Your posts seem to be about what happens if you filter out considerations that don’t go your way. Obviously, yes, that way you can get distortion without saying anything false. But the proposal here is to avoid certain topics and be fully honest about which topics are being avoided. This doesn’t create even a single bit of distortion. A blank canvas is not a distorted map. People can get their maps elsewhere, as they already do on many subjects, and as they will keep having to do regardless, simply because some filtering is inevitable beneath the eye of Sauron. (Distortions caused by misestimation of filtering are going to exist whether the filter has 40% strength or 30% strength. The way to minimize them is to focus on estimating correctly. A 100% strength filter is actually relatively easy to correctly estimate. And having the appearance of a forthright debate creates perverse incentives for people to distort their beliefs so they can have something inoffensive to be forthright about.)
The people going after Steve Hsu almost entirely don’t care whether LW hosts Bell Curve reviews. If adjusting allowable topic space gets us 1 util and causes 2 utils of damage distributed evenly across 99 Sargons and one Steve Hsu, that’s only 0.02 Hsu utils lost, which seems like a good trade.
I don’t have a lot of verbal energy and find the “competing grandstanding walls of text” style of discussion draining, and I don’t think the arguments I’m making are actually landing for some reason, and I’m on the verge of tapping out. Generating and posting an IM chat log could be a lot more productive. But people all seem pretty set in their opinions, so it could just be a waste of energy.
Your posts seem to be about what happens if you filter out considerations that don’t go your way. Obviously, yes, that way you can get distortion without saying anything false. But the proposal here is to avoid certain topics and be fully honest about which topics are being avoided. This doesn’t create even a single bit of distortion. A blank canvas is not a distorted map. People can get their maps elsewhere, as they already do on many subjects, and as they will keep having to do regardless, simply because some filtering is inevitable beneath the eye of Sauron. (Distortions caused by misestimation of filtering are going to exist whether the filter has 40% strength or 30% strength. The way to minimize them is to focus on estimating correctly. A 100% strength filter is actually relatively easy to correctly estimate. And having the appearance of a forthright debate creates perverse incentives for people to distort their beliefs so they can have something inoffensive to be forthright about.)
The people going after Steve Hsu almost entirely don’t care whether LW hosts Bell Curve reviews. If adjusting allowable topic space gets us 1 util and causes 2 utils of damage distributed evenly across 99 Sargons and one Steve Hsu, that’s only 0.02 Hsu utils lost, which seems like a good trade.
I don’t have a lot of verbal energy and find the “competing grandstanding walls of text” style of discussion draining, and I don’t think the arguments I’m making are actually landing for some reason, and I’m on the verge of tapping out. Generating and posting an IM chat log could be a lot more productive. But people all seem pretty set in their opinions, so it could just be a waste of energy.