Suppose you could move up along that axis, to the 95th percentile. Would you consider than a change for the better? For the worse? A neutral shift?
All else equal, better, of course. (In reality, all else is rarely equal; at a minimum there are opportunity costs.)
Sure, opportunity costs are always a complication, but in this case they are somewhat beside the point. If indeed it’s better to be further along this axis (all else being equal), then it seems like a bad idea to encourage and incentivize being lower on this axis, and to discourage and disincentivize being further on it. But that is just what I see happening!
If indeed it’s better to be further along this axis (all else being equal), then it seems like a bad idea to encourage and incentivize being lower on this axis, and to discourage and disincentivize being further on it. But that is just what I see happening!
The consequent does not follow. It might be better for an individual to press a button, if pressing that button were free, which moved them further along that axis. It is not obviously better to structure communities like LessWrong in ways which optimize for participants being further along on this axis, both because this is not a reliable proxy for the thing we actually care about and because it’s not free.
That it’s “not free” is a trivial claim (very few things are truly free), but that it costs very little, to—not even encourage moving upward along that axis, but simply to avoid encouraging the opposite—to keep your thumb off the scales, as much as possible—this seems to me to be hard to dispute.
because this is not a reliable proxy for the thing we actually care about
Could you elaborate? What is the thing we actually care about, and what is the unreliable proxy?
Sure, opportunity costs are always a complication, but in this case they are somewhat beside the point. If indeed it’s better to be further along this axis (all else being equal), then it seems like a bad idea to encourage and incentivize being lower on this axis, and to discourage and disincentivize being further on it. But that is just what I see happening!
The consequent does not follow. It might be better for an individual to press a button, if pressing that button were free, which moved them further along that axis. It is not obviously better to structure communities like LessWrong in ways which optimize for participants being further along on this axis, both because this is not a reliable proxy for the thing we actually care about and because it’s not free.
That it’s “not free” is a trivial claim (very few things are truly free), but that it costs very little, to—not even encourage moving upward along that axis, but simply to avoid encouraging the opposite—to keep your thumb off the scales, as much as possible—this seems to me to be hard to dispute.
Could you elaborate? What is the thing we actually care about, and what is the unreliable proxy?