10% of the world is way too many people. I’m not sure a lot of them would be capable of comprehending a lot of the material I’ve read, given the distribution of cognitive and reading ability in the world. It would probably have to be something written for most people to read, not like ~anything on LessWrong. Like, if HPMOR could work I’d pick that. If not, perhaps some Dostoyevsky? But, does 10% of the world speak English? I am confused about the hypothetical.
The idea of this conversational technique is that you can shape the hypothetical to find one where the two of you have strong, clear, differing intuitions.
If you’re like “IDK man, most people won’t even understand most of the books that I think are important, and so most of the problem is figuring out something that ‘works’ at all, not picking the best thing”, you could adjust the hypothetical, accordingly. What about 10% of the global population sampled randomly from people who have above 110 IQ, and if they’re not english speakers they get a translation? Does that version of the hypothetical give you a clearer answer?
Or like (maybe this is a backwards way to frame things but) I would guess[1] that there’s a version of some question like this to which you would answer the sequences, or something similar, since it seems like your take is “[one of] the major bottleneck[s] in the world is making words mean things.” Is there a version that does return the sequences or similar?
FYI, I feel interested in these answers and wonder if Alex disagrees with either the specific actions or something about the spirit of the actions.
For instance, my stereotype of religious prophets, is that they don’t dedicate their life to taking down, or prosecuting a particular criminal. My personal “what would Jesus / Buddha do?” doesn’t return “commit my life to making sure that guy gets jail time.” Is that an “in” towards your actual policy differences (the situations in the world where you would make different tradeoffs)?
Yeah, I should probably write these up. I called this “action-oriented operationalization” (in contrast to prediction-oriented operationalization) and at least part of the credit goes to John Salvatier for developing it.
The idea of this conversational technique is that you can shape the hypothetical to find one where the two of you have strong, clear, differing intuitions.
If you’re like “IDK man, most people won’t even understand most of the books that I think are important, and so most of the problem is figuring out something that ‘works’ at all, not picking the best thing”, you could adjust the hypothetical, accordingly. What about 10% of the global population sampled randomly from people who have above 110 IQ, and if they’re not english speakers they get a translation? Does that version of the hypothetical give you a clearer answer?
Or like (maybe this is a backwards way to frame things but) I would guess[1] that there’s a version of some question like this to which you would answer the sequences, or something similar, since it seems like your take is “[one of] the major bottleneck[s] in the world is making words mean things.” Is there a version that does return the sequences or similar?
FYI, I feel interested in these answers and wonder if Alex disagrees with either the specific actions or something about the spirit of the actions.
For instance, my stereotype of religious prophets, is that they don’t dedicate their life to taking down, or prosecuting a particular criminal. My personal “what would Jesus / Buddha do?” doesn’t return “commit my life to making sure that guy gets jail time.” Is that an “in” towards your actual policy differences (the situations in the world where you would make different tradeoffs)?
Though obviously, don’t let my guesses dictate your attitudes. Maybe you don’t actually think anything like that!
I like the technique.
Yeah, I should probably write these up. I called this “action-oriented operationalization” (in contrast to prediction-oriented operationalization) and at least part of the credit goes to John Salvatier for developing it.