I would disagree that people in the real world act based on what's cheaper. None of the cancellations we already see over other things are done so as to be financially optimal for the cancellers. Even companies don't act based on what's financially optimal; if Google was willing to fire James Damore, Google certainly would be willing to fire people for not selling their vote to Google. If Disney is willing to lose millions, maybe billions, of dollars through woke Marvel and Star Wars, I'm pretty sure they'd be willing to fire people who won't sell their votes to them, even if it "isn't cheaper".

It's true that the market hurts companies that do this sort of stuff, but it takes a long time between when someone loses money because they are acting against the market, and when they actually go out of business. Disney isn't about to die soon.

And punishing some people does often benefit them financially anyway because even though firing an employee costs money, it also intimidates other employees, reducing the sale price of their votes.

There's also the issue that some people won't sell their vote for the financially optimal price either, so the company or the mob will threaten to fire them to force them to. Many people wouldn't, absent coercion, sell their vote for any price, just like many people won't sell sex. Or they will, but only for a life-changing amount that is many times the market price.

If there are a hundred thousand people like you who are being asked to sell your vote and you stand to lose $1000 from the wrong person being elected, your vote can only be 1/100000 of the reason the person is elected, so you should sell it for $1000/100000 = 1 cent. Under the proper decision theory, you shouldn't sell it for less than $1000, but the number of people in the real world who understand (let alone both understand and agree with) such decision theories is negligible on the scale of voting.

What about the situation where you get fired unless you sell your vote to the company? Or maybe to the union?

Or the situation where the mob demands that you sell your vote to them so that they can use it for some socially beneficial purpose, and otherwise they cancel you?

My own reading of Omelas: The scenario at the end has the child being sacrificed for the good of the rest of society. But the lesson to be learned from that depends on who you're supposed to identify with. If you identify with the society, the reader is being lectured on not hurting people for his own gain. But if you identify with the child, the moral of the story is that it's wrong for other people to ask you to sacrifice things for the good of society. The moral that was obviously intended was the first of these--this kind of story tends to lecture the reader, and "you need to be less selfish" is one of the most common morals in existence. Nobody writes a story whose moral is that you should be selfish and ignore the greater good, but the story unintentionally says exactly that.

I also wouldn’t want people to be peer-pressured into making statements that are more extreme than their actual views, but I think we’re pretty far from that world.

That's because there isn't a norm for safety researchters to take the public stance described here. Once such a thing became a norm, peer pressure into making extreme statements, and generally threats to force them to make extreme statements, would be common.

Look at what we have now with all sorts of social justice statements.

Old post but...

In a recent intelligence explosion discussion, someone mentioned that Vinge didn’t seem to think that brain-computer interfaces would increase intelligence much, and cited Marooned in Realtime and Tunç Blumenthal, who was the most advanced traveller but didn’t seem all that powerful. I replied indignantly, “But Tunç lost most of his hardware! He was crippled!” And then I did a mental double-take and thought to myself: What the hell am I saying.

If the question is about what Vinge seems to think then this reasoning is perfectly appropriate. Tunc doesn't really exist, but if you want to know what Vinge thinks, the details of the scenario that Vinge wrote are relevant--if Vinge wrote Tunc as not having much increased intelligence because he was crippled, this doesn't show what Vinge thinks about increased intelligence in general.

Betting against your professed beliefs is valid as an example of diversification.

High status is something you can only control to a limited degree, especially when you are trying to do things that have an immediate effect rather than doing thigns that gain status in the long run. Acting confident certainly helps, but it won't help by so much that you can get away with wearing a clown suit because you're acting confident. What will happen is that instead of confidence making the clown suit work, the clown suit will make the confidence fail.

Fedoras aren't quite clown suits, but still, you can see how they worked, which is "not well".

None of the ideas you're saying are completely wrong, but you're wrong about how they balance against each other.

1 in 10000 allows me to be Pascal mugged, so it must be much smaller. Also, scenarios where shrimp suffering exists and matters are generally scenarios where my ability to reason about the world is compromised, so any number I could produce would be useless for calculations.

The question is ambiguous. Is an "accusation" "this mage has illegally healed" or "this mage has done this specific illegal healing"?