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wedrifid comments on [Altruist Support] How to determine your utility function - Less Wrong Discussion

7 Post author: Giles 01 May 2011 06:33AM

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Tags: instrumental rationality utility winning

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Comment author: wedrifid 01 May 2011 01:01:58PM 3 points [-]

Then someone (if not you) needs to set out, in detail, what the desired vision for the wiki is. Because at present, it's entirely unclear what you intend it to be useful for. Saying "no that's not it, I don't like that, try again" is not helpful.

I'm not sure what Vladimir's vision is - and this is more or less his baby - but the wiki is most useful as a way to reduce inferential distance for newcomers by serving as a reference for jargon and cached thoughts.

It does not need to go into any detail. All significant content should be posted in the form of blog posts where it can (, will and probably already has been) be discussed in depth.

No lumps allowed! Sparsity and incompleteness are to be preferred to lumps. The wiki does not need to be complete. A standalone wiki cannot afford to be lacking in content. A LW wiki can. Because this is a blog, not a wiki. There is plenty of content here. If all the 'wiki' did was have a dozen pages with indexes and a few references then it would still be serving a purpose.

Comment author: Perplexed 01 May 2011 03:20:24PM 1 point [-]

No lumps allowed! Sparsity and incompleteness are to be preferred to lumps.

I think that the big difference between David's viewpoint and yours is that he views a wiki as a living, growing thing. The trouble with your slogans above is that they effectively become:

No lumps allowed ever! Perpetual sparsity and incompleteness are to be preferred to occasional and temporary lumps.

Did you really mean to make these slogans so strong?

Comment author: wedrifid 01 May 2011 04:42:17PM *  0 points [-]

I think that the big difference between David's viewpoint and yours is that he views a wiki as a living, growing thing.

Not really. I view it as a living thing with higher standards and without a willingness to sacrifice quality for growth.

The trouble with your slogans above is that they effectively become:

You are toeing a line here between inappropriate and disingenuous. Not only are my assertions of preference not slogans I was only reluctantly going along with David's 'lumps' metaphor because there were more important things to criticize than an awkward description.

You then proceed to overtly misquote me, adding words that change the meaning to something I quite obviously did not intend. Following up with "Did you really mean to make these slogans so strong?" just strikes the logical rudeness home.

occasional and temporary lumps.

Aside from not being what I referred to this does not accurately represent the kind of system that David was describing either.

Comment author: David_Gerard 01 May 2011 07:31:27PM -1 points [-]

occasional and temporary lumps.

Aside from not being what I referred to this does not accurately represent the kind of system that David was describing either.

No, actually it does. There will always be lumps, but any given lump will be temporary.

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