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komponisto comments on The noncentral fallacy - the worst argument in the world? - Less Wrong
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Comments (1742)
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.
I'd like to point out that Overcoming Bias, back in the day, was a dictatorship: Robin and Eliezer were explicitly in total control. Whereas Less Wrong was explictly set up to be community-moderated, with voting taking the place of moderator censorship. And the general consensus has always been that LW was an improvement over OB.
Do you have any evidence for that ? In my experience, it all depends on the dictator, not on the venue.
It's easier to leave a forum than a country. Forum-dictators who abuse their power end up with empty forums.
Real world dictators who abuse their power often end up dead. (But perhaps not as much as real world dictators who do not abuse their power enough to secure it.)
Not as often as you seem to think.
Perhaps I misunderstood what ArisKatsaris was saying. I thought he meant something like this:
If this is true, your objection is somewhat tangential to the topic (though an empty forum is less desirable than an active one). But perhaps he meant something else ?
Since it's easier to leave, a dictator in a forum has more motivation not to abuse his power.
Just my own personal experience of how moderated vs non-moderated forums tend to go, and as for countries, likewise my impression of what countries seem nice to live in.
You're probably right about modern countries; however, as far as I understand, historically some countries did reasonably well under a dictatorship. Life under Hammurabi was far from being all peaches and cream, but it was still relatively prosperous, compared to the surrounding nations. A few Caesars did a pretty good job of administering Rome; of course, their successors royally screwed the whole thing up. Likewise, life in Tzarist Russia went through its ups and downs (mostly downs, to be fair).
Unfortunately, the kind of a person who seeks (and is able to achieve) absolute power is usually exactly the kind of person who should be kept away from power if at all possible. I've seen this happen in forums, where the unofficial grounds for banning a user inevitably devolve into "he doesn't agree with me", and "I don't like his face, virtually speaking".
"Dictators" in forums can't kill people or hold them hostage.
Right, but that doesn't mean they tend to be beneficial, either. We're not arguing over which dictator is the worst, but whether dictators in forums are diametrically opposed to their real-world cousins.
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.
I'd be cautious about saying something's never a terminal value. Given my model of the EEA, it wouldn't be terribly surprising to me if some set of people did have poor reactions to certain types of external constraint independently of their physical consequences, though "freedom" and its various antonyms seem too broad to capture the way I'd expect this to work.
Someone's probably studied this, although I can't dig up anything offhand.
I take back the "never" part, it is way too strong. What I meant to say is that the probability of someone proclaiming that freedom is her terminal value not having dug deep enough to find her true terminal values is extremely high.
That seems reasonable. Especially given how often freedom gets used as an applause light.
Yes, I was commenting on this at the same time. The mental perception of restrictions, or the mental perception of absence of restrictions, can become a direct brainwired value through evolution, and is a simple step enough from other things already in there AFAICT. Freedom itself, however, independent of perception/observation and as a pattern of real interactions and decision choices and so on, seems far too complex to be something the brain would just randomly stumble upon in one go, especially only in some humans and not others.
I agree that freedom is an instrumental value. I disagree that it is never a terminal value. It is constitutive of the good life.
See if you can replace "freedom" with its substance, and then evaluate whether that substance is something the human brain would be likely to just happen to, once in a while, find as a terminal, worth-in-itself value for some humans but not others, considering the complexity of this substance.
Yes, the mental node/label "freedom" can become a terminal value (a single mental node is certainly simple enough for evolution to stumble upon once in a while), but that's directly related to a perception of absence of constraints or restrictions within a situation or context.
I don't see what you're getting at here. All terminal values are agent-specific.
More complex values will not spontaneously form as terminal, built-in-brain values for animals that came into being through evolution. Evolution just doesn't do that. Humans don't rewire their brains and don't reach into the Great Void of Light from the Beyond to randomly pick their terminal values.
Basically, the systematic absence of conceptual incentives and punishment-threats organized such as to funnel the possible decisions of a mind or set of minds towards a specific subset of possible actions (this is a simplified reduction of "freedom" which is still full of giant paintbrush handles) is not something a human mind would just accidentally happen to form a terminal value around (barring astronomical odds on the order of sun-explodes-next-second) without first developing terminal values around punishment-threats (which not all humans have, if any), decision tree sizes, and various other components of the very complex pattern we call "lack of freedom" (because lack of freedom is much easier to describe than freedom, and freedom is the absence or diminution of lack(s) of freedom).
I don't see any evidence that a sufficient number of humans happen to have most of the prerequisite terminal values for there to be any specimen which has this complex construct as a terminal value.
As I said in a different comment, though, it's very possible (and very likely) that the lighting-up of the mental node for freedom could be a terminal value, which feels from inside like freedom itself is a terminal value. However, the terminal value is really just the perception of things that light up the "freedom!" mental node, not the concept of freedom itself.
Once you try to describe "freedom" in terms that a program or algorithm could understand, you realize that it becomes extremely difficult for the program to even know whether there is freedom in something or not, and that it is an abstraction of multiple levels interacting at multiple scales in complex ways far, far above the building blocks of matter and reality, and which requires values and algorithms for a lot of other things. You can value the output of this computation as a terminal value, but not the whole "freedom" business.
A very clever person might be capable of tricking their own brain by abusing an already built-in terminal value on a freedom mental-node by hacking in safety-checks that will force them to shut up and multiply, using best possible algorithms to evaluate "real" freedom-or-no-freedom, and then light up the mental node based on that, but it would require lots of training and mind-hacking.
Hence, I maintain that it's extremely unlikely that someone really has freedom itself as a terminal value, rather than feeling from inside like they value freedom. A bit of Bayes suggests I shouldn't even pay attention to it in the space of possible hypotheses, because of the sheer amount of values that get false positives as being terminal due to feeling as such from inside versus the amount of known terminal values that have such a high level of complexity and interconnections between many patterns, reality-referents, indirect valuations, etc.
Ironically, the appearance of freedom can be a default terminal value for humans and some other animals, if you take evolutionary psychology seriously. Or, to be more accurate, the appearance of absence of imposed restrictions can be a default terminal value that receives positive reinforcement cookies in the brain of humans and some other animals. Claustrophobia seems to be a particular subset of this that automates the jump from certain types of restrictions through the whole mental process that leads to panic-mode.
The abstract concept of freedom and its reality referent pattern, however, would be extremely unlikely to end up as a terminal value, if only even for its sheer mathematical complexity.
I agree with this.
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.
I don't think so. I agree with that statement, with the same caveats. If there are also 100 people about to die and I can save them instead, I should probably do so. I suppose it depends how morally-informed you think "something else you'd rather do with your time" is supposed to be.
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.