Could you give a reference for the Hierarchy Game? A quick google search did not turn up anything that sounded like game theory.
On a separate note, this post is IMO really toeing the line in terms of what’s too political for LW. I’d consider it safely in-bounds if there were more explanation of the content of the hierarchy game, the conditions required for stability of expropriation in that game, and then discussion of evidence that those conditions actually do exist in current political systems. As it stands, the post has too many borderline-controversial claims and too little explicit evidence.
Could you give a reference for the Hierarchy Game? A quick google search did not turn up anything that sounded like game theory.
I think that was coined specifically for this post, and doesn’t (yet?) have a corresponding formalism. I would be interested in seeing an attempt to formalize this, but there’s enough subtlety that I’d worry about confusion arising from mismatches between the idea and the formalism.
On a separate note, this post is IMO really toeing the line in terms of what’s too political for LW.
The way we currently handle this is with the Frontpage vs Personal Blog distinction; things that meet our frontpage guidelines, we promote to frontpage, everything else we leave on Personal Blog. We chose to front-page this, but I agree that it’s borderline.
We considered giving a specific explanation of why we chose to frontpage this. I had decided not to at the time but will do so now.
In general, Benquo is writing a lot of stuff these days about group rationality and social dynamics. All of the topics are intrinsically a bit “hard mode” to write about – it’s difficult to write about them without generating mindkilling dynamics. But, they’re still a crucial part of rationality, and we need to try to deal with them at some point.
Basically each of the posts so far has been an edgecase of what I’d consider frontpage-appropriate (usually having at least one section that superficially violates a frontpage rule). But, we try not to be a slave to frontpage rules, instead treating them as guidelines to help us (and others) coordinate around an overall spirit.
In each case so far (including this post), despite superficially violating a guideline, my overall takeaway from the post felt very measured. I didn’t feel incited to go join or fight a coalition, or to rally socially around an idea, or that Ben was employing rhetorical tricks to make it harder to come to my own conclusions.
We wrote explicitly about other posts here (and here). I also specifically didn’t frontpage the North Korea post since it more overtly delved into object level politics of both North Korea and Effective Altruism (each separately are something we avoid frontpaging in most cases).
The borderline-nature of this post is different from Authoritarian Empiricism. Instead of worrying about LessWrong members getting mindkilled, the worry here is about attracting mainstream politics discourse into LW.
If that started happening (i.e. new users show up and start posting in this thread, or in the near future about controversial mainstream political stuff), I would change my mind about how easily to frontpage posts like this. (My current belief is that this is sufficiently abstracted to avoid that failure mode).
I don’t think it makes sense to require more formalization of the Hierarchy game, since this post seemed like “the first post exploring it as an idea.” Basically all game theory has some rooting in politics, and I don’t think it’s good to force new proto-formalisms to jump through more hoops than jumped through here.
(also note: I will be trying avoid commenting much more about the frontpage-decisions on the current series of Benquo posts. I think with this comment I’ve now covered most of concerns that the team has discussed. I’m hoping future posts in the series can just focus more on the object level)
Thanks, the decision makes sense given your reasoning.
I also agree more formalization shouldn’t be required, if it’s early exploration of an idea. I had read the post as saying that there was already a formal model out there, which cast the whole thing in a different light.
Could you give a reference for the Hierarchy Game? A quick google search did not turn up anything that sounded like game theory.
On a separate note, this post is IMO really toeing the line in terms of what’s too political for LW. I’d consider it safely in-bounds if there were more explanation of the content of the hierarchy game, the conditions required for stability of expropriation in that game, and then discussion of evidence that those conditions actually do exist in current political systems. As it stands, the post has too many borderline-controversial claims and too little explicit evidence.
I think that was coined specifically for this post, and doesn’t (yet?) have a corresponding formalism. I would be interested in seeing an attempt to formalize this, but there’s enough subtlety that I’d worry about confusion arising from mismatches between the idea and the formalism.
The way we currently handle this is with the Frontpage vs Personal Blog distinction; things that meet our frontpage guidelines, we promote to frontpage, everything else we leave on Personal Blog. We chose to front-page this, but I agree that it’s borderline.
We considered giving a specific explanation of why we chose to frontpage this. I had decided not to at the time but will do so now.
In general, Benquo is writing a lot of stuff these days about group rationality and social dynamics. All of the topics are intrinsically a bit “hard mode” to write about – it’s difficult to write about them without generating mindkilling dynamics. But, they’re still a crucial part of rationality, and we need to try to deal with them at some point.
Basically each of the posts so far has been an edgecase of what I’d consider frontpage-appropriate (usually having at least one section that superficially violates a frontpage rule). But, we try not to be a slave to frontpage rules, instead treating them as guidelines to help us (and others) coordinate around an overall spirit.
In each case so far (including this post), despite superficially violating a guideline, my overall takeaway from the post felt very measured. I didn’t feel incited to go join or fight a coalition, or to rally socially around an idea, or that Ben was employing rhetorical tricks to make it harder to come to my own conclusions.
We wrote explicitly about other posts here (and here). I also specifically didn’t frontpage the North Korea post since it more overtly delved into object level politics of both North Korea and Effective Altruism (each separately are something we avoid frontpaging in most cases).
The borderline-nature of this post is different from Authoritarian Empiricism. Instead of worrying about LessWrong members getting mindkilled, the worry here is about attracting mainstream politics discourse into LW.
If that started happening (i.e. new users show up and start posting in this thread, or in the near future about controversial mainstream political stuff), I would change my mind about how easily to frontpage posts like this. (My current belief is that this is sufficiently abstracted to avoid that failure mode).
I don’t think it makes sense to require more formalization of the Hierarchy game, since this post seemed like “the first post exploring it as an idea.” Basically all game theory has some rooting in politics, and I don’t think it’s good to force new proto-formalisms to jump through more hoops than jumped through here.
(also note: I will be trying avoid commenting much more about the frontpage-decisions on the current series of Benquo posts. I think with this comment I’ve now covered most of concerns that the team has discussed. I’m hoping future posts in the series can just focus more on the object level)
Thanks, the decision makes sense given your reasoning.
I also agree more formalization shouldn’t be required, if it’s early exploration of an idea. I had read the post as saying that there was already a formal model out there, which cast the whole thing in a different light.