If discussions about how best to accomplish this are "mind killing" then the smartest people in our civilization (no, not the posters on this blog) are all brain-dead.
Neither Yudkowsky nor me argues that discussions about how best to accomplish this are always "mind killing". It something you think because you are angry and that anger prevents you from clearly understanding what other people are thinking.
That anger mind killed you. It makes you ineffective at convincing other people.
People in the real world don't refer to intelligent political positions as "mind-killing."
Being angry is no intelligent political position.
If you live in China you can achieve some political ends by getting a sufficent number of people angry. You can't in Western democracies. Julian Assange made the point that most of the actual power is in contracts which just won't change because someone is angry. I'm not 100% with Assange on the point but he said, that the reason free speech is legal in Western democracy while it isn't in China is that political power in Western democracy is stable enough that you don't change power structures with free speech.
According to him the effort that a given government extends at suppressing a certain type of speech correlates to that speech potential to create substantial political change.
Lesswrong is an echo chamber for people whose priorities are computer programming above all else. Such people will spend their lives programming mostly for other people, because their vision is too narrow to own their own lives.
Actually no. There are plenty of people here no care about saving lifes in Africa through bet nets that have been proven to be effective. They are not angry that people die to malaria. They just calculate how they can safe as many lifes as possible and then engage in that cause of action.
Then MIRI wants to prevent our world from getting destroyed by an unfriendly artificial intelligence and many people here think that's a more important project than being angry that some political injustice.
I myself did even do mainstream media interviews in Germany about QS where one of the points I make is that people shouldn't rely on authorities but trust their own judgment. I'm no apolitical person. I however don't let emotions like anger cloud my intellectual abilities to understand the world in all it's shades of grey.
When it comes to a topic like the war on drugs I know the background of politics that doubled the amount of marijuana that you can carry around in Berlin without getting charged with a crime. The people who acted there politically weren't angry.
In the US there are many places where medical marijuana polls much better than drug legislation. If you actually want to win politically it can make a lot of sense to focus on something like medical marijuana for which it's easier to find a societal consensus than focusing on anger that everything isn't legalised.
Political successes need coalition building and that usually doesn't happen from a place of extreme anger.
Want to save time? Skip down to "I'm looking to compile a thread on Internet Research"!
Opinionated Preamble:
There is a lot of high level thinking on Less Wrong, which is great. It's done wonders to structure and optimize my own decisions. I think the political and futurology-related issues that Less Wrong cover can sometimes get out of sync with the reality and injustices of events in the immediate world. There are comprehensive treatments of how medical science is failing, or how academia cannot give unbiased results, and this is the milieu of programmers and philosophers in the middle-to-upper-class of the planet. I at least believe that this circle of awareness can be expanded, even if it's treading into mind-killing territory. If anything I want to give people a near-mode sense of the stakes aside from x-risk: all in all the x-risk scenarios I've seen Less Wrong fear the most, kill humanity somewhat instantly. A slower descent into violence and poverty is to me much more horrifying, because I might have to live in it and I don't know how. In a matter of fact, I have no idea of how to predict it.
This is one reason why I'm drawn to the Intelligence Operations performed by the military and crime units, among other things. Intelligence product delivery is about raw and immediate *fact*, and there is a lot of it. The problems featured in IntelOps are one of the few things rationality is good for - highly uncertain scenarios with one-off executions and messy or noisy feedback. Facts get lost in translation as messages are passed through, and of course the feeding and receiving fake facts are all a part of the job - but nevertheless, knowing *everything* *everywhere* is in the job description, and some form of rationality became a necessity.
It gets ugly. The demand for these kinds of skills often lie in industries that are highly competitive, violent, and illegal. I believe that once a close look is taken on how force and power is applied in practice then there isn't any pretending anymore that human evils are an accident.
Open Source Intelligence, or "OSINT", is the mining of data and facts from public information databases, news articles, codebases, journals. Although the amount of classified data dwarfs the unclassified, the size and scope of the unclassified is responsible for a majority of intelligence reports - and thus is involved in the great majority of executive decisions made by government entities. It's worth giving some thought as to how much that we know, that they do too. As illustrated in this expose, the processing of OSINT is a great big chunk of what modern intelligence is about aside from many other things. I think understanding how rationality as developed on Less Wrong can contribute to better IntelOps, and how IntelOps can feed the rationality community, would be awesome, but that's a post for another time.
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The Show
Through my investigations into IntelOps I've noticed the emphasis on search. Good search.
I'm looking to compile a thread on Internet Research. I'm wondering if there is any wisdom on Less Wrong that can be taken advantage of here on how to become more effective searchers. Here are some questions that could be answered specifically, but they are just guidelines - feel free to voice associated thoughts, we're exploring here.
That should be enough to get started. Below are some links that I have found useful with respect to Internet Research.
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Meta-Search Engines or Assisted Search:
Summarizers:
Bots/Collectors/Automatic Filters:
Compilations and Directories:
Guides:
Practice:
I don't really care how you use this information, but I hope I've jogged some thinking of why it could be important.