Further follow-up: Guido Reichstadter wraps up after 30 days. Impressively long! And a bit longer than I'd guessed.

Yeah but "this theory sometimes correctly predicts the economy in a way no other theory has been capable of, and sometimes gets things totally wrong, and this theory says AI will cause extinction" is not unjustly privileging the hypothesis. It's a mistake to say that theory "just isn't very informative" when it's been incredibly informative on lots of issues, even while mistaken on others.

But it's made tons of accurate predictions in game theory and microeconomics?

Curated! Thanks for the post.

I am having a hard time explaining why I'm curating this. I think for me this post is helping me move ethics from some mystical thing, into an engineering/design problem, which is how I think a lot of it should be thought of. I recently having been reading a book on the classic virtues, and it makes them sound so dreary and uncompelling; this account seems more true and healthier.

I think the examples were great and really illustrated this well. But I agree with a comment (from Wei Dai) that this post is weak on proving that the presence or lack of good ethical design patterns was critical in the success or failure of different systems, rather than other factors.

I hope to see more writing about concrete cases, and more work to help turn our consequentialist analyses into ethical design patterns / folk ethics.

Thx – yeah seems that something broke when I shipped it, I should ship a fix in the next day or two.

I see! That makes sense. I hoped it was clear from the surrounding context in the thread, but I will endeavor in future to link to my comments elsethread for reference.

I think the dynamic Thomas pointed to is more helpful and accurate than the specifics, which seem to me like inaccurate glosses.

I agree that ranting and emotional writing is part of a healthy processing of information in humans. Insofar as someone is ranting imprecisely and recklessly about groups and their attitudes, when trying to understand local politics, I wish that some care is taken to note that it's not the default standard for comments, that it's more likely to produce inaccuracies and be misleading, rather than to walk straight into it seemingly unaware of the line being crossed. It's the standard thing about line crossing: the problem isn't in choosing to cross the line, it's in seemingly not being aware that there is a line at all.

The comment painted lots of groups of people with a broad brush, mainly associating them with a negative feelings that I don’t believe most of them experience very much or at all, it (I think?) implied it had named all the groups (while naming ~none of the groups I natively think of), and then said that naming groups wasn’t a problem to be worried about.

It’s not norm-violating, but IMO it was not a good move in the dance of “sanely discuss local politics”.