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Has anyone else been disgusted by how partisan and mindkilled many "rationality figureheads" have been during this election?
I've stopped supporting 80,000 Hours because of their employees' writings and lost trust in CFAR; I now see them as political think tanks that are possibly even more biased and broken than the average organization.
Claiming Trump as the most significant current existential risk, and prioritizing political activism over all other charity work, are the two that I was most offended by. These were usually not backed by any rigorous analysis or explanation, just the assumption that the reader conforms to the beliefs.
But I think ultimately, it was the frequency and amount of emotion and hostility that was shown that made my mind image these people as mind-killed.
A statement made by a lifelong liberal writer, who was offended by Trump's lifestyle. Trump has short attention span, and doesn't read books - therefore he will use nukes!
Predicting one person's proclivity to cause nuclear war is an incredibly complicated prediction problem, and one flimsy and tribally motivated statement has almost zero predictive power. If I see a reasonable analysis, which considers both candidates and what kind of scenarios could actually lead to nuclear war; I'm ready to change my beliefs.
The goal of motivating people, as opposed to truth-seeking, is exactly the objection. They may or may not be mind-killed, but seeing them turn so easily toward the dark arts makes me value them a lot less as allies in rationality.
The most important quality for a rationalist is to admit that you were wrong and change your mind accordingly: so I will say, as an excercise in strength and calibration, that I was totally wrong.
I thought, with a high degree of probability, that Clinton was going to be the next POTUS. Instead it's Trump. My model of the world was wrong, and I'll adjust accordingly.
I, for one, called it months ago. And found myself unable to tell all but 2 people in my social circle my conclusions because if I did they seemingly mistook my assessment of the likely outcome for endorsement and reacted quite unplesantly with incredulity and offense especially whenever I tried to tell them they were living in an echo chamber. Thus I quickly learned not to try.
Interestingly the people who actually listened were an immigrant from Armenia and an expat rather than domestic American citizens, I wonder if that means anything.
('Called it' meaning calling that true support was higher than most thought especially in the greater rust belt plus extremely low enthusiasm for the other party leading to high chances of an electoral victory and that most of what most people around me thought was weakening the campaign was actually strengthening it or completely neutral.)
I gave him a 45% chance
That's actually better than most (all?) pollsters including Nate Sliver.
Peter Thiel made it to be one of the 16 people of Trump's transition team. The transition team in turn will have a large role in choosing the makeup of the cabinet and thus what the Trump administration will do.
Let's hope Peter Thiel is good at having his voice heard in the team and choosing good people for the positions.
What have we learned from this election? The political scientists who say that you can't buy elections with money are right. Mainstream media lost it's power.
There's a power vacuum to be filled.
Cloud computing needs coders, for now. Looks like the hottest ticket other than machine learning and data analysis.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/cloud-companies-desperately-need-experienced-workers/#
and know who has the keys to your cloud
Are there any heuristics for distinguishing a rumored (but not real) scientific discovery from a discovery that seems implausible but will later turn out to be true? If i'm a remote, non-expert observer and the specialists disagree about the test results, are there any clues i can look for that hint at whether the discovery is real or not?
This is inspired by, but more general than, the current EM / microwave propulsion controversy.
An example of a discovery that later turns out to be real would be nuclear fission, which the theoretical physics community found implausible at the time.
Hold off on proposing solutions.
Do not propose solutions until the problem has been discussed as thoroughly as possible without suggesting any.
The problem: There are a number of folks in the LW-diaspora (and adjacent circles) who live in the U.S. and are living with disabilities and chronic medical conditions. Many of these people have benefited from increased access to health care in the past few years due to the Affordable Care Act. This increased access may very well be going away soon, putting these folks' health, well-being, and in some cases live...
Can anyone point me towards resources about the rationality technique of trying to correct for bias/motivated reasoning by imagining your ideas and words as being presented by someone else, and then trying to nitpick their ideas for flaws?
Also appreciated would be anything about related techniques about disassociation, correcting for your own motivated reasoning, etc...
Is there any good material on the concept of willpower out there? I'm struggling to understand how it works, what can be done about it, and whether it's even consistent enough to make general claims that are useful. Or if it even makes sense as a concept and isn't just a term for a bunch of misunderstood mechanisms. The usual motivational stuff etc. that I've seen doesn't really qualify.
So if rationality is about winning and Trump won, is he rational?
No, because rationality is systematic winning. And the main point here is “systematic". You could win sometimes in Russian roulette, but to play in it is not rational.
Systematic winning gives you opportunity to win constantly in many different games. Randomness and witchcraft give you a chance to win sometimes, but later you will inevitable fail.
Systematic winning is the ability to transfer expertise from one domain to another.
Trump surely has expertise in public stunts and PR. He knows ...
So if rationality is about winning and Trump won, is he rational? No, because rationality is systematic winning.
Trump seems to have been winning pretty systematically. It's not like he's a penniless loser with an ugly wife who randomly found a lottery ticket which entitled him to the presidency of the US :-P
Trump's victory calls for serious reflections on how people see the government as the enabler of change in environmental policies :
No meaningful change is ever enforced from the top , we should start dedicating a bit of our time and money to convince those who see their financial future jeopardized by the policies on climate change (e.g. coal and oil&gas workers) and not just talk and discuss with people who already agree with us . If we fail to do this we'd have a situation where people would feel threatened , abandoned and full of resentments towa
Prediction : Trump will channel public money through his companies in order build "public" infrastructures , I honestly can't say if he's gonna move forward and build the great wall of the americas though
My ideal election would have been Paul vs Sanders vs Johnson vs Stein.....never supported Hillary
and 2 libertarians so what is your problem , dude? They're all 4 equilibrate people regardless of where they stand politically , the same could not be said for a guy who spent 5 millions dollars for having his bathroom plated in gold and sexually assaults women given that you're so concerned about rapists
Also are there any online polls/exit polls regarding women? I suspect that in the privacy of the booth the high status alpha male personality of Donald Trump might have had some not accounted for effect , online polls could still have people lying about their vote and age/gender/race , but eliminate the shy voter variable which I suspect was pretty big with a character like DJT
I'm very pessimistic about this. Basically, a single person, with very few exceptions, cannot influence politics in any meaningful way. Therefore there is no motivation, no utility to be gained from actions themselves. The only way to extract any utility from a political discussion is by bonding with similarly minded people, making new friends and having fun. And for that purpose, the more echo-chamber-y your environment is, the better. And most people use political discussion that way - very few are interested in small scale local politics, where they could have some influence, and most attention is being paid to the presidential elections because they are the most entertaining, even though their influence on them is negligible.
I agree completely here, and Bernies supporters are likely to stay highly motivated, and actually try and get elected to local positions.
But the most useful political structure i have seen is actually from the Occupy movement. Their participatory democracy is a pretty useful model.
https://theconversation.com/anarchy-in-the-usa-five-years-on-the-legacy-of-occupy-wall-street-and-what-it-can-teach-us-in-the-age-of-trump-68452