= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
"the earth's climate has warmed dramatically over the last 50 years" is a claim of an empirical fact.
"The earth's climate has warmed by about x °C over the last 50 years" is a claim of an empirical fact. "It is dramatic for a planet to warm by about x °C in 50 years" is an expression of the speaker's sense of drama.
a single statement to which you, presumably, want to attach some single truth value
It would be a probability, actually, and it would need a lot of tightening up before it would make any sense even to try to attach any definite probability to it. (Though I might be happy to say things like "any reasonable tightening-up will yield a statement to which I assign p>=0.9 or so".)
your statement consists of multiple claims from radically different categories
Yes, it does.
For the avoidance of doubt, in writing down a conjunction of three simpler propositions I was not making any sort of claim that they are of the same sort, or that they are equally probable, or that they are equivalent to one another, or that it would not often be best to treat individual ones (or indeed further-broken-down ones) separately.
Jamming three very different claims together and treating them as a single statement doesn't look helpful to me.
It seems perfectly reasonable to me. It would be unhelpful to insist that the subsidiary claims can't be considered separately (though each of them is somewhat dependent on its predecessors; it doesn't make sense to ask why the climate has been warming if in fact it hasn't, and it's risky at best to forecast something whose causes and mechanisms are a mystery to you) but, I repeat, I am not in any way doing that. It would be unhelpful to conflate the evidence for one sub-claim with that for another; that's another thing I am not (so far as I know) doing. But ... unhelpful simply to write down a conjunction of three closely related claims? Really?
If you go back through my comments on LW (note: I am not actually suggesting you do this; there are a lot of them, as you know) you will find that in this sort of context I almost always say explicitly something like "evidence and arguments", precisely because I am not confused about the difference between the two. Sometimes I am lazy. This was one of those times.
Bad arguments and bad evidence can serve equally well in a Gish gallop.
something like "the earth's climate has warmed dramatically over the last 50 years, largely because of human activity, and is likely to continue doing so unless we change what we're doing"
Without restarting the discussion, let me point out what I see to be the source of many difficulties. You proposed a single statement to which you, presumably, want to attach some single truth value. However your statement consists of multiple claims from radically different categories.
"the earth's climate has warmed dramatically over the last 50 years" is a claim of an empirical fact. It's relatively easy to discuss it and figure out whether it's true.
"largely because of human activity" is a causal theory claim. This is much MUCH more complex than the preceding claim, especially given the understanding (existing on LW) that conclusions about causation do not necessarily fall out of descriptive models.
"and is likely to continue doing so" is a forecast. Forecasts, of course, cannot be proved or disproved in the present. We can talk about our confidence in a particular forecast which is also not exactly a trivial topic.
Jamming three very different claims together and treating them as a single statement doesn't look helpful to me.
"If we could somehow install Holden Karnofsky as president it would probably improve the lives of a billion people"
Amusingly, our suggestion of these two charities is entirely syndicated from a blog post put up by Holden Karnofsky himself: http://www.openphilanthropy.org/blog/suggestions-individual-donors-open-philanthropy-project-staff-2016
Thanks for your interest in our work.
As we say in the post, on this and most problem areas 80,000 Hours defers charity recommendations to experts on that particular cause (see: What resources did we draw on?). In this case our suggestion is based entirely on the suggestion of Chloe Cockburn, the Program Officer for Criminal Justice Reform at the Open Philanthropy Project, who works full time on that particular problem area and knows much more than any of us about what is likely to work.
To questions like "does 80,000 Hours have view X that would make sense of this" or "is 80,000 Hours intending to do X" - the answer is that we don't really have an independent view on any of these things. We're just syndicating content from someone we perceive to be an authority (just as we do when we include GiveWell's recommended charities without having independently investigated them). I thought the article was very clear about this, but perhaps we needed to make it even more so in case people skipped down to a particular section without reading the preamble.
If you want to get these charities removed then you'd need to speak with Chloe. If she changes her suggestions - or another similar authority on this topic appears and offers a contrary view - then that would change what we include.
Regarding why we didn't recommend the Center for Criminal Justice Reform: again, that is entirely because it wasn't on the Open Philanthropy Project's list of suggestions for individual donors. Presumably that is because they felt their own grant - which you approve of - had filled their current funding needs.
All the best,
Rob
A cursory glance through Fivethirtyeight's collected poll data shows a survey with over 84,000 voters (CCES/YouGov) giving Clinton a +4 percentage point lead, with 538 adjusting that to +2. Google and SurveyMonkey routinely had surveys of 20,000+ individuals, with one SurveyMonkey one having 70,000 with Clinton +5 (+4 adjusted). There was no clear reason to prefer your poll (whichever that one was) over these. https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/national-polls/
And it should go without saying that Clinton did end up at +2 nationally.
Southern pole sea ice expansion drives ice ages , along with orbital effects.
"According to Lee's models, it has to do with the fact that the planet has been generally cooler over the past million years than it was prior to that. The models show that, when the Earth was generally warmer than today, precession-related sea ice expansion in the Southern Hemisphere is less likely to occur. That allows the obliquity cycle to dominate the global temperature signature. After a million years ago, when Earth became a bit cooler on average, the obliquity signal starts to take a back seat to the precession/eccentricity signal."
https://watchers.news/2017/01/26/orbit-variations-ice-age-study/
"Hemispheric sea ice distribution sets the glacial tempo" - Jung-Eun Lee, Aaron Shen, Baylor Fox-Kemper, Yi Ming - Geophysical Research Letters (AGU) - Accepted January 7, 2017 - DOI: 10.1002/2016GL071307
I'm sure pollsters sometimes "cheat" by constructing biased samples, but this can happen even if you're honest because, as I explain in my post, polling is really difficult to do. To my mind, the problem had more to do with commentators who were making mistaken inferences based on the polls, than with the polls themselves, although evidently some of them got things badly wrong.
What makes recent "deep learning" progress interesting to me is that traditionally there's been a sort of paradox in AI: things we might naively think of as impressive achievements of the human intellect (e.g., grandmaster-level chess) turned out to be much easier to get computers to do than things we take for granted because even averagely intelligent children do them without much trouble (e.g., looking at a cat and saying "cat") -- and deep neural networks seem (not hugely surprisingly, perhaps) to be a good approach to some of those.
That doesn't, of course, mean that deep NNs + good old-fashioned AI = human-level intelligence. There are still what seem like important gaps that no one has very good ideas how to fill. But it does seem like one gap is getting somewhat filled.
"gish galloping"
I did not accuse you of that. I don't think you've done that. I said that Lumifer did it because, well, he did: I said "no one is proposing X", he said "what about A and B", I pointed out that A and B were not in fact proposing X, and he posted another seven instances of ... people not proposing X. A long sequence of bad arguments, made quickly but slower to answer: that is exactly what a Gish gallop is. I don't think you've been doing that, I don't think Lumifer usually does it, but on this occasion he did.
I am generally unenthusiastic about this sort of attempt to seize the intellectual high ground by fiat, not least because it is unanswerable if you choose to make it so;
Can you explain what you mean by “attempt to seize the intellectual high ground” and “it is unanswerable”, as it applies here?
"Attempting to seize the intellectual high ground" = "attempting to frame the situation as one in which you are saying clever sensible things that the other guy is too stupid or blinkered or whatever to understand. "Unanswerable if you choose to make it so" because when you say "I don't think you have grasped my argument", any response I make can be answered with "No, sorry, I was right: you didn't understand my argument" -- regardless of what I actually have understood or not understood. (I suppose one indication of good or bad faith on your part, in that case, would be whether you then explain what it is that I allegedly didn't understand.)
Am I allowed to believe that I'm probably right [...]?
I am greatly saddened, and somewhat puzzled, that you apparently think I might think the answer is no. (Actually, I don't think you think I might think the answer is no; I think you are grandstanding.) Anyway, for the avoidance of doubt, I have not the slightest interest in telling anyone else what they are allowed to believe, and if (e.g.) what I have said upthread about that paper about global warming has led you to think otherwise then either I have written unclearly or you have read uncharitably or both.
For example, “being seen as rude”, itself, is so not what it’s about.
The problem here is unclarity on my part or obtuseness on yours, rather than obtuseness on my part or unclarity on yours :-).The bit about "being seen as rude" was not intended as a statement of your views or of your argument; it was part of my initial sketch of the class of situations to which those views and that argument apply. The point at which I start sketching what I think you were saying is where I say "Your principal point is, in these terms, ...".
The reason I do think they’re making a mistake is not present in your description of my views.
Well, I was (deliberately) attempting to describe what I took to be your position on the general issue, rather than on what the authors of the article might or might not have done. (I am not all that interested in what you think they have done, since you've said you haven't actually looked at the article.) But it's entirely possible that I've failed to notice some key part of your argument, or forgotten to mention it even though if I'd been cleverer I would have. I don't suppose you'd like to explain what it is that I've missed?
This is a very understandable reading of what I said, but no. I do not agree that what you call "external #2" is ever a good thing to do either.
Just in case anyone other than us is reading this, I would like to suggest that those hypothetical readers might like to look back at what I actually wrote and how you quoted it, and notice in particular that I explicitly said that I think your position probably isn't the one that "on the face of it you've suggested". (Though it was not previously clear to me that you think "external #2" is literally never a good idea. One reason is that it looks to me -- and still does after going back and rereading -- as if you explicitly said that you sometimes do it and consider it reasonable. See here and search for "A small minority".)
As to the other things you've said (e.g., asking whether and where and why I disagree with your position), I would prefer to let that wait until you have helped me fix whatever errors you have discerned in my understanding of your position and your argument. Having gone to the trouble of laying it out, it seems like it would be a waste not to do that, don't you think?
You've made specific mention of two errors. One (see above) wasn't ever meant to be describing your position, so that's OK. The other is that my description doesn't mention "the reason I do think they're making a mistake" (they = authors of that article whose title you've read); I don't know whether that's an error on my part, or merely something I didn't think warranted mentioning, but the easiest way to find out would be for you to say what that reason is.
Your other comments give the impression that there are other deficiencies (e.g., "It is far enough off that I can’t endorse it as “getting” where I’m coming from." and "It looks like you understand the one I do not hold, but do not realize that there is another, completely different, reason to not want to do #2 externally.") and I don't think it makes any sense to proceed without fixing this. (Where "this" is probably a lack of understanding on my part, but might also turn out to be that for one reason or another I didn't mention it, or that I wasn't clear enough in my description of what I took to be your position.) If we can't get to a point where we are both satisfied that I understand you adequately, we should give up.
The executive summary would be that TAPs are cfar discovering one of these. You can hit various systems with the decomposition hammer and you'll start to see the more common pieces crop up over and over. OODA loop, GTD, analogical reasoning, sorting schemes for prioritization. The tell tale sign of one of these is that you can feed it to itself, which indicates it is flexible enough to take all sorts of arguments.
I'll try to write a short post on it at some point.
well, there were "mainstream" polls (used as a propaganda in the proclintonian media), sampled a bit over 1000, sometimes less, often massively oversampling registered Dem. voters... what do you expect?
and there was the biggest poll of 50000 (1000 per state) showing completely different picture (and of course used as a prooaganda in the anticlintonian, usually non-mainstream media)
google "election poll 50000"
I'm not sure there's anything I could say or do that you would take as such evidence.
What you say below (“I do in fact appreciate that point”) is all it takes for this.
(General remark: throughout this discussion you appear to have been assuming I fail to understand things that I do in fact understand. I do not expect you to believe me when I say that.
For what it’s worth, I feel the same way about this. From my perspective, it looks like you are assuming that I don’t get things that I do get, are assuming I’m assuming things things I am not assuming, saying thing things I’m not saying, not addressing my important points, being patronizing yourself, “gish galloping”, and generally arguing in bad faith. I just had not made a big stink about it because I didn’t anticipate that you wanted my perspective on this or that it would cause you to rethink anything.
Being wrong about what one understands is common too (illusion of transparency, and all that), but I absolutely do take this as very significant evidence as it does differentiate you from a hypothetical person who is so wrapped up in ego defense that they don’t want to address this question.
I am generally unenthusiastic about this sort of attempt to seize the intellectual high ground by fiat, not least because it is unanswerable if you choose to make it so;
Can you explain what you mean by “attempt to seize the intellectual high ground” and “it is unanswerable”, as it applies here? I don’t think I follow. I don’t think I’m “attempting to seize” anything, and have no idea what the question that “unanswerable” applies to is.
it seems to me that the underlying problem here is that from the outset you have proceeded on the assumption that I am beneath your intellectual level and need educating rather than engaging. Is this “educating” as in scare quotes “educating”/”correcting your foolish wrong thoughts”, or as in the “I thought you might be interested in hearing what I have to say about the topic, so I shared” kind of educating? I’ll agree that it’s the latter, but I wouldn’t put “beneath [my] intellectual level” on it. You asked a question, I had an answer, I thought you wanted it. Asking questions does not make people inferior or “beneath” anyone else, in my opinion.
However, if you mean “you don’t seem interested in my rebuttle”, then you’re right, I was not. I have put a ton of thought into the ethics of persuasion over the last several years, and there aren’t really any questions here that I don’t feel like I have a pretty darn solid answer to. Additionally, if you don’t already think about these problems the way that I do, it’s actually really difficult to convey my perspective, even if communication is flowing smoothly. And it often doesn’t, because it’s also really really easy to think I’m talking about something else, leading to the illusion that my point has been understood. This combination makes run-of-the-mill disagreement quite uninteresting, and I only engaged because I mistook your original question for “I would like to learn how to differentiate between teaching and thought-policing”, not “I would like to argue that they aren’t thought policing and that you’re wrong to think they are”.
And again, I do not think it warrants accusations of “patronizing you poor, poor fool” for privately holding the current best guess that this disagreement is more likely to be about you misunderstanding my point than about me hallucinating something in their title. Am I allowed to believe I’m probably right, or do I have to believe that you’re probably right and that I’m probably wrong? Are you allowed to believe that you’re probably right?
However, I will on this occasion attempt to state your position and see whether you consider my attempt adequate.
It is far enough off that I can’t endorse it as “getting” where I’m coming from. For example, “being seen as rude”, itself, is so not what it’s about. There are often two very different ways of looking at things that can produce superficially similar prescriptions for fundamentally different reasons. It looks like you understand the one I do not hold, but do not realize that there is another, completely different, reason to not want to do #2 externally.
However, I do appreciate it as an intellectually honest attempt to check your understanding of my views and it does capture the weight of the main points themselves well enough that I’m curious to hear where you disagree (or if you don’t disagree with it as stated).
Somewhat relatedly but somewhat separately, I’m interested to hear how you think it applies to how you’ve approached things here. From my perspective, you’re doing a whole lot of the external #2 at me. Do you agree and think it’s justified? If so, how? Do you not see yourself as doing external #2 here? If so, do you understand how it looks that way to me?
Given this summary of my view, I do think I see why you don’t see it as suggesting that the researchers were making any mistake. The reason I do think they’re making a mistake is not present in your description of my views.
I will be hampered here and there by the fact that in many places you have [...] chosen not to oblige when I've asked you questions aimed at clarifying them, and objected when I have made guesses.
Hold on.
I gotta stop you there because that’s extremely unfair. I haven’t answered every question you’ve asked, but I have addressed most, if not all of them (and if there’s one I missed that you would like me to address, ask and I will). I also specifically addressed the fact that I don’t have a problem with you making guesses but that I don’t see it as very charitable or intellectually honest when you go above and beyond and respond as if I had actively claimed those things.
You've made it explicitly that you're not claiming that external #2 is always a bad idea; on the face of it you've suggested that external #2 is fine provided
This is a very understandable reading of what I said, but no. I do not agree that what you call “external #2” is ever a good thing to do either. I also would not frame it that way in the first place.
Govt science based "Resistance" twitter account compilation.
https://twitter.com/StollmeyerEU/lists/twistance/members
NWSPodunk is an original comedy acct.....
"According to Capcom's official stat tracker on ResidentEvil.net, 9.6 percent of all players worldwide have used VR to play the game. It's extra impressive considering VR support is only available on PS4, just one of RE7's three supported platforms. "
I might wonder if there are things humans can do with concepts and symbols and principles, the traditional tools of the “higher intellect”, the skills that show up on highly g-loaded tasks, that deep learning cannot do with current algorithms. ... So far, I think there is no empirical evidence from the world of deep learning to indicate that today’s deep learning algorithms are headed for general AI in the near future.
I strongly agree, and I think people at Deepmind already get this because they are working on differentiable neural computers.
Another key point here is that hardware gains such as GPUs and Moore's law increase the returns to investing time and effort into software and research.
Beliefs that B has about the world contain, as a subset, the beliefs that B has about A and his/her reliability. Since the argument in my post assumes that there is currently no sufficient evidence for the experience, B has to judge based on this subset for which we use the word 'trust'.
This is a great post helldago. I've found a lot of these useful myself and the others I'm excited to try out because I can relate a lot. A couple of other things I have found useful for resilience.
A Mental Health section in my Anki deck. There's about 170 cards which includes things like cognitive reframes (a bad behaviour doesn't make you a bad person, failure is useful if you use the information gained to update your plan etc.), common depression traps I might be caught in (comparison, labelling, all or nothing), stoic quotes and the like. I've never been able to get those mindsets to stick permanently so the periodic reminders pull me out of ruts and provide a mood boost.
Going outside when you've got brain fog. I think there is at least a couple of parts behind this. Sunlight seems to have an almost instant positive mood boost once the warmth hits you. Also subtle shifts in temperature and air quality can happen very gradually without my noticing and I'll become uncomfortable and restless without realising it. The shift in climate puts my mind in a new frame.
And 80,000 hours is advertising that they aim to help everyone, but then they are funding an organisation that is explicitly aiming to favor certain groups. As I have already said, males are disproportionately incarcerated by a very large margin, and any realistic decrease in incarceration will therefore help males, but that fact is not being trumpeted. It's the color label that is getting extra special attention here and being promoted from a side effect of doing something else good to a goal in its own right.
IMO this is not a good thing to fund.
Well, I am probably overstepping if I claim to know for certain that Prop 47 was a mistake. 80,000 hours is advertising that they will maintain public safety with their efforts in this area, but the consensus is that Prop 47 has done the exact opposite.
Why don't you wonder about any of them being true, instead of just wondering about the case where wishful thinking comes into play?
Could you point me to where I only wondered about "the case where wishful thinking comes into play"?
I am getting the sense that you are arguing against propositions I haven't put forward. Could you phrase my argument in your own words so we can clarify?
Yes you are. You say that if you believe bad evidence, you may end up believing something true that ranges from insignificant to essential.
This is correct. But you are conflating the identification of the issue with an action strategy that I haven't suggested. Also do not forget that I am talking about truths that are experientially verifiable not just believed in.
But any belief with any evidence could range from insignificant to essential. And you aren't mentioning them.
Of course. If there is evidence a rational approach will lead us to the conclusion that it is worth exploring the belief. I think the LW community is perfectly aware of that kind of assesment.
So you must think there's something special about beliefs based on bad evidence, that gives you a reason to mention them.
I think there is something special about truths for which the verification is experientially available, but for which there is currently no evidence.
It might be important that "impossible" depends on your state of knowledge. For example in counterfactual mugging getting the large reward doesn't become impossible until after you know the result of the coin flip. So you should perhaps more carefully state your principal as "impossible at the time that the agent make the decision".
The tradeoffs here are at least somewhat controversial.
Tradeoffs are always controversial, but if these two are the most 'controversial' examples one can think of, then color me unimpressed. It's not at all obvious that these people would belong in jail under a sane criminal justice system, and the "citation" reported as an alternative still does a good job of bringing consequences for the offender.
Because lotteries cost more to play than the chance of winning is worth, someone who understands basic probability will not buy lottery tickets.
Whereas as someone who understands advanced probability, particularly the value/utility distinction, might.
The situation you're describing is similar. If you dismiss beliefs that have no evidence from a reference class of mostly-false beliefs, you're at a disadvantage in knowing about unlikely-but-true facts that have yet to become mainstream. But you're also not paying the opportunity cost of trying out many unlikely ideas, most of which don't pan out. Overall, you're better off, because you have more time to pursue more promising ways to satisfy your goals.
So long as you can put a ceiling on possible benefits.
The focus on 'people of color' you picked up on is thus not necessarily indicative of a damaging bias here
But let's suppose that the most effective intervention in this field resulted in increasing the racial disparity in incarceration. Would ASJ pursue it? Can we take their outward focus on race as evidence that race-favoritism is a goal that they internally pursue, perhaps over and above the high-level goal that 80,000 hours advertises them under?
Does their focus on race bias them about where the tradeoff between incarceration and safety should be struck? For example,
and what is Prop 47?
and also:
The tradeoffs here are at least somewhat controversial.
This combination of goals is good at explaining the words that are being emitted by the ASJ. It explains the focus on people of color ....
This just doesn't seem to be a fair characterization of what ASJ is actually working on. It's simply a fact that 'communities of color' [sic] are most impacted by mass incarceration - that's a rather trivial consequence of the statistics you rightly pointed to. ASJ is most focused on reducing incarceration for non-serious and non-violent offenders (i.e. precisely the sorts of offenders for whom the alternatives work best!) and spending the savings on crime prevention. The focus on 'people of color' you picked up on is thus not necessarily indicative of a damaging bias here; it might just make the org more attractive to more SJW-inclined funders.
it seems quite intuitive that any effective approach to reducing mass incarceration in the U.S. will have its biggest impact in 'communities of color'
It is very hard for me to respond to this without breaking my own rules; "this post is not intended to start an object-level discussion about which race, gender, political movement or sexual orientation is cooler", but let me try.
First: 'people of color' is simply a Social Justice term meaning "not white", and explicitly includes (far east) Asian Americans. Without implying here any form of superiority, it is a fact that the incarceration rates for Asian Americans most certainly do not put them into the same broad category as other "people of color".
So in this context, the term "people of color" is not a category that carves reality at its joints. A martian xenosociologist would not find the category "all people who are not white European" useful for trying to maximise the objective of "substantially reducing incarceration while maintaining public safety", when compared to the more natural categories of actual races. Uncharitably, one could explain the non-carving-at-joints term "people of color" as a brazen attempt to rope Asian Americans and other "Model minorities" into a political coalition that actively harms them.
Second: the stated goal of 80,000 hours here is not to reduce incarceration. It is to reduce incarceration while maintaining public safety. The mere fact that more "people of color" (sorry, Asian Americans!) are incarcerated than white European people is not enough to get to the the claim that you are making - "biggest impact in 'communities of color' ".
And then there is the further claim by the ASJ that we should "reduce racial disparities in incarceration". That's an additional jump from "having the biggest impact in communities of color", because it implies that you could keep the same level of incarceration in communities of color, but incarcerate more white people. That would technically reduce the disparity. Are they trying to invent affirmative action for courts/prisons?
Go back to our martian alien who knows nothing of SJWs. He starts trying to come up with a plan to reduce incarceration whilst maintaining public safety, he looks at the well-established facts about differential incarceration rates. Then maybe he communicates with the earthling ChristianKl who has just started having potentially useful ideas about "rewarding prisons financially for low recidivism rates". What does the alien, who is apolitical and doesn't know to avoid the taboos of the culture war think about next? He might look at redictivism rates by race?
At this point, the alien would perhaps start to question whether the goal of "reducing incarceration while maintaining public safety" was really an accurate specification of what humans wanted. Maybe what they want is some combination of
- less incarceration overall
- more safety for the law-abiding public
- a justice system which exhibits equality of outcomes when that would benefit groups that are high status within the SJ movement (e.g. African Americans), and equality of process when equality of outcomes would be to the detriment of groups that are high status within the SJ movement (e.g. women)
This combination of goals is good at explaining the words that are being emitted by the ASJ. It explains the focus on people of color as well as the total lack of any mention of the fact that males are vastly over-represented in prisons, and the conspicuous absence of efforts to reduce the gender disparity in prisons.
Now you might say, "wow, you have really broken your own rules there!" - well, let me disclaim that I am not implying any form of moral superiority between culture-war salient groups here. There are certainly many people of color who have suffered injustice at the hands of a highly imperfect and unfair, sometimes racist, system.
I am simply pointing out that if you casually assert the "intuitive" equivalence of statements that are not equivalent in all possible worlds, then you are taking some pretty big risks regarding good epistemology.
Economic growth basically means that workers get more productive. Less hours of work means more output. GDP growth is not really possible without making workers more efficient.
It's interesting how in the last years the old luddie arguments got revived. The idea that automation means that there won't be any jobs anymore get's more and more popular.
Yet as far as ASJ goes, it seems quite intuitive that any effective approach to reducing mass incarceration in the U.S. will have its biggest impact in 'communities of color' and that 'protecting' such communities from crime nonetheless must be integral to any such effort.
Not really.
If you want to reduce incarceration while keeping up public safety you could focus on rewarding prisons financially for low recidivism rates. Giving out additional financial rewards costs money but at the same time this policy would lead to increased safety and decreased incarceration.
Advocating such a policy likely wouldn't be perceived as fighting for communities of color. Campaigning against policies like stop and frisk on the other hand does.
in a hypothetical where lucid dreaming hasn't been proven, and can't be proven, you should conclude that it's not worth spending time on lucid dreaming.
this seems false. The provability would just be one dimension of a cost-benefit analysis. If lucid dreaming were high value and low cost to test, but unproveable, you'd likely go ahead and test. Likewise with psychic tests in the real world. Grab a pack of cards and test with a friend. Takes ~1 minute.
What can a "level 5 framework" do, operationally, that is different than what can be done with a Bayes net?
Do well at problems that require developing ontology to represent the problem like Bongard's problems (see Chapman's post on metarationality)
I admit that I don't understand what you're actually trying to argue, Christian.
Yes, fully understanding would likely mean that you need to spend time understanding a new conceptional framework. It's not as easy as simply picking up another mental trick.
But in this thread, my point isn't to argue that everybody should adopt meta-rationality but to illustrate that it's actually a different way of looking at the world.
I am not proposing wasting time with bad evidence.
Yes you are. You say that if you believe bad evidence, you may end up believing something true that ranges from insignificant to essential.
But any belief with any evidence could range from insignificant to essential. And you aren't mentioning them.
So you must think there's something special about beliefs based on bad evidence, that gives you a reason to mention them.
But you could always be missing something. Something can be true even though all the evidence looks bad. But something can also be true if there is no evidence (either good or bad). Something can be true even if the only evidence is fraudulent. Something can be true even if the only evidence for it is that you asked your 6 year old child for an example of science and he told you it.
Why don't you wonder about any of them being true, instead of just wondering about the case where wishful thinking comes into play?
use evidence and careful reasoning to work out how to best promote the wellbeing of all.
So what are the recommended charities? (my emphasis below) ...
I don't understand this emphasis. You seem to be saying that ASJ and Cosecha are somehow opposed to promoting the "wellbeing of all". Yet as far as ASJ goes, it seems quite intuitive that any effective approach to reducing mass incarceration in the U.S. will have its biggest impact in 'communities of color' and that 'protecting' such communities from crime nonetheless must be integral to any such effort.
Cosecha is rather more dubious (I agree that it hardly belongs on any EA list of 'recommended' charities!), but even if you agree (as most people do) that immigration to this country must be carefully regulated, and thus that illegals shouldn't be allowed to stay in the U.S. and should be sent back to their home countries (i.e. deported), that hardly licenses extreme levels of 'mass incarceration/detention, denigration of rights, and discrimination'. And in fact there's quite a bit of worry that such things might occur since the new POTUS was inaugurated.
Are there any other organizations that are working against these things with any real effectiveness? If not, then maybe you can still view Cosecha's activities overall as somewhat worthwhile, even if you regard opposition to deportation and possibly promoting some illegal activities as undesirable. (Though even then, a 'strike' by undocumented immigrants hardly seems to be 'illegal' in itself, considering that they aren't allowed to work in the first place!)
This is inspiring, thank you.
Edit crossposted:
The past 18 months have seen what subjectively feels like more progress than the previous 8 years combined. Inspired by this post I want to briefly outline my current guesses for what the inputs to this have been. Why do I consider myself to have leveled up?
I can trace the genesis of experiences in a much less flinchy, moralizing, or otherwise unhelpful way. This is a dramatic performance improvement for the debugging console, making me more likely to use it.
I consume more worthwhile material than at any previous point in my life, while taking detailed notes that allow me to refer back to it systematically.
As a result of 1, iterating habits is much more effective. All of my self care: sleep, exercise, diet, etc. have improved in ways I expect to be more robust (though not immune) to disruption.
Noticeable decrease in neuroticism. I.e. negative moods are less harsh and shorter in duration.
Noticeable decrease in stress and reactivity. People yelling in my face (including people who have power over processes vital to projects) hasn't bothered me much lately whereas before it would have me shaken for days, and likely cause an unpleasant recall months or years later.
It feels like there is more room in my mind to think bigger, more complex thoughts.
Feel more excited and less defensive when encountering critical feedback or the idea that I have a blindspot.
Far fewer problems seem intractable.
My problem decomposition skills seem improved in the sense that when I talk over problems with intelligent friends I often feel it is easy to point out many potentially useful distinctions that their current model does not make and suggest ways we might test them. I can also rubber duck my own plans in this way and improve their quality dramatically. It's not that this didn't happen before, but there is a sharp clarity that wasn't there before.
Things that seem to have helped (lots of potential confounding with the biggest one being age. I am somewhat disinclined to believe that due to the suddenness of the shift. Shrug.):
Movement. Sure, having an exercise habit, but also just physically altering my state when I am not functioning well gets things working more often than not. Weights, cardio, yoga, but also just walking and sit stand desk ($30 from Ikea parts).
Info triaging. Reading many things at a coarser level and prioritizing more ruthlessly based on what seems valuable, alive. This is a rather pithy description for something of such vast value. It is probably worth a post. (huge ht to Alex Ray for finally finally convincing me to actually do this.)
Developing exobrain systems that work for me in a pleasant rather than onerous, virtue based way. eg I use workflowy, pomodoros, and konmarie like systems a lot. I find many other systems for organizing my priorities to be unpleasant, so I don't use them. Note I said organize my priorities, I don't use such systems in order to try to make myself work. Once I stopp thinking of these as 'productivity systems' I started getting tons of value out of them. That frame is propaganda for an internal fight that it's better to get a ceasefire on rather than developing ever more powerful weapons for.
Noticing negative self talk and not putting up with it. Internal parts that are motivated to get something can engage respectfully with other parts/values or they can be ignored. This got more subtle as I got better at it. I went from noticing explicitly violent internal moves (yelling, shaming, etc.) to noticing that parts use things like hypnotic binding, misleading choice of words to frame issues etc. Your parts are as smart as you because they are you. (sometimes they seem smarter because systems arrived at via selection don't have to stick to a particular abstraction level the way explicitly planned ones do)
Internalizing the core framework of coherence therapy and Immunity to Change by Kegan: that your current bugs/negative emotions/etc. are trying to help you and if you don't acknowledge the important job they are doing any fighting you do against them likely won't work. Or in other words, akrasia is self healing unless you figure out the ways your current coping strategies are helping you get your needs met and you find alternate ways.
I don't know what to call this one that won't induce an eye roll. To paraphrase Lama Yeshe: 'I am not telling you to help others as some sort of virtuous commandment. I am saying that from a 100% selfish standpoint you should try out focusing on the needs of others. Try it for 3 weeks, and honestly evaluate if your life is better. If not, you never have to do it again. But it will likely be impossible not to notice how much better things go when you get in the habit of keeping a lookout for ways you can assist others in their positive goals. No one is telling you to give up your critical faculties and be taken advantage of. And you'll find that your paranoia was unwarranted.' I'll note that if you are secretly keeping a tally of how people owe you you are not doing the thing. This might be semi-involuntary and take conscious effort to drop. Others might be wary as they suspect you of angling for some advantage. Let them in on the secret that you are being selfish. Those you genuinely enjoy helping and those you don't will work itself out naturally.
My attention span has improved dramatically as a result of significantly reduced use of super stimuli (news feeds, video games, pornography, super stimulating foods, hero's journey fiction, hyper attention grabbing style music, frequency of hamster pellet checks (fb, email, messaging, etc.), video binging) and the resulting free time is shocking.
Schematizing everything. This is an improvement not to normal mental tools but to the mental toolbox. Collecting schematic workflows that other tools can be plugged in to for specific tasks. There are far fewer of these and they assist in the mental availability of the correct mental tools because they have what Eugene Gendlin calls a 'specific' or 'sharp' blank. ie a blank that knows what it is looking for (what was that word? no that's not it etc.). Ever wonder why you can remember thousands of words but not 100 mental tools? Because you have a rich associational web for your words (connotation space) but not one for mental tools. This starts fixing that. The sooner you start the better.
Noting (outlined here: http://lesswrong.com/…/triaging_mental_phenomena_or_leveli…/).
Rituals make your life more like Groundhog Day. Mainly used for the meta-habits of setting intentions around other habits and doing reflection. A morning and evening routine is very worth it. It will repeatedly fail, you have to keep iterating so it fits your current life.
Climbing out of the valley of bad meta of believing if I just installed the correct set of mental tools and habits that things would magically fall into place at some indeterminate point in the future. Realizing that I can't use the outputs of other people's processes as my process (as you would be doing if you tried to instantiate this list as a set of processes rather than using it as inspiration to examine your own life more closely)
Meta: carefully investigating motivation, prioritizing, meaning, the concept of 'carefully investigating', goals, systems, mental tools, mental states, search strategies, what counts as an explanation, tacit vs explicit, procedural vs declarative, and others.
That's interesting. You haven't simply pointed out my errors in my thought processes. I have yet to see you simply point them out, rather than arguing with assumptions that I can refute with basic reasoning. It's cute that you, for example, assume I don't have an answer to your hypothetical scenarios because I simply point out that it's a waste of time. Hypotheticals are intellectual entertainment. But it might've been a better choice to answer your questions from the mindset I was speculating of.
I just watched The Master which was an aesthetically pleasing movie. It does give some taste of cults/new-age thinking, and I can see myself doing the same type of thinking for other things. I've discussed with people with different perspectives and watched such content as well. I've come to the conclusion that this is human nature. Thinking back long ago in my life and now, unfortunately, if you think you're incapable of such thinking or not actually a part of such a thing right now, you probably are. But that is very confrontational and I wouldn't be surprised that you, or someone else, would without hesitation deny that fact. I can only tell you that in some hope that you don't reinforce the belief that you probably are not.
I'm going to open my mind now, you're free to reprogram my brain, tell me, Master and break through to me. Seriously, I am open minded.
As a counterpoint, I intended to contribute to the donation lottery (couldn't arrange tax deductibility outside the US), and think it would be a good thing if most EAs participated in donation lotteries.
All of the people that would be interested in participating are already effective altruists. That means that as a hobby they are already spending tons of time theorizing on what donations they would make to be more efficient. Is the value of information from additional research really sufficient to make it worthwhile in this context? Keep in mind that much of the low-hanging analysis from a bog-standard EA's perspective has already been performed by GiveWell, and you can't really expect to meaningfully improve on their estimates.
As Benquo notes, "GiveWell does not purport to solve the general problem of 'where should EA's give money.'". Personally, I believe that existential risk interventions are the best donations, so there is no equivalent to GiveWell for me to defer to. If I won the lottery, I imagine it would be worth my time engaging thoroughly with organisations fundraising documents, refining my world-model on how to reduce existential risk, and reaching out to those likely to have better knowledge than myself. I'm not already spending "tons of time doing this" - I work full-time, and in particular don't have the cognitive space to do high-quality thinking on this in the pockets of time I have available.
At a community-level, it does seem that most EA's have thought insufficiently about cause prioritization. Challenging one's beliefs isn't easy though, so I'm hopeful that a donor lottery can provide a mechanism for someone to say "I recognise that there's some worthwhile reflection and research I haven't done, and I don't have the motivation to do it when the stakes are lower, but will do so on the off-chance I win the lottery."
Winning the lottery to spend $100,000 of other people's money doesn't suddenly endow me with tens or hundreds of hours to use for extra research (unless I can spend some of the money on my research efforts...).
If I won the lottery, I imagine I'd take a few weeks consecutive leave from work to research.
However, it is still a guess and to respond as if they are affirmatively claiming that you believe this is putting words in their mouth that they did not say and can really mess with conversations, as it has here.
In my experience, when it messes with conversations it is usually because one party is engaging in what I would characterize as bad-faith conversational manoeuvres.
I haven't seen any evidence that you appreciate this point
I'm not sure there's anything I could say or do that you would take as such evidence. (General remark: throughout this discussion you appear to have been assuming I fail to understand things that I do in fact understand. I do not expect you to believe me when I say that. More specific remark: I do in fact appreciate that point, but I don't expect you to believe me about that either.)
I want to have some indication that you actually understand what my argument is, that's all, and I haven't seen it.
I am generally unenthusiastic about this sort of attempt to seize the intellectual high ground by fiat, not least because it is unanswerable if you choose to make it so; I remark that there are two ways for one person's argument not to be well understood by another; and it seems to me that the underlying problem here is that from the outset you have proceeded on the assumption that I am beneath your intellectual level and need educating rather than engaging. However, I will on this occasion attempt to state your position and see whether you consider my attempt adequate. (If not, I suggest you write me off as too stupid to bother discussing with and we can stop.) I will be hampered here and there by the fact that in many places you have left important bits of your argument implicit, chosen not to oblige when I've asked you questions aimed at clarifying them, and objected when I have made guesses.
So. Suppose we have people A and B. A believes a proposition P (for application to the present discussion, take P to be something like "the earth's climate has warmed dramatically over the last 50 years, largely because of human activity, and is likely to continue doing so unless we change what we're doing") and is very confident that P is correct. B, for all A knows, may be confident of not-P, or much less confident of P than A is, or not have any opinion on the topic just yet. The first question at issue is: How should A speak of P, in discussion with B (or with C, with B in the audience)? And, underlying it: How should A think of P, internally?
"Internally" A's main options are (1) to treat P as something still potentially up for grabs or (2) to treat it as something so firmly established that A need no longer bother paying attention to how evidence and arguments for and against P stack up. With unlimited computational resources and perfect reasoning skills, #1 would be unambiguously better in all cases (with possible exceptions only for things, if any there be, so fundamental that A literally has no way of continuing to think if they turn out wrong); in practice, #2 is sometimes defensible for the sake of efficiency or (perhaps) if there's a serious danger of being manipulated by a super-clever arguer who wants A to be wrong. The first of those reasons is far, far more common; I don't know whether the second is ever really sufficient grounds for treating something as unquestionable. (But e.g. this sort of concern is one reason why some religious people take that attitude to the dogmas of their faith: they literally think there is a vastly superhuman being actively trying to get them to hold wrong beliefs.)
"Externally" A's main options are (1) to talk of P as a disputable matter, to be careful to say things like "since I think P" rather than "since P", etc., when talking to B; and (2) to talk as if A and B can both take it for granted that P is correct. There is some scope for intermediate behaviours, such as mostly talking as if P can be taken for granted but ocasionally making remarks like "I do understand that P is disputed in some quarters" or "Of course I know you don't agree about this, but it's so much less cumbersome not to shoehorn qualifications into every single sentence". There is also a "strong" form of #2 where A says or implies that no reasonable person would reject P, that P-rejecters are stupid or dishonest or crazy or whatever.
Your principal point is, in these terms, that "internally" #2 is very dangerous, even in cases where A is extremely confident that contrary evidence is not going to come along, and that "externally" #2 is something of a hostile act if in fact B doesn't share A's opinion because it means that B has to choose between acquiescing while A talks as if everyone knows that P, or else making a fuss and disagreeing and quite possibly being seen as rude. (And also because this sort of pressure may produce an actual inclination on B's part to accept P, without any actual argument or evidence having been presented.) Introducing this sort of social pressure can make collective truthseeking less effective because it pushes B's thinking around in (I think you might say, though for my part I would want to add some nuance) ways basically uncorrelated with truth. (There's another opposite one, just as uncorrelated with truth or more so, which I don't recall you mentioning: B may perceive A as hostile and therefore refuse to listen even if A has very strong evidence or arguments to offer.) And you make the secondary point that internal #2 and external #2 tend to spill over into one another, so that each also brings along the other's dangers.
We are agreed that internal #2 is risky and external #2 is potentially (for want of a better term) rude, "strong" external #2 especially so. We may disagree on just how high the bar should be for choosing either internal or external #1, and we probably do disagree more specifically on how high it should be in the case where P is the proposition about global warming mentioned above.
(We may also disagree about whether it is likely that the authors of the paper we were discussing are guilty of choosing, or advocating that their readers choose, some variety of #2 when actually #1 would be better; about whether it is likely that I am; about whether it makes sense to apply terms like "crimethink" when someone adopts external #2; and/or about how good the evidence for that global-warming proposition actually is. But I take it none of that is what you wish to be considered "your argument" in the present context.)
In support of the claim that internal #2 is dangerous far more often than A might suppose, you observe (in addition to what I've already said above) that people are very frequently very overconfident about their beliefs; that viewed externally, A's supreme confidence in P doesn't actually make it terribly unlikely that A is wrong about P. Accordingly, you suggest, A is making a mistake in adopting internal #2 even if it seems to A that the evidence and arguments for P are so overwhelming that no one sane could really disagree -- especially if there are in fact lots of people, in all other respects apparently sane, who do disagree. I am not sure whether you hold that internal #2 is always an error; I think everything you've said is compatible with that position but you haven't explicitly claimed it and I can think of good reasons for not holding it.
In support of the claim that external #2 is worse than A might suppose, you observe that (as mentioned above) doing it imposes social costs on dissenters, thereby making it harder for them to think independently and also making it more likely that they will just go away and deprive A's community of whatever insight they might offer. And (if I am interpreting correctly one not-perfectly-clear thing you said) that doing this amounts to deciding not to care about contrary evidence and arguments, in other words to implicitly adopting internal #2 with all its dangers. You've made it explicitly that you're not claiming that external #2 is always a bad idea; on the face of it you've suggested that external #2 is fine provided A clearly understands that it involves (so to speak) throwing B to the wolves; my guess is that in fact you consider it usually not fine to do that; but you haven't made it clear (at least to me) what you consider a good way to decide whether it is. It is, of course, clear that you don't consider that great confidence about P on A's part is in itself sufficient justification. (For the avoidance of doubt, nor do I; but I think I am willing to give it more weight than you are.)
That'll do for now. I have not attempted to summarize everything you've said, and perhaps I haven't correctly identified what subset you consider "your argument" for present purposes. (In particular, I have ignored everything that appears to me to be directed at specific (known or conjectured) intellectual or moral failings of the authors of the paper, or of me, and attended to the more general point.)
That seems like the sort of thing that really needs stating up front. It's that Gricean implicature thing again: If someone writes something about goldfish and you respond with "It's really stupid to think that goldfish live in salt water", it's reasonable (unless there's some other compelling explanation for why you bothered to say that) to infer that you think they think goldfish think in salt water.
(And this sort of assumption of relevance is a good thing. It makes discussions more concise.)
If someone writes "it's stupid to think that goldfish live in saltwater" there's probably a reason they say this, and it's generally not a bad guess that they think you think they can live in salt water. However, it is still a guess and to respond as if they are affirmatively claiming that you believe this is putting words in their mouth that they did not say and can really mess with conversations, as it has here.
For sure that's far more informative. But, like it or not, that's not information you usually have available.
Agree to disagree.
My own guess is that (1) it's probably pretty safe
A big part of my argument is that it doesn't matter if Omega comes down and tells you that you're right. It's still a bad idea.
Another big part is that even when people guess that they're probably pretty safe, they end up being wrong a really significant point of the time, and that from the outside view it is a bad idea to drop the distinction simply because you feel it is "probably pretty safe" - especially when there is absolutely no reason to do it and still reason not to even if you're correct on the matter. (also, people are still often wrong even when they say "yeah, but that's different. They're overconfident, I'm actually safe")
I don't see good reason to think they're doing anything that's likely to come back to bite them.
I note that you don't. I do.
That's OK, you don't need to; I already did. I was hoping you might answer it.
The point is that I don't see it as worth thinking about. I don't know what I would do with the answer. It's not like I have a genie that is offering me the chance to eliminate the problems caused by one side or the other, but that I have to pick.
There are a lot of nuances in things like this, and making people locally more correct is not even always a good thing. I haven't seen any evidence that you appreciate this point, and until I do I can only assume that this is because you don't. It doesn't seem that we agree on what the answer to that question would mean, and until we're on the same page there it doesn't make any sense to try to answer it.
So, given what you were saying earlier about "imposing social costs", about not presupposing people are unreasonable, about interacting with people respectfully if at all ... You do know how that "It doesn't surprise me ..." remark comes across, and intend it that way, right?
(In case the answer is no: It comes across as very, very patronizing; as suggesting that you have understood how I, poor fool that I am, have come to believe the stupid things I believe; but that they aren't worth actually engaging with in any way. Also, it is very far from clear what "that" actually refers to.)
I am very careful with what I presuppose, and what I said does not actually presuppose what you say it does. It's not presupposing that you are wrong or not worth engaging with. It does imply that as it looks to me - and I do keep this distinction in mind when saying this - as it looks to me, it was not worth it for me to engage with you on that level at the time I said it. Notice that I am engaging with you and doing my best to get to the source of our actual disagreement - it's just not on the level you were responding on. Before engaging with why you think my argument is wrong, I want to have some indication that you actually understand what my argument is, that's all, and I haven't seen it. This seems far less insulting to me than "poor fool who I am willing to presuppose believes stupid things and is not worth engaging with in any way". Either way though, as a neutral matter of fact, I wasn't surprised by anything you said so take it how you would like.
I'm not presupposing that you're not worth engaging with on that level, but I am refusing to accept your presupposition that you are worth engaging with on that level. That's up for debate, as far as I'm concerned, and I'm open to you being right here. My stance is that is never a good idea to presuppose things that you can predict your conversation partner will disagree with unless you don't mind them writing you off as an arrogant fool and disengaging, but that you never have to accept their presuppositions out of politeness. Do you see why this distinction is important to me?
I was aware that what I said was likely to provoke offense, and I would like to avoid that if possible. It's just that, if you are going to read into what I say and treat it as if I am actively claiming things when you just have shaky reason to suspect that I privately believe them, then you're making me choose between "doing a lot of legwork to prevent gjm from unfairly interpreting me" or "letting gjm unfairly interpret me and get offended by things I didn't say". I have tried to make it clear that I'm only saying what I'm saying, and that the typical inferences aren't going to hold true, and at some point I gotta just let you interpret things how you will and then let you know that again, I didn't claim anything other than what I claimed.
"So here's a new idea: why not create new money at the bottom of the pyramid when people perform useful work in their communities? How about paying people for being producers, rather than paying them to be consumers?
http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2017/01/what-would-labor-centered-economy-look.html
The argument doesn't have anything to say about what should happen at the nation-state level.
Concerns about social cohesion and stability are mostly relevant at the nation-state level. This is so because at sub-state levels the exit option is generally available and is viable. At the state level, not so much.
In plain words, it's much easier to move out if your town loses cohesion and stability then if your country does.
you don't get to choose the diversity
You don't get to choose the diversity, but you can incentivise or disincentivise the differentiation with long-term consequences. For an example, look at what happened to, say, people who immigrated to the US in the first half of the XX century. They started with a lot of diversity but because the general trend was towards homogenisation, that diversity lessened considerably.
Of course, it's possible for two members of the triumvirate to create a second duumvirate that will profit from the hapless third member. Feel free to add whatever political metaphor you think this fits.
That still applies. The duumvriate chooses (red, blue) and split the loss and gain. Two of the ex-triumvirate also choose (red, blue) and agree to split the loss and gain between themselves only. The last member to the triumvirate is now left out in the cold: whatever they choose, they lose, and they take the whole loss, while both other pairs gain.
Actually, as a tournament player I feel I can help explain the slowness:
The article suggests that this isn't due to increased computational speed or focus, but I think that's wrong. Playing slowly doesn't imply thinking slowly. In a chess game, you have a certain amount of time overall, and often when the position is very complicated players will spend half an hour delving into variations and sub-variations. If it's hard to concentrate, they may just rely on low-calc alternatives, and play faster.
Are you basically saying [...]
Just to clarify, I am describing rather than making arguments. As I said upthread, I am not claiming that they are actually good arguments nor endorsing the conclusion they (by construction) point towards. With that out of the way:
that it's "good" [...] for people to be tribal at the nation-state level but bad for them to be tribal at more granular levels?
The argument doesn't have anything to say about what should happen at the nation-state level. I guess most people do endorse tribalism at the nation-state level, though.
For most cohesion you want a very homogeneous population [...] any diversity reduces social cohesion
If you have a more or less fixed national population (in fact, what we have that's relevant here is a more or less fixed population at a level somewhere below the national; whatever scale our postulated school segregation happens at) then you don't get to choose the diversity at that scale. At smaller scales you can make less-diverse and therefore possibly more-cohesive subpopulations, at the likely cost of increased tension between the groups.
(I think we are more or less saying the same thing here.)
The obvious counterpoint is that diversity has advantages.
Yes. (We were asked for arguments against segregation by ability, so I listed some. Many of them have more or less obvious counterarguments.)
specific IQ levels
You might find this interesting: The 7 Tribes of Intellect.
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