Because otherwise you are at risk of being obnoxiously rude, and you are likely to be wrong.

I think norms of conversation that prevent honest communication by labeling it as rude are not useful for discussions that are about learning about the world. You should express different beliefs because your beliefs are rude kills an atmosphere of learning.

Of course managing the resulting emotions with empathy is something that's much easier in person and it might very well prevent anything positive to happen in this online conversation.

I'm afraid you are still failing to be clear. (Whether the problem is that you aren't expressing yourself clearly, or that you aren't thinking clearly, I don't know.)

The problem is that I'm refering to concepts that are likely not in your map. I know that various people have taken months of in person teaching to get the concepts to which I'm refering, so it's not suprising to me that the ideas don't feel clear to you. If what I'm saying what feel clear to you, you would ignore what I'm saying. Successfully pointing somewhere that's outside of your present map feels inherently unclear. For me it's a success that you don't feel like I'm meaning of those those things that are inside your map.

Whether I'd call any of the possibilities 'perceiving the sound of silence', I don't know; would you care to say more about what you mean by that?"

At one of the meditations I lead in an LW context I made the point to focus on perception of silence as something besides simply absence of sound. Afterwards I checked with the person in the room where I was predicting that they least likely got something from the experience and they did experience a silence that was distinct from the absence of sound.

It's no big shiny effect, but I would suspect that many committed naturalists think silence = absence of sound and any suggestion that it isn't is emitting deep-sounding word salad. The person developed a new phenomological category for listening to silence that's distinct from not hearing sounds.

Now, that's an experience I gave the person in a 20 minute meditation and it wasn't the only thing I did in that 20 minutes. In multiple days, especially with a teacher that has more skill than I have at the moment, more new experiences are possible.

I have noticed a contrarian position on the whole minimum wage thing. One that advocates buying from sweatshops, because they say "at least those people working in the sweatshops aren't homeless".

Possible solution to the whole minimum wage thing: model the thing as a math problem where you minimize the cost to taxpayers? Like, if (current minimum wage * current number of jobs) - (hypothetical minimum wage * resulting number of jobs) < 0, then the taxpayers would want to switch to the hypothetical minimum wage.

And to keep experimentation in that from being too harmful to people who have jobs, a possible solution: a limited number of sweatshops, where there is no minimum wage. The limited number is important, so that it doesn't become a viable option for companies like Walmart to start their own sweatshops and flood the market with jobs, contaminating the experimental results.

Actually a sort of "sweatshop fallback net" might be a good idea.

I see. I guess I am having trouble following your conclusions from your premises.

Walmart is in a low-margin business and it employs unskilled labor, so naturally they put as much squeeze on the wages as they can get away with. I don't see anything immoral about it, it's just business. Corporations are well known to behave like psychopaths.

There is a 100 year-old solution to this issue, it is called organized labor. While unions are out of place in many other industries, Walmart is a perfect target for unionizing, since individual workers have zero leverage against the company, while a union can fight for reasonable wages and benefits. Same applies to Amazon warehouses, by the way. So, an alternative to increase in mandatory minimum wage (which ought to be increased, by the way, in the US it is currently lower in inflation-adjusted dollars than it was 30 years ago) and to a guaranteed basic income (which shifts the burden of paying the Walmart employees from the shareholders and the customers to everyone and adds some unnecessary overhead) is to enact policies making it easier to unionize unskilled labor.

Interesting reading, although I'm always leery of relying on a single meta-analysis of a politically charged subject.

My first reference above was more of a "meta-meta-analysis" since it surveys the results of several meta-analyses! At a high level, it is going to be quite difficult to argue that there really is a big impact on employment, but somehow all the analyses and meta-analyses have missed it. As I said, I found it surprising, but this is the full evidence base.

For the sake of argument, though, let's take it as given that increasing the minimum wage has no or only a small effect on employment rates. Where's the money coming from, and what would we expect that to do to the economy?

This is the main question addressed by the Schmitt paper. To quote the exec summary.

"The report reviews evidence on eleven possible adjustments to minimum-wage increases that may help to explain why the measured employment effects are so consistently small. The strongest evidence suggests that the most important channels of adjustment are: reductions in labor turnover; improvements in organizational efficiency; reductions in wages of higher earners ("wage compression"); and small price increases."

One of the other hypotheses considered was a reduction in profits (which is what the toy model would suggest: the low-wage "Job 1" maximizes profits rather than productivity, and moving to "Job 2" increases productivity but lowers profits). However, Schmitt found not many studies and not much evidence of this, except in the UK following introduction of the minimum wage from nothing. Again, I found that very surprising: if anyone is losing out by paying the minimum wage, you would expect it to be the Walmarts of the world. But not so, apparently.

The goal seems to be to construct a plausible entity such that, if Pascal's Wager is applied to this entity rather than to the Christian deity, it becomes an argument for atheism rather than Christianity—thus refuting the Wager by reductio ad absurdum. The payload is the first two sentences; the rest is just elaboration on the fact that knowledge about Athe would be an infohazard if taken seriously.

hen you get to live in that richer system and enjoy the benefits. Your quality of life is better when you live somewhere with reliable electricity, uncensored internet, and trivial access to potable water, right?

The "uncensored internet" part is going to be hard for places like UK and Australia, but anyway, you seem to be arguing that it is the propensity for charity (or altruism) which drives economic progress. Charitable populations live in rich systems and uncharitable ones continue to wallow in poverty. That's an... interesting viewpoint. Are you sure you thought it through?

but it's easier for everyone to agree on

That doesn't seem to be true at all.

so just go ahead and solve all of them

Do you? Or you are so unfocused you solve none of them?

In the U.S., what happens to people who cannot survive without assistance (like people without the dexterity to feed themselves, or even people without the ability to keep a job or fill out paperwork) who do not have a family or the means to trade for help? What, physically, keeps them from starving to death?

Is it useful to think about the difference between 'physically possible' i.e. obeying the laws of physics and possible to engineer? In computer science there is something like this. You have things which can't be done on a turing machine (e.g. halting problem). But then you have things which we may never be able to arrange the atoms in the universe to do, such as large cases of NP-hard problems.

So what about in physics? I have seen the argument that if we set loose a paperclip maximizer on earth, then we might doom the rest of the observable universe. But maybe there is simply no sequence of steps that even a super brilliant AI could take to arrange matter in such a way as to say move 1000kg at 98% the speed of light. Anyway, I am curious if this kind of thinking is developed somewhere.

How does a rationalist determine the value of helping other people they don't know, i.e. why is QALY something worth maximizing? Is it an efficient and sustainable way of improving one's own quality of life because (a) humans have empathy built-in and (b) philanthropy is a socially rewarded meme?

Really? Perhaps I should reread at least some of Atlas Shrugged from that angle, but I don't see how wanting to run a railroad competently can be read as villianous.