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This really should have been done as a Kickstarter project. If SIAI suddenly decides it doesn't have enough money to fund lukeprog, what is going to happen to the people donating "unrestricted" but with the intent to fund lukeprog? Why should SIAI waste resources administrating the fundraiser while a perfectly good third-party product exists?
Any suggestions how to get that ideal "steady stream of low-level publicity"?
I don't really know. Social news sites and peoples' blogs seem like good ways to get this steady drip. If we got a link on front pages of Reddit or Hacker News every few days, that might be enough.
And what do you think about my idea of suggesting a story idea to one of the reporters (I think he tends to write multi-page feature stories)? If he actually took up the suggestion (which I admit, given what Vladimir_M said, is a big if), would that be an overall positive or negative?
It depends on the spin. The Seigenthaler incident was so bad because it was completely negative and seemed to traumatize the higher-ups. They ran around like chickens with their heads cut off, doing something, anything to tell the press that 'we're fixing things!' And this lead to a general climate where BLPs are treated extremely harshly by Foundation diktat, which has in turn fostered a general highly negative attitude to new content, content you wouldn't find in the Encyclopedia Britannica, and anything not impeccably sourced.
(For example, page creation was turned off. Supposedly statistics were being collected to see whether it helped. Wales finally admitted in the Signpost a few years ago that they were lying through their teeth, no statistics were or are being collected, and the decision was never going to be reversed. I don't know what others think of Wales, but that was a breathtaking example of why I trust him and the Foundation as far as I can throw them and have never donated since.)
If the spin is 'here's a great site with lots of fascinating things to read', maybe that wouldn't be so bad. If it's more like 'look at these dangerous low-status techy fantasists'...
How about college newspapers, forums, meetups, talks, casual lunches and what ever else works. Colleges often act as small semi-closed social ecosystems so it is easier to reach the critical number needed for a self sustaining community, or the critical number of people to take an idea from odd to normal.
It isn't obvious to me that additional clueless comments are superlinearly harmful, that their harm outweighs the benefits of greater publicity, or that the problems with defection that you mention are serious enough to prevent a collective solution from working.
Can you think of other online communities that suffer or at least go through great and unpredictable change due to a high influx of new people?
the Supreme Court could use the "murder" rationale to reverse Roe, if it wanted to do so; and were the decision to be reconsidered in a new case, do you have any doubt that pro-life groups would file amicus briefs urging them to do just that?
Yes, I doubt they would do this, given the fact that I haven't found anyone yet who actually wants women who abort fetuses to be punished on a par with, shall we say, 'other kinds of murderers'; multiple decades of imprisonment, or life imprisonment, or death.
I have heard people talk of punishing abortion on par with other kinds of murder. This view point has the real potential to alienate people. It makes sense that people with that view point and realize this are not shouting it to the world or filing court cases. Instead they judge small changes are the best way to get what they want in the long term and fight those intermediary battles instead of taking it straight on.
I've stated that I don't want to continue having this conversation with you. The summary in the grandparent was for komponisto.
For the people down who would down vote this, is it better if she did not respond to lukeprog's post at all? Acknowledging someone when they attempt to communicate to you is considered polite. It often serves the purpose communicating a lack of spite and/or hard feels even as you insist on ending the current conversation.
In response to
Meetup : Houston Hackerspace Meetup
We could have a google+ account open and offer to hangout with interested parties near by or far. I got the idea from: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/731/meetup_proposal_google/
Some situation at a college where they'll give you a cookie if you take an STD test seems quite likely
You situation does not really count as no cost though. In a world in which you must spend effort to avoid getting a STD test it seems unlikely that plausible deniability can be generated in the first place.
I don't see how the situation is meaningfully different from no cost. "I couldn't be bothered to get it done" is hardly an acceptable excuse on the face of it, but despite that people will judge you more harshly when you harm knowingly rather than when you harm through avoidable ignorance, even though that ignorance is your own fault. I don't think they do so because they perceive a justifying cost.
I think the point that others have been trying to make is that gaining the evidence isn't merely of lower importance to the agent than some other pursuits, it's that gaining the evidence appears to be actually harmful to what the agent wants.
I think the point that others have been trying to make is that gaining the evidence isn't merely of lower importance to the agent than some other pursuits, it's that gaining the evidence appears to be actually harmful to what the agent wants.
Yes I was proposed the alternative situation where the evidence is just considered as lower value as an alternative that produces the same result.
I don't see how the situation is meaningfully different from no cost. "I couldn't be bothered to get it done" is hardly an acceptable excuse on the face of it
At zero cost(in the economic sense not in the monetary sense) you can not say it was a bother to get it done because a bother would be a cost.
Avoiding the evidence would be irrational. Focusing on more important evidence is not.
I disagree. In the least convenient world where the STD test imposes no costs on Alex, he would still be instrumentally rational to not take it. This is because Alex knows the plausibility of his claims that he does not have an STD will be sabotaged if the test comes out positive, because he is not a perfect liar.
(I don't think this situation is even particularly implausible. Some situation at a college where they'll give you a cookie if you take an STD test seems quite likely, along the same lines as free condoms.)
I disagree. In the least convenient world where the STD test imposes no costs on Alex, he would still be instrumentally rational to not take it. This is because Alex knows the plausibility of his claims that he does not have an STD will be sabotaged if the test comes out positive, because he is not a perfect liar.
In a world were STD tests cost absolutely nothing, including time, effort, thought, there would be no excuse to not have taken a test and I do not see a method for generating plausible deniability by not knowing.
Some situation at a college where they'll give you a cookie if you take an STD test seems quite likely
You situation does not really count as no cost though. In a world in which you must spend effort to avoid getting a STD test it seems unlikely that plausible deniability can be generated in the first place.
You are correct "Avoiding the evidence would be irrational." does seem to be incorrect in general and I generalized too strongly from the example I was working on.
Though this does not seem to answer my original question. Is there a by definition conflict between "Whatever can be destroyed by the truth, should be." and generating plausible deniability. The answer I still come up with is no conflict. Some truths should be destroyed before others and this allows for some plausible deniability for untruths low in priority.
Avoiding the evidence would be irrational. Focusing on more important evidence is not.
This is a very good point. We cannot gather all possible evidence all the time, and trying to do so would certainly be instrumentally irrational.
Is the standard then that it's instrumentally rational to prioritize Bayesian experiments by how likely their outcomes are to affect one's decisions?
Is the standard then that it's instrumentally rational to prioritize Bayesian experiments by how likely their outcomes are to affect one's decisions?
It weighs into the decision, but it seems like it is insufficient by itself. An experiment can change my decision radically but be on unimportant topic(s). Topics that do not effect goal achieving ability. It is possible to imagine spending ones time on experiments that change one's decisions and never get close to achieving any goals. The vague answer seems to be prioritize by how much the experiments will be likely to help achieve ones goals.
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In my laboratory statistics manual from college (the first edition of this book) the only statistics were frequentist, and Jaynes was considered a statistical outlier in my first year of graduate school. His results were respected, but the consensus was that he got them in spite of his unorthodox reduction method, not because of it.
In my narrow field (reflection seismology) two of the leaders explicitly addressed this question in a (surprisingly to me little-read and seldom-referenced) paper: To Bayes or not to Bayes. Their conclusion: they prefer their problems neat enough to not require the often-indispensable Bayes method.
It is a debate I prefer to avoid unless it is required. The direction of progress is unambiguous but it seems to me a classic example of a Kuhn paradigm shift where a bunch of old guys have to die before we can proceed amicably.
A very small minority of people hate Bayesian data reduction. A very small minority of people hate frequentist data reduction. The vast majority of people do not care very much unless the extremists are loudly debating and drowning out all other topics.
Another graduate student, I have in general heard a similar opinions from many professors through undergrad and grad school. Never disdan for bays but often something along the lines of "I am not so sure about that" or "I never really grasped the concept/need for bayes." The statistics books that have been required for classes, in my opinion durring the class, used a slightly negative tone while discussing bayes and 'subjective probability.'