I’m a rational empiricist, philosopher, and systemic thinker who aims to improve the world. I am in the process of writing a book on how I plan to do that.
Benjamin Kost
Karma: 31
I think it’s not only nice, but a necessary step for reducing information asymmetry which is one of the greatest barriers to effective democratic governance. Designing jargon terms to benefit more challenged learners would carry vastly more benefit than designing them to please adept learners. It wouldn’t harm the adept learners in any significant way (especially since it’s optional), but it would significantly help the more challenged learners. Many of my ideas are designed to address the problem of information asymmetry by improving learning and increasing transparency.
“Some jargon can’t just be replaced with non-jargon and retain its meaning.”
I don’t understand this statement. It’s possible to have two different words with the same meaning but different names. If I rename a word, it doesn’t change the meaning, it just changes the name. My purpose here isn’t to change the meaning of words but to rename them so that they are easier to learn and remember.
As far as jargon words go, “linearity” isn’t too bad because it is short and “line” is the root word anyway, so to your point, that one shouldn’t be renamed. Perhaps I jumped to meet your challenge too quickly on impulse. I would agree that some jargon words are fine the way they are because they are already more or less in the format I am looking for.
However, suppose the word were “calimaricharnimom” instead of of “linearity” to describe the very same concept. I’d still want to rename it to something shorter, easier to remember, easier to pronounce, and more descriptive of the idea it represents so that it would be easier to learn and retain which is the goal of the jargon index filter. All words that aren’t already in that format or somewhat close to it are fair game, regardless of how unique or abstract the concept they represent is. The very abstract ones will be challenging to rename in a way that gives the reader a clue, but not impossible to rename that way, and even if we assume it is impossible for some words, just making them shorter, more familiar looking, and easier to pronounce should help.
All that said, this is an enormous project in itself because it would need to be done for every major language, not just English. It would need to be an LLM/human collaboration wiki project. Perhaps I should establish some guidelines for leaving certain jargon words alone for that project.
Claude is fine if you ask him to cite his sources since you won’t be directly relying on Claude. It’s still prudent to check the sources.
Thank you for taking the time to explain that. I never took linear algebra, only college algebra, trig, and calc 1, 2, and 3. In college algebra our professor had us adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing matrices and I don’t remember needing those formulas to determine they were linear, but it was a long time ago, so my memory could be wrong, or the prof just gave us linear ones and didn’t make us determine whether they were linear or not. I suspected there was a good chance that what I was saying was ignorant, but you never know until you put it out there and ask. I tried getting AI to explain it, but bots aren’t exactly math whizzes themselves either. Anyway, I now stand corrected.
Regarding the graph vs the equation, that sounds like you are saying I was guilty of reification, but aren’t they both just abstractions and not real objects? Perhaps your point is that the equation produces the graph, but not the other way around?
I’m trying hard to understand your points here. I am not against mathematical notation as that would be crazy. I am against using it to explain what something is the first time when there is an easier way. Bear with me because I am not a math major, but I am pretty sure “a linear equation is an equation that draws a straight line when you graph it” is a good enough explanation for someone to understand the basic concept.
To me, it seems like “ A(cx) = cA(x) and A(x+y) = A(x) + A(y)” is only the technical definition because they are the only two properties that every linear equation imaginable absolutely has to have in common for certain. However, suppose I didn’t know that, and I wanted to be able to tell if an equation is linear. Easy. Just graph it, and if the graph makes a single straight line, it’s a linear equation. Suppose I didn’t want to or couldn’t graph it. I can still tell whether it is linear or not by whether or not the slope is constant using y=mx/b, or I could just simply look to see if the variables are all to the power of one and only multiplied by scalar constants. Either of those things can help me identify a linear equation, so why is it that we are stuck with A(cx) = cA(x) and A(x+y) = A(x) + A(y) as the definition? Give me some linear equations and I can solve them and graph them all day without knowing that. I know that for a fact because though I am certain that definition was in some of my math textbooks in college, I never read the textbooks and if my professors ever put that on the board, I didn’t remember it, and I certainly never used it for anything even though I’ve multiplied and divided matrices before and still didn’t need it then either. I only got A’s in those classes.
That’s why I am having trouble understanding why that definition is so important how it is too wordy to say “a function or equation with a constant slope that draws a single straight line on a graph” The only reason I can think of is there must be some rare exception that has those same properties but is not a linear equation. Even so, I am fairly certain that homogeneity and additivity could be summed up as “one output per input” and “the distributive property of multiplication is true for the equation/function”. That’s still not that wordy. Let’s pretend for a second that a math professor instead of using words to do the lecture read the symbols phonetically and explained everything in short hand on the board. Would more or fewer people passing the class in your opinion?
I am also wondering what your definition of jargon is. Jargon has 2 required elements:
The key elements of jargon are:
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Specific to a particular context: Jargon is used within a specific industry, profession, or group and may not be easily understood by those outside of that context.
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Involves technical terms, acronyms, or phrases that are not part of everyday language.
Straight Line Property doesn’t qualify for the second element which is why I like it. That said, linear isn’t the best example of jargon because it has the word “line” in it which at least gives the reader a clue what it means. I’m not trying to redefine words, I’m merely trying to rewrite them so that they use common language words that give a clue to what they mean because I am certain that leads to better memory retention for the layperson hearing it for the first time and is also less jarring to readers with poor vocabulary skills. This should apply equally to all jargon by the definition I gave. However, giving a clue may be very challenging for some jargon words that describe very abstract and arcane concepts that don’t map well to normal words which is what I initially thought your point was.
The only downside I see to providing an option to automatically replace useful jargon on demand is that it might lead to a more permanent replacement of the words over time which would irritate people already familiar with the jargon. If your point is that it is not useful, then I would like to hear your counterargument to the point I made about memory retention and the jarring cognitive effect on people with poor vocabulary skills. The jarring effect is easily observable and it’s hard for me to imagine that word familiarity and embedded clues don’t help memory retention of vocabulary, but I am open to counter arguments.
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That’s actually good feedback. It’s better to think of the barriers to success ahead of time while I am still in the development phase. I agree that convincing people to do anything is always the hardest part. I did consider that it would be difficult to stop a competitor who is better funded and more well connected from just taking my ideas and creating a less benevolent product with them, and it is a concern that have no answer for.
I don’t think $10 a month to subscribe to a local official in exchange for extra influence is a big deal because $10 isn’t a lot of money, but I can see how other people might ignore the scale and think it’s a big deal. I’m not married to the idea though. The main reason I wanted to include that feature is to thwart the control of special interests. I’ve considered that special interests are inevitable to some degree, so if we could decentralize them and make the same influence available to the general public at a nominal cost, that would be an improvement. The other reason I liked the idea is because I don’t think weighting every vote identically creates the smartest system. If someone is willing to participate, pay attention, and pay a small amount of money, that should work like a filter that weeds out apathy, and I don’t see how reducing apathy within the voting system wouldn’t increase the quality of the decision making process rather than decrease it. I agree it would be a hard sell to the public though because it sounds bad described in the abstract, general sense like “paying for representation” when the entire concept isn’t considered with proper detail and context. That said, we already have a system like that except you have to have a lot more than $10 to buy representation, so what the idea actually does in theory is democratize the system we already have.
As far as following through, I plan to try my best even if it fails because I will feel better having tried my best and failed than to have never tried at all and let things spiral down the drain.
Regarding being non-partisan, I have decided the only way to do that is to be explicitly apolitical other than supporting democracy. I could put that right in the charter for both organizations and create incentives for keeping to it and disincentives for abandoning it. If both organizations can’t take sides on any issues, then I don’t see how they can be partisan. Personally, I don’t have strong feelings either way on most issues other than I don’t want an expansive, homogeneous government that is so large that it is very difficult to escape from. We only have such a government because of the advantages of a centralized military power which is rife with abuse.
Regarding moving being bad for children, just a quick skim shows me that those studies aren’t necessarily telling you what you think they are. For instance, one portion cites 3 studies that show “ High rates of residential mobility have been associated with social disadvantage including poverty [1, 2, 4]” yet they didn’t appear to control for these variables in the studies I skimmed. Even for the children in those conditions, moving might actually be beneficial. I would assume it depends on what alternative we are comparing it to. In the many cases, moving may be less harmful than staying such as when they are moving from a bad neighborhood with bad schools to a good neighborhood with good schools. I think the same thing applies to complaints about democracy not protecting minorities well enough which was the trigger for this conversation. Compared to what? I am open to suggestions. Which system of governance protects minorities better than democracy? If the answer is none, then that is an argument for democracy, not against it.
Ultimately, I probably should have waited to post about this on here until I had a very detailed outline to put everything in context with all of the supporting arguments and proper citations. Either way though, even if not a single person here likes the ideas, I would still write the book and attempt to carry the plan out, but I would use the criticisms to modify the plan. Like l’ve said before, I love it when people shoot holes in my arguments. I don’t want to cling to bad arguments or bad ideas and I value both positive and negative feedback as long as it is honest.
I don’t particularly agree about the math jargon. On the one hand, it might be annoying for people already familiar with the jargon to change the wording they use, but on the other hand, descriptive wording is easier to remember for people who are unfamiliar with a term and using an index to automatically replace the term on demand doesn’t necessarily affect anyone already familiar with the jargon. Perhaps this needs to be studied more, but this seems obvious to me. If “linearity” is exactly when A(cx) = cA(x) and A(x+y) = A(x) + A(y), there is no reason “straight-line property” can’t also mean exactly that, but straight-line property is easier to remember because it’s more descriptive of the concept of linearity.
Also, I can see how the shorthand is useful, but you could just say “linearity is when a function has both the properties of homogeneity and additivity” and that would seem less daunting to many new learners to whom that shorthand reads like ancient Greek. I could make more descriptive replacement words for those concepts as well and it might make it even easier to understand the concept of linearity.
I’m not sure if certifying a candidate as a leader and optionally holding them to an oath by holding collateral would count as an endorsement, but you never know with legal issues. It is definitely something to look into, so thanks for that information. It would be better for LOCALS to qualify as a tax exempt organization and charity that accepts donations. However, I am not assuming this is legally possible. I would need to find legal expertise to figure out whether it is or isn’t.
Regarding experimental politics being unpopular, I agree that it would be unpopular if I frame it as an experiment. Framing is very important. The better way to frame strong local self-determination for communities is that it gives the community freedom to make their own rules how they see fit with less interference from external actors who have no skin in the game with the local community, and the fact that it provides us opportunities to get more data on the effectiveness of social policies is a coincidental side benefit for doing the right thing in the first place.
I haven’t done or found any studies on whether kids having to make new friends is a common sticking point for mobility, but in my experience, it isn’t. My parents moved a couple times for jobs they didn’t particularly need because they already had good jobs with little to no concern for that. I also had lots of friends as a child whose families moved away for trivial reasons. I am not assuming my experience is representative of the mean, but I wouldn’t assume it isn’t either.
I agree I should make an official post. I will when I am less busy. Thank you for the help.
//There are different kinds of political parties. LOCALS sounds like a single-issue fusion party as described here: https://open.lib.umn.edu/americangovernment/chapter/10-6-minor-parties/
Fusion parties choose one of the main two candidates as their candidate. This gets around the spoiler effect. Eg the Populist Party would list whichever of the big candidates supported Free Silver.
A problem with that is that fusion parties are illegal in 48 states(?!) because the major parties don’t want to face a coalition against them.
LOCALS would try to get the democrat and the republican candidate to use Co-Co to choose their policies (offering the candidate support in form of donations or personnel), and if they do then they get an endorsement. I’m still a bit iffy on the difference between an interest group and a political party, so maybe you are in the clear.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_fusion_in_the_United_States //
Thank you for that information. I did not know anything about fusion parties, so you had me worried for a minute. I then looked up what “cross-endorsement” is and this in not remotely like anything I had in mind. Consider the name “Liaisons for Organizing Community Action and Leadership Strategies”. Besides being a clever acronym, it is very descriptive of the intended purpose of the organization. The group will have three main missions: 1. Developing leadership through an in house program (This is where future candidates sworn to uphold democracy will come from), 2. Organizing community actions such as referendums, planning and fundraising various local charity projects, organizing voting initiatives, lobbying local government and local businesses for various reasons, planning other various political strategies for the community, etc. 3. Maintaining the Township-Talks portion of Co-Co for their political district chapter. Other than #3, I plan to keep locals and Co-Co as completely separate organizations with separate agendas. LOCALS will be a nonprofit organization (Probably) while Co-Co will be a for profit corporation (Most Likely). As I mentioned before, I am not yet solid on structural organization, but I do know that they will be separate organizations. This is important because if they were the same organization, LOCALS might very ambiguously be considered a political party which I not only don’t want but absolutely can’t have for the plan to work.
To explain this, I will need to explain how part of the Township-Talks (the political section) portion of Co-Co will work which will be the main part that the LOCALS chapter manages. There will be a page/section for each current representative for each office within the LOCALS chapter political district. A person, bot, or combo will be assigned to each representative to collect information and post it there. Upcoming/past votes and voting records will be collected and posted there along with an AI generated synopsis of what the issue they are voting on is about. There will be tools that the representatives can use to talk to the public and hold town hall meetings online if they so wish. The representatives can also submit to make corrections for information about them, but they won’t directly be in charge of this information. The LOCALS chapter will research and populate this information into Co-Co will then take the information collected by LOCALS, compare it to the data collected from users via surveys and other sources, and then use an algorithm to score every single office holder/representative with a “democracy score” that indicates how well they are doing the will of the people. This way, LOCALS will simply be doing the nonprofit work of researching all of the available officeholders and merely using Co-Co as a tool to upload their research to for the public to view. Co-Co will then do the rest of the data collection and algorithmic sorting and figuring on its own to rate how the officeholders are doing and get the information to the constituents of the political district. There will also be a section for candidates during elections as well which will somewhat overlap with the officeholders because we expect incumbents to run for office again.All this said, LOCALS will not be directly putting up any candidates. The only thing LOCALS will be doing is training candidates, getting them to swear oaths to uphold democracy according to a specific set of rules enshrined within the open source Co-Co algorithm that calculates the will of the people, and optionally putting up one or more assets with the LOCALS trust as collateral in case they violate their oath.
Now this next part is where I worry things might get somewhat sticky legally, but I am more certain that it is legal than not. There will be a monetization feature as well for any officeholder or candidate willing to swear the oath to uphold democracy via township talks data that can be where in exchange for a standardized low monthly user fee (like $10), a township talks user can answer special additional polls related to upcoming votes, propose legislative changes, and get more interactive time with the officeholder they are subscribed to. Besides those extra privileges, the algorithm that calculates what the officeholder should do according to the will of the people in Co-Co will be weighted heavier for the subscribers of the officeholder. Co-Co will receive a small portion of the funds, the rest will go directly to the officeholder as income. Importantly, this won’t be the only way to get beneficially weighted by the algorithm. There will be civics and local politics education courses that once completed have that effect, uploading proof of local charity work or donations will have that effect, and participating in online town halls and debates will also have that effect. I will likely add other ways to get further weighted as well (all of this in general rather than officeholder specific). In this way, users will build capital towards having more of a democratic influence in their community thus we have “stakeholder democracy” as I call it. The problem with plain democracy is that the fentanyl junkie gets the same vote as Mother Theresa and Albert Einstein. The most competent and virtuous people are the ones who ought to be in charge of decisions, so I had the idea to weakly integrate meritocracy and virtue ethics into the process while also getting the officeholders decentrally paid by their active constituents for their work so that the results are skewed towards good faith individuals and competent decision makers. I also figure that most politicians live off bribes these days, so rather than expecting the bribing to stop, why not have the option for the constituents to very weakly and decentrally bribe the officeholders to do what they want? It is not much different than campaign funding except it happens while in office, and the officeholder just gets to keep the money and use it however he or she wishes. As part of this process, the officeholder would sign a multi-lateral contract that incurs strong financial penalties if they don’t do what they promised and would be forced to pay back the fees to the subscribers.
Finally, besides for officeholders, as I mentioned before, candidates will get similar pages and they will be able to raise campaign funds via Township Talks also so long as they are sworn to uphold stakeholder democracy. It would work the same way as with the officeholder subscriptions. Subscribe to your candidate, and if they win, you get further weighted in the algorithm for any issues they vote on. I would make this a significant weighting because it is riskier considering the candidate might lose.
Anyway, LOCALS will neither directly run nor fund candidates. Instead, they will train leaders who will then run independently from LOCALS as candidates who will be certified by LOCALS under the democrat and primary tickets. What you are calling a fusion party involves a literal political party running a candidate say, the Libertarian party, under both the Libertarian ticket and the Republican ticket at the same time. So, for instance, if the Libertarian party nominated Donald Trump, then Donald Trump would be both the Libertarian and Republican party candidate. Absolutely nothing like that is even happening here. LOCALS doesn’t even have a ticket, doesn’t seek ballot access, or technically even field candidates. LOCALS merely trains and certifies candidates who they hand pick for their leadership program and who swear to uphold democracy according to a specific set of rules, agree to campaign in a certain fashion, and may optionally choose to put one or more assets up for collateral with the LOCALS trust that would be lost if they break their oath. This would make 2 types of LOCALS certified candidates: 1. a LOCALS certified candidate, and 2. a LOCALS certified Trust candidate. In this manner, rather than running candidates (which I improperly said for simplicity sake in the earlier response), all they will be doing is hand picking and training leaders and helping them enforce self-imposed rules. The self-imposed part is important. If the problem were officeholders didn’t have enough freedom in how they vote and run their campaigns and offices, we would have a problem. Because the problem is that they have too much, we can create candidates that work based on self-imposed rules without breaking/changing any laws or rewriting any constitutions. That realization is what got the gears turning for this whole idea. There is also a precedent in both major parties for hijacking them. With the GOP we had/have “the Tea Party wing” and “the MAGA wing”, and for the Dems we have “The Squad” (originally known as “Justice Democrats”). Upon seeing these in party rebels take over from the primaries, I said to myself “why not both parties?” If LOCALS can get LOCALS certified candidates to win both primaries for a single office, that office is guaranteed to go to a LOCALS certified candidate. It’s also easier and cheaper to win in the primaries because there is less turnout and less funding, and if Co-Co takes off, Co-Co can organize voter turnout for the LOCALS certified candidates.
//I love your vision of how a politician should answer the abortion question. Separating the three questions “who do voters think is qualified” “what do voters want” and “what is true” would be great for democracy. Similar to: https://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/futarchy.html//
I love how you were able to grok that from the few context clues that I gave you. That’s exactly what I was thinking. American elections are not democratic because they are too ambiguous to functionally achieve democracy in quite a few ways. The voter has to somehow figure out which candidate is trustworthy (won’t back stab or sell out later or is just lying to begin with), competent, supports their values and interests, and has a reasonable chance of winning all at the same time (assuming such a candidate exists, which usually isn’t the case). I harp on people confusing elections with democracy all the time. Sure, an election happens in that situation, but nothing remotely close to the will of a majority of people is happening because of the election. I liken it to voting on who gets to punch you in the face. Logically, the democracy part can only happen after the election. The election should only be about who is competent and trustworthy and the issues sorted out later by the constituents via data science. It doesn’t even make sense for the candidate to promise what they will do ahead of time because circumstances change and decisions should change with them. All this seems obvious to me, but most other people don’t generally seem to understand what democracy actually is. They think democracy is elections. I always like to point out that we could have democracy entirely without elections if we switched to sortition instead. I am not saying we should, though I doubt it could be worse than what we have now, but the point is that democracy doesn’t even require elections. I also don’t want to do the stupid form of democracy like the article you linked referenced which is why I designed a system as a stakeholder democracy to weight the process towards merit, virtue, and participation.
//When it comes to local vs not local, if 1⁄100 people is an X, and they are spread out, then their voice doesn’t mean much and the other 99⁄100 people in their district can push through policies that harm them. If the Xes are in the same district, then they get a say about what happens to them. I used teachers as an example of an X, but it is more general than that. (Though I’m thinking about the persecution of Jews in particular.)//
Yes, Claude chided me often about protecting political minorities as well. As I told him, this is less of a concern in a local community sovereignty setup in modern times where mobility is cheap and easy because of the ability to vote with one’s feet than it would be in literally any other known system. I am actually hoping that people do just that and move wherever they like the politics. I am a big fan of intentional communities, and if people move based on political preferences, then they will naturally self sort into intentional communities. The gain in social capital from living in a community of people who share your beliefs and policy preferences is enormous! Regarding Jews, I think they are protected under federal law anyway. However, for political rather than racial/ethnic minorities which is I believe what we are discussing now, voting with one’s feet still applies. Suppose you hate gun control and 95% of the community is for it, you can just move to another community that loves guns. People already do it now. Are you a wing nut and your community hates private airplanes? Just move one community over where they either like them or don’t care. Problem solved. That’s why I am very serious about making sovereignty as localized as possible. If literally every neighborhood were sovereign, you wouldn’t have to go very far to escape a bad policy. I have also toyed with the idea of creating a way to use Co-Co and/or LOCALS to grease mobility even further for people.
The fact of the matter is, no matter what type of government is chosen, the risk of becoming a disgruntled political minority is always a possibility. That being the case, the only real insurance against this is, in fact, radical decentralization of political districts coupled with local sovereignty. This actually fits well with social contract theory which is the main theory that political science is based on. Social contracts are implicitly agreed to by staying within the jurisdiction. If the jurisdiction is too difficult to escape, then the implicit contract is violated. Perhaps most importantly, it would be very beneficial to have lots of different communities trying lots of different things. That’s how we could really advance the social sciences. We need the data, but we don’t want to do anything too widespread because of the risk profile involved. Single community testing is perfect. If it works one place, others will likely try it too. If it fails miserably, that’s unfortunate, but at least others will avoid it like a hot stove. The risk profile for localism makes a lot more sense for empirically testing, implementing, and improving social policies in an iterative manner.
Speaking of empiricism, I also think that lack of empiricism in politics is one reason why the U.S. and western civilizations appear to be having a political mental health crisis. Being passionate about abstractions reported in the news regarding far off places is not good for mental health. People in California should be a lot more worried about the homeless guys shooting fentanyl in camps on the streets than what is happening in Ukraine or Gaza. We can’t even know if the information regarding that stuff is accurate. It could be almost 100% BS. Being spoon fed your worldview by provably dishonest media organizations that are probably at least partially controlled by various intel agencies and special interests both foreign and domestic isn’t conducive to a stable, healthy worldview. Furthermore, when you are trying to politically control the entire nation, the stakes are too high and we get strong political hatred like we see now. That’s why I want to stop people from focusing on and controlling what happens in Ukraine or Gaza (which is absurd!) or even across the nation in other states and start worrying about controlling the literal streets they live on instead. We’re experiencing a megalomania crisis where everyone thinks that modern tech coupled with sham democracy allows them to control not only the entire country, but the entire world! Control your own neighborhood people! Then you can start worrying about the neighboring communities. Don’t even try to control the world. You can’t and shouldn’t anyway. It would be unethical even if you could. However, if the people can organize to be sovereign at the community level, the federal government will automatically get weaker and have fewer teeth. They can’t control every individual neighborhood. We do the feds a huge favor by not caring enough about our neighborhoods and focusing on national/international politics instead. It’s much easier to control a power vacuum caused by a confusopoly.
That said, I realize what a logistical nightmare that many districts with strong sovereignty might be, but we have AI and other software now. Coordinating communities to collaborate and trade is part of what Co-Co will be programmed to do. I think we are set for solving logistics problems. I don’t have all the answers yet, but I know that people could figure out a way to seamlessly integrate things with modern tech, and figuring out how to do so should create jobs anyway.
I’m glad you like the idea. That was a good catch that I didn’t capture of the true meaning of linear very well. I was a little rushed before. That said, your definition isn’t correct either. Though it is true that linear functions have that property, that is merely the additivity property of a linear function which is just the distributive property of multiplication used on a polynomial. I also didn’t see where the linked text you provided even defines linearity or contains the additivity rule you listed. That was a linear algebra textbook chapter though, and I am still glad you showed me it because it reminded me of how I was great at math in college, but not at all because of the textbooks (which were very expensive!). I have rather good reading comprehension and college math textbooks might as well be written in another language. I learned the math 100% from the lectures and used the text books only to do the problems in the back and got an A in all 3 Calculus classes I took. I am pretty sure I could write a much easier to understand math textbook and I know it is possible because the software that teaches math isn’t nearly as confusingly worded as the textbooks.
This is how I would keep it as simple as possible and capture more of the original meaning:
Multiplying grids of numbers is a straight-line property process.
That said, point taken regarding math jargon being very challenging to descriptively reword as I suspect it will get a lot harder as the concepts get more complex. The point in my process isn’t to perfectly define the word but to use a descriptive enough word replacement that one’s brain more easily grabs onto it than it does with, for example, Latin terms of absurd length for anatomy like “serratus posterior inferior” which is a muscle I had trouble with recently. Just off the top of my head, I would just call that the lower ribcage stabilizer instead. That gives one a much better idea of where it is and what it does and would be much easier to remember and accurately label on a diagram for a quiz. However, with such abstract concepts like math deals with, this will certainly be very challenging.
LOCALS is absolutely NOT a political party. I am very anti political party because I consider political parties to be anti-democratic. I suppose this is the danger in giving a sloppy synopsis. I was hoping to convey that it wasn’t a political party via a context clue by saying LOCALS candidates will run in the democrat and republican primaries. In other words, they would run as democrats and republicans because 1. They are not a political party and 2. The system is rigged to permanently codify the democrat and republican parties as the only 2 viable parties. It is a bad strategy to try to change the system from the outside. It has to be changed from the inside to be successful. There is no way LOCALS could compete with the two major parties, so instead of competing it aims to join both and become an integral part of both while making both irrelevant in the long run.
Another reason LOCALS shouldn’t be considered a political party is that one of the aims is to be as non political as possible. This would be accomplished by prioritizing democracy (really stakeholder democracy, but that’s another long conversation) over every issue. For example, suppose a LOCALS candidate were to be asked “what is your opinion on abortion”, they would give a standard LOCALS answer such as “I am completely supportive of whatever the will of the majority of the constituents from my district want according to the data collected from the Township Talks portion of the Community-Cohesion application. I want to work for you, so I’m more interested in what you think. What’s your opinion on abortion?” Similar answers would be given for gun control and other controversial issues. I could write a whole essay on this idea alone and how it solves a number of political problems, but my time is limited.
Co-Co would deal with a lot more than politics and would indeed help your cookouts, and I also think that is very important, but I think focusing on national politics is both a strategical and ethical mistake when it comes to a majority of domestic policies. Education is one of those. I don’t like the prospect of a teacher in Texas identifying politically more with a teacher in New York than his own community. It reminds me of teacher’s unions which I am also against. While that may be good for the individual teachers, it comes at the expense of the community that the teachers serve. Ideally, teachers should be trying to figure out how to best serve their community rather than themselves. Realistically, we know that most will act selfishly due to human nature, but the fact of the matter is that students and parents in Texas have different needs and priorities than students and parents in New York. When the teachers from New York and Texas collaborate to enforce their own will over the will of the communities they serve, that is something which I consider to be akin to an economic externality like when companies pollute to save costs and increase market competitiveness. Furthermore, by collaborating on such endeavors, they make pedagogy more centralized and uniform in the process which means less innovation and more fat tail risk because vastly more students are affected when they get it wrong.
Next, why should people in New York have any say in how people in Texas choose to educate their students or vice versa? I strongly believe in every community’s right to political self-determination within certain moral boundaries and see a national teacher’s union as a violation of that right. The only counterargument to this is expertocracy where we discount parents and students in the decision making process in favor of the teachers who are supposed to serve them because they know less than teachers about pedagogy. I see that as an information problem to be solved in more ethical ways. While that sounds very daunting to most people, as a naturally creative thinker and problem solver, it sounds less daunting to me although I will admit that my solution in this case involves rethinking the whole entire education system because I find the entire system to be inherently unsatisfactory in ways that can’t be internally reformed. I wish I could say otherwise, but I believe public school is actually damaging to a majority of children, especially compared to possible unrealized alternatives that would take me more time than I have to explain. Suffice it to say it would be part of Co-Co if I am successful. Perhaps that will give you an idea of how broad the proposed app is. It is definitely the most daunting part of my plan. I remain optimistic though because recent advances in computer science make me believe it is possible to accomplish the things I want to do with it.
As far as how Co-Co would attract and keep users, I could sum that up by saying that if it works and gets off the ground then it would become absolutely indispensable for daily life and everyone would have it and use it to do all kinds of things ranging from determining how their local elected officials create and vote on policies to making money directly through the app, finding jobs, buying and selling on the private market, buying and selling with local businesses, looking at product reviews, browsing and searching the internet, finding friends or dates, and much more. I am in the process of getting a complete description on paper. Even just that is a lot of work, and I am still developing ideas for it as well. Before I even do any of that here, I am thinking I will first post about my epistemology and ethical philosophies as well as what challenges I believe the US faces to try to get people on the same wavelength before I go posting really long discourses on how to solve them. Unfortunately, I am not a fast writer. I frequently rewrite and edit everything heavily before I post something that I am serious about because I know how important a first impression is about a subject. I’m actually being quite lazy in this discussion which is why you got some wrong impressions from my previous post.
I don’t expect the jargon filter to work perfectly to explain any concept, but I do expect it to make concepts easier to understand because learning new vocabulary is a somewhat cognitively demanding process, and especially so for some people. Memory works differently for different people, and different people have different confidence levels in their vocabulary skills, so the jargon heavy sentence you used above, while perfectly fine for communicating with people such as you and I, wouldn’t he good for getting someone less technically inclined to read about math or remember what that sentence means. It’s great that you gave me an example to work with though. I just went to Claude and used the process that I am talking about to give you an example and came back with this:
“Multiplying grids of numbers is a step-by-step process”
Can you see how that would be easier to understand at first glance if you were completely unfamiliar with linear algebra? It also doesn’t require memorizing new vocabulary. The way you put it requires an unfamiliar person to both learn a new concept and memorize new vocabulary at the same time. The way I put it doesn’t perfectly explain it to an unfamiliar person, but it gives them a rough idea that is easy to understand while not requiring that they take in any new vocabulary. Because it is less cognitively demanding, it will feel less daunting to the person you are trying to teach so as not to discourage them from trying to learn linear algebra.
I believe you also hit on something important when you mentioned jargon intended to confuse the reader. I suspect that is why a lot of jargon exists in the first place. Take binomial nomenclature for example. Why are biologists naming things using long words in a dead language? That only serves the purpose of making the information more daunting and less accessible to people with poor vocabulary memorization skills. That seems like elitism to me. It makes people who have capable vocabulary memorization skills feel smarter but is a terrible practice from a pedagogical and communication perspective. That said, I assume the majority of the problem is that the people creating these new words are just bad at naming and aren’t taking pedagogy or best communication practices into consideration, but elitism probably plays a role as well.
When I post other places, I purposely dumb down my vocabulary because it is better communication practice. I am not going to bother on LW because it probably would be worse communication for my target audience here anyway and it is extra work for me. (For example, I might use the phrase “teaching strategy” instead of the word “pedagogy”.
I forgot to mention, my app would actually present a solution for the word “rationalist” being used to describe the community. One of the features that I plan to implement for it is what I call the jargon index filter which will Automatically replace jargon words and ambiguous words with more descriptive words that anybody can understand. I’ve found LLMs to be very useful for creating the jargon index, but it is a slow process that will take a lot of labor hours using an LLM such as Claude to make as many recommendations for easy to understand replacement words or short phrases that even a fourth grader could understand for complex or ambiguous words and picking the best one from the big list. I am planning to make the jargon index a wiki project and then the filter will use the index coupled with AI to analyze the paragraphs to find contextual meanings (for homographs) to replace every ambiguous or technical word in a given text with unique descriptive words or phrases that anyone with a 4th grade or higher level of education/cognitive ability could understand. To make genuine democracy work in practice, the general public will need to be smarter which is a pedagogical issue that I believe I have good solutions for.
Thanks. I did give Claude a thumbs up, actually. I’ll give you the gist of my plan. The hardest part to planning something as big as changing society in a large nation like the United States is getting enough people to act on a plan. To do that, the plan involves creating a new social media app that emphasizes local communities called Community-Cohesion or Co-Co for short which will be very comprehensive by design and will try to overtake a slew of other apps that have some obvious problems while also filling some new niches that nobody has even thought of yet as well as providing ways for people to make money using the app. I see social media as one of the problems in modern society, but it could also be a solution if implemented correctly. The app will be tied to a nonprofit that I plan to create called Liaisons for Organizing Community Action and Leadership Strategies (LOCALS) that will aim to have a local chapter in every political jurisdiction across the US (municipal, county, and federal district) which will organize political action and try to get their own candidates into both the democrat and republican primaries for every office. The candidates will actually use the app not only for campaign fundraising and awareness, but to collect data to determine the will of the people which they will swear to uphold based on the data collected. Optionally, they can put up assets with the LOCALS trust as collateral in case they violate their oath.
It will be a bottom up, decentralized approach that uses a massive social media app to make the internet safer and less deceptive and will deprogram people at the same time. The app is such a good idea that I am very confident in it, but creating it will be another thing. Fortunately, with AI it might not be as hard as it would have been a short time ago.
Even still, it’s going to take a diverse group of experts including not only software engineers, but lawyers, data scientists, and people familiar with the political machinery for a massive array of local political jurisdictions. I’m not rich or I would just hire them, so I either have to raise the funds to hire them or find volunteers or some combination of both. That will be very difficult, and I also worry the app will be too big and thus be too difficult to debug. I’ve noticed that bugs are a plague for modern software in general, but especially for under-funded software. The good thing is that it has a number of ways of making money, so if it can get off the ground, then it would make a lot of money and be self sustaining.
That creates its own problems though in the form of controlling interests. I am still working on designing the charter for LOCALS and Co-Co to be resistant to corruption, but I am not a lawyer, so it’s hard for me to see the whole field. I considered going to law school, but I don’t think there is time for that, so I need to find at least one lawyer for corporate law who is willing to volunteer to help me design the corporate structure of the company or nonprofit. I am undecided on whether both LOCALS and Co-Co should be nonprofits or whether only LOCALS should be. I am leaning towards only LOCALS being one because I believe there are ways one could charter a corporation that would be more democratic and robust against corruption than a nonprofit.
Anyway, I plan to write a bunch of posts on this to outline all of the details, so stay tuned.
BTW, how does the voting system on here work exactly? I read the new user guide, but it doesn’t explain it well or tell the user which type of button goes with which type of vote. I need to stop being the dork who uses it wrong all the time. I see left and right arrows, checks and X’s, and up and down arrows. It’s funny how little explanation there is for these things. I’ve looked exhaustively for instructions.
I am not sure what your point was with this, but I think the concept presented is more easily explained by the fact that the more complex the model our brains try to map to, the higher the expected error rate rather than this being a unique phenomenon from mapping 2D vs 3D objects.
I think debating is the best way to learn. I’ve always been somewhat cynical and skeptical and a critical thinker my whole life, so I question most things. Debating works better for me as a learning tool because I can’t be simply fed information like is done in public schools. I have to try to poke holes in it and then be convinced that it still holds water.
As for what I asked Claude, he actually recommended LW to me about 3 different times on 3 different occasions. I collaborate with him to refine my ideas/plans and he recommended finding human collaborators to help execute them here, Astral Codex, and effective altruism groups. The first time he described LW as a “rationalist” group and I mistook what that meant due to my philosophy background and was thinking “you mean like fans of Decarte and Kant?” and wasn’t very impressed (I consider myself more epistemically empiricist than rationalist). The second time I actually looked into it since he mentioned it more than once and realized that the word “rationalist” was being used differently than I thought. The third time I decided to pull the trigger and started reading the sequences and then made the intro post. So far, I haven’t read anything terribly new, but it’s definitely right up my alley. I’d already gotten to that type of methodological thinking by reading authors such as Daniel Kahneman, Karl Popper, and Nassim Taleb, or I would be enthralled, but I am really glad there is an internet community of people who think like that.
That said, I know AI safety is the hot topic here right now, and I am tech savvy but far from an AI expert. I find AI to already be incredibly useful in its current form (mostly LLMs). They are quite imperfect, but they still do a ton of sloppy thinking in a very short time that I can quickly clean up and make useful for my purposes so long as I prompt them correctly.
However, I think I have a lot to contribute to AI safety as well because much of the AI savior/disaster razor is hinging on social science problems. IMO, social sciences are very underdeveloped because few, if any people have looked at the biggest problems in ways which they could realistically be solved and/or are/were capable of imagining/designing social systems which would functionally modulate behaviors within social groups, are robust from being gamed by tyrants and antisocial personalities, have a non-catastrophic risk profile, and have any realistic chance of being implemented within the boundaries of current social systems. I believe I am up to the challenge (at least in the U.S.), but my first task is to convince a group of people with the right skills and mindsets to collaborate and help me pull it off. It will also take a lot of money for a startup that needs to be raised via crowdfunding so there aren’t any domineering interests. When I asked Claude where I might even begin to look for such help, he suggested here as the top choice 3 different times.
Whether it works out that way or not, I am glad I found LW. I only have my family, normies, and internet trolls to discuss serious topics with otherwise, and that gets exhausting.
Hello all, and thank you to everyone who helps provide this space. I am glad to have discovered LW. My name is Benjamin. I am a philosopher and self guided learner. I just discovered LW a short while ago and I am reading through the sequences. After many years of attempting to have productive conversations to solve problems and arrive at the truth via social media groups (which is akin to bludgeoning one’s head against the wall repeatedly), I gave up. I was recently recommended to join LW by Claude AI, and it seems like a great recommendation so far.
One of the things that I find discouraging about modern times is the amount of outright deception that is tolerated. Whether it is politics, business, institutions of science, interpersonal relationships, or even lying to oneself, deception seems to be king in our modern environment. I am a systemic thinker, so this seems like a terrible system to me. The truth is a better option for everyone but not as rewarding as deception on an individual actor level, and thus we have entered a prisoner’s dilemma situation where most actors are defectors.
I am interested in answering two questions related to this situation:
How might we get to a higher trust environment than the current one with fewer defectors?
What are the best strategies for navigating a low trust environment where there is a wealth of information that is mostly non credible?
I like the chances of solving this problem with AI, but I think government and corporations are going to try to centralize control of AI and prevent this from happening because both institutions mainly subsist on deception. I believe we are standing on a razors edge between true democracy and freedom and a centralized totalitarian oligarchy which largely depends on how things shake out with control over AI. I am a decentralist philosophically. I strongly believe in true democracy as opposed to false democracy as an applause light as it was aptly described in the sequences. I am in the process of writing a book on how to gain true democracy in the United States because I believe that the future of the world hinges on whether or not this can be accomplished.
I am also very open to counter-arguments. I have no desire whatsoever to cling to false beliefs, and I am happy to lose a debate because it means I learned something and became smarter in the process. In this sense, the loser of a debate is the real winner because they learned something while the winner only spent their time and energy correcting their false belief. However, winning has its own benefits in the form of a dopamine rush, so it is a positive sum game. I wish everyone had this attitude. Just know that if you can prove I am wrong about something, I won’t retreat into cognitive dissonance. Instead, I will just update my opinion(s).
I have a large number of ideas on how to affect positive change which I will be posting about, and any critical feedback or positive feedback is welcome. Thanks to everyone who contributes to this space, and I hope to have many cooperative conversations here in the future.
I noticed that something is conspicuously missing from this article. Namely, that truth can have disutility as well as utility. There are instances where it is better to not know than to know. For instance, if nazis come to your house looking for Anne Frank, it’s better that they don’t know she is in your attic. It can also be better that someone doesn’t know you don’t like their gift.
Then there are times where the truth can be a hindrance. For example, when I look at the desktop on my computer screen and drag a file to the trash, I am not throwing anything away. I am really manipulating voltages inside the computer, but knowing exactly how I am manipulating those voltages would distract so greatly from the actual task that if I insisted on knowing it before executing the task, it would take forever to get done. I don’t need to know all that to delete a file on my computer because pretending that I am dragging a file to the trash on my screen works better than trying to manually manipulate the voltages on the reductionist level, so that information has disutility to me. I can think of plenty of other scenarios as well such as a cheating wife who otherwise remained faithful besides the one time. Truth could ruin the otherwise happy marriage forever.
What about beneficial mind hacks where one fools themself internally to accomplish some feat that they might otherwise be incapable of accomplishing such as thinking “I can do anything if I really put my mind to it”? Knowing something can even get you killed such as if you learn that the mafia is bribing the mayor or chief of police in your city. Assuming that truth always has utility just isn’t accurate. In most situations truth is useful, but that is just a heuristic, not a universal. Knowing when to use it and when to be able to let go of it is also important. I like to view truth as a useful tool. No matter how useful it may be, it still isn’t the right tool for every single job. This itself is a truth.
You are confusing two definitions for the same word. The judge is biased by one definition of “bias”, but not by the other definition as used in cognitive or statistical bias.
I just recently realized this place is even here, but simplifying concepts and applying better pedagogical techniques so that people of average intelligence can learn them is one of my main areas of focus. I believe we could do a lot better job both teaching and getting normal people interested in learning which are two sides of the same coin.