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Why wasn't slavery outlawed quickly after the US started? I would expect the free non-slaveholders would vote against slavery, since they wouldn't want to compete with slaves, and they'd outnumber the slaveholders.
In response to
Open Thread, October 1-15, 2012
How are you imagining the US government enforcing the abolition of slavery ca. 1800? Even in a much stronger relative position ca. 1865, it was extremely costly to do so. There was fair less abolitionist sentiment in earlier decades, and in relative terms, the federal government was far weaker and the southern elites far stronger. Attempting to outlaw slavery "quickly after the US started" (I'm assuming a window from about 1790-1810, please correct me if I mis-guestimated) would have been an act of suicide by the central government.
I'm afraid of the acceptance and approval of low quality comments, irrespective of the positions they express.
I am not calling you a liar, because I accept that you are sincere, but I don't believe you. The claim that you determine the quality of comments without regard to the positions they express is outlandish, for at least two reasons. One, that you are human, and therefore subject to the same biases as every other human known to have ever existed, meaning that you will inevitably tend to appraise posts that agree with your views more favorably than those that disagree. Two, that if you aren't judging comments' quality by the positions they express, there's little of substance left by which you could judge them. The vast majority of comments and posts are neither formal nor rigorous enough for their reasoning, when considered solely on the comments' own merits, to hold up to any serious scrutiny. So that leaves presentation, and...?
If I really do have preferences in the achievable sections of policyspace, there are things I should do, right?
Of course you should! But you should be rational about it. Try to do things that give you more than a nanoslice of power.
There's no Omega, so why not take the nanoslice of power that's readily available, in addition to whatever you can get by trying for more? It appears to me that doing both maximizes the expected payoff in all probable contexts.
If a non-negligible number of people upvote comments expressing negative opinions of Eliezer Yudkowsky or the Sequences, what leads you to the conclusion that the best response is to label these comments "slander" and cast for roundabout ways to suppress them? If you want an echo-chamber (a reasonable thing to want), that can be easily and non-disingenuously accomplished, for instance by making it explicit policy that disagreement with local authority figures is not permitted.
Well, I don't do that, clearly, since I don't run such an Internet forum.
Less trivially, though... yeah, I suspect I would do so. The tendency to take more seriously people whose faces I can see is pretty strong. Especially if it were a case like this one, where what the RL people are telling me synchronizes better with what I want to do in the first place, and thus gives me a plausible-feeling justification for doing it.
I suspect you're not really asking me what I do, though, so much as implicitly suggesting that what EY is doing is the wrong thing to do... that the admins ought to attend more to commenters and voters who are actually participating on the thread, rather than attending primarily to the folks who attend the minicamp or Alicorn's dinner parties.
If so, I don't think it's that simple. Fundamentally it depends on whether LW's sponsors want it to be a forum that demonstrates and teaches superior Internet discourse or whether it wants to be a forum for people interested in rational thinking to discuss stuff they like to discuss. If it's the latter, then democracy is appropriate. If it's the former, then purging stuff that fails to demonstrate superior Internet discourse is appropriate.
LW has seemed uncertain about which role it is playing for as long as I've been here.
LW has seemed uncertain about which role it is playing for as long as I've been here.
Yes, that's certainly the single largest problem. If the LW moderators decided on their goals for the site, and committed to a plan for achieving those goals, the meta-tedium would be significantly reduced. The way it's currently being done, there's too much risk of overlap between run of the mill moderation squabbles and the pernicious Eliezer Yudkowsky cult/anticult squabbles.
At this point you're just using pedantry to dismiss the very concept of hypothetical questions. The question is simple: What option you would take with the mentioned choices at hand as a given situation: Whether you'd prefer the certainty of 500 dollars or a 15% chance at 1 million.
As simple as that. You really don't have to estimate how unlikely you're to be given this option in reality. That's why it's called a "hypothetical" question.
And the question is likewise not about what you would do if you were in danger of starving to death. Just what you would do. You're free to offer a conditional response (e.g. "I'd choose the 15% chance at a million, except if I was dead broke and in danger of immediate starvation), but just claiming that all possible responses are equally valid, regardless of conditions, just won't fly.
I'm tapping out.
If you're going to tap out, fair enough, but don't do it after a three paragraph response. That's just a chickenshit way of trying to have the last word.
first $500 almost certainly has greater marginal utility than the second, and possibly more than the next 1,999 put together.
Sure, if they're to starve (or freeze to death) within the month if not for this money, then certainly: accepting the bet would then become a 85% chance of death vs a 15% chance at a million. And rejecting a 85% chance of death is reasonable, even in the face of a 15% chance at a million.
But relatively very few of the people offered the choice would really be so much in need. There's no point in finding ways to excuse simple irrationality by bringing in extreme scenarios that would justify it in some implausible cases....
Simple irrationality would be taking the implausible scenario both seriously and at face value. A priori, the likelihood of someone honestly offering you money for nothing is extremely low, as is the likelihood that they even have a million dollars to give away. If you don't take the scenario seriously, it's just a case of guessing the teacher's password. If you do take it seriously, it would not be rational in most contexts take the offer at face value, in which case "$500 now" has about as a good an expected pay-off as any, and at least provides guaranteed evidence of the offer's legitimacy.
I've only ever seen one case of a man who'd previously had a rationalist mate going back to nonrationalist mates afterward. The reason why the gender skew of our culture is a mating problem for men is that once you go rationalist you don't go back.
"Go to the physics department, find a woman you consider attractive, point her at HPMOR, and see if anything develops" sounds like more useful advice to me.
For (straight) men who insist on dating externally, asking a woman whether she would prefer a certainty of $500 or a 15% chance at $1 million seems likely to be a surprisingly good filter on potential mates. I didn't believe it either as first, but I've verified that many women, and in at least one case a female grad-student doing advanced math homework, says she would rather have the $500; while every woman I've tested inside our community - regardless of her math/science/economics level or her ability to talk glibly about explicit rationality - takes the 15% chance at $1M with a puzzled look and 'Is this a trick question?'
If you really need the $500, why throw that away for a one-off, low odds chance for more? The first $500 almost certainly has greater marginal utility than the second, and possibly more than the next 1,999 put together. And that's assuming the offer is totally legit, which is not very rational.
What about 'gals'? While it's technically just a form of "girls", it's used contextually similarly to "guys".
Only when it's used at all, which is far less often than 'guys'. Yes, it's true that it's a distaff counterpart to 'guys', but so is 'dolls', and would you seriously propose unironic usage of 'dolls'?
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The crusades are often portrayed as violent Christians invading Muslim lands, which forgets that the Muslims violently took those lands from Christians in the first place.
On the other hand, no one complains that the battle of Normandy consisted of violent democracies attacking the lands of the Third Reich.
There probably would be people complaining if D-Day had occurred four centuries after the fall of France.