Prediction: Government regulations greatly reduce economic growth. Trump, with the help of the Republican Congress, is going to significantly cut regulations and this is going to supercharge economic growth allowing Trump to win reelection in a true landslide.
Do you want to put a probability on that? Also, break it down into a bunch of steps. Be precise. Include timelines.
Has anything like that every happened in the entire history of the world? In four years? For example, most of what Reagan is credited with doing to the economy was either done by Carter or in Reagan's second term.
Why do you believe that federal regulations are a significant portion of the total?
Has anything like that every happened in the entire history of the world
Yes, China after Mao.
It might not just be federal regulations. For example, if Republicans passed a freedom to build law that allowed landowners to quickly get permission to build we would see a massive construction boom.
Derek Parfit (author of "Reasons and Persons", a very influential work of analytic philosophy much of which is concerned with questions of personal identity and which comes up with decidedly LW-ish answers to most of its questions) has died. (He actually died a few weeks ago, but I only just heard of it, and I haven't seen his death mentioned on LW.)
A few years ago I used to be a hothead. Whenever anyone said anything, I’d think of a way to disagree. I’d push back hard if something didn’t fit my world-view.
It’s like I had to be first with an opinion – as if being first meant something. But what it really meant was that I wasn’t thinking hard enough about the problem. The faster you react, the less you think. Not always, but often.
Hi everyone,
I'm a PhD candidate at Cornell, where I work on logic and philosophy of science. I learned about Less Wrong from Slate Star Codex and someone I used to date told me she really liked it. I recently started a blog where I plan to post my thoughts about random topics: http://necpluribusimpar.net. For instance, I wrote a post (http://necpluribusimpar.net/slavery-and-capitalism/) against the widely held but false belief that much of the US wealth derives from slavery and that without slavery the industrial revolution wouldn't have happened, as well ...
How do you weight the opinion of people whose arguments you do not accept? Say you have 10 friends who all believe with 99% confidence in proposition A. You ask them why they believe A, and the arguments they produce seem completely bogus or incoherent to you. But perhaps they have strong intuitive or aesthetic reasons to believe A, which they simply cannot articulate. Should you update in favor of A or not?
I'm curious if anybody here frequents retraction watch enough to address this concern I have.
I find articles here very effective at announcing retractions and making testimonies from lead figures in investigations a frequent fallback, but rarely do you get to see the nuts and bolts of the investigations being discussed. For example, "How were the journals misleading?" or "What evidence was or was not analyzed, and how did the journal's analysis deviate from correct protocol?" are questions I often ask myself as I read, followed by an ur...
In a crack of time between doing my last data analysis for my PhD and writing my thesis, I couldn't stop myself from churning out a brief sparsely-sourced astrobiology blog post in which I argue that the limited lifespan of planetary geospheres and the decay of star formation rates means that even though the vast majority of star-years are in the distant future around long-lived small stars, we are still a typical observer in that we are occurring less than 15 billion years into an apparently open-ended universe.
https://thegreatatuin.wordpress.com/2017/01/29/on-the-death-of-planets/
I think either you're misunderstanding the paper, or I'm misunderstanding you. (Or of course both.) The point isn't that scientists should be looking at consensus instead of actually doing science; of course they shouldn't. It's that for someone who isn't an expert in the field and isn't in a position to do their own research, the opinions of those who are experts and have done their own research are very useful information. (In cases -- such as this one -- where there is near unanimity among the experts, I think the only reasonable options are "accep...
I'm new to writing resumes and am currently writing one for an internship application. I don't know if trying to optimize for uniqueness or quirkiness comes at significant social costs, or if there are many benefits. If anyone is good at this sort of thing (listing / bragging skills), general tips would be very welcome.
Several state attorneys general have initiated them.
Could you give some examples? I'm failing to find any instances where any such action has actually been brought.
What I can find is an investigation by several state AGs into ExxonMobil, which appears to be focusing on what EM's management knew about climate change; there's some suggestion that they're now digging into possible misrepresentations of how big oil reserves are, presumably with a view to arguing that they misled investors. Note that investigating what Exxon management knew about climate cha...
OK, and how is this distinction supposed to manifest in practice?
One distinction is that someone accused under (2) could defend themselves by showing that they genuinely didn't believe anyone was paying attention to their expression of disbelief in global warming, whereas that defence presumably wouldn't be open to them under (1).
[..] in any case when (2) happens who exactly will be forbidden to assert that global worming isn't real? Does it matter if [...]?
Since it suffices to give one operationalizable difference between (1) & (2) for gjm's cl...
Catholic theologians are experts in what the Roman Catholic Church believes. If you claim that the RCC isn't really trinitarian, then "bullshit, look at what all the Catholic theologians say" is a perfectly good response.
They claim (or at least let's suppose arguendo that they do) to be experts on the actual facts about God. It turns out they're wrong about that. So ... is their situation nicely parallel to that of climate scientists?
Why, no. Look at all the people in the world who claim to be God-experts and have studied long and hard, got fancy...
Suggestion to sticky the welcome thread. Stickying the welcome thread to the sidebar would encourage participation/comments/content. And perhaps in the future add emphasis on communication norms to the thread, specifically that negative reception and/or lack of reception is more obvious on LessWrong – So have thick skin and do not take it personal. I'd imagine that quality control will be what it has always been, critical comments.
I have just read a debate about whether high-IQ kids should be allowed to attend special schools, and the debate was predictable. So I used this as an opportunity to summarize the arguments against "smart segregation". (The arguments in favor of it seem quite straightforward: better education, less bullying, social and professional company of equals.) Here are the results; please tell me if some frequently-made argument is missing.
Note: different arguments here contradict each other, which is okay, because they are typically not made by the same ...
Thoughts on punching nazis? I can't really wrap my head around why there are so many people who think it's 100% ok to punch nazis. Not sure if discussion about this has happened elsewhere (if so please direct me!) . For the purposes of this discussion let's ignore whether or not the alt-right counts as Nazism and speak only about a hypothetical Nazi ideological group.
I understand to some extent the argument that reasonable discussion with Nazis is almost certainly futile and that they are perhaps a danger to others, however my main concerns with punching ...
some clothing, e.g., high heels, is rather impractical
I beg to disagree. To speak of practicality you need to have a specific goal in mind. High heels are very impractical for running, but they are quite practical for attracting the attention of a potential mate.
Do continue trying to put words into my mouth. That's absolutely going to convince me that it's worth responding to you with good arguments.
Note that the people doing the prosecution haven't presented any evidence of "promulgation of assertions that global warming isn't real in order to gain an unfair competitive advantage in a marketplace" beyond the fact that the people in question are asserting that global warming isn't real.
Are there in fact any such prosecutions yet? (I don't think there are, but maybe there are and I missed them.)
Does it matter if they believe it is in fact not real, does it matter if they have evidence?
Yes, because the proposed prosecutions are under la...
I think that "tribal bias" is the norm, not the exception, and accusing someone of having their reasoning messed with, to some extent, by tribal biases is a little like accusing them of having shit that stinks. I'd much rather hold off and only criticize people when they deal with visible bias poorly, and It's legitimately hard enough to see your own tribal biases and how they affect your thinking that I'm a little hesitant to accuse someone of being blatantly dishonest because they don't see and correct for what looks like a bias to me. Especial...
I upvoted you because I think your explanation of Lumifer's point there is correct and needed to be said.
However, I'd like to comment on this bit:
Given that gjm has just demonstrated that (3) is false, I'm inclined to believe the real reason for your bias is that you belong to a tribe where agreeing with gjm's conclusion is high status.
I don't think this is fair to take away gjm's entire reputation based on one disagreement or even one confirmed counterexample.
I also think it's premature to conclude that satt is biased here due to tribal beliefs, beca...
We have satellite temperature data since the late 70s. Before that, yes, there is opportunity for shenanigans.
Economic growth basically means that workers get more productive. Less hours of work means more output. GDP growth is not really possible without making workers more efficient.
It's interesting how in the last years the old luddie arguments got revived. The idea that automation means that there won't be any jobs anymore get's more and more popular.
Does anyone have an electronic copy of the Oxford Handbook of Metamemory that they're willing to share?
Are there any forums explicitly about how to think about and act to best make humanity survive its future?
Our consensus is pretty unalterably "Build an AI God".
Kinda. The LW's position is "We will make a God, how do we make sure He likes us?"
In that case, let me give a quick summary of what I know of that segment of effective altruism.
For context, there are basically 4 clusters. While many/most people concentrate on traditional human charities, some people think animal suffering matters more than 1/100th as much as a human suffering, and so think of animal charities are therefore more cost effective. Those are the first 2 clusters of ideas.
Then you have people who think that movement growth is more important, since organizations like Raising for Effective Giving have so far been able to move like $3/year (I forget) to effective charities for each dollar donated to them that year. Other organizations may have an even higher multiplier, but this is fairly controversial, because it’s difficult to measure future impact empirically, and it risks turning EA into a self-promoting machine which achieves nothing.
The 4^th category is basically weird future stuff. Mostly this is for people who think humans going extinct would be significantly worse than a mere 7 billion deaths would be. However, it's not exclusively focused on existential risk. Unfortunately, we have no good ways of even evaluating how effective various anti-nuclear efforts are at actually reducing existential risk, and it's even worse for efforts against prospective future technologies like AI. The best we can do is measure indirect effects. So the entire category is fairly controversial.
I would further divide the "weird future stuff" category into Global Catastrophic Risk/x-risk and non-GCR/x-risk stuff. For example, Brian Tomasik has coined the term s-risk for risks of astronomical future suffering. He makes a strong case for wild animals experiencing more net suffering than happiness, and so thinks that even without human extinction the next billion years are likely to be filled with astronomical amounts of animal suffering.
Within the GDR/x-risk half of the "weird future stuff" category, there appear to be maybe 4 or 5 causes I'm aware of. Nuclear war is the obvious one, along with climate change. I think most EAs tend to think climate change is important, but just not tractable enough to be a cost effective use of resources. The risk of another 1918 Flu pandemic, or of an engineered pandemic, comes up occasionally, especially with relation to the new CRISPR gene editing technology. AI is a big concern too, but more controversial, since it is more speculative. I'm not sure I've ever seen asteroid impacts or nanotechnology floated as a cost-effective means of reducing x-risk, but I don't follow that closely, so perhaps there is some good discussion I've missed.
Much or most of the effort I've seen is to better understand the risks, so that we can better allocate resources in the future. Here are some organizations I know of which study existential risk, or are working to reduce it:
The Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford, and is led by Nick Bostrom. They primarily do scholarly research, and focus a good chunk of their attention on AI. There are now more academic papers published on human extinction than there are on dung beetles, largely due to their efforts to lead the charge.
Center for the Study of Existential Risk is out of Cambridge. I don't know much about them, but they seem to be quite similar to FHI.
Future of Life Institute was founded by a bunch of people from MIT, but I don't believe there is any official tie. They fund research too, but they seem to have a larger body of work directed at the general public. They give grants to researchers, and publish articles on a range of existential risks.
Perhaps there are discussion forums associated with these groups, but I'm unaware of them. There are a bunch of EA facebook groups, but they are mostly regional groups as far as I know. However, the EA forum and here are the closest things I know to what you're after.
B612 Foundation is working on impact risks, by trying to get some IR cameras out to L2, L3 at least, and hopefully at S5. and Planetary Resources say that objects found with their IR cameras for mining, will go into the PDSS database.
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post, then it goes here.
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