All of Bae's Theorem's Comments + Replies

Kansas City, MO

When: December 21st, 5p

Where: Kansas City Oasis (1717 W 41st St, Kansas City, MO, 64111)

Signup: LW Facebook Partiful

"It can sometimes be better for things to be worse."

I will just leave that there with no further comment.

3Vladimir_Nesov
The point is distinction between the value of the greater good and the means of achieving it. Values about spacetime rather than values about some future that forgets the past leading to it. Applicability of this general point to this incident is dubious, but the general point seems valid (and relevant to reasoning behind condemnation of individual instances of downvoting in such cases).

Thank you for your service. This is a good thing, and everyone who downvoted you is personally responsible for this site having gotten worse.

1Vladimir_Nesov
Autonomy/boundaries is an important value. Hence even actual help that makes everything substantially better can be unwanted. (In this particular case there is already a similar existing feature, it's more ambiguous.) So even in the less convenient possible world where this is clearly true, such unwanting is a part of what matters, its expression lets it be heard. It can sometimes be better for things to be worse. Value is path-dependent, it's not just about the outcome. It's not my own position in this case, but it's a sensible position even in this case. And taking up the spot of the top comment might be going too far. Minor costs add up but get ignored as a result of sacredness norms, such as linking downvoting to clearly personally making things worse.

I attended this year, and went googling to see if anyone has had the same issues with her behavior. It is appalling to find that this has been apparently going on for over a decade.

If you are concerned about attending due to a lack of RSVPs here, rest assured we will have a large crowd! Everyone RSVPs on Meetup.com, and most people don't RSVP.

https://www.meetup.com/kc_rat_ea/events/300051722/

Is it possible to crowdfund the necessary expenses to get this onto Spotify? Are there any significant potential licensing issues?

6habryka
No huge licensing issues, I think. My guess is these should go live on Spotify within the next few days or so, we are currently waiting on their review to complete.

CEO of the Guild of the ROSE here. This is an excellent writeup, and I appreciate the shoutout. You've correctly identified that our current structure lends itself more towards a university-like environment, but we have always aspired for that to just be one piece of the Guild. We are also interested in being a more open-ended community and providing the things you describe.

Right now, we are limited by funds and time. We have been working on this project for several years without pay, and so we have had to severely restrict what we focus on. If anyone wants to use us for the aspirations outlined in this post, let us know and we will happily lend ourselves to this mission.

What are the dimensions of the frames you used? Or better yet, do you have an amazon link to them?

2mingyuan
Whoops very late reply but in the pictures, the posters are actually just taped to 8.5"x10" sheets of black cardstock; after printing the virtues themselves we manually cut them all down to have 1/2" margins all around. When we moved houses in 2019 we did frame them, using these frames that conveniently come in a 12 pack! (For the void we put a piece of black paper in the frame.)

Hi! CEO here. 

I would re-frame the conversation by saying everyone has things that are already impressive about them, but they also have weaknesses that prevent them from fulfilling their individual potential. The approach ROSE is taking is to help people shore up their weaknesses, leaving them only with strengths. To this end, we have already begun to succeed.

We have members who have made significant life decisions with the help of our Practical Decision Making course. We have helped people learn how to learn new skills more efficiently with our Meta... (read more)

6Said Achmiz
Thanks for the response. I think it would be very useful for us to hear more about these things—they sound like they might be important components of an answer to my outside-view question.

If anyone has any questions, I am co-CEO of ROSE and will be periodically checking these comments. :)

"God of the EA community"? The majority of my city's EA community doesn't even know who Yudkowsky is, and of the few who do most have ambivalent opinions of him.

The primary goal of this document is to articulate my personal moral philosophy, and I use the Mohism branding because it has strong corollaries to said moral philosophy, but otherwise I am reinventing it from scratch.

I do think that a lot of the core tenets are widely (if subconsciously) held. As for the ones that aren't widely held, I personally think they should be. But, like any good Neo-Mohist, I'm willing to be convinced otherwise. ;)

The phrasing of this as a philosophy for others to adopt is mostly an aesthetic decision, a reframing to help me look at it more critically.

Thanks for the feedback! 

Basing it on Mohism is more of an aesthetic decision than anything; if classical Mohism has an issue then Neo-Mohism should set out to solve it. :)

I think there's a difference between "no fixed standards" and "the ability to update standards in light of new evidence". Neo-Mohism is definitely about "strong opinions, weakly held" kind of thing. The standards it sets forth are only to be overturned by failing a test, and until then should be treated as the best answer so far.

If you would like to attend a Guild mixer to meet the Council and some of the students, come join us saturday! We expect to do this on a monthly or quarterly basis.

https://bit.ly/3lOco5O

Never mind, I found your calendly. Got us scheduled for friday. :)

2Ruby
Woop! Sorry, should have put my Calendly link in the post.
1Bae's Theorem
Never mind, I found your calendly. Got us scheduled for friday. :)

Please note that we have added a Google Form for registration, to make sure we have enough food.

No, the best way to convince me is to show me data. Evidence I can actually update on, instead of self-reporting on results that may be poisoned by motivated reasoning, or any number of other biases. Data I can show to people who know what they are talking about, that they will take seriously.

2Alexei
Your question was: “What evidence can I show to a non-Rationalist that our particular movement...” I’m saying for non rationalists that’s one of the better ways to do it. They don’t need the kind of data you seem to require. But if you talk about your life in a friendly, open way, that will get you far. Additionally, “example of your own life” is data. And some people know how to process that pretty remarkably.

I see Bayesian Rationality as a methodology as much as it is a calculation. It's being aware of our own prior beliefs, the confidence intervals of those beliefs, keeping those priors as close to the base rates as possible, being cognizant of how our biases can influence our perception of all this, trying to mitigate the effects of those biases, and updating based on the strength of evidence.

I'm trying to get better at math so I can do better calculations. It's a major flaw in my technique I acknowledge and am trying to change.

But as you noted earlier, non

... (read more)

A strong correlation between adopting the virtues and established methods of rationality, and an increased quality of life, but yeah; more handwavey. I don't even know what calculations could be made. That's sorta why I'm here.

1eigen
If you're not doing calculations then you are not doing "Bayesian Rationality". Therefore, you very likely cannot explain to someone how "Bayesian Rationality" has worked out for you.

Yes, but they could all be explained by the fact I just sat down and bothered to think about the problem, which wouldn't exactly be an amazing endorsement of rationality as a whole.

I also don't look at rationality as merely a set of tools; it's an entire worldview that emphasizes curiosity and a desire to know the truth. If it does improve lives, it might very well simply be making our thinking more robust and streamlined. If so, I wouldn't know how to falsify or quantify that.

2eigen
I don't understand how are you getting so many questions about your post instead of sensible replies to it. Did someone really say to you to change the question? Why would you ever do that if what you really want to know is how people are benefited by this way of thinking? What if say to that guy: "no,no..." how about you tell me how you have benefited about Bayesian thinking since that's what I'm interested in knowing?

I ask the question this way to hopefully avoid stepping on toes. I'm fully open to the idea that the answer is "we have none". Also, I am primarily addressing the people who are making a claim. I am not necessarily making a claim myself.

3John_Maxwell
Fair enough. CFAR has some data about participants in their workshops: https://rationality.org/studies/2015-longitudinal-study BTW, I think the inventor of Cohen's d said 0.2 is a "small" effect size. I think some LW surveys have collected data on the amount people have read LW and checked to see if that was predictive of e.g. being well-calibrated on things (IIRC it wasn't.) You could search for "survey [year]" on LW to find that data, and you could analyze it yourself if you want. Of course, it's hard to infer causality. I think LW is one of the best online communities. But if reading a great online community is like reading a great book, even the best books are unlikely to produce consistent measurable changes in the life outcomes of most readers, I would guess. Supposedly education research has shown that transfer learning isn't really a thing, which could imply, for example, that reading about Bayesianism won't make you better calibrated. Specifically practicing the skill of calibration could make you better calibrated, but we don't spend a lot of time doing that. I think Bryan Caplan discusses transfer learning in his book The Case Against Education, which also talks about the uselessness of education in general. LW could be better for your human capital than a university degree and still be pretty useless. The usefulness of reading LW has long been a debate topic on LW. Here are some related posts: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LgavAYtzFQZKg95WC/extreme-rationality-it-s-not-that-great https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7dRGYDqA2z6Zt7Q4h/goals-for-which-less-wrong-does-and-doesn-t-help https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qGEqpy7J78bZh3awf/what-i-ve-learned-from-less-wrong https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PBRWb2Em5SNeWYwwB/humans-are-not-automatically-strategic http://www.overcomingbias.com/2012/06/the-smart-are-more-biased-to-think-they-are-less-biased.html https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AdYdLP2sRqPMoe8fb/knowing-about-biases-can-hurt-people You can al

I'm convinced mostly due to its effects on my own life, as stated in the opening paragraph. But I'm unsure of how to test and demonstrate that claim. My question is for my benefit as well as others.

5Alexei
Right, but how do you know? Are there specific stories of how you were going to make a decision X but then you used a rationality tool Y and it saved the day?

I just realized that I work tomorrow, so we are not doing the hike. Instead, we are doing our usual 6pm meetup at the Johnson County Central Resource Library. We will do our hike next week (June 25th, 9am, Shawnee Lake Dog Park).

If I find that it does have actual impact on the podcast's effectiveness, then I absolutely will seriously consider changing it. Your criticism has updated me marginally in that direction, but it's not quite enough for me to act on it, particularly since you're the only person to mention it. Thank you for your feedback!

I'm sure that there are Street Epistemologists that are guilty of this, but that's literally opposite of what I encourage or practice.

At its core, SE is merely coaching people in asking the Fundamental Question of Rationality. As an SE-er, it's my way of Raising the Sanity Waterline. It's excellent at circumventing the Backfire Effect.

There are as many motivations for SE as there are practitioners.

The Bayesian Conspiracy needs to be updated with Jess as a new host. :)

1Mati_Roy
please go ahead!:) and let me know if you have trouble editing the wiki

I will be sure to include a transcript in all future episode descriptions/show notes.

Done! Link to the transcript has been posted in the description, and also here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1MjTM4revF1upDvO00y0v8jF8G6HUbcABtFDxVYiLyPc/edit?usp=sharing

Is there a different venue/format for the notes you had in mind?

4Said Achmiz
This is perfect, thanks.

Due to the nature of assembling a bug list, there might not be a whole lot to discuss and do. If we are finished significantly early, we might simply move on to Day 2: 'Yoda Timers'

The Kansas City Rationalists are putting together a dojo, for the purpose of improving our cognitive abilities, happiness, and efficiency. For content, we will be using the 'Hammertime' sequence. Attendees are expected to read the introduction ('Hammers and Nails') and Day 1 ('Bug Hunt'), as well as put together their bug list. The meeting will consist of meta-discussion about the content, and discussion about our experience putting together our bug lists. Bonus points if you are willing to share the bugs you found!

We will be meeting weekly, at the same time and location.

1Bae's Theorem
Due to the nature of assembling a bug list, there might not be a whole lot to discuss and do. If we are finished significantly early, we might simply move on to Day 2: 'Yoda Timers'
2Michael Roman
Did it work? Or does it need adjustment?

My IRL rationality group is preparing to test that sequence. It looks promising, although we do have some quibbles with it. If we successfully finish testing, we'll publish the details.

This may seem stupid, but I didn't even think about doing odds calibration on such a small scale. That's a great idea. Making a pinned Google Keep note now.

4Vaughn Papenhausen
How about something like: "Tsuyoku Naritai - The Becoming Stronger Podcast"?

I was thinking "Tsuyoku Naritai". 😊

2ChristianKl
That name doesn't give anybody who reads it an idea about what the podcast is about. It also doesn't contain any keywords that are good for SEO.

If I understand you correctly, I wholeheartedly agree that "Less Wrong" is not just referring to a dichotomy of "what is true" and "what is wrong" (although that is part of it, ala 'Map and Territory').

There's a reason rationality is often called "systemized winning"; while the goals that you are trying to win are entirely subjective, rationality can help you decide what is most optimal in your pursuit of goal Y.

1Inyuki
Well, my main point was, that error can be of arbitrary type, one may be of the modeling of what is ("Map"), another of modeling what we want to be ("Territory"), and one can think of infinite number of various types of "errors", - logical, ethical, pragmatic, moral, ecological, cultural, situational, .. the list goes on and on. And, if each type of error we think of "suboptimality", then "less err" or "less wrong" would be etymologically equivalent to "optimize". So, we're a community for optimization. And that's actually equivalent to intelligence. No matter, if we are seeking for truth or pragmatics, the methods of rationality remain largely the same -- it's the general mathematical methods of optimizing.

Thank you for the encouragement! I hope I didn't sound like I was fishing for that. I just wanted to emphasize my desire to seek any other more optimal paths.

4Yoav Ravid
didn't sound like that at all - all the support is because of how this community is :)

Good idea! Get comfortable with my own journey before using someone else's. Makes sense.

Yes! The facebook event page links to our Facebook group.

Just listened to that about 10 minutes ago. Good sequence. When you say "assumption", I hear "a thing that is accepted to be true".

What changes in cognition when something is accepted as true?

1rthomas2
When something is accepted as true, then observations to the contrary become surprising. So, if I’m surprised to find it raining out, then I’d assumed it was going to be sunny.
2Gurkenglas
I mean that it's used to anticipate experiences, like when you believe that you have a dragon in your garage, expect its breath to keep the house toasty and therefore turn off the heater in advance.

Please have a non-leather hardcover option for us vegans. :)

3Rob Bensinger
Yes :) I wasn't thinking real leather, though maybe synthetic leather also has signaling problems..!

Please no real leather for us vegans. :)

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6Rob Bensinger
Not at present. Some people requested that we release higher-quality versions, so that's been on our radar, and I'd be interested to hear what kinds of variants people would and wouldn't be interested in buying. (Full-color, leather-bound, hardcover, etc.)
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