I generally try to use probability when interacting with people. I know they are not as likely to jump of a bridge as to cross it. Amazingly it seems to help me have good relations with them. Incredible I know. I hear statistical reasoning about humans is evil though so maybe I shouldn't be sharing this advice.
I never did get why that is though.
Apply Bayes to making decisions in real life, in ways that the cool people don't? That idea will never fly on LessWrong!
Consider this easy-to-predict eventuality as an indictment of how incredibly ineffective and mindkilled LessWrong is about sex, for obviously ideological reasons (though we may disagree about which side it is that is mindkilled).
Doesn't follow. The base rate for getting more than 100 comments on a main, non-announcement article is already something like 70%.
Ah, but this was less the case at the time the poll was made (the community has been growing in the meantime) and it was also not clear that this would be a Main as opposed to Discussion post. So that has to be factored into the probabilities.
I'm a male LWer with an infant daughter. I'd like to request some specific advice on avoiding the common failure modes.
Relevant:
The “Anonymous Narratives by LW Women” thread will receive >100 comments,
The “Anonymous Narratives by LW Women” thread will receive >500 comments
Consider this easy-to-predict eventuality as an indictment of how incredibly ineffective and mindkilled LessWrong is about sex, for obviously ideological reasons (though we may disagree about which side it is that is mindkilled).
See my previous comment re: mistaking a vocal minority for a group consensus.
I don't even think they're particularly vocal. I can recall like two loud Moldbuggians: Konk and Vlad_M, who is inactive and doesn't even mention Moldbug by name, to my knowledge.
I think it looks like these Moldbuggians are active because a lot of Moldbuggianism is deconstructing assumptions about how politics works. So there's a lot of mainstream ideological assumptions that aren't seen as ideological at all by most people (democracy is good, the media is an observer not a participant in government, etc) yet are seen as incorrect and/or political claims by Moldbuggians. So then Moldbuggians say things like "wait now, democracy isn't all that great" and it looks like they suddenly injected Moldbuggery in a non-politics thread, when they see it as just adding another comment on an existing politics thread.
Ever since reading West Hunter I've been intrigued by the idea of mutational load as an explanation for increasing prevalence of mental disorders. It would mean chance of having these disorders would increase with increasing paternal age, and in fact that's what we find. Since everyone's waiting longer to have babies nowadays, that explains some of the change.
I wonder if increasing paternal age explains even more of the change than that article lets on, just because it's accumulating over generations; it's not just that your dad was older, it's that your grandfather was older and therefore your father started with more mutations and so on. You can't measure that effect just by separating people into autistic and neurotypical and then asking them how old their fathers were.
I would certainly expect that the category "bad effects of lifestyle changes favored by highly educated researchers" would be understudied, relative to studying the nasty effects of poor-folks culture.
There appear to be two major strains of response to this post:
The first response seems a case of wishful thinking - as though by believing really hardthat others share our local values, and outgroupping those who disagree with us, we could make it a PR positive.
The second is exactly analogous to an anti-abortion activist who opposes teaching birth control. It's not incoherent, really, but it does demonstrate that we place a higher value on loud sexual weirdness than our nominal goals, at this margin.
Eliezer's talked some about the constraints he's under that keep him from going along with the usual norms of public relations, it would probably be good for someone to link to those comments so this doesn't become a circle jerk of "hah Eliezer isn't good at public relations" and its ripostes.
And let's certainly give credit where it's due, he handled the responses in the thread as well as could be expected under the circumstances - with deflecting humor rather than hurt anger.
The rationalist in question, of course, is our very own EY.
Quotes giving a reasonable sample of the spectrum of reactions:
Epic Fail on the e-harmony profile. He’s over-signalling intelligence. There’s a good paper about how much to optimally signal, like when you have a PhD to put it on your business card or not. This guy is going around giving out business cards that read Prof. Dr. John Doe, PhD, MA, BA. He won’t be getting laid any time soon.
His profile is probably very effective for aspergery girls who like reading the kinds of things that appear on LessWrong. Yudkowsky is basically a celebrity within a small niche of hyper-nerdy rationalists, so I doubt he has much trouble getting laid by girls in that community.
You make it sound like a cult leader or something....And reading the profile again with that lens, it actually makes a lot of sense.
I was about to agree [that the profile is oversharing], but then come to think of it, I realize I have an orgasm denial fetish, too. It’s an aroused preference that never escaped to my non-aroused self-consciousness.
Why is this important to consider?
LessWrong as a community is dedicated to trying to "raise the sanity waterline," and its most respected members in particular put a lot of resources into outreach, via CFAR, HPMoR, and maintaining this site. But a big factor in how people perceive our brand of rationality is about image. If we're serious about raising the sanity waterline, that means image management - or at least avoiding active image malpractice - is something we should enthusiastically embrace as a way to achieve our goals. [1]
This is also a valuable exercise in considering the outside view. Marginal Revolution is already a fairly WEIRD site, focused on abstract economic issues. If any major blog is likely to be sympathetic to our cultural quirks, this would be it. Yet a plurality of commenters reacted negatively.
To the extent that we didn't notice anything strange about LW's figurehead having this OKCupid profile, LW either failed at calibrating mainstream reaction, or failed at consequentialism and realizing the drag this would have on our other recruitment efforts. In our last discussion, there were only a few commenters raising concerns, and the consensus of the thread was that it was harmless and had no PR consequences worth noting.
As one commenter cogently put it,
I’m not saying that he’s trying to make a statement with this, I’m saying that he is making a statement about this whether he’s trying to or not. Ideas have consequences for how we live our lives, and that Eliezer has a public, identifiable profile up where he talks about his sexual fetishes is not some sort of randomly occurring event with no relationship to his other ideas.
I'd argue the same reasoning applies to the community at large, not just EY specifically.
[1] From Anna's excellent article: 5. I consciously attempt to welcome bad news, or at least not push it away. (Recent example from Eliezer: At a brainstorming session for future Singularity Summits, one issue raised was that we hadn't really been asking for money at previous ones. My brain was offering resistance, so I applied the "bad news is good news" pattern to rephrase this as, "This point doesn't change the fixed amount of money we raised in past years, so it is good news because it implies that we can fix the strategy and do better next year.")
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In other words, smart, reflective people are better at using those smarts and reflections to play monkey political games, maybe one meta-level up.
Of course, playing politics well is important to effectiveness in real life. Learning about rationality might make you a worse rationalist, but it probably helps you win at life, including if your goal is to, say, promote a movement that is positively correlated with rationality.