LESSWRONG
LW

All of The_Lion's Comments + Replies

7Vladimir_Nesov
The comments are still banned, so it's unclear what you are talking about (maybe they were banned, unbanned and banned again?). If the account's posting rights were previously revoked and then given back, it's implausible Eliezer could be the one giving you the posting rights, right in the middle of this post. It's strange how the parent comment got 40 upvotes (and 20 downvotes), seems too many for a sane manual sockpuppet farm. Anti-moderation faction? Anyway, banning the copies of banned comments posted as The_Lion2. Neutral on the original moderator's decision, but against such workarounds.
1Houshalter
Why on earth did they give into this? Please ip ban this asshat and everyone who's ever upvoted his comments.
-2Good_Burning_Plastic
Your other comments still don't show up in their original context or in my inbox (though they do in your overview page). Meh, I'm going to reply to the The_Lion2 copies instead.
9username2
+7 karma in 5 minutes, nice.
Stupid Questions, 2nd half of December
The_Lion-20

I always maintain "If there is a quantitative difference, I sure as hell hope we never find it."

You may want to practice reciting the litany of Gendlin.

I think that'd lead to some pretty unfortunate stuff.

So have false beliefs about equality.

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4gjm
It's far from clear that it's "false beliefs about equality" that were responsible for the massacres committed by the communist states you refer to. And given the context, it's maybe also worth pointing out that the communists' distinctive "beliefs about equality" were not beliefs about racial equality[1], or beliefs about equality of intelligence[2], so bringing them up here is something of a red herring. [1] E.g., under the Khmer Rouge, you really didn't want to be ethnic Chinese. [2] Opinions on that point in, e.g., the USSR seem to have been highly variable.
0AmagicalFishy
Mine was a little ill-thought out comment.
Open Thread, January 4-10, 2016
The_Lion-20

Ok, while we're nitpicking Paul Graham's essay, I should mention the part of it that struck me as least rational when I read it. Namely, the sloppy way he talks about "poverty", conflating relative and absolute poverty. After all, thanks to advances in technology what's considered poverty today was considered unobtainable luxury several centuries ago.

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1bogus
Advances in technology have certainly improved living standards across the board, but they have not done much for the next layer of human needs - things like social inclusion or safety against adverse events. Indeed, we can assume that, in reasonably developed societies (as opposed to dysfunctional places like North Korea or several African countries) lack of such things is probably the major cause of absolute 'poverty', since primary needs like food or shelter are easily satisfied. It's interesting to speculate about focused interventions that could successfully improve social inclusion; fostering "organic" social institutions (such as quasi-religious groups with a focus on socially-binding rituals and public services) would seem to be an obvious candidate.
5gjm
According to this Brookings Institute report the majority of black people living in metropolitan areas in the US live in the suburbs. ... are more likely to report events when they are (1) unusual and/or (2) shocking. By "inner cities" I take it you mean poor central residential areas. Not much happens there that would be of interest to most mainstream news sources. [EDITED for slightly more precise wording.]
gjm150

Oh, hello, Eugine. Nice to know you can still be relied on to say much the same things any time anyone mentions race.

The latest statistics I can find show a homicide rate for black Americans of about 20 per 100k per year. In 1950 the corresponding figure was a little under 30 per 100k per year. So those "crime-field hell-holes" would seem to be less bad than whatever places black people were living in in 1950.

Why you're comparing overall homicide rates to lynching rates, I have no idea. (Nor in fact why you're talking about lynchings at all.) The... (read more)

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3bogus
Does this really apply to "most blacks", or are those who live in crime-fied inner cities just more salient to us because that stuff gets reported in the news?
Open Thread, January 4-10, 2016
The_Lion00

It should be obvious how focusing on one of these groups and downplaying the significance of the other creates two different political opinions. Paul Graham complains about his critics that they are doing this (and he is right about this), but he does the same thing too, only less blindly... he acknowledges that the other group exists and that something should be done, but that feels merely like a disclaimer so he can display the required virtue, but his focus is somewhere else.

So why are you focusing your complaining on Paul Graham's essay rather than ... (read more)

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1bogus
We hold someone like Paul Graham to higher standards than some random nobody trying to score political points. Isn't Graham one of the leading voices in the rationalist/SV-tech/hacker tribe?
Stupid Questions, 2nd half of December
The_Lion-40

If you would ask the same question on http://skeptics.stackexchange.com it would be closed as being too vague

You do realize that's a problem with skeptics.stackexchange not with AmagicalFishy's question.

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2tut
That's a matter of perspective/values. I agree with Christian on this one.
Rationality Quotes Thread January 2016
The_Lion-30

The destroyer of science and rationality isn't the uneducated blue collar, but the "fortune cookie" journo trying to "communicate" science.

Nassim Taleb

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0[anonymous]
Hello back, Eugine.
2username2
Yeah, you have to have some power to go against scientific community. Media, tobacco, oil companies and governments are obviously more dangerous than average Joes.
Rationality Quotes Thread January 2016
The_Lion-30

Not all changes are good. In fact, most potential changes would be absolutely awful.

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1[anonymous]
That's a ridiculously pessimistic thing to say
5Silver_Swift
That is no reason to fear change, "not every change is an improvement but every improvement is a change" and all that.
Rationality Quotes Thread December 2015
The_Lion-20

Basically one huge problem here is that there isn't enough data compared to the number of variables involved.

Not to mention that this is a problem in what Taleb would call extremistan, i.e., the distribution of possible outcomes from intervening, or not-intervening, are fat-tailed and include a lot of rare possibilities that haven't yet shown up in the data at all.

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0Gleb_Tsipursky
Nope, I don't think it would be good for the EA movement at all! It's important to have life balance in doing good for the world, and getting fun things for oneself with disposable income helps ensure that doing good for the world is a marathon, not a sprint. On a separate note about giving, it would be worthwhile for some people in the EA movement to shift from an earn-to-give orientation to one where they use their work time to make a contribution, due to the current talent gap in the EA movement. I myself am doing that, not teaching additional classes and instead orienting to working more on Intentional Insights to promote effective giving, for example.