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Please don't write comments all in boldface. It feels like you're trying to get people to pay more attention to your comment than to others, and it actually makes your comment a little harder to read as well as making the whole thread uglier.
It looks to me as if, of the four "root causes of social relationships becoming more of a lemon market" listed in the OP, only one is actually anything to do with lemon-market-ness as such.
The dynamic in a lemon market is that you have some initial fraction of lemons but it hardly matters what that is because the fraction of lemons quickly increases until there's nothing else, because buyers can't tell what they're getting. It's that last feature that makes the lemon market, not the initial fraction of lemons. And I think three of the four proposed "root causes" are about the initial fraction of lemons, not the difficulty of telling lemons from peaches.
- urbanization: this one does seem to fit: it means that the people you're interacting with are much less likely to be ones you already know about, so you can't tell lemons from peaches.
- drugs: this one is all about there being more lemons, because some people are addicts who just want to steal your stuff.
- MLM schemes: again, this is "more lemons" rather than "less-discernible lemons".
- screens: this is about raising the threshold below which any given potential interaction/relationship becomes a lemon (i.e., worse than the available alternative), so again it's "more lemons" not "less-discernible lemons".
Note that I'm not saying that "drugs", "MLM", and "screens" aren't causes of increased social isolation, only that if they are the way they're doing it isn't quite by making social interactions more of a lemon market. (I think "screens" plausibly is a cause of increased social isolation. I'm not sure I buy that "drugs" and "MLM" are large enough effects to make much difference, but I could be convinced.)
I like the "possible solutions" part of the article better than the section that tries to fit everything into the "lemon market" category, because it engages in more detail with the actual processes involved by actual considering possible scenarios in which acquaintances or friendships begin. When I think about such scenarios in the less-isolated past and compare with the more-isolated present, it doesn't feel to me like "drugs" and "MLM" are much of the difference, which is why I don't find those very plausible explanations.
I think this is oversimplified:
High decouplers will notice that, holding preferences constant, offering people an additional choice cannot make them worse off. People will only take the choice if its better than any of their current options.
This is obviously true if somehow giving a person an additional choice is literally the only change being made, but you don't have to be a low-decoupler to notice that that's very very often not true. For a specific and very common example: often other people have some idea what choices you have (and, in particular, if we're talking about whether it should be legal to do something or not, it is generally fairly widely known what's legal).
Pretty much everyone's standard example of how having an extra choice that others know about can hurt you: threats and blackmail and the like. I might prefer not to have the ability to pay $1M to avoid being shot dead, or to prove I voted for a particular candidate to avoid losing my job.
This is pretty much parallel to a common argument for laws against euthanasia, assisted suicide, etc.: the easier it is for someone with terrible medical conditions to arrange to die, the more opportunities there are for others to put pressure on them to do so, or (this isn't quite parallel, but it seems clearly related) to make it appear that they've done so when actually they were just murdered.
Then it seems unfortunate that you illustrated it with a single example, in which A was a single (uniformly distributed) number between 0 and 1.
I think this claim is both key to OP's argument and importantly wrong:
But a wavefunction is just a way to embed any quantum system into a deterministic system
(the idea being that a wavefunction is just like a probability distribution, and treating the wavefunction as real is like treating the probability distribution of some perhaps-truly-stochastic thing as real).
The wavefunction in quantum mechanics is not like the probability distribution of (say) where a dart lands when you throw it at a dartboard. (In some but not all imaginable Truly Stochastic worlds, perhaps it's like the probability distribution of the whole state of the universe, but OP's intuition-pumping example seems to be imagining a case where A is some small bit of the universe.)
The reason why it's not like that is that the laws describing the evolution of the system explicitly refer to what's in the wavefunction. We don't have any way to understand and describe what a quantum universe does other than in terms of the evolution of the wavefunction or something basically equivalent thereto.
Which, to my mind, makes it pretty weird to say that postulating that the wavefunction is what's real is "going further away from quantum mechanics". Maybe one day we'll discover some better way to think about quantum mechanics that makes that so, but for now I don't think we have a better notion of what being Truly Quantum means than to say "it's that thing that wavefunctions do".
I have the impression -- which may well be very unfair -- that at some early stage OP imbibed the idea that what "quantum" fundamentally means is something very like "random", so that a system that's deterministic is ipso facto less "quantum" than a system that's stochastic. But that seems wrong to me. We don't presently have any way to distinguish random from deterministic versions of quantum physics; randomness or something very like it shows up in our experience of quantum phenomena, but the fact that a many-worlds interpretation is workable at all means that that doesn't tell us much about whether randomness is essential to quantum-ness.
So I don't buy the claim that treating the wavefunction as real is a sort of deterministicating hack that moves us further away from a Truly Quantum understanding of the universe.
(And, incidentally, if we had a model of Truly Stochastic physics in which the evolution of the system is driven by what's inside those probability distributions -- why, then, I would rather like the idea of claiming that the probability distributions are what's real, rather than just their outcomes.)
I don't know exactly what the LW norms are around plagiarism and plagiarism-ish things, but I think that introducing that basically-copied material with
I learned this by observing how beginners and more experienced people approach improv comedy.
is outright dishonest. OP is claiming to have observed this phenomenon and gleaned insight from it, when in fact he read about it in someone else's book and copied it into his post.
I have strong-downvoted the post for this reason alone (though, full disclosure, I also find the one-sentence-per-paragraph style really annoying and that may have influenced my decision[1]) and will not find it easy to trust anything else I see from this author.
[1] It feels to me as if the dishonest appropriation of someone else's insight and the annoying style may not be completely unrelated. One reason why I find this style annoying is that it gives me the strong impression of someone who is optimizing for sounding good. This sort of style -- punchy sentences, not too much complexity in how they relate to one another, the impression of degree of emphasis on every sentence -- feels like a public speaking style to me, and when I see someone writing this way I can't shake the feeling that someone is trying to manipulate me, to oversimplfy things to make them more likely to lodge in the brain, etc. And stealing other people's ideas and pretending they're your own is also a thing people do when they are optimizing for sounding good. (Obviously everything in this footnote is super-handwavy and unfair.)
In case anyone is in doubt about abstractapplic's accusation, I've checked. The relevant passage is near the end of section 3 of the chapter entitled "Spontaneity"; in my copy it's on page 88. I'm not sure "almost verbatim" is quite right, but the overall claim being made is the same, "fried mermaid" and "fish" are both there, and "will desperately try to think up something original" is taken verbatim from Johnstone.
One can't put a price on glory.
Wow, that was incredibly close.
I think simon and aphyer deserve extra credit for noticing the "implicit age variable" thing.
There are a few things in the list that I would say differently, which I mention not because the versions in the post are _wrong_ but because if you're using a crib-sheet like this then you might get confused when other people say it differently:
- I say "grad f", "div f", "curl f" for , , . I more often say "del" than "nabla" and for the Laplacian I would likely say either "del squared f" or "Laplacian of f".
- I pronounce "cos" as "coss" not as "coz".
- For derivatives I will say "dash" at least as often as "prime".
The selection of things in the list feels kinda strange (if it was mostly produced by GPT-4 then that may be why) -- if the goal is to teach you how to say various things then some of the entries aren't really pulling their weight (e.g., the one about the z-score, or the example of how to read out loud an explicit matrix transpose, when we've already been told how to say "transpose" and how to read out the numbers in a matrix). It feels as if whoever-or-whatever generated the list sometimes forgot whether they were making a list of bits of mathematical notation that you might not know how to say out loud or a list of things in early undergraduate mathematics that you might not know about.
It always makes me just a little bit sad when I see Heron's formula for the area of a triangle. Not because there's anything wrong with it or because it isn't a beautiful formula -- but because it's a special case of something even nicer. If you have a cyclic quadrilateral with sides then (writing ) its area is . Heron's formula is just the special case where two vertices coincide so . The more general formula (due to Brahmagupta) is also more symmetrical and at least as easy to remember.
With rather little confidence, I estimate for turtles A-J respectively:
22.93, 18.91, 25.47, 21.54, 17.79, 7.24, 30.36, 20.40, 24.25, 20.69 lb
Justification, such as it is:
The first thing I notice on eyeballing some histograms is that we seem to have three different distributions here: one normal-ish with weights < 10lb, one maybe lognormal-ish with weights > 20lb, and a sharp spike at exactly 20.4lb. Looking at some turtles with weight 20.4lb, it becomes apparent that 6-shell-segment turtles are special; they all have no wrinkles, green colour, no fangs, normal nostrils, no misc abnormalities, and a weight of 20.4lb. So that takes care of Harold. Then the small/large distinction seems to go along with (gray, fangs) versus (not-gray, no fangs). Among the fanged gray turtles, I didn't find any obvious sign of relationships between weight and anything other than number of shell segments, but there there's a clear linear relationship. Variability of weight doesn't seem interestingly dependent on anything. Residuals of the model a + b*segs look plausibly normal. So that takes care of Flint. The other pets are all green or grayish-green so I'll ignore the greenish-gray ones. These look like different populations again, though not so drastically different. Within each population it looks as if there's a plausibly-linear dependence of weight on the various quantitative features; nostrils seem irrelevant; no obvious sign of interactions or nonlinearities. The coefficients of wrinkles and segments are very close to a 1:2 ratio and I was tempted to force that in the name of model simplicity, but I decided not to. The coefficient of misc abs is very close to 1 and I was tempted to force that too but again decided not to. Given the estimated mean, the residuals now look pretty normally distributed -- the skewness seems to be an artefact of the distribution of parameters -- with stddev plausibly looking like a + b*mean. The same goes for the grayish-green turtles, but with different coefficients everywhere (except that the misc abs coeff looks like 1 lb/abnormality again). Finally, if we have a normally distributed estimate of a turtle's weight then the expected monetary loss is minimized ifwe estimate mu + 1.221*sigma.
I assume
that there's a more principled generation process, which on past form will probably involve rolling variable numbers of dice with variable numbers of sides, but I didn't try to identify it.
I will be moderately unsurprised if
it turns out that there are subtle interactions that I completely missed that would enable us to predict some of the turtles' weights with much better accuracy. I haven't looked very hard for such things. In particular, although I found no sign that nostril size relates to anything else it wouldn't be very surprising if it turns out that it does. Though it might not! Not everything you can measure actually turns out to be relevant! Oh, and I also saw some hints of interactions among the green turtles between scar-count and the numbers of wrinkles and shell segments, though my brief attempts to follow that up didn't go anywhere useful.
Tools used: Python, Pandas, statsmodels, matplotlib+seaborn. I haven't so far seen evidence that this would benefit much from
fancier models like random forests etc.
Yes , I know what the middle-child phenomenon is in the more literal context. I just don't have any idea why you're using the term here. I don't see any similarities between the oldest / middle / youngest child relationships in a family and whatever relationships there might be between programmers / lawyers / alignment researchers.
(I think maybe all you actually mean is "these people are more important than we're treating them as". Might be true, but that isn't a phenomenon, it's just a one-off judgement that a particular group of people are being neglected.)
I still don't understand why the distribution of talent/success/whatever among law students is relevant. If your point is that very few of them are going to be in a position to make a difference to AI policy then surely that actually argues against your main claim that law students should be getting more attention from people who care about AI.
Having read this post, I am still not sure what "the Middle Child Phenomenon" actually is, nor why it's called that.
The name suggests something rather general. But most of the post seems like maybe the definition is something like "the fact that there isn't a vigorous effort to get law students informed about artificial intelligence".
Except that there's also all the stuff about the distribution of talent and interests among law students, and another thing I don't understand is what that actually has to do with it. If (as I'm maybe 75% confident) the main point of the post is that it would be valuable to have law students learn something about AI because public policy tends to be strongly influenced by lawyers, then it seems like this point would be equally strong regardless of how your cohort of 1000 lawyers is distributed between dropouts, nobodies, all-rounders, CV-chasers, and "golden children". (I am deeply unconvinced by this classification, by the way, but I am not a lawyer myself and maybe it's more accurate than it sounds.)
It looks as if you're taking a constructive Dedekind cut to involve a "set of real numbers" in the sense of a function for distinguishing left-things from right-things.
Is that actually how constructivists would want to define them? E.g., Bishop's "Foundations of Constructive Analysis", if I am understanding its definitions of "set" and "subset" correctly (which I might not be), says in effect that a set of rational numbers is a recipe for constructing elements of that set, along with a way of telling whether two things constructed in this way are equal. I'm pretty sure you can have one of those but not be able to determine explicitly whether a given rational number is in the set, in which case your central argument doesn't go through.
Are Cauchy sequences and Dedekind cuts equivalent if one thinks of them as Bishop does? There's an exercise in his book that claims they are. I haven't thought about this much and am very much not an expert on this stuff, and for all I know Bishop may have made a boneheaded mistake at this point. I'm also troubled by the apparent vagueness of Bishop's account of sets and subsets and whatnot.
More concretely, that exercise in Bishop's book says: a Dedekind cut is a pair of nonempty sets of rationals S,T such that we always have s<t and given rationals x<y either x is in S or y is in T. Unless I'm confused about Bishop's account of sets, all of this is consistent with e.g. S containing the negative rationals and T the positive rationals, and not being able to say that 0 is in either of them. And unless I'm confused about your "arbitration oracles", you can't build an arbitration oracle out of that setup.
(But, again: not an expert on any of this, could be horribly wrong.)
I did, in fact, read the post and the NYT articles, and I am not convinced that your description of what they do and what it means is correct. So, if my response to your article doesn't consist mostly of the gushing praise your first paragraph indicates you'd prefer, that's one reason why.
But, regardless of that: If you write something wrong, and someone points out that it's wrong, I don't think it's reasonable to respond with "how dare you point that out rather than looking only at the other parts of what I wrote?".
Scott is not using some weird eccentric definition of "lie". E.g., the main definition in the OED is: "An act or instance of lying; a false statement made with intent to deceive; a criminal falsehood." (Does that first clause soften it? Not really; it's uninformative, because they define the verb "lie" in terms of the noun "lie".) First definition in Wiktionary is " To give false information intentionally with intent to deceive". But, in any case, even with a very broad definition of "lie" the first four levels in his taxonomy are simply, uncontroversially, obviously not kinds of lying. Again, the first one is "reasoning well, and getting things right".
If I say "There are seven classes of solid objects in the solar system: dust motes, pebbles, boulders, mountains, moons, small planets, and large planets" and you identify something as a small planet, you should not call it "a Level 6 Planet, according to gjm's classification of planets".
And, while I understand a preference for being charitable and not leaping to calling things dishonest that aren't necessarily so ... I don't think you get to demand such treatment in the comments on an article that does the exact reverse to someone else.
Your justification seems to me almost completely non-responsive to the point I was actually making, which is not about whether it's reasonable to call what the NYT did in these cases "lying" but about whether it's reasonable to call something at level 6 in Scott's taxonomy a "level 6 lie".
Scott classifies utterances into seven types in ascending order of dishonesty. The first four are uncontroversially not kinds of lying. Therefore, something on the sixth level of Scott's taxonomy cannot reasonably be called a "level 6 lie", because that phrase will lead any reader who hasn't checked carefully to think that Scott has a taxonomy of levels of lying, where a "level 6 lie" is something worse than a level 5 lie, which is worse than a level 4 lie, ... than a level 1 lie, with all these things actually being kinds of lies.
Whereas in fact, even if we ignore Scott's own opinion that only "the most egregious cases of 6" (and also all of 7) deserve to be called lies at all, at the absolute worst a level-6 utterance is more-dishonest-than only one lower level of lie.
Further, you called these things "Scott Alexander's criteria for media lies", which is plainly not an accurate description because, again, more than half the levels in his taxonomy are completely uncontroversially not lying at all (and Scott's own opinion is that only the top level and "the most egregious cases of" the one below should be called lying).
So even if you were 100% sincere and reasonable in regarding what the NYT did as ("routinely and brazenly") lying, I do not see any way to understand your alleged application of Scott's taxonomy as a sincere and reasonable use of it. I do not find it plausible that you are really unable to understand that most of its levels are plainly not types of lie. I do not find it plausible that you really thought that something that begins with "reasoning well, and getting things right" followed by "reasoning well, but getting things wrong because the world is complicated and you got unlucky" can rightly be described as "criteria for media lies".
I could, of course, be wrong. Maybe you really are stupid enough not to understand that "according to X's criteria for media lies, Y is a level 6 lie" implies that what X presented is a classification of lies into levels, in which Y comes at level 6. Or maybe the stupidity is mine and actually most people wouldn't interpret it that way. (I would bet heavily against that but, again, I could be wrong.) Maybe you didn't actually read Scott's list, somehow. But you don't generally seem stupid or unable to understand the meanings and implications of words, so I still find it much much more plausible that you knew perfectly well that Scott was presenting a taxonomy of mostly-not-lies, and chose to phrase things as you did because it made what you were accusing the NYT of sound worse. Which is, I repeat, on at least level 6 of Scott's taxonomy.
And, again, none of this is about whether the NYT really did what you say, nor about whether it's reasonable to describe what you said the NYT did was lying. It's entirely about your abuse of Scott's taxonomy, which (1) is not a list of "criteria for media lies" and (2) is not something that justifies calling an utterance at its Nth level a "level N lie".
It is not true that "no pattern that suggests a value suggests any other", at least not unless you say more precisely what you are willing to count as a pattern.
Here's a template describing the pattern you've used to argue that 1+2+...=-1/12:
We define numbers with the following two properties. First, , so that for each we can think of as a sequence that's looking more and more like (1,2,3,...) as increases. Second, where , so the sums of these sequences that look more and more like (1,2,3,...) approach -1/12.
(Maybe you mean something more specific by "pattern". You haven't actually said what you mean.)
Well, here are some to consider. When we'll let . When we'll let . And when we'll let . Here, is some fixed number; we can choose it to be anything we like.
This array of numbers satisfies our first property: . Indeed, once we have , and the limit of an eventually-constant sequence is the thing it's eventually constant at.
What about the second property? Well, as you'll readily see I've arranged that for each we have . So the sequence of sums converges to .
In other words, this is a "pattern" that makes the sum equal to . For any value of we choose.
I believe there are more stringent notions of "pattern" -- stronger requirements on how the approach for large -- for which it is true that every "pattern" that yields a finite sum yields . But does this actually end up lower-tech than analytic continuation and the like? I'm not sure it does.
(One version of the relevant theory is described at https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2010/04/10/the-euler-maclaurin-formula-bernoulli-numbers-the-zeta-function-and-real-variable-analytic-continuation.)
Once again you are making a ton of confident statements and offering no actual evidence. "is a high priority", "they want", "they don't want", "what they're aiming for is", etc. So far as I can see you don't in fact know any of this, and I don't think you should state things as fact that you don't have solid evidence for.
Let us suppose that social media apps and sites are, as you imply, in the business of trying to build sophisticated models of their users' mental structures. (I am not convinced they are -- I think what they're after is much simpler -- but I could be wrong, they might be doing that in the future even if not now, and I'm happy to stipulate it for the moment.)
If so, I suggest that they're not doing that just in order to predict what the users will do while they're in the app / on the site. They want to be able to tell advertisers "_this_ user is likely to end up buying your product", or (in a more paranoid version of things) to be able to tell intelligence agencies "_this_ user is likely to engage in terrorism in the next six months".
So inducing "mediocrity" is of limited value if they can only make their users more mediocre while they are in the app / on the site. In fact, it may be actively counterproductive. If you want to observe someone while they're on TikTok and use those observations to predict what they will do when they're not on TikTok, then putting them into an atypical-for-them mental state that makes them less different from other people while on TikTok seems like the exact opposite of what you want to do.
I don't know of any good reason to think it at all likely that social media apps/sites have the ability to render people substantially more "mediocre" permanently, so as to make their actions when not in the app / on the site more predictable.
If the above is correct, then perhaps we should expect social media apps and sites to be actively trying not to induce mediocrity in their users.
Of course it might not be correct. I don't actually know what changes in users' mental states are most helpful to social media providers' attempts to model said users, in terms of maximizing profit or whatever other things they actually care about. Are you claiming that you do? Because this seems like a difficult and subtle question involving highly nontrivial questions of psychology, of what can actually be done by social media apps and sites, of the details of their goals, etc., and I see no reason for either of us to be confident that you know those things. And yet you are happy to declare with what seems like utter confidence that of course social media apps and sites will be trying to induce mediocrity in order to make users more predictable. How do you know?
"Regression to the mean" is clearly an important notion in this post, what with being in the title and all, but you never actually say what you mean by it. Clearly not the statistical phenomenon of that name, as such.
(My commenting only on this should not be taken to imply that I find the rest of the post reasonable; I think it's grossly over-alarmist and like many of Trevor's posts treats wild speculation about the capabilities and intentions of intelligence agencies etc. as if it were established fact. But I don't think it likely that arguing about that will be productive.)
What's going on is that tailcalled's factor model doesn't in fact do a good job of identifying rationalists by their sociopolitical opinions. Or something like that.
[EDITED to add:] Here's one particular variety of "something like that" that I think may be going on: an opinion may be highly characteristic of a group even if it is very uncommon within the group. For instance, suppose you're classifying folks in the US on a left/right axis. If someone agrees with "We should abolish the police and close all the prisons" then you know with great confidence which team they're on, but I'm pretty sure the great majority of leftish people in the US disagree with it. If someone agrees with "We should bring back slavery because black people aren't fit to run their own lives" then you know with great confidence which team they're on, but I'm pretty sure the great majority of rightish people in the US disagree with it.
Tailcalled's model isn't exactly doing this sort of thing to rationalists -- if someone says "stories about ghosts are zero evidence of ghosts" then they have just proved they aren't a rationalist, not done something extreme but highly characteristic of (LW-style) rationalists -- but it's arguably doing something of the sort to a broader fuzzier class of people that are maybe as near as the model can get to "rationalists". Roughly the people some would characterize as "Silicon Valley techbros".
There are definitely answers that your model wants rationalists to give but that I think are incompatible with LW-style rationalism. For instance:
- "People's anecdotes about seeing ghosts aren't real evidence for ghosts" (your model wants "agree strongly"): of course people's anecdotes about seeing ghosts are evidence for ghosts; they are more probable if ghosts are real than if they aren't. They're just really weak evidence for ghosts and there are plenty of other reasons to think there aren't ghosts.
- "We need more evidence that we would benefit before we charge ahead with futuristic technology that might irreversibly backfire" (your model wants "disagree" or "disagree strongly"): there's this thing called the AI alignment problem that a few rationalists are slightly concerned about, you might have heard of it.
And several others where I wouldn't go so far as to say "incompatible" but where I confidently expect most LWers' positions not to match your model's predictions. For instance:
- "It is morally important to avoid making people suffer emotionally": your model wants not-agreement, but I think most LWers would agree with this.
- "Workplaces should be dull to reflect the oppressiveness of work": your model wants not-disagreement, but I think most LWers would disagree (though probably most would think "hmm, interesting idea" first).
- "Religious people are very stupid"; your model wants agreement, but I think most LWers are aware that there are plenty of not-very-stupid religious people (indeed, plenty of very-not-stupid religious people) and I suspect "disagree strongly" might be the most common response from LWers.
I don't claim that the above lists are complete. I got 11/24 and I am pretty sure I am nearer the median rationalist than that might suggest.
I don't have particularly strong opinions and think you should do whatever you like with your name, but just as a datapoint I (1) didn't think "the gears to ascension" was either so cool a name as to demand respect or so stupid a name as to preclude it, and (2) don't think the "often wrong" in your name will make much difference to how I read your comments.
I don't think it ever occurred to me to think that calling yourself "the gears to ascension" amounted to claiming to be a key part of some transhumanist project or anything like that. The impression it gave me was "transhumanist picking a name that sounds cool to them".
The "often wrong" provokes the following thoughts: (1) this person is aware of often being wrong, which is more than most people are, so maybe take them more seriously? (2) this person is, by their own account, often wrong, so maybe take them less seriously? (3) this person is maybe doing a sort of defensive self-deprecatory fishing-for-compliments thing, so maybe take them less seriously? but all of these are pretty weak effects, and I think 2+3 more or less exactly cancel out 1.
"Lauren (often wrong)" is probably about equally memorable to "the gears to ascension". if your goal is to have all your comments stand on their own, then aside from the one-off effect of reducing the association between things said by "Lauren" and things said by "gears" I don't think the change will do much one way or the other. "Lauren" on its own is probably less memorable and your comments might be treated as more independent of one another if you just called yourself that. (But there appear already to be two users called just Lauren, so something slightly more specific might be better.)
The trouble with these rules is that they mean that someone saying "I played the AI-box game and I let the AI out" gives rather little evidence that that actually happened. For all we know, maybe all the stories of successful AI-box escapes are really stories where the gatekeeper was persuaded to pretend that they let the AI out of the box (maybe they were bribed to do that; maybe they decided that any hit to their reputation for strong-mindedness was outweighed by the benefits of encouraging others to believe that an AI could get out of the box; etc.). Or maybe they're all really stories where the AI-player's ability to get out of the box depends on something importantly different between their situation and that of a hypothetical real boxed AI (again, maybe they bribed the gatekeeper and the gatekeeper was willing to accept a smaller bribe when the outcome was "everyone is told I let the AI out" rather than whatever an actual AI might do once out of the box; etc.).
Of course, even without those rules it would still be possible for gatekeepers to lie about the results. But if e.g. a transcript were released then there'd be ways to try to notice those failure modes. If the gatekeeper-player lets the AI-player out of the box and a naysayer says "bah, I wouldn't have been convinced", that could be self-delusion on the naysayer's part (or unawareness that someone playing against them might have adopted a different method that would have worked better on them) but it could also be that the gatekeeper-player really did let the AI-player out "too easily" in a way that wouldn't transfer to the situations the game is meant to build intuitions about.
It seems to me that "are against immigration" means multiple things that are worth separating. If "old Republicans are against immigration", that might mean
- that when asked their opinions, that's what they say
- that when given the choice of voting for anti-immigration Republican candidates or pro-immigration Democratic candidates they choose the former
- that when given the choice of anti-immigration Republican candidates or pro-immigration Republican candidates they choose the former
- that when they have the opportunity to influence Republican party policy they try to push it in an anti-immigration direction
and these are all different things.
Voting mostly for reasons other than affecting the outcome certainly explains the second of those, but that one wasn't particularly in need of explanation anyway if Republican candidates generally suit the self-interest of old Republicans better than Democratic candidates.
(Perhaps your argument is that actually voting Republican at all is against the self-interest of old Republican voters? If so, it seems to me like more support for that claim is needed.)
As for the others:
- Stating "immigration is bad", like voting for anti-immigration candidates, doesn't actually have much likelihood of changing immigration policy, so maybe your explanation also covers that (and, more generally, pretty much any expression of political opinions). What it doesn't explain is why those old Republicans would want to say that immigration is bad; an obvious explanation (which again generalizes to wealthy Democrats advocating tax increases, etc.) is that they consider their interests advanced on the whole if their party does well, and so they advocate for all their party's positions.
- Do we actually know anything about what old Republicans do when they have a (real) choice between two Republican candidates who differ mostly in immigration policy? (To whatever extent e.g. Donald Trump is a particularly anti-immigration candidate, his success in the Republican primaries might be evidence, but it feels like there are way too many other confounding factors there.) My impression is that there just aren't very many pro-immigration Republicans around to vote for.
- Do we actually know anything about what old Republicans do if and when they have a chance to influence Republican immigration policy? (My impression is that most old Republicans have no such chance, and those who do might be highly atypical in various relevant ways.)
Do you have some concrete examples where you've explained how some substantial piece of the case for AI accident risk is a matter of word games?
The prior for any given newly-emerged virus being a natural zoonosis rather than a lab leak is higher when there are fewer labs to leak.
I agree that the prior for a leak happening from any given lab at any given time doesn't depend on how many labs there are, of course.
The DEFUSE proposal that you linked to doesn't (so far as I can tell) say anything about where the furin cleavage site work would be done. OP here includes an image that seems to show a Word document or something with a comment about that, but it isn't obvious to me where it's from or how it's known to be genuine or anything.
The "uniformly spaced recognition sites and BsmBI" thing (at least, the instance of it that I've found) looks rather sketchy and unconvincing to me, though I'm not really competent to evaluate it (are you?). It's possible that what I'm looking at isn't what you're referring to; I'm talking about a post on Alex Washburne's Substack where he draws attention to mention in the DEFUSE proposal of "reverse genetic systems" and "infectious clone technology" (though so far as I can see neither of these is actually mentioned in the proposal itself), claims (I do not know with what evidence) that using these methods would produce unusually regularly spaced instances of certain genome subsequences that are targeted by BsmBI or a similar enzyme, and claims that the SARS-CoV-2 shows such unusually regularly spaced instances.
But (1) unless there's something I'm missing this "specifically links WIV to" those methods only in a very weak sense (e.g., the DEFUSE proposal doesn't in fact say that they are going to use those methods, or that it would be done at the WIV), (2) Washburne doesn't provide any support for his claim that researchers using this technique would in fact make the relevant segments unusually uniform in length, and (3) nor does he seem to give any details of the analysis that supposeedly shows that SARS-CoV-2 has such unusually uniform segments. He makes some claims about earlier drafts of the DEFUSE proposal supposedly obtained by FOIA requests, which if correct go some way to filling these gaps a bit, but if he actually shows those or gives evidence that they're real then I haven't seen it.
(Note: I find the style of Washburne's writing very offputting; it pattern-matches to e.g. creationists crowing about their nonsensical statistical arguments. Lots of expressions of triumph, pointlessly flowery writing, that sort of thing. Of course that isn't strong evidence that Washburne is wrong in the same sort of way as the creationists are, but I find it does strongly incline me to skepticism. It's odd that, when arguing that something previously dismissed as a conspiracy theory is probably true, it doesn't occur to him to try not writing like a conspiracy theorist.)
You're saying "this virus" again when what's actually known is that WIV was studying coronaviruses, not specifically that it was studying SARS-COV-2.
(If it turns out that WIV was studying SARS-COV-2 specifically before it started infecting humans then yes, that would be very strong evidence in favour of lab leak theories.)
Anyway: yes, I do agree that the fact that SARS-COV-2 first got into humans somewhere rather near a lab that was studying similar viruses is substantial Bayesian evidence that it got into humans via that lab. But the exact same thing that makes it substantial evidence (there aren't many such labs, whereas there are many opportunities for natural zoonosis which could happen in a wider variety of places) also means that the prior is low.
So the question is roughly "how dangerous do you think, on priors, a single WIV-like lab is, compared to a large wet market?". ("Dangerous" meaning probability of releasing coronaviruses into the human population.) If, before hearing about SARS-COV-2, you would have thought WIV was about as likely to release coronaviruses into the human population as the Wuhan wet market, then after hearing about SARS-COV-2 you should think the probability it was a lab leak is about 50%. (And then potentially modify that substantially depending on all the details that we're ignoring in this discussion, which might give more concrete evidence to distinguish the hypotheses.) Etc.
[EDITED to add:] I've now seen your post about this; I agree that the DEFUSE thing seems like highly relevant evidence (but haven't looked into the DEFUSE proposal myself to check whether I agree with what you say about it). If it's correct that WIV is known to have been working on something much more specifically matched to SARS-COV-2 then that dangerousness ratio looks quite different (because something so much more specific is correspondingly less likely to occur as a natural zoonosis).
Indeed, but my impression is that low response rates are the default outcome when you mail around a survey like this.
(It's natural to wonder about bias. My feeling is that people who think COVID-19 was a lab leak are probably more, not less, likely to want to answer an anonymous survey that gives them a chance to say so.)
Aside from the fact that you're answering a different question from Brendan's, this argument seems like it involves some assumptions that are not known to be correct.
Isn't the right version of your question "Create a virus in a natural spillover event; what is the chance that that spillover happens within a few miles of a lab that is studying similar viruses?"?
The answer to that might be "fairly large", if e.g. it happens that there are virus labs and likely spots for natural zoonotic spillover located near to one another. Which is in fact the case in Wuhan, no?
(I don't know how well the details of the case fit the "escape from the Wuhan virus lab" and "zoonosis at the Wuhan wet market" hypotheses. Maybe they're a better fit for the former than for the latter. But that's a very different sort of argument from "there's a virus lab that was studying coronaviruses near to where COVID-19 was first seen in humans".)
I think you're answering a different question from the one Brendan asked.
You're answering "Why do you think COVID-19 escaped from a lab?".
Brendan was asking "Conditional on COVID-19 having escaped from a lab, why do you think it was created there rather than being a natural virus they were studying in that lab?".
I think using the phrase "level 6 lies" when referring to Scott's taxonomy is itself at least a "level 6 lie".
Here, by way of reminder, is Scott's list. (I've abbreviated it a bit; you can find the full version at the far end of trevor's link if you want to check my honesty.) 1. Reasoning well and getting things right. 2. Reasoning well and getting things wrong by bad luck. 3. Reasoning badly through honest incompetence. 4. Reasoning badly because of unconscious bias. 5. Presenting true facts in a way that misleads, "subconsciously and unthinkingly". 6. Presenting true facts in a way that misleads, with deliberate intent to deceive. 7. Saying false things on purpose, in order to deceive.
I claim that "levels" 1-4 in this list are simply, straightforwardly, uncontroversially not lying.
It seems highly dubious to me to call 5 and 6 (5 especially) "lying", but even if we decide to do so Scott's 6 is not in any useful sense the sixth of seven levels of lying, it's at most the second of three levels.
Further, Scott's own position, stated very clearly in the article you linked to, is that things at level 5 are not lies, and that most things at level 6 are not lies either. "I prefer to reserve lying for 7 and the most egregious cases of 6, and to have a pretty high standard for accusing people of this rather than 2/3/4/5."
If you call things at level 6 (and, it seems to me, not in fact "the most egregious cases of 6" in this case) "level 6 lies" then you are not, contrary to your own description, applying "Scott's criteria for media lies".
I suggest that "brazenly lied" also strongly implies something more than "lying by omission".
(Others have already made essentially the same point I am making here, but I think it needs making with more force and details.)
Meta: If you're going to say "Written with the assistance of GPT-4" then I, at least, want to know roughly what GPT-4 assisted with. Did you use it to clean up little mistakes in spelling and grammar? (In that case, I don't actually see why it's necessary to mention GPT-4 at all. "Written with the assistance of the Chambers English Dictionary.") Did you write a first version of the article and use GPT-4 to make the writing style more, well, GPT-4-like? Did you say "Please write me an article about economics and AI risk suitable for posting on Less Wrong"? Or what? The inferences I draw both about the article and about GPT-4 are going to be quite different in those different cases.
I actually considered writing "cardiologists" instead of "pianists" :-).
I think what's needed is some sort of context in which the thought "group X are all criminals" is salient (even if only as a deliberate exaggeration). For someone who has strongly anti-black attitudes, that thought may be salient all the time when X = black people. For someone who's just heard about some statistics saying that pianists commit a bit more crime, it's probably salient enough because they've specifically been thinking about pianists and crime. But e.g. a few years after that criminologists' conference, when everyone's aware that pianists commit a bit more crime but no one particularly hates pianists as a result or anything, I don't think they'd find the joke funny.
I'm not sure whether the ambiguity you're referring to is (1) the black paint / black skin one (which I mention in my other comment) or (2) something else.
If (1), I flatly disagree that that ambiguity is essential to (or even relevant to) the joke. I think Alice is expecting Bob and Carol to understand "black" as meaning "for black people" right from the outset.
If (2), then I'm not sure whether you mean (a) something to do with the alleged criminality of black people, or (b) something else.
If (a), then I think you misunderstand what I'm doing with the comparison. (Also, I don't think "there is no ambiguity here" is a good way of describing the difference between the two jokes.)
If (b), then perhaps you could do me the favour of explaining more clearly what you have in mind, because in case (2b) I have clearly failed to grasp it.
I should justify "I think you misunderstand what I'm doing with the comparison". (Here I'm assuming we're in case 2a.) I'm not saying "the black-people version of the joke isn't funny, because the pianist version of the joke isn't funny and there are no relevant differences between them". I'm saying "since the pianist version of the joke is uncontroversially not-funny, any funniness in the black-people version of the joke must depend on what's different about the two versions of the joke" -- more specifically, I think it depends mostly on the idea that black people are criminals -- which is relevant because you claimed that (apparently as a matter of objective fact) the black-person version of the joke "is funny", and I don't think that's an accurate way to describe something whose funniness is completely dependent on particular ideas or attitudes that many people don't hold.
People who think that pianists are criminals would (I think) find the pianist version of the joke about as funny as people who think that black people are criminals find the black-people version. The difference isn't in (what I at least would call) the structure of the joke, it's in the context that makes certain aspects of the structure salient.
By "couldn't" I didn't mean "would be physically incapable of", I meant "certainly wouldn't", which is what I took your "would not be ..." to be saying. "Usually wouldn't", I have no disagreement with.
I think that when you say
My understanding is that it is not true that if you ran computers for a long time that they would beat the human also running for a long time
(which I don't disagree with, btw) you are misunderstanding what Ege was claiming, which was not that in 1997 chess engines on stock hardware would beat humans provided the time controls were long enough, but only that in 1997 chess engines on stock hardware would beat humans if you gave the chess engines a huge amount of time and somehow stopped the humans having anything like as much time.
In other words, he's saying that in 1997 chess engines had "superhuman but slower-than-human performance": that whatever a human could do, a chess engine could also do if given dramatically more time to do it than the human had.
And yes, this means that in some sense we had superhuman-but-slow chess as soon as someone wrote down a theoretically-valid tree search algorithm. Just as in some sense we have superhuman-but-slow intelligence[1] since someone wrote down the AIXI algorithm.
[1] In some sense of "intelligence" which may or may not be close enough to how the term is usually used.
I feel like there's an interesting question here but can't figure out a version of it that doesn't end up being basically trivial.
- Is there any case where we've figured out how to make machines do something at human level or better if we don't care about speed, where they haven't subsequently become able to do it at human level and much faster than humans?
- Kinda-trivially yes, because anything we can write down an impracticably-slow algorithm for and haven't yet figured out how to do better than that will count.
- Is there any case where we've figured out how to make humans do something at human level or better if we don't mind them being a few orders of magnitude slower than humans, where they haven't subsequently become able to do it at human level and much faster than humans?
- Kinda-trivially yes, because there are things we've only just very recently worked out how to make machines do well.
- Is there any case where we've figured out how to make humans do something at human level or better if we don't mind them being a few orders of magnitude slower than humans, and then despite a couple of decades of further work haven't made them able to do it at human level and much faster than humans?
- Kinda-trivially no, because until fairly recently Moore's law was still delivering multiple-orders-of-magnitude speed improvements just by waiting, so anything we got to human level >=20 years ago has then got hugely faster that way.
I agree that someone who behaves like Bob is almost certainly being performatively-fake-innocent, but I think you're wrong to say that someone unfamiliar with the stereotypes couldn't behave that way. For one thing, Bob-as-portrayed isn't impervious to explanation or flatly uninterested in understanding. He asks for explanations and doesn't really get them, and if he ends up not understanding it's mostly because Alice hasn't really tried to help him understand (perhaps because Alice thinks, as you do, that he can't be sincere).
If someone told the "abortion clinic for pianists" version of the joke in my other comment in this thread, I can imagine responding very much like Bob. (Aside from the black paint / black people misunderstanding, which wouldn't have a parallel in that case.) I'd be assuming that there was some relevant thing about pianists that I didn't know, or some pun I was failing to detect, and I'm not sure I could do much better than "I still don't get it".
Having the form of a joke is not sufficient to make something funny. I think you're right that David goes too far when he says it "isn't really a joke" -- it is really a joke -- but to whatever extent it's even meaningful to say "this is/isn't funny" without appending "to me" or "to the average 21st-century San Franciscan" or whatever, you can't refute "it isn't funny" just by saying that the thing is joke-shaped.
Suppose it had been "What do you call an abortion clinic for pianists?" with the same punchline. There would be the exact same structure, the exact same "subverting by means of semantic ambiguity" at the end. But I am fairly sure that essentially no one in the world would find it funny. And the only difference between this version and the one in the OP is that some people think black people are very often criminals and no one thinks that about pianists.
Maybe that's enough to make the joke funny for people who think black people are very often criminals. (I'm inclined to think not.) But I don't think you can claim that "of course it's funny" if its funniness depends on a belief that not everyone shares.
("But black people are more likely to be criminals than white people, I've seen the statistics!" Maybe so, but I don't think that's enough. Suppose it turns out that pianists are a bit more likely to be criminals than the general population; would that make the pianist version funny? Nope. I think the joke depends on equating "black people" and "criminals"; of course that doesn't mean that to find it funny you have to think all criminals are black and all black people are criminals, but I think you do need opinions that can round off to that; part of the humour, such as it is, comes from the exaggeration involved in doing so.)
Hmm. You're definitely right that my analysis (if it deserves so dignified a name) assumes all collisions are head-on, which is wrong. If "the x-axis" (i.e., the normal vector in the collision) is oriented randomly then everything still works out proportional to the kinetic energies, but as you say that might not be the case. I think this is basically the same issue as the possible bogosity of the "possibly-bogus assumption" in my original analysis.
Dealing with this all properly feels like more work than I want to do right now, though :-).
This is a terrible idea because as we all know Sumerian is uniquely suited for hacking humans' language-interpretation facilities and taking control of their brains.
(Disclaimer: I am a mathematician, not a physicist, and I hated the one thermodynamics course I took at university several decades ago. If anything I write here looks wrong, it probably is.)
Let's try to do this from lower-level first principles.
The temperature is proportional to the average kinetic energy of the molecules.
Suppose you have particles with (mass,velocity) and and they collide perfectly elastically (which I believe is basically what happens for collisions between individual molecules). The centre-of-mass frame is moving with velocity relative to the rest frame, and there the velocities are and . In this frame, the collision simply negates both velocities (since this preserves the net momentum of zero and the net kinetic energy) so now they are and , so back in the rest frame the velocities are and . So the first particle's kinetic energy has changed by (scribble scribble) .
(I should say explicitly that these velocities are vectors and when I multiply two of them I mean the scalar product.)
Now, the particles with which any given particle of our cooling object comes into contact will have randomly varying velocities. I think the following may be bogus but let's suppose that the direction they're moving in is uniformly random, so the distribution of v2 is spherically symmetrical. (It may be bogus because it seems like two particles are more likely to collide when their velocities are opposed than when they are in the same direction, and if that's right then it will induce a bias in the distribution of v2.) In this case, the v1 v2 term averages out to zero and for any choice of |v2| we are left with constant . (KE2 - KE1). So as long as (1) our possibly-bogus assumption holds and (2) the rate at which object-particles and environment-particles interact isn't changing, the rate of kinetic energy change should be proportional to the average value of KE2-KE1, which is to say proportional to the difference in termperatures.
This is the (unmodified) Newton cooling law.
So if my calculations are right then any wrongness in the Newton law is a consequence of assumptions 1 and 2 above failing in whatever ways they fail.
I think assumption 2 is OK provided we keep the environment at constant temperature. (Imagine an environment-molecule somewhere near the surface of our object. If it's heading towards our object, then how long it takes before it collides with an object-molecule depends on how many object-molecules there are around, but not on how they're moving.)
I am suspicious of this "Lambert's law". Suppose the environment is at absolute zero -- nothing is moving at all. Then "Lambert's law" says that the rate of cooling should be infinite: our object should itself instantly drop to absolute zero once placed in an absolute-zero environment. Can that be right?
I am not (deliberately or knowingly) strawmanning anything, and what you call "doubling down" I call "not having been convinced by your arguments". If you think tailcalled was doing something more heinous than (1) having purposes other than advancing the discussion here and (2) not going out of his way to say so, then maybe you should actually indicate what that was; your accounts of his alleged dishonesty, so far, look to me like (1) + (2) + your disapproval, rather than (1) + (2) + something actually worse than 1+2.
If "the problem is at the level of his character" then I do not think there is any realistic chance that complaining about his character will do anything to solve the problem.
Have you ever seen any case where a substantial improvement to someone's character came about as a result of someone telling them on an internet forum what a bad person they were? I don't think I have.
At this point I shall take habryka's advice and drop this discussion. (Not only because of habryka's advice but because I agree with him that this conversation seems unlikely to be very productive, and because the LW user interface -- deliberately -- makes it painful to take part in discussions downthread of highly-downvoted comments.) I will not be offended if you choose to get in the last word.
I am deeply unconvinced by the argument "Some time after writing X, tailcalled said he said it partly to do Y; it's very unclear how X could possibly do Y; therefore when tailcalled wrote X he did it under false pretenses". It certainly does seem to follow from those premises that tailcalled's account of why he did X isn't quite right. But that doesn't mean that when he wrote X there was anything dishonest going on. I actually think the most likely thing is that he didn't in fact write X in order to do Y, he just had a vague notion in his mind that maybe the discussion would have effect Y, and forgot that he hadn't so far got round to saying anything that was likely to do it. Never attribute to malice what is adequately explained by incompetence.
(Not very much incompetence. This sort of discussion is easy to lose track of.)
And, again, it is not "false pretenses" to engage in a discussion with more than one goal in mind and not explicitly lay out all one's goals in advance.
an evasiveness that he does not typically display
Oh. I'd thought you were mostly alleging persistent character flaws rather than one-off things. Anyway: I won't say it's impossible that what you say is true, but I am so far unconvinced.
I cannot effectively criticise a community without criticising its members
Perhaps I have been unclear about what it is I think you have been doing in this thread that it would be better not to do. I am not objecting to criticizing people's behaviour. (I think I disagree with many of your criticisms, but that's a separate matter.) What I think is both rude and counterproductive is focusing on what sort of person the other person is, as opposed to what they have done and are doing. In this particular thread the rot begins with "thus flattering your narcissism" -- I don't agree with all your previous criticism of tailcalled but it all has the form "you did X, which was bad because Y", which I think is fine; but at this point you switch to "and you are a bad person". And then we get "you've added one more way to feel above it all and congratulate yourself on it" and "your few genuine displays of good faith" and "goal-oriented towards making you appear as the sensible moderate" and "you have a profound proclivity for bullshitting" and so forth.
I think this sort of comment is basically never helpful. If what you are trying to do here is something that can't be done without this sort of comment, then I think it would be better not to do it . (More precisely: if you think that what you are trying to do here is something that can't be done without such comments, then I think you are probably wrong unless what you are trying to do is mostly "make tailcalled feel bad" or something.)
Probably-obvious question: you mention finding one of them in a library, but have you tried asking the librarians there for help? They might have more relevant expertise than the readership of Less Wrong...
If I'm understanding the paper correctly -- and I've only looked at it very briefly so there's an excellent chance I haven't -- there's an important asymmetry here which is worth drawing attention to.
The paper is concerned with two quite specific "Sticky" and "Switchy" models. They look, from glancing at the transition probability matrices, as if there's a symmetry between sticking and switching that interchanges the models -- but there isn't.
The state spaces of the two models are defined by "length of recent streak", and this notion is not invariant under e.g. the prefix-XOR operation mentioned by James Camacho.
What does coincidental evidence for Sticky look like? Well, e.g., 1/8 of the time we will begin with HHHH or TTTT. The Sticky:Switchy likelihood ratio for this, in the "5-step 90%" model whose matrices are given in the OP, is 1 (first coin) times . 58/.42 (second coin) times .66/.34 (third coin) times .74/.26 (fourth coin), as the streak builds up.
What does coincidental evidence for Switchy look like? Well, the switchiest behaviour we can see would be HTHT or THTH. In this case we get a likelihood ratio of 1 (first coin) times .58/.42 (second coin) times .58/.42 (third coin) times .58/.42 (third coin), which is much smaller.
It's hard to get strong evidence for Switchy over Sticky, because a particular result can only be really strong if it was preceded by a long run of sticking, which itself will have been evidence for Sticky.
This seems like a pretty satisfactory explanation for why this set of models produces the results described in the paper. (I see that Mlxa says they tried to reproduce those results and failed, but I'll assume for the moment that the correct results are as described. I wonder whether perhaps Mlxa made a model that doesn't have the multi-step streak-dependence of the model in the paper.)
What's not so obvious to me is whether this explanation makes it any less true, or any less interesting if true, that "Bayesians commit the gambler's fallacy". It seems like the bias reported here is a consequence of choosing these particular "sticky" and "switchy" hypotheses, and I can't quite figure out whether a better moral would be "Bayesians who are only going to consider one hypothesis of each type should pick different ones from these", or whether actually this sort of "depends on length of latest streak, but not e.g. on length of latest alternating run" hypothesis is an entirely natural one.
Well, maybe I'm confused about what tailcalled's "original comment" that you're complaining about was, because looking at what I thought it was I can't see anything in it that anyone could possibly expect to convince anyone that Blanchardians are abusive. Nor much that anyone could expect to convince anyone that Blanchardians are wrong, which makes me suspect even more that I've failed to identify what comment we're talking about. But the only other plausible candidate I see for the "original comment" is this one, which has even less of that sort. Or maybe this one, which again doesn't have anything like that. What comment do you think we are talking about here?
I am fairly sure my opinions of tailcalled's responses here is very similar to my opinion of his comments elsewhere which haven't (so far as I've noticed) involved you at all, so I don't find it very plausible that those opinions are greatly affected by the fact that on this occasion he is arguing with someone I'm finding disagreeable.
"Pointing out character flaws". "Insults". Po-TAY-to. Po-TAH-to. My complaint isn't that the way in which you are pointing out tailcalled's alleged character flaws is needlessly unpleasant, it's that you're doing it at all. (And I would say the same if tailcalled were spending all his time pointing out your alleged character flaws, whatever those might be, but he isn't.) As far as I am concerned, when an LW discussion becomes mostly about the character of one of its participants, it is very unlikely that it is doing any good to anyone. And if what you mostly want to do here is point out people's character flaws, then even if those character flaws are real I think it's probably not very helpful.
It doesn't look to me as if LW is the hotbed of "constant abuse" you are trying to portray it as (and no, I'm not trying to insist that "constant" has to mean "literally nonstop" or anything). It looks to me -- and here I'm going off my own impression, not e.g. anything tailcalled may have said about the situation -- as if Zack gets plenty of disagreement on LW but very little abuse. So to whatever extent your "accusations of injustice" are of the form "tailcalled denies that Zack is constantly being abused, but he is", I find myself agreeing with tailcalled more than with you. Again, this was already my impression, so it can't be a halo/horns thing from this conversation.
(Of course, you may have me pigeonholed as one of the "crowd of enablers". Maybe you're right, though from my perspective I'm pretty sure I'm not abusing anyone and have no intention or awareness of engaging in the specific catch-22 you describe. I have disagreed with Zack from time to time, though.)
I am not persuaded by any part of your analysis of the situation.
Saying something relevant to an ongoing discussion (which it seems clear to me tailcalled's original comment was) while also hoping it will be persuasive to someone who has disagreed with you about something else is not "false pretenses".
It is certainly true that I am put off by your disagreeable manner. I do not think this is the halo effect. Finding unpleasantness unpleasant isn't the halo/horns effect, it's just what unpleasantness is; as for any opinions I may form, that's a matter of reasoning "if Cornelius had good arguments I would expect him to use them; since he evidently prefers to insult people, it is likely that he doesn't have good arguments". Of course you might just enjoy being unpleasant for its own sake, in which case indeed I might underestimate the quality of the arguments or evidence you have at your disposal; if you want me (or others who think as I do) not to do that, I suggest that you try actually presenting said arguments and evidence rather than throwing insults around.
It doesn't look to me as if tailcalled is being evasive; if anything he[1] seems to me to be engaging with the issues rather more than you are. (Maybe he's being evasive in whatever other venues your Drama is spilling over from; I have no way of knowing about that.) In any case, evasiveness doesn't compel insults. There is no valid inference from "tailcalled is being evasive" to "I must insult devote a large fraction of what I say to tailcalled to insulting him".
[1] I actually have no idea of tailcalled's gender; I'm going along with your choice of pronoun. In the unlikely (but maybe less unlikely in this particular sort of context) event that this is leading my astray, my apologies to tailcalled.
It does not look to me as if your repeated insultingness towards tailcalled is a necessary consequence (or in fact any sort of consequence) of having to keep pulling the conversation back to something he is avoiding talking about. (I'm not sure what it is that you think he is avoiding talking about. Maybe it's How Terrible Tailcalled Is, but in that case I don't think you get to say "I'm only being insulting to tailcalled because he keeps trying to make the conversation be about something other than how awful he is".)
I haven't followed whatever Drama may be going on between you and tailcalled elsewhere, but I don't see anything manipulative or under-false-pretenses about what you're complaining about here.
(And, for what it's worth, reading this thread I get a much stronger impression of "importing grudges from elsewhere" from you than from tailcalled.)
I would find this discussion more enlightening and more pleasant to read if you would focus on the issues rather than devoting so much of what you write to saying what a bad person you think tailcalled is.
Of course there's no particular reason why you should care what I find enlightening or pleasant, so let me add that one strong effect of the large proportion of insults in what you write is that it makes me think it more likely that you're wrong. (Cf. this old lawyers' saying.)