Like Hogwarts houses? Star signs? MBTI? Enneagram? Keirsey Temperaments? Big 5? Oldham Personality Styles? Jungian Types? TA? PC/NPC? AD&D Character Classes? Four Humours? 7 Personality Types? 12 Guardian Spirits?

I made one of those up. Other people made the rest of them up. And Google tells me the one I made up already exists.

Where does Professional/Auteur come from?

Essentially, treat it as seriously as a personality test.

Ah. That seriously. :)

I can buy these as character sketches of two imaginary individuals, but are there actual clusters in peoplespace here? There's a huge amount of burdensome detail in them.

Sometimes beliefs have implications but they are implications in the long-tail, or in the far-future.

A far future belief that effects heavily estimated utility are important. In the case of Christianity, the stakes are nothing less than eternity. So once you agree with the medieval Catholic that that's really what's at stake, the behavior makes sense. The primary issue isn't one of "dogma" but of disagreeing with their fundamental premises.

I would wager that most medieval Christians could not follow a medieval Christian theological debate about transubstantiation, and would not alter their behavior at all if they did.

True. So what?

And eventually, Christians came to the consensus that this particular piece of dogma was not worth fighting over.

No, enough of them came to that conclusion that they stopped having large-scale wars of the same type. But note that that conclusion was essentially due to emotional issues (people being sick of it) and the general decline in religiosity which lead to a focus on other disagreements, especially those focusing on ideology or nationalism, and less belief that the issues genuinely mattered. And if one looks one still sees a minority of extremist Catholics and Protestants who think this was a mistake.

Can you think of a decision and action it could impact (I really would like to know an example!)?

Sure. Some people have argued that cryonics makes more sense in an MWI context. So if one is considering signing up that should matter.

I'm not saying it's totally irrelevant or uninteresting, it's just disproportionately touted as a badge of rationalism, and disproportionately argued about

So, I agree that it is disappointingly touted as a badge of rationalism, but that conclusion is for essentially different reasons: I don't think the case for MWI is particularly strong given that we don't have any quantum mechanical version of GR. The reason why MWI makes sense as a badge if you think there's a strong case is because it would demonstrate a severe failing on the part of the physics community, what we normally think of as one of the most rational parts of the scientific community. It also functions as a badge because it shows an ability to accept a counterintuitive result even when that result is not being pushed by some tribal group (although I suspect that much of the belief here in MWI is tribal in the same way that other beliefs end up being tribal affiliation signals for other groups).

This argument can be applied to anything. Automotive knowledge, political knowledge, mathematical knowledge, cosmetics knowledge, fashion knowledge, etc. I think it's great to know things, especially when you actually do need to know them but also when you don't.

Sure. All of those are important. Unfortunately, the universe is big and complicated and life is hard, so you need to prioritize. But that doesn't mean that they are unimportant: it means that there are a lot of important things.

But if some piece of knowledge is unimportant to determining your actions or most of them, I won't privilege it just because it has some cultural or theoretical role in some ideology.

How much of that is that you don't identify with the culture, don't agree with the theory and don't accept the ideology?

I imagine the following:

Suppose 2 movies have been produced, movie A by company A and movie B by company B. Suppose further that these movies target the same audience and are fungible, at least according to a large fraction of the audience. Both movies cost 500 000 dollars to make.

Company A sells tickets for 10 dollars each, and hopes to get at least 100 000 customers in the first week, thereby getting 1000 000 dollars, thus making a net gain of 500 000 dollars.

Company B precommits to selling tickets priced as 10 f(n) dollars, with f(n) defined as 1 / ( 1 + (n-1)/150000 ) , a slowly decreasing function. If they manage to sell 100 000 tickets, they get 766 240 dollars. Note that the first ticket also costs 10 dollars, the same as for company A.

200 000 undecided customers hear about this.

If both movies had been 10 dollars, 100 000 would have gone to see movie A and 100 000 would have seen movie B.

However, now, thanks to B's sublinear pricing, they all decide to see movie B. B gets 1270 000 dollars, A gets nothing.

Wolfram alpha can actually plot this! neat!

Do you think it's a circle?

I can see the " irrationally obstinate and arrogant" bureaucrats and "aggressive conformers" at one junction, and I can see evangelist Eagle Scouts and perfectionist fixers at the other junction.

Steve Jobs seems to be a classic second-junction type.

Christians have murdered each other over transubstantiation vs consubstantiation. Some strands of Libertarianism obsess over physical property. On this forum huge amounts of digital ink are spilled over Many-Worlds Interpretation.

One of these is not the like the others. The first one is killing over something that likely doesn't exist. The others are a bit different from that. The second one is focusing on a coherent ideological issue with policy implications. The third one may have implications for decision theory and related issues. Note by the way that if the medieval Christian's theology is correct then the the first thing really is worth killing over: the risk of people getting it wrong is eternal hellfire. Similarly, if libertarianism in some sense is correct then figuring out what counts as property may be very important. Similar remarks about to MWI. The key issue here seems to be that you disagree with all these people about fundamental premises.

To live a Christian life, it could not matter less what you believe about the Eucharist.

The people in question would have vehemently and in fact violently disagreed. The only way this makes sense is if one adopts a version of Christianity which doesn't focus on the Eucharist, again disagreeing with a fundamental premise at issue. None of the groups in question consider "live a Christian life" to mean be a nice person and believe that Jesus was a swell dude.

You could live your life as if the world were classically Newtonian and everything defying that was magic, and unless you were a physicist it would not affect your life as a rationalist

Or if you did quantum computing, or if you were a chemist, or if you were a biologist, or if you care about understanding and figuring out the Great Filter and related issues, or if you work with GPS, or if you care about nuclear safety and engineering, or if you work with radios, etc. And that's before we look at the more silly problems that can arise from seeing parts of the world as magic, like people using quantum mechanics to justify homeopathy. If quantum mechanics is magic, then this is much easier to fall prey to.

The answers to questions matter.

Politics as entertainment

For many policy questions I normally foresee long term 'obvious' issues that will arise from them. However, I also believe in a Singularity of some sort in that same time frame. And when I re-frame the policy question as will this impact the Singularity or matter after the Singularity the answer is usually no to both.

Of course, there is always the chance of no Singularity but I don't give it much weight.

So my question is: Has anyone successfully moved beyond the policy questions (emotionally)? Follow up question: once you are beyond them do you look at them more as entertainment like which sports team is doing better? Or do you use them for signalling?

One could note that natural markets are going to this direction. For example steam has pretty reliably games appear on sale year or two after their release. Savvy consumers already know to wait if they can. This can get so bad taht early access games hit sales before they are released!

I tired to bring this topic up at a LessWrong meeting I have been calling my thoughts on this direction as "contributionism".

There is some additional even more radical suggestions. Instead of treating at each new sell as lesser amount, retroactively lower the price for already happened purchases (I am pretty sure they dont' mind). Otherwise there is this contention that if two customers are about to buy the product they try to make the other guy buy first so they get the cheaper price (which leads to a mexican standoff that chills selling).

Also normally when a seller and a customer are negotiating for a price seller wants to make it high and the buyer wants it to go low. However if the seller fixes the total amount of money he wants form all of his products then the price negotiation is only about whether the buyers wants to opt in now that it is higher or later when it is lower. However if the price retroactively changes you are "ultimately" going to be spending the same amount of money. If you attach your money early you get earlier access and run the risk that the product never hits high sales numbers (ie that you do not get any returns on it).

However the more people attach money the more the instant price lowers and more money is prone to flow in. This can also be leveraged to overcome a coordination problem. Even if the current instant price too much for you the seller can ask you how much you would honestly be willing to pay for it. (Answering this question too high will not cost you (too much) money). Then when the next customer that doesn't quite have enough buying willingness he might still promise the same level of sum of it. At some point that enough promisers have visited the sum of the promises actually covers for whaqt the seller wants to get for all of his products combined. At this point we can inform the promisers of each others existence - ie that a working sale configuration has been found. This might be a lot of people for a small sum of money each indivudally totalling up to a considereable sum.

Howeer this runs contary to a lot of curretn economical "ethos". Essentially every seller is expected ot try make as much money with the products as possible, there is no sum that is "good enough" that he would settle for. There is also talk of profit motive and letting the pricing game go on is said to make the wheels of the economy run smoothly. However in practise sellers will settle at some price as they think the proabbility of getting more diminishes faster than the gain.

However instead of maximising profits we could set profits to be constant and minimise cost per user. Ie instead of trying to maximse the wealth transfer we try to make the sale happen with as little fuss as possible.

One of the current economys problems is also that advertising and such creates otherwise frivoulous needs that prodeucts can be marketed for. The customer is taken into the decision procees only in what product they choose from the super market self. The decision to build the factory and logistic chain is a money lord with a profit motive trying to be greedy.

However we start from the needs of the customer for example that "I want our village to be educated and I am willing to do 10 hours of work for that end". When you got 100 of these kind of people someone might come suggest aplan to build a school that would take about 150 hours + 50 hours of someone teaching. It turns out that for contrucetion 1.5 hours of work on average is required per villager. Howevver the teacher is doing 50 hours of work when his "fair share" would have only be 1.5 hours. Probably the teacher has other desires beside wanting the village to be educated, the other promise to work on those projects for 48.5 hours. Divided evenly amongs the rest of the 99 willing villagers this amounts to 0.5 hours on those other projects.

That is in this village scenario the customer/investors put in 2 hours of effort 1.5 which most do themself and part is focused on one teacher.

I am interested if anyone wants to talk start-up or similar thingies, or just plainly would be okay purchasing some kind of services in this manner. The most challenge I have faced that people don't like it when a product doesn't cost a fixed amount of money even if they could argue that it's a fixed cost + free money afterwards however it comes back. Also it reminds of a ponzi scheme. However you can never go into a negative price ie you can't profit by buying a product. At most you get the product for (practically) free.

I would like to point out that kick starter uses clever methods in making sure taht the donation amount doesn't degenerate into nothingness. Ie it has perks where you get something when you enough. I am not sure whether being the "not profit making version" of kickstarter is a big enough difference to go compete with such recognised thing. But it has other alluring properties. However it is hard to pitch as a venture capital idea because it is "anti-profit" the most close is that sellign in this way would slightly outcompete with a profit maker because the profit makes has to guess beforehand the price point right to exact digits in order to have similar performance. In practise sales deviate somewhat from projected sales, contributionistic sale is sure to make econimcal sense at whatever scale but a beforehand fixed pricepoint will always live in a slightly uncompatible scale.

Sublinear pricing.

Many products are being sold that have substantial total production costs but very small marginal production costs, e.g. virtually all forms of digital entertainment, software, books (especially digital ones) etc.

Sellers of these products could set the product price such that the price for the (n+1)th instance of the product sold is cheaper than the price for the (n)th instance of the product sold.

They could choose a convergent series such that the total gains converge as the number of products sold grows large (e.g. price for nth item = exp(-n) + marginal costs )

They could choose a divergent series such that the total gains diverge (sublinearly) as the number of products sold grows large (e.g. price for nth item = 1/n + marginal costs )

Certainly, this reduces the total gains, but any seller who does it would outcompete sellers who don't. And yet, it doesn't seem to exist.

True, many sellers do reduce prices after a certain amount of time has passed, and the product is no longer as new or as popular as it once was, but that is a function of time passed, not of items sold.