This is hardly silly. Our very thread started with a comment about complications to an easy thing.
When something is important, you should not assume you are in the position to properly evaluate its difficulty (or even that you have the right task), and adopt that level of determination. Rather you determine to do the important thing, and figure out what is it and how hard it could be.
You don’t do the impossible because FAI is realy hard, you decide to do the impossible because the world needs saved.
And yes, you weight the risk of ninjas against all other possible challenges and the risks of preparation and inaction, the probability that you’re mistaken about the button and ought to be doing something else, and all other factors within your limits. But you don’t just throw out the idea of ninja-level obstacles.
This means we ought to be preparing to press every possible world saving button, and counter every possible challenge, weighted against how likely they are to present themselves, and to actually save the world. Lesswrong tries at this, but we have a long way to go.
Eliezer initially downvoted (I think sight unseen, the mere concept of) this billion dollar button. I would have rated the likelihood of something like this pretty low without the details of Newmark’s comments, and I suspect this is typical of lesswrongers.
I don’t I think we’ve ever devoted a whole lot of thought to polite viral marketing, Advertising contracts, what to do with a billion dollars, or Facebook.
Now here we are facing a ninja we didn’t train for, and any of us could put up a facebook page and break the button, and we’re not sure how hard to press.
EDIT: We DO need to make good rational plans on how to do this, but that planning can be done by a small group of rationalists. I mean only that the front end should be targeted at less-rational people.
Before that, it really did seem like you were using “Shut up and do the impossible” to dismiss MrHen’s questions as complaints about the difficulty.
I see now that you meant to refer to the task of figuring out how to do execute the idea effectively. A major reason this was confusing is that no one was complaining that this is hard, let alone impossible. There was no reason to support it with “Shut up and do the impossible”. To communicate more effectively, forget the colorful slogans and metaphors (it also wasn’t clear that you meant the “save the world” button as a metaphor for the Facebook group, and not just an example), and just clearly state your position, in this case, what you want to do.
This is hardly silly. Our very thread started with a comment about complications to an easy thing.
When something is important, you should not assume you are in the position to properly evaluate its difficulty (or even that you have the right task), and adopt that level of determination. Rather you determine to do the important thing, and figure out what is it and how hard it could be.
You don’t do the impossible because FAI is realy hard, you decide to do the impossible because the world needs saved.
And yes, you weight the risk of ninjas against all other possible challenges and the risks of preparation and inaction, the probability that you’re mistaken about the button and ought to be doing something else, and all other factors within your limits. But you don’t just throw out the idea of ninja-level obstacles.
This means we ought to be preparing to press every possible world saving button, and counter every possible challenge, weighted against how likely they are to present themselves, and to actually save the world. Lesswrong tries at this, but we have a long way to go.
Eliezer initially downvoted (I think sight unseen, the mere concept of) this billion dollar button. I would have rated the likelihood of something like this pretty low without the details of Newmark’s comments, and I suspect this is typical of lesswrongers. I don’t I think we’ve ever devoted a whole lot of thought to polite viral marketing, Advertising contracts, what to do with a billion dollars, or Facebook.
Now here we are facing a ninja we didn’t train for, and any of us could put up a facebook page and break the button, and we’re not sure how hard to press.
Ok, I went back and read your edit:
Before that, it really did seem like you were using “Shut up and do the impossible” to dismiss MrHen’s questions as complaints about the difficulty.
I see now that you meant to refer to the task of figuring out how to do execute the idea effectively. A major reason this was confusing is that no one was complaining that this is hard, let alone impossible. There was no reason to support it with “Shut up and do the impossible”. To communicate more effectively, forget the colorful slogans and metaphors (it also wasn’t clear that you meant the “save the world” button as a metaphor for the Facebook group, and not just an example), and just clearly state your position, in this case, what you want to do.