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All of geniuslevel20's Comments + Replies

3dxu
And how do you know he/she did that? For that matter, how do I know you're not just leveling false accusations at him/her right now based on your dislike of the manner of expression he/she employed? Your "mind-reading" is, if anything, far worse than anything wedrifid did, because not only are you criticizing someone's actions based on insufficient evidence, you also purport to know that person's motivations. Have you heard of the fundamental question of rationality? "What do you think you know, and why do you think you know it?" I suggest you apply it here. Again, you are drawing highly uncharitable conclusions based on little to no evidence. In addition, you misspelled wedrifid's username as "Werdifred", and I'm not sure if you did so intentionally in order to call him/her "Weird Fred". I'm not sure what to call this, honestly; "ad hominem" might actually be too nice of a term. This is playground-level name-calling. Finally, I have no idea what you mean by your last paragraph. From reading common_law's comment, he/she does not appear to be making any claims about there being something "necessarily better about the faux-naive arguer than the 'clever arguer'". Bringing Eliezer and Robin into this seems entirely irrelevant, and moreover, your assertions about them are entirely unsupported, true or not. I feel no need to argue this point. This will be my last reply to you on this thread, unfortunately. You have not yet demonstrated that you are capable of carrying on clear, constructive conversation; your first action was to call wedrifid, an esteemed long-time member of LW, a "pompous ass", and it only got worse from there. At this stage I see no further benefit to carrying on this conversation.
8dxu
I have no horse in this race, but I note that right after saying this, you proceed to say this, doing the exact same thing you condemn wedrifid for doing: Irony much?
Power and difficulty
geniuslevel20
50

As instrumental rationalists, this is the territory we want to be in. We want to beat the market rate for turning effort into influence.

Would someone be so kind as to direct me to a forum for epistemic rationalists?

[Who wants to talk to folks about important matters when they declare their willingness to deceive even themselves if it gets them what they want?]

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1JoachimSchipper
This is not nice - could you try to find a more pleasant way to say this? Also, LW does do epistemic rationality - but it's easier to say something useful and new about practical matters, so there are more posts of that kind.
[meta] Policy for dealing with users suspected/guilty of mass-downvote harassment?
geniuslevel20
-40

That rationale for the karma system would be the rankest hypocrisy. To facilitate the upvoting of particular commenters—regardless of content—LW records karma totals.

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1VAuroch
It does no such thing. It tracks how much people have been upvoted to estimate their contribution to the community; it tracks monthly totals to estimate how much of that was recent.
2Vladimir_Nesov
Distinguish mass downvoting from indiscriminate downvoting. If most comments someone writes are terrible, there shouldn't be an issue with downvoting those bad comments (except perhaps if you also systematically hunt down all comments, including very old ones, making the average estimate of user's work severely skewed towards your own judgement). This would be a kind of mass downvoting, but not indiscriminate. I agree. It would be great to also have a method of expressing disapproval of particular users ("This user has N friends and M enemies" or something), but indiscriminate downvoting of comments isn't it, it conflates different signals (quality of specific comments vs. overall impression about a user) and makes them less useful.
1MugaSofer
Well, I believe the ideal is for users to learn what type of comment other users dislike, and adjust their behavior. If you signal that everything they do is bad, then they can only "adjust their behavior" by leaving the site - and if new users are chased off by this, it's bad for the LessWrong community. With that said, *I don't think it's reasonable to punish this. The user(s) responsible were, presumably, acting in good faith to improve site, as they saw it. It should be punished going forward*, but banning them will only serve to render their actions even more useless. I wont improve their future actions. I doubt it will even act as a useful signal, compared to an announcement that this is now against the rules.
2ChristianKl
Can you point to a space on this website where the website makes the promise to keep voting anonymous? Who do you think gave posters that "right" and where did the grant it? Given the way US law works they probably couldn't even grant you that right if they wanted to do so.
5PhilGoetz
Mass downvoting would be a legitimate, non-anti-social choice if the votes were counted in a proper Bayesian way, in terms of the evidence they provided. The mass-downvoter's votes would provide no evidence, and so would count for zero.
9Richard_Kennaway
No rule prohibits burning down the servers that LW runs on. It's just that certain standards of behaviour are expected, here as anywhere else, and when rules are made, it is in order to clarify things where that is thought necessary. Mass downvoting by one individual against another has emerged as a questionable phenomenon. Proof of its questionability: it is being questioned. Also, no-one has owned up to doing it, no-one has defended it, and if the motivation were concern for the good of LessWrong, the targets seem oddly chosen for that. BTW, I was once the target of a bulk downvote. I had around 400 karma at the time and dropped 40. I thought, hahahahahahahahahaha! A dog barked; the caravan moved on. But the current practitioners appear to be operating on a larger scale. Voting is anonymous, in that your votes are not published to anyone else. That there is a database recording every vote that everyone has ever cast is obvious. How does the site ensure you only get one vote on each comment? How does it show you your own votes? Because it knows. That such a database, given that it exists, will be examined in sufficiently egregious cases, is also obvious. However, I have not yet seen any instance of personal voting information being made public.
5Decius
Rather than look at the rules as logic tests that must be passed for an action to be punished, look at the rules as informing what behavior is allowed and prohibited. Choosing to dislike every post by a specific user because it is by that user is simply harassment. Choosing to dislike a poster /without providing feedback/ as to why is counter to the principles of good communication.
What should a Bayesian do given probability of proving X vs. of disproving X?
geniuslevel20
00

Commenters minunderstand your problem and your argument for its solution. I take your problem to be "What could the probability of a mathematical proposition be besides its comparative likelihood of proof or disproof?

Perhaps the answer is that there are reasons besides proof to believe even a mathematical proposition. Empirical reasons, that is.

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0Richard_Kennaway
Except that the example he gives is not a mathematical one, but the question of free will. I have to wonder if the question of free will is not the real subject of the post.
1lmm
If we know that for some particular class of propositions, some number were proven false quite easily, and some number were proven true but only after hundreds of years and great struggle, and the rest have remained unproven, it seems intuitively reasonable to suspect that more of the unproven ones are true than a naive ratio would suggest. I don't know how to make this rigorous though.
Willpower Depletion vs Willpower Distraction
geniuslevel20
10

While these are all interesting empirical findings, there’s a very similar phenomenon that’s much less debated and which could explain many of these observations, but I think gets too little popular attention in these discussions.

But you don't explain the findings!

I once asked a room full of about 100 neuroscientists whether willpower depletion was a thing,

I don't even know what that question is supposed to mean.

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4ChristianKl
Understanding questions isn't always trival. If you want to understand the question in depth reading Rob Baumeister's book Willpower will give you the background.
How I Am Productive
geniuslevel20
30

You overemphasize that this worked for you and made you productive. It's not just a matter of different strokes for different folks. It's more basic: you really don't know that your productivity increase is due to the particular techniques, and the nontestimonal evidence for the techniques is weak or nonexistent. (For example, commenters have pointed out that they can find nothing rigorous on prodromo.)

Anti-procrastination is like dieting. Achieving a large weight loss over eight months doesn't make the diet effective: most people regain the lost weight.

E... (read more)

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2Peter Wildeford
I think that's too pessimistic. I have a pretty strong time-order self-report -- I spent many years being unproductive, implemented these changes, and then became productive, and haven't stopped yet. (Though the same is true for the weight loss from my diet change and addition of exercise...) Not to mention, there is some "consensus of experts" here around these techniques, though admittedly this also doesn't mean much. ~ You could be right, but I don't know what basis you're making this from. Is it your personal experience? Do you have nontestimonial evidence that these techniques won't create sustainable change, at least for me? I think it goes both ways here.
The Robots, AI, and Unemployment Anti-FAQ
geniuslevel20
20

In comparing the skills of just the manufacturing jobs created and lost, you ignore the seismic and dominating change in the urban/rural ratio. The process can be seen at an accelerated rate today in China: peasants transformed into workers and getting paid higher income as the result, thus expanding the economy. Peasants to workers is a much weightier trend than skilled workers to unskilled workers.

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0Nornagest
Ah. I think we may be working from different senses of "associate". I took it to indicate perceptions, not real economic changes. You are of course right that the Industrial Revolution led to a larger economy and that the urban/rural shift had a lot to do with that.
The Robots, AI, and Unemployment Anti-FAQ
geniuslevel20
80

The main question is why is automation associated with unemployment today when it wasn't in the past. To answer, you have to consider the kinds of jobs created by and lost to automation and the determinants of workers incomes in the jobs.

Most of the industrial revolution is associated an increasing number of workers in manufacturing and fewer in farming. The industrial work force grew primarily at the expense of the peasants or farmers. Today, automation is causing manufacturing jobs to be replaced by service jobs. Farming jobs were the first to go because... (read more)

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0feanor1600
"Groups of workers with higher status get paid better." True. But what is the main direction of causation here? According to basic economics, workers will get paid their marginal product (how much you add to production). This is a pretty good first approximation. Of course, you can get paid in many ways- money, flexible hours, even status. The higher the status of a job the less it needs to pay to attract workers; this is called a compensating differential. High-level politicians are very high-status but don't make that much. Conversely, very low-status jobs (like janitor or garbageman) have to pay a bit more in money wages to get people to work.
6Nornagest
It was, or at least has been at some points. Our word "Luddite" originally referred to members of an an anti-automation movement active in the early 19th century, which believed that powered looms and similar devices would lead to unemployment among the artisan classes. In actual fact the Industrial Revolution ended up creating more jobs than it destroyed, thanks to lower prices for manufactured goods expanding the customer base, but the jobs that it created did demand less skill and were lower-paying than their predecessors, at least until the labor movement caught up. The analogy to the service sector's expansion at the expense of the manufacturing sector isn't perfect, but I think it's closer than you're giving it credit for.
Introduction to Connectionist Modelling of Cognitive Processes: a chapter by chapter review
geniuslevel20
100

Allow me, please, to question whether a book precis should be on "Main." An ordinary precis doesn't represent a "top level" contribution. Putting this on Main makes it look like a "top ten" poster can get upvoted by posting almost anything, anywhere.

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8Kaj_Sotala
Due to the main post having so few upvotes and this comment having several, moved the post to Discussion.
Mandatory Secret Identities
geniuslevel20
100

even if one accepted the implied unlikely propsition that no such persons exist or ever have existed, the terminological question would remain

I don't think so: psychiatry has no need for terms that fail to refer. (On the other hand, psychiatry might have a term for something that doesn't exist--because it once was thought to have existed.)

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-1komponisto
At the risk of stating the obvious: I did not intend to restrict the terminological question to psychiatry specifically. But in any event: you could say the same thing about zoology. And yet we still have the word unicorn.