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Diaspora roundup thread, 15th June 2016
This is a new experimental weekly thread.
Guidelines: Top-level comments here should be links to things written by members of the rationalist community, preferably that would be interesting specifically to this community. Self-promotion is totally fine. Including a very brief summary or excerpt is great, but not required. Generally stick to one link per top-level comment. Recent links are preferred.
Rule: Do not link to anyone who does not want to be linked to. In particular, Scott Alexander has asked people not to link to specific posts on his tumblr. As far as I know he's never rescinded that. Do not link to posts on his tumblr.
(I've mostly only skimmed.)
It can be hard to find good content in the diaspora. Possible solution: Weekly "diaspora roundup" posts to Less Wrong. I'm too busy to do this, but anyone else is more than welcome to (assuming both people reading LW and people in the diaspora want it).
This is what /r/RationalistDiaspora was intended to do. It never really got traction, and is basically dead now, but it still strikes me as a good solution. If that's not going to revive though, I agree that a weekly thread on LW is worth trying. By default, I'll make one later this week. (I'm not currently sure I'll have anything to post in it myself, I'll be asking people to post links in the comments.)
Go tell Scott Alexander you'll build an online forum to his specification, with SSC community feedback, to provide a better solution for his overflowing open threads.
He tried to move people to /r/SlateStarCodex, but that didn't work. We'd want to understand why. (Some hypotheses: it wasn't actually on SSC, where people go directly; posts there don't pop up in their RSS readers; people have an aversion to comment systems with voting; people have an aversion to reddit specifically.)
As Scott features more and more posts, he gains a moderation team full of people who wrote posts that were good enough to feature.
I'm not sure that "writes good posts" and "would make a good moderator" are sufficiently correlated for this to work. A lot of people like Eliezer's writing but dislike his approach to moderation.
(On the other hand: maybe, if we want Eliezers to stick around, we need them to be able to shape the community? Even if that means upsetting people who don't write much.)
It also creates weird incentives, like: "I liked this post that was highly critical of our community, but I don't want the author to be a mod". (This is the problem that Scott Aa points to of "this system can only improve on ordinary democracy if the trust network has some other purpose" - I worry that voting-for-comment-scores isn't a sufficiently strong purpose to outweigh voting-for-moderators.)
Another system to consider would be to do it based on the way people administer votes, not the way they remove them. If your votes tend to correlate with others', they have more weight in future. If posts you flag tend to get removed, your flags count for more. (I'm not convinced that this works either.)
Yes; I hear that he's the second largest donor to MIRI this year, and I've been working with him successfully on esports betting (with half of the proceeds earmarked for MIRI). I don't know if anyone has taken him up on the match offer.
Huh. I would have bet at strong odds against this.
In response to
Open Thread May 23 - May 29, 2016
How do you solve interpersonal problems when neither sides can see themselves as the one in fault?
I've had a a fight with my sister regarding my birthday present. She bought me - boosted with a contribution of my mom and dad - a bunch of clothes. I naturally got mad because: 1. it's a large investment for an unsafe return (my disappointment) 2. I always hated getting clothes for my birthday and the trend haven't changed. I always just asked for money instead.
It has caused a little bit of bitterness. I understand her point of view, which was to make me happy on my birthday but I still can't excuse the invalidity of the function she was using, especially considering that I previously mentioned that I hate clothes for birthday.
What should I do in order to ease the situation? Also, do you think that my reaction was inappropriate?
I talked about this with other people and what people said was 'it's the intention that matters' and that sounds like an excuse (and at this point I'm curious if I actually am looking for criticism or just subconsciously hoping I'll get a bunch of chocolate frogs) so get the best criticism you can give.
Did you offer any suggestions of things she could buy you? Cash doesn't count because mumblereasons. It sounds to me like your sister acted poorly, especially in getting your parents to contribute. But did you make it easy for her to act well?
I too would prefer simply receiving cash, but I've accepted that that's not happening, so I have an Amazon wishlist. It mostly has books and graphic novels. Graphic novels in particular make a good gift for me, because they're often a little more expensive than I'd like to spend on them myself.
(I feel like some people dislike even buying presents from a list, but you can at least suggest categories of things.)
In response to
Open Thread May 23 - May 29, 2016
Any advice on what is the best way to buy index funds and/or individual stocks? Particularly for people in the UK?
I know this has probably been asked before on a 'basic knowledge' thread, but I can't find the answer.
There's this document written by /u/sixes_and_sevens. I used it to set up mine (I'm the one who anti-recommended M&G). I might be able to answer any further questions, but it was a while ago so maybe not.
Isn't that a completely different fallacy?
I took the meaning to be "therefore you think there are some nonsentient things I should be forbidden to eat". I agree that as written the other meaning is a more natural interpretation, but in the context of the rest of the article I think my interpretation is more likely (exactly because otherwise it would involve an entirely different logical error). philh, would you like to confirm or refute?
[EDITED to fix an idiotic mistake: for some reason I thought Elo, not philh, was the author. My apologies to both.]
Yes, that's what I was going for.
The Sally-Anne fallacy
Cross-posted from my blog
I'd like to coin a term. The Sally-Anne fallacy is the mistake of assuming that somone believes something, simply because that thing is true.1
The name comes from the Sally-Anne test, used in developmental psychology to detect theory of mind. Someone who lacks theory of mind will fail the Sally-Anne test, thinking that Sally knows where the marble is. The Sally-Anne fallacy is also a failure of theory of mind.
In internet arguments, this will often come up as part of a chain of reasoning, such as: you think X; X implies Y; therefore you think Y. Or: you support X; X leads to Y; therefore you support Y.2
So for example, we have this complaint about the words "African dialect" used in Age of Ultron. The argument goes: a dialect is a variation on a language, therefore Marvel thinks "African" is a language.
You think "African" has dialects; "has dialects" implies "is a language"; therefore you think "African" is a language.
Or maybe Marvel just doesn't know what a "dialect" is.
This is also a mistake I was pointing at in Fascists and Rakes. You think it's okay to eat tic-tacs; tic-tacs are sentient; therefore you think it's okay to eat sentient things. Versus: you think I should be forbidden from eating tic-tacs; tic-tacs are nonsentient; therefore you think I should be forbidden from eating nonsentient things. No, in both cases the defendant is just wrong about whether tic-tacs are sentient.
Many political conflicts include arguments that look like this. You fight our cause; our cause is the cause of [good thing]; therefore you oppose [good thing]. Sometimes people disagree about what's good, but sometimes they just disagree about how to get there, and think that a cause is harmful to its stated goals. Thus, liberals and libertarians symmetrically accuse each other of not caring about the poor.3
If you want to convince someone to change their mind, it's important to know what they're wrong about. The Sally-Anne fallacy causes us to mistarget our counterarguments, and to mistake potential allies for inevitable enemies.
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From the outside, this looks like "simply because you believe that thing".
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Another possible misunderstanding here, is if you agree that X leads to Y and Y is bad, but still think X is worth it.
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Of course, sometimes people will pretend not to believe the obvious truth so that they can further their dastardly ends. But sometimes they're just wrong. And sometimes they'll be right, and the obvious truth will be untrue.
Polyamory is the whole motivation for polyhacking, I guess, so that "another step" is actually very small.
And polyamory is usually advertised here as an opportunity to have more sexual freedom and be a part of the happy rationalist family. So it seems relevant to note that it may also come with a price, and that even the happy rationalist family is not perfect in avoiding the price.
(My personal opinion is that if you are 20 and you are not planning to have kids during the nearest decade, go poly. There is almost nothing to lose, because the probability of staying with the same partner ten years later is low, so you might as well share them now and get something nice in return. But I predict that as soon as children start getting born, most poly relationships will fall apart.)
I feel like, if someone's interested in polyhacking, they've probably already looked at evidence about whether or not to go poly. It feels somehow off to classify "polyamory, pro or con" as being about polyhacking. For one thing it's easy to find the former, but hard to find the latter, and presenting the former as the latter makes it even harder.
It also comes across as pushing an agenda, though I don't think that was your intent.
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I'm not sure that "interesting specifically to this community" is quite what I'm trying to point at. Taking some of my posts as examples: I want to discourage linking to things like pi.py which might be of general interest to programmers, but not of interest to this community beyond the fact that many of us are programmers. A scream of swifties is more marginal, because swifties feel kind of ingroupy. The sally-anne fallacy is totally relevant.
I'm not sure how to feel about political links.