No, that's not the meaning of the word soviet. Soviet translates into something like "counsel" in English.

In English, "Soviet" is the adjectival form of "USSR".

Never mind the word. What is the actual structure at the Free University of Berlin that you're referring to? And in 1968, did they believe that this was how things were done in the USSR?

Ooh, yay, free knowledge and links! Thankyou, you're awesome!

The linked study was a fun read. I was originally a bit skeptical - it feels like songs are sufficiently subjective that you'll just like what your friends like or is 'cool', but what subjects you choose to study ought to be the topic of a little more research and numbers - but after further reflection the dynamics are probably the same, since often the reason you listen to a song at all is because your friend recommended it, and the reason you research a potential career in something is because your careers guidance counselor or your form tutor or someone told you to. And among people who've not encountered 80k hours or EA, career choice is often seen as a subjective thing. It'd be like with Asch's conformity experiments where participants aren't even aware that they're conforming because it's subconscious, except even worse because it's subconscious and seen as subjective...

That seems like a very plausible explanation. There could easily be a kind of self-reinforcing loop, as well, like, "I didn't learn fluid dynamics in school and there aren't any fluid dynamics Nobel prize winners, therefore fluid dynamics isn't very cool, therefore let's not award it any prizes or put it into the curriculum..."

At its heart, this is starting to seem like a sanity-waterline problem like almost everything else. Decrease the amount that people irrationally go for novelty and specific prizes and "application is for peasants" type stuff, and increase the amount they go for saner things like the actual interest level and usefulness of the field, and prestige will start being allocated to fields in a more sensible way. Fluid dynamics sounds really really interesting, by the way.

Also perhaps worth noting that the effect within the LW subculture in particular may have to do with lots of LW users knowing a lot about ideas or disciplines where there are a lot of popular but wrong positions so they know how not to go astray. Throughout the Sequences, before you figure out how to do it right, you hear about how a bunch of other people have done it wrong: MWI, p-zombies, value theory, evolutionary biology, intellectual subcultures, etc. I don't know that there are any sexy controversies in fluid mechanics.

I don't think modern mathematicians are going to drown someone for using infinitesimally small numbers...

Not really. Everyone agrees that calculus can be done with infinitesimals, but most mathematicians think that doing it with limits forms a better basis for going on to real analysis and epsilon-delta proofs later.

Non-standard analysis is perfectly fine. Most mathematicians just don't deal with that kind of analysis.

I'm not sure this is necessarily always true.

Yes; you'll get some politicians who actually want to reduce the crime rate and are willing to look for advice on how to do that effectively.

They're hard to spot, because all politicians want to look like that sort of politician, leaving the genuine ones hidden in a crowd of lookalikes...

We need to make it so that science>ideology in prestige terms, which will be really tricky.

People tried this in the late 19th/early 20th century (look up "technocracy" if you want to learn more). That's how we got into the mess we are in now.

Who's responsible for creating such a program? The current professors. Given that they don't do so, we need different people.

I think you missed what I see as the main point in "What they might have considered, however, was that there was no valve in their pipe. Aiming to purify the American state, they succeeded only in corrupting the American mind." Not surprising, because Moldbug (the guy quoted about the Mugwumps) is terribly long-winded and given to rhetorical flourishes. So let me try to rephrase what I see as the central objection in a format more amenable to LW:

The scientific community is not a massive repository of power, nor is it packed to the gills with masters of rhetoric. The political community consists of nothing but. If you try to run your new party by listening to the scientific community without first making the scientific community far more powerful and independent, what's likely to happen is that the political community makes a puppet of the scientific community, and then you wind up running your politics by listening to a puppet of the political community.

To give a concrete relatable figure: The US National Science Foundation receives about 7.5 billion dollars a year from the US Congress. (According to the NSF, they are the funding source for approximately 24 percent of all federally supported basic research conducted by America's colleges and universities, which suggests 30 billion federal dollars are out there just for basic research)

The more you promote "Do what the NSF says", the more Congress is going to be interested in using some of those billions of dollars to lean on the NSF and other similar organizations so that you will be promoting "Do what Congress says" at arm's remove. No overt dishonesty needs be involved. Just little things like hiring sympathetic scientists, discouraging controversial research, asking for a survey of a specific metric, etc.

Suppose you make a prediction that a law will decrease the crime rate. You pass the law. You wait a while and see. Did the crime rate go down? Well, how are you measuring crime rate? Which crimes are you counting? To take an example discussed on Less Wrong a while ago, if you use the murder rate as proxy for crime rate over the past few decades, you are going to severely undercount crime because of improvements in medical technology that make worse wounds more survivable.

Obviously you can fix this particular metric now that I've pointed it out. But can you spot and fix such issues in advance faster and better than people throwing around 30 billion dollars and with a massive vested interest in retaining policy control?

When trying to solve something like whether P=NP, you can throw more and brighter scientists at the problem and trust that the problem will remain the same. But the problem of trying to establish science-based policy, particularly when "advocating loads of funding for science", gets harder as it gets more important and you throw more people at it. This is a Red Queen's Race where you have to keep running just to stay in place, because you're not dealing with a mindless question that has an objective answer floating out there, you're dealing with an opposed social force with lots of minds and money that learns from its own mistakes and figures out how to corrupt better, and with more plausible deniability.

You yourself are unlikely to start the French Revolution, but somehow, well-intentioned people seem to get swept up in those movements. Even teachers, doctors, and charity workers can contribute to an ideological environment that goes wrong; this doesn't mean that they started it, or that they supported it every step of the way. But they were part of it.

The French Revolution and guillotines is indeed a rarer event. But if pathological altruism can result in such large disasters, then it's quite likely that it can also backfire in less spectacular ways that are still problematic.

As you point out, many interventions to change the world risk going wrong and making things worse, but it would be a shame to completely give on making the world a better place. So what we really want is interventions that are very well-thought out, with a lot of care towards the likely consequences, taking into account the lessons of history for similar interventions.

But the choice is between trying your best, accepting that you might fail, and doing nothing.

Failure often comes with worse consequences than just an unchanged status quo.

Don't mind Lumifer. He's one of our resident Anti-Spirals.

But, here's a question: if you're angry at the Bad, why? Where's your hope for the Good?

Of course, that's something our culture has a hard time conceptualizing, but hey, you need to be able to do it to really get anywhere.

Burning fury does, and if it makes me help people... whatever works, right?

There is a price to be paid. If you use fury and anger too much, you will become a furious and angry kind of person. Embrace the Dark Side and you will become one with it :-/

I'm just a kid who wants to grow up and study social science and try and help people.

Maybe :-) The reason you've met a certain... lack of enthusiasm about your anger for good causes is because you're not the first kid who wanted to help people and was furious about the injustice and the blindness of the world. And, let's just say, it does not always lead to good outcomes.

I am very angry about terrorism. I think terrorism is a very bad thing and we should eliminate it from the world if we can.

Then why wasn't it included along with racism/sexism/etc. in your list of things your angry about in the ancestor?

Being very angry about terrorism =/= thinking that a good way to solve the problem is to randomly go kill the entire population of the Middle East in the name of freedom (and oil).

You do realize no one thinks that. In particular that wasn't the position Jiro was arguing against.

If you see someone else very angry about terrorism, though, wouldn't you think there's a good chance that they support (or can be easily led into supporting) anti-terrorism policies with bad consequences? Even if you personally can be angry at terrorism without wanting to do anything questionable, surely you recognize that is commonly not true for other people?

It's the same for racism.

I'm trying to say that when I say "I oppose racism", intending to signal "I oppose people beating up minorities", and people misunderstand badly enough that they think I mean "I oppose IQ-by-race studies", it disturbs me.

That's because most people who say "I oppose racism" mean the latter, and no one except you means the former. That's largely because most people oppose beating people up for no good reason and thus they don't feel the need to constantly go about saying so.

Believing in equality of opportunity =/= believing in equality of outcome =/= believing in communism =/= being willing to kill people to make communism happen.

Actually falsely believing in equality of ability => being willing to kill to make equality happen. The chain of reasoning goes as follows:

1) As we know all people/groups are of equal ability, but group X is more successful then other groups, thus they must be cheating in some way, we must pass laws to stop the cheating/level the playing field.

2) We passed laws to level the playing field but group X is still winning, they must be cheating in extremely subtle ways, we must pass more laws to stop/punish this.

3) Group X is still ahead, we must presume members of group X are guilty until proven innocent, etc.

If you are seriously suggesting that believing that it is wrong for people to hurt one another, so if you're hurting someone on grounds of their race, you should stop somehow leads to wanting to have a repeat of Cambodia and kill all the educated people

No that's not what I'm saying. In the grandparent you said:

If I say that I am opposed to racism, and someone immediately leaps to defend their right to read whatever scientific studies they like - completely ignoring all of the other things that racism refers to, like you know, genocide, which I think we can agree is a pretty bad thing - then that reveals a set of values which are kinda disturbing to me. It signals that you care about whether you can read IQ-by-race-and-gender studies more than you care about genocide and acid attacks and lynchings, and would rather yell at me about the possibility that I might oppose you reading IQ studies rather than agree with me that people murdering one another is a bad thing.

My point is that not being able to read IQ-by-race-and-gender studies is likely to lead to a repeat of Mao/Pol Pot. Thus being extremely concerned about being able to read them is a perfectly rational reaction.

I want to learn social science, do research to figure out what will make people happiest, and then do that.

Unfortunately, as we've just established you have very false ideas about how to go about doing that. Furthermore, since these same false ideas are currently extremely popular in academia, going there to study is unlikely to fix this.

An excellent way to stop people from being killed is to make them strong or get them protected by someone who is strong. Strong in a broad sense here, from courage to coolness under pressure etc.

Here is a problem. To be a strong protector correlates with having the kind of transphobic and so on, long list of anti-social justice stuff or bigotry, because that list reduces to either disliking weakness or distrusting difference / having strong ingroup loyalty, and there is a relationship between these (a tribal warrior would have all).

Here is a solution. Basically moderate, reciprocal bigotocracy. Accept a higher-status, somewhat elevated i.e. clearly un-equal social role of the strong protector type i.e. that of traditional men, in return for them actively protecting all the other groups from coming to serious harm. The other groups will have to accept having lower social status, and it will be hard on their pride, but will be safer. This can be made official and perhaps more palatable by conscripting straight males, everybody claiming genderqueer status getting an exemption, and also after the service expecting some kind of community protection role, in return for higher elevated social status and respect. Note: this would be the basic model of most European countries up to the most recent times, status-patriarchy and male privilege explicitly deriving from the sacrifice of conscription.

This is not easy to swallow. However there seem to be not many other options. You cannot have strong protectors who are 100% PC because then they will have no fighting spirit. Without strong protectors, all you can hope is a utopia and hoping the whole Earth adopts it or else any basic tribe with gusto will take you over.

But I think a compromise model of not 100% complete equality and providing a proctor role in return should be able to work, as this has always been the traditional civilized model. In the recent years it was abandoned due to it being oppressive, and perhaps it was, but perhaps there is a way to find a compromise inside it.

Well, "providing universal healthcare and welfare will lead to a massive drop in motivation to work" is a scientific prediction.

I wasn't talking about providing people with universal healthcare. (That merely leads to a somewhat dysfunctional healthcare system). I was talking about taking so much from the "haves" that you "[prevent] them from going on holiday / buying a nice car".

Word of advice, try actually reading what I wrote before replying next time. Yes, I realize this is hard to do while one is angry; however, that's an argument for not using anger as your primary motivation.

Scandinavia and the UK are relatively ethnically homogenous, high-trust, and productive populations. Socialized policies are going to work relatively better in these populations. Northwest European populations are not an appropriate reference class to generalize about the rest of the world, and they are often different even from other parts of Europe.

Socialized policies will have poorer results in more heterogenous populations. For example, imagine that a country has multiple tribes that don't like each other; they aren't going to like supporting each other's members through welfare. As another example, imagine that multiple populations in a country have very different economic productivity. The people who are higher in productivity aren't going to enjoy their taxes being siphoned off to support other groups who aren't pulling their weight economically. These situations are a recipe for ethnic conflict.

Icelanders may be happy with their socialized policies now, but imagine if you created a new nation with a combination of Icelanders and Greeks called Icegreekland. The Icelanders would probably be a lot more productive than the Greeks and unhappy about needing to support them through welfare. Icelanders might be more motivated to work and pay taxes if it's creating a social safety net for their own community, but less excited about working to pay taxes to support Greeks. And who can blame them?

There is plenty of valid debate about the likely consequences of socialized policies for populations other than homogenous NW European populations. Whoever told you these issues were a matter of scientific fact was misleading you. This is an excellent example of how the siren's call of politically attractive answers leads people to cut corners during their analysis so it goes in the desired direction, whether they are aware they are doing it or not.

Generalizing what works for one group as appropriate for another is a really common failure mode through history which hurts real people. See the whole "democracy in Iraq" thing as another example.

Actually, in voting and activism, I'm a full-throated socialist. Social democracy is weaksauce next to a fully-developed socialism, but we don't have a fully-developed socialism, so you're often stuck with the weaksauce.

And as an object-level defense: social democracy, as far as I can tell, does the best at aggregating value information about diverse domains of life and keeping any one optimization criterion from running roughshod over everything else that people happen to care about.

Every system that works is covert or overt meritocracy. Social democracy works, so ....