Apply Bayes to making decisions in real life, in ways that the cool people don’t? That idea will never fly on LessWrong!
Athrelon
Karma: 754
Ah, but this was less the case at the time the poll was made (the community has been growing in the meantime) and it was also not clear that this would be a Main as opposed to Discussion post. So that has to be factored into the probabilities.
I’m a male LWer with an infant daughter. I’d like to request some specific advice on avoiding the common failure modes.
Don’t take your parenting approach from ideology, because it’s not optimized for being a reflection of reality. (Extreme example here)
Relevant:
The “Anonymous Narratives by LW Women” thread will receive >100 comments,
The “Anonymous Narratives by LW Women” thread will receive >500 comments
Consider this easy-to-predict eventuality as an indictment of how incredibly ineffective and mindkilled LessWrong is about sex, for obviously ideological reasons (though we may disagree about which side it is that is mindkilled).
glances at thread
Econ is the mind-killer.
I don’t even think they’re particularly vocal. I can recall like two loud Moldbuggians: Konk and Vlad_M, who is inactive and doesn’t even mention Moldbug by name, to my knowledge.
I think it looks like these Moldbuggians are active because a lot of Moldbuggianism is deconstructing assumptions about how politics works. So there’s a lot of mainstream ideological assumptions that aren’t seen as ideological at all by most people (democracy is good, the media is an observer not a participant in government, etc) yet are seen as incorrect and/or political claims by Moldbuggians. So then Moldbuggians say things like “wait now, democracy isn’t all that great” and it looks like they suddenly injected Moldbuggery in a non-politics thread, when they see it as just adding another comment on an existing politics thread.
I would certainly expect that the category “bad effects of lifestyle changes favored by highly educated researchers” would be understudied, relative to studying the nasty effects of poor-folks culture.
Finally, I noticed when I first read this that the article gave me the squicks. In trying to compare the feeling to a known quantity, I realized it was analogous to when my religious parents would scandalously tell me of a couple who are “shacking up”.
Very good, then raise your right hand and repeat after me: “I hold the right to conduct sexual activities in any way without being judged to be a sacred value. I will gladly condemn [not merely oppose; “squick” is a stronger emotional reaction than that] anyone who criticizes, explicitly or implicitly, any expression of voluntary sexuality. This sacred value overrides any consequentialist concern for actually producing more effective rationalists.”
There appear to be two major strains of response to this post:
There is no PR disadvantage to having an OKCupid profile like this
To the extent that there is such a tradeoff, the freedom to broadcast sexual weirdness is a deontological good (“can’t we just let him date in peace?”) and weighing it against institutional effectiveness is a taboo tradeoff.
The first response seems a case of wishful thinking—as though by believing really hardthat others share our local values, and outgroupping those who disagree with us, we could make it a PR positive.
The second is exactly analogous to an anti-abortion activist who opposes teaching birth control. It’s not incoherent, really, but it does demonstrate that we place a higher value on loud sexual weirdness than our nominal goals, at this margin.
And let’s certainly give credit where it’s due, he handled the responses in the thread as well as could be expected under the circumstances—with deflecting humor rather than hurt anger.
[Link] “An OKCupid Profile of a Rationalist”
Yeah, the billionaire class may be interesting but naturally I don’t know much about it and at any rate it’s mostly unattainable. The Ferris-style folks may be more interesting.
Another place to look is ethnic diasporas, but I don’t really see a strong trend of ethnic ties superseding national ones. The incentives for success usually favor cultural assimilation over maintaining ethnic ties. (The aside one exception is Jews, who have some fairly unique history favoring cohesion).
yet I’m also a young no income white male and seeing some deeply disturbing kinds of language among the cool set with regards referring to my demographic. Seems pretty stage three-ish by Stanton’s scale.
Would you mind sharing some of this evidence so we can assess its significance, Bayes style?
Minorities that do well economically end up targets of irrational hate. The memetic core for scapegoating for various problems that will only grow worse is clearly there and unlikely to be opposed strongly by any institution I’m aware of.
From an American point of view, money seems to be really helpful in terms of insulating yourself from bad consequences. Are there the Slovenian equivalents of gated communities where you’re safely away from inner city war zones and so on, for a small price? It seems that market dominance is a net positive not a negative, especially if class lines are hardening.
I’m thinking to teach my children & grandchildren to not be too attached to any particular country and be ready to move at the drop of a hat. Maybe even try to set up a viable subculture around that.
That is my plan as well. This Atlantic article may give some ideas of how to pull it off. But do note the tradeoffs—cultural integration is hard and pretty much requires lifelong residence to learn the culture well enough to get the benefits of being considered an ingroup member. Gaining mobility means being considered an outsider and yes this means significant penalties even in “tolerant” liberal democracies. (This may be mitigated if a clade of transient elites actually takes off, with its own ingroup dynamics and everything—but I sense some internal contradictions within that idea.)
Of course you’re technically correct. There are, and have been, terrible arguments for monarchy advanced in the past. But today, democracy is the high-status mode of governance, and so the terrible arguments generated by motivated cognition, such as this OP, are in favor of democracy, not monarchy.
Worrying about bad arguments for monarchy now is like someone worrying about bad arguments for evolution in a creationist school board meeting. Yes it could potentially be a problem, but this over-concern is hardly our biggest problem right now and is very likely itself generated by motivated cognition.
“You know, given human nature, if you lived in a country in which there was democracy, pretty soon someone would try to sound deep by inventing reasons that voting was a good thing. But if you lived in a universe in which democracy wasn’t the high-status mode of governance, and asked them if they wanted it, with all its attendant consequences, they would say no. It would never occur to them to invent all the clever rationalizations that someone resigned to democracy would devise.”
I am not convinced that this is morally superior to selling opium. This depends critically on how much use the marginal student actually gets out of English.
Now SAT tutoring, that is certainly morally inferior to selling opium. (Inferior, not equal, for obvious utility reasons.)
Yeah, there’s a pattern where people latch onto a poorly-understood term as a curiosity-stopper around controversial disciplines. This is not to say that there aren’t sophisticated critiques of mainstream perspectives, but most people who use the 201 arguments don’t even understand 101 yet; they’re just “warding off evil facts,” as Cochran puts it.
Example: Economics—“Non-efficient markets!”
That’s actually a really fascinating observation. Why is it okay to tell groups of people “You should delay childbearing by several years” but not okay to tell them “You should have fewer children”?
I wonder if this is because in near-mode, people model themselves as immortal, so sacrificing a few years is just consmuption-shifting and not an actual opportunity cost.
Eugenics wasn’t considered crazy during its first wave of popularity.
And given that it was associated with the single biggest evil that modern society acknowledges—indeed, the only thing you can straight-facedly call “evil” without seeming really old-fashioned and unsophisticated, wouldn’t it make sense that modern culture, having extirpated the offending government root and branch, would then proceed to salt the surrounding memetic ground within a 200 mile radius?
Heck, we now even have “creepy” associations with large well-coordinated military style ceremonies, something that every other country in the world did at the time.
In other words, smart, reflective people are better at using those smarts and reflections to play monkey political games, maybe one meta-level up.
Of course, playing politics well is important to effectiveness in real life. Learning about rationality might make you a worse rationalist, but it probably helps you win at life, including if your goal is to, say, promote a movement that is positively correlated with rationality.