Darkar Dengeno

Karma: 80

Darkar Dengeno 8 Apr 2023 16:03 UTC
1 point
0
on: Parametrize Priority Evaluations

Devising means of measurement will be left as an exercise to the reader, however I recommend that serious thought and effort be given to such testing.

I expect this is where much of the challenge and nuance of this technique lies. A few questions come to mind when I try this. How do you handle terminal vs instrumental value? How do you handle various kinds of uncertainty? (expected value calculations can require your whole world-model if you don’t limit scope!)

Do you have any specific examples of how you perform this measurement on a real decision?

Darkar Dengeno 19 Nov 2019 14:38 UTC
1 point
in reply to: at_the_zoo’s comment on: Steelmanning social justice
Agreed on both counts, yeah. I still don’t think this is actually evidence against the possibility of the political nexus shifting away from social justice (in fact, I would count it as evidence we’re near peak intensity) and I still think there is a lot of value to trying to understand and capture interesting insights from the social justice movement, but I don’t think a real concerted effort do do this is possible until things relax a bit.
If someone can think of reasonable ways to verify whether the cultural toxicity of the SJ fight has ‘moved on’ I would be willing to make a public prediction that it will have done so in five years. Maybe some kind of random sample of twitter fights? Or a survey of leftist tumblr?

Darkar Dengeno 18 Nov 2019 22:47 UTC
1 point
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Steelmanning social justice
Given that politics is problematic it’s worthwhile to discourage people from posting low quality political posts on LessWrong
I did not say “low quality” and I do not think this post is low quality. I think it is of middling quality, around what I would expect an average LessWrong member to be capable of writing. It is less specific than I would like and I think overreaches in the amount the key insight is able to explain but there is a key insight. One I found useful and novel and well constructed.
Further, while it would be very bad to have LessWrong become solely about politics, looking at the front page there are very few posts with a political focus. Politics is a part of our world and if we cannot discuss it then that is a weakness in our epistemology. If we strongly discourage mid-quality posts that deal with political topics then it could have an intellectual chilling effect.
That said, the post has positive karma right now and while it’s not quite where I would place it, it’s within a range that I would expect to see for most posts like this so I am no longer as terrified as I was that LessWrong had suddenly caught groupthink.

Darkar Dengeno 18 Nov 2019 22:34 UTC
1 point
in reply to: at_the_zoo’s comment on: Steelmanning social justice
All math, world languages, and all visual and performing arts courses should have an ethnic studies equivalent.
Ah, I think you’re right. It seems like they want an “ethnic studies” version of everything and students have to take at least one ethnic studies course per year. I’m not a huge fan of that and it seems like it is taking some well-deserved criticism.
Looking at this presentation through the lens of the original post, it seems like what the Ethnic Studies Board is trying to do is create safe spaces and reduce perceived harms against minorities (hence, I think, why they want to make sure there’s an “ethnic studies” version of every core class: so that the people they feel will best benefit from this curriculum can use it for their entire high school education).
I’m not sure they have fully considered the consequences of doing this (especially opportunity cost: all the class time spent on “ethnic studies” math is time not spent on, well, math) but I see no objection with the goal of providing minority students with a curriculum which will fit them better, in and of itself.
This is an interesting discussion which touches on education philosophy (how do we know the curriculum the Ethnic Studies Board has produced actually accomplishes its goals?), optimal resource allocation, language, culture, and (yes) race. But it is not a discussion we can have if seeing the phrase, “countering dominant narratives” makes the participants blind to anything else there.

Darkar Dengeno 18 Nov 2019 21:21 UTC
1 point
in reply to: at_the_zoo’s comment on: Steelmanning social justice
Right, so, a few things:
The curriculum isn’t mandatory
There is a huge difference in my mind between forcing teachers to adopt a specific curriculum with political implications and providing them the resources to include political topics as they see fit.
I’ll admit, looking over the framework itself feels pretty icky. There are a few things I like about it, though.
SWBAT identify ancient mathematicians and their contributions to mathematics
I’ve long felt that more history of mathematics should be included in math curriculum (for much the same reason as history of science should be included). Seeing how our understanding of math as changed as new concepts were invented makes it feel more like a living process (off the top of my head, you could probably get a lot of mileage out of just looking at how the conception of numbers changed from the Greece to Rome to India).
Who holds power in a mathematical classroom? Is there a place for power and authority in the math classroom? Who gets to say if an answer is right? What is the process for verifying the truth?
This is practically proto-rationalism. Getting kids to question why things are accepted as the correct answer (‘because that’s what the book says’ vs ‘because I can prove it given ZFC axioms’) and understand that there is a way they can see for themselves if something is true.
How is math manipulated to allow inequality and oppression to persist?
I didn’t say the framework was perfect. This is just one example of clear progressive-coded language and yeah, I have a hard time defending why this ought to be in a math curriculum.
Going back to my earlier point, though, Christian-advocacy groups do sometimes try to get evolution taken out of public schools (or have creationism taught alongside evolution as an equivalent ‘theory’). I’m not saying that it never happens or that there aren’t extremists or that no effort should be put into wacking back insanity. But trying to paint evolution vs creation as the most important debate ever feels silly now. And more than that, for people who think religion vs atheism is the most important fight ever, trying to get one side to recognize good arguments on the other is like pulling teeth.
Politics is the mind-killer. The fact that, as I write this, a reasonable-if-flawed attempted steelmanning of an ideology that the LessWrong community has decided is on the other side is sitting at ~minus 5 karma~ (ninja edit: +5 now, it seems to be fluctuating a lot, so reduce the intensity of this) should be considered shameful. I grow ever more afraid that LessWrong is just one more community that can tolerate anything except the outgroup.

Darkar Dengeno 18 Nov 2019 17:33 UTC
1 point
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Steelmanning social justice
It might be that nobody gets a degree in education without professing allegiance to SJ and those teachers then go to bring SJ into all the subject at school.
This sounds unlikely, uncharitable, and frankly more than a little conspiratorial. I’m not even sure if this is something most social justice advocates would even want.
What comes next might be a version that’s even more radical.
I would not consider this an actual paradigm shift in the way the atheism->SJ shift occurred and I do not think it will actually happen.
My model of culture wars is that they are fought over large ideological fronts. Atheism was a front line, now it is not. Scott proposed a view in which that front line moved over the ideological space centered around identity and culture and became the social justice conflict. If this model is correct then that front line can move again but it can’t move to social justice because it’s already there. If this happens, people could still argue about SJ topics and think they’re important (just like people still argue about atheism now) but it also means people can discuss these things intelligently without the discussion devolving.
I’d encourage you to take an outside view here and consider how plausible it would sound for an atheist arguing in 2004 that atheism vs religion was going to be the most important cultural topic forever and that the reason for this was that theists were just so backwards and extreme they would keep upping the fight until faith pledges became mandatory in public schools and everyone would be forced to read the Bible instead of studying biology.

Darkar Dengeno 18 Nov 2019 16:19 UTC
2 points
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Steelmanning social justice
Where do we go from here? I’m not sure. The socialist wing of the Democratic Party seems to be working off a model kind of like this, but hoping to change the hamartiology from race/gender to class. Maybe they’ll succeed, and one day talking too much about racism will seem as out-of-touch as talking too much about atheism does now; maybe the rise of terms like “woke capitalism” is already part of this process.
This is what I was referencing, I think it is unlikely social justice will remain the political center it has been for the last decade or so forever and socialism seems like a plausible ‘next step’ (though I wouldn’t place much confidence on this).
That movement has social dynamics that drive people to take more extreme positions and not express dissent that don’t exist in the same way in New Atheism.
I’m not sure this is true; New Atheism hit its peak before I was really active online but I don’t think arguments like “religion may be false and harmful in some cases but it also has certain benefits to individuals and society that it would be foolish to ignore” would have gone over well in atheist communities, nor would “most modern organized religions downplay the harm they have caused historically and honestly dealing with those harms, both historical and modern, is a weak-point for many followers, even highly educated ones” have been met with much generosity in religious communities.
I cannot personally judge whether the atheism/religion flame wars were as toxic as the social justice/alt-right wars are today and I would not be shocked to learn that things really are worse now and that this conflict is stickier memetically, but I would be very surprised if this were the last political conflict ever. Something has to come next. In fact, I’d put ~75% odds that by 2025 it will seem odd that so much emphasis was put on social justice during this decade (although I’m not sure how one would judge this fairly).

Darkar Dengeno 17 Nov 2019 22:35 UTC
6 points
on: Steelmanning social justice
I’d like to thank you for writing this up. I have a strong intuition that many of the ideas central to social justice would work well alongside the rationalist movement if it were less politically charged. Maybe if Scott Alexander’s thesis about New Atheism transforming into Social Justice is correct (and the corollary that a new hamartiology will show up soon and take its place) then it is plausible social justice ideology will become less toxic and more amenable to an approach at the object-level (which is where I think we excel).
I am not sure this model is complete; in another comment, Wei_Dai points out that much of the social justice movement is centered around social inequalities, and your frame of “reducing suffering that can cause from predicted harms” doesn’t seem to exactly hit on the problems systemic inequality can cause (such harms are often relatively easy to measure, even if not as straightforward to correct).
Social justice, as I currently understand it, is at least partially about reducing freedom in order to increase safety.
This makes sense to me. My model of a social justice advocate would argue that threats to safety are also threats to freedom: if someone does not feel safe in their environment then the range of actions they can de facto pursue is reduced even if they are technically permissible. In either case, my suspicion and the underlying assumption that good-faith social justice advocates must believe: social Pareto improvements exist.

Darkar Dengeno 7 Oct 2019 17:32 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Zack_M_Davis’s comment on: Are there technical/object-level fields that make sense to recruit to LessWrong?
Hmm, that might be worth exploring. Thanks

Darkar Dengeno 7 Oct 2019 17:13 UTC
1 point
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Are there technical/object-level fields that make sense to recruit to LessWrong?
It was, as I admitted, a mistake. I was being inexact as it was not critical for my central point, if it was I would have looked it up, failed to find it, and adjusted my approach (or more likely, left out IQ altogether). I’m unsure what continuing to belabor this accomplishes aside from chastising me for insufficiently respecting numbers.

Darkar Dengeno 7 Oct 2019 16:47 UTC
2 points
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Are there technical/object-level fields that make sense to recruit to LessWrong?
Amusingly, the article you linked redirected to a different article which seems to reinforce your first point and I think helped clarify for me the exact dynamics of the situation. The author defends Dr. Littman’s paper on what she terms ‘rapid-onset gender dysphoria’ against the heavy backlash it received (mostly on twitter, it seems) and especially Harvard’s response to that backlash.
I find it difficult to imagine that healthy academic discourse could take place in an environment that conflict-heavy. Critically, this does not require the field itself to be nonsense but rather so deeply joined to the social justice culture war that the normal apparatuses of academia are hijacked.
This has raised my estimation of the risk of inviting gender studies researchers to participate in discussions on LW significantly, especially since as you point out, that risk runs in both directions.
There may still be ideas worth salvaging from the gender studies community and I’m really curious at what a ‘rationalist gender studies’ field looks like but the risk does look salient enough it may not be worth the effort.
You lost your meeting room because you were discussing (what I assume to be) politically sensitive topics. I think we’d agree that intellectual progress halts when important topics become too charged to touch and I don’t want feminism to become like that in the rationalist sphere.
But rationalist sphere != LessWrong and perhaps this isn’t the right place for progress in that area to happen. You bring up the differing approaches of SSC and LW and I actually quite like SSC’s approach of high-discussion-norms while not shying from sensitive topics, but you’re not wrong about paying a price for that.
So now I’m left wondering, if not here, then where? Where could rational-adjacent people sanely interact with feminists and sociologists and others in ‘challenging’ fields and what would the discussion there have to look like to keep people safe?
The answer might be ‘nowhere’. This could be a fundamentally irreconcilable difference and if that’s the case then I will be sad about it and move on. I don’t think I have enough evidence to conclude this yet, but I will concede that is this place does exist, LessWrong probably isn’t it.

Darkar Dengeno 7 Oct 2019 1:35 UTC
2 points
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Are there technical/object-level fields that make sense to recruit to LessWrong?
This is a stronger case than the one Anderson made, I think, and it is one I take seriously (which is why I plan to approach this problem by reading material first to see what the landscape is actually like).
Any field that has dogma’s that aren’t allowed to be publicly debated has a problem with the kind of open discussion we are having here.
I agree with this statement, but the question is whether modern gender studies is actually such a field. Trying to make bold claims about the quality of academic discussion in a field neither I nor my conversation partner has actually investigated seriously strikes me as a futile exercise. I think it’s probably a bad idea to judge the quality of academic feminism by the merits of tumblr or ‘pop’ feminism in the same way it would be unfair to judge skeptic movements by the intellectual standards of r/atheism.
I’m also deeply skeptical of the idea that inviting feminists to participate in discussion would lead to an opening of the hellgates. LessWrong is a community that has examined infohazards and sees participants from a wide variety of political backgrounds including many that are considered extreme by most people, so my prior is that we’re better than most communities at managing political discord in a sane way.

Darkar Dengeno 7 Oct 2019 1:19 UTC
2 points
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Are there technical/object-level fields that make sense to recruit to LessWrong?
I agree, that was a confused point for me to make that didn’t advance my main argument. The initial claim Anderson made was that the field of gender studies advocated total social determination of all observed differences between genders, I argued that this was not the case and provided an instance of a gender communications researcher discussing the biological influences on gendered behavior.
The point about IQ was a half remembered factoid from a metastudy I read a while back and I’ve been unable to find subsequently so it’s likely misremembered. It’s irrelevant to the discussion though, I think.

Darkar Dengeno 26 Sep 2019 14:47 UTC
10 points
in reply to: Stuart Anderson’s comment on: Are there technical/object-level fields that make sense to recruit to LessWrong?
I’m afraid that’s the case.
Alright, a different angle then. If we did find some academic feminists or gender studies researchers who were willing to engage in good faith, serious discussion without trying to be activist or throwing around accusations of -isms or -phobics, would you object to their presence in the community? The hostility you’ve shown towards an entire field is something I find deeply concerning.
Perhaps you and I just have fundamentally different approaches towards outgroups since I honestly cannot think of a single group I would treat the way you’ve been treating feminists in this discussion.
New age pagans, reactionaries, anarchists, neoliberals, small-c-conservatives, and even the alt-right; I consider these to be among my outgroups and I could make major criticisms of their core philosophies as well as how they generally conduct themselves in discourse. But if a member of any one of them actually wanted to engage me in a real discussion in good faith I would take them up on it (time permitting, of course) and if they brought up evidence I had overlooked or perspectives I hadn’t considered then I would gladly update my views in response.
It’s very simple: if you are a real academic you spend your time savaging your own ideas until you cannot assail them further, and then you put them out there for your peers to do exactly the same in ways you hadn’t considered.
This is pretty close to my entire ethos; it’s the reason I became a rationalist in the first place and the reason I think the rationalist community has a chance to help the world where so many ‘grand vision’ movements have failed. But we have to be willing, no, eager, to engage our ideological opponents and take from them what value we can.
When I see you repeating antifeminist talking points and taking a dramatically uncharitable view of a huge academic field and political movement (and yes, I am bothered by the extent to which those two overlap) which seems to be informed by their most vitriolic and toxic members (and yes, the more moderate members seem to do frustratingly little to reign in their extremist counterparts) what I keep thinking is: we’re supposed to be better than this.
good luck getting them to sit down to talk with people that don’t believe exactly the same thing they do.
I’ve decided to interpret this as genuine. Throughout this whole conversation I’ve been annoyed at you for not engaging with what gender studies scholars actually believe, but my exposure to their ideas has basically been Wikipedia, some mild googling, and popular media. We’ve been going back and forth about whether feminists can argue coherently and in good faith and whether the field of gender studies is suitably rigorous but I’m only just now realizing the best way to resolve the question is to read some of their stuff critically and form my own opinions.
I’ve got a hypothesis that feminist social theory could be a helpful addition to the ever-growing rationalist canon and a way to test that just by doing a little reading. I’ll let you know if it turns out you were right all along.

Darkar Dengeno 25 Sep 2019 14:36 UTC
10 points
in reply to: Stuart Anderson’s comment on: Are there technical/object-level fields that make sense to recruit to LessWrong?
I contest that those are not actually claims made by sociologists. Or if they are, they are minority opinions (in which case there would be other sociologists debunking them).
As a test, if you provide links to sociologists (or academic feminists/gender studies researchers) making each of those claims I will try to find others within the same field arguing against them.

Darkar Dengeno 25 Sep 2019 14:31 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Stuart Anderson’s comment on: Are there technical/object-level fields that make sense to recruit to LessWrong?
Are you claiming that none of the differences between men and women are cultural? To me, that seems as obviously incorrect as saying all of them are. Not to go all ‘fallacy of the grey’ here but this really does seem to be an issue where both sides are a major influence. IQ is around 50% heritable, the other 50% also matters, though.
My view is that if we accept both biological and cultural influences on behavior then behavioral geneticists, neurologists, evolutionary psychologists, etc. focus their effort on the biological side and sociologists and academic feminists focus on the cultural side. Can you not see how, at least in theory, this is an interesting dynamic? Even if it were the case that all academic feminists think all observed social differences between men and women come from social causes (which, again, I think is a weakman argument) can’t you see that there’s something worth investigating there?
There is a fascinating feedback loop between biology and culture and the ways in which (mostly) static biological realities are interpreted culturally in many different ways and how this can shape the lives of people living within that culture are varied and difficult to describe simply. One of the things that I love so much about the rationalist community is their daring attempts to tackle really challenging issues in a clear manner. Things like the Human’s Guide to Words sequence or SSC’s Categories post take a look at the nuance and complexity of language and culture and make an honest, and in my view surprisingly successful, attempt to pull coherent, useful models out of the mud. I think we should do this for more stuff and I think gender is one of the issues that could really use a nice, demystifying treatment.
And when I ask myself where I might find people who could help with this ‘demystify gender’ project, I recall that there is an entire field of study that deals with this topic specifically. Even if there’s a bunch of crap coming out of that field, hell, even if 95% of it is people trying to find ways to confuse the issue harder or just trying to score political points, surely there’s clear-thinking people in there somewhere, right? There are people who went to school to study this stuff because they found it interesting in the same way some people find probability theory or linguistics interesting.
I’m not saying we should open the floodgates to every tumblr feminist with a grudge, but do you really think that trying to find open-minded gender studies researchers who would be willing to engage in adversarial collaboration would be such a terrible idea? Do you really take such an uncharitable view of the field you can’t imagine any usable work coming out of it?

Darkar Dengeno 23 Sep 2019 16:19 UTC
9 points
in reply to: Stuart Anderson’s comment on: Are there technical/object-level fields that make sense to recruit to LessWrong?
the second you step into the sociology department you’re not only expected to ignore that, you’re expected to deny it and attribute it to *oppression* without a single shred of supporting evidence.
To be perfectly honest, I’ve never stepped into a sociology department except to take classes that happened to be scheduled in the sociology building. The closest I’ve studied to sociology or gender studies in a formal setting was an introductory folklore course.
That being said, your statement sounds concerningly weakmanish, like the sort of criticism one would level at a field is one’s only experience with it were extremists and people complaining about the extremists. After some googling I found an article in the Huffington Post by Dr. Carol Morgan, who has a PhD in Gender Communication, that references the nature vs nurture debate (and provides anecdotal evidence on the nature side for the author’s sons’ gender identities).
the big “Nature vs. Nurture” debate in gender. In other words, why are males and females so different? No one can deny that both are at work. We are simply born with different bodies, different hormones, and quite literally, different brains. So there is a strong argument for the “nature” side of the debate.
This does not sound like a paragraph that would come out of a field that has decisively settled on ‘nurture’. I think the extent to which gender behaviors are biologically determined is still quite hotly debated within gender studies and the closest to a consensus view I can find is “they both play a role but people tend to naively overestimate the position of nature”.
Perhaps you should reevaluate what gender studies researchers actually believe?

Darkar Dengeno 16 Sep 2019 14:27 UTC
8 points
in reply to: Stuart Anderson’s comment on: Are there technical/object-level fields that make sense to recruit to LessWrong?
I understand and to largely share your concerns. Theoretically, there’s a distinction between academic and activist gender studies and while the latter probably has almost nothing to offer and would likely just cause toxicity even if acting in good faith the former might have more value. I am not confident about the degree to which this distinction between academic study and activist action exists in actual fact, though.
>This is a discipline that can only exist by the deliberate denial of the medical and psychological fields and all the reproducible experimental data of said fields.
I’m not sure that this is true. The fundamental idea that ‘gender’ is an interesting concept that interacts with culture and biology in sometimes surprising ways seems valid, so saying that there is _no way_ gender studies can exist as a field without ignoring medical facts strikes me as a much stronger statement than I’m comfortable with.
As much as there is a reading of gender studies that is opposed to science and rigour, I think there is a reading that paints modern gender studies and ‘LGBTism’ as a surprisingly rational movement, as it injects nuance (consider the distinction they make between biological sex and psychological gender) and has neat transhumanist themes (the LGBT biohacker movement is really interesting and is actually what made me consider any of this as being worth a second glance, check out Ada Powers on twitter for the sort of thing I’m talking about here).
Gender studies has been a source of a lot of toxicity and its interactions with the rationalist community have not been a source for a lot of hope (I’m familiar with Scotts Alexander and Aaronson’s difficulties with feminist activists in the past) but I suspect/hope that there are _individual scholars_ in the field who try to avoid toxicity and apply whatever rigour they can to their work and that by finding and reaching out to these people we might begin development of a more rationalist-friendly gender studies with higher norms for outgroup tolerance and evidence.
Again, I’m not super confident in this and I think there is a decent chance that this will wind up being pointless but it still seems worth spending a little time investigating.

Darkar Dengeno 15 Sep 2019 23:05 UTC
5 points
on: Are there technical/object-level fields that make sense to recruit to LessWrong?
I’d make an argument for ‘soft-sciences’ and humanities. Philosophy, cultural anthropology, history, political science, sociology, literature, and maybe even gender studies. Computer science, mathematics, economics, and other STEM-heavy fields are already pretty well represented within the current LW community.
The focus on group rationality and developing a thriving community seems like it could benefit from the expertise these fields bring to the table. This might also reduce the amount of ‘reinventing the wheel’ that goes on (which I don’t necessarily think is a bad thing but also consumes scarce cognitive resources).
Further, I think there’s a case to be made that a lot of the goals of the rationalist movement could be furthered by strengthening connections to serious academic fields that are less likely to come into memetic contact with rationalist ideas. If nothing else, it would probably help raise the sanity waterline.

Darkar Dengeno 22 Feb 2019 16:18 UTC
9 points
on: If a “Kickstarter for Inadequate Equlibria” was built, do you have a concrete inadequate equilibrium to fix?
Perhaps we need a list of inadequate equilibria. I’ve thought before it could be interesting to have some curated set of (ideally well-researched and discussed) ‘hey this thing is dumb’. Things like higher education cost disease, paywalled scientific journals, first-past-the-post voting in democratic elections, etc. Even if we don’t have coherent solutions yet, it would be good to be able to easily see the scope.