One thing that I typically get out of holidays is having experiences associated with my interests that I would otherwise not be able to have. For example: musicals on Broadway typically have more talented casts than musicals elsewhere in the United States; looking at artwork in person is generally more emotionally moving for me than looking at it online; I met some famous people, watched interesting panels, and went shopping at WorldCon; and Disneyland has rides and the opportunity to interact with costumed characters.
I assume if you had interests such th...
You can do an encouragement design similar to what was done in Belarus by randomizing some hospitals to adopt breastfeeding-friendly policies and some to not adopt them. Unfortunately, since not all parents in a breastfeeding-friendly hospital will breastfeed and not all parents in a control hospital will use formula, and since you're randomizing at the hospital level, your sample size has to be huge to detect any effect. And because many of the outcome variables you're interested in are long-term (IQ age seven, for example), you have to follow p...
I really really enjoyed reading this blog post. Your thoughts about privileging the future were new to me, and I think that's a really insightful way of looking at it.
In my experience, quarantine channels are a good choice if some participants want a particular kind of content, and it's agreed to be appropriate for the community, but not everyone wants to view it. For example, a writing discord I participate in has several NSFW channels. It's agreed upon that some people might want to write and talk about writing NSFW things, and that other people don't want to view NSFW content (because of age, religion, personal preference, etc.). I think it's a bad idea to create a quarantine channel for content that is actually inappropriate for the community: for example, I banned religion as a topic in my parenting discord, instead of creating a religion channel.
"I normally have little regard for trigger warnings, but on this occasion, imagine that my words are prefaced with every trigger warning ever" is a very unhelpful warning. Taken literally, it implies you are warning for diet talk, pictures of spiders, sudden loud noises, people's faces, flashing gifs, sex, curse words, and a detailed description of how to commit suicide; zero of these things are in your piece. In general, I think trigger warnings should have a brief and non-vivid description of the potentially triggering content, in order to...
That's not a proxy for suffering; it is caring about more than just suffering. You might oppose making animals' brains smaller because it also reduces their ability to feel pleasure, and you value pleasure in addition to pain. You might oppose amputating non-essential body parts because that reduces the animal's capacity for pleasurable experiences of the sort the species tends to experience. You might oppose breeding animals that enjoy pain because of the predictable injuries and shorter lifespan that would result: physical health and fitne...
That's not a proxy for suffering; it is caring about more than just suffering
Yes, I agree with all that! I am not advocating that one approach is right and all the others are wrong. I have no prescriptive intentions about animals. I am advocating being honest with oneself about your preferences. If you proclaim to care about the reduction of animal suffering yet really care about many other metrics just as much, spend time reflecting on what your real values are, instead of doing motte-and-bailey when pressed. (This is a generic "you", not you personally.)
I think you have failed to address the issue of why these solutions are acceptable for chickens and not for humans. The obvious explanation for why people disagree with you on this point is not that they don't care about animal suffering, any more than people who don't want to amputate the non-essential body parts that might give humans discomfort later in life don't care about human suffering. It is that they think those actions are unethical for animals, just like they are for humans.
This seems like an irrelevant objection, given that the OP is explicitly arguing about a conditional (IF mundane improvements in factory farming is a good intervention point for aggregate welfare reasons, THEN wireheading chickens is an even better intervention on those grounds), not unconditionally favoring the latter policy over the former.
For EA to make any sense at all as a way of organizing to do good, it needs to be able to clearly distinguish a rank-ordering of interventions on the basis of merit in a strictly utilitarian or other aggregative analys...
Excellent post! Your explanations were interesting and intuitive for me, even though I don't know much of anything about computer science.
I'm not sure that it makes sense, at our current level of knowledge of scrupulosity, to declare that anything is "the" cause of scrupulosity. I have no doubt that what you say is *a* cause of scrupulosity, but the term is deliberately quite broad. For example, clinical OCD can cause scrupulosity, but that's not related to internalized "shoulds", it's related to the mind's tendency to obsessively think about things it's trying not to think about.
I realize there are constraints because of when the summer solstice actually is, but this overlaps with Pride, which lots of rationalists (including me) probably want to go to. SF Pride is consistently the last weekend in June, and I am going to be pretty annoyed if I have to choose between Pride and Summer Solstice every year.
Dropping the metaphor because it's tedious to write around--
It is difficult to square men being harmed by seeing scantily clad women with the popularity of strip clubs, softcore porn, cheerleaders, Game of Thrones, etc. It's one thing to argue that men aren't aware that they're being harmed, and quite another to argue that they are deliberately seeking out something that harms them.
I think a useful point of comparison is evangelical modesty culture, which does have a real "there is no way to win" problem.
I do think it's...
Some apple eaters enjoy apple brandishing and, in fact, some are willing to pay money and commit crimes for the privilege of viewing it.
Based on evidence from other societies and subcultures, it is very likely that if apple holders stopped the behavior currently considered to be apple brandishing, apple eaters would merely feel taunted by something else. In some cultures, in fact, even the shadow of a leaf is considered to be taunting, while in others green apples are carried openly and only red apples are concealed, and apple eaters consider it laughable...
FWIW, as a suicidal person, I found an emphasis on personal growth to be tremendously important in my recovery from suicidality. It was important to have the idea that my suicidality *could* change, and that it wasn't going to change if I sat on my butt and waited for someone else to magically fix it for me. I have no doubt that there is variation in how useful memes around personal growth are for different people, but I really don't think status and amount of suffering are the axes on which it differs.
Politeness is often useful instrumentally in order to communicate efficiently.
I attempted to describe the central examples of a similarity cluster; not everything in a similarity cluster will have all the traits associated with that cluster. ("Ten fingers" is part of the human similarity cluster, but some humans have nine fingers.)
It might be silly to have a "I don't eat yellow food" diet, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't have the concept of yellow. Indeed, I would argue that there are far more concepts that do not provide good diet advice than concepts which do.
One polite way to respond to people using words you prefer they not use is "[Word] upsets me for [Reason], can you use [Replacement Word] instead?" If they can't (because they're not a native English speaker, or they have a linguistic disability, or they are chronically sleep deprived, to name just three of the reasons that word replacement can be impossible), then you have to judge how important not being around people who use Word is for you.
You could also consider asking what they mean if you don't know what they mean. My rough ...
I feel like the example for "loading definitions" does, in fact, strike a word from my vocabulary without suitable replacement. I would like a word for "the aspects of masculinity that are bad"; in order to prevent the conversation turning into a bunch of complaints about my use of a particular term, I instead have to just say "masculinity." I do not want to use "masculinity" to mean "the aspects of masculinity that are bad." I would like to distinguish between those two things.
(While I have no moderation power, I would personally really prefer that this conversation not turn into a conversation about the merits of that particular term.)
A piece of writing advice: even if Too Like The Lightning gave you the idea, The questions the readers have are "what does this idea mean?", "what are some examples?", and "how can I use it?", not "where did the author come up with this idea?" Too Like the Lightning is not illuminating about any of the former questions (i.e. you don't use it as a source of vivid examples), but it takes up nearly half your post.
I would point to (the ethical parts of) the BDSM community as an example of useful norms about this.
1) You do not hit people who do not want you to hit them.
1a) Outside of the context of a relationship in which it can be assumed your partner generally wants you to hit them, you ask someone before hitting them.
2) You do not engage in consensual violence around nonconsenting individuals. (A light tap is not violence; punching someone is.)
2a) Bystander consent may be assumed if the bystanders are at a party or social event arranged for the specific purpose o...
I am not permitted to engage in morality for exactly the same reason an alcoholic is not permitted to have a drink-- I can never stop at just one.
By coincidence, when I try as solemnly as possible to figure out what I genuinely want to do, one of the things I want to do is to be St. Basil the Great. Of course, I want to do very many unrealistic and mutually contradictory things: in addition to being St. Basil the Great, I also want to go to Disneyland about once a month, cook three delicious meals for myself every day from scratch, read my son every board ...
I think, in general, one should not write posts about the basilisk, particularly not as a first post. You shouldn't try to model future superintelligences in enough detail that they can blackmail you, and the entire topic makes both rationalists and AI risk look ridiculous. (You asked for brutal, I'm giving brutal.)
I don't think the rationality community should become a political movement; there are ways to achieve things outside the government. I think putting controversial items like euthanasia and ending the war on drugs on the list risks alienating more conservative rationalists.
Potentially confusing aspect of the survey: "animal rights" and "animal welfare" refer to different things within the animal activism space. In general, animal rights activism seeks to end all human exploitation of animals, while animal welfare activism seeks to make sure all animals have a high quality of life. Since PETA is a very prominent animal rights organization and not particularly associated with effective animal activism, it's unclear to me whether you intended to specify animal rights activism in particular or whether y...
Human babies require at least two and preferably more adults to take care of them. While we can expect some males to have a sexual strategy in which they don't provide caregiving and instead rely on e.g. the baby's grandparents, the mother's friends, or the mother's husband who has been deceived into thinking the baby is his, it is probably going to be way more common for human males to provide the caregiving themselves.
Ask a libertarian "Why don't we have any good songs about our values?"
This is a tangent, but Sons of Liberty by Frank Turner.
I mean, I suspect I *am* one of the Chicken Littles, and here you are, engaging with me. :)
I would make a bet at fairly generous odds that no rattumb person who offered a negative opinion of Dragon Army will face social consequences they consider significant from having a negative opinion of Dragon Army.
I would make a bet at fairly generous odds that no rattumb person who offered a negative opinion of Dragon Army will face social consequences they consider significant from having a negative opinion of Dragon Army.
My model of social consequences is that most of them are silent; someone who could have helped you doesn't, someone asked for a recommendation about you gives a negative one, you aren't informed of events because you don't get invited to them. This makes it difficult to adjudicate such bets; as you'd have to have people coming forward with silent disapprovals, which would have to be revealed to the person in question to determine their significance.
I think a problem with this strategy is that the Chicken Littles don't particularly like you or care about your opinion, and so the fact that you disapprove of their behavior has little to no deterrent effect.
+1
It also risks a backfire effect. If one is in essence a troll happy to sneer at what rationalists do regardless of merit (e.g. "LOL, look at those losers trying to LARP enders game!"), seeing things like Duncan's snarky parenthetical remarks would just spur me on, as it implies I'm successfully 'getting a rise' out of the target of my abuse.
It seems responses to criticism that is unpleasant or uncharitable are best addressed specifically to the offending remarks (if they're on LW2, this seems like pointing out the fall...
That seems like an unfair criticism of Current Affairs. All magazines with a long history started out with a short history at some point, and presumably they do not generally change their names when the history is long enough. Also, how seriously you should take a magazine is not particularly well correlated with age: Cosmopolitan magazine is more than a hundred years old and played a key role in the passing of the Seventeenth Amendment, but that does not mean we should care deeply about the deep psychological insight of the Manthropology section.
its unusual antipathy to other religions -- I haven't seen anyone deploy the murder-Gandhi argument to explain why people shouldn't do drugs or make tulpas
The murder-Gandhi argument against drugs is so common it has a name, "addiction." Rationalists appear to me to have a perfectly rational level of concern about addiction (which means being less concerned about certain drugs, such as MDMA, and more concerned about other drugs, such as alcohol).
I am puzzled about how making tulpas could interfere with one's ability to decide not to make any more tulpas.
I want to be clear that my comment was not intended to be a criticism of Alicorn or of this post.
I'd like to add the caution that not all depressed, romantically unsuccessful, or crisis-prone people are misery pits, particularly since many such people are likely to assume they themselves are. If you have friendships that extend for longer than a year or two, you are almost certainly not a misery pit.
From the perspective of a person who might be a misery pit: one key is to avoid overburdening any single person. Cycling between three or four support people can be helpful. For validation-seeking, I've found social media works well, since likin...
What is your subjective probability that the most prolific mathematician of all time did half of his most productive work after going blind in both eyes?
That's surprising but not that surprising: Milton wrote much of his best poetry while blind, and Beethoven was famously deaf. Conversely, I cannot think of a single unambiguous example of a mythological motif encoding a non-obvious scientific truth (such as that nothing can go faster than light, or that all species evolved from a single-celled organism, or that the stars are trillions and trillions of miles away), so I think this is very very unlikely.
Death of the Author, but iirc Scott mentioned the point of the Kabbalah in Unsong is the exact opposite-- you can connect anything to anything if you try hard enough, so the fact that you can is meaningless.
Of course, this shows the exact problem with using fiction as evidence.
You might as well say that when you don't criticize people for saying the truth in an unproductive way, then you shift the Overton window of required politeness over toward the "maximally confrontational" side. Next time, you give a pass to someone who sprinkles their comments with irrelevant insults. You keep going until you're 4Chan.
Given that spaces other than 4Chan that have disagreements exist, I think it's possible to put a fence on the slippery slope.
PDV, I like you and often agree with you and am on your side about the circling thing, so I hope you will take this in the sense it is meant, but I agree with gworley. In particular, I think you often tend to escalate arguments you're part of, sometimes to the point of transforming them into demon threads even though they didn't have to be. That's a good trait to have sometimes: it's what lets you point out that the emperor has no clothes. But I get the feeling that you're not deploying it particularly tactically, and you'd probably do better at advancing your goals if you also deescalated sometimes.
They might be worth the attention of some subset of people. For example, I write rationalist-influenced posts about transness. These are no doubt very uninteresting to the vast majority of the cisgender population, but people who have specifically chosen to subscribe to my blog are probably going to be interested in the subject.
Not if all rationalists start taking up woo.
This is a tangent, but I feel like this comment is making the mistake of collapsing predictions into a "predicted Trump"/"predicted Clinton" binary. I predicted about a 20% chance of Trump (my strategy was to agree with Nate Silver, Nate Silver is always right when speaking ex cathedra), and I do not consider myself to have made an error. Things with a 20% chance of happening happen one time out of five. Trump lost the popular vote after an October surprise; that definitely looks like the sort of outcome you get in a world where he was genuinely less likely than Clinton to win.
I feel like "don't circle at people without their consent" is meaningfully different from "do not express your feelings or let other people know what would make communication easier for you." Very few people have ever circled, but nearly everyone can express feelings and preferences.
That rule might exclude people who only have one script for expressing feelings and preferences, however, which is a particular concern in a community where so many people rely on scripts to communicate.
I didn't invest in Bitcoin because I don't invest in things that I don't understand well enough to be confident that the Efficient Market Hypothesis doesn't apply. I continue to believe this is a rational choice-- okay, sure, this one time I might have made a lot of money, but most of the time I would waste a bunch of money/time/other resources. And no one writes blog posts about how they could have lost a lot of money but didn't, so the availability heuristic is going to overweight successes.
I agree with Raemon. I want to read about lex's idea of target stress, not about lex's use of capital letters, and I have no idea how to obtain this goal except, perhaps, writing a defense of not using capital letters and hoping the derailment works backwards.
[downvotes self]
If the demon thread has two to three participants who know each other, I wonder about the effectiveness of making repair attempts. If one participant says something like "I'm sorry, let me try to say that better," or "I agree with part of what you're saying," or (I don't know) links to a cat picture or something, does it tend to deescalate the situation? I'm not actually sure but I think it's worth trying.
I've found that certain topics predictably degenerate into demon threads (I had an example, but then r...
If people enjoy demon threads, it may not be strictly true that the 'Someone is wrong on the internet' feeling (noticeably) feels bad.
When reading the OP, I thought, "I recognise that feeling, but my main (noticed) 'someone is wrong on the internet'-response is a positive, inspired motivational one."
Perhaps these feelings do get jumbled, and distinguishing how much is 'inspired' vs 'this is wrong' is part of the skill of avoiding demon threads.
I still sense that there's two different feelings here:
Type...
I strongly agree and have messaged the organizers about personally arranging this.
Don't deceive yourself even if it seems like a really really good idea.
Don't falsify data, frame people for bad things they didn't do, or hide bad things your allies are doing even if it seems like a really really good idea.
Prepare ahead of time for disasters. Learn first aid. Know what to do in the event of nuclear war. Keep essential first aid and disaster preparedness supplies on hand.
Assume every new sex partner is fertile and has HIV, and decide your safer-sex risk tolerance based on that.
Build slack. Have fuck-you money. Build extra...
As someone with time that is relatively valueless compared to Elizer's and Oliver's, I'd like to second this comment. As much as I'd love to respond to every person who has a criticism of me, it would take up a lot of mental energy that I'd rather use for writing. That doesn't mean that I don't read criticisms and take them to heart.
I personally very much enjoyed Expecting Better, Debunking the Bump, the Informed Parent, and the Science of Mom.
There are certainly various sorts of sports and games, which I didn't talk about because I don't like sports. I'd imagine both a Baseline Human and a Transhuman league, depending on your preferences. There are also the normal human status games about trying to be the best scientist or artist or writer or whatever; it's just that if you choose to opt out, you can still do what you love without starving.
I think that American society makes it very difficult to have friends (television, absence of third places, giant houses with individual yards so you have to drive to see people, stigmatization of men having intimate nonromantic friendships, etc). The vast majority of the change is not doing that. I'd also imagine programs intended to help friendless people meet other friendless people (perhaps a community center with book groups, sports teams, knitting circles, and so on): in many countries there are already such programs aimed at elderly men that ar...
Advice for pregnant people is really bad. The advice is so risk-averse that it generally doesn't clearly distinguish between "this is moderately risky," "this is a very small risk," and "we have not conclusively proven that a risk does not exist," which means that there are far more pieces of advice than anyone can remember and people quite often end up doing moderately risky things. The FDA continues to recommend limiting fish consumption in spite of the epidemiological evidence that eating fish increases IQ. Cleaning li...
The old Thrawn trilogy concludes with a major (and wonderful!) out-of-context problem for Thrawn. The new Thrawn trilogy just has him win all the time in order to set him up as a scary villain for the Rebels TV series. (I understand he both loses a bunch in Rebels and is much less well-written.)