I would like to note that at the time of this comment this post has karma of 3 with 7 votes. So, that indicates it is being downvoted. But I do not think that the quality of the post is sub-par or mediocre in any way, and this is easy to tell from reading it. So that must mean it is being downvoted due to disagreement, or because it goes against LW’s “cherished institutions.”
It could be argued that LW’s collective determination is the highest and best authority it has, but I would like to see more posts like this, personally. I don’t think things should be downvoted just because they disagree with something that could be considered a core principle / central idea.
I haven’t voted on it, but downvoting doesn’t seem inappropriate.
”Quality” meaning what? Long form essay with few spelling mistakes, or making a valid point? Getting an A+ in an English class would not satisfy the definition of Quality on this site for me. In fact those two would be pretty uncorrelated. If it’s rehashing arguments that already exist, or making bad arguments, even if in good faith, having it upvoted certainly wouldn’t be appropriate. I personally think its arguments aren’t well thought out even if it does attempt to answer a bunch of objections and has some effort put in.
People can concern troll that we shoot down objections to “core” principles that we have all taken for granted, but if you go to math stack exchange and post about how 10 + 10 should be 21 in as many words, I think you’ll find similar “cherished institutions”. Sometimes an appropriate objection is “go back to 101”, and as with any subject, some people may never be able to get more than a F in the class unfortunately.
The Orthogonality Thesis is the Orthogonality Thesis, not the Orthogonality Theorem. My understanding is that it has not been proven.
It is often the case that things that disagree with other things (regardless of whether they are considered “core principles” or not) will get downvoted on the basis of being “low quality” or being in want of something, but it is not obvious to me that disagreement should be equated with a lesser level of understanding. Here that appears to be the equivocation.
There are two ways in which the Orthogonality Thesis may be false:
there is a set of values all intelligent agents converge to for some reason, but those values hold no special role in the universe, and this is just a quirk of intelligence, or
there is a set of values that is objectively correct (whatever that even means) and the smarter you are, the more likely you are to discover it.
Talking about moral realism is suggesting 2, which is a fantastically strong hypothesis that is disbelieved by many for very good reasons. It is mostly the realm of religion. To suggest something like empirical moral realism requires a lot of work to even define the thing in a way that’s somehow consistent with basic observations about reality. I mean, you can try, but the attempt has to be a lot more solid than what we’re seeing here.
But it was obvious to some of us the moment the problem was described. So replace 10 + 10 with something that isn’t obvious to you initially, but is definitely true. Maybe the integral doesn’t tell you the area under the curve. Maybe there are no other planets in the universe. Maybe tectonic plates don’t move. Is a site that talks about [math, astronomy, geology] obligated to not downvote such questions because they aren’t obvious to everyone? I think any community can establish a line beyond which questioning of base material will be discouraged. That is a defining characteristic of any forum community, with the most open one being 4chan. There is no objective line, but I’m fine with the current one.
Here’s another rule that seems better: downvote posts that are either poorly argued or argue for a position that is very stupid. In order to think there are no other planets or no tectonic plates, one must be very dumb—to deny orthogonality thesis, one need not be. Scott Aaronson is by no means dumb.
I don’t think you or Scott is dumb, but arguments people make don’t inherit their intellect.
And who gets to decide the cutoff for “very dumb”? Currently the community does. Your proposal for downvote poorly argued or argue for a position that is very stupid is already the policy. People aren’t trying to silence you. I recommend going to the Discord where I’m sure people will be happy to chat with you at length about the post topic and these comment sub-topics. I can’t promise I’ll be responding more here.
I guess if the belief is that the orthogonality thesis is totally trivial—anyone with half a brain can recognize that it is true—then it would make sense to downvote. That seems obviously wrong though.
And indeed your point is that it [The Orthogonality Thesis] is not obviously true, not that it is obviously false. So if I were to downvote your post because I thought your argument was silly or obviously wrong, that would be equivalent to stating that it is obviously true. This couldn’t of course be the case, I doubt that anything in the Sequences was written down because the author considered those things to be obviously true.
I didn’t vote on this post either way. I think it’s making mistakes, but I appreciate the effort being put in to trying to understand reality. I’m quite sympathetic because it reminds me of many mistakes I made in the past, and I think it’s quite valuable to be able to make mistakes in public and have people politely point out where they think you’re confused or misunderstanding things.
As to voting on Less Wrong, the stated norm is to vote up the things you want to see more of, vote down the things you want to see less of. Unfortunately this often devolves into agree/disagree voting, and perhaps separate agree/disagree votes from see/don’t see votes, like we have on comments, would be useful on posts.
Something to be aware of with votes is that I (and I think many other people) vote based on where we think the total karma should be, not necessarily just “this is good” or “this is bad”. I actually voted this up even though I think it’s only ok, because I think the post is made me think and doesn’t deserve negative karma even though I think it’s wrong, but I would have voted it down if it had a very positive karma score.
Consider that if you don’t see the post make mistakes that would be both serious and obvious, this could be a fact about you, not a fact about the post.
I would like to note that at the time of this comment this post has karma of 3 with 7 votes. So, that indicates it is being downvoted. But I do not think that the quality of the post is sub-par or mediocre in any way, and this is easy to tell from reading it. So that must mean it is being downvoted due to disagreement, or because it goes against LW’s “cherished institutions.”
It could be argued that LW’s collective determination is the highest and best authority it has, but I would like to see more posts like this, personally. I don’t think things should be downvoted just because they disagree with something that could be considered a core principle / central idea.
I haven’t voted on it, but downvoting doesn’t seem inappropriate.
”Quality” meaning what? Long form essay with few spelling mistakes, or making a valid point? Getting an A+ in an English class would not satisfy the definition of Quality on this site for me. In fact those two would be pretty uncorrelated. If it’s rehashing arguments that already exist, or making bad arguments, even if in good faith, having it upvoted certainly wouldn’t be appropriate. I personally think its arguments aren’t well thought out even if it does attempt to answer a bunch of objections and has some effort put in.
People can concern troll that we shoot down objections to “core” principles that we have all taken for granted, but if you go to math stack exchange and post about how 10 + 10 should be 21 in as many words, I think you’ll find similar “cherished institutions”. Sometimes an appropriate objection is “go back to 101”, and as with any subject, some people may never be able to get more than a F in the class unfortunately.
The Orthogonality Thesis is the Orthogonality Thesis, not the Orthogonality Theorem. My understanding is that it has not been proven.
It is often the case that things that disagree with other things (regardless of whether they are considered “core principles” or not) will get downvoted on the basis of being “low quality” or being in want of something, but it is not obvious to me that disagreement should be equated with a lesser level of understanding. Here that appears to be the equivocation.
There are two ways in which the Orthogonality Thesis may be false:
there is a set of values all intelligent agents converge to for some reason, but those values hold no special role in the universe, and this is just a quirk of intelligence, or
there is a set of values that is objectively correct (whatever that even means) and the smarter you are, the more likely you are to discover it.
Talking about moral realism is suggesting 2, which is a fantastically strong hypothesis that is disbelieved by many for very good reasons. It is mostly the realm of religion. To suggest something like empirical moral realism requires a lot of work to even define the thing in a way that’s somehow consistent with basic observations about reality. I mean, you can try, but the attempt has to be a lot more solid than what we’re seeing here.
There’s a bunch of ways it could b wrong, but many of them aren’t very impactive.
I think a key difference is that it’s very obvious that 10 + 10 = 20, while I don’t think that the orthogonality thesis is that obvious .
But it was obvious to some of us the moment the problem was described. So replace 10 + 10 with something that isn’t obvious to you initially, but is definitely true. Maybe the integral doesn’t tell you the area under the curve. Maybe there are no other planets in the universe. Maybe tectonic plates don’t move. Is a site that talks about [math, astronomy, geology] obligated to not downvote such questions because they aren’t obvious to everyone? I think any community can establish a line beyond which questioning of base material will be discouraged. That is a defining characteristic of any forum community, with the most open one being 4chan. There is no objective line, but I’m fine with the current one.
Here’s another rule that seems better: downvote posts that are either poorly argued or argue for a position that is very stupid. In order to think there are no other planets or no tectonic plates, one must be very dumb—to deny orthogonality thesis, one need not be. Scott Aaronson is by no means dumb.
I don’t think you or Scott is dumb, but arguments people make don’t inherit their intellect.
And who gets to decide the cutoff for “very dumb”? Currently the community does. Your proposal for downvote poorly argued or argue for a position that is very stupid is already the policy. People aren’t trying to silence you. I recommend going to the Discord where I’m sure people will be happy to chat with you at length about the post topic and these comment sub-topics. I can’t promise I’ll be responding more here.
I guess if the belief is that the orthogonality thesis is totally trivial—anyone with half a brain can recognize that it is true—then it would make sense to downvote. That seems obviously wrong though.
You know you wrote 10+10=21?
Haha, fixed.
And indeed your point is that it [The Orthogonality Thesis] is not obviously true, not that it is obviously false. So if I were to downvote your post because I thought your argument was silly or obviously wrong, that would be equivalent to stating that it is obviously true. This couldn’t of course be the case, I doubt that anything in the Sequences was written down because the author considered those things to be obviously true.
Not all things that are obviously true once stated are immediate to think of.
I didn’t vote on this post either way. I think it’s making mistakes, but I appreciate the effort being put in to trying to understand reality. I’m quite sympathetic because it reminds me of many mistakes I made in the past, and I think it’s quite valuable to be able to make mistakes in public and have people politely point out where they think you’re confused or misunderstanding things.
As to voting on Less Wrong, the stated norm is to vote up the things you want to see more of, vote down the things you want to see less of. Unfortunately this often devolves into agree/disagree voting, and perhaps separate agree/disagree votes from see/don’t see votes, like we have on comments, would be useful on posts.
Something to be aware of with votes is that I (and I think many other people) vote based on where we think the total karma should be, not necessarily just “this is good” or “this is bad”. I actually voted this up even though I think it’s only ok, because I think the post is made me think and doesn’t deserve negative karma even though I think it’s wrong, but I would have voted it down if it had a very positive karma score.
Consider that if you don’t see the post make mistakes that would be both serious and obvious, this could be a fact about you, not a fact about the post.