All of verbiage_ecstatic's Comments + Replies

Here’s a better explanation that captures the intuition behind those responses: a middling probability doesn’t just come from balanced evidence, it also results from absence of evidence (because in the absence of evidence, we revert to our priors, which tend to be middling for events that aren’t dramatically outside the realm of what we consider possible). It’s not suspicious at all that there are millions of questions where we don’t have enough evidence to push us into certainty: understanding the world is hard and human knowledge is very incomplete. It

I think it’s a sad and powerful Overton window demonstration that these days someone can write a paper like this without even mentioning space colonization, which is the obvious alternate endgame if you want a non-global-dictatorship solution.

I have a counter-example. I have a few people in my Facebook feed who regularly post outraged articles about Palestinians launching terror attacks or doing bad things. I also have a few people who regularly post outraged articles about Israelis killing Palestinian protestors. This theory would predict that the people posting the former would tend to be Palestinian or Muslim, while the latter who tend to be Israeli or Jewish. But I’m fact it’s the opposite: all the articles about Palestinians doing bad things are posted by Jews, and all the articles about Israelis are posted by Muslims.

I’ve also read the book and agree that it is totally compatible with what EY is saying. I’ve also met many people who sound like founder 1.

My theory is that founder 1s don’t exist in the wild because of confusion about epistemology. Rather, I think most people don’t like and / or are bad at top-down reasoning from first principles. I think that if you are good at it, and try to do things in the real world, your epistemology will automatically gravitate towards being reasonable. And if you are bad at it / don’t do it, it doesn’t matter how many articles... (read more)

Thanks! Always helpful to know what the actual term is. I did a couple minutes of googling... the one contemporary player I turned up is https://collaction.org. They seem to be playing from the modern web startup playbook (design aesthetic is Kickstarter-lite), but they don't seem to have much traction: they claim six people on their team, but no evidence of revenue or fundraising, and their website is slow and a little clunky.

Their demo projects are pretty uninspiring; they don't seem to be going after genuine collective action problems, but ... (read more)

Soooo.... why doesn't someone build an app for this??

I mean, seriously. As Part 1 pointed out, we have Kickstarter, but Kickstarter only solves problems where it's obvious that directly applying cash is what is needed. As soon as it gets more complicated than that, you need to trust the person who is going to be spending the cash, and then you get back into assymetric information land.

Let's take the subset of problems where a) no one is afraid to be publically affiliated with the hard-to-coordinate action, they just can't rationally t... (read more)