Once upon a time ...

I'm curious. For those in their 20s, how were you taught to write essays?

Back in the Stone Age when I was growing up, we were taught to have a thesis statement early on so that our readers would know what we were going to be talking about. Here's where we're going with this. Is that entirely out of fashion?

My advisor in grad school expanded on this, to here's the issue, here's the thesis, here's how we're going to get there. A tidy map to let the reader know where we're going, to make it easier to know what to look for to follow along with the progress of the trip.

After a couple of paragraphs, I have no idea where this is going, Are we setting up some analogy to current events, or just setting up the context in which some thesis operates? I don't know, and I find I just don't care enough to continue reading.

I have often griped about essays here, suggesting that people start with an abstract. But here, I want to get get some information on how people are being taught to write. I'm often infuriated by journalists these days, as they write and write and write, and I wonder and I wonder and I wonder where the hell it's all going. Are people doing this on purpose?

Are they being taught to do this? If so, what are the specifics of the pedagogy involved?

I agree with other commenters that this reads like an obfuscated version of some real-world issue (perhaps A and B are white and black people in the USA or men and women or something?), and it ends up (for me, at least) not working well either as an oblique commentary on any real-world issue or as an abstract discussion of how to think well: it feels like politics and therefore stirs up the same defensive reflexes, the obfuscation makes it hard to be sure what the actual point is, I'm wasting brainpower trying to "decode" what I'm reading, and it's full of incidental details that I can't tell whether I need to be keeping track of (because they're probably highly relevant if this is a coded discussion of some real-world issue, but not so relevant if they're just illustrations of a general principle or even just details added for verisimilitude).

I propose the following principle: the mind-killing-ness of politics can't be removed merely by light obfuscation, so if you want to talk about a hot-button issue (or to talk about a more general point for which the hot-button issue provides a good illustration) it's actually usually better to be explicit about what that issue is. Even if only to disavow it by saying something like "I stumbled onto this issue when arguing about correlations between race and abortion among transgender neoreactionaries, but I think it applies more generally. Please try not to be distracted by any political applications you may see -- they aren't the point and I promise I'm not trying to smuggle anything past your defences.".

As to the actual point the article is (explicitly) making: I agree but it seems kinda obvious. Of course considering the incentives on all sides may be difficult to do when you're in the middle of a political battle, but I'm not sure that having read an article like this will help much in that situation.

Imagine a machine that created $100 every time you (and only you, you can't hire somebody to do it for you, or give it to somebody else) push a button; more, this is a magical $100 imbued with anti-munchkin charms (such that any investments purchased never gain value, any raw materials transformed or skills purchased remain at most the same value (so research is out), and any capital machines purchased with it provoke the same effect on any raw materials they themselves process, and so on and so forth; and no, burning the money or anything else for fuel doesn't subvert the charm, or even allow you to stop the heat death of the universe). Assuming you can push it three times per second, fifteen minutes of effort buys you a really nice car. An hour buys you a nice house. A solid workday buys you a nice mansion. A week, and you could have a decent private island. A few months and you might be able to have a house on the moon - but because of the anti-munchkin charms, it won't jump-start space exploration or the space industry or anything like that.

You have, in effect, as much personal utility as you want.

There are three things about this scenario:

First, you consume utility in this process, you don't create it. The anti-munchkin charms mean you are a parasite on society; the space travel you purchase is taking resources away from some other enterprise.

Second, even without the anti-munchkin charms wrt capital goods, money is a barter token, not utility in and of itself. This machine cannot be used to make society better off directly, it merely allows you to redistribute resources in an inefficient manner. Insofar as you might be able to make society better off, that is dependent on you being about to distribute resources more efficiently than they already are - and if you can recognize global market inefficiencies with sufficient clarity to correct them, there are more productive ways for you to spend your time than pushing a button that dispenses what is relatively chump change.

Third, the first thousand times you push the button will make a substantively larger difference in your life than the second thousand times. Each iterative $100 has diminishing returns over the previous $100, even without taking the inflationary effect this will have on society into account.

You don't get to specify a universe without the kind of causality that the kind of CDT we use in our universe depends on, and then claim that this says something significant about decision theory.

What kind of causality is this, given that you assert that the correct thing to do in smoking lesions is refrain from smoking, and smoking lesions is one of the standard things where CDT says to smoke?

"A causes B, therefore B causes A" is a fallacy no matter what arguments you put forward.

In terms of CDT, we can say that smoking causes the gene

CDT asserts the opposite, and so if you claim this then you disagree with CDT.

You don't understand what counterfactuals are.

No it doesn't. It assumes a "perfect predictor" is what it is. I don't give a damn about evidence - we're specifying properties of a universe here.

You said "you shouldn't smoke", which is a decision-theoretical claim, not a specification. It's consistent with EDT, but not CDT.

You don't get to say "Everybody who smokes has this gene" as a property of the universe, and then pretend to be an exception to a property of the universe because you have a bizarre and magical agency that gets to bypass properties of the universe.

In other words, you're denying the exact thing that CDT asserts.

There is a contradiction there

Which is what a counterfactual is.

Whatever your theory is, it is denying core claims that CDT makes, so you're denying CDT (and implicitly assuming EDT as the method for making decisions, your arguments literally map directly onto EDT arguments).

you will smoke if and only if you have the gene, and you will have the gene if and only if you smoke, and in which case you shouldn't smoke

This implicitly assumes EDT.

At the point at which the gene is a perfect predictor, if you have a genetic test and you don't have the gene, and then smoke

But that's not what CDT counterfactuals do. You cut off previous nodes. As the choice to smoke doesn't causally affect the gene, smoking doesn't counterfactually contradict the prediction. If you would actually smoke, then yes, but counterfactuals don't imply there's any chance of it happening in reality.

"If you have a genetic test and you don't have the gene, and then smoke - then the genetic test produced a false negative."

If Omega makes the mistake of telling someone else that he predicted that you will one-box, and that person tells you, so you then take both boxes, knowing that the million is already there, then Omega's prediction was wrong.

Omega can be a perfect predictor, but he cannot tell you his prediction, at least not if you work the way normal humans do. Likewise, a gene could be a perfect predictor, but not if you know about it, at least not if you work the way normal humans do.

I may be misunderstanding something, but isn't the standard LW position on smoking to smoke even if the gene's correlation to smoking and cancer is 1?

As long as the predictor doesn't cause anything but merely informs, they're equivalent to the gene. The reason why one-boxing is correct is because your choice causes the money, while the reason smoking is correct is because your choice doesn't cause cancer.

3^^^3 copies of me is either a net negative - as a result of 3^^^3 lives not worth living - or a net positive - as a result of an additional 3^^^3 lives worth living. The point of the dust speck is that it has only a negligible effect; the weight of the dust speck moral issue is completely subsumed by the weight of the duplicate people issue.

If you smoke in the smoking lesions scenario, then you shouldn't choose your action here based on how many people would exist, because they would exist anyway. (At least in the first of three cases.)

For the case that dust specks aren't additive, assuming we treat copies of me as distinct entities with distinct moral weight, 3^^^3 copies of me is either a net negative - as a result of 3^^^3 lives not worth living - or a net positive - as a result of an additional 3^^^3 lives worth living. The point of the dust speck is that it has only a negligible effect; the weight of the dust speck moral issue is completely subsumed by the weight of the duplicate people issue.

If we don't treat them as distinct moral entities, well, the duplication and the dust speck doesn't enter into it.

I don't think your conceptual problem sufficiently isolates whatever moral quandary you're trying to express; there's just too much going on here.