All of Yoav Ravid's Comments + Replies

Yeah, that's certainly a possibility, but I think it's still worth exploring in case there is a way they can complement each other.

Very much like greed powers markets to produce wealth, tribalism powers the "bridging" algorithm to produce societal trust

We also have a system that uses greed to produce societal trust in information - prediction markets. Could we combine both somehow? What if we used bridging-based ranking on a prediction market data? Would giving more weight to similar bets by people who bet differently on other things make prediction markets even more accurate and trustworthy?

4Martin Sustrik
My feeling is that combining both would lead to each compromising the other. Markets are driven by greed. If you add tribalistic incentives, you distort the flow of financial information within the system and make the market work less efficiently. Same applies the other way round: If you add financial incentives to the Twitter's bridging algorithm, you are likely to end up with lower quality community notes.

I looked into bridging-based ranking a bit more. The term seems to have been introduced in Aviv Ovadya's paper from 2022. Aviv and his partner Luke Thorburn have a website dedicated to Bridging systems. And this article seems like a good explanation of the concept and how it's applied in community notes.

I haven't found applications to voting.

Are there voting systems which function similarly to their bridging algorithm?

e.g, approval voting, but if I get a vote from two people whose other votes are different then it counts more?

Right, that was never the intention. I actually think there's something noble about them realizing and expressing the ideal values even though they fell short of them. It would be very easy to rationalize their shortcomings, as most people do and did all throughout history. Instead, they left an unfulfilled ideal as legacy for future generations to fulfill. That dream was their gift to tomorrow.

Yes, this will be discussed in more length inside the book. But I think by saying that our civilization is founded on the idea I am implying its aspirational nature as you suggested, rather than claiming it is fully realised (indeed, the point of my book is exactly that it still isn't). And if we look at the US I think it's literally true that it has been "founded" (as in, "the founding of the united states") on this idea, since it is stated in the deceleration of independence (though phrased very differently, of course)

1Karl Krueger
Many of the same people who cheered for liberty also practiced slavery; including the author of that Declaration. We could as well say that the USA was founded on the contradiction between liberty and slavery; which proved to be an unstable foundation indeed — as this contradiction briefly but violently tore the country apart a few generations later.

Hmm... I'm not sure I see the connection, honestly. But thanks for the comment :)

I don't think comparing 5 to 7 is correct, because we don't want to compare to downvote to no-vote, we want to compare one ordering of votes to another ordering of votes. So, what would be the difference if it went up before it went back down again, rather than first go down like it has.

I think we do agree that if I didn't ask why it was downvoted it would have remained at 5 rather than go up to 15, and that this is suboptimal, right?

To me it feels like mid-popularity posts are affected too much by noise and when they get posted.

I don't think that's enough? I have 3.5k Karma, which gives me a strong vote power of 7, but when I made this post the other post was on 5 Karma and long gone from the front page. It only started gaining karma and came back to the frontpage after I made this post.

And I kinda dislike "why am I getting downvoted" posts, so I would like mechanisms that make them unnecessary. 

4habryka
I mean, the difference between 7 and 5 karma on frontpage ranking is miniscule, so I don't think that made any difference. The real question is "why did nobody upvote it"? Like, I think there physically isn't enough space on the frontpage to give 5 karma posts visibility for very long, without filling most of the frontpage with new unvetted content.

Thanks for the feedback. I've been writing it for a year already without talking about it much publicly, and wanted to put it out there so people know what I'm doing. I see it similarly to the updates people give here on their research agendas or work they intend to do. I agree that for LW (but not for twitter, for which this was originally written) it's probably good to put more meat and give more detail about what the book will discuss. Maybe I'll edit it in.

Edit: I added a list at the end of the post of things I plan to discuss or look into

I think there's an asymmetry problem here. An early downvote hides the post from the frontpage and impedes it from getting more evaluations, so it's a pit that's hard to get out from (without, say, creating a different post asking why your first post is in the pit :P). An early upvote, on the other hand, exposes the post to more evaluations by keeping it longer on the frontpage, and it's easy for later downvotes to push it back down, so it's more like a slippery hill than a pit.

So I think a mechanism that would avoid premature burials of posts would overcome some of the noise and lead to more information being incorporated into the "final" evaluation of the post (the karma it stabilizes on).

2habryka
I agree this is true for content by new users, but honestly, we kind of need to hide content from most users from the frontpage until someone decided to upvote it. For more active users, their strong-vote strength gets applied by default to the post, which helps a good amount with early downvotes not hurting visibility that much.

I think making downvotes completely unavailable beneath a certain karma level wouldn't be good. 

But also I think the outsized effects of downvotes is strongest when it's one of the first votes, (as it was) rather than when it's one among many votes, because it also makes the post disappear from the front page and takes away from it the chance to get more votes. upvotes don't do that, because they make the post stay longer on the frontpage, so it can always later gain more downvotes by new people getting exposed to it.

So if we do limit the power of downvotes or who can cast them, perhaps it should be focused on early votes, and not votes in general?

2Viliam
I would need more data to make an opinion on this. At first sight, it seems to me like having a rule "if your total karma is less than 100, you are not allowed to downvote an article or a comment if doing so would push it under zero" would be good. But I have no idea how often that happens in real life. Do we actually have many readers with karma below 100 who bother to vote? By the way, I didn't vote on your article, but... you announced that you were writing a book i.e. it is not even finished, you didn't provide a free chapter or something... so what exactly was there to upvote you for? (Sorry, this is too blunt, and I understand that people need some positive reinforcement along the way. But this is not a general website to make people feel good; unfortunately, aspiring rationalists are a tiny fraction of the general population, so making this website more welcoming to the general population would get us hopelessly diluted. Also, there is a soft taboo on politics, which your post was kinda about, without providing something substantial to justify that.)

Ok, I really don't get why my post announcing my book got downvoted (ignored is one thing, downvoted quite another)...

Update: when I made this post the original post was on 5 Karma and out of the frontpage. Now it's 15 Karma, which is about what I expected it to get, given that it's not a core topic of LW and doesn't have a lot of information (though I now added some more information at the end), so I'm happy. Just a bit of a bummer that I had to make this post to get the original post out of the pit of obscurity it was pushed into by noise.

6Maxwell Peterson
The post is an advertisement, without other content. I think a post of that type should only be on the site if it comes with some meat - an excerpt, at least. (And even then I’m not sure). The reader can’t even look up or read the book yet if he wanted to! (There is a quote of the thesis of the book, but the text is stuff I’ve been rereading for years now. It feels like someone is always telling me liberalism is under threat recently.)
4habryka
I don't know either! Early voting is often quite noisy, and this thing is a bit politics-adjacent. I expect it won't end up downvoted too long. I've considered hiding vote-scores for the first few hours, but we do ultimately still have to use something for visibility calculations, and I don't like withholding information from users.
4Seth Herd
LW has been avoiding all discussion of politics in the runup to the election. And it usually is suspicious of politics, noting that "politics is the mindkiller" that causes arguments and division of rationalist communities. Thus it could be argued that it's an inappropriate place to announce your book, even though it's intended as a rationalist take on politics and not strictly partisan. But it's a judgment call. Which is why your post is now positive again. I'm uncertain; I would neither downvote nor upvoted your post. I certainly wouldn't discuss the theory here, but announcing it seems fine. I'm not sure where the requests RE political discussion are stated. The site FAQ is one place but I don't think that says much.
5plex
Sorry to hear about that experience. I think that "downvote" should be a power you unlock when you're well-established on LW (maybe at 1k karma or so) rather than being universally available. The sting of a downvote on something you think is important is easily 50x the reward of an upvote, and giving that power to people who have little context on the community seems very bad EV. Especially with LW becoming more in the public eye, letting random internetgoers who register give any LWer negative feedback (which is often painful/discouraging) seems pretty likely to be detrimental. I'd be interested in takes from the LW team on this. Edit: Man, I love the disagree vote separation. It's nice people being able to disagree with me without downvoting.

I think I was already doing what this post suggested before it was published, but the distilled phrase was good and I thought about it quite often since.

Where it meets me personally - I'm shocked at how Liberals are dropping the ball on Liberalism. It is incredibly important, and yet Liberals don't properly understand it and don't know how to defend it, at a time where it's under an onslaught by anti-liberals. To be slightly glib, I basically believe that everyone is wrong about Liberalism. I don't know of anyone who shares my understanding of it. So I'm trying to finally pick up the ball by writing a book about how to fix Liberalism (and actually, a year ago today is exactly when I began writing it). 

Sounds like a question a non-human would ask :P

Maybe it can be good to have a "add post to sequence" option when you click the context menu on a post. That's more intuitive than going to the library page.

Just watched it upon your recommendation. Thanks! It is indeed a fantastic film, and a great example of (epistemic) rationality.

Would Moloch qualify as an Egregores? 

Typo: It's Prediction Markets "Fail" To *Mooch (not Moloch)

2Arjun Panickssery
lol fixed thanks

Reducing the amount of voters can be good because it increases the remaining voters' motive to become well informed instead of remaining rationally ignorant, but it won't work if people just self refrain, because the people who refrain will probably me exactly those that should remain.

Using sortition to pick a representative subset of the population to vote solves this problem.

Technically it makes sense for the nuked side to lose everything and for the nuking side to gain little. But you want to model a scenario where the sides might actually want to nuke the other side, which you have naturally between enemies, but don't have between LessWrongers unless you incentivize them somehow. So giving rewards for nuking makes sense, because people want to increase their own Karma but don't want to decrease the Karma of others.

And I think the incentives are deliberately designed such that no nukes aren't the obvious optimal equilibrium. That's what makes it an exercise in not destroying the world. If it were easy it wouldn't be much of an exercise.

This is extremely cool! good job! Looking forward to seeing how this unfolds, which will unfortunately happen mostly as I sleep (and as a citizen I hope to come out at the end of this with no change to my Karma)

Thanks. If it's indeed framed as a game then I would like to participate as well. So I pressed the button and opted in.

That sounds like a terrible strategy. Your threat won't be credible because your goal is to make the world better, not destroy it. And anything you do to make the threat credible (like some sort of precomitment mechanism) will risk the world actually getting destroyed.

4Jozdien
It could work as a precautionary measure against existential risk. If someone is planning on doing something that also risks the world getting destroyed, then the threat could be credible. (I am not endorsing humans actually using this strategy in the real world, obviously).
1Milan W
I agree.

Did anything happen after you pressed it?

1nick lacombe
the only change i can see is the button ui (see screenshot). i assume that it only signs me up for a game which is going to happen tomorrow on petrov day.

How would you leverage a button that destroys the world to make the world better?

2Milan W
By blackmailing powerful people into doing good, I assume.
Yoav Ravid*3610

So the responsible thing to do is to refrain, right? Cause if everybody did nobody would have the ability to destroy the site, and what would you do with such an ability anyway except not use it?

The problem is it feels like a game/exercise, and a game/exercise is something I want to opt in to, even if just to challenge myself.

That said, I think twice before pressing any big red button, and as of yet I haven't pressed this one.

Edit: Following Dagon's comment (published 8 hours after this post), which confirmed it's framed as a game, I decided to press the b... (read more)

3nick lacombe
for people that didn't see it yet, the following post explains today's petrov day game: The 2024 Petrov Day Scenario
4Quinn
I was thinking the same thing this morning! My main thought was, "this is a trap. ain't no way I'm pressing a big red button especially not so near to petrov day"
1Bridgett Kay
Seems to me that the only winning move is not to play. 
Dagon170

I pressed the button, and it asked me to confirm that I want to participate in a "social deception game", which I did.  I'm somewhat ambivalent that this event does anything except raise awareness of a specific thing that happened during the cold war (and presumably has been patched away in current response procedures), but it's interesting to see people taking it seriously.

Depending on the framing, I will or will not press it if I'm chosen.  I'll try to play along with the rules and guidelines as published, including the in-game motivations specified.

Thanks for posting this - I never look at the front page, so would have missed it.

7nick lacombe
that's a good point. i decided to press so that I can test myself. hopefully testing myself not to end the world on lower stakes means I improve at doing it if ever the stakes are larger.
8Veedrac
If ‘Opt into Petrov Day’ was aside something other than a big red ominous button, I would think the obvious answer is that it's a free choice and I'd be positively inclined towards it. Petrov Day is a good thing with good side effects, quite unlike launching nuclear weapons. It is confusing to me that it is beside a big red ominous button. On the one hand, Petrov's story is about the value of caution. To quote a top comment from an older Petrov Day, On the other hand, risk-taking is good, opting in to good things is good, and if one is taking Petrov Day to mean ‘don't take risks if they look scary’ I think one is taking an almost diametrically wrong message from the story. All that said, for now I am going to fall for my own criticism and not press the big red ominous button around Petrov Day.
5Shankar Sivarajan
Leverage it to create a better world. (Well, this button doesn't really do much, but y'know, pretend it's the ability to destroy the world.)
4Hastings
The funniest possible outcome is that no one opts in and so the world is saved but the blog post is ruined. I would hate to remove the possibility of a funny outcome. No opt in!
4quetzal_rainbow
Button is very intimidating, indeed.

a method to induce male stem cells to lose their Y chromosome and duplicate the X chromosome, thus becoming female.

If you had twin fertilised eggs, could you use this method to create almost-genetically-identical opposite-sex twins? Which would supposedly let you isolate the effects of sex on the individual?

2robo
I suspect experiments with almost-genetically identical twin tests might advance our understanding about almost all genes except sex chromosomes. Sex chromosomes are independent coin flips with huge effect sizes.  That's amazing!  Natural provided us with experiments everywhere!  Most alleles are confounded (e.g.. correlated with socioeconomic status for no causal reason) and have very small effect sizes. Example: Imagine an allele which is common in east asians, uncommon in europeans, and makes people 1.1 mm taller.  Even though the allele causally makes people taller, the average height of the people with the allele (mostly asian) would be less than the average height of the people without the allele (mostly European).  The +1.1 mm in causal height gain would be drowned out by the ≈-50 mm in Simpson's paradox.  Your almost-twin experiment gives signal where observational regression gives error. That's not needed for sex differences.  Poor people tend to have poor children.  Caucasian people tend to have Caucasian children.  Male people do not tend to have male children.  It's pretty easy to extract signal about sex differences. (far from my area of expertise)

Yeah, I think I agree with this. Do you have an idea for a name that captures this dynamic? Do you think one of the names I or Legionnaire suggested captures it?

4Nathan Helm-Burger
I asked Claude Sonnet 3.5. Nathan : I dislike the term sacrifice since it implies a knowing deliberate choice to give up something, specifically for a ceremonial purpose. I think this intentionality is importantly absent in these race dynamics. Indeed, all the parties realizing the nature of the pattern they are in is often the first step to escaping it. Claude: You make an excellent point. The term "sacrifice" does indeed carry connotations of intentionality and ceremony that are not accurate for this dynamic. You're right to highlight that the lack of awareness is often a crucial part of the problem. Let's reconsider our options with this in mind: 1. Race-based terms: * "Destructive Race Dynamic" * "Race to Ruin" * "Competitive Decline Spiral" 2. Trap-based terms: * "Mutual Depletion Trap" * "Collective Erosion Trap" * "Competitive Degradation Trap" 3. Equilibrium-based terms: * "Negative Equilibrium Dynamic" * "Deteriorating Equilibrium Trap" * "Suboptimal Stability Trap" 4. Feedback-based terms: * "Negative Feedback Loop" * "Destructive Feedback Cycle" * "Erosive Competition Cycle" 5. Other options: * "Collective Value Decay" * "Competitive Devaluation Dynamic" * "Mutual Loss Spiral" * "Unintentional Decline Pattern" These alternatives avoid the implication of intentional sacrifice while still capturing the essence of the dynamic. They emphasize the unintended, gradual nature of the decline and the trapped state of the participants. Among these, I find "Competitive Decline Spiral" particularly effective. It captures the competitive nature, the worsening situation over time, and avoids any implication of intentionality. "Mutual Depletion Trap" is another strong contender, emphasizing the trapped nature of the situation and the mutual loss without suggesting deliberate action. "Unintentional Decline Pattern" might be the most explicit in addressing your concern

Hmm.. I think our understanding what "Moloch" stands for is quite different, cause none of what you suggested seems close to me. Which I guess also illustrates why I wanted a different name. "Moloch" is very good at entering your head and creating a visceral feeling of the dynamic, but it can also make it ambiguous and difficult to understand. Also, I find  when I introduce people to the concept, it really throws them off if I start to talking about some mythical deity from the Bible :)

Ouuu nice! there's some good ones here. I think my favourite from these is "Sacrificial Spiral". "Sacrificial Contest" is also good. Deadlock is also a good term, though not as part of "Competition Deadlock". Perhaps "Mutual Sacrifice Deadlock", or something of the sort. "Feedback" can also be a good term.

Thanks!

I tried to think of different names for the Moloch Dynamic[1] and came up with

  • Mutual Sacrifice Trap
  • Mutual Sacrifice Equilibrium
  • Mutual Sacrifice Equilibrium Trap
  • Sacrifice Race
  • Sacrifice Competition

"Collective" can also replace or be added before "Mutual", to signify that it tends to refer to dynamics of many actors, where coordinating to get out of the equilibrium trap is difficult.

What do you think of these options?

  1. ^

    A reminder of what the Moloch Dynamic is:

    "In some competition optimizing for X, the opportunity arises to throw some other value under the

... (read more)
4Nathan Helm-Burger
To me, the heart of the matter is being trapped in local minima which involve negative sum competitions. Pyrrhic victory is sometimes involved, but sometimes not. An example of not a mutual loss would be if Actor A does come out ahead of where they started, but Actor B lost more than Actor A gained. A rat race which devours slack, as Dagon mentions is another example. Although that doesn't seem as central to Moloch to me as Negative Sum competition. Also, there's a related psychological aspect to this. When people get scared and insecure and hostile in their trades and competitions, they have a tendency to stop even searching for win-win solutions. Liv Boeree talks about Win-Win being the opposite of Moloch. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC09fp6hZ2RHiUYwY8hNCirA
7Legionnaire
LLMs can be very good at coming up with names with some work: A few I liked: Sacrificial Contest Mutual Ruin Game Sacrificial Spiral Universal Loss Competition Collective Sacrifice Trap Competition Deadlock Competition Spiral Competition Stalemate Destructive Contest Destructive Feedback Competition  Conflict Feedback Spiral  
4Dagon
I think competition is an important element to capture in the name.  I'm not sure that any of sacrifice, race, or trap are defining concepts, though they usually apply.  I think of it as over-focus on a few somewhat-visible (if not perfectly legible) dimensions, at the expense of harder-to-notice-analytically value dimensions.  So maybe "goodharted value optimization", but that's not great either. In my head, I tend to think of it as related to "moneyball over-focus" - taking the wrong lesson from Billy Beane's success - he optimized for winning on a budget, not for great baseball athleticism or developing player excellence (except as part of the visible optimization).  He was very successful in that, but the world lost something for it. The antidote is Slack, which is the ultimate illegible value.  I'm not sure how/whether to work that into the name.

From Protection or Free Trade by Henry George:

The Robber that Takes All that is Left 

Labor may be likened to a man who as he carries home his earnings is waylaid by a series of robbers. One demands this much, and another that much, but last of all stands one who demands all that is left, save just enough to enable the victim to maintain life and come forth next day to work. So long as this last robber remains, what will it benefit such a man to drive off any or all of the other robbers?

Such is the situation of labor today throughout the civilized worl

... (read more)

One extreme solution, which I think is good regardless of this issue, is using sortition with high alternance, like they did in ancient Athens. I recommend Terry Bouricius' book on sortition.

The difference between leaders in dictatorships and in democracies isn't so much in the average time they rule, but in the variability in the time they rule. Yes, not ageing wouldn't help someone like Bachir Gemayel who was assassinated after two weeks in office, but it would probably have helped a leader like Stalin. So I care more about the variability of how much no-ageing would help dictators than the average. But still, I agree ageing isn't the main bottleneck on dictatorship. 

The comment option sorting is amazing! Thanks!

The new reacts are also cool, though I also liked the "I checked" reacts and would have liked to have both.

3Rana Dexsin
I was pretty sad about the ongoing distortion of “I checked” in what's meant to be an epistemics-oriented community. I think the actual meanings are potentially really valuable, but without some way of avoiding them getting eaten, they become a hazard. My first thought is to put a barrier in the way, but I don't know if that plays well with the reactions system being for lower-overhead responses, and it might also give people unproductive bad feelings unless sold the right way.

I am really missing the word counter. It's something I look at quite a lot (less so on reading time estimates, as I got used to making the estimate myself based on the wordcount).

1quila
same here, even 5 months later. this comment from the time says the word counter is still there but i can't find it anywhere. (edit: nvm, it's visible on the frontpage hoverover.) ( @habryka because comments on others' comments don't notify by default. while i'm at it, also your username doesn't show when i enter "@habryka")

Why is no one talking about the GiveDirectly study on UBI? It seems to also be a very good study, and it found positive results.

I'd be happy to try :)

Sending you a DM

I'm looking for a dialogue partner with whom to discuss my normative philosophy of political/social change which I call Experimentalism or Experimentationism

It is an attempt to give a name and structure to a position I believe many people already implicitly and intuitively tend towards, and to go beyond Progressivism and Conservatism, or to "synthesise" them, if you want, though I don't particularly like the term.

I found it a bit hard to flesh out an explanation on my own, so I hope doing so in a dialogue would be helpful. This doesn't require any s... (read more)

4tailcalled
I can challenge the idea, but I'm not sure whether my challenges would help flesh out the position. Might be worth trying and seeing how it goes and whether my questions are worth publishing.

I didn't go to college/university, but i'm also from Israel, not the US, so it's a little different here. If it still feels relevant then i'd be willing to join.

Are there multiwinner voting methods where voters vote on combinations of candidates?

5Marcus Ogren
Party list methods can be thought of as such, though I suspect that's not what you meant. Aside from party list, I don't recall any voting methods in which voters vote on sets of candidates rather than on individual candidates being discussed. Obviously you could consider all subsets of candidates containing the appropriate number of winners and have voters vote on these subsets using a single-winner voting method, but this approach has numerous issues.

from their FAQ

How much does it cost? Unlike pretty much everyone else, we don't take a cut from your donations! Premium features like Memberships, Ko-fi Shop and Commissions can either be paid for via a small subscription to Ko-fi Gold or a low 5% transaction fee. You decide.

How do I get paid? Instantly and directly into your PayPal or Stripe account. We take 0-5% fees from donations and we don't hold onto your money. It goes directly from your supporter to you. Simple!

Their fees do seem lower than other services, but I think other services can pay directly to your bank account, so you don't have to pay PayPal or Stripe fees.

I haven't clicked this fast on a LessWrong post in a long while. I've been waiting for someone to seriously tackle this issue ever since I read the sequences six years ago. So thanks! Now I'm going to take some time to think about it :)

Wow, I had no idea about the effects of alcohol on hearing! It makes so much sense - I never drink and I hate how loud the music is in parties! 

Yeah, when there's loud music it's much easier for me to understand people I know than people I don't because I'm already used to their speaking patterns, and can more easily infer what they said even when I don't hear it perfectly. And also because any misunderstanding or difficulty that rises out of not hearing each other well is less awkward with someone I already know than someone I do.

Collaborative Truth Seeking = Deliberation

Sometimes our community has a different name for something than others do, so it's useful to know which name others use so we can learn from them.

Today I learned, that deliberative democracy researchers call Deliberation what we call Collaborative Truth Seeking:

"Deliberation requires rational reasoning, or “thinking slow,” in Kahneman’s terminology. It is distinct from oratory, rhetoric, negotiation, persuasion, and common forms of debate, which frequently use pathos and emotion. (...) According to deliberative dem

... (read more)

I think George does see the dividend as necessary for solving poverty, but only in addition to taxing rent. On its own it would indeed be gobbled up by landlords.

Also, what George suggests is a bit different from UBI (and I think Universal Land Dividend is a better name for it than Citizen's Dividend). With UBI, the law dictates a set amount to be given each person each year/month. With the Citizen's Dividend, whatever revenue isn't spent at the end of the year is distributed equally between everyone. This on the one hand leads to a variable income, on the... (read more)

7Viliam
I also like the elegance, but... people being people, I would expect that if five years in a row the "variable income" happens to always be around X, people will start to expect it, will make this expectation a part of their personal finances, and if the next year the income is only X/2, there will be riots in the streets. (Compare to the mortgage crisis of 2008, which happened because of a change in numbers much less directly related to people's incomes, and yet many people have lost their homes because they relied too much on the numbers staying constant.) So I expect that in practice the government would take it at least as a soft obligation, and would use various accounting tricks to keep the income constant (and if that means a disaster in 10 years, the advantage of democracy is that it becomes someone else's problem).
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