Thank you very much for the in-depth comment, it is indeed very helpful for me to hear. Let me try to address your points:
- "How does evolution go backward in time..." - I don't think it does. Let me try to explain the mechanism:
(1) groups of people, whether families, tribes, villages and then larger ones have existed for pretty much as long as human species (even down to pre-humans). We called it a "state", as it is the current incantation, but generally speaking a system of cooperating groups of people has perhaps always been stronger than individual people, hence I think it did have as much impact on human evolution as individual... (read 724 more words →)
Thank you! I've updated the article.
We expected that there may be some minor things that people will not like about the article, but the current negative karma suggests that we have misjudged it. Since this is our first article, it would be especially helpful to hear your comments.
complicated.world is a website, where we're trying to present our view on certain popular aspects like the need for privacy, problem of discrimination, immigration, or platforms moderation vs freedom of speech. We want each article to be rooted in some basic values and axioms. We have recently started and here is a link to our first article, which is on happiness and which is a foundation for further articles.
Excerpts:
... (read 381 more words →)Origins of Happiness
We may only expect that as with everything else, evolution is to blame. Evolution means survival of the fittest and in the current world it seems that strong, effective societies are the fittest entities. That would lead us to a presumption that
Thanks! The key to topic selection is where we find that we are most disagreeing with the popular opinions. For example, the number of times I can cope with hearing someone saying "I don't care about privacy, I have nothing to hide" is limited. We're trying to have this article out before that limit is reached. But in order to reason about privacy's utility and to ground it in root axioms, we first have to dive into why we need freedom. That, in turn requires thinking about mechanisms of a happy society. And that depends on our understanding of happiness, hence that's where we're starting.
Hi LessWrong Community!
I'm new here, though I've been an LW reader for a while. I'm representing complicated.world website, where we strive to use similar rationality approach as here and we also explore philosophical problems. The difference is that, instead of being a community-driven portal like you, we are a small team which is working internally to achieve consensus and only then we publish our articles. This means that we are not nearly as pluralistic, diverse or democratic as you are, but on the other hand we try to present a single coherent view on all discussed problems, each rooted in basic axioms. I really value the LW community (our entire team does) and would like to start contributing here. I would also like to present from time to time a linkpost from our website - I hope this is ok. We are also a not-for-profit website.
All of the examples that you mentioned share one critical non-technical aspect though. Their results are publicly available (I guess they were funded by general public, e.g. in case of "BadLlama" - by donations and grants to a foundation Palisade Research and IIIT, an Indian national institute). If you took the very same "technical" research and have it only available to a potentially shady private company, then that technical information could help them to indeed circumvent Llama's safeguards. At that point, I'm not sure if one could still confidently call it "overwhelmingly positive".
I agree that the works that you mentioned are very positive, but I think that the above non-technical aspect is necessary to take into consideration.