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Where does our community disagree about meaningful issues?

16 Post author: ChristianKl 12 February 2016 11:34AM

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?

Comments (55)

Comment author: OrphanWilde 16 February 2016 05:45:23PM 1 point [-]

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.

Comment author: polymathwannabe 15 February 2016 03:52:47PM 2 points [-]

Genetic determinism.

Comment author: username2 14 February 2016 12:34:00AM 11 points [-]

Moral realism, apparently

Comment author: seuoseo 14 February 2016 09:41:33AM 2 points [-]

Keeping costly promises/contracts after changing into someone who no longer would have agreed to them.

Comment author: AspiringRationalist 14 February 2016 12:23:41AM 4 points [-]

How important is money?

  • To have
  • To earn
  • To donate

Are EA causes bottlenecked on money or talent?

Comment author: AspiringRationalist 14 February 2016 12:25:00AM 3 points [-]

Should we try to grow the community? How? How much?

Comment author: Elo 13 February 2016 02:06:05PM 9 points [-]

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)

Comment author: V_V 12 February 2016 11:37:00PM 16 points [-]
  • "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?

Comment author: Elo 13 February 2016 02:25:52PM 1 point [-]

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)

Comment author: Daniel_Burfoot 13 February 2016 02:05:49AM 9 points [-]

The historical importance of the modern era.

Comment author: Viliam 14 February 2016 08:51:13PM 0 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Gleb_Tsipursky 13 February 2016 12:50:41AM 5 points [-]

How/whether to do rationality outreach

Comment author: Elo 13 February 2016 02:03:09PM 1 point [-]

Explicitly both of "how" and "whether or not" as independent topics/

Comment author: James_Miller 12 February 2016 04:29:33PM 20 points [-]

Cryonics, supporting free market policies, and the value of the social justice movement.

Comment author: buybuydandavis 12 February 2016 11:57:22PM *  5 points [-]

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.

Comment author: ChristianKl 13 February 2016 11:31:14AM 0 points [-]

Politics, if you consider it meaningful.

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.

Comment author: buybuydandavis 14 February 2016 11:16:13PM 2 points [-]

Why had a discussion a while ago about whether we should do something to get mariuanah legalized in Berlin.

So the discussion wasn't about whether pot should be legalized, but whether you should do something to make that happen?

Comment author: ChristianKl 15 February 2016 12:13:54AM 0 points [-]

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.

Comment author: gwern 12 February 2016 05:53:35PM 14 points [-]

You could look on the surveys: what questions are closest to 50%?

Comment author: ChristianKl 13 February 2016 11:23:27AM 7 points [-]

My desire is to find questions that aren't already well surveyed that matter.

Comment author: AspiringRationalist 13 February 2016 05:23:57AM 13 points [-]

From the 2014 Survey:

Polyamory:

  • 51.8% prefer monogamous, 15.1% prefer polyamorous (a lot uncertain)
  • But only 5.3% have more than 1 partner

Children:

  • 36.1% want more child(ren), 28.3% uncertain, 34.3% don't want more

Politics:

  • 38.9% Social Democratic, 27.7% Liberal, 25.2% Libertarian
  • Taxes: 3.14 +- 1.212 (1 = should be lower; 5 = should be higher)
  • Minimum Wage: 3.21 +- 1.359 (1 = should be lower; 5 = should be higher)
  • Social Justice: 3.15 +- 1.385 (1 = negative view; 5 = positive view)

Ethics:

  • 60% accept or lean towards consequentialism
  • Out of constructivism, error theory, non-cognitivism, subjectivism and substantive realism, none had more than a third

Cryo:

  • 24% don't want to, 36.7% considering, 30.8% signed up or want to be
  • Probability that a person frozen today will be revived: 22.3 +- 27.3% (median 10%)

Misc:

  • p(many worlds) = 47.6% +- 30.1%
Comment author: SolveIt 12 February 2016 05:36:12PM 12 points [-]

The actual effectiveness of MIRI

Comment author: Gram_Stone 12 February 2016 05:40:16PM *  5 points [-]

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.

Comment author: iceman 12 February 2016 09:37:39PM 5 points [-]

The value of the Effective Altruism movement.

Comment author: Curiouskid 12 February 2016 09:38:46PM *  3 points [-]

I'll add some sub-points:

1) AI risk is important

2) Everybody should be vegan.

  • Veganism is healthier than other diets (e.g. paleo, keto)
  • Even if veganism is less healthy, it is still morally superior to other diets.

Other people have mentioned:

  • Cryonics
  • Relationships / PUA

Political topics:

  • Free Market Policies
  • Social Justice Movement
  • The importance of environmentalism
Comment author: LessWrong 12 February 2016 06:15:01PM 4 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Manfred 13 February 2016 12:27:48AM 2 points [-]

What's so different about relationships with only one gender involved?

:P

Comment author: LessWrong 13 February 2016 05:34:37AM *  0 points [-]

Those dialogues are usually about M/F relationships, with demographics taken into account.

Comment author: username2 12 February 2016 12:51:42PM 9 points [-]

Everything except the value of probability theory and statistics?

Comment author: ChristianKl 12 February 2016 01:35:34PM *  3 points [-]

I think it's useful to actually be explicit about disagreements. What do you consider to be the most important disagreements?

Comment author: fubarobfusco 13 February 2016 12:20:07AM 1 point [-]

When, if ever, is it morally acceptable to lie or deceive?

Comment author: qmotus 18 February 2016 11:57:15AM 0 points [-]

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)

Comment author: Dagon 12 February 2016 05:53:44PM 0 points [-]

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.