All of Bruce Lewis's Comments + Replies

The best path forward might be for @DPiepgrass to make a prototype or mockup, borrowing ideas from HowTruthful and then discussing from there.

0DPiepgrass
Another thing: not only is my idea unpopular, it's obvious from vote counts that some people are actively opposed to it. I haven't seen any computational epistemology (or evidence repository) project that is popular on LessWrong, either. Have you seen any? If in fact this sort of thing tends not to interest LessWrongers, I find that deeply disturbing, especially in light of the stereotypes I've seen of "rationalists" on Twitter and EA forum. How right are the stereotypes? I'm starting to wonder.
1DPiepgrass
Ah, this is nice. I was avoiding looking at my notifications for the last 3 months for fear of a reply by Christian Kl, but actually it turned out to be you two :D I cannot work on this project right now because busy I'm earning money to be able to afford to fund it (as I don't see how to make money on it). I have a family of 4+, so this is far from trivial. I've been earning for a couple of years, and I will need a couple more years more. I will leave my thoughts on HowTruthful on one of your posts on it.

This comment is a level 1 lie! (I'm replying to it now with a level 5 lie.)

I don't think 11 needs to be a community value. If someone comes in believing in the supernatural, in cryptozoology, UFOs, P = NP, or other ideas that haven't been scientifically verified, who cares as long as they're interested in changing their way of modeling the world to be more evidence-based?

2mako yass
Yeah, and that's the posture you have to take if you want any sort of growth at all. Inevitably, people who've been on the path for a while will end up converging on weird ideas that aren't intuitive to new members, such as, you know, short timelines and alignment difficulty. New members will always arrive believing things that aren't common in the rest of the community.

Sympathize with them, but also with those affected by them.

I strongly upvoted this post because I believe epistemic empathy is important.

The word "irrational" has too many meanings, and I try to avoid it. And I try to direct criticism at arguments rather than people. But I do want to answer your final question as best I can. I'll just phrase it as problems with arguments rather than people's irrationality.

In my experience, the problem with arguments against COVID-19 vaccines is that they mainly consist of evidence that there's risk involved in getting vaccinated. To usefully argue against getting vaccinated, one n... (read more)

6dr_s
In the most extreme cases they also assume vast conspiracies that I assign a very low prior probability to simply based on "people can't do that sort of thing on that scale without screwing up". Paradoxically enough, very often conspiratorial beliefs assume more rationality and convergent behaviour (from the elites seen as hostile) than is warranted!

Good points are made in other comments about the significance of weakest bonds, but mostly I want to say that I like this post because it's making a clear point with clear reasoning, and was very readable.

6Yitz
Strong agree here, I don't want the author to feel discouraged from posting stuff like this, it was genuinely helpful in at the very least advancing my knowledge base!

Are you really insulating from reality, or from recency bias?

Answer by Bruce Lewis3-2

At the beginning of 2023 I thought Google was a good place to work. I changed my mind after receiving new evidence.

Agreed there's a lot of work ahead in making it engaging.

I define "pro" as anything one might say in defense of a statement, and that includes decomposing it. It can also include disambiguating it. Or citing a source.

Thanks for the well-wishes. Only two paid users so far, but I'm getting very useful feedback and will have a second iteration with key improvements.

My humble opinion is that teachers should make such decisions. From my own education I've come to think that the best education comes from enthusiastic teachers.

I had not heard of Community Notes. Interesting anti-bias technique "notes require agreement between contributors who have sometimes disagreed in their past ratings". https://communitynotes.twitter.com/guide/en/about/introduction

2jacquesthibs
I've been on Twitter for a long time, and there's pretty much unanimous agreement that it works amazingly well in practice!

I got a paying customer on https://en.howtruthful.com/ yesterday. Hopefully more to come.

There's truth in what you're saying. At the same time, I feel like people have an instinctive desire for clarity over riddlespeak. I think it's the same instinct that makes people favor 4k televisions over standard definition. I think it's possible to make a twitter-like medium that discourages hardcoded blind spots.

Do you still think students should learn to analyze conflicts and write about them in a nuanced and researched way? I think answering that question will lead you to the answer to your original question.

1Gesild Muka
Of course and if it were up to me students would do so by studying the War of the Ring by reading and analyzing Tolkien but I don't think that would be as useful for their academic and professional careers as studying current events. The original question is who should make such decisions?

OK so the immune system comment simply meant that since vaccines rely on a system that isn't 100% effective, they can't themselves be 100% effective. It definitely wasn't intended to compare a vaccine-trained immune system to a non-vaccine-trained immune system.

To make a statement more specific, just make the more specific wording a "pro" argument. Because it's something someone might say when arguing for the main statement. I just made a new introductory video today that illustrates this.

I think Bob should be even more direct about what's happening. "I know most of the people who disagree with you on this are thinking of X, Y, and Z. My reasons are different. My opinions on X, Y and Z are largely similar to yours. But I'm concerned about ☈, ♄, and ⚗." I think this approach would do even more than the idea in your last paragraph to make the surprise less jarring for Alice.

I'll be really interested to hear what the 4-year-old says about the stories, especially the 2nd one.

2ChristianKl
It seems like it's not driving the reasoning to the actual empiric cruxes. If you look at "Vaccines are 100% effective at preventing COVID-19 infection, transmission and death" the pro-empiricism reasoning would be to look at clinical trials who didn't find them 100% effective. "Vaccines work via your own immune system and therefore can't be more effective than your own immune system" seems either quite wrong or too vague to be wrong. It's possible for vaccines to lead to the immune system generating antibodies that are more effective than what you get through exposure to the virus.  A lot of the work on mRNA vaccines against the cancer of an individual person falls into that category as does work to create universal flu vaccines.  It seems to me like the framework is lacking ways to make claims more specific. 

I agree that audience score seems to be a better signal than critics score, but neither works consistently.

Answer by Bruce Lewis10

Should that topic be taught in AP history? I don't know.

If so, how? According to the AP history test. My search just now only showed "AP US history", so if that's the AP history in question, it would be in relation to US involvement.

If not, why? Potential good reasons not to discuss the issue, if they are true: It's not related to the test they're preparing for. It's a divisive issue for the students. Divisive issues distract from the goals of the class.

OK so I've laid out the potential pros and cons for discussing Israel-Palestine in an AP class. If you figure out how truthful each pro and con is, then the answer to the original question should be obvious.

1Gesild Muka
Thank you for your answer. I'm not so sure it is a divisive issue for the students, they seem to have little context or interest. If the purpose of AP courses is just to pass the AP test then there's already a lot of pointless materials and discussions, current events are not less relevant by comparison. Or maybe they are? I don't know who should make this decision (I've added this to the question). Before I started teaching I would have thought that at the AP level students should, even briefly, learn to analyze conflicts and write about them in a nuanced and researched way. Now that I'm behind the curtain I see it's mostly up to individual teachers and a quick conversation in the teacher's lounge will often decide what is and isn't taught. It was somewhat alarming. Is it just me?

It's very hard to predict how a previously untried activity will go, since humans adapt to situations they're in, and then adapt to the adaptations of others around them. I'd experiment on this soon with a small group. One possible failure mode would be if people told to talk about "anything they want" jump to topics that don't offer the opportunity to practice either Crocker or reverse-Crocker.

2Screwtape
Yeah, I usually try these posted meetups two or three times before I do the writeup. The Experimental tag exists for when I haven't gotten around to doing that yet. Not having anything unusually direct or nice to say would be a failure mode for this, and one that could be avoided by prompting topics that are more likely to have opportunities. I suspect (though have no direct evidence for this) that the temptation to say "you are just wrong about the Topical Issue of the Day" will arise given what I've seen of LessWrong or Astral Codex Ten meetups, which is where I anticipate these being used. I think it's harder to nudge people into using the affordance Crocker's Rules provide. I'll update once I've run this a few times and found out :)

This is my first comment on LW. I was laid off from my full-time employment on October 27. I am working full-time in November and December on a web site I created for arriving at truth. My employer was kind enough to lay off a lot of my friends together with me, and a few of us have a daily meeting where we talk about our respective projects. One of my friends pointed me here, since she saw a lot of overlap. She was right. What I'm doing is very different from the posts/comments/replies structure you see here on LW and on most online forums, but my goals are very similar to LW's goals. I look forward to bouncing ideas off of this community. I'll have a lengthy post out soon, probably tomorrow.