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I have joined the movement to #GhostNYT. No clicks, links or business of any kind.
Maybe we need something like SciHub for people accessing NYT articles in a way that doesn't give them business?
There are multiple desired properties of a voting system for a general selection. Most systems are designed with an idea that there are legislative matters that have different effect on different geographical locations and thus the system not only wants to empower representation along the e-political dimensions but also representation along meaningful geographic areas.
That principle seems to be important enough for people to have decided for example for elections to the European parliament that Malta gets one seat per ~100,000 citizens while Germany gets one seat per ~865.000 citizens.
There are multiple desired properties of a voting system for a general selection. Most systems are designed with an idea that there are legislative matters that have different effect on different geographical locations and thus the system not only wants to empower representation along the e-political dimensions but also representation along meaningful geographic areas.
That principle seems to be important enough for people to have decided for example for elections to the European parliament that Malta gets one seat per ~100,000 citizens while Germany gets one seat per ~865.000 citizens.
There are multiple desired properties of a voting system for a general selection. Most systems are designed with an idea that there are legislative matters that have different effect on different geographical locations and thus the system not only wants to empower representation along the e-political dimensions but also representation along meaningful geographic areas.
That principle seems to be important enough for people to have decided for example for elections to the European parliament that Malta gets one seat per ~100,000 citizens while Germany gets one seat per ~865.000 citizens.
In practice, it's impossible to create a voting method that elects S equally-weighted candidates without wasting some votes; typically at least somewhere between 1/2S and 1/(S+1) of them.
This is a bit hard to read. Maybe write instead of 1/2S and 1/(S+1) of them a formula that depends on the V the number of voters and that's V/(2S) and V/(S+1).
If you look at US incumbent politicians' voting records using a methodology like DW-NOMINATE, you get a number between 1 and 2. If you look at all people's opinions on all possible issues, you'd surely get a much higher number. I personally think that healthy political debate would probably settle at about 𝓮 effective dimensions — that is, a bit less than 3.
https://www.civicscience.com has data about political preferences of large numbers of citizens. It might be good to talk with them to get an idea about what e actually happens to be.
If there are blues, greens, reds and oranges and when you are dealing with a orange you want to label them as either blue or green and label them green because you are blue you are not going to have them be happy with the label.
Since the logical techniques I was using are just identifying simple patterns, for them to be useless requires social relations to be so chaotic that no theories can be applied.
No, if you override emotions as the motivating factor for actions with intellectual guidelines that can harmful even if the intellectual guidelines are based on patterns that exist.
I am confused by this statement.
If you look at the people in EY's post about toolbox thinking and lawful thinking, EY uses David Chapman as an example for toolbox thinking.
He uses Julia Galef as an example for lawful thinking and as far as I remember Julia Galef is a person who doesn't believe that people should override their way of social habits with intellectual models. (Flag - My view on Galef is second-hand information from maybe 2016)
Could you expand on what you mean with benefits coming from not consciously thinking about a problem and how you think those benefits would accure in a way that presupposes that the are not created by another process being able to work in the absence of the conscious thinking?
I think you confuse judging moral responsibility with judging effective action.
Whenever you want to deal with a large political organization that you want to change it's actions you want that faction win internal political battles that push the organization towards the ends you want.
If you don't take that into account you will often end up with an organization reacting towards being attacked by getting even worse.
Say that listening to someone makes a friend 80% of the time and talking at them makes a friend 20% of that time.
The kind of mental model you need of friendship to model it in a way where that sentence makes sense might not be conductive to winning friends.
The problem is that my friends find Toolboxism an offensive descriptor.
Toolboxism isn't an inherently offensive descriptor. It's however not a term that describes the way of thinking that your friend describes in your quote. It might not be that your friend finds it offensive, but just finds it wrong.
It's problematic to have a mental model where you expect people to either be blues or greens and not be open for someone to come with a different position.
The idea of orthogonality isn't part of toolbox thinking the way it was previously described. When David Chapmen transfered what he learned from a religious ritual to his DARPA AI research Chapmen transfered knowledge across domains.
Standard NLP resource work seems to me more about artifically adding state changes then mr-hire's model.
"What value I can focus on to make this meaningful" is a qualitatively different way to change state then to fire off an anchor that's loaded with the feeling of meaning from another experience.
Not all of the NYTimes is the enemy.
The NYTimes spread lies to the American people about WMDs that supported the mobilisation towards war. Afterwards it faced public criticism and as a result it had reforms to the way it publishes the news. They created the office of the public editor to increase their ethical standards.
Was it bad that public pressure changed their news-making in that regard? It seems to me obvious that it's good when public critcism leads a news outlet to increase their ethical standards.
Whenever an organization has the choice to engage in an action that brings them short term economic benefits (clicks) at the expense of social value for broader society, it's important when public pressure can change the organization to engage in more ethical behavior.
From Agnes Twitter:
I believe that the arguments in this op-ed--about why philosophers shouldn't use petitions to adjudicate their disputes--also apply to those non-philosophers who, for independent reasons, are committed to the power of public reason.
The kind of means you use to adjudicate disputes depends on both parties.
If I would believe that the NYTimes is commited to the power of public reason, then I would grant that reasoned argument is a better vehicle then a petition. I do however believe that the NYTimes cares more about making money for it's shareholders then it cares for public reason.
If anybody wants to make an argument that public reason is more important for the NYTimes then profits, I would be happy to see examples where the NYTimes decided to engage in actions that were neither good for clicks nor their reputation and that can be explained by caring for public reason.
Lastly, I think that philosophers as a class should exert more public pressure on institutions that engage in behavior that violates the knowledge that the philosophers gathered. Philosophers should do petitions about how the ontological assumptions of the DSM-5 are appalling.
It's no rewrite it's just adding a feature to the protocol in a way that's not backwards compatible with the federalized
Linux Signal UI has been broken for me for years:
Given that you don't have mobile phone numbers in Linux, you likely wouldn't have gotten it to be useful in Linux in the initial setup.
Frankly, it seems to me you're not focusing on the general idea.
You seem to claim that there are people who can predict in advance for "really innovative" products what features they need. That's not how it works as the lean startup movement makes clear.
Later in this thread you suggest that the job can be done by a government burocrat that does central planning. That seems even more innovation destroying.
I do agree that engaging in preemptive violence would be a stupid move.
You don't need to argue for moral relativism to think that change in moral norms is not always change for the better.
In the US morals are changing to give homosexuals more rights and in Russia they are changing to give them less rights.
When Signal was first developed they thought that building a messanger shouldn't be that complex. It should be on a level of complexity that allows for a federalized protocol with allows many different clients.
As time went on the came to the conclusion that this is not a good way to think about the problem and removed their federalization ideas to be able to implement new features such as multidevice support.
If they hadn't Signal would likely have been faded into the background because it wouldn't have kept up with other messengers.
This may remind the reader of Google's products: when was the last time there was an update to Gmail
Last week there seems to have been three updates:
- Edit Calendar events directly from Gmail and Docs.
- Spanish grammar suggestions now available in Google Docs and Gmail. Learn more
- New quick settings help you optimize your Gmail layout.
Are these groundmaking new features? Not really, but having grammar suggestions will likely be appreciated by the Spanish users.
I can imagine using the feature to edit Calendar events directly from Gmail.
It's one thing to say that past 1970 (or 2000 to 2014 as in one of the linked articles) the middle class has been decreasing.
You however seem to argue about effects of the industrial revolution which was an event that happened on a different time scale and which actually build the middle class in the metropolian areas.
The article sees the claim it defends as “It is not okay to use lies, insults, and harassment against people, even if it would help you enforce your preferred social norms.”
Responding to force with force is different then enforcing preferred social norms.
Scott also doesn't seem to want to act according the the role models of Martin Luther King, Desmond Tutu, Aung San Suu Kyi and Nelson Mandela who all share the effect that they wouldn't let themselves be silenced.
The effects of weaponizing claims of sexism and racism against the NYT might have undesireable effects on the power conflicts inside of the organization.
NYT hasn't made a public decision to actually publish the article, so there's not really a situation for them to make a public statement about the individual case.
a specific individual who 3) never signed up for a position of responsibility to field these kinds of threats
Which would not be the case for a journalists who decided to take the repsonsibility of doxxing someone. That seems like a clear way of signing up for the responsibility.
A catastrophic result might be that personally-targeted violence is visited on someone at the Times by a psychopath who uses the boycott as their excuse.
You might also prevent a psychopath from visiting someone at home because Times journalists might be more careful about writing attack pieces in the future. That likely happens much more often then Times journalists getting visited.
I think what you should actually care about is minimizing the amount of people in general that get visited by psychopaths. It's also good if being more innocent reduces the changes of it happening.
In general there's no cost to ignoring it when people curse. Different comments imply a variety of costs such as canceled subscriptions.
I don't think say effectively saying "Fuck you!" is a good description of what most people are writing.
I think that's very different then saying the incentives should be changed in a way so that Moloch doesn't let reporters destroy the good.
We are in a situation where the decision whether or not to publish Scott's name isn't yet made. As such it's important to build up pressure to affect that decision and it's not useful to be charitable. Even if canceling the whole NYT would not be proportional canceling the reporter in question might be.
You could argue that influential writers on political topics should have skin in the game and Scott being pseudonymous prevents him from having enough skin in the game. If that's the argument then I don't see the reporter who writes such an article shouldn't have the same likelihood of losing his job over the article then Scott.
I think journalists bullying people they perceive to be easy targets is a general problem and not specific to Scott. The NYT times also frequently runs attack pieces which are hard to defend on utilitarian grounds. From a mistake perspective living in a world where Moloch rewards journalists for causing harm to people is bad.
This is a question of how associated the publishing location happens to be. You can have your throwaway account on medium or steemit if you are worried about medium censorship.
You get the problem of discoverability. I don't think you can add the discoverability without also adding association that can be attacked.
Additionally a TheWispher network that's linked to LessWrong karma still allows LessWrong to be tarnished by association.
The mob doesn't care if you have plausible deniability.
I don't think LessWrong is big enough to have a separate channel like that with enough users. It seems more effective if individual posts with higher need are published with throwaway accounts.
It's quite possible to invest more time into "contacting the NYTimes" then writing a single email. You could for example encourage other people to write as well. Especially people who they NYTimes might more care about than random people.
I think you take the wrong things from romance novels if you take them as examples of what men need to be desireable partners.
A story like 365 Days isn't just about the man being an asshole but about the woman being able to play the powerful female role where she has an effect on the guy to domesticate him.
If the guy starts out as a nice guy then there's no part on the woman where she can use her female power to make him open up and show his nice side because the guy already showed that side from the beginning. If you want to understand the structure of the stories that romance novels tell Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women is a good book.
A lot of what being female is about in our society is to hold back female power. In romance novels you have a setting where the woman doesn't need to hold back.
There's a difference between painting a target on someone's elses back and making them aware that engaging in a specific action is equivalent to painting a target on their back. Scott made a point not to name the journalist in question. Whether or not they want to publish an article that links their own name to this is their own choice.
I do think that a person who works to shut down an important blog is an enemy and should be fully informed of the responsibility he takes. If the reporter does that there's a benefit from being clear about what they are doing and that they picked the fight, so it's easier to explain in the future to bullies that they don't want to pick the fight.
I do believe in people who go around running people's lives having skin in the game and that being more effective to encourage ethical behavior then going after institutions. The institution of the NYT won't force the reporter to put in Scott's real name, so they should take the responsiblity for their actions.
Why do you believe that bullies should be get away from personal consequences for their actions? Or more specifially shouldn't be warned that their bullying might have negative consequences for them? Why do you think our community shouldn't defend itself against someone shutting down key parts of our infrastructure? Do you also think nerds on the schoolyard should let themselves be bullied?
I don't think we should organize retaliation here on LW, but that likely won't be necessary for the journalist predictably facing consequences for bringing down a major blog for reasons of vanity.
I don't think the code cares about the distinction between anonymous / pseudonymous but about whether there's a journalist-source relationship.
It likely makes more sense to follow Scotts advice to contact the NYTimes to advice not to doxx him then focus on preparing for retaliation.
That's not how most Wikis work in practice. You ususally have norms where bad content on Wiki pages either gets removed or when it happens on talk pages it gets argued against.
The claim that likely all of the top stories on Ars Technica are there because of a PR agent is a very different claim then the one that Paul Graham makes in The Submarine that plenty of stories are written because of PR agents.
It's worth noting that the Graham article used to be faulty in his first version to the point that he had to correct it.
I run a company that has been featured in the media, so I get a look behind the curtain.
Are you really saying that no journalists contacted you that you didn't contact?
Retaliation only makes sense if the article gets published with the name which hasn't yet happened.
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Revealing people's names is protected by the first amendment. But then there are also plenty of legal ways to ruin the live of that NYTimes reporter and warning the reporter that his actions might make him enemies that he doesn't want to have as Scott has done might be the only way forward.
When Peter Thiel's legal attack on Gawker isn't enough to deter this kind of unethical journalism maybe going against the individual journalists who engage in that kind of behavior is better to create a deterence effect. It might now be up to the NYTimes journalist whether painting that target on his back is what he wants to do.
I haven't heard a nonrationalist say "what you are saying sounds smart but I don't know enough about the topic to evaluate your argument, so I won't let myself get convinced" but have heard that from a rationalist (as in someone coming to the LessWrong community weekend).
It's not rational to let yourself be argued into anything when faced with a powerful and potentially manipulative actor.
Few activities are as quintessentially human as being on the cusp of falling asleep and suddenly be assaulted by a memory that has us relive an embarrassing episode that we thought long forgotten.
When it comes to my dreams they don't seem to be about reliving the past but about situations that are made up.
The decision making could be an individual but the information gathering needs multiple people.
I don't expect there to be a good market for precictions of lunch rating especially since there's one person who can easily make winning predictions.
Futarchy by definition is a system for group decision making. That means that you can't use it for decisions that involve one person.
Fortunately, there are a lot of groups that need governance that are bigger then one person and at the same time smaller then nation-states.
I generally think that student-self governance would be the ideal enviroment to try out new ways of governance but when it comes to Futarchy, an EA charity that's governed by it might be a good project.
Lesswrong isn't a forum that exist for venting one's frustration.
As far as the third point goes for most non-anti-fragile systems the effects of unknown unknowns are more likely to be harmful then benefitial.
There are multiple reasons. Let's say you have nine different courses of action and all have utility -1. You have some error function when evaluating the utility of the actions and you think the options have utilities -5, -4, -3, -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, 3. All the negative options won't be on your mind and you will only think about doing those options that score highly.
Even if you have some options that are actually benefitial if your evaluation function has enough noise, the fact that you don't put any attention on the options that score negatively means that the options that you do consider are biased.
Confirmation bias will make you further want to believe that the option that you persue are positive.
Most systems in our modern world are not anti-fragile and suffer if you expose them to random noise.
When it comes to the downside risk, it's often that there are more unknown unknown that produce harm then positive unknown unknown. People are usually biased to overestimate the positive effects and underestimate the negative effects for the known unknown.
As such it's worth to err on minimizing harm to some extend.
A merger where the merging company gets $20 billion in debt likely isn't worth it.
Hertz is a big company. It has a yearly revenue of US$9.779 billion. If there's a 10% chance that Hertz gets rescued and becomes a stable company it might be wroth US$9.779 billion or more. If that chance would be 10% that justifies the $900 market cap.
because their business model has been losing money for years despite several attempts to turn things around.
They had a positive net income in 2019.
Downvoted. I don't think this style of asking loaded questions should be welcomed on LessWrong.
Most other vote-based websites are run by businesses that want a lot of traffic and prefer quantity over quality.
LessWrong keeps up relatively high norms for content by downvoting a lot of posts that are neither spam nor trolling.