[Survey Taken Thread]

By ancient tradition, if you take the survey you may comment saying you have done so here, and people will upvote you and you will get karma.

Let's make these comments a reply to this post. That way we continue the tradition, but keep the discussion a bit cleaner.

The history of the shuttle is a typical example of a generic problem that occurs frequently in the development of science and technology, the problem of premature choice. Premature choice means betting all your money on one horse before you have found out whether she is lame. Politicians and administrators responsible for large project are often obsessed with avoiding waste. To avoid waste they find it reasonable to choose one design as soon as possible and shut down the support of alternatives. ... The evolution of science and technology is a Darwinian process of the survival of the fittest. In science and technology, as in biological evolution, waste is the secret of efficiency. Without waste you cannot find out which horse is the fittest. This is a hard lesson for politicians and administrators to learn.

Freeman Dyson, From Eros to Gaia

"For example, I wonder if a person over the age of twenty who likes robot anime is really happy. He could find greater happiness elsewhere. Regrettably, I have my doubts about his happiness."

--Hideaki Anno, "Skill Up"; ("From Newtype, April 4, p. 4, article entitled 'Skill Up'." Interview ~April 1995)

Now I feel like every group that tries to do something faces a trilemma:

1) Deny your weakness. Leads to irrationality.

2) Admit your weakness. Leads to low status, and then opposition from outsiders.

3) Deny your weakness publicly, only admit them among trusted members. Leads to cultishness.

How important is trying to personally live longer for decreasing existential risk? IMO, It seems that most risk of existential catastrophes occurs sooner rather than later, so I doubt living much longer is extremely important. For example, Wikipedia says that a study at the Singularity Summit found that the median date for the singularity occurring is 2040, and one personal gave 80% confidence intervals from 5 - 100 years. Nanotechnology seems to be predicted to come sooner rather than later as well. What does everyone else think?

That first link strikes me as not extremely scary, and it seems to be a rant rather than a threat which was sent to someone in particular. Furthermore, it doesn't have specific details about injuries and degradation. It isn't a photoshopped image of the person being threatened, either.

Gamergate is hopelessly weird-- as you may know, the initial post was basically a man talking about having been emotionally abused by a woman, with only a minor mention of games and journalism, and it morphed into something completely different.

As far as I can tell, SJWs consider themselves to be part of feminism and/or the one true feminism. I haven't seen a claim anywhere that they aren't feminists, and at least one suggestion that there's no point is saying that they aren't feminists, even if they're wrong-headed.

It wouldn't surprise me if a lot of moderate feminists (like most people) aren't engaging with SJs because that looks like a lot of work and no fun.

I'm not saying "result" but system. The US constitution got written after the US got independent and not before.

several post-Soviet states (if you count leaving the USSR as a revolution)

Some countries of the USSR did copy the Western style of democracy and free markets. They could do that by letting other countries send people to tell them how to run their country. They didn't do that because they themselves knew how to create a democratic state with free markets.

This is trivially true if you mean that no revolution produced the desired result up to the end of time. But then, the same is true of anything any human being does.

If my project is to lock my apartment with my key, then I can be quite certain that the result with look roughly like I plan beforehand. The bigger the project the harder it is to plan everything beforehand.

As a result big software projects get these days not fully planned in advance via waterfall but get created in an agile way. Creating a substantial new political system as opposed to just copy some existing one, is much more complex than a software project and therefore even less doable via waterfall.

I at least somewhat disagree with this. Weirdness is not a reliable measure of truth; in fact, I'd argue that it may even slightly anti-correlate with truth (but only slightly--it's not like it anti-correlates so well that you'd be able to get a good picture of reality out of it by reversing it, mind you). After all, not every change is an improvement, but every improvement is a change. Every position that seems like common sense to us nowadays was once considered "weird" or "unusual". So yeah, dismissing positions on the basis of weirdness alone doesn't seem like that great of an idea; see the absurdity heuristic for further details.

Also, people often have reasons for discrediting things outside of striving for epistemic accuracy. Good people/causes can often be cast in a bad light by anyone who doesn't like them; for instance*, RationalWiki's article on Eliezer makes him so weird-sounding as to be absolutely cringeworthy to anyone who actually knows him, and yet plenty of people might read it and be turned off by the claims, just like they're turned off from stuff like Time Cube.

*It is not my intention to start a flame-war or to cause a thread derailment by bringing up RW. I am aware that this sort of thing happens semi-frequently on LW, which is why I am stating my intentions here in advance. I would ask that anyone replying to this comment not stray too far from the main point, and in particular please do not bring up any RW vendettas. I am not a moderator, so obviously I have no power to enforce this request, but I do think that my request would prevent any derailment or hostility if acceded to. Thank you.

It might be worth emphasizing the difference between persuading people and being right. The kind of people who care about weirdness points are seldom the ones contributing good new data to any question of fact, nor those posing the best reasoning for judgments of value. I appreciate the impulse to try to convince people of things, but convincing people is extremely hard. I'm not Noam Chomsky; therefore, I have other things to do aside from thinking and arguing with people. And if I have to do one of those two worse in order to save time, I choose to dump the 'convince people' stat and load up on clear thinking.

It's not that it has no marginal benefit, it's that it has diminishing marginal benefit for the effort spent. At some point, you're better off working on another class's assignment instead. At some point you're better off taking leisure time, or even sleeping. If even people with a good understanding are only expected to get 50% correct, how are you supposed to know when you're better off going to sleep, only knowing that you've completed 50% and not knowing whether the extra 5% from sacrificing some sleep is worth it?