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komponisto comments on The noncentral fallacy - the worst argument in the world? - Less Wrong
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Let me see if I understand you correctly: if someone cares about how Less Wrong is run, what they should do is not comment on Less Wrong -- least of all in discussions on Less Wrong about how Less Wrong is run ("meta threads"). Instead, what they should do is move to California and start attending Alicorn's dinner parties.
Have I got that right?
That's how politics usually works, yes.
Also, you have to attend dinner parties on a day when Eliezer is invited and doesn't decline due to being on a weird diet that week.
Can we call this the social availability heuristic?
Don't worry, I'm sure that venue's attendees are selected neutrally.
All you have to do is run into me in any venue whatsoever where the attendees weren't filtered by their interest in meta threads. :)
But now that you've stated this, you have the ability to rationalize any future IRL meta discussion...
Can "Direct email, skype or text-chat communications to E.Y." count as a venue? Purely out of curiosity.
The problem is that if you initiate it, it's subject to the Loss Aversion effect where the dissatisfied speak up in much greater numbers.
I don't see what this has to do with "loss aversion" (the phenomenon where people think losing a dollar is worse than failing to gain a dollar they could have gained), though that's of course a tangential matter.
The point here is -- and I say this with all due respect -- it looks to me like you're rationalizing a decision made for other reasons. What's really going on here, it seems to me, is that, since you're lucky enough to be part of a physical community of "similar" people (in which, of course, you happen to have high status), your brain thinks they are the ones who "really matter" -- as opposed to abstract characters on the internet who weren't part of the ancestral environment (and who never fail to critique you whenever they can).
That doesn't change the fact that this is is an online community, and as such, is for us abstract characters, not your real-life dinner companions. You should be taking advice from the latter about running this site to about the same extent that Alicorn should be taking advice from this site about how to run her dinner parties.
Do you have advice on how to run my dinner parties?
Vaniver and DaFranker have both offered sensible, practical, down-to-earth advice. I, on the other hand, have one word for you: Airship.
Not plastics?
Consider seating logistics, and experiment with having different people decide who sits where (or next to whom). Dinner parties tend to turn out differently with different arrangements, but different subcultures will have different algorithms for establishing optimal seating, so the experimentation is usually necessary (and having different people decide serves both as a form of blinding and as a way to turn up evidence to isolate the algorithm faster).
Huh, I haven't been assigning seats at all except for reserving the one with easiest kitchen access for myself. I've just been herding people towards the dining table.
Consider eating Roman-style to increase the intimacy / as a novel experience. Unfortunately, this is made way easier with specialized furniture- but you should be able to improvise with pillows. As well, it is a radically different way to eat that predates the invention of the fork (and so will work fine with hands or chopsticks, but not modern implements).
Was Eliezer "lucky" to have cofounded the Singularity Institute and Overcoming Bias? "Lucky" to have written the Sequences? "Lucky" to have founded LessWrong? "Lucky" to have found kindred minds, both online and in meatspace? Does he just "happen" to be among them?
Or has he, rather, searched them out and created communities for them to come together?
The online community of LessWrong does not own LessWrong. EY owns LessWrong, or some combination of EY, the SI, and whatever small number of other people they choose to share the running of the place with. To a limited extent it is for us, but its governance is not at all by us, and it wouldn't be LessWrong if it was. The system of government here is enlightened absolutism.
The causes of his being in such a happy situation (is that better?) were clearly not the point here, and, quite frankly, I think you knew that.
But if you insist on an answer to this irrelevant rhetorical question, the answer is yes. Eliezer_2012 is indeed quite fortunate to have been preceded by all those previous Eliezers who did those things.
Then, like I implied, he should just admit to making a decision on the basis of his own personal preference (if indeed that's what's going on), instead of constructing a rationalization about the opinions of offline folks being somehow more important or "appropriately" filtered.
I would replace preference with hypothesis of what constitutes the optimal rationality-refining community.
They are sensibly the same, but I find the latter to be a more useful reduction that is more open to being refined in turn.
This is a community blog. If your community has a dictator, you should overthrow him.
Is the overthrowing of dictators a terminal value to you, or is it that you associate it with good consequences?
A little of both. Freedom is a terminal value, and heuristically dictators cause bad consequences.
My own view: Dictators in countries tend to cause bad consequences. Dictators in forums tend to cause good consequences.
Freedom is never a terminal value. If you dig a bit, you should be able to explain why freedom is important/essential in particular circumstances.
With the caveats:
Agreed. With the caveat that I think all 'should's are that weak.
"If you see someone about to die and can save them, you should."
Now, you might agree or disagree with this. But "If you see someone about to die and can save them, you should, if it is convenient to do so and you haven't got something else you'd rather do with your time" seems more like disagreement to me.
How did he acquire such a friend, and who convinced him to bankroll SIAI?
SIAI over its history (you can look at the Form 990s if you want) has gotten maybe half or less its budget from Thiel. Where's the rest coming from? Lady Luck's charitable writeoffs?
Still, at least you seem to have dropped your claim that SIAI or LW is a homeschooling propaganda front...
It's my impression that "front group" as typically used refers to a hidden/covert connection. LessWrong on the other hand has the logos/links for CFAR, SI and the Future of Humanity Institute displayed prominently.
<nitpick>Thiel</nitpick>
What would have happened if he didn't? How many times, do you think, other potential sponsors decided to pass? Seems like this is one of those cases where a person makes his own luck.
True. For that to be an effective communication channel, there would need to be a control group. As for how to create that control group or run any sort of blind (let alone double-blind) testing... yeah, I have no idea. Definitely a problem.
ETA: By "I have no idea", I mean "Let me find my five-minute clock and I'll get back to you on this if anything comes up".
So I thought for five minutes, then looked at what's been done in other websites before.
The best I have is monthly surveys with randomized questions from a pool of stuff that matters for LessWrong (according to the current or then-current staff, I would presume) with a few community suggestions, and then possibly later implementation of a weighing algorithm for diminishing returns when multiple users with similar thread participation (e.g. two people that always post in the same thread) give similar feedback.
The second part is full of holes and horribly prone to "Death by Poking With Stick", but an ideal implementation of this seems like it would get a lot more quality feedback than what little gets through low-bandwidth in-person conversations.
There are other, less practical (but possibly more accurate) alternatives, of course. Like picking random LW users every so often, appearing at their front door, giving them a brain-scan headset (e.g. an Emotiv Epoc), and having them wear the headset while being on LW so you can collect tons of data.
I'd stick with live feedback and simple surveys to begin with.
But Eliezer Yudkowsky, too, is subject to the loss aversion effect. Just as those dissatisfied with changes overweight change's negative consequences, so does Eliezer Yudkowsky overweight his dissatisfaction with changes initiated by the "community." (For example, increased tolerance of responding to "trolling.")
Moreover, if you discount the result of votes on rules, why do you assume votes on other matters are more rational? The "community" uses votes on substantive postings to discern a group consensus. These votes are subject to the same misdirection through loss aversion as are procedural issues. If the community has taken a mistaken philosophical or scientific position, people who agree with that position will be biased to vote down postings that challenge that position, a change away from a favored position being a loss. (Those who agree with the newly espoused position will be less energized, since they weight their potential gain less than their opponents weigh their potential loss.)
If you think "voting" is so highly distorted that it fails to represent opinion, you should probably abolish it entirely.