Where does our community disagree about meaningful issues?
Yesterday at our LW Berlin Dojo we talked about areas where we disagree. We got 4 issues:
1) AI risk is important
2) Everybody should be vegan.
3) It's good to make being an aspiring rationalist part of your identity.
4) Being conscious of privacy is important
Can you think of other meaningful issues where you think our community disagrees? At best issues that actually matter for our day to day decisions?
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Comments (55)
Cryonics, supporting free market policies, and the value of the social justice movement.
"Bayes vs Science": Can you consistently beat the experts in (allegedly) evidence-based fields by applying "rationality"? AI risk and cryonics are specific instances of this issue.
Can rationality be learned, or is it an essentially innate trait? If it can be learned, can it be taught? If it can be taught, do the "Sequences" and/or CFAR teach it effectively?
You could look on the surveys: what questions are closest to 50%?
My desire is to find questions that aren't already well surveyed that matter.
From the 2014 Survey:
Polyamory:
Children:
Politics:
Ethics:
Cryo:
Misc:
The actual effectiveness of MIRI
I support MIRI, but I would be particularly interested in discussion of the objection that the impact of existential risk mitigation is not measurable.
EDIT: I wrote an article on this.
Moral realism, apparently
what "the garden" (of LW) should ultimately look like. (we enjoy that topic more than actually bringing about the version of the garden we think is best)
The historical importance of the modern era.
Really? What exactly is "historical importance" supposed to mean here? Even if we avoid both Singularity and self-destruction, this era will still be remembered as the one that burned all the easily available fossil fuels.
Politics, if you consider it meaningful.
Maybe not so much in Berlin - I'm guessing the libertarian count there is lower than in Brit derived countries.
Why had a discussion a while ago about whether we should do something to get mariuanah legalized in Berlin. In that background I would consider political questions about drug legislation meaningful questions. I don't think that political disagreement that's more about tribal affiliations then about beliefs that effect real world actions are strongly meaningful.
So the discussion wasn't about whether pot should be legalized, but whether you should do something to make that happen?
Yes, it was about actually affecting the politcs. A person from the Giordano Bruno Stiftung (GBS) thought about starting a project for drug legislation. The Giordano Bruno Stiftung has a decent stories in getting media stories published but not that much of actually getting policy into law.
I think there are basically two reasonable ways to affect the topic politically:
(1) Pushing for a referendum on effectively decriminlizing pot in Berlin by adding a zero or two to the limit of mariuanah that can be carried around without persecution. It's not exactly clear cut that such a referndum can be started for complex legal reasons but I believe it can and that other people are not seeing the possible move of starting a referendum.
(2) Actually thinking through how an alternative system should ideally work. If you simply legalize the all the drugs, then that also affects pharmaceutical drugs and companies might want to sell the drugs without doing the expensive trials needed for evidence-based medicine. It potentionally very valuable to have a group of smart people think through a design of an alternative system and write it down in a whitepaper.
The GBS might be well positioned to do (2). Work like that is unfortunately strongly neglegted. The track record of the Pirate party of actually engaging into thinking up practical policies was unfortunately very disappointing.
The think tanks which actually manage to think up practical policies unfortunately are largely driven by corporate interests. There some money from influential people in drug legalization but I think we are still lacking serious investigation of the alternatives and that's why instead of drug legalization countries like Portugal just have decriminalization.
The value of the Effective Altruism movement.
How important is money?
Are EA causes bottlenecked on money or talent?
Everything except the value of probability theory and statistics?
I think it's useful to actually be explicit about disagreements. What do you consider to be the most important disagreements?
Should we try to grow the community? How? How much?
I've deleted my previous post here but I'd like to point out the relationship elephant in the room.
It's seemingly a never-ending topic and looking at it from aside, it reminds me of an Escher painting - some sort of strange loop where people continuously argue about what's effective in a relationship with only one gender involved.
What's so different about relationships with only one gender involved?
:P
Those dialogues are usually about M/F relationships, with demographics taken into account.
How/whether to do rationality outreach
Explicitly both of "how" and "whether or not" as independent topics/
I'll add some sub-points:
1) AI risk is important
2) Everybody should be vegan.
Other people have mentioned:
Political topics:
Genetic determinism.
Keeping costly promises/contracts after changing into someone who no longer would have agreed to them.
When, if ever, is it morally acceptable to lie or deceive?
Whether we should encourage more motivated growth or appreciation and contentment with what we have. (for reasons of overpopulation maybe we shouldn't grow outwards across the galaxy. Especially when we haven't figured out how to stop destroying this planet yet)
Communalism versus individualism.
It may sound vague, but it is the difference between Effective Altruists and people like me whose response to EA is basically, "Well, that's better than what you had before, good luck with that." Which is to say, I harbor no animosity towards EA, I just see no point in participating, because it starts from an axiom, or perhaps set of axioms, I don't share.
Which isn't to say I haven't donated money to causes, but rather that I donate money to causes which I think will make my life better. I have some kind of interest in AI risk, for a Less-Wrong appropriate example, but little to no interest in malaria in third-world nations.
Quantum/big world/mutliverse immortality? (Whether it's true, whether it's relevant, whether it's good or bad, what implications it has if any)
I suspect we disagree on what is a meaningful disagreement. Until you can state a proposition of future experience, you don't know if you're disagreeing about anything, or only affiliating with a general idea.