While I appreciate the recommendation and understand why you recommended it after just now watching it on netflix, I honestly can’t get over this laugh track. How do people watch shows with laughs in the background like this? I find it not only extremely distracting but also a bit insulting to have the show give me a cue of when I should find things funny.
EricHerboso
Karma: 308
I can’t edit a poll, but obviously option 2 was meant to read “allow”, not “require”.
I’d like to second a change for so that all future posts are explicitly under whatever license is needed. The mission of LW involves outreach, and you can’t effectively conduct outreach if every time a book is published or a podcast is made every author has to be individually contacted for explicit permission.
How do others feel about making this change for all future submissions?
[pollid:376]
Others have already pointed to HN comments arguing that 23andme is mostly for novelty, but for those just skimming lw discussion that don’t want to wade through pages of material, I’ll highlight the strongest argument against taking 23andme seriously:
Recent research hints that 10% of ordinary healthy people have genes that we understand to be indicative of major disease. In other words, if these people bought 23andme’s service, they would receive results that would be extraordinarily distressing, even while being nonetheless healthy.
See the study in question. Relevant quote: “[O]ur current best mean estimates of ∼400 damaging variants and ∼2 bona fide disease mutations per individual [is an underestimate]”. (The study was brought to my attention by NPR. Note that I have not read the actual paper, but only listened to a news report on it and read the abstract.)
I see no reason to throw out their responses. They appear to just not be familiar with the terminology. To someone that does not know that “fair coin” is defined as having .5 probability for each side, they might envision it as a real physical coin that doesn’t have two heads.
Seriously? Are you sure you’ve been comparing good narrators to that TTS voice?
For me, a good narrator will win out in an overwhelming majority of cases where I can choose between TTS and a good narrator.
I assume there’s got to be a ground universe somewhere in the chain.
I’m not saying you’re wrong to think this is likely, but I don’t think this is as necessary a condition as some people are taking it to be. So long as each simulation is simulated from somewhere, there’s no reason why it can’t be the case that every simulator is also simulated. I can think of no reason why the universe would be like this, but I can also think of no reason why it can’t be that way.
Several months ago, another user offered to set up a fork of the reddit enhancement suite that could achieve this and other features for users interested in them, but the project never took off. Arguably, this is a poor way of solving the problem, because it requires opting in, and most users would continue to see the old look instead. But it would be better, perhaps, than doing nothing.
I get the impression that they already have years worth of demand lined up, and so investing in supply improvements will have far higher returns on their end.
I’d hate for this to be the reason why CFAR decides not to pursue putting out an online course on rationality. Even if demand really is as high as you say, doing an online course would dramatically increase the number of people able to go through the curriculum at all, which I assume would be good progress toward CFAR’s mission. Even if CFAR couldn’t fully take advantage of the extra demand for camps that this would drive, I still think Konkvistador & Wrongnesslessness’ idea is worthwhile for the organization.
I recently took the time to compile a list of my favorite philosophy podcasts and finally realized in the process that I spend a disproportionate amount of time on podcasts in general. However, since I’ve been pretty happy about how much time I spend on podcasts, I’m unsure if changes to my current behavior are warranted.
My current plan is to cut the bottom third of podcasts I prefer out and see how I feel. If it turns out that I’ll be just as content with only 2⁄3 of the time invested, that’ll definitely free up some time I can spend on other projects. But my prediction is that I’ll miss a lot of them and just end up re-adding them after a few weeks’ hiatus. I’ll guess I’ll find out in a month or two.
You’re correct; I was confusing the 80k pledge with the GWWC pledge. I retract all previous comments made in this thread on this point. Sorry for being stubborn earlier without rechecking the source.
Remember that the pledge is not to give money to GWWC; it’s a pledge to give to effective charities in general. So those who want to focus on just human will be giving only to human-based charities, while those who give to animal welfare charities will have their money spent on animal welfare.
Although I agree the pledge wording would be perhaps too deceptive, I do not agree that anyone would ever feel tricked, since they still individually choose where to send their money. Conservatives would probably give to the human welfare orgs GWWC recommends, while others would give to the animal welfare orgs EAA recommends.
To clarify I meant changing the pledge from:
“to donate 10% of their income to the charities that they believe will most effectively help people living in poverty”
to:
“to donate 10% of their income to the charities that they believe will most effectively help persons living in poverty”.
I don’t think the usage in this context is referring to the actors with the means and inclination to take altruistic action; the context instead is on those acted upon. (Of course, this is not a very good way of saying it, especially as there is ample evidence that money given directly to the poor in developing countries might be better than developed countries giving what they incorrectly think the poor need, but this is beside the point.)
When conservative people read “persons in poverty”, they will automatically think “humans living in poverty”, whereas those more familiar with the use of “person” being inclusive with non-humans might instead interpret “persons living in poverty” much more liberally. (I realize this is nonstandard usage of the term, but my intent here is to allow a liberal interpretation while maintaining specificity.)
It might be slightly deceptive (and thus not worth doing), but what about changing “people” to “persons”? Those who think about animal welfare more liberally would recognize “persons” as referring to both humans and non-humans, while those who are more conservative that GWWC is trying to reach will just automatically assume it means “people”.
I would prefer this to your reformulation of “do good” because it explicitly takes other types of “doing good” out of the equation. (Unless possibly there’s some reason why being more inclusive of “doing good” is worthwhile to use in such a pledge? It seems at first glance to me that specificity is important in pledges of this kind.)
I agree with the idea that EAA seems more likely to be more effective than 80k for the reasons you stated. However, I disagree that this is sufficient reason to encourage earmarking.
It’s true that I’d prefer to give to EAA directly, and the only way to do this currently is to write a check to the “Tides Foundation” and earmark it for EAA. But I think the far better way of doing this is for EAA to be separate not just from Tides, but also 80k (which has a confusingly distinct mission focused on careers and lifetime charitable donations, not animal welfare). Until they’re separate, I can see why earmarking is justified, but you said it should be encouraged, which is an entirely different thing. I would NOT encourage earmarking; I’d earmark regretfully, and only until they separate out the organizations so that I can donate toward the mission I consider to be genuinely more effective.
Actually, I think this is a technical problem they have, and should not be construed as a positive endorsement of earmarking. It looks like what they want are separate organizations (80k, GWWC), but the way their org is set up, they can only be tax deductible if you donate to the “Tides Foundation” instead.
Although technically this looks like earmarking, the intent seems to be that they wanted to have separate organizations with separate funding but have so far not actually separated them for the purposes of tax deductibility.
Ascribing a prior probability of zero for these claims is like saying we should ignore all previous evidence and start over from scratch. But this is inappropriate; there is a long history of “aliens on Earth”-type claims that have been made over the years, and they’ve all been shown to be insufficient. So when a new “aliens on Earth”-type claim arises (like your linked video, which I have not yet clicked on), it is entirely appropriate to assign it a low prior.
Quick correction:
(90%-30%)1/(3.5 million)($7 trillion) = $1.2 million
The beginning of this should be 90%-10%, which changes the projected value to $1.6 million, not $1.2 million.
I answered every question, and enjoyed doing so. Thank you for putting this together. (c:
Whether something is doable is irrelevant when it comes to determining whether it is right.
A separate question is what should we do, which is different from what is right. We should definitely do the most right thing we possibly can, but just because we can’t do something does not mean that it is any less right.
A real example: There’s nothing we can realistically do to stop much of the suffering undergone by wild animals through the predatory instinct. Yet the suffering of prey is very real and has ethical implications. Here we see something which has moral standing even though there appears to be nothing we can do to help the situation (beyond some trivial amount).