gwillen comments on LessWrong 2.0 - Less Wrong

89 Post author: Vaniver 09 December 2015 06:59PM

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Comment author: gwillen 03 December 2015 08:17:58AM 19 points [-]

I would caution away from a bias towards "the current situation seems vaguely bad, therefore Something Must Be Done." There are lots of people still getting use out of LessWrong. I think it would be unfortunate that a bias towards Doing Something over Leaving It Be might cause a valuable resource to be ended without good cause. If the site can be reinvented, great, but if it can't -- don't hit the Big Red Button without honestly weighing the significant costs to the people who are still actively using the site.

(I briefly searched, to see if there's an article on LW about the idea of a bias towards Doing Something. It would of course be essentially the opposite of status quo bias; and yet I think it's a real phenomenon. I certainly feel like I observe it happening in discussions like this. Perhaps the real issue is in the resolution of conflicts between a small minority who are outspoken about Doing Something, and a large silent majority who don't express strong feelings because they're fine with the status quo. This is an attempt to express a thought that I've had percolating, not a criticism of this post.)

Comment author: Vaniver 04 December 2015 01:04:53AM 8 points [-]

I would caution away from a bias towards "the current situation seems vaguely bad, therefore Something Must Be Done."

I agree, and I am a firm believer in Don't Do Something, Just Stand There.

One of the things that is perhaps unclear from this post is just how much Standing There has been done; people were talking about this as a problem in 2013, I went from believing that a decline existed and it was okay to believing a decline existed and it wasn't okay in 2014, most of the in-person conversations about this happened in August of this year.

Comment author: gwillen 08 December 2015 06:41:56AM 1 point [-]

To continue with my theme about the bias towards action, I would note the following. Suppose that one periodically samples a random variable to decide whether the correct action is to leave some situation alone, or to intervene. Assuming that one continues sampling after getting back "do nothing", but that an "intervene" decision is final, it should be clear that "intervene" will always win eventually, if the random variable has even a tiny probability of coming up "intervene", even if the vast majority of the probability mass is on "do nothing".

So in light of that, if one is going to continue to stand around and talk about intervening, one should probably bias further and further away from intervening as time passes, to account for the fact that eventually the coin will come up "intervene" through bad luck no matter what the correct decision is.