All of Jess_Riedel's Comments + Replies

Many people within the Boston EA community seem to have come to it post college and through in-person discussions.

Hmm. I haven't spent much time in the area, but I went to the Cambridge, MA LessWrong/Rationality "MegaMeetup" and it was almost exclusively students. Is there a Boston EA community substantially disjoint from this LW/Rationality group that you're talking about?

More generally, are there many historical examples of movements that experience rapid growth on college campuses but then were able to grow strongly elsewhere? Civil righ... (read more)

I mostly disagree with both parts of the sentence "Except that it's much cheaper to convince other people's kids to be generous, and our influence on the adult behavior of our children is not that big." I would argue that

(1) Almost all new EA recruits are converted in college by friends and/or by reading a very small number of writers (e.g. Singer). This is something that cannot be replicated by most adults, who are bad writers and who are not friends with college students. We still need good data on the ability of typical humans to covert... (read more)

The invention of nuclear weapons seems like the overwhelmingly best case study.

1. New threat/power comes from fundamental new scientific insight.
2. Existential risks (nuclear winter, run-away nitrogen fusion in atmosphere).
3. Massive potential effects, both positive and negative (nuclear power for everything, medical treatments, dam building and other manipulation of Earth's crust, space exploration, elimination of war, nuclear war, increased asymmetric warfare, reactor meltdowns, increased stability of dictatorships). Some were realized.
4. Very large first-move

With respect, I've always found the dynamic inconsistency explanation silly. Such an analysis feels like one is forcing, in the face of contradictory evidence, to model human beings as rational agents. In other words, you look at a person's behavior, realize that it doesn't follow a time-invariant utility function, and say "Aha! Their utility function just varies with time, in a manner leading to a temporal conflict of interests!" But given sufficient flexibility in utility function, you can model any behavior as that of a utility-maximizing ... (read more)

I agree with you in general, and would especially like to hear from some LW psychologists. I think this field is pretty new, though, and not heavily dependent on any canon.

I've never heard of willpower depletion....Surely willpower is a long-term stat like CON, not an diminishable resource like HP.

In fact, previous research has shown that it is a lot like HP in many situations. See the citations near the beginning of the article.

Sure, on average it's negative sum. But I have to guess that society as a whole suffers greatly from having many (most?) of its technically skilled citizens at the low end of the social-ability spectrum. The question would be whether you could design a set of institutions in this area which could have a net positive benefit on society. (Probably not something I'll solve on a Saturday afternoon...)

I'm pretty sure this varies state-to-state.

Well, there's three kinds of meetups I can imagine.

(1) You go for the intellectual content of the meeting. This is what I was hoping for in Santa Barbara. For the reasons I mentioned above, I now think it's unlikely that the intellectual content will ever be worthwhile unless somebody does some serious planning/preparation.

(2) You go for the social enjoyment of the meeting. I confirmed my suspicion in SB that I personally wouldn't socially mesh with the LW crowd, although maybe this was a small sample size thing.

(3) You go to meet interesting people. ... (read more)

I suffer from exactly the same thing, but I don't think this what Roko is worring about, is it? He seems to worry about "ugh fields" around important life decisions (or "serious personal problems"), whereas you and I experience them around normal tasks (e.g. responding to emails, tackling stuck work, etc.). The latter may be important tasks -- making this an important motivation/akrasia/efficiency issue -- but it's not a catastrophic/black-swan type risk.

For example, if one had an ugh field around their own death and this prevented th... (read more)

Could you suggest a source for further reading on this?

I attended a meetup in Santa Barbara which I found largely to be a waste of time. The problem there--and I think, frankly, with LW in general--is that there just aren't that many of us with something insightful to say. (I certainly don't have much.) While it's great, I guess, that the participants acknowledge the importance behind some of the ideas championed by Yudkowsky and Hanson, most of us don't have anything to add. Some of us may be experts in other fields, but not in rationality.

Here's the perfect analogy: it's like listening to a bunch of coll... (read more)

What happens at the meetups?

In most books, insurance fraud is morally equivalent to stealing. A deontological moral philosophy might commit you to donating all your disposable income to GiveWell-certified charities while not permitting you to kill yourself for the insurance money. But, yea, utilitarians will have a hard time explaining why they don't do this.

Exactly. If a parent doesn't think cryonics makes sense, then they wouldn't get it for their kids anyways. Eliezer's statement can only criticize parents who get cryonics for themselves but not their children. This is a small group, and I assume it is not the one he was targeting.

Yes, of course it is weak evidence. But I can come up with a dozen examples off the top of my head where powerful organizations did realize important things, so you're examples are very weak evidence that this behavior is the norm. So weak that it can be regarded as negligible.

The existence of historical examples where people in powerful organizations failed to realize important things is not evidence that it is the norm or that it can be counted on with strong confidence.

It's hard to think of a policy which would have a smaller impact on a smaller fraction of the wealthiest population on earth. And it faces extremely dedicated opposition.

I still think that Caplan's position is dumb. It's not so much a question of whether his explanation fits the data (although I think Psychohistorian has shown that in this case it does not), it's that it's just plain weird to characterize the obsessive behavior done by people with OCD as a "preference". I mean, suppose that you were able to modify the explanation you've offered (that OCD people just have high preferences for certainty) in a way that escapes Psychohistorian's criticism. Suppose, for instance, you simply say "OCD people jus... (read more)

I agree that everything you do, you genuinely want to do, in the sense that you're not doing it under duress.

I really think this is a bad way to think about it. Please see my comment elsewhere on this page.

EDIT: Unless of course you just define "genuinely wanting to do something" as anything one does while not under duress. But in that case, what counts as duress?

This is one place where Caplan seems to go off the deep end. I think it illustrates what happens if you take the Cynic's view to the logical conclusion. In his "gun to the head" analogy, Caplan suggests that OCD isn't really a disease! After all, if we put a gun to the head of someone doing (say) repetitive hand washing, we could convince them to stop. Instead, Caplan thinks it's better to just say that the person just really likes doing those repetitive behaviors.

As one commenter points out, this is equivalent to saying a person with a broke... (read more)

Careful. The term "graph theory" is usually used to refer to a specific branch of mathematics which I don't think you're referring to.

I think the problem is much more profound than you suggest. It is not something that rationalists can simply take on with a non-infinitesimal confidence that progress will be made. Certainly not amateur rationalists doing philosophy in their spare time (not that this isn't healthy). I don't mean to say that rationalists should give up, but we have to choose how to act in the meantime.

Personally, I find the situation so desperate that I am prepared to simply assume moral realism when I am deciding how to act, with the knowledge that this assumption is ve... (read more)

I've read it before. Though I have much respect for Eliezer, I think his excursions into moral philosophy are very poor. They show a lack of awareness that all the issues he raises have been hashed out decades or centuries ago at a much higher level by philosophers, both moral realists and otherwise. I'm sure he believes that he brings some new insights, but I would disagree.

Moral skepticism is not particularly impressive as it's the simplest hypothesis. Certainly, it seems extremely hard to square moral realism with our immensely successful scientific picture of a material universe.

The problem is that we still must choose how to act. Without a morality, all we can say is that we prefer to act in some arbitrary way, much as we might arbitrarily prefer one food to another. And...that's it. We can make no criticism whatsoever about the actions of others, not even that they should act rationally. We cannot say that striving ... (read more)

The quotation refers to punitive damages in civil cases. What evidence is there that this phenomenon exists with criminal penalties? (I don't deny that it exists, but it is probably suppressed. That is, criminal penalties are more likely to reflect probability of detection than punitive damages).

For instance, there are road signs in northern Virginia warning of a $10,000 fine for littering. The severity of the fine is surely due to the difficulty in catching someone in the act.

Should we be worried that people will vote stuff up just because it is already popular? There is currently no penalty for voting against the crowd, so wouldn't people (rightly) want to do this?

(Of course, we assume people are voting based on their personal impressions. It's clear that votes bases on Bayesian beliefs are not are useful here.)

Exactly. It seems unlikely that prestigious researchers will be unable to publish their brilliant but unconventional idea because they can't fully utilize their fame to sway editors. In fact, prestigious researchers have exactly what is needed to ensure their idea will take hold if it has merit: job security. They have plenty of time to nurture and develop their idea until it is accepted.

That's exactly the point: voting is supposed to put comments in order according to quality, so that you can read the worthwhile comments in a reasonable time. My claim is that the current voting system will not do this well at all and that a dual voting system will be better. (That second bit is just a guess). The opinion poll information is just a nice side effect.

Yep, what I wrote is just based on my best guess. A usability study would be great.

Also, I am going with the crowd and changing to a user name with an underscore