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Rescheduled - skipped it on the 9th for the eclipse, and couldn't do the original plan for the 23rd (park bocce, probably coming in a future month)
But you can't change it for anyone else's view, which is the important thing.
Isn't this post describing the replication attempt?
You should try doing the next version as an adversarial collaboration.
Clarification:
"Steam" is one possible opposite of Slack. I sketch a speculative view of steam as a third 'cognitive currency' almost like probability and utility.
Are 'probability' and 'utility' meant to be the other two cognitive currencies? Or is it 'Slack', and if so which is the third?
This was fairly untested but went very well!
I'll do a better writeup as a Meetup In a Box later, but this is how it went:
For each set, 10m writing things down, then ?20m? discussing, then next set
List a few things that went very well this year. (3-5)
List a few things that went very badly this year. (3-5)
If you were to 80/20 your last year, which 20% gave the 80% you valued most?
If someone looked at your actions for the last year, what would they think your priorities were?
What did you intend your priorities to be?
Do you want to make any of the revealed priorities official intentions for next year? Do you want to drop any of the intended priorities which you ended up not following up on?
What habits did you pick up? What goals (revealed or intentional) did those habits serve?
What habits got in the way? What did you fail to get due to them?
What's the most important unfulfilled goal for the last year? How can you change for the next try?
What did you learn last year?
What lessons do you hope to learn this year?
What things are you curious about, that you expect to learn more about this year?
- this one might be worth writing down and storing for next year
We ended up combining sets 3 and 4 because 3 sets is the right amount. I had a whiteboard and wrote short versions of the questions on the whiteboard as a reminder everyone could look at, and later on emailed everyone the questions so they could refer to the list. Doing at least one of those things is probably important.
Is there a graph of solar efficiency (fraction of energy kept in light -> electricity conversion) for solar tech that's deployed at scale? https://www.nrel.gov/pv/cell-efficiency.html exists for research models but I'm unsure of any for industrial-scale.
No, I said what I meant. And not just what I meant, but what many other people reading but not commenting here are saying; rather than count I'll simply say 'at least a dozen'. This response, like all her other responses, are making her sound more and more like a grifter, not an honest dealer, with every statement made. The fact that when called to defend her actions she can't manage anything that resembles honest argument more than it does dishonest persuasion is a serious flaw; if it doesn't indicate that she has something to hide, it indicates that she is incapable of being a 'good citizen' even when she's in the right.
My primary update from every comment Kat makes is that this is a situation that calls for Conflict Theory, not Mistake Theory.
Rescheduled to the end of the month because I am sick again. Guess maybe I should have worn a mask to the airport in travel season.
It's amazing how everything you say trying to defend yourself make you sound even more like a grifter.
Six weeks, once, with significant counterpressure exerted against her doing so is confirmation of the original claim, not counterevidence.
This post seems wildly over-charitable toward Nonlinear and their claims. Several things you note as refuted by Nonlinear aren't, e.g. "they were not able to live apart from the family unit while they worked with them" which even given the reply by Nonlinear is accurate (uncertain) is still true and obviously and unambiguously so.
Also, you fail to acknowledge that basically everything about Nonlinear's replies indicates an utterly toxic and abusive work environment and a staff of people who are seriously disconnected from reality and consumed in high-simulacra-level nonsense. The attempt to refute the claims made against them managed to be far more damning than the claims themselves. And the claims weren't minimal, either!
Dodging questions like this and living in the world where they go well is something you can do approximately once in your life before you stop living in reality and are in an entirely-imaginary dream world. Twice if you're lucky and neither of the hypotheticals were particularly certain.
A number of Manifold markets under https://manifold.markets/browse?topic=pandemic, looks like most are trading around 10% chance of anything happening outside China.
Possible new pandemic? China's concealing evidence again, looks like the smart money is against 'new virus' but thinks it's drug-resistant pneumonia, specifically resistant to the drugs that are safe for small children.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/11/28/chinese-hospitals-pandemic-outbreak-pneumonia/
The LessWrong user who acted as a sounding board over lunch is welcome to be credited if they want to be, or may wish to avoid association with this catastrophe waiting to happen.
I don't think I added anything but encouragement, but that was me. TBH if it's a catastrophe that's an interesting result itself. I wonder if it happens every time
Updated to reflect the new, more regular schedule starting beginning of the year
Interesting. Strikes me as the logical extension of Choices are Bad in some senses.
Censorship always prevents debates. The number of things which are explicitly banned from discussion may technically be small, but the chilling effect is huge. And the fact that ideas and symbols are banned is - correctly! - taken as evidence that they can't be beaten by argument, that people are afraid of the ideas. Also, naturally, the opposite side never has to practice their arguments, so they look like weak debaters because they are.
I tried being more polite many times over the last months on Discord. All it got was dismissal, because anxietybrain is anxietybrain.
In what sense is that a nitpick or something that doesn't affect the message? It's a substantial drag on the message, data that only supports the conclusion if you already have a prior that the conclusion is true.
This got deleted from 'The Dictatorship Problem', which is catastrophically anxietybrained, so here's the comment:
This is based in anxiety, not logic or facts. It's an extraordinarily weak argument.
There's no evidence presented here which suggests rich Western countries are backsliding. Even the examples in Germany don't have anything worse than the US GOP produced ca. 2010. (And Germany is, due to their heavy censorship, worse at resisting fascist ideology than anyone with free speech, because you can't actually have those arguments in public.) If you want to present this case, take all those statistics and do economic breakdowns, e.g. by deciles of per-capita GDP. I expect you'll find that, for example, the Freedom House numbers show a substantial drop in 'Free' in the 40%-70% range and essentially no drop in 80%-100%.
Of the seven points given for the US, all are a mix of maximally-anxious interpretation and facts presented misleadingly. These are all arguments where the bottom line ("Be Afraid") has been written first; none of this is reasonable unbiased inference.
The case that mild fascism could be pretty bad is basically valid, I guess, but without the actual reason to believe that's likely, it's irrelevant, so it's mostly just misleading to dwell on it.
Going back to the US points, because this is where the underlying anxiety prior is most visible:
1. because of Biden's unpopularity, if the election were held again tomorrow, Biden would most likely lose. Biden won the tipping-point state, Wisconsin, by only half a percent in 2020, and both polls and favorability ratings show he has lost popularity since then;
Interpretation, not fact. We're still in early enough stages that the reality of Biden is being compared to an idealized version of Trump - the race isn't in full swing yet and won't be for a while. Check back in October when we see how the primary is shaping up and people are starting to pay attention.
2. the House, Senate, and Electoral College all have biased maps that will let Republicans win a governing trifecta, even with a minority of the popular vote;
This has been true for a while. Also, in assessing the consequences, it's assuming that Trump will win, which is correlated but far from guaranteed.
3. two-thirds of Republican congressmen voted to overturn the election immediately after January 6th, and most of Trump's primary opponents strongly support his actions, so even if Trump has a heart attack tomorrow, many in the party would still be hostile to democracy;
Premise is a fact, conclusion is interpretation, and not at all a reliable one. Trumpism isn't HYDRA - if the popular populist figurehead is cut off, there is no reason to believe another will take his place. That usually doesn't work.
4. there have been waves of Republican retirements in the House and Senate during 2018 and 2022, so that many of the Trump-skeptical congressmen in office during his first term have been replaced by far-right radicals and Trump loyalists;
I guess this one is basically true.
5. most of the "adults in the room" during Trump's first term were fired or resigned, and Trump plans to fill their roles with new staff, loyal to his own vision;
Probably true, and therefore it is unlikely he will be able to achieve much of anything.
6. if elected to a second term, Trump has said he will use "Schedule F" to purge the non-partisan professional civil service, law enforcement, and the American military, and replace them with Trumpists who won't resist attempts to end democracy;
Ditto, only stronger. And that assumes he carries out this promise and that he's successful in that, neither of which is terribly likely.
7. if re-elected, Trump plans to withdraw the US from NATO and end the post-WWII policy of an American "nuclear umbrella", which will likely trigger a Chinese invasion of a now-defenseless Taiwan; global nuclear proliferation; and general, worldwide instability not seen since 1945.
Premise is almost a fact, conclusion is wild interpretation. Trump has said he plans to do that. Will he do that? Possible. Will it trigger an invasion of Taiwan if he does? Possible. Will it trigger nuclear proliferation if he does? Sure, probably, but I'm not too concerned, it won't move fast enough to catch up to AI. Will it trigger worldwide instability? Not fucking likely. (Also, really, The Daily Beast? You couldn't find a source more credible or less biased than that?)
Or, in short:
But what is less well-known is that:
False things are rarely well-known.
Explaining is good, but doesn't remove the need to downvote.
Or just remove the flag. Seriously, who thought this was a good idea?
Then again, that could be said for... pretty much every decision the moderation and design team has made since LW 2.0 began.
The 'new user' flag being applied to old users with low karma is condescending as fuck.
I'm not a new user. I'm an old user who has spent most of my recent time on LW telling people things they don't want to hear.
Well, most of the time I've actually spent posting weekly meetups, but other than that.
since it selects from a huge pool of people in large part for the ability to come up with cool ideas and takes
No, it just selects for the ability to be viral on demand. Which is anticorrelated with truth.
You really have no intellectual integrity at all, do you?
That's still shifting to a claim about social reality and therefore not the same thing.
Version 1 is probably not the same content, since it is mostly about the speaker, and in any case preserves most of the insultingness. Version 2 is making it entirely about the speaker and therefore definitely different, losing the important content. Version 3 is very obviously definitely not the same content and I don't know why you bothered including it. (Best guess: you were following the guideline of naming 3 things rather than 1. If so, there is a usual lesson when that guideline fails.)
Shifting to sharing the speaker's experience is materially different. The content of the statement was a truth claim - making it a claim about an individual's experience changes it from being about reality to being about social reality, which is not the same thing. It is important to be able to make truth claims directly about other people's statements, because truth claims are the building blocks of real models of the world.
If it's really a skill issue, why hasn't anyone done that? If it can be written in a non-insulting way, demonstrate! I submit that you cannot.
Owing people a good-faith effort to probe at cruxes is not a result of anything in this conversation. It is universal.
I do not think that is the usual result.
Additionally, yes, you do owe me something. The same thing you owe to everyone else reading this comment section, Said included. An actual good-faith effort to probe at cruxes to the extent possible. You have shown absolutely no sign of that in this part of the conversation and precious little of it in the rest of it. Which means that your whole side of this conversation has been weak evidence that Said is correct and you are not.
You've said very little in a great deal of words. And, as I said initially, you haven't even attempted this.
unless you can provide a rephrasing which (a) preserves all relevant meaning while not being insulting, and (b) could have been generated by me, your disbelief is not evidence of anything except the fact that some things seem easy until you discover that they’re impossible.
Forget requirement (b). You haven't even attempted fulfilling requirement (a). And for as long as you haven't, it is unarguably true that your disbelief is not evidence for any of your claims or beliefs.
This is the meaning of "put up or shut up". If you want to be taken seriously, act seriously.
If you're not even willing to attempt the thing you say should be done, you have no business claiming to be arguing or negotiating in good faith.
You claimed this was low-effort. You then did not put in the effort to do it. This strongly implies that you don't even believe your own claim, in which case why should anyone else believe it?
It also tests your theory. If you can make the modification easily, then there is room for debate about whether Said could. If you can't, then your claim was wrong and Said obviously can't either.
I'm sure there is an amount of rudeness which generates more optimization-away-from-truth than it prevents. I'm less sure that this is a level of rudeness achievable in actual human societies. And for whether LW could attain that level of rudeness within five years even if it started pushing for rudeness as normative immediately and never touched the brakes - well, I'm pretty sure it couldn't. You'd need to replace most of the mod team (stereotypically, with New Yorkers, which TBF seems both feasible and plausibly effective) to get that to actually stick, probably, and it'd still be a large ship turning slowly.
A monoculture is generally bad, so having a diversity of permitted conduct is probably a good idea regardless. That's extremely hard to measure, so as a proxy, ensuring there are people representing both extremes who are prolific and part of most important conversations will do well enough.
You haven't even given an attempt at rephrasing.
you seem to think there's this sort of latent potential for people to overcome their feelings of insult and social attack
Of course there is! People can and do overcome that when it's actually important to them. At work, as part of goals they care about, in relationships they care about. If we care about truth-seeking - and it's literally in the name that we do - then we can and will overcome that.
It is a plus that some people are not worrying about other people's feelings. Worrying about other people's feelings is a liability for truthseeking.
(To which the counterargument is humans are humans, conversation does not proceed better when people feel threatened or attacked, we have to work with who we are, and that means perhaps putting some thought into how people feel.)
If the counterargument is that humans are humans... then, well, we must become more. And isn't this the place for that, particularly on the particular axis of truth-seeking?
Personally, the thing I think should change with Said is that we need more of him, preferably a dozen more people doing the same thing. If there were a competing site run according to Said's norms, it would be much better for pursuing the art of rationality than modern LessWrong is; disagreeable challenges to question-framing and social moves are desperately necessary to keep discussion norms truth-tracking rather than convenience-tracking.
But this is not an argument I expect to be able to win without actually trying the experiment. And even then I would expect at least five years would be required to get unambiguous results.
If you care more about not making social attacks than telling the truth, you will get an environment which does not tell the truth when it might be socially inconvenient. And the truth is almost always socially inconvenient to someone.
So if you are a rationalist, i.e. someone who strongly cares about truth-seeking, this is highly undesirable.
Most people are not capable of executing on this obvious truth even when they try hard; the instinct to socially-smooth is too strong. The people who are capable of executing on it are, generally, big-D Disagreeable, and therefore also usually little-d disagreeable and often unpleasant. (I count myself as all three, TBC. I'd guess Said would as well, but won't put words in his mouth.)
You still haven't actually attempted the challenge Said laid out.
And hopefully it might push EA back toward an equilibrium of having individuals who are dedicated and well-spoken but basically ordinary in-the-trenches EAs being the face it presents to the world, rather than people who make it their job to be spokespeople. That was better for EA internally, and given the whole FTX debacle and PR-focused mistakes, probably better for the world as well.
Do it! You've always been a better spokesman for EA than any of the people with the big audiences and big platforms. I think your book would, correspondingly, be a better book than any of the ones we've seen published so far. Less prestigious, probably, but higher quality.
The type of problem I predicted has occurred. There has been a runaway groupthink spiral of social desirability bias and common knowledge of false consensus (creating enforced real consensus). I did not specifically predict that outgroup-respectability would be the target but it is not a surprising target.
I noted that most actions are more status-motivated than they appear, even to the people doing them, and that this warps nearly everything we do; the problem noted here is that LW and the community are warping their actions and perceptions to accrue respectability, i.e. status.
I claimed moderation doubled down on this. Ben notes that it is in fact used in that way.
It's possible I merely predicted the effects correctly and happened to be wrong about one of the major causes. But that isn't the way to bet.
[...]that a lot of my work over the past few years has been bad for the world (most prominently transforming LessWrong into something that looks a lot more respectable in a way that I am worried might have shrunk the overton window of what can be discussed there by a lot, and having generally contributed to a bunch of these dynamics).
While I did not literally claim this in advance, I came close enough that I claim the right to say I Told You So.
We should definitely not expect the "true fraction of beef consumption" to be proportional to impact. Steaks are consumed basically the same way as they were before subsidies (though in much larger quantity); they don't respond much to the subsidy to take advantage of it. Fast food isn't restricted to being prepared or sourced in a particular traditional way and therefore will change itself to best exploit subsidy. Estimating that effect as a 2.5x multiplier seems like a perfectly good conservative approximation, so you should just stick with 1%.