Just this guy, you know?
This is going the wrong direction. If privacy from admins is important (I argue that it's not for LW messages, but that's a separate discussion), then breaches of privacy should be exceptions for specific purposes, not allowed unless "really secret contents".
Don't make this filter-in for privacy. Make it filter-out - if it's detected as likely-spam, THEN take more intrusive measures. Privacy-preserving measures include quarantining or asking a few recipients if they consider it harmful before delevering (or not) the rest, automated content filters, etc. This infrastructure requires a fair bit of data-handling work to get it right, and a mitigation process where a sender can find out they're blocked and explicitly ask the moderator(s) to allow it.
“I think contributing considerations is usually much more valuable than making predictions.”
I think he's absolutely right. Seeing predictions of top predictors should absolutely be a feature of forecasting sites. I think the crossover with more conceptual and descriptive posts on LessWrong is pretty minimal.
I have no expectation of strong privacy on the site. I do expect politeness in not publishing or using my DM or other content, but that line is fuzzy and monitoring for spam (not just metadata; content and similarity-of-content) is absolutely something I want from the site.
For something actually private, I might use DMs to establish a mechanism. Feel free to look at that.
If you -do- intend to provide real privacy, you should formalize the criteria, and put up a canary page that says you have not been asked to reveal any data under a sealed order.
edit to add: I am relatively paranoid about privacy, and also quite technically-savvy in implementation of such. I'd FAR rather the site just plainly say "there is no expectation of privacy, act accordingly" than that it try to set expectations otherwise, but then have to move line later. Your Terms of Service are clear, and make no distinction for User Generated Content between posts, comments, and DMs.
Thank you for saying this! I very much like that you're acknowledging tensions and that unhelpful attitudes include BOTH "too much" and "too little" worry about each topic.
I'd also like to remind everyone (including myself; I often forget this) about typical mind fallacy and the enormous variety in human agency, and peoples' very different modeling and tolerance of various social, relationship, and financial risks.
if you’re in a dysfunctional organization where everything is about private fiefdoms instead of getting things done…why not…leave?”
This is a great example! A whole lot of people, the vast majority that I've talked to, can easily answer this - "because they pay me and I'm not sure anyone else will", with a bit of "I know this mediocracy well, and the effort to learn a new one only to find it's not better will drain what little energy I have left". It's truly exceptional to have the self-confidence to say "yeah, maybe it won't work, but I can deal if so, and it's possible I can do much better".
It's very legitimate to see problems and STILL not be confident that a different set of problems would be better for you or for your impact on the world. The companies that seem great from outside are often either 1) impossible to get hired at for most people; and/or 2) not actually that great, if you know actual employees inside them.
The question of "how can I personally do better on these dimensions", however, is one that everyone can and should ask themselves. It's just that the answer will be idiosyncratic and specific to the individual's situation and self-beliefs.
I vote no. An option for READERS to hid the names of posters/commenters might be nice, but an option to post something that you're unwilling to have a name on (not even your real name, just a tag with some history and karma) does not improve things.
Identity is a modeling choice. There's no such thing in physics, as far as anyone can tell. All models are wrong, some models are useful. Continuity of identity is very useful for a whole lot of behavioral and social choices, and I'd recommend using it almost always.
As a thought experiment in favor of presentism being conceivable and logically consistent with everything you know, see Boltzmann brain - Wikipedia .
I think that counter-argument is pretty weak. It seems to rely on "exist" being something different than we normally mean, and tries to mix up tenses in a confusing way.
Ehn, ok, but for a pretty liberal and useless use of the word "exists". If presentism is true, then "exists" could easily mean "exists in memory, there may be no reality behind it".
Debatable, and not today's argument, but you'd have to show WHY it's true, which might include questions of what other currently-nonexistent things can be said to be "was wise".
The proposition exists, yes.
Bait and switch. The constituent of <Socrates was wise> is either <Socrates>, the thing that can be part of a proposition, or "Socrates was", the existence of memory of Socrates.
Complete non-sequitur. Both the proposition-referent or the memory of Socrates can exist in presentism.
Nope.
you can only care about what you fully understand
I think I need an operational definition of "care about" to process this. Presumably, you can care about anything you can imagine, whether you perceive it or not, whether it exists or not, whether it corresponds to other maps or not. Caring about something does not make it territory. It's just another map.
Embedded agents are in the territory.
Kind of. Identification of agency is map, not territory. Processing within an agent happens (presumably) in a territory, but the higher-level modeling and output of that processing is purely about maps. The agent is a subset of the territory, but doesn't have access at the agent level to the territory.
Agreed - we (and more generally, embedded agents) have no access to territory. It's all maps, even our experiences are filtered through interpretation. Territory is inferred as the thing that makes different maps (at different levels of abstraction or different parts of the universe) consistent with each other and across time.
That said, some maps are very detailed, repeatable, and can support a lot of other maps. I tend to think of those as "closer to the territory". In colloquial discussion and informal thinking, I don't think there's much harm in pretending that the actual territory is the same as the fine-grained maps. Not technically true - there are more levels of maps, and they're asymptotic to reaching the territory. But close enough for a lot of things.
A few missing points, which may break the whole plan:
Thanks for this! It applies to a lot of different kinds of insurance. Car insurance, for instance, isn't financially great (except liability umbrella in many cases), but having the insurance company set standards and negotiate with the other driver (or THEIR insurance company) is much simpler than having to do it yourself, potentially in court.
For some kinds of insurance, there's also tax treatment advantages. Because it's usually framed as responsible risk reduction (and because insurance bundles some lobbying into the fees), premiums are sometimes untaxed, and payouts are almost always untaxed. This part only affects the financial considerations, but can be significant.