There is a Russian saying (it's frequently ascribed to Saltykov-Shchedrin, and sounds to me like something he'd write, but I'm not able to properly source this) to precisely that effect... but not in the way you imagine. Roughly translated, it goes like this - "In Russia, the severity of the laws is compensated by the non-neccesity to obey them".
(I don't have too much time for this, so apologies for shoddy sources down in the answer. Please let me know if you'd like more proper ones, I'll be sure to come back to that later.)
My personal model of Russi...
One thing that seems important to note: nuclear warfare need not occur in a vacuum. If countries possessing nuclear weapons are trading all-out strikes, as in your model, they probably are in a state of (World?) war already, and either have fought with other weapons prior to the nuclear exchange, or plan to continue to do so after it. This may include use of non-nuclear weapons with high collateral damage, like chemical or biological agents, or saturation bombardment targeting high-population areas. I wonder if that skews the assessment of damage in any meaningful way.
This is not really erisology in any way, but I think specific topics of discussion/interactions with specific people may very well become Ugh Fielded if you have an initially bad experience.
Since you address "how likely meeting a certain politically charged event would be", I assume your question is focussed on what I've called "Polling 2", which concerns itself with predicting future events.
Yes, you're right, and I should have been more clear - thanks for pointing that out.
The best way to put the matter into quantitative terms may be to ask the interviewee what odds he would give in a bet on the event occuring
I don't know if I'm convinced that would work. I think that most people fall into two camps regarding betting odds. Camp A is no...
I don't have good data to back this up, but I have a feeling that people are thinking in more binary terms than you expect. More specifically, I conjecture that if you were to ask someone for how likely meeting a certain politically charged event would be, they would parse your question as a binary one and answer either "almost certainly" or "very unlikely" - and when pressed for a number, would give you either between 90-100%, or 0-10% respectively.
I don't have a full answer, but here's what seems important to consider - in my experience, the baseline for the level of confidence in speech that is associated with competence and authority is a lot lower in intellectual circles like LessWrong, compared to the general public.
This is because exposure to rationality and science usually impresses into someone that making mistakes is "fine" and an unavoidable component of learning, and that while science has made very impressive progress there is still a lot to learn and understand about the world. On ...
Illustration from Michael Haddad for Wired. It was originally commissioned for an article about biohackers, but I find that it captures the spirit of agency and self-improvement that is well-aligned with some of rationalist values.
I may attempt a more comprehensive analysis to suggest some tests later (although I'm not sure that would be very successful - my rationality skills feel like they are nascent at best), but from a superficial read, it seems to me that points A13 and B10 are essentially the same - both deal with stupidity becoming more widespread as a matter of consumerist/capitalist politics/market foces. That could be opposed by noticing that B10 deals with actually smart individuals who pretend to be stupid to reap the benefits, and A13 deals with actually stupid i...
Of course, you have to modulate that by the possibility that allowing people to live off their UBI or blow it on frivolous spending will cancel out those good effects. That question is beyond my pay grade, and I suspect nobody really knows
This makes me think of something. Can't we look at what people who experienced windfall gains spent their newfound money on? Looking into lottery winners seems like an easy enough to obtain sample, although not unproblematic - it takes a certain kind of person to participate in a lottery in the first place. But if we can ...
This is interesting. I wonder how this would apply to the literature on investing mistakes (esp. amateur investors like people who get burned on Robinhood).
If your idea is correct, IMO people then must be thinking about investing money using priors, concepts and feelings from their own spending experience. Maybe some patterns of systemic bias/mistakes associated with trying to use the "feeling for what N dollars buys and feels like spending" can be teased out.
Sorry if I wasn't clear enough. My critique refers to your point about scenarios where humans evolve like a dystopia not being applicable because if it were, suffering should be a rare occurence - if I understand you correctly, you're stating that if we could evolve to like dystopias, by this point in time we would have evolved to either avoid or like any source of suffering. My counterpoint to this is that there is a massive sub-multitude of sources of suffering that do not affect evolution in any way because they are too transient to effect any serious selection pressure.
You could perhaps engineer scenarios where humans will genuinely evolve to like a dystopia
I think that this kind of misrepresents the scale on which evolution happens - it's not one generation, or two, it's hundreds and thousands, and it's taken relatively good care of the sources of suffering that are fundamental enough to persist and keep the selection pressure on across that time frame - we're pretty good at not eating things that are toxic, breeding, avoiding predators and so on. The problem with evolution is that a significant n...
This post reminds me of an insight from one of my uni professors.
Early on at university, I was very frustrated with that the skills that were taught to us did not seem to be immediately applicable to the real world. That frustration was strong enough to snuff out most of the interest I had for studying genuinely (that is, to truly understand and internalize the concepts taught to us). Still, studying was expensive, dropping out was not an option, and I had to pass exams, which is why very early on I started, in what seemed to me to be a classic instance o...
Disclaimer: this comment includes a lot of speculation on philosophy and art movements that I myself don't have an in-depth understanding of. Please take this with a grain of salt. If anyone reading this understands the matter better and sees me saying BS, please correct me.
I think that one thing that can be helpful to examine is postmodernism. As Jean-Francois Lyotard had originally described it in the late 70s, it is "incredulity towards metanarratives". For Lyotard this meant rejecting the idea that the world is described or describable b...
Thanks for the reply and sorry I couldn't get to this for some time! Hope you're still interested in the discussion.
I expect that politics in most places, and US Congressional politics especially, is usually much more heavily focused on special interests than the overall media narrative would suggest
This is really interesting and you probably have a good point. Do you think there's a more reliable way (for an outsider like myself, who's not able to, I dunno, go and ask people in a dive bar what they think) to get the lay of the politi...
So... it's possible that there is something about Middle Eastern politics that I don't understand, and it would be cool if you could clarify. If I understand you correctly, you write that farms in the South are owned by rich people. At the same time, you write that farms in the North are somehow connected to the ruling coalition, and because of this the government had to signal loyalty to them.
I was under the impression that in monarchic/autocratic countries it was near-impossible to be rich while not being connected to the ruling group (= not being the kind of agent the ruling group would need to signal loyalty to). The farmers in the South contradict that. How does this work?
I'm probably missing something obvious, but I don't trivially see how this
Interestingly, this suggests that a leader can get high value from a group whose preferences are orthogonal to their own; pursue power in groups which care about different things than you!
follows from this
A leader’s power is high when group members all want to coordinate their choices, but care much less about which choice is made, so long as everyone “matches”. Then the leader can just choose anything they please, and everyone will go along with it....
Hah, thanks. At the risk of stroking my ego one too many times - can I ask you to speculate on why that might be the case?
What I mean is - I'm sure what I wrote has some meritoric value (I would've kept it to myself otherwise), but I expected this post to do similarly to how other comparable posts do on LW (first-time post, political topic, not a lot of hard analysis and abstractio... (read more)