Overview for atucker - Less Wrong

atucker on Can we dodge the mindkiller?

2013-06-15T20:10:49.272430+10:00

Political instrumental rationality would be about figuring out and taking the political actions that would cause particular goals to happen. Most of this turns out to be telling people compelling things that you know that they don't happen to, and convincing different groups that their interests align (or can align in a particular interest) when it's not obvious that they do.

Political actions are based on appeals to identity, group membership, group bounding, group interests, individual interests, and different political ideas in order to get people to shift allegiances and take action toward a particular goal.

For any given individual, the relative importance of these factors will vary. For questions of identity and affiliation, they will weigh those factors based on meaning being reinforced, and memory-related stuff (i.e. clear memories of meaningful experiences count, but so do not-particularly meaningful but happens every day stuff). For actual action, it will be based on various psychological factors, as well as simply options being available and salient while they have the opportunity to act in a way that reinforces their affiliations/meaning/standing with others in the group/personal interests.

As a result, political instrumental rationality is going to be incredibly contingent on local circumstances -- who talks to who, who believes what how strongly, who's reliable, who controls what, who wants what, who hears about what, etc.

A more object level example takes place in The Wire, when a pastor is setting up various public service programs in an area where drug dealing is effectively legalized.

The pastor himself is able to appeal to his community on the basis of religious solidarity in order to get money, and so he can fund some stuff. He cares about public health and the fate of the now unemployed would-be drug runners who are no longer necessary for drug dealing because of Christian reasons (since drugs are legal, the gang members don't bother with various steps that ensure that none of them can be photographed handing someone drugs for money -- the dealer gets the money then the runner (typically a child) goes to the stash to give the buyer drugs). Further, he knows people from various community/political events in Baltimore.

So far, so good. He controls some resources (money), has a goal (public health, child development), and knows some people.

One of the first people he talks to is a doctor who has been trying to do STD prevention for a while, but hasn't had the funding or organizational capacity to do much of anything. The pastor points out to him that there are a lot of at-risk people who are now concentrated in a particular location so that the logistics of getting services to people is much simpler. In this case, the pastor simply had information (through his connections) that the doctor didn't, and got the doctor to cooperate by pointing out the opportunity to do something that the doctor had wanted.

He gets the support of the police district chief who decided to selectively enforce drug laws by appealing to the police chief's desire for improving the district under his command (he was initially trying to shift drug trafficking away from more populated areas, and decrease violence by decreasing competition over territory), and it more or less worked.

That being said, I have more or less no idea what kinds of large-scale political action ought to be possible/is desirable.

I totally have the intuition though that step one of any plan is to become personally acquainted with people who have some sort of influence over the areas that you're interested in, or to build influence by getting people who have some control over what you're interested in to pay more attention to you. Borderline, if you can't name names, and can't point at groups of people involved in the action, then you can't do anything particularly useful politically.

atucker on Near-Term Risk: Killer Robots a Threat to Freedom and Democracy

2013-06-15T18:51:25.963160+10:00

This distinction is just flying/not-flying.

Offense has an advantage over defense in that defense needs to defend against more possible offensive strategies than offense needs to be capable of doing, and offense only needs one undefended plan in order to succeed.

I suspect that not-flying is a pretty big advantage, even relative to offense/defense. At the very least, moving underground (and doing hydroponics or something for food) makes drones just as offensively helpful as missles. Not flying additionally can have more energy and matter supplying whatever it is that it's doing than flying, which allows for more exotic sensing and destructive capabilities.

atucker on Near-Term Risk: Killer Robots a Threat to Freedom and Democracy

2013-06-15T11:41:10.707419+10:00

Almost certainly, but the point that stationary counter-drones wouldn't necessarily be in a symmetric situation to counter-counter-drones holds. Just swap in a different attack/defense method.

atucker on Near-Term Risk: Killer Robots a Threat to Freedom and Democracy

2013-06-15T09:15:07.024385+10:00

I think that if you used an EMP as a stationary counter-drone you would have an advantage over drones in that most drones need some sort of power/control in order to keep on flying, and so counter-drones would be less portable, but more durable than drones.

atucker on Useful Concepts Repository

2013-06-11T03:50:22.321060+10:00

From off site:

Energy and Focus is more scarce than Time (at least for me), Be Specific (somewhat on site, but whatever),

From on the site:

Mind Projection Fallacy, Illusion of Transparency, Trivial Inconveniences, Goals vs. Roles,

atucker on Research is polygamous! The importance of what you do needn't be proportional to your awesomeness

2013-05-29T05:15:08.199257+10:00

Fair, but at least some component of this working in practice seems to be a status issue. Once we're talking about awesomeness and importance, and the representativeness of a person's awesomeness and the importance of what they're working on, and how different people evaluate importance and awesomeness, it seems decently likely that status will come into play.

atucker on Research is polygamous! The importance of what you do needn't be proportional to your awesomeness

2013-05-29T05:00:39.718141+10:00

Good point, I did summarize a bit fast.

There's two issues at hand, one asserting that you're doing something that's high status within your community, and asserting that your community's goals are more important (and higher status) than the goals of the listener's community.

If there's a large inferential distance in justifying your claims of importance, but the importance is clear, then it's difficult to distinguish you from say, cranks and conspiracy theorists.

(The dialogues are fairly unrealistic, but trying to gesture at the pattern)

A within culture issue:

"I do rocket surgery"

"I'm working on hard Brain Science problem X"

"Doesn't Charlie work on X?"

"Yeah."

"Are you working with Charlie on X?"

"No."

"Isn't Charlie really smart though?"

"Yep."

"Are you saying that you're really smart too?"

"No."

"Why bother?"

Between cultures:

"I do Rocket Surgery".

"That's pretty cool. I'm trying to destroy the One Ring".

"Huh?"

"Basically, I'm trying to destroy the power source for the dark forces that threaten everything anyone holds dear".

"Shouldn't Rocket Brain Surgery Science be able to solve that"?

"No. that's a fundamentally flawed approach on this problem -- the One Ring doesn't have a brain, and you carry it around. If you look at --"

"So you're looking for a MacGuffin?"

"No."

atucker on Research is polygamous! The importance of what you do needn't be proportional to your awesomeness

2013-05-27T11:23:16.592989+10:00

I entirely agree with this point, but suspect that actually following this advice would make people uncomfortable.

Since different occupations/goals have some amount of status associated with them (nonprofits, skilled trades, professions) many people seem to take statements about what you're working on to be status claims in addition to their denotational content.

As a result, working on something "outside of your league" will often sound to a person like you're claiming more status than they would necessarily give you.

atucker on Problems with Academia and the Rising Sea

2013-05-25T10:35:15.022147+10:00

Textbooks replace each other on clarity of explanation as well as adherence to modern standards of notation and concepts.

Maybe just cite the version of an experiment that explains it the best? Replications have a natural advantage because you can write them later when more of the details and relationships are worked out.

atucker on Meetup : London Special Guests: Jaan Tallinn and Michael Vassar of MetaMed

2013-05-06T16:59:41.220063+10:00

If I were in London, or even within an hour or two of it, I would try to go to this.