All of Nornagest's Comments + Replies

I think conflating literalism and fundamentalism here is probably a bad idea. I am not an expert in the early history of the Abrahamic religions, but it seems likely that textual literalism's gone in and out of style over the several thousand years of Abrahamic history, just as many other aspects of interpretation have.

Fundamentalism is a different story. There have been several movements purporting to return to the fundamentals of religion, but in current use the word generally refers only to the most recent crop of movements, which share certain charac... (read more)

While it's true that BMI is a rough metric and gets rougher when you're dealing with unusual proportions or body compositions, those effects are often exaggerated. An athletic male of 6 feet 6 inches (99.8th percentile) and 210 pounds, which is about what you'd find in your average pro basketball player, would score as normal weight.

It's hard to get players to use specific speech patterns, and harder to teach them to get it right. I've worked on a game which tried to get players to use pseudo-Elizabethan prose (in a particularly ham-handed way, granted), but in practice what happened was the people who didn't care just used natural speech, and the people that did used whatever butchered old-timey dialect they thought would be appropriate for their character. Most people didn't care.

I'm a One Medical member. The single biggest draw for me is that you can get appointments the same or next day with little or no waiting time -- where my old primary care doctor was usually booked solid for two weeks or more, by which point I'd either have naturally gotten over whatever I wanted to see him for, or have been driven to an expensive urgent care clinic full of other sick people.

They don't bother with the traditional kabuki dance where a nurse ushers you in and takes your vitals and then you wait around for fifteen minutes before the actual ... (read more)

That was pretty good.

I don't really follow the Narnia fandom, but whenever I run into it I'm usually impressed by its quality. Especially considering that the movies behind it (it seems primarily to be a movie fandom, though everyone's read the books) were second-rate as popularity goes and not particularly deep or creative.

Let's not break our arms patting ourselves on the back, at least not until the data's in. At the moment we could be more, less, or equally susceptible to scamming than our demographics generally are.

It'd be interesting to see which, though.

For almost all subjects X, an X festival is an excuse to drink beer, hang out, and do silly X-themed stuff.

This should not be taken to mean that it has nothing to do with X, or that it adds no value toward it. What you're really getting out of it is an opportunity to meet other people who're into the subject, or at least well-disposed enough to show up to a festival advertised as such.

Probably contrarianism talking -- both here and on RationalWiki, actually. I wouldn't take it too seriously.

My guess would be that there are a lot of truck drivers and it's a very male-leaning job, so I'd expect to see it paired up with a lot of female-leaning jobs of about the same class.

I'm not saying we should do away with rules. I'm saying that there needs to be leeway to handle cases outside of the (specific) rules, with more teeth behind it than "don't do it again".

Rules are helpful. A ruleset outlines what you're concerned with, and a good one nudges users toward behaving in prosocial ways. But the thing to remember is that rules, in a blog or forum context, are there to keep honest people honest. They'll never be able to deal with serious malice on their own, not without spending far more effort on writing and adjudicating them than you'll ever be able to spend, and in the worst cases they can even be used against you.

Standing just on this side of a line you've drawn is only a problem if you have a mod staff that's way too cautious or too legalistic, which -- judging from the Eugine debacle -- may indeed be a problem that LW has. For most sites, though, that's about the least challenging problem you'll face short of a clear violation.

The cases you need to watch out for are the ones that're clearly abusive but have nothing to do with any of the rules you worked out beforehand. And there are always going to be a lot of those. More of them the more and stricter your rules are (there's the incentives thing again).

Speaking as someone that's done some Petty Internet Tyrant work in his time, rules-lawyering is a far worse problem than you're giving it credit for. Even a large, experienced mod staff -- which we don't have -- rarely has the time and leeway to define much of the attack surface, much less write rules to cover it; real-life legal systems only manage the same feat with the help of centuries of precedent and millions of man-hours of work, even in relatively small and well-defined domains.

The best first step is to think hard about what you're incentivizing a... (read more)

The cheapest technical fix would probably be to prohibit voting on a comment after some time has passed, like some subreddits do. This would prevent karma gain from "interest" on old comments, but that probably wouldn't be too big a deal. More importantly, though, it wouldn't prevent ongoing retributive downvoting, which Eugine did (sometimes? I was never targeted) engage in -- only big one-time karma moves.

If we're looking for first steps, though, this is a place to start.

I'm sympathetic, but I do note that this would further incentivize retributive downvoting.

I'm not talking about having a generally sunny disposition, although that probably helps; I'm talking about quantifiable questions like "how likely am I to get this job?" Unrealistically high estimates could fairly be described as denial (though a relatively benign form); nonetheless they're empirically correlated with success.

I'm open to the possibility that this isn't causal, though.

I'm not sure that's true. All the research I've seen on the subject suggests that successful people in most contexts harbor optimistic rather than accurate views of their chances, skills, and associates.

That said, there's probably a sweet spot.

I don't give out a lot of compliments in general. But when I do, I've had better luck complimenting people on appearance when it's stuff they obviously chose and put effort into: a haircut; tattoos; choice in clothing. Few people like to be complimented on stuff they didn't do anything for; many people like to be complimented on stuff they did.

(If you try clothing, though, be aware that "nice top" is likely to be read as "nice breasts".)

You have context. If you meet a woman at a bar, she's probably the kind of person that hangs out at bars. At an Iron Maiden concert, she's probably a metalhead. At a climbing gym, she's probably athletic and at least a little outdoorsey. Even if you just ran into her in a Starbucks, it's still one Starbucks in one neighborhood, and she was there and not somewhere else for a reason. You're filtering, but you're filtering less on what she wrote in one of the little boxes and more on what you both bothered to show up for -- which can actually end up bein... (read more)

"Nastiness in the comments" and "people asking him to be more rigorous" aren't mutually exclusive. I heard a lot of this in person, so I can't easily provide references, but back when that was all going down I remember a lot of talk from Eliezer and other major contributors about how LW was getting unpleasantly nitpicky.

In Eliezer's case this probably has something to do with the fastest-gun-in-the-west dynamic, where if you're known as a public intellectual in some context you're going to attract a lot of people looking to gain some s... (read more)

At that level, it looks like it mostly happens with incumbents, especially in districts so politically polarized that the other party can't mount a realistic challenge. In these cases, the real challenge to the incumbent, if there is one, would happen at the primary level and the Wikipedia page wouldn't pick it up.

I don't know how common primary-level challenges are. I wouldn't expect them to be universal, but I did see at least one entry on that page (Ralph Hall, for Texas' fourth district) where the candidate defeated an incumbent in the primary and then went on to win the general election unopposed.

It's not too uncommon for candidates to run unopposed in local, sometimes even state, elections in the US. It's not the norm, exactly, but every so often you get an office where only one person has the time, interest, and availability to mount a serious campaign.

I'm not sure about grand strategy, but I've definitely noticed that attitudes toward government, even that of the nominal good guys, are way more cynical in Eastern European (including Russian) fantasy. The arms of government it touches on often also strike me as more modern, involving things like special forces and organized espionage in otherwise medieval settings, but that might just be because I'm more used to the anachronisms in Western fantasy.

There are factors pointing both ways here. If getting a job means giving up benefits for the unemployed, or means-tested welfare that you'll become ineligible for, that's a disincentive to get a job. But utility isn't linear in money, and so a job paying N dollars will always be more attractive to someone making zero dollars than the same job is to someone on UBI worth K dollars -- and increasingly so the higher K is. That's also a disincentive.

Which of these disincentives is bigger depends on the sizes of N and K and the specifics of the welfare system. I think I'd usually expect the incentive landscape on the margins to be friendlier under UBI, but it's by no means a certainty.

Mocking tombstones is edgy and transgressive. Mocking pencils is just weird.

If you find yourself so engrossed with abstract epistemic considerations that you can't deal with concrete ones, it may be time to start wondering how much instrumental rationality your approach to this epistemic rationality thing is buying you.

The best players of any game usually do a lot of systematizing, but there is such a thing as too much meta.

Maybe, but I've rarely gotten more than one offer from a given headhunter -- actually, I've gotten multiple offers from one company more often than through one headhunting agency. Reading between the lines, I get the impression that most of them have a library of openings and look in real time for candidates matching them, rarely going into their back catalog.

Multiple offers might be more common for people with less specialized skillsets than mine, though.

I don't know, but if you could get a working plan by asking on public boards, I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be worth billions of dollars.

I haven't read the Potter books for a long while, but from what I recall they're pretty good at avoiding instant-gratification solutions when there's some specific plot coupon that the protagonists need to master. The Patronus charm, the Polyjuice potion, etc. Harry even tries hard and fails to learn an essential skill once, with Occulemency, which is practically unheard of in fiction.

It doesn't seem to generalize very well, though. The protagonists are mediocre students aside from Hermione, and after the first couple of books her studiousness seems to ... (read more)

In the short term, rehearse well with as close a simulation of your eventual stage as you can manage, or use prescription or nonprescription anxiolytics, or try one of the many speakers' tricks for reducing stage fright. Most of the latter probably won't work, but some might.

In the long run, the best way is probably exposure: doing a lot of public speaking, perhaps in front of progressively larger audiences.

Higher minimum wage means the poorest people have more money, then they turn around and spend that money at Walmart.

The poorest people do not directly benefit from minimum wage, because they don't have jobs. Many participants in the informal economy are also very poor.

One option I didn't think of in the ancestor is that people pushed into the informal sector may still be showing up as employed in the sources being referenced: people making a lower-than-minimum-wage living as e.g. junk collectors are sometimes counted as such depending on methodology. ... (read more)

Actually, I'd interpret this very differently - inviting someone back for coffee is, on the face of it, saying that the reason you are inviting them is for coffee, not sex. Its a false pretext.

It's a pretext, sure. That's the point. The standard getting-to-know-you script does not allow for directly asking someone for sex (unless you're already screwing them on the regular; "wanna get some ice cream and fuck?" is acceptable, if a little crass, on the tenth date) so we've developed the line as a semi-standardized cover story for getting a cou... (read more)

It's almost always creepy in the context of an early relationship: whether you've kissed or not, it's a strong signal of contempt for or unfamiliarity with sexual norms. About the only exceptions I can think of would occur in very sex-positive cultures with very strong norms around explicit verbal negotiation. There aren't many of those cultures, and even within them you'd usually want some strong indications of interest beforehand.

On the other hand, if you've invited someone up for coffee (or just said "do you want to come back to my place?",... (read more)

Of course we can - because UFAI is defined as superintelligence that doesn't care about humans!

For a certain narrow sense of "care", yes -- but it's a sense narrow enough that it doesn't exclude a motivation to sim humans, or give us any good grounds for probabilistic reasoning about whether a Friendly intelligence is more likely to simulate us. So narrow, in fact, that it's not actually a very strong assumption, if by strength we mean something like bits of specification.

UFAI is not strongly motivated to sim us in large numbers

This is the weakest assumption in your chain of reasoning. Design space for UFAI is far bigger than for FAI, and we can't make strong assumptions about what it is or is not motivated to do -- there are lots of ways for Friendliness to fail that don't involve paperclips.

we praise people who build, but we neglect to shame the lazy gamers

I can't help wondering where you got this idea. The mainstream absolutely shames lazy gamers; they're one of the few groups that it's socially acceptable to shame without reservation, even more so than other subcultures seen as socially unproductive (e.g. stoner, hippie, dropout) because their escape of choice still carries a childish stigma. That's countered somewhat by an expectation of somewhat higher social class, but the "mom's basement" stereotype is alive and well.

Even... (read more)

So why are taxes even progressive for the 99,99%? They achieve just about nothing in reducing GINI, they piss of the upper-middle who may be unable to buy a nice car...

The purpose of progressive taxation is not to reduce the Gini coefficient; it's to efficiently extract funding and to sound good to fairness-minded voters. With regard to the former, there's a lot more people around the 90th percentile than the 99.99th, more of their money comes in easily-taxable forms, and they're generally more tractable than those far above or below. They may be unab... (read more)

There have been a few apps based around this, though usually lacking the karma part. The one that comes to mind is Honesty Box for Facebook. (Which may no longer exist? I last heard of it several years ago.)

I don't think a working model of this would look much like a cannon. Nukes don't directly produce (much of) a shockwave; most of the shock comes from everything in the vicinity of the warhead absorbing a massive dose of prompt gamma and/or loose neutrons and suddenly deciding that all its atoms really need to be over there. So if you had a payload backed right against a nuke, even if it managed to survive the explosion, it wouldn't convert much of its power into velocity; Orion gets its power by vaporizing the outer layers of the pusher plate or a layer ... (read more)

Consider the construct of conscientiousness. It's very suspicious that it maps onto a prexisting notion...

Is it? We've been modeling each other as long as language has existed. Conscientiousness might not correspond to a single well-defined causal system in the brain, but it would be no surprise to me at all to find common words in most languages for close empirical clusters in personality-space. And the Big 5 factors are very much empirical constructs, not causal.

Between the word "beliefs" (which rules out most demographic groups), the word "openly" (which rules out anything you can't easily hide), and the existence of a plausible "anti-X" group (which rules out most multipolar situations), there's not too many possibilities left. The correct answer is the biggest, and most of the other plausible options are subsets of it.

I suppose it could also have been its converse, but you don't hear too much about discrimination cases going that way.

There are the so-called dumb jocks and then there are athletic geniuses (for example, Alan Turing was an extremely good runner). You could easily end up with a skilled team featuring a large gap in IQ scores. The endpoints of this gap would have overlapping interests despite the intelligence difference.

When I was in high school, I was a skinny nerd that could barely bench-press the bar. But I spent most of my senior year eating my lunches with some guys from the football and track teams, including a lineman who went on to the NFL.

These guys weren't dum... (read more)

In that case, I'm an ENTJ.

But without medicalizing, how can we generate significant-sounding labels for every aspect of our personalities?

There's always divination. It's totally random, of course, but throw enough parameters and different methods at the problem and eventually most people will hit something they're happy with.

I'm a Cancer with Aries rising. What's your sign?

Welcome to LW! I suspect you'll find a lot of company here, at least as regards thinking in unwarranted detail about fictional magic systems.

I suspect most rationalists will turn out to care more about their cuddle piles than about their ideas becoming mainstream. There's always been a rather unhealthy interaction between community goals and the community's social quirks (we want to raise the sanity waterline -> we are saner -> our quirks should be evangelized), and we don't really have a working way to sort out what actually comes with increased rationality and what's just a founder effect.

I think the cost is higher than you're giving it credit for. Securing dev time to implement changes around here is incredibly hard, at least if you aren't named Eliezer, and changes anywhere are usually harder to back out than they are to put in; we can safely assume that any change we manage to push through will last for months, and forever is probably more likely.

An earlier version of my comment read "LW or parts of it". Edited it out for stylistic reasons and because I assumed the application to smaller domains would be clear enough in context. Guess I was wrong.

Granted, not everything I said would apply to the first proposal, the one where top-level posts are upvote-only but comments aren't. That's a little more interesting; I'm still leery of it but I haven't fully worked out the incentives.

As to empirics, one thing we're not short on is empirical data from other forums. We're not so exceptional that the lessons learned from them can't be expected to apply.

Proposals for making LW upvote-only emerge every few months, most recently during the retributive downvoting fiasco. I said then, and I continue to believe now, that it's a terrible idea.

JMIV is right to say in the ancestor that subtle features of moderation mechanics have outsized effects on community culture; I even agree with him that Eliezer voiced an unrealistically rosy view of the downvote in "Well-Kept Gardens". But upvote-only systems have their own pitfalls, and quite severe ones. The reasons behind them are somewhat complex, but boi... (read more)

Prison gangs formed from a kind of arms race of mutual self-defense.

Lots of gangs form that way -- it's one of the two main pathways to organized crime, the other one being economies of scale in selling illegal goods and services. The Bloods, for example, started out as a sort of anti-Crips self-defense force, and many yakuza organizations are generally thought to have their roots in mutual-protection societies among small commercial enterprises.

You've cited some examples of people who, it is undeniable, are successful, but who also happen to fit your argument. But equally there are many successful businesspeople who did not study maths/CS/physics

If only there were some way of quantifying this.