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paper-machine comments on Open Thread, October 1-15, 2012 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (477)
I disapprove of this thread on the principle that people should be able to idly speculate on their own blog without being harangued elsewhere.
I disapprove of your use of parables to smuggle in your economic hypotheses, rather than arguing for them competently and clearly.
I disapprove of your commentary, because I agree with wedrifid here:
Is this meant to apply just to LessWrongers? Because it seems kosher to discuss and critique blog posts generally in open threads.
On second thought, you make a good point. The problem wasn't Vaniver bringing it up, the problem was me not putting clear muflax-like epistemic state warnings on my blog.
I disagree with your disapproval. While perhaps one wouldn't want to be "harangued", it is entirely appropriate to comment on publicly-available texts, and the open thread here is a perfectly acceptable place to do so.
The emphasis (and hence the use of the word "harangued" over neutral variants like "discussed" or "criticized") was on the inappropriateness of Vaniver's repeated emotional appeals and status attacks against Yvain.
Forum switching is a well-known trolling technique that dates back to Usenet, and indeed possibly further.
It would have been legit if there was a link posted to the blog.
There is one. And no edit marker on the comment. Confused.
Can you point me to it? I control +F'd it for "less", "wrong", and "Vaniver" and found nothing.
I link to Yvain's livejournal from my comment on LW, but I don't link to my comment on LW from a comment on Yvain's livejournal, because I don't have a livejournal account and am not interested in making one.
I didn't look into it very hard (maybe they let you post comments anonymously?) because it wasn't clear to me which option was more polite.
I'm not super opposed to your not posting a link to the livejournal page. I just think it would definitely unquestionably have been legit if you did that, whereas it's about 3% shady the way you did it right now, to give a super rough estimate of the level of shadiness I feel coming off of that.
Thank you :)
EDIT: Actually, see here
Very well.
First, people prefer longer lives to shorter ones.
Second, just as it is difficult to think of goods that are only absolute, it is difficult to think of goods that are only positional. The used car provides $4,500 in transportation value; the Ferrari provides $50,000 in transportation value.
Third, many professions create durable value and large positive externalities. 25% more lawyering or 25% more derivative trading may not have obvious positive benefits, but 25% more programming or 25% more engineering or 25% more science obviously do. Crunch time may be 20 hours a day instead of 16, and so the programmers have just as little time to themselves, but the product will actually be superior, which seems like a Pareto gain.
Fourth, phase changes have effects that are difficult to anticipate. A world that moved at startup speed- where more people were massively productive and focused- could be far more glorious, delightful, and pleasant than our world. It is difficult to imagine just how miserable conditions were when society was liquid, rather than a gas; similarly, it is difficult for a gas to imagine the joys of being a plasma.
I agree it was insufficiently clear. I meant that Yvain has seen societies that are both liquid and gas, and I do not see how someone who grasped the difference between those phases could write a post like his.
You are overestimating the value of reasoning by metaphor and the extent to which your metaphors are shared by others.
When I take a pot of water and heat it, it becomes gas. If I seal the pot and keep heating, it won't become plasma. It will blow up in my face. See, a metaphor!
It would seem so, and I will try to adjust my style from here on out. Writing was easier when most were a step or two removed from the farm.
I don't think I understand the metaphor here.
Haiti is miserably poorer than America, in large part because of its people and its institutions. Not just in the sense of physical goods, but in most of the things that make life grand, and the things that make life annoying.
Similarly, we are poorer than the future will be- again, because of people and institutions. (Technology- as in, knowledge about reality and devices that make clever use of that knowledge- is the result of people and institutions.)
Importantly, this is not just in the sense of physical goods. It is one thing to compare a McMansion to a comfortably sized home; it is another to compare the sort of life lived by someone who lives in a world where they can buy a customized continent to someone who lives in a world where they can buy a McMansion.
And so, in light of those changes, to look at a spark that could ionize our gas and say "but we'll just be running in circles faster!" seems to miss the point. No, when every manager is a clear-headed executive, commercial organizations will be better run and more pleasant to deal with, and the sorts of things we can do will go from great to fantastic. What does it matter that the yachts will be longer and the quays more crowded with them?
Thank you.