Just this guy, you know?
Dagon
Karma: 13,323
I suspect that this is a bit too much of an anlytical and legible framework. the VAST majority of human interaction is not based on explicit rules or negotiated contracts, it’s based on socially-evolved heuristics for who to trust to do what under what conditions, and then each individual has variance in their compliance and expectations, almost none of which are ever stated clearly.
I’d love to see ‘institution and constitution design’ replaced with ‘institution and constitution studies’. Coordination is a word that hides a number of important sub-topics about enforcement/agreement for behaviors among misaligned individuals.
sorry for being a bit combative and terse. Edited to be clearer, and perhaps gentler. Mostly “generate discussion” is not a clear reason—what do you want from the discussion?
[edited to clarify. apologies for oversimplifying. ]
Right. If your goal is to generate discussion for its own sake, it’s less likely to be welcomed. You need a reason for wanting the discussion, and that will determine how and whether to go about it here.. If your goal is to get some help in your understanding of the world and finding whether and how this idea fits into current knowledge and models, then shortform is a good start, and based on engagement (or not), you can expand to a longer post highlighting how it differs from current models and when it’s helpful.
in summary: this is not a place to proselytize or promulgate ideas. It’s a place to cooperatively explore what is true and how we know it. There are LOTS of exceptions and subtlety in specific topics that are already in the Overton window around here, and I wish there were fewer, but for new/unpopular ideas, start with curiosity and learning for yourself, not with pushing or convincing others.Edit: also, if it’s unpopular/criticized due to complexity of long trains of inference, or large inferential distance from the more popular ideas/models, it’s a VERY good tactic to break it down into smaller pieces, which you can discuss independently. This is not “write more, in a series that can’t be understood until complete”, it’s more “figure out the cruxes and individual atoms of disagreement/unpopularity, and resolve them in isolation”.
I think maybe don’t go in with that goal. If you have an idea that you want to understand better yourself, and to update your own beliefs about whether and where it fits in an overall consistent worldview, then introducing it in a short form may be a good way to summarize and get initial reactions.
If you’re trying to persuade or convince people to adopt it via “winning” a debate, this isn’t the right forum.
This may be valuable in less-than-adversarial complex equilibria. Even if things aren’t controlled or predicted from outside, they contain lots of forces that are pushing toward over-simple optimization (see https://www.lesswrong.com/w/moloch). Pushing away from optimal can add slack (https://subgenius.fandom.com/wiki/Slack).
Only skimmed, but I think you need to include COST of early action times the probability of false-alarm in the calculation.
The high number of false positives silently trains us to wait
For me, the high number of false positives loudly and correctly trains me to wait. Bayes for the win—every false alarm is evidence that my signal is noisy. As a lot of economists say, “the optimal error rate is not 0”.
How can someone inside a universe tell which type it is?
Also, a lot of thinking about paradoxes and extremely-unlikely-foretold-events misses what’s likely to be MY motivation for testing/fighting/breaking the system: amusement value. I find unlikely events to be funny, and finding more and more contortions to be adversarial about a prophesy would be great fun.
I don’t know the reference myself, and I’d probably recommend against using insider shortcut phrases with people who aren’t already aware. For most people who don’t already have the background knowledge to understand it from your explanation, a link isn’t going to help them much.
For the kind of person who WILL benefit from a link, I’d recommend a more general one—perhaps LessWrong overall, or https://www.lesswrong.com/w/probability-theory.
A bias against drugs is very different from “drugs are always bad”. It’s very reasonable to say “I’d prefer not to mess with my body via fairly blunt chemical intervention, but there are lots of exceptions for specific cases where the risk is worth it”.
Not taking drugs IS better, in the median case of a drug being offered to you. It’s just that the variance is wide—sometimes it’d be extremely bad (say, narcotics before a road-trip), sometimes it’s quite good (antibiotics when you have pneumonia). Often it’s less clear, and having a default position against this kind of intervention is probably OK.
This generalizes quite a bit: Simple moral strictures should very rarely be the first or second consideration in your life-optimization decisions. They certainly CAN be tiebreakers when it’s a relatively close call.
For the specific, I don’t actually know anyone who thinks all drugs are automatically bad. I do know people who sloganize this way, but when pressed they tone it down to recreational and self-prescribed palliative drugs are bad. Prescribed drugs (and, depending on the vigor of your counterpart in the discussion quasi-legal off-brand uses for a specific reason) are generally well accepted.
Neither pro-drug nor anti-drug are coherent positions—there’s just too much variance across drugs and patients to have any simple rule.
Separately, the topics of mental health and neurodivergence are not well-formed in our culture(s). That deserves a discussion very distinct from drugs generally.
“supply and demand” is correct, but like the “calories in-out” theory of weight loss, is missing a lot of important causality about the supply and about the demand. There are a LOT of textbooks that go much deeper—George Stigler and Milton Friedman are well-known authors on this topic.
There’s a wide range of behaviors and responses that are better framed as “protect yourself” than “seek justice” or “punish defectors”. I’d argue that the majority of thinking (for non-universal, non-government topics) should be framed in terms of exclusion to avoid costs, rather than punishment.
Amazon should check if you’re producing fraudulent products and ban you. This is because they’re unusually skilled and experienced with this kind of thing, and have good info about it.
Amazon could be skilled at this kind of thing, but they’re famously frugal and are optimizing for throughput, not for justice or even safety. They do, in fact, ban sellers and customers who are significantly negative-value. But their precision-recall balance is -way- different than a criminal investigation or personal decision of retribution would have.
Transit systems should ban non-payers, not to punish them, but to save the expense and hassle of trying to monitor them, and to prevent the waste of resources in having more people in the system who aren’t contributing. (IMO, first, ban anyone who reduces value by acting badly on a bus or train, even if they paid).
Likewise for infrastructure—the first goal is not justice, or even fairness. It’s protecting the infrastructure itself. If someone is harming your mission, exclude them. At some scale, if the infrastructure is an effective monopoly and is necessary for life, then the simpler exclusion mechanisms become infeasible, and more legible/coercive mechanisms (law enforcement) comes into play.
This is one reason to prefer that infrastructure is distributed and no single piece is critical and irreplaceable for people who won’t cooperate with the complex of expected behaviors in that community. It makes it possible to exclude people, and they can find other places where they fit better (or if they piss off EVERYBODY, then maybe it’s ok they don’t get many services).
#1 is purely impossible and irrelevant.
#2 and #3 depend heavily on what “trivially” and “easily” mean, and #3 for the reasons that most people have this clearly false belief. #2 and #3 are the same states of the world, just with a slightly different mix of fools.
My main point is that the deepfakepocalypse is not itself the main or only cause of the lack of trust in video evidence. This has been going on for a long time, and there are plenty of people who deny the veracity of some pretty-well-documented true photos from decades ago.
It’s worth separating the different concerns about “fake”. Like text, there’s been plenty of staged/incorrect/fictional audios and images since the invention of each medium. Lies are as old as speech.
The big concern recently is that the availability of this kind of media has become decentralized over the last few decades—it’s no longer a small amount of publishers that earn trust by being the primary way to channel such things, clearly labeled as to whether it’s fiction or not. This is combining with ease of fakery that removes other clues as to the provenance of such things to make almost nothing trustworthy.
The root of the problem is that I don’t have access to any other phenomenological experiences. I have no direct evidence of how a bird or a tree or a rock experiences their corner of spacetime. It can be described as how to map physical/measurable activity to experiences, but that doesn’t actually help if we can’t detect/measure the experiences in order to have any clue whether our mapping is correct.
If it’s just what someone claims, we have a pretty good mapping—neurons fire, vocal chords vibrate. If it’s what it feels like to be them, we don’t even know what we’re mapping to.
the fact that we have access to our own minds first
I have fairly limited access to my own mind. I give most humans the benefit of the doubt that they do as well, but I can’t really be sure.
That strategy (assume everything is fake) removes the ability to learn about the world beyond what you personally can experience and verify. Fairly limiting.
Can we define consciousness as memory, intelligence and metacognition tightly, reflectively integrated behind a perceptual boundary?
You can define consciousness however you like. Whether others will agree is hard to guess—it’ll depend on which bailey you’re trying to defend from that motte.
There are a LOT of rules which are codification of things that should not apply in all circumstances, but which it’s too complicated to define the rule to the fine-grained level that would make it universal. Lax enforcement is one way to allow flex in rules that are best if they’re directional guidance rather than clear specifications.
Speed limits on public roads, for instance—they’re insanely low for good conditions (clear, dry, good visibility, competent driver in a well-functioning car). They’re somewhat low for decent conditions, they’re probably too high in the worst possible case.
There’s a lot of the world that works this way—there’s enough variance across participants and conditions that there is literally no legible coherent rule which maximizes any goal—it’s all a compromise among averages.
Humans have minds, which are the things one has when one is conscious. So do animals, though exactly which ones have them is a matter of serious debate.
Do they? I know I have a mind, but I can only guess at anyone else.
I’m serious—until you propose an operational and testable definition which gives a specific answer in all cases, you can’t debate whether various classes of things have that property.
This assumes a bit too much rigor in common language. When most people wonder “what’s guaranteed in life”, they really mean “what kinds of events and causal links are so common in my context that I should give high probability to their occurence”.
The common answer “death and taxes” shows this well. One of them is far more likely than the other.