue of The New York Review of Science Fiction.

I think you are referring to Goodheart's law, because all the measures your examples used as a proxy to achieve some goal were gamified in a way that the proxy stopped working reliably.

We might still have some problems with comment and PM submissions that I am looking into. Not sure what's causing that.

Just to clarify, I wouldn't really say that "we are building our own editor". We are just customizing the CKEditor 5 framework. It is definitely a bunch of work, but we aren't touching any low-level abstractions (and we've spent overall more time than that trying to fix bugs and inconsistencies in the current editor framework we are using, so hopefully it will save us time in the long-run).

Ah, yeah that makes sense, just an oversight. I'll try to fix that next week.

We're using CkEditor5 as a base to build some new features. There are a number of reasons for this (in the immediate future, it means you can finally have tables), but the most important (later on down the line) reason is that it provides Google Docs style collaborative editing. In addition to being a generally nice set of features for coauthors, I'm hoping that it dovetails significantly with the LW 2019 review in December, allowing people to suggest changes for nominated posts.

(We inherited the terms of use from the old LessWrong so while I tried my best to understand them, I don't have as deep of a sense of understanding as I wish I had, and it seemed more important to keep the terms of use consistent than to rewrite everything, to maintain consistency between the agreements that authors made when they contributed to the site at different points in time)

The Wikipedia article on Moral Rights: 

The moral rights include the right of attribution, the right to have a work published anonymously or pseudonymously, and the right to the integrity of the work.[1] The preserving of the integrity of the work allows the author to object to alteration, distortion, or mutilation of the work that is "prejudicial to the author's honor or reputation".[2] Anything else that may detract from the artist's relationship with the work even after it leaves the artist's possession or ownership may bring these moral rights into play. Moral rights are distinct from any economic rights tied to copyrights. Even if an artist has assigned his or her copyright rights to a work to a third party, he or she still maintains the moral rights to the work.[3]

What exactly these rights are seems to differ a bunch from country to country. In the U.S. the protection of these moral rights is pretty limited. From the same article: 

Moral rights[17] have had a less robust tradition in the United States. Copyright law in the United States emphasizes protection of financial reward over protection of creative attribution.[5]:xiii The exclusive rights tradition in the United States is inconsistent with the notion of moral rights as it was constituted in the Civil Code tradition stemming from post-Revolutionary France. When the United States acceded to the Berne Convention, it stipulated that the Convention's "moral rights" provisions were addressed sufficiently by other statutes, such as laws covering slander and libel.[5]

Concrete instances where I can imagine this waiving becoming relevant, and where I think this makes sense (though this is just me guessing, I have not discussed this in detail with a lawyer): 

• An author leaves a comment on a post that starts with a steelman of an opposing position. We display a truncated version of the comment by default, which now only shows them arguing for a position they find abhorrent. This could potentially violate their moral rights by altering their contribution in a way that violates their honor or reputation.
• An author leaves a comment and another user quotes a subsection of that comment, bolding, or italicizing various sections that they disagree with, and inserting sentences using $[...]$ notation. 

It's on EAForum [EA · GW], perhaps?

I think you can refer the person to orthogonality thesis

Seems like an appeal to ?false? authority. May not be a fallacy because there's a demonstrable trend between technological superiority and moral superiority at least on Earth. Assuming that trend extends to other civilizations off Earth? I'm sure there's something fallacious about that, maybe too geocentric.

It might generally be Moral Realism (anti-moral-relativism). The notion that morality is some universal objective truth that we gradually uncover more of as we grow wiser. That's how those people usually conceive it.

I sometimes call it anti-orthogonalism.

Nope, looks like a bug, will look into it.

I'm planning to try this: https://learn.nateliason.com/. I think that the Roam founder also recommends it.

I recently applied for a Roam account. Can I ask when it was you applied and how long before they got back to you?