Promoted to curated: This feels like the best summary of all the key Covid updates to make over the last month or so, and generally just a post with a lot of good points.
I generally don’t want all of LessWrong to become about Covid, but creating common knowledge of things like this feels like the right tradeoff in handling the visibility of Covid stuff, though I am not super confident.
I don’t think “too much Covid content” is the major problem here. Rather, the major problem with this essay is that it mostly states Zvi’s updates, without sharing the data and reasoning that led him to make those updates. It’s not going to convince anyone who doesn’t already trust Zvi.
This is perhaps an acceptable trade-off if people have to move fast and make decisions without being able to build their own models. But it’s an emergency measure that’s very costly long-term.
And for the most important decisions, it is especially important that the people who make them build their own models of the situation.
(For the record: I think Zvi’s thinking on Covid is mostly extremely sensible, and I disagree with Sherrinford’s comment below. So this is not about whether he’s right or not. I’d bet he is, on average.)
I think it’s relevant that this isn’t Zvi’s first COVID-19 post on LW; it’s his seventeenth, and he’s been showing his work to an exceptional degree.
Since some important stuff isn’t hyperlinked in the post itself, putting it all in a sequence (or the mods just picking out a few of the relevant past discussions of these topics and linking them in a pinned comment) might be helpful.
Indeed, the goal of this post is that long post is long in order to cover all the ground and I’m explicit that I’m not showing my work here. I tried to put up hyperlinks to the previous posts in the relevant places, where work is shown, but that’s definitely not covering all bases.
I’m not up for extensive additional hyperlinking work at this time, but if others have suggestions I will likely accept them.
I am a bit worried about the fact that an essay that depicts “governments most places” as “lying liars with no ability to plan or physically reason” and, based on similar assessments, calls for the dissolution of the WHO while not providing evidence (as stated in the second paragraph) is considered “the best summary of all the key Covid updates to make over the last month or so”.
Would you feel similarly concerned about a hypothetical curated essay that instead said ‘the WHO has done a reasonably good job and should have its funding increased’ (in the course of a longer discussion almost entirely focused on other points) while providing just as little evidence?
If so, then I disagree: in a dialogue about world affairs with people I respect, where someone has thirty important and relevant beliefs but only has time to properly defend five of them, I’d usually rather that they at least mention a bunch of the other beliefs than that they stay silent. I think it’s good for those unargued beliefs to then be critiqued and hashed out in the comments, but curation-level content shouldn’t require that the author conceal their actual epistemic state just because they don’t expect to be able to convince a skeptical reader.
If not, then I think I’d disagree a lot more strongly, and I’m a bit confused. Suppose we have a scale of General Institutional Virtue, where a given institution might deserve an 8⁄10, or a 5⁄10, or a 1⁄10. I don’t see a reason to concentrate our prior on, say, ‘most institutions are 8⁄10’ or ‘most institutions are 3⁄10’; claiming that something falls anywhere on the scale should warrant similar skepticism.
Perhaps the average person on the street thinks the WHO’s Virtue is 7⁄10; but by default I don’t think LessWrong should put much weight on popular opinion in evaluating arguments about institutional efficacy, so I don’t think we should demand less evidence from someone echoing the popular view than from someone with a different view. (Though it does make sense to be more curious about an unpopular view than a popular one, because unpopular views are likely to reflect less widely known evidence.)
You disagree with both answers I could possibly, in your view, give to a question that you ask. But the hypothetical alternative you give is not the mirror image of Zvi’s essay, nor is it the mirror image of what I referred to from Zvi’s essay.
Zvi claims that governments are “lying liars” and they have “no ability to plan or physically reason”. In the reasoning for your first disagreement possibility, you effectively say that your prior about any of Zvi’s statements being right is high because you respect him and also because he properly defends some of the many statements he makes. By contrast, my own prior of the quality of Zvi’s less political assessments in this text are lower because the statement that governments have “no ability to plan” is false. Concerning the WHO, Zvi’s statement about the response to the pandemic is that it is “not that different” from “attacking, restraining and killing innocent people”. This is far from my understanding of what governments or the WHO are doing. So my priors on other statements in the essay are not high after reading the politics sections, and this does not depend on the average person on the street’s opinion, or on what Zvi writes in other texts.
I agree that LessWrong should not put much weight on popular opinion in evaluating arguments per se. Though depending on what you mean by your suggestion to be more curious about an unpopular view, I may disagree there. Unpopular views can very well be unpopular because they are wrong. The statement that the moon is made of toothpaste is unpopular for that reason. Of course, Zvi’s essay is very popular on Lesswrong, though I would not say that that is sufficient to tell me whether what he states is right.
To my impression, Zvi is not just writing a curated essay that says the WHO should be dissolved, but actually makes many statements that go through on the nod for people that believe them in advance. However, I believe people who do not believe the statements in advance may not even understand them. But probably that is just me not understanding the text, so I’ll just list examples of what I find confusing:
The “sacrifices to the gods” section is a description of a perceived behavior of … whom? The government? People in general? Because all governments do the same, and all people obey (the rules by the government? the rules by society? I don’t know what is implied here.)
Zvi implies that the “we” would not choose efficient action even if it could be easily identified (“If the action is efficient and actually were to solve the problem in a meaningful way, that would invalidate the whole operation.”), which I find highly implausible, he states that people don’t trust “the authorities” (which may be true, but who knows?), and seems to imply (again I don’t know who “we” is) that governments or societies are only willing to “choose one individual intervention that solves our problems, rather than combining their effectiveness, because math is not a thing”, while actually several countries have combined measures like e.g. masks and distance prescriptions.
Having explained in this whole section that the “we” does only stupid things (while “market forces” could do the good ones), in the next section (about governments) it is the “we” that is lied to by WHO etc. And then “It’s all they still have the ability to do. Almost no one with the ability to model the physical world, or who would care about the implications of their model if they did have one, has any power or authority at this point.” Okay, I better don’t question whether that is true, I guess it must be self-evident in dystopian America.
So I think a mirror image text may be one that asserts that “the WHO has done a reasonably good job and should have its funding increased because governments, the WHO and similar organizations exclusively and efficiently act based on science, evidence, and altruism”. And yes I would be concerned about such a hypothetical curated essay.
So all of this is fine for a personal opinion essay. After all, Zvi says “This post is not making strong evidence-based arguments for these views. This is not that post. This is me getting all this out there, on the record, in a place one can reference.” I just don’t have the impression it’s about “aim to explain”. But ok, both of you know the idea of lesswrong much better than I do.
Sorry, those two weren’t the only answers I imagined you might give, I just didn’t want to make the comment longer before letting you respond.
My next guess was going to be that your objection was stylistic — that Zvi was using a lot of hyperbole and heated rhetoric that’s a poor fit for curated LW content, even if a more boring and neutral version of the same core claims would be fine.
I think that’s part of what’s going on (in terms of why the two of us disagree). I think another part of what’s going on is that I feel like I have good context for ~all the high-level generalizations and institutional criticisms Zvi is bringing in, and why one might hold such views, from reading previous Zvi-posts, reading lots of discussion of COVID-19 over the last few months, and generally being exposed to lots of rationalist and tech-contrarian-libertarian arguments over the years, such that it doesn’t feel super confusing or novel as a package and I can focus more on particular parts I found interesting and novel. (Like critiques of particular organizations, or new lenses I can try out and see whether it causes a different set of actions and beliefs to feel reasonable/‘natural’, and if so whether those actions and beliefs seem good.)
This isn’t to say that Zvi’s necessarily right on all counts and you’re wrong, and I think a discussion like this is exactly the way to properly bridge different people’s contexts and priors about the world. And given the mix of ‘this seems super wrong’ and ‘the style seems bad’ and ‘there aren’t even hyperlinks I can use to figure out what Zvi means or where he’s coming from’, I get why you’d think this isn’t curation-worthy content. I don’t want to go down all the object-level discussion paths necessarily to reach consensus about this myself, though if someone else wants to, I’ll be happy about that.
The conclusions in the post only make sense to people who already believed them, and aren’t that useful for most people to read.
Here are some examples of conclusions you disagree with and whose arguments you find confusing: You disagree that the WHO has an inability to plan and is effectively attacking, restraining and killing innocent people; you don’t get the bits about sacrifices to the gods; you don’t get why he says countries are failing to use multiple measures rather than a single hopeful fix-all, when some countries are using multiple measures; you’re confused who ‘we’ refers to and have some sense that it shifts throughout the post.
It seems totally fine (and good!) for Zvi to write this post, but the mod team curating it as “the best summary of all the key Covid updates to make over the last month or so” seems like a confusing call, because it isn’t very helpful to perhaps the majority of people who will read it.
Thank you very much, Ben. By and large, I think the summary is fine, but I think I would like to clarify the following things.
First, I am unsure about the “useful for most people to read” part. Obviously, many people like the essay, and I am not sure what makes political opinion essays “useful”. Of course there will be many people who find it useful to link to the text. Similarly, I am unsure how timeless it is; if it makes a post timeless that it is exemplary for the political sentiment of lesswrong in June/May 2020, then sure this seems to be timeless (which you can see because it is curated). But I am negative about the explain vs persuade part. Admittedly, this essay may be characterized by a third category additional to these two, but I believe as a curated lesswrong post that is explicitly intended to be used as a reference, it will rather be used to persuade on politics without explaining.
Secondly, the WHO having an “inability to plan” sounds a bit different from “no ability to plan”. In my understanding, the first is a matter of opinion, the second is absurd as a description of basically any organization. But maybe I am overinterpreting. I think I understand what Zvi is saying about sacrifices, though I am not really sure.
You say “the political sentiment of lesswrong” and “persuade on politics”; if we replace “politics” with “a model of world affairs” or “a view about the state of the world’s main decisionmaking institutions” or the like, that changes my intuitive response to your comment a fair bit.
There are risks to talking about world affairs or the state of the US government on LW, and the risks may outweigh the benefits. But in a relatively utopian version of LW, at least, in a world where it was possible to do so without a bunch of bad side-effects, I think there would be a lot of curated “politics” content in the sense of “content that aids in understanding the current state of the world and its institutions”, even though there are other interpretations of “politics” according to which politics doesn’t belong on the LW front page.
In this utopian version of LW, I think some curated posts would focus on defending models, while others would focus on presenting new models for evaluation or summarizing previously-defended models.
(This abstract point seems more important to me than the question of whether Zvi’s post in particular would be curated in utopian-LW.)
Promoted to curated: This feels like the best summary of all the key Covid updates to make over the last month or so, and generally just a post with a lot of good points.
I generally don’t want all of LessWrong to become about Covid, but creating common knowledge of things like this feels like the right tradeoff in handling the visibility of Covid stuff, though I am not super confident.
I don’t think “too much Covid content” is the major problem here. Rather, the major problem with this essay is that it mostly states Zvi’s updates, without sharing the data and reasoning that led him to make those updates. It’s not going to convince anyone who doesn’t already trust Zvi.
This is perhaps an acceptable trade-off if people have to move fast and make decisions without being able to build their own models. But it’s an emergency measure that’s very costly long-term.
And for the most important decisions, it is especially important that the people who make them build their own models of the situation.
(For the record: I think Zvi’s thinking on Covid is mostly extremely sensible, and I disagree with Sherrinford’s comment below. So this is not about whether he’s right or not. I’d bet he is, on average.)
I think it’s relevant that this isn’t Zvi’s first COVID-19 post on LW; it’s his seventeenth, and he’s been showing his work to an exceptional degree.
Since some important stuff isn’t hyperlinked in the post itself, putting it all in a sequence (or the mods just picking out a few of the relevant past discussions of these topics and linking them in a pinned comment) might be helpful.
Indeed, the goal of this post is that long post is long in order to cover all the ground and I’m explicit that I’m not showing my work here. I tried to put up hyperlinks to the previous posts in the relevant places, where work is shown, but that’s definitely not covering all bases.
I’m not up for extensive additional hyperlinking work at this time, but if others have suggestions I will likely accept them.
I am a bit worried about the fact that an essay that depicts “governments most places” as “lying liars with no ability to plan or physically reason” and, based on similar assessments, calls for the dissolution of the WHO while not providing evidence (as stated in the second paragraph) is considered “the best summary of all the key Covid updates to make over the last month or so”.
Believe me, I am also very bothered that I can produce useful Covid-19 content. And also that these statements seem appropriate. But here we are.
Would you feel similarly concerned about a hypothetical curated essay that instead said ‘the WHO has done a reasonably good job and should have its funding increased’ (in the course of a longer discussion almost entirely focused on other points) while providing just as little evidence?
If so, then I disagree: in a dialogue about world affairs with people I respect, where someone has thirty important and relevant beliefs but only has time to properly defend five of them, I’d usually rather that they at least mention a bunch of the other beliefs than that they stay silent. I think it’s good for those unargued beliefs to then be critiqued and hashed out in the comments, but curation-level content shouldn’t require that the author conceal their actual epistemic state just because they don’t expect to be able to convince a skeptical reader.
If not, then I think I’d disagree a lot more strongly, and I’m a bit confused. Suppose we have a scale of General Institutional Virtue, where a given institution might deserve an 8⁄10, or a 5⁄10, or a 1⁄10. I don’t see a reason to concentrate our prior on, say, ‘most institutions are 8⁄10’ or ‘most institutions are 3⁄10’; claiming that something falls anywhere on the scale should warrant similar skepticism.
Perhaps the average person on the street thinks the WHO’s Virtue is 7⁄10; but by default I don’t think LessWrong should put much weight on popular opinion in evaluating arguments about institutional efficacy, so I don’t think we should demand less evidence from someone echoing the popular view than from someone with a different view. (Though it does make sense to be more curious about an unpopular view than a popular one, because unpopular views are likely to reflect less widely known evidence.)
You disagree with both answers I could possibly, in your view, give to a question that you ask. But the hypothetical alternative you give is not the mirror image of Zvi’s essay, nor is it the mirror image of what I referred to from Zvi’s essay.
Zvi claims that governments are “lying liars” and they have “no ability to plan or physically reason”. In the reasoning for your first disagreement possibility, you effectively say that your prior about any of Zvi’s statements being right is high because you respect him and also because he properly defends some of the many statements he makes. By contrast, my own prior of the quality of Zvi’s less political assessments in this text are lower because the statement that governments have “no ability to plan” is false. Concerning the WHO, Zvi’s statement about the response to the pandemic is that it is “not that different” from “attacking, restraining and killing innocent people”. This is far from my understanding of what governments or the WHO are doing. So my priors on other statements in the essay are not high after reading the politics sections, and this does not depend on the average person on the street’s opinion, or on what Zvi writes in other texts.
I agree that LessWrong should not put much weight on popular opinion in evaluating arguments per se. Though depending on what you mean by your suggestion to be more curious about an unpopular view, I may disagree there. Unpopular views can very well be unpopular because they are wrong. The statement that the moon is made of toothpaste is unpopular for that reason. Of course, Zvi’s essay is very popular on Lesswrong, though I would not say that that is sufficient to tell me whether what he states is right.
To my impression, Zvi is not just writing a curated essay that says the WHO should be dissolved, but actually makes many statements that go through on the nod for people that believe them in advance. However, I believe people who do not believe the statements in advance may not even understand them. But probably that is just me not understanding the text, so I’ll just list examples of what I find confusing:
The “sacrifices to the gods” section is a description of a perceived behavior of … whom? The government? People in general? Because all governments do the same, and all people obey (the rules by the government? the rules by society? I don’t know what is implied here.)
Zvi implies that the “we” would not choose efficient action even if it could be easily identified (“If the action is efficient and actually were to solve the problem in a meaningful way, that would invalidate the whole operation.”), which I find highly implausible, he states that people don’t trust “the authorities” (which may be true, but who knows?), and seems to imply (again I don’t know who “we” is) that governments or societies are only willing to “choose one individual intervention that solves our problems, rather than combining their effectiveness, because math is not a thing”, while actually several countries have combined measures like e.g. masks and distance prescriptions.
Having explained in this whole section that the “we” does only stupid things (while “market forces” could do the good ones), in the next section (about governments) it is the “we” that is lied to by WHO etc. And then “It’s all they still have the ability to do. Almost no one with the ability to model the physical world, or who would care about the implications of their model if they did have one, has any power or authority at this point.” Okay, I better don’t question whether that is true, I guess it must be self-evident in dystopian America.
So I think a mirror image text may be one that asserts that “the WHO has done a reasonably good job and should have its funding increased because governments, the WHO and similar organizations exclusively and efficiently act based on science, evidence, and altruism”. And yes I would be concerned about such a hypothetical curated essay.
So all of this is fine for a personal opinion essay. After all, Zvi says “This post is not making strong evidence-based arguments for these views. This is not that post. This is me getting all this out there, on the record, in a place one can reference.” I just don’t have the impression it’s about “aim to explain”. But ok, both of you know the idea of lesswrong much better than I do.
Sorry, those two weren’t the only answers I imagined you might give, I just didn’t want to make the comment longer before letting you respond.
My next guess was going to be that your objection was stylistic — that Zvi was using a lot of hyperbole and heated rhetoric that’s a poor fit for curated LW content, even if a more boring and neutral version of the same core claims would be fine.
I think that’s part of what’s going on (in terms of why the two of us disagree). I think another part of what’s going on is that I feel like I have good context for ~all the high-level generalizations and institutional criticisms Zvi is bringing in, and why one might hold such views, from reading previous Zvi-posts, reading lots of discussion of COVID-19 over the last few months, and generally being exposed to lots of rationalist and tech-contrarian-libertarian arguments over the years, such that it doesn’t feel super confusing or novel as a package and I can focus more on particular parts I found interesting and novel. (Like critiques of particular organizations, or new lenses I can try out and see whether it causes a different set of actions and beliefs to feel reasonable/‘natural’, and if so whether those actions and beliefs seem good.)
This isn’t to say that Zvi’s necessarily right on all counts and you’re wrong, and I think a discussion like this is exactly the way to properly bridge different people’s contexts and priors about the world. And given the mix of ‘this seems super wrong’ and ‘the style seems bad’ and ‘there aren’t even hyperlinks I can use to figure out what Zvi means or where he’s coming from’, I get why you’d think this isn’t curation-worthy content. I don’t want to go down all the object-level discussion paths necessarily to reach consensus about this myself, though if someone else wants to, I’ll be happy about that.
Summary of what you said:
Is that right?
Thank you very much, Ben. By and large, I think the summary is fine, but I think I would like to clarify the following things.
First, I am unsure about the “useful for most people to read” part. Obviously, many people like the essay, and I am not sure what makes political opinion essays “useful”. Of course there will be many people who find it useful to link to the text. Similarly, I am unsure how timeless it is; if it makes a post timeless that it is exemplary for the political sentiment of lesswrong in June/May 2020, then sure this seems to be timeless (which you can see because it is curated). But I am negative about the explain vs persuade part. Admittedly, this essay may be characterized by a third category additional to these two, but I believe as a curated lesswrong post that is explicitly intended to be used as a reference, it will rather be used to persuade on politics without explaining.
Secondly, the WHO having an “inability to plan” sounds a bit different from “no ability to plan”. In my understanding, the first is a matter of opinion, the second is absurd as a description of basically any organization. But maybe I am overinterpreting. I think I understand what Zvi is saying about sacrifices, though I am not really sure.
You say “the political sentiment of lesswrong” and “persuade on politics”; if we replace “politics” with “a model of world affairs” or “a view about the state of the world’s main decisionmaking institutions” or the like, that changes my intuitive response to your comment a fair bit.
There are risks to talking about world affairs or the state of the US government on LW, and the risks may outweigh the benefits. But in a relatively utopian version of LW, at least, in a world where it was possible to do so without a bunch of bad side-effects, I think there would be a lot of curated “politics” content in the sense of “content that aids in understanding the current state of the world and its institutions”, even though there are other interpretations of “politics” according to which politics doesn’t belong on the LW front page.
In this utopian version of LW, I think some curated posts would focus on defending models, while others would focus on presenting new models for evaluation or summarizing previously-defended models.
(This abstract point seems more important to me than the question of whether Zvi’s post in particular would be curated in utopian-LW.)
I think I agree to all of what you say, except that I am unsure whether it is about what I wrote.