-1, this is pointlessly negative. There’s a disclaimer at the top (so it’s not like he’s claiming false authority), the title is appropriate (so it’s not like you were tricked into clicking on the article), and it’s reasonably on-topic because LW people are in the software/AI/entrepreneurship space. Sure, maybe most of the proposals are far-fetched, but if one of the ideas sparks an idea that sparks an idea, the net value could be very positive.
Note that neither Lumifer, nor Dagon, nor Brillyant have ever made a top-level submission of original content to Less Wrong. It’s easy to be a critic.
Since Lumifer, Dagon, and Brillyant seem to want a site that never has anything new on it, may I suggest example.com? It hardly ever changes.
...what did people say they’d need to rejoin [Less Wrong]?
Feel free to read these yourselves (they’re not long), but I’ll go ahead and summarize: It’s all about the content. Content, content, content. No amount of usability improvements, A/B testing or clever trickery will let you get around content. People are overwhelmingly clear about this; they need a reason to come to the site and right now they don’t feel like they have one. That means priority number one for somebody trying to revitalize LessWrong is how you deal with this.
The problem with comments like Lumifer’s is not that they are incorrect. It’s that they create a bad incentive structure for content creators. Anyone who posts to LW is doing free labor in an attempt to improve the accuracy of the community’s beliefs. I believe that lukeprog, Eliezer, and Yvain have all complained that writing LW posts is not very rewarding. If there’s some probability that the Lumifers are the world are going to call your post “stupid” without offering any specific feedback, that makes the job even more thankless. And no, this is not necessarily something a person can predict in advance: a previous post chaosmage made got voted to +55, and the ideas in it were being used by a friend of mine years after it was made.
The cost of an occasional bad post is not very high: you read it until you realize it is bad and then you move on. But the cost of nasty comments like Lumifer’s can be quite high. Most online communities suck, and nasty comments are a big part of the reason why. If I was selling a product you could spray on an online community to prevent anything from growing there, I would name it Lumifer.
The problem with comments like Lumifer’s is not that they are incorrect. It’s that they create a bad incentive structure for content creators.
That’s a very interesting opposition to set up :-D
First, let’s take it as black-and-white. If I call a top-level post stupid and I’m “not … incorrect”, then let me point out that the incentive structure is entirely right: I don’t want content creators posting stupid stuff and I doubt many people would prefer to see more stupid posts on LW.
If we take it more reasonably as a trade-off, it certainly exists—both in the let’s-pick-polite-expressions dimension and in the let’s-avert-out-eyes-and-say-nothing dimension. However the principle stands—you want to provide negative incentives to stupid posts.
In general, I think we have a bigger disagreement. Your approach to “content” is that of a consumer—you want other people to feed you tasty bits of content. My approach is different. I find considerably more value in discussion (especially a spirited one) than in the posts themselves. From my point of view, most of the “content” is in comments, not in posts, and being able to participate in the give-and-take makes the conversation even more worthwhile.
As I said several times I dislike the high-priesthood view of science and I dislike the high-priesthood view of forums as well. I am not particularly interested in having a few high-status people bestow their wisdom upon me in exchange for adoration.
I am also not interested in providing incentives for any content. There are places on the ’net with LOTS AND LOTS of content—Facebook, Reddit, Buzzfeed, etc. etc. If you want “content”, go there: LW will never be able to compete. From LW I want specific and highly filtered content—that’s what makes LW special and interesting. If LW gets filled with half-assed stream-of-consciosness ramblings about random stuff, well, I don’t think it will work out well :-/
Anyone who posts to LW is doing free labor in an attempt to improve the accuracy of the community’s beliefs.
First, that’s false. Second, some of these attempts are… counterproductive.
But the cost of nasty comments like Lumifer’s can be quite high
Show me the data.
If I was selling a product you could spray on an online community to prevent anything from growing there, I would name it Lumifer.
Ah, how cute! Tell you what, when you startup gets to the MVP stage, ping me and we’ll discuss the brand name licensing terms :-P
From LW I want specific and highly filtered content
We want the same thing then. My way of achieving it is to write posts and comments when I have something interesting to say. For example, if I disagree with something, I usually don’t reply unless I can add a bit of insight to my disagreement, so it’s worth reading to everyone and not just the person I’m replying to.
From talking to you, it seems like you’re using the opposite strategy. You ask questions that are uninteresting on their own (or at least feel that way to me and others). When someone replies, you follow up with more of the same. Maybe you could try optimizing your comments for interest instead of “spirited discussion”?
You ask questions that are uninteresting on their own (or at least feel that way to me and others)
I am a bit curious, then, how did I manage to accumulate that much karma by merely being uninteresting...
People are different. They find interesting different things. It seems likely that our interests don’t overlap much—but I would be wary of making wide-ranging conclusions on that basis.
A couple of year ago, when we still had downvotes, there was an interesting thread about the values of “% positive” karma which you can see if you hover your mouse over the karma score box.
Because upvotes were always more plentiful than downvotes, the opinions expressed in that thread converged to something like:
~50% positive: LW hates you, you don’t fit in
70-80% positive: you’re fine
90% positive: you have been consumed by the hive mind, it’s probably too late for you to escape
Don’t think “troll” is a valid label for him—he just was… very enthusiastic and persistent about his disagreements with EY.
But is there a point you’re making? Is it that 75% is too little? Is it that the % positive is meaningless? It is that the karma score tells you nothing?
From my point of view, most of the “content” is in comments, not in posts, and being able to participate in the give-and-take makes the conversation even more worthwhile.
If content is content is content, why are your nasty comments typically about top-level contributions rather than comments? However little signal there may have been in chaosmage’s post, your reply contained even less. It was at DH3 at best, plausibly DH0.
If content is content is content, and most of the content is in the comments, shouldn’t we also call everyone in this thread who responded to chaosmage’s post in earnest stupid?
When you assess your own contributions, do you think they are stupid? Do you think they are good enough to be top-level posts? If not, why exactly should should we hold your comments to a lower standard than we hold top-level posts to? Especially if the discussion is where the value is supposed to be found.
Frankly, I find your contributions consistently uninteresting and banal. Just in this comment, you managed to
Misread my comment. “If we take it more reasonably as a trade-off”—that’s what I did. I discussed the both the costs and benefits of harsh replies (cf “The cost of an occasional bad post is not very high: you read it until you realize it is bad and then you move on.”)
Strawman my comment. “I am also not interested in providing incentives for any content. There are places on the ’net with LOTS AND LOTS of content—Facebook, Reddit, Buzzfeed, etc. etc.” That’s not what I advocated. I advocated taking in to account the counterfactual impact of nasty comments. Which is a point you still haven’t responded to. Maybe it would be sensible to make comments harsher if we start to have the “too much content” problem. But that’s not the current problem.
Introduce a non sequiter: “As I said several times I dislike the high-priesthood view of science and I dislike the high-priesthood view of forums as well. I am not particularly interested in having a few high-status people bestow their wisdom upon me in exchange for adoration.” How is this relevant to our discussion? The issue here is you being nasty without adding any signal. Despite their username, chaosmage is no “high priest”.
Respond at DH3 again: “First, that’s false.” Why is it false? As usual, you express disagreement without adding anything to the discussion.
Consistent with my position, I might tolerate you if your only issue was low-signal contributions. I might tolerate your constant need to disagree with everything if you weren’t a jerk about it: “Hey chaosmage, I’m skeptical that the future is this easy to predict.” I might even tolerate your toxic behavior if you were actually providing contributions of value. But your combination of low-signal contributions and toxic behavior is too much. You seem to think that flatly contradicting everything in sight makes you some kind of bold maverick. I see you as more of a poster child for this essay.
Show me the data.
During the period where LW declined, you have consistently been at or near the top of “TOP CONTRIBUTORS, 30 DAYS” on the sidebar. You spend more time participating than anyone else, so you set the tone for the forum. This was during a period where almost everyone agrees that things moved in the wrong direction.
At this point, due to all the time you spend here, Less Wrong has undergone evaporative cooling. Many of the users who remain are those who have an affinity for your brand of uninspired, disagreeable obstinacy. I know of at least 4 other people who agree with me that you, specifically, have been toxic for Less Wrong’s culture. Some of these people I have a lot of respect for, in the sense that I learn things from talking to them. (I never learn things from talking to you.) These people spend a lot less time contributing to LW as a result.
What if you are the harbringer of Eternal September? Have you ever considered that?
I probably won’t respond further in this thread, because I’ve found that arguing with you results in an exponentially growing tree of tiresome objections. You never seem to change your mind on anything and you seem to disagree just for the sake of disagreement. I don’t ever get the sense that you have an underlying model of the world that informs your comments. It seems like you are more about disagreeing with everything in sight. And you seem to think that because you are disagreeing with people, it’s OK for your comments to be held to a lower standard.
I will say that I really, really wish you would find somewhere else on the internet to hang out.
I think Lumifer can be annoying as hell at times. But has been entirely consistent from the very start and has continued to engage in entirely the same way with whatever members are posting here.
Perhaps the different post rating system in LW 2.0 (if successfully launched and managed) will allow members who don’t like this sort of thing to more easily avoid or hide from this kind of dialogue but I expect (hope?) Lumifer will remain immune to shifts in the incentive structure.
I find your contributions consistently uninteresting and banal … your combination of low-signal contributions and toxic behavior is too much.
Well, don’t read them, then. When you see the name “Lumifer”, just skip over the comment. It’s not too hard—I manage to ignore comments by some people here without calling them names or expressing hope that they will disappear.
Ignoring stuff you don’t want to see is a very basic internet skill. I wonder how you manage without it.
due to all the time you spend here, Less Wrong has undergone evaporative cooling
The theory that I, personally, am responsible for the LW decline has a few rather large holes. For one, by the time I got here Eliezer was already gone and Scott was making only very occasional comments. For another one, that “top contributors” leaderboard ranks by karma, not by volume—if I was prone to staying on top of it, this means that the existing LW population tended to like my comments.
What if you are the harbringer of Eternal September?
LOL, nope. Eternal September is about quite a different thing, anyway.
I really, really wish you would find somewhere else on the internet to hang out
Sorry, I don’t grant wishes. May I suggest that you learn to deal with the fact that not all people are interested in your seal of approval?
To be fair, I didn’t expect this to be voted very high. Not in these times. I was basically writing this down to have a public record of the talk I gave, and to look back at this years later and see how I did predicting things.
I do see your larger point though. I was clearly motivated to produce this by the large and friendly crowd at the European Less Wrong Community Weekends, where most people go by Crocker’s Rule and give way better feedback than Lumifer is able to. The little extra effort of writing down would have been worth it even if all the comments would have been Lumifer level quality. If LessWrong was the only place I put these ideas, the current environment here would indeed not feel very much worth the work of spelling them out in the first place.
I like futurism, but this is not it. This is an attempt to forecast how economic incentives will get rearranged in the near future conditional on the self-driving cars technology becoming widespread. This attempt was a failure.
Moreover, it was such an obvious failure, that the only two explanations I can come up with is either that the author has no clue at all about business and economics, or that he dumped a stream of consciousness without bothering to spend five minutes thinking about it.
If it is trivial to do better with a few moments of reflection then make with the interesting comments. I see your near universal non-specific disdainful comments as a significant part of why LW is less pleasant to post to.
The two root problems in your post are that you treat self-driving cars as cost-free instant teleportation devices and that you don’t understand which costs drive the particular forms that businesses take.
Diversification of vehicle types
Somewhat, but much less than you expect because contemporary car design is driven by law-mandated safety requirements. The same requirements put a floor on the cars’ weight.
There is also the fact that a general-purpose car will spend less time sitting in a parking lot doing nothing while waiting for someone to require it. Renting specialized equipment is expensive partially because of this—there is a lot of idle time.
Services at home
Nope. It’s not the case that the doctor doesn’t come to your house because she can’t afford a driver. The doctor doesn’t come to your house first because her time is more valuable than yours and second because it’s hard (=expensive) to bring along all the nurses and assistants and the medical equipment that she has around her office. And, by the way, the doctor doesn’t fill out the insurance paperwork—she has a much cheaper assistant who does.
Of course you can get a doctor (and a hairdresser, and a tatoo artist, etc.) to come to your house, even without self-driving cars. It’s just going to be very very expensive. I don’t expect this to change.
Rent anything
The cost of a driver is a minor component of the cost of renting large, expensive, luxury things. Taking it out will not make them suddenly affordable. And, by the way, who will unload, set up, dismantle and load back into the self-driving truck all these jacuzzis and huge sound systems?
Also, about the “stuff that previously only millionaires or billionaires would afford” that your median-income person would be able to rent if only you take the truck driver out of the equation—literally nothing comes to my mind.
Self-driving hotel rooms
They are called caravans or camper vans or RVs. They exist. Have you tried renting them? They are quite expensive to rent, much more so than hotel rooms.
Rise of alcoholism and drug abuse
″ for a large number of people, driving is their only reason not to drink or do drugs”—that’s, um, wrong. I have no idea how you came up with such nonsense.
Autonomous boats and yachts
There is no such thing as a “sailing license” (in most countries that I know of) and renting sizeable boats is quite expensive. It will not become less expensive if the boat has an autopilot. Recreational boating doesn’t want fully autonomous boats, anyway, and commercial shipping already uses autopilots and still finds out that it needs people to run ships.
Mobile storage
I think this already has been mentioned—storing things in trucks is much, MUCH more expensive than storing them in warehouses. Also, just-in-time (JIT) manufacturing was all the rage a couple of decades ago. The enthusiasm has cooled down considerably since then, mostly because people have found out that JIT production is not robust to disruptions and does not degrade gracefully if something goes wrong. Hint: something always goes wrong.
Renting a self-driving truck is not going to be cheaper than renting a regular truck (the rental company does not supply a driver in any case). Go ahead, look up how much renting trucks costs and then see if you want to store stuff in them.
contemporary car design is driven by law-mandated safety requirements
I don’t know about your country but in mine (Germany) the car industry has so much influence they basically write their own laws. (That’s how we got those safety requirements: They’re defense against cheaper cars from abroad.) If their business model stops being focused on general use cars, the laws will change very quickly.
a general-purpose car will spend less time sitting in a parking lot doing nothing while waiting for someone to require it
Sure! Not a problem if its TCO is pretty low. Most of those more specialized vehicles will be cheaper than general purpose cars, because they have sharply reduced capabilities. A great number of them will be pretty small, just enough to carry a single person or (in an even smaller, windowless car) a piece of cargo. Others will have to require paying a premium, but they’ll mostly be doing things general purpose cars cannot do, like transport a horse.
Side note: Some of those specialized cars will also be sold, not rented. I imagine rich parents gifting their seven year olds their own car. And as soon as someone makes what is basically just a bed on wheels, a small minority of people will live in those things.
The doctor doesn’t come to your house first because her time is more valuable than yours
That’s a good point. So maybe it starts with hairdressers.
Of course offering services at home will be most attractive to those who are new to their field and haven’t sunk costs into an office.
and second because it’s hard (=expensive) to bring along all the nurses and assistants and the medical equipment that she has around her office.
Most doctors need very little equipment most of the time. Some types of doctors (psychiatrists, dermatologists) need very little equipment period.
The cost of a driver is a minor component of the cost of renting large, expensive, luxury things. Taking it out will not make them suddenly affordable.
The main cost is insurance and autonomous vehicles means that one drops hard. The lack of a driver mostly means you can rent things out in a very large operating radius.
And, by the way, who will unload, set up, dismantle and load back into the self-driving truck all these jacuzzis and huge sound systems?
Most of the things never leave the “truck”. The vehicle is built around them, on a standardized flat chassis. Some of them will have staff, sure. For example, you’d have a bartender if you were renting out a highly specialized mobile bar that has casks of twenty different excellent whiskeys and might be popular with bachelor parties.
Also, about the “stuff that previously only millionaires or billionaires would afford” that your median-income person would be able to rent if only you take the truck driver out of the equation—literally nothing comes to my mind.
Alright. I’ll leave it at that.
They are called caravans or camper vans or RVs. They exist. Have you tried renting them? They are quite expensive to rent, much more so than hotel rooms.
You’re simply wrong about rental RVs: their prices are not much more expensive than hotel rooms anymore. (They do remain more expensive than small rental cars.) Check for yourself at places like http://www.apollorv.com/ . They’ll get cheaper by going electric (like all cars will) due to less moving parts and less repairs. They’ll get cheaper again by going autonomous (like all cars will) due to less mass for the driver cab and less accidents. So even if it was just self-driving RVs, they’d be an opportunity to disrupt stationary hotels.
But RVs are lower class than most hotel rooms, they’re cramped, they’re optimized for carrying lots of supplies and they have kitchens. A lot of people wouldn’t want to use an RV even if it was half the price of a typical hotel room. If you have a self-driving RV and you want to really tear into the market share of stationary hotels, you throw out the kitchen and most of the cupboards and put in the best bed that you can make fit and a great entertainment system.
″ for a large number of people, driving is their only reason not to drink or do drugs”—that’s, um, wrong. I have no idea how you came up with such nonsense.
Couple of years in psychiatric research.
no such thing as a “sailing license” (in most countries that I know of)
So you don’t know a lot of European countries? I don’t know a lot of non-European ones, so you may be right this isn’t a factor there.
renting sizeable boats is quite expensive
Exactly. And why? Because the risk of accidents, and the insurance to cover that, is a larger cost factor than with cars. And the main advantage of vehicle autonomy is the sharply reduced number of accidents.
Maybe many don’t. But recreational divers and anglers and people who just need to get across the water will be happy with it.
commercial shipping already uses autopilots and still finds out that it needs people to run ships
Yes but it needs way fewer people. If you charter a yacht now, you have a crew of at least 5 people. With an autonomous yacht, you can go down to one crewmember who mostly cleans the place, and maybe a cook.
Renting a self-driving truck is not going to be cheaper than renting a regular truck
Your assertion is ludicrous. Yes it will be cheaper, and a lot. The self-driving truck doesn’t need to carry all the mass that the driver needs, including fragile points of failure such as windows, it doesn’t have mandatory stop times, it gets into way fewer accidents, it basically cannot be stolen. If you don’t think a self-driving truck company can undercut a traditional trucking company, I hope you don’t run a trucking company.
Sorry, I’ll bail out of the detailed debate, primarily because it’s all handwaving and there are very few falsifiable assertions in there. You say that it’s going to get much much cheaper, I say that it won’t—and there is no way for us to resolve this disagreement. As an aside, several statements of fact that you make here are wrong (no, you don’t need a crew of at least five people to charter a yacht; yes, RV rentals are much more expensive than hotel rooms—have you rented an RV? I have).
For what it’s worth, my original opinion remains intact.
Yes, it was not worth posting because coming up with a list of unrealistic ideas is trivially easy. The hard part is getting rid of the “unrealistic” adjective.
I’m sorry, this is an armchair-businessing load of rubbish.
You write:
This seems correct.
-1, this is pointlessly negative. There’s a disclaimer at the top (so it’s not like he’s claiming false authority), the title is appropriate (so it’s not like you were tricked into clicking on the article), and it’s reasonably on-topic because LW people are in the software/AI/entrepreneurship space. Sure, maybe most of the proposals are far-fetched, but if one of the ideas sparks an idea that sparks an idea, the net value could be very positive.
No, it’s pointedly negative. This post doesn’t belong on LW.
Yes. LW’s content is too good for this.
Note that neither Lumifer, nor Dagon, nor Brillyant have ever made a top-level submission of original content to Less Wrong. It’s easy to be a critic.
Since Lumifer, Dagon, and Brillyant seem to want a site that never has anything new on it, may I suggest example.com? It hardly ever changes.
Source. Less Wrongers overwhelmingly want there to be more posts.
The problem with comments like Lumifer’s is not that they are incorrect. It’s that they create a bad incentive structure for content creators. Anyone who posts to LW is doing free labor in an attempt to improve the accuracy of the community’s beliefs. I believe that lukeprog, Eliezer, and Yvain have all complained that writing LW posts is not very rewarding. If there’s some probability that the Lumifers are the world are going to call your post “stupid” without offering any specific feedback, that makes the job even more thankless. And no, this is not necessarily something a person can predict in advance: a previous post chaosmage made got voted to +55, and the ideas in it were being used by a friend of mine years after it was made.
The cost of an occasional bad post is not very high: you read it until you realize it is bad and then you move on. But the cost of nasty comments like Lumifer’s can be quite high. Most online communities suck, and nasty comments are a big part of the reason why. If I was selling a product you could spray on an online community to prevent anything from growing there, I would name it Lumifer.
That’s a very interesting opposition to set up :-D
First, let’s take it as black-and-white. If I call a top-level post stupid and I’m “not … incorrect”, then let me point out that the incentive structure is entirely right: I don’t want content creators posting stupid stuff and I doubt many people would prefer to see more stupid posts on LW.
If we take it more reasonably as a trade-off, it certainly exists—both in the let’s-pick-polite-expressions dimension and in the let’s-avert-out-eyes-and-say-nothing dimension. However the principle stands—you want to provide negative incentives to stupid posts.
In general, I think we have a bigger disagreement. Your approach to “content” is that of a consumer—you want other people to feed you tasty bits of content. My approach is different. I find considerably more value in discussion (especially a spirited one) than in the posts themselves. From my point of view, most of the “content” is in comments, not in posts, and being able to participate in the give-and-take makes the conversation even more worthwhile.
As I said several times I dislike the high-priesthood view of science and I dislike the high-priesthood view of forums as well. I am not particularly interested in having a few high-status people bestow their wisdom upon me in exchange for adoration.
I am also not interested in providing incentives for any content. There are places on the ’net with LOTS AND LOTS of content—Facebook, Reddit, Buzzfeed, etc. etc. If you want “content”, go there: LW will never be able to compete. From LW I want specific and highly filtered content—that’s what makes LW special and interesting. If LW gets filled with half-assed stream-of-consciosness ramblings about random stuff, well, I don’t think it will work out well :-/
First, that’s false. Second, some of these attempts are… counterproductive.
Show me the data.
Ah, how cute! Tell you what, when you startup gets to the MVP stage, ping me and we’ll discuss the brand name licensing terms :-P
We want the same thing then. My way of achieving it is to write posts and comments when I have something interesting to say. For example, if I disagree with something, I usually don’t reply unless I can add a bit of insight to my disagreement, so it’s worth reading to everyone and not just the person I’m replying to.
From talking to you, it seems like you’re using the opposite strategy. You ask questions that are uninteresting on their own (or at least feel that way to me and others). When someone replies, you follow up with more of the same. Maybe you could try optimizing your comments for interest instead of “spirited discussion”?
I am a bit curious, then, how did I manage to accumulate that much karma by merely being uninteresting...
People are different. They find interesting different things. It seems likely that our interests don’t overlap much—but I would be wary of making wide-ranging conclusions on that basis.
Sheer volume of comments is the main reason. You’re receiving about 2x as many downvotes as cousin_it, proportionally speaking.
A couple of year ago, when we still had downvotes, there was an interesting thread about the values of “% positive” karma which you can see if you hover your mouse over the karma score box.
Because upvotes were always more plentiful than downvotes, the opinions expressed in that thread converged to something like:
~50% positive: LW hates you, you don’t fit in
70-80% positive: you’re fine
:-D
One of our worst trolls ever was XiXiDu, who had 75%.
Don’t think “troll” is a valid label for him—he just was… very enthusiastic and persistent about his disagreements with EY.
But is there a point you’re making? Is it that 75% is too little? Is it that the % positive is meaningless? It is that the karma score tells you nothing?
If content is content is content, why are your nasty comments typically about top-level contributions rather than comments? However little signal there may have been in chaosmage’s post, your reply contained even less. It was at DH3 at best, plausibly DH0.
If content is content is content, and most of the content is in the comments, shouldn’t we also call everyone in this thread who responded to chaosmage’s post in earnest stupid?
When you assess your own contributions, do you think they are stupid? Do you think they are good enough to be top-level posts? If not, why exactly should should we hold your comments to a lower standard than we hold top-level posts to? Especially if the discussion is where the value is supposed to be found.
Frankly, I find your contributions consistently uninteresting and banal. Just in this comment, you managed to
Misread my comment. “If we take it more reasonably as a trade-off”—that’s what I did. I discussed the both the costs and benefits of harsh replies (cf “The cost of an occasional bad post is not very high: you read it until you realize it is bad and then you move on.”)
Strawman my comment. “I am also not interested in providing incentives for any content. There are places on the ’net with LOTS AND LOTS of content—Facebook, Reddit, Buzzfeed, etc. etc.” That’s not what I advocated. I advocated taking in to account the counterfactual impact of nasty comments. Which is a point you still haven’t responded to. Maybe it would be sensible to make comments harsher if we start to have the “too much content” problem. But that’s not the current problem.
Introduce a non sequiter: “As I said several times I dislike the high-priesthood view of science and I dislike the high-priesthood view of forums as well. I am not particularly interested in having a few high-status people bestow their wisdom upon me in exchange for adoration.” How is this relevant to our discussion? The issue here is you being nasty without adding any signal. Despite their username, chaosmage is no “high priest”.
Respond at DH3 again: “First, that’s false.” Why is it false? As usual, you express disagreement without adding anything to the discussion.
Consistent with my position, I might tolerate you if your only issue was low-signal contributions. I might tolerate your constant need to disagree with everything if you weren’t a jerk about it: “Hey chaosmage, I’m skeptical that the future is this easy to predict.” I might even tolerate your toxic behavior if you were actually providing contributions of value. But your combination of low-signal contributions and toxic behavior is too much. You seem to think that flatly contradicting everything in sight makes you some kind of bold maverick. I see you as more of a poster child for this essay.
During the period where LW declined, you have consistently been at or near the top of “TOP CONTRIBUTORS, 30 DAYS” on the sidebar. You spend more time participating than anyone else, so you set the tone for the forum. This was during a period where almost everyone agrees that things moved in the wrong direction.
At this point, due to all the time you spend here, Less Wrong has undergone evaporative cooling. Many of the users who remain are those who have an affinity for your brand of uninspired, disagreeable obstinacy. I know of at least 4 other people who agree with me that you, specifically, have been toxic for Less Wrong’s culture. Some of these people I have a lot of respect for, in the sense that I learn things from talking to them. (I never learn things from talking to you.) These people spend a lot less time contributing to LW as a result.
What if you are the harbringer of Eternal September? Have you ever considered that?
I probably won’t respond further in this thread, because I’ve found that arguing with you results in an exponentially growing tree of tiresome objections. You never seem to change your mind on anything and you seem to disagree just for the sake of disagreement. I don’t ever get the sense that you have an underlying model of the world that informs your comments. It seems like you are more about disagreeing with everything in sight. And you seem to think that because you are disagreeing with people, it’s OK for your comments to be held to a lower standard.
I will say that I really, really wish you would find somewhere else on the internet to hang out.
I think Lumifer can be annoying as hell at times. But has been entirely consistent from the very start and has continued to engage in entirely the same way with whatever members are posting here.
Perhaps the different post rating system in LW 2.0 (if successfully launched and managed) will allow members who don’t like this sort of thing to more easily avoid or hide from this kind of dialogue but I expect (hope?) Lumifer will remain immune to shifts in the incentive structure.
I completely agree with everything you said here.
Tsk, tsk. Such a nasty comment… X-)
Well, don’t read them, then. When you see the name “Lumifer”, just skip over the comment. It’s not too hard—I manage to ignore comments by some people here without calling them names or expressing hope that they will disappear.
Ignoring stuff you don’t want to see is a very basic internet skill. I wonder how you manage without it.
The theory that I, personally, am responsible for the LW decline has a few rather large holes. For one, by the time I got here Eliezer was already gone and Scott was making only very occasional comments. For another one, that “top contributors” leaderboard ranks by karma, not by volume—if I was prone to staying on top of it, this means that the existing LW population tended to like my comments.
LOL, nope. Eternal September is about quite a different thing, anyway.
Sorry, I don’t grant wishes. May I suggest that you learn to deal with the fact that not all people are interested in your seal of approval?
Well said.
To be fair, I didn’t expect this to be voted very high. Not in these times. I was basically writing this down to have a public record of the talk I gave, and to look back at this years later and see how I did predicting things.
I do see your larger point though. I was clearly motivated to produce this by the large and friendly crowd at the European Less Wrong Community Weekends, where most people go by Crocker’s Rule and give way better feedback than Lumifer is able to. The little extra effort of writing down would have been worth it even if all the comments would have been Lumifer level quality. If LessWrong was the only place I put these ideas, the current environment here would indeed not feel very much worth the work of spelling them out in the first place.
I was criticising the criticism of this post.
I feel like you’re taking all of this way too seriously.
Fix the “RECENT ON RATIONALITY BLOGS”
I agree although i do not dislike Lumifer’s comments in general, just the overly negative ones.
I’m not saying it’s misleading. I’m saying it’s stupid.
Strongly disagree. I would be more enthused about lesswrong if it had more attempts at futurism.
I like futurism, but this is not it. This is an attempt to forecast how economic incentives will get rearranged in the near future conditional on the self-driving cars technology becoming widespread. This attempt was a failure.
Moreover, it was such an obvious failure, that the only two explanations I can come up with is either that the author has no clue at all about business and economics, or that he dumped a stream of consciousness without bothering to spend five minutes thinking about it.
If it is trivial to do better with a few moments of reflection then make with the interesting comments. I see your near universal non-specific disdainful comments as a significant part of why LW is less pleasant to post to.
Among the most pleasant places to post to are mutual-adoration communities. There are some on the web. They are among the most useless, too, though.
The way it usually works is that the place to get good information is different from the place to get your hedons. That’s not an accident.
I don’t see how it was a failure, so you’re wrong about it being obvious.
Given the intensity of your criticism, I wonder why you aren’t being more specific about the faults you see here.
The two root problems in your post are that you treat self-driving cars as cost-free instant teleportation devices and that you don’t understand which costs drive the particular forms that businesses take.
Somewhat, but much less than you expect because contemporary car design is driven by law-mandated safety requirements. The same requirements put a floor on the cars’ weight.
There is also the fact that a general-purpose car will spend less time sitting in a parking lot doing nothing while waiting for someone to require it. Renting specialized equipment is expensive partially because of this—there is a lot of idle time.
Nope. It’s not the case that the doctor doesn’t come to your house because she can’t afford a driver. The doctor doesn’t come to your house first because her time is more valuable than yours and second because it’s hard (=expensive) to bring along all the nurses and assistants and the medical equipment that she has around her office. And, by the way, the doctor doesn’t fill out the insurance paperwork—she has a much cheaper assistant who does.
Of course you can get a doctor (and a hairdresser, and a tatoo artist, etc.) to come to your house, even without self-driving cars. It’s just going to be very very expensive. I don’t expect this to change.
The cost of a driver is a minor component of the cost of renting large, expensive, luxury things. Taking it out will not make them suddenly affordable. And, by the way, who will unload, set up, dismantle and load back into the self-driving truck all these jacuzzis and huge sound systems?
Also, about the “stuff that previously only millionaires or billionaires would afford” that your median-income person would be able to rent if only you take the truck driver out of the equation—literally nothing comes to my mind.
They are called caravans or camper vans or RVs. They exist. Have you tried renting them? They are quite expensive to rent, much more so than hotel rooms.
″ for a large number of people, driving is their only reason not to drink or do drugs”—that’s, um, wrong. I have no idea how you came up with such nonsense.
There is no such thing as a “sailing license” (in most countries that I know of) and renting sizeable boats is quite expensive. It will not become less expensive if the boat has an autopilot. Recreational boating doesn’t want fully autonomous boats, anyway, and commercial shipping already uses autopilots and still finds out that it needs people to run ships.
I think this already has been mentioned—storing things in trucks is much, MUCH more expensive than storing them in warehouses. Also, just-in-time (JIT) manufacturing was all the rage a couple of decades ago. The enthusiasm has cooled down considerably since then, mostly because people have found out that JIT production is not robust to disruptions and does not degrade gracefully if something goes wrong. Hint: something always goes wrong.
Renting a self-driving truck is not going to be cheaper than renting a regular truck (the rental company does not supply a driver in any case). Go ahead, look up how much renting trucks costs and then see if you want to store stuff in them.
I don’t know about your country but in mine (Germany) the car industry has so much influence they basically write their own laws. (That’s how we got those safety requirements: They’re defense against cheaper cars from abroad.) If their business model stops being focused on general use cars, the laws will change very quickly.
Sure! Not a problem if its TCO is pretty low. Most of those more specialized vehicles will be cheaper than general purpose cars, because they have sharply reduced capabilities. A great number of them will be pretty small, just enough to carry a single person or (in an even smaller, windowless car) a piece of cargo. Others will have to require paying a premium, but they’ll mostly be doing things general purpose cars cannot do, like transport a horse.
Side note: Some of those specialized cars will also be sold, not rented. I imagine rich parents gifting their seven year olds their own car. And as soon as someone makes what is basically just a bed on wheels, a small minority of people will live in those things.
That’s a good point. So maybe it starts with hairdressers.
Of course offering services at home will be most attractive to those who are new to their field and haven’t sunk costs into an office.
Most doctors need very little equipment most of the time. Some types of doctors (psychiatrists, dermatologists) need very little equipment period.
The main cost is insurance and autonomous vehicles means that one drops hard. The lack of a driver mostly means you can rent things out in a very large operating radius.
Most of the things never leave the “truck”. The vehicle is built around them, on a standardized flat chassis. Some of them will have staff, sure. For example, you’d have a bartender if you were renting out a highly specialized mobile bar that has casks of twenty different excellent whiskeys and might be popular with bachelor parties.
Alright. I’ll leave it at that.
You’re simply wrong about rental RVs: their prices are not much more expensive than hotel rooms anymore. (They do remain more expensive than small rental cars.) Check for yourself at places like http://www.apollorv.com/ . They’ll get cheaper by going electric (like all cars will) due to less moving parts and less repairs. They’ll get cheaper again by going autonomous (like all cars will) due to less mass for the driver cab and less accidents. So even if it was just self-driving RVs, they’d be an opportunity to disrupt stationary hotels.
But RVs are lower class than most hotel rooms, they’re cramped, they’re optimized for carrying lots of supplies and they have kitchens. A lot of people wouldn’t want to use an RV even if it was half the price of a typical hotel room. If you have a self-driving RV and you want to really tear into the market share of stationary hotels, you throw out the kitchen and most of the cupboards and put in the best bed that you can make fit and a great entertainment system.
Couple of years in psychiatric research.
So you don’t know a lot of European countries? I don’t know a lot of non-European ones, so you may be right this isn’t a factor there.
Exactly. And why? Because the risk of accidents, and the insurance to cover that, is a larger cost factor than with cars. And the main advantage of vehicle autonomy is the sharply reduced number of accidents.
Maybe many don’t. But recreational divers and anglers and people who just need to get across the water will be happy with it.
Yes but it needs way fewer people. If you charter a yacht now, you have a crew of at least 5 people. With an autonomous yacht, you can go down to one crewmember who mostly cleans the place, and maybe a cook.
Your assertion is ludicrous. Yes it will be cheaper, and a lot. The self-driving truck doesn’t need to carry all the mass that the driver needs, including fragile points of failure such as windows, it doesn’t have mandatory stop times, it gets into way fewer accidents, it basically cannot be stolen. If you don’t think a self-driving truck company can undercut a traditional trucking company, I hope you don’t run a trucking company.
Sorry, I’ll bail out of the detailed debate, primarily because it’s all handwaving and there are very few falsifiable assertions in there. You say that it’s going to get much much cheaper, I say that it won’t—and there is no way for us to resolve this disagreement. As an aside, several statements of fact that you make here are wrong (no, you don’t need a crew of at least five people to charter a yacht; yes, RV rentals are much more expensive than hotel rooms—have you rented an RV? I have).
For what it’s worth, my original opinion remains intact.
I should be disappointed, but disappointment requires surprise.
There is value in idea generation. It might be limited but some value. Do you think it was not worth posting?
Yes, it was not worth posting because coming up with a list of unrealistic ideas is trivially easy. The hard part is getting rid of the “unrealistic” adjective.