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A few notes about the community
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A note for theists: you will find the Less Wrong community to be predominantly atheist, though not completely so, and most of us are genuinely respectful of religious people who keep the usual community norms. It's worth saying that we might think religion is off-topic in some places where you think it's on-topic, so be thoughtful about where and how you start explicitly talking about it; some of us are happy to talk about religion, some of us aren't interested. Bear in mind that many of us really, truly have given full consideration to theistic claims and found them to be false, so starting with the most common arguments is pretty likely just to annoy people. Anyhow, it's absolutely OK to mention that you're religious in your welcome post and to invite a discussion there.
A list of some posts that are pretty awesome
I recommend the major sequences to everybody, but I realize how daunting they look at first. So for purposes of immediate gratification, the following posts are particularly interesting/illuminating/provocative and don't require any previous reading:
- The Worst Argument in the World
- That Alien Message
- How to Convince Me that 2 + 2 = 3
- Lawful Uncertainty
- Your Intuitions are Not Magic
- The Planning Fallacy
- The Apologist and the Revolutionary
- Scope Insensitivity
- The Allais Paradox (with two followups)
- We Change Our Minds Less Often Than We Think
- The Least Convenient Possible World
- The Third Alternative
- The Domain of Your Utility Function
- Newcomb's Problem and Regret of Rationality
- The True Prisoner's Dilemma
- The Tragedy of Group Selectionism
- Policy Debates Should Not Appear One-Sided
More suggestions are welcome! Or just check out the top-rated posts from the history of Less Wrong. Most posts at +50 or more are well worth your time.
Welcome to Less Wrong, and we look forward to hearing from you throughout the site!
Once a post gets over 500 comments, the site stops showing them all by default. If this post has 500 comments and you have 20 karma, please do start the next welcome post; a new post is a good perennial way to encourage newcomers and lurkers to introduce themselves. (Step-by-step, foolproof instructions here; takes <180seconds.)
If there's anything I should add or update on this post (especially broken links), please send me a private message—I may not notice a comment on the post.
Finally, a big thank you to everyone that helped write this post via its predecessors!
I read your article on IVN, so this is mostly a response to that.
I do think that it would be great if people thought about politics in a scientifico-rational way. And it isn't great that you really only have two options in the United States if you want to join a coalition that will actually have some effect. It's true that having two sets of positions that cannot be mismatched without signaling disloyalty results in a false-dichotomous sort of thinking. But it seems important to think about why things are in this state in the first place. Political parties can't be all bad, they must serve some function.
Think about labor unions and business leaders. Employees have some recourse if they dislike their boss. They can demand better conditions or pay, and they can also quit and go to another company. But we know that when employees do this, it usually doesn't work. They usually get fired and replaced instead. The reason is that if an employer loses one employee out of one hundred, then they will be operating at 99% productivity, while the employee that quit will be operating at 0% productivity for some time. Labor unions solve the coordination problem.
Likewise, the use of a political party is that it offers bargaining power. Any scientifico-rational political platform will have to solve such a coordination problem, and they will have to use a different solution from the historical one: ideology. That's not easy. Which is not to say that it's not worth trying.
So, it's not enough that citizens be able to reveal their demand for goods and services from the government, or other centers of power; it's also necessary that officials have incentives to provide the quality and quantity of goods and services demanded. In democracy this is obtained through the voting mechanism, among other things. A politician will have a strong incentive to commit an action that obtains many votes, but barely any incentive to commit an action that will obtain few votes, even if they have detailed information about what policies would result in the greatest increase in the public interest in the long run, and even if the action that obtains the most votes is not the policy that maximizes public interest in the long run. They would not be threatened by the loss of a few rational votes, or swayed by the gain of a few rational votes, any more than the boss would be threatened by the loss of one employee.
It seems difficult to me to fix something like this from the inside. I think a competitive, external government would be an easier solution. Seasteading is an example of an idea along these lines. I don't believe that private and public institutions are awfully different in their functions, we often see organizations on each side of the boundary performing similar functions at different times, even if some are more likely to be delegated to one than the other, and it seems to me that among national governments there is a deplorable lack of competition. In the market, the price mechanism provides both a way for consumers to reveal their demand, and a way to incentivize suppliers to supply the quality and quantity of goods and services demanded. If a firm is inefficient, then it goes out of business. However, public institutions are different, in that there often is no price mechanism in the traditional sense. If your government sucks, you mostly cannot choose to pay taxes to a different one. Exit costs are very high as a citizen of most countries. And the existing international community has monopolized the process of state foundation. You need territory to be sovereign, but all territory has been claimed by pre-existing states, except for Marie Byrd Land in Antarctica, which the U.S. and Russia reserve the right to make a claim to, and the condominium in Antarctica does not permit sovereignty way down there a la the Antarctic Treaty System. The only other option is the high sea. Scott Alexander's Archipelago and Atomic Communitarianism is related to this.
I wonder if you've thought about stuff like that. I don't think that our poor political situation is only a matter of individuals having bad epistemology.