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This definitely belongs on the next survey!
Why do you read LessWrong? [ ] Rationality improvement [ ] Insight Porn [ ] Geek Social Fuzzies [ ] Self-Help Fuzzies [ ] Self-Help Utilons [ ] I enjoy reading the posts
[ ] Wow, these people are smart. [ ] Wow, these people are dumb. [ ] Wow, these people are freaky. [ ] That's a good way of putting it, I'll remember that.
(For me, it's all of the above. "Insight porn" is probably the biggest, but it doesn't dominate.)
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CFAR in 2014: Continuing to climb out of the startup pit, heading toward a full prototype
Any other fundraisers interesting to LW going on?
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CFAR in 2014: Continuing to climb out of the startup pit, heading toward a full prototype
Electology is an organization dedicated to improving collective decision making — that is, voting. We run on a shoestring; somewhere in the lowish 5 digits $ per year. We've helped get organizations such as the German Pirate Party and the various US stat Libertarian Parties to use approval voting, and gotten bills brought up in several states (no major victories so far, but we're just starting.)
Is a better voting system worth it, even if most people still vote irrationally? I'd say emphatically yes. Plurality voting is just a disaster as a system, filled with pathological results, perverse incentives, and pernicious equilibria. Credible numerical estimates (utility-based simulations) suggest that better systems such as approval voting offer as much improvement again as the move from dictatorship to democracy was.
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CFAR in 2014: Continuing to climb out of the startup pit, heading toward a full prototype
CFAR seems to many of us to be among the efforts most worth investing in. This isn’t because our present workshops are all that great. Rather, it is because, in terms of “saving throws” one can buy for a humanity that may be navigating tricky situations in an unknown future, improvements to thinking skill seem to be one of the strongest and most robust.
Why? You tend to be marketing your workshops to people who've already got significant training in much of Traditional Rationality. In my view, much of the world's irrationality comes from people who have not even heard of the basics or people whose resource constraints do not allow them to apply what they know, or both. In this model, broad improvements in very fundamental, schoolchild-level rationality education and the alleviation of poverty and time poverty are much stronger prospects for improving the world through prevention of Dumb Moves than giving semi-advanced cognitive self-improvement workshops to the Silicon Valley elite.
Mind, if what you're really trying to do is propagandize the kind of worldview that leads to taking MIRI seriously, you rather ought to come out and say that.
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CFAR in 2014: Continuing to climb out of the startup pit, heading toward a full prototype
In terms of “saving throws” one can buy for a humanity that may be navigating tricky situations in an unknown future, improvements to thinking skill seem to be one of the strongest and most robust.
Improvements to collective decision making seem to be potentially an even bigger win. I mean, voting reform; the kind of thing advocated by Electology. Disclaimer: I'm a board member.
Why do I think that? Individual human decisionmaking has already been optimized by evolution. Sure, that optimization doesn't fit perfectly with a modern need for rationality, but it's pretty darn good. However, democratic decisionmaking is basically still using the first system that anybody ever thought of, and monte carlo utility simulations show that we can probably make it at least twice as good (using a random dictator as a baseline).
On the other hand, achieving voting reform requires a critical mass, while individual rationality only requires individuals. And electology is not as far along in organizational growth as CFAR. But it seems to me that it's a complementary idea, and that it would be reasonable for an effective altruist to diversify their "saving throw" contributions. (We would also welcome rationalist board members or volunteers.)
In response to
CFAR in 2014: Continuing to climb out of the startup pit, heading toward a full prototype
One idea for measurement in a randomized trial:
In order to apply, you have to list 4 people who would definitely know how awesome you're being a year from now, and give their contact info. Then, choose 1 of those people 6 months later and 1 person a year later and ask them how awesome the person is being. When you ask, include a "rubric" of various stories of various awesomeness levels, in which the highest levels are not always just $$$ but sometimes are. Ask the people you're asking to please not contact the person specifically to check awesomeness, because that could introduce bias ("this person is checking, that makes me remember the workshop I did, and feel awesome").
The 4 people should probably include no couples. Your family, long-term friends...
The one way this breaks down is facebook. I mean, if your interaction with each person is separate, and the workshop makes you seem more awesome to each of 4 people, it is working. But if it just makes you post more upbeat things on Facebook, that might not translate to actual awesomeness. But I think that's a really minor factor.
Sure, it's gonna be a noisy and imperfect measurement. You will have to look at standard deviations and calculate power (including burning all 4 contacts for some people to see the within-subject variance). Also, correct for demographic info on contacts, and various other tricks to increase power. But one way or another, you'll get a posterior distribution of the causal impact.
I think you've misunderstood the question. As I understand it, it's not "is the distribution of startup values a power law" but "do startups distribute their profits to employees according to a power law".
In response to
The Importance of Sidekicks
I can't help to notice that this may be a gender-correlated personality trait:
All the people you cite that gave you positive advice about being a sidekick are female. In a community which is almost 90% male this seems pretty difficult to get by chance.
You're a nurse, a typically (~90%) female job. Nurses are natural sidekicks to doctors.
I suppose that the fixation for being a hero of the LW community that makes you feel out of place may be the result of it's mostly young male demographic. Maybe young male nerds are particularly prone to that, since they grow up fantasizing about being Frodo or Luke Skywalker or Harry Potter, and they have an inflated ego due to the "smartest kid in class" effect.
Maybe female nerds are more oriented towards the sidekick role because they are more likely to be biologically programmed to attach themselves to an alpha male rather than seeking dominance/leadership roles for themselves, or maybe females are just more realistic than males about the actual chances of becoming the hero who "saves the world" because they have less testosterone-fuelled hubris of the youth.
Wish I could both up- and down- vote this comment. +1 for interesting, cogent observation; -1 for followinng that up with facile beakering. So instead I upvoted this comment and downvoted your reply below ( which deserves the downvote in its own right)
(I just made up the word "beakering". It means doing TV science, with beakers and bafflegab, in real life. A lot of amateur evo-something and neuro-something involve beakering.)
Interesting technique, I'll need to remember that.
Reminds me of the several times I've thought I've disagreed with Eliezer on various issues here, spent a while understanding my objections so I could detail it in a reply, and ended up convincing myself of his orignal position by the time I finished writing.
Would be better if you didn't say whom you ended up agreeing with. Most people here have either a halo or horns on Eliezer, and discounting that is distracting.
Study: In giving charity, let not your right hand...
So, here's the study¹:
It's veterans' day in Canada. As any good Canadian knows, you're supposed to wear a poppy to show you support the veterans (it has something to do with Flanders Field). As people enter a concourse on the university, a person there does one of three things: gives them a poppy to wear on their clothes; gives them an envelope to carry and tells them (truthfully) that there's a poppy inside; or gives them nothing. Then, after they've crossed the concourse, another person asks them if they want to put donations in a box to support Canadian war veterans.
Who do you think gives the most?
...
If you guessed that it's the people who got the poppy inside the envelope, you're right. 78% of them gave, for an overall average donation of $0.86. That compares to 58% of the people wearing the poppy, for an average donation of $0.34; and 56% of those with no poppy, for an average of $0.15.
Why did the envelope holders give the most? Unlike the no-poppy group, they had been reminded of the expectation of supporting veterans; but unlike the poppy-wearers, they hadn't been given an easy, cost-free means of demonstrating their support.
I think this research has obvious applications, both to fundraising and to self-hacking. It also validates the bible quote (Matthew 6:3) which is the title of this article.
¹ The Nature of Slacktivism: How the Social Observability of an Initial Act of Token Support Affects Subsequent Prosocial Action; K Kristofferson, K White, J Peloza - Journal of Consumer Research, 2014
Perhaps I phrased my template too formally. Though as I search for examples, I notice that different uses of the word "guy" would require various replacements ("person," "someone," or "the one") in order to sound natural.
Really, I begin to think it would be simpler to alter our culture so that nobody expects "guy" to imply "male".
That's simpler to say, but not at all simpler to do.
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The first three words here are in contradiction with the last three words... :-/
I presume you're saying that utility-based simulations are not credible. I don't think you're actually trying to say that they're not numerical estimates. So let me explain what I'm talking about, then say what parts I'm claiming are "credible".
I'm talking about monte-carlo simulations of voter satisfaction efficiency. You use some statistical model to generate thousands of electorates (that is, voters with numeric utilities for candidates); a media model to give the voters information about each other; and a strategy model to turn information, utilities, and choice of voting system into valid ballots for that voting system. Then, you see who wins each time, and calculate the average overall utility of that winners. Clearly, there are a lot of questionable assumptions in terms of the statistical, media, and strategy models, but the interesting thing is that exploring various assumptions in all of those cases shows that the (plurality-dictatorship)≈(good system-plurality) equation is pretty robust, with various systems such as approval, condorcet, majority judgment, score, or SODA in place of "good system".
There are certainly various ways to criticize the above.
"Don't believe it": If you think that I've messed up my math or not done a good job with the sensitivity analysis, of course you'd question my conclusions. But if you want to play with my code to check it, it's here.
"Utilitarianism is a bad metric": It may not be perfect, but as far as I can tell it's the only rational way to put numbers on things.
"Democracy is a bad idea": In other words, if you think that the average voter's estimate of their utility for a candidate has 0 or negative correlation with their true utility of that candidate winning, then this simulation is garbage. I'd respond with the old saying about democracy being the worst system except all the others.
"The advantages of democracy over dictatorship aren't in terms of who's in charge": if you think that democracy's clear superiority to dictatorship in terms of human welfare comes from something other than choosing better leaders (such as, for instance, reducing the prevalence of civil wars), then improving the voting system might not be able to have comparable payoff as instituting a voting system to begin with. I'd respond that this critique is probably partially right, but on the other hand, better leadership could credibly have better responses to crises (financial, environmental, and/or existential-risk) which could indeed be on the same order as the democracy dividend.
All in all, taking a more outside view, I see how the combination of the above objections would reduce your estimate of the expected "voting system dividend". Still, when I "shut up and multiply" I get: $80 trillion world GDP * plausible (conservative) effect size in a good year of 2% * .1 plausible portion of good years over time * .5 plausible portion of good years over space (some country's economies might already be immune to the kind of harm this could prevent) * .5 chance you trust my simulations * .1 correlation of voter preference with utility * .5 probability leadership makes any difference = about $2 billion/year potential payoff in expected value, even without compounding. That seems to me like (a) quite a conservative choice of factors, (b) not a totally implausible end result, and (c) still big enough to care about. Of course, it's incredibly back-of-the-envelope, but I invite you to try doing the estimation yourself.