Open thread, Mar. 20 - Mar. 26, 2017

I'd suggest being careful about your approach. If you lose this battle, you may not get another chance. David Gerard most likely has 100 times more experience with wiki battling than you. Essentially, when you make up a strategy, sleep on it, and then try imagining how a person already primed against LW would read your words.

For example, expect that any edit made by anyone associated with LW will be (1) traced back to their identity and LW account, and consequently (2) reverted, as a conflict of interest. And everyone will be like "ugh, these LW guys are trying to manipuate our website", so the next time they are not going to even listen to any of us.

Currently my best idea -- I didn't make any steps yet, just thinking -- is to post a reaction to the article's Talk page, without even touching the article. This would have two advantages: (1) No one can accuse me of being partial, because that's what I would openly disclose first, and because I would plainly say that as a person with a conflict of interest I shouldn't edit my article. Kinda establishing myself as the good guy who follows the Wikipedia rules. (2) A change in article could be simply reverted by David, but he is not allowed to remove my reaction from the talk page, unless I make a mistake and break some other rule. That means, even if I lose the battle, people editing the article in the future will be able to see my reaction. This is a meta move: the goal is not to change the article, but to convince the impartial Wikipedia editors that it should be changed. If I succeed to convince them, I don't have to do the edit myself; someone else will. On the other hand, if I fail to convince them, any edit would likely be reverted by David, and I have neither time nor will to play wiki wars.

What would be the content of the reaction? Let's start with the assumption that on Wikipedia no one gives a fuck about Less Wrong, rationality, AI, Eliezer, etc.; to most people this is just an annoying noise. By drawing their attention to the topic, you are annoying them even more. And they don't really care about who is right, only who is technically correct. That's the bad news. The good news is that they equally don't give a fuck about RationalWiki or David. What they do care about is Wikipedia, and following the rules of Wikipedia. Therefore the core of my reaction would be this: David Gerard has a conflict of interest about this topic; therefore he should not be allowed to edit it, and all his previous edits should be treated with suspicion. The rest is simply preparing my case, as well as I can, for the judge and the jury, who are definitely not Bayesians, and want to see "solid", not probabilistic arguments.

The argument for David's conflict of interest is threefold. (1) He is a representative (admin? not sure) of RationalWiki, which is some sense is LessWrong's direct competitor, so it's kinda like having a director of Pepsi Cola edit the article on Coca Cola, only at a million times smaller scale. How are these two websites competitors? They both target the same niche, which is approximately "a young intelligent educated pro-science atheist, who cares a lot about his self-image as 'rational'". They have "rational" in their name, we have it pretty much everywhere except in the name; we compete for being the online authorities on the same word. (2) He has a history of, uhm, trying to associate LW with things he does not like. He made (not sure about this? certainly contributed a lot) the RW article on Roko's Basilisk several years ago; LW complained about RW already in 2012. Note: It does not matter for this point whether RW or LW was actually right or wrong; I am just trying to establish that these two have a several years of mutual dislike. (3) This would be most difficult to prove, but I believe that most sensational information about LW was actually inspired by RW. I think most mentions of Roko's Basilisk could be traced back to their article. So what David is currently doing in Wikipedia is somewhat similar to citogenesis... he writes something on his website, media find it and include it in their sensationalist reports, then he "impartially" quotes the media for Wikipedia. On some level, yes, the incident happened (there was one comment, which was once deleted by Eliezer -- as if nothing similar ever happened on any online forum), but the whole reason for its "notability" is, well, David Gerard; without his hard work, no one would give a fuck.

So this is the core, and then there are some additional details. Such as, it is misleading to tell the readers what 1% of LW survey identify as, without even mentioning the remaining 99%. Clearly, "1% neoreactionaries" is supposed to give it a right-wing image, which adding "also, 4% communists, and 20% socialists" (I am just making the numbers up at the moment) would immediately disprove. And the general pattern of David's edits, for increasing the length of the parts talking about basilisk and neoreaction, and decreasing the lenght of everything else.

My thoughts so far. But I am quite a noob as far as wiki wars are concerned, so maybe there is an obvious flaw in this that I haven't noticed. Maybe it would be best if a group of people could cooperate in precise wording of the comment (probably at a bit more private place, so that parts of the debate couldn't be later quoted out of context).

Also, the edit warring is two way...someone wholesale deleted the Rs B section.

Problem is, this is probably not a good news for LW. Tomorrow, the RB section will most likely be back, possibly with a warning on the talk page that the evil cultists from LW are trying to hide their scandals.

The process is not different from what occurred in the past, and I think this was basically the catalyst for anti-semitism during the post industrial revolution era. You observe a characteristic of a group of people who seem to be doing a lot better than you, in that case a lot of them happened to be Jewish, and so you then associate their Jewish-ness with your lack of success and unhappiness.

The main difference is that society continues to modernize and technology improves. Bad ideas for why some people are better off than others become unpopular. Actual biases and unfairness in the system gradually disappear. But despite that, inequality remains and in fact seems to be rising. What happens is that the only thing left to blame is instrumental rationality. I imagine that people will look as hard as they can for bias and unfairness for as long as possible, and will want to see it in people who are instrumentally rational.

In a free society, (and even more so as a society becomes freer and true bigotry disappears) some people will be better off just because they are better at making themselves better off, and the degree to which people vary in that ability is quite staggering. But psychologically it is too difficult for many to accept this, because no one wants to believe in inherent differences. So it's sort of a paradoxical result of our society actually improving.

"Postmodernists" call themselves poststructuralists, continental philosophers, or critical theorists.

Not quite. "Poststructuralism" is an ex-post label and many of the thinkers that are most often identified with the emergence of "postmodern" ideas actually rejected it. (Some of them even rejected the whole notion of "postmodernism" as an unhelpful simplification of their actual ideas.) "Continental philosophy" really means the 'old-fashioned' sort of philosophy that Analytic philosophers distanced themselves from; you can certainly view postmodernism as encompassed within continental philosophy, but the notions are quite distinct. Similarly, "critical theory" exists in both 'modernist'/'high modern' and 'postmodern' variants, and one cannot understand the 'postmodern' kind without knowing the 'modern' critical theory it's actually referring to, and quite often criticizing in turn.

All of which is to say that, really, it's complicated, and that while describing postmodernism as a "different set of concerns, goals and approaches" may hit significantly closer to the mark than merely caricaturing it as an antithesis to rationality, neither really captures the worthwhile ideas that 'postmodern' thinkers were actually developing, at least when they were at their best. (--See, the big problem with 'continental philosophy' as a whole is that you often get a few exceedingly worthwhile ideas mixed in with heaps of nonsense and confused thinking, and it can be really hard to tell which is which. Postmodernism is no exception here!)

Rationalists (Bay area type) tend to think of what they call Postmodernism[*] as the antithesis to themselves, but the reality is more complex. "Postmodernism" isn't a short and cohesive set of claims that are the opposite of the set of claims that rationalists make, it's a different set of concerns, goals and approachs.

Except that it does make claims that are the opposite of the claims rationalists make. It claims that there is no objective reality, no ultimate set of principles we can use to understand the universe, and no correct method of getting nearer to truth. And the 'goal' of postmodernism is to break apart and criticize everything that claims to be able to do those things. You would be hard pressed to find a better example of something diametrically opposed to rationalism. (I'm going to guess that with high likelihood I'll get accused of not understanding postmodernism by saying that).

And what's worse is that bay area rationalism has not been able to unequivocally define "rationality" or "truth". (EY wrote an article on the Simple idea of Truth, in which he considers the correspondence theory, Tarki's theory, and a few others without resolving on a single correct theory).

Well yeah, being able to unequivocally define anything is difficult, no argument there. But rationalists use an intuitive and pragmatic definition of truth that allows us to actually do things. Then what happens is they get accused by postmodernists of claiming to have the One and Only True and Correct Definition of Truth and Correctness, and of claiming that we have access to the Objective Reality. The point is that as soon as you allow for any leeway in this at all (leeway in allowing for some in-between area of there being a true objective reality with 100% access to and 0% access to), you basically obtain rationalism. Not because the principles it derives from are that there is an objective reality that is possible to Truly Know, or that there are facts that we know to be 100% true, but only that there are sets of claims we have some degree of confidence in, and other sets of claims we might want to calculate a degree of confidence in based on the first set of claims.

Bay area rationalism is the attitude that that sceptical (no truth) and relativistic (multiple truth) claims are utterly false, but it's an attitude, not a proof.

It happens to be an attitude that works really well in practice, but the other two attitudes can't actually be used in practice if you were to adhere to them fully. They would only be useful for denying anything that someone else believes. I mean, what would it mean to actually hold two beliefs to be completely true but also that they contradict? In probability theory you can have degrees of confidence that are non-zero that add up to one, but it's unclear if this is the same thing as relativism in the sense of "multiple truths". I would guess that it isn't, and multiple truths really means holding two incompatible beliefs to both be true.

If rationalist is to win over "postmodernism", then it must win rationally, by being able to demonstrate it's superioritiy.

Except that you can't demonstrate superiority of anything within the framework of postmodernism. Within rationalism it's very easy and straightforward.

I imagine the reason that some rationalists might find postmodernism to be useful is in the spirit of overcoming biases. This in and of itself I have no problem with - but I would ask what you consider postmodern ideas to offer in the quest to remove biases that rationalism doesn't offer, or wouldn't have access to even in principle?

I don't think it's necessary for 'rationality' to be used an applause light for this to happen. The only things needed, in my mind, are:

• A group of people who adopt rationality and are instrumentally rationalist become very successful, wealthy and powerful because of it.
• This groups makes up an increasing share of the wealthy and powerful, because they are better at becoming wealthy and powerful than the old elite.
• The remaining people who aren't as wealthy or successful or powerful, who haven't adopted rationality, make observations about what the successful group does and associates whatever they do / say as the tribal characteristics and culture of the successful group. The fact that they haven't adopted rationality makes them more likely to do this.

And because the final bullet point is always what occurs throughout history, the only difference - and really the only thing necessary for this to happen - is that rationalists make up a greater share of the elite over time.

But if some group of idiots will choose "rationality" as their applause light and they will be doing it completely wrong, and everyone else will therefore turn against rationality, that would cause much more damage. (Similarly to how Stalin is often used as an example against "atheism". Now imagine a not-so-implausible parallel universe where Stalin used "rationality" -- interpreted as: 1984-style obedience of the Communist Party -- as the official applause light of his regime. In such world, non-communists hate the word "rationality" because it is associated with communism, and communists insist that the only true meaning of rationality is the blind obedience of the Party.

Somewhat ironically, this is exactly the sort of cargo-cultish "rationality" that originally led to the emergence of postmodernism, in opposition to it and calling for some much-needed re-evaluation and skepticism around all "cached thoughts". The moral I suppose is that you just can't escape idiocy.

This may be partially what has happened with "science" but in reverse. Liberals used science to defend some of their policies, conservatives started attacking it, and now it has become an applause light for liberals--for example, the "March for Science" I keep hearing about on Facebook. I am concerned about this trend because the increasing politicization of science will likely result in both reduced quality of science (due to bias) and decreased public acceptance of even those scientific results that are not biased.

As soon as the main political players will all turn against rationality, fighting rationality will become less important for them, because attacking things the others consider sacred will be more effective.

So, do you want to ask the Jews how that theory worked out for them?

Ensure that the benefits of AI accrue to everyone generally, rather than exclusively to the teeny-tiny fraction of humanity who happen to own their own AI business.

s/AI/capital/

Now, where have I heard this before..?

I feel like it's rather obvious that this is approximately what is meant. The people who talk of democratizing AI are, mostly, not speaking about superintelligence or do not see it as a threat (with the exception of Elon Musk, maybe).

I try not to assume that I am smarter than everybody if I can help it, and when there's a clear cluster of really smart people making these noises, I at least want to investigate and see whether I'm mistaken in my presuppositions.

To me, "democratize AI" makes as much sense as "democratize smallpox", but it would be good to find out that I'm wrong.

Tiling the whole universe with small copies of GNU GPL, because each nanobot is legally required to contain the full copy. :D

*GNU AGPL, preferably

"Declining Energy Returns" is based on the false idea that civilization requires exponential increases in energy input, which has been wrong for decades. Per capita energy consumption has been stagnant in the first world for decades, and most of these countries have stagnant or declining populations. Focusing on EROI and "quality" of oil produced is a mistake. We don't lack for sources of energy; the whole basis of the peak oil collapse theory was that other energy sources can't replace oil's vital role as a transport fuel.

This seems relevant These statistics do not support your claim that energy consumption per capita has been stagnant. Did I miss something? Perhaps you're referring strictly to stagnation in per capita use of fossil fuels? Do you have different sources of support? After all, this is merely one data point.

I'm not particularly sure where I stand with regards to the OP, part of the reason I brought it up was because this post sorely needed evidence to be brought up to the table, none of which I see.

I suppose this lack of support gives a reader the impression of naiveté. but I was hoping members here would clarify with their own, founded claims. Thank you for the debunks, I'm sure there's plenty of literature to link to as such, which is exactly what I'm after. The engineering behind electric cars, and perhaps its history, will be a topic I'll be investigating myself in a bit. If you have any preferred sources for teaching purposes, I'd love a link.

Much more than the top 20% of this planet has mobile phones. Most people benefit from technologies like smart phones.

I wouldn't cherry-pick one technological example and make a case for the rest of available technological advancements as conducive to closing the financial gap between people. Tech provides for industry, industry provides for shareholders, shareholders provide for themselves (here's one data point in a field of research exploring the seemingly direct relationship between excess resource acquisition and antisocial tendencies, I will work on finding more, if any). I am necessarily glossing over the extraneous details, but since the corporate incentive system provides for a whole host of advantages, and since it has power over top-level governments (lobbying success statistics come to mind), this incentive system is necessarily prevalent and of major interest when tech advances are the topic of discussion. Those with power get tech benefits first, if any benefits exist beyond that point, fantastic. If not, the obsolescence conspiracy seems the likely next scenario. I have no awareness of an incentive system that dictates that those with money and power need necessarily provide for everyone else. If there was one, I wouldn't be the only unaware one, since clearly the OP isn't aware of such a thing either.

Are there any technological advancements you can think of that necessarily trickle down the socio-economic scale and help those poorest of the poor? My first idea would be agricultural advancements, but then I'd have to go and collect statistics on rates of food acquisition for the poorest subset of the world population, with maybe a start in the world census data for agriculture, which may not even have the data I'd need. Any ideas of your own?

But you seem to be making the much stronger claim that we should therefore altruistically expend effort to accelerate its development.

This is almost the inverse Basilisk argument.

it means that there exists an upper limit to human IQ

I'm pretty sure that that there is an upper limit to the IQ capabilities of a blob of wetware that has to fit inside a skull.

AFAIK (and wikipedia tells), this is not how IQ works. For measuring intelligence, we get an "ordinal scale", i.e. a ranking between test-subjects. An honest reporting would be "you are in the top such-and-so percent". For example, testing someone as "one-in-a-billion performant" is not even wrong; it is meaningless, since we have not administered one billion IQ tests over the course of human history, and have no idea what one-in-a-billion performance on an IQ test would look like.

Because the IQ is designed by people who would try to parse HTML by regex (I cannot think of a worse insult here), it is normalized to a normal distribution. This means that one applies the inverse error-function with SD of 15 points to the percentile data. Hence, IQ is Gaussian-by-definition. In order to compare, use e.g. python as a handy pocket calculator:

from math import *

iqtopercentile = lambda x: erfc((x-100)/15)/2

iqtopercentile(165)

4.442300208692339e-10

So we see that claims of any human being having an IQ of 165+ is statistically meaningless. If you extrapolated to all of human history, an IQ of 180+ is meaningless:

iqtopercentile(180)

2.3057198811629745e-14

Yep, by current definition you would need to test 10^14 humans to get one that manages an IQ of 180. If you test 10^12 humans and one god-like super-intelligence, then the super-intelligence gets an IQ of maybe 175 -- because you should not apply the inverse error-function to an ordinal scale, because ordinal scales cannot capture bimodals. Trying to do so invites eldritch horrors on our plane who will parse HTML with a regex.