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gwern comments on Should effective altruists care about the US gov't shutdown and can we do anything? - Less Wrong
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Why is a mere statement of contradiction voted up to five? Something I'm missing here? I could understand if it was Clippy and there was some paperclip related subtext that took a minute to "get" but ...
I suspect two reasons: 1) This summarizes a large amount what other people were thinking. Note that the post Gwern is replying to has had a lot of downvotes, so people who think it is obviously not well thought out favor a response like this. 2) Gwern is a highly respected user who almost never says something without fairly good data to back up his positions, so they are operating under this being a summary of Gwern's more detailed position. (A slightly more cynical version of 2 is simply that Gwern has high status here.)
You didn't provide any reasons, which is odd. Did you just want me to weigh your opinion by itself?
I see you as someone who generally knows stuff, so your opinion alone does have some weight. However, as it stands, I can't even tell whether the lack of an explanation is meant to imply that this is an obvious conclusion and I'm being silly, or whether you're just making a casual remark. Can you say how confident you are in this opinion?
Yes.
If I were to attach a probability, it would be far below 1%; even if the most prominent famous person connected to LW I can think of, billionaire Peter Thiel, were to intervene, I still would not expect as high as a 1% chance of meaningful influence on the outcome.
I think this is the important point people should be talking about; Why are you talking about politics? What possible benefit will come of talking and arguing over that which you can have no effect?
As the son of a company VP said after he observed his elders pontificating on politics:
Case in point: the weather.
In retrospect it was my mistake, although given my initial state of knowledge I don't think I did anything wrong.
1) I thought there was a possibility that something could be done. As of now, I'll take the majority opinion's word that nothing can be done, even though I'm still not sure why this is true. The opinions from people I trust to assign confidences accurately is sufficient evidence for now. I might investigate myself later if I have time, although the fact that most people think nothing can be done indicates that perhaps it's not worth the time to research it.
2) I didn't mentally classify this under the heading "politics", but under "shit, lots of labs are shutting down for a potentially preventable reason, and many smart people (on this forum, too) think that science research is the single most cost-effective good, so maybe this is a very critical time to act. Maybe if I post, other people who know more than me will think about it from an effective altruism perspective and a useful discussion will spark." It seemed a pretty non-partisan issue, since all sides agree that it's bad. That was actually a mistake - I should have realized that anything tangentially related to politics is a political issue.
Despite some of the responses to the contrary, I'm actually still not convinced that this whole shutdown isn't a really, really bad thing...but I guess calculating the harm would be a difficult fermi estimate to pull off.
I'd say the mistake was speaking about disastrous consequences (as a certain fact), when in reality you had little information to back this up.
The proper approach in such situation would be asking: "I heard about X. Do you think it will significantly impact Y?" And then the debate would be about the estimated impacts of X (instead of about your overconfidence).
The political aspect just makes it worse, but I think speaking about disasters in situations where you have little information would be bad even in non-political areas.