LessWrong is a forum that does have basic standards without banning people for their political views. It has different dynamics of how content standards are enforced then banning.
That sentence doesn't propose banning people for extreme content but for who they happen to be regardless of how they behave in the forum.
Saying that certain people who belong to a certain social group that's generally accepted in good company to be the outgroup should be banned outright, seems to advocate something that's very similar to bullying.
I do think it makes sense to ban users who only join a forum like LessWrong to push one particular political perspective. Those people might be "Nazis" but they could also have many different causes.
How is being a cashier not exchanging money?
You need the numerology to get your perspective. It's similar to the source of the 64 bits of entropy for the I Ching.
I would expect that it's normally not the job of the marketing people to chose the market but to implement a strategy for the market that the CEO chose.
The question would be whether there's a genius VP of DeBeers that's responsible for diamonds being a special case or whether that's more an intrinsic aspect of the market for diamonds.
I would like to see a comparison to government (especially managers below the elected levels, as elections carry their own special pathologies),
It's likely very different in a country like the US where a newly elected government can change a lot of the heads of departments and a country like the UK where a newly elected government can't even decide on the private secreteries.
23583450863409854 is not a perspective that helps me get a new view on a problem I'm considering.
Being obedient is not always the same as acting in the interests of the company.
If you are a corrupt cop at the head of a police department, you want people lower down on the chain also be corrupt. You want to be able to buy their allegiance by providing the right incentives.
A boss who wants to hit his short term metrics wants directs who also care about the short term metrics that the boss can control and not directs who optimize for long term success of the company.
It sounds to me like you are claiming that infected and not infected are binary or bimodal states. Is that the case?
Whether the emotional experience is positive depends on the ability of the person you are dealing with do deal with feedback and your own ability to give good feedback.
It doesn't depend on whether the other person wants to get feedback on the system II level.
I think you are likely underrating how much unproductive social behavior most people engage in because of emotional reasons. Likely, including yourself.
This comment changed my mind.
They would be assholes for forming a grudge in the situations and carrying an indirect revenge whether I detect it or not.
"Revenge" is a phrase that implies intent.
Let's say someone invites you for a dinner party. Then you comment on how their food could be improved when they ask for a honest opinion of their cooking.
Some time later the person thinks about throwing a dinner party and about who to invite. They are going to do this likely by thinking of possible invities and seeing what kind of emotional reaction they feel about whether it would be good to invite the person.
The act of having received your feedback does affect the emotional reaction even when the person doesn't remember the incident. There's likely some emotional tension and that makes it less likely that they invite you without them having any ill-will they reasoned about.
This can even happen when the person judges the feedback as welcome on a system II level.
In your example it's quite clear that boxing happened. Whether or not it was justified play or wasn't is another question.
I have never heard the term "visual migraines" before. I have experienced a bunch of different visual effects but it's hard for me to decide which qualify and estimating quantity is also hard.
As a person that does not find social situations intuitive I know social situations are not easy. In my experience my ignorance or disregard for social conventions has not really given me the benefit of a doubt.
That sounds to me like you often don't recognize when people get punished for saying inconvenient truths as it doesn't happen in explicit ways.
Reading a message takes more cognitive resources then seeing a single emoticon. It's easy for people to click +1 to get an opinion of what multiple people think then when every person lays out "I agree with you", "I think we should adopt your proposal" etc.
It's easy to be self-aware about the fact that you box other people. It's easy to avoid boxing people.
On the other hand, there are a lot of fine decisions in social interactions about how to interact with other people. Without a lot of training people are not self-aware of how their emotions play into all the aspects of how they treat other people.
Part of what the quest of rationality is about is getting an idea about where you want to go. Without knowing what you want, half of rationality can't be applied.
It seems to me like you are assuming that people have a lot more emotional self control then they have in reality.
It's not possible for 99% of the people to simply remove their ability to retaliate.
I found the questions hard to answer. I don't think the terms in #2 are well enough defined to give a good answer.
"Here's a particular topic many users currently have a contrarian opinion about. But if you still disagree after reading our thoughts, we want to hear why!"
If any such claim is made it should be backed by census numbers.
We had the topic of SNS and PSNS recently on a bodywork workshop and one of the points that was made there is that most people in our society are likely too much in SNS and not enough in PSNS.
On the other hand, setting being in PSNS as the goal can also lead to being all the time in a low energy state. If you want to get things done in the world, it's useful to also be able to operate in SNS mode.
When it comes to measuring, I get the impression that measuring HRV gives you a more useful signal then Galvanic Skin response.
It would be great to have an app that trains you to do credence calibration on your HRV.
When pointing to a name like Wiener it would be great to have the full name to be able to google who you mean. In this case Norbert Wiener seems me best guess?
When I understand the MetaMed pitch it's:
You can pay a lot of money (high 4 figures or 5 figures) and then we give will research the best treatments for you and there's no promise of effectiveness.
It's my impression that people usually don't want to pay for information directly. People are not willing to pay for a ConsumerReports report before buying a new washing mashine. On the other hand people are quite willing to read Amazon reviews about what's the best washing machine and make their buying decision based on that information. They are also willing to go to the WireCutter and let them get their affiliate commission (even through most of the people likely don't think about the commission).
I think the success of various expensive alternative medicine treatments suggests that people are quite willling to pay money for treatments that they hope will help them with a medical issues for which they currently don't have a solution.
If a person starts answering a questionaire about their pain, it's straightforward to be able to funnel them to the person who does the mirror hands for amputees.
In Germany the person who does mirror hands for amputees would need to spend ~1 year for an education as a "Heilpraktiker" to be allowed to heal people and then a bit of time to learn how the mirror handing works and how to estimate the probabilities.
It's a quite different skillset then the expensive skillset of doctors.
As far as the skillset of making good predictions about treatment success goes, I think it will help in many cases with the clinical decision making. David Burns (who was one of the people who popularized CBT) wrote a bit about how important testing and calibration is in his essay of why he now advocates TEAM instead of CBT. Working with calibration does require additional skills that are a barrier but it pays off. Working that way while being supported by software will be easier then with photocopying sheets the way Burns does.
There's an interesting parallel between Slack reactions and the wiggle fingers applause from sign language. If we have reactions on LessWrong that can express more nuance, I think it would be great to have corresponding hand gestures that can be used for offline interaction within our communities.
And even of those who do preregister, noboby puts down their credence for the likilihood that there's an effect.
There's a reason very few people label themselvse as pro-abortion in the US. It's not even a position that's important enough that gallup asks about it. People who favor the right to abortion in the US generally label as pro-choice.
The general argument based on which abortion is legal in the US is about a woman's right to her own body being a very important sacred value that trumps the right to life of the fetus.
It's not that the fetus has no interest in living. It's rather that his preferences aren't that valuable given that he hasn't yet progressed enough in the direction of personhood to overrule the strong sacred value of bodily autonomy.
The US legal system does consider it reasonable to punish people who kill an unborn fetus of a woman without the consent of the woman and doesn't think the fetus counts for nothing.
Given the cheapness of genetic testing, if you take your own argument seriously the woman in question wouldn't be the only person with an obligation to stop the pregnancy from resulting in birth.
It would also not within the discourse to suggest that the other diploments that are involed in the negotiation should do so.
Yes.
No, the women in the story wouldn't create babies if she knows she has HD, so the comparison is HD-life and no-life.
When it comes to selective genetic testing the alternatives are dying at age -0.75 or dying at age 45 to 60 while suffering from symptoms in the years 15 before that. That doesn't even figure in future medical progress.
While there was low quality criticism on LW 1.0 I don't think it was a place where anybody who was asked to justify their criticism wouldn't do so.
It doesn't feel to me like failure to justify criticism when there was a demand was an issue, posters were generally willing to double-down on low quality criticism.
in general norms online often trend too much in the direction of low-content mockery rather than reasoned debate.
Do you think this is currently a problem on LessWrong.com? I have a hard time bringing up examples of cases where someone made public online accusations against other people that they weren't willing to justify.
Given that Zack chose "Easy Going - I just delete obvious spam and trolling" as the commenting guidelines, I don't see how it's not allowed to write an object level comment about "this principle A is often wrongly applied in case X, but it shouldn't be applied in case X as case X is different for reasons".
If you actually add something interesting in for reasons* I would be very surprised if your posts gets downvoted. If you actually are able to articulate reasons that address blindspots that people have when thinking about principle A, such a comment would also likely be strongly upvoted given how LW functions even if it would partly political.
*and in this case it would be good to have object level reasons and not appeal to personal feelings.
I thought that was what the personal feature is about. It feels to me like "banned users all" also needs a tooltip.
It's specifically the window of acceptable political discourse.
I don't think it's within the window of acceptable political discourse within North America to discuss whether or not Trump should do some exercises that get him in touch with his body together with the Chinese before they set down to negotiate, with the goal to get them to mutual understanding of each other.
That's not an acceptable question to ask about the US-Chinese trade dispute. It's not just that answers to the questions are problematic, the question itself is outside of the window.
I'm personally unsure about how reliable Kegan's framework is. But in this case I think there's a basic idea that I believe to be true:
Considering signaling and whether one's tribe wins to be the most important is not an human universal. It takes a certain amount of mental maturity to move past it and the humanities are at the moment not teaching mental maturity at the quality they used to. The democratization through the internet additionally moved power about the public narrative to people with less mental maturity.
One of the interviews on YouTube. I unfortunately don't have a link right now.
The concept of evidence that we have in Anglo-American discourse isn't a universal one of humanity as a whole.
If you go to a good humanities department people can tell you about knowledges that are structured quite differently.
Uber managed to be a marketplace that allows people to be more effective at buying taxi services. I see no reason why should be impossible for someone to create a new marketplace that provides a more effective way to buy medical services or legal services.
You would need to run the system at a jurisdiction that gives some freedom, but it's worth keeping in mind that most Westerns jurisdictions provide at the moment enough freedom for acupuncturists and homeopaths being in business.
You wouldn't start by going directly after mainstream medicine but with more alternative providers like hypnotists.
A hypnotists who can cure an allergy in a few hours of work would benefit a lot from a central website funneling him clients that know that he can actually cure patients reliably of their allergies. A highly effective hypnotists is going to make a lot more money when he's payed by the outcomes he produces instead of him being payed by the hour.
I believe that there are enough people currently who can produce great outcomes for their clients but who don't have any way to trustworthly inform prospective buyers about their skills and distinguish themselves from the noise empty marketing promises that a startup who provides a marketplace where those people could sell their services would be viable.
Vassar speaks in The legend of healthcare about how much value a person who provides the mirror hand treatment for amputees can provide to patients. If a person in a city specializes in doing the mirror hand treatment and could advertises their services to the patients who need them via such a marketplace the person could create an obsene amount of value while being able to charge prices that reflect that the buyer knows that this is his way to stop the immense pain.
in a way that's a lot simpler for humans to handle and doesn't serve as a giant tax on people who don't have graduate-level probability skills.
I don't think you need high level probability skills on the buyer side. If a website lists treatments and says treatment A has 60% chance of curing you and costs 500$ while treatment B has 80% chance of curing you and costs 1000$ that doesn't need graduate level math.
Unfortunately, you need some statistics skills on the provider side but teaching healthcare providers the ability to make accurate predictions about the effects of their intervention, will likely lead to them making better treatment decisions.
I like "I feel language". I think nonviolent communication is good. It's however a huge misunderstand of violent communication that it's simply about exchanging a few words without exchanging the meaning. It cheapens the language. It has an aspect of dishonesty. People engaging in that kind of dishonesty is the reason that there are articles written about how nonviolent communication doesn't work.
The institution of trigger warning exists because some people don't want to be exposed to certain information that makes them feel bad. Banning users on LW who write posts that make you feel bad is similar.
I think it's important to give people ways to avoid situations that make them feel bad if that's their desire.
I was thinking of "political questions" in terms of the kind of conventional and typical problems most people try to solve in politics.
You can use this kind of definition of politics but you have to be careful as it means that political power has nothing to do with politics. In that frame Robert Moses can have the power to get the parliament in New York to pass whatever bill he wants without him doing anything political.
Of course it's about diplomacy, which is political, but it's so out of left field, "what kind of exercise should diplomats do before negotiations?" seems to me "outside the Overton window" in the same sense of the question "what should I have for lunch today?" I don't see how you mean for the two to intersect.
That reaction is because it's far enough outside of your Overton window that you don't have a good way to think about the question and what it means.
The question "what should I have for lunch today?" is different because you don't want to achieve political ends. Getting diplomats to do exercises to get in touch with their body on the other hand can be a means to get them to come to a peaceful resolution instead of waging war.
Two people who are at Kegan level 4 are likely to have a debate that is at it's core about which ideas are better.
Two people at Kegan level 2 or 3 are going to put more value in their tribe winning than in the inherent quality of the ideas that are under discussion.
It's a description of the effects had by progressives/liberals typically having a disproportionately progressive/liberal social media bubble, and respectively likewise for conservatives.
It's largely a non-evidence based description of effects. Horoscopes are also descriptions of effects of people being classified in a certain way.
I think he common narrative about filter bubbles makes assumptions about effect sizes that aren't well backed by empirical data even if I grant that the effects aren't zero.
abstract epistemology and Bayesian inference
The dispute in question isn't about epistemology but ontology and I think it's worth keeping the two apart mentally but I think your general point still stands.
I see no reason why you are not allowed to discuss a specific example when someone talks abstractly when you consider this example to be important.
If you think the principle advocated in a post like Where to Draw the Boundaries? gets case X very wrong, it would be illuminating to write out why you think the principle that's advocated gets case X wrong and how that shows that the abstract principle is flawed.
It's harder to defend as that means you actually have to articulate a coherent concept of the concept of identity and argue why that concept is better then Where to Draw the Boundaries? but it's very far removed from saying that you are not allowed to defend yourself.
As far as the norms of double crux goes, when there's an object level disagreement and the crux seems to be on a higher abstract layer, the standard way to proceed would be to actually discuss the higher layer.
We now do have a "banned user" feature. If I understand it right you should be able to put down Zack_M_Davis name in it and afterwards you won't see anymore of his posts. If you want to avoid reading his posts because they make you feel bad, that seems to me like the ideal solution given the current way LW works.
In the health care system hard patients are usually send to hospital that have a reputation for being able to deal with hard cases well, and thus I'm not sure how well simply statistics go.
I wrote the prediction-based medicine article to propose a system that would actually be able to allow you to compare the skill of two medical practioners for your individual issue.
You could do the same thing with lawyers. You shop around and tell a few lawyers about your case and every lawyer has to give you the likelihood of them winning your case for you. When there's a system that tracks the predictions in the background and tells you how good the lawyer would be at predicting, you would suddenly be able to shop for the best lawyer.
My solution for getting out of my own filter bubble, not only to understand people around me, but to seek what's true beyond that, has been to be cognizant of the full span of contemporary political discourse, including those political perspectives that fall outside the Overton window to the left, to the right, or whatever direction.
To me this still seems like a strong filter as it's still thinking in the one dimensional frame of politics where politics is about a certain set of questions.
The question about whether or not the US should switch to an inquisitorial legal system like Germany has, is a political question that's not much asked in contemporary political discourse.
A similar question would be whether the Anglo-Saxon paradigm of how to do accounting is really better then the old German way.
If you move further then you get to question such as whether diplomats should do exercise that increase their bodily perception before sitting down to negotiate about important matters where the question is even farther out of the Overton window.
I think this frame of filter of filter bubbles is misleading. I think Kegan's levels of development are a more useful frame for understanding the problem.
If a Kegan level 3 liberal sees a post of a conversative on Facebook, the result isn't that they get more moderate because they are exposed to views outside their filter bubble. They rather get angry and more radicalized.
We used to live in a society where the opinion makers where mostly Kega level 4 and thus didn't consider winning tribal conflicts to be the most important thing.
Postmodernism that was about getting from Kegan level 4 to level 5 unfortunately destroyed the ability of the university to bring a large number of opinion makers from Kegan level 3 to level 4 which is what a good humanities education could do before it was deconstructed.
The internet provides additional flatting by giving more power to set opinions to the majority at Kegan level 2 and 3. The conflict that exists comes from the public agenda being set by people with lower Kegan level then it used to be the case.
Making a token commitment to wanting honesty doesn't prevent a person from feeling negative emotions when they hear the wrong answer. If you are dealing with a person who doesn't act based on their intellectual commitments but based on what they feel, someone saying that they want an honest answer doesn't go very far.