As I’m imagining this, it would not constitute accepting a tip unless the server or the restaurant keeps it. Ideally the server would notice before the customer was out the door and return the money to the customer. But surely that won’t always happen, especially in the transition. In that case, let the restaurant donate the money to a nonprofit.
River
Karma: 464
With regard to fixing tip culture, I think the solution is obvious. Make it illegal for a server to accept a tip. It probably looks bad to enforce this against individual servers, so enforce it at the restaurant level. Any restaurant where a server accepts a tip can get sued or fined or shut down by regulators or something. Frame it, accurately I think, as cracking down on fraudulent pricing practices.
With regard to the ERA, on a strict textualist reading of Article V (the one that talks about amendments), it is not crazy to think the ERA is valid. The constitution says that an amendment becomes part of the constitution when it is proposed by 2⁄3 of each house of congress, and ratified by ¾ of state legislatures. Those things happened. Nowhere in the constitution does it say that congress gets to add extra conditions like time limits. That said, the Supreme Court has long held that such time limits are valid and I see no reason that would or should change now.
As to why the archivist matters here, it’s a litigation thing. You need to name a defendant if you want to bring a case. You can’t sue the Supreme Court to ask them to declare the ERA part of the constitution. You can sue the Archivist of the United States for not listing it as part of the constitution. And several states did. That’s how the Archivist became a focus of this issue.Honestly, the thing that bothered me most about Biden’s comment was the hypocricy of it. He’s been the president for four years. He could have directed his DOJ to litigate in favor of recognizing the ERA as the 28th amendment at any time during his presidency. Not only did he not do that, his DOJ defended the Archivist’s decision not to include the ERA in the constitution when several states sued over the issue. State of Illinois v. David Ferriero (D.C. Cir. 2023). Changing your position just as you are leaving office is cheap.
I am quite glad to see that Lighthaven is on a path to financial sustainability, as I sometimes attend events there, and I am very much not looking to be subsidized by anyone’s charity. One clarifying question. The rough Lighthaven budget above has a line for “interest”. Am I correct in assume that that is the entire mortgage payment, both interest and principal, not just the interest? In other words, by successfully making the $1M payment each year, the amount you owe the bank is going down each year and will eventually hit zero?
“Agnostic” doesn’t necessarily mean “unknowable and not subject to testing”. Much more often it has the weaker meaning “not currently known”. There is a house being built across the street. Is there a work van parked in front of it right now? I don’t know. This is certainly knowable and subject to testing—I could get up, walk over to a window in the front of the house, and look. But I don’t care enough to do that, so I continue to now know if there is a work van parked in front of the house across the street. I am agnostic about the existence of such a work van.
For people who do test prep seriously (I used to be a full time tutor), this has been known for decades. One of the standard things I used to tell every student was if you have no idea what the answer is, guess B, because B is statistically most likely to be the correct answer. When I was in 10th grade (this was 2002), I didn’t have anything to gain by doing well on the math state standardized test, so I tested the theory that B is most likely to be correct. 38% of the answers on that test were in fact B.
> This is pretty weird. As far as we know, humans don’t tend to prefer choices labeled B, so we’re not sure where this could have come from in the training data. As humans, it initially didn’t even occur to us to look for it!Remember, LLMs aren’t modeling how a human reading text would process the text. LLMs are trying to model the patterns in the texts that are in the training data itself. In this case, that means they are doing something closer to imitating test writers than test takers. And it is well known that humans, including those who write tests, are bad at being random.
In the automatic response they told me that they expect to give me the decision before this deadline.
Contrary to the promise, I don’t get any response.There is an obvious disconnect here. A statement that someone “expects” to do something is not a promise, especially not when made in an automated response. If Igor misread this as a promise, and given that he has not provided exact quotes of the other alleged promises, it seems quite plausible that nobody ever promised anything, and that Igor was imprudent in re-arranging his life based on a pending grant application. If I’m right about that, then Igor has defamed EAIF by accusing them of “lies”.
Great post!
> a client can show me where they buried their dozen murder victims and I wouldn’t be allowed to tell a soul, even if an innocent person is sitting in prison for their crimes.For any Alaskan serial murderers reading this, do note that this does not apply to you. Your Alaskan attorney can breach attorney-client privilege to prevent an innocent person from going to jail. See Rule 1.6(b)(1)(C).
That’s it. You continue to refuse to engage with the argument that a norm against lawsuits is harmful. You presume that such a norm exists, to try to illegitimately shift the burden to me to show that it does not. Now you presume that lawsuits are more harmful than a norm against lawsuits, to again try to illegitimately shift the burden to me to show the reverse. Even if your position were sound, your argumentative tactics are dirty, and I will not continue to engage with them.
I am talking about the community norm of not using lawsuits to settle arguments (and, more generally, disputes that are… just about words, let’s say). It’s not exclusively a property of small communities—that’s my point.
Then you misunderstood what I was trying to point at when I brought up the distinction about the scale of a community. I was trying to point at the fact that when lawsuits occur, there is likely already too much negative feeling between the parties for them to enjoy direct interactions even in a small group context, and if there isn’t already, the lawsuit causes it. I was pointing to a fact about human psychology, which on a pragmatic level we need to arrange our social structures to deal with. I was not pointing to a norm about using libel lawsuits.
At this point, you’ve failed to engage with my point that having a norm against lawsuits is harmful, even though lawsuits themselves are also harmful. I’m guessing your case for having such a norm is that lawsuits are harmful, which is not something I dispute. Is there any more to say?
But the fact that we’ve not deviated from the behavior the norm would mandate, is evidence of the norm’s effective existence.
Negligible evidence, especially in comparison to the lack of any past discussion of such a norm. Your argument here is so bad, and your choice of language so ambiguous, that I have to question whether you are even arguing in good faith.
Can you articulate what exactly the property of small communities is that we are talking about, and what its benefits are? I still am not forming a coherent picture of what the heck you are talking about because, again, the thing I was trying to point to in making this distinction I think is inherently a property of small groups.
Are you seriously now claiming that all of society has a norm against lawsuits? I think that is just obviously wrong, particularly for the US. And the misappropriation of the more traditional “arguments get arguments, not bullets” is just astoundingly oblivious. Lawsuits are a kind of argument! They are an example of the thing we are supposed to do instead of bullets!
No, I cannot empirically observe that the rationalist community has operated by such a norm. I can empirically observe that I know of no instance where one rationalist has actually filed a libel suit against another, but this is much more likely to be due to either (1) my ignorance of such a suit, or (2) the low rate of actually filing libel lawsuits in society at large combined with the small size of the rationalist community. I know of no instance of a rationalist going to space either, but I’m pretty sure we don’t have a norm against it. I’d never heard anyone speak of such a norm until the NL drama. That is significant evidence that there is no such norm.
May I ask which city you live in?
I agree that these different sorts of communities exist along a continuum. What startles me is that you seem to think that the intimacy of the something of the smaller community can and should be scaled to the larger sort of community. To my mind, it is inherently a property of the small size. Trying to scale it sets of loud alarm bells. I’m not sure to what extent I endorse this, but possibly one way of summarizing the problems of overly controlling organizations like cults is that they try to take the intimacy or something of a small community and scale it.
I also strongly disagree with your presumption that we are talking about “Going from having [the understanding that we do not use libel suits within the community], to not having it”. I have never understood the rationalist community to have such a norm. From where I am sitting, Habryka is trying to create such a norm out of nothing, and I am not ok with that.
As I believe I have said already, I agree that libel suits, and law suits generally, can be damaging, and I certainly do not encourage anyone to use them. I’m just pointing out that having a norm against using lawsuits can be even more damaging.
A real court would apply complex rules of evidence, which sometimes involve balancing but often are more categorical. But yes, it’s a different notion of public interest than whatever one rando thinks is public interest.
I agree that there is a significant difference between cases where the accused knows the identity of the accuser and cases where they do not, and we should split our analysis.
In cases where the accused does not know the identity of the accuser, I think the accusations would necessarily be so vague that I wouldn’t update much on them, and I would hope other rationalists and EAs wouldn’t either, but clearly there is a significant contingent of people in these communities who do not share my epistemic scruples. Given that, I don’t know, seems a mess. But your rule that only the accused should share the identity of the accuser seems too absolute—surely accusers are sometimes in the wrong, and sometimes malicious, and in that case having their identities publicly known seems good. Yes that will result in some amount of social punishment, and if the accusations were false and malicious, then I think that is good.
The case where the accused does know the identity of the accuser is where my above logic about the accused appearing retaliatory would suggest it is better for a third party to name the accuser.
I think you are using an inapplicable definition of “community”. Your example of a D&D group calls to mind a “community” in the sense of “a group of single digit number of people who are in the same room socially interacting on a recurring basis.” In this sense of the word, neither EA nor rationality is a community. I agree that we should not expect Ben/Alice/Chloe to be in the same community with Kat/Emerson, for this narrow sense of community. And my assumption is that they weren’t on the day before Ben made his post. And that is fine.
There is a broader sense of the word “community”, which we might define as “an extended social network with shared identity and values”, which does apply to EA and rationality. I don’t see a reason why two people in a legal dispute shouldn’t be able to remain in this sort of community.
Why do you think that third parties shouldn’t name an accuser? If an accusation is being handled in the court of public opinion, presumably it is because the public has an interest in the truth of the matter, and therefor I would think that any member of the public who has relevant evidence ought to be able to present it. If the accusation depends on the credibility of the accuser, then the identity of the accuser seems like relevant evidence. If anything, I’d think the accused should be particularly hesitant to name the accuser, at least as a strategic matter, for fear of appearing retaliatory. Third parties, not being under that constraint, might be in a better position to name the accuser.
I find the general response to the threat of a libel suit to be deeply concerning. It is true that libel suits, and lawsuits generally, are expensive, time consuming, and generally unpleasant for everyone involved, including the victors. That is why I think NL ultimately made the right decision not to sue. That said, I also think that it is important not to use social pressure to discourage lawsuits. And I think we can all see this when we look at other communities from an outside perspective. When a community mistreats its members badly enough, it is important that the law be there as an escape hatch, and attempting to interfere with that by creating norms against lawsuits is therefor likely to be very harmful. The Amish famously will never seek recourse in the secular legal system, no matter how bad the wrong or what the circumstances are. Does anyone here admire this aspect of the Amish culture? Cults also famously use all kinds of pressure tactics to prevent members from seeking out the law. This is bad. We should not be like this. So when I see the way Habryka for example talks about the threat of a libel suit in this case, or Gwern, or a number of others, that sets off alarm bells for me. I don’t think Habryka is a cult leader right now, but I do think he is veering uncomfortably in that direction and I hope he changes course.
I did not know this. How long has this been around?
Still strikes me as a really bad idea to ignore the norms that actual financial markets have developed over centuries of experience, but I am curious if this will actually solve the problem of judges biased by having a position in their own markets.
I knew they did not prohibit it, but I am surprised they are actively encouraging it. In any real-money market, doing anything analogous would almost certainly be grossly illegal. I have significant restrictions on my real-life trading, and I just work at a company that sells information about the market, but doesn’t actually run it. I’ve found the practice of people betting in their own markets on manifold to predictably result in unfair resolutions, and so I do judge people who do it, and I judge more harshly if they don’t actively disclose the fact. I came to manifold on the expectation that it was trying to be like a real-money prediction market, and just couldn’t because of laws in the US. As I see them diverging more and more from the standards of real markets, I become more and more disappointed. But you do make a fair point that perhaps I should judge Manifold more than the market makers if they are actively encouraging such bad behavior.
I would were the judge not betting in the market. You really should be more upfront about that.
I agree that one could approach the issue that way. I don’t believe anyone is. One big reason not to do that, and not to support the ERA at this point in general, is that it is not at all obvious what “not abiding by the ERA” would even look like. The legal landscape has changed so much since it was initially proposed. Most importantly, since the ERA was proposed, the Supreme Court has interpreted the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment to prohibit most discrimination based on sex. I’m not sure what work the ERA is supposed to do that the 14th Amendment isn’t already doing. And since no court has ever recognized the ERA as part of the constitution, there is no case law to guide us in figuring out what it might mean.
So lets imagine that you are a lawyer, and a client comes to you and asks you to sue the government because, say, the government awarded a contract to her male competitor despite her obviously superior bid, and she thinks it was because of her sex. So you verify the facts as best you can and draft up a complaint (the legal document that initiates a lawsuit). After describing the facts and the basis of the court’s jurisdiction, you then have to tell the court which legal provisions you think the government violated. You could write “Count I − 28th Amendment”. But if that’s all you write, you will almost certainly have committed malpractice. There are much better things you can write, and it is your job as a competent lawyer to know about them and write them. You’re going to have to also write “Count II—Equal Protection Clause”, and maybe some more counts after that. And now you’ve given the judge an opportunity, which they will almost certainly take, to avoid deciding the validity of the ERA. Maybe the judge decides that you win on the basis of the Equal Protection Clause, in which case it is unnecessary for the judge to address the ERA at all. Or maybe the judge decides that you loose your Equal Protection Clause claim, and then they can write something like this: “the court assumes without deciding that the ERA is part of the constitution. In the absence of any authority to the contrary, the court chooses to apply the same standard, intermediate scrutiny, under the ERA as under the Equal Protection Clause. Plaintiff’s claims under the ERA therefor fail for the reasons already discussed.” And now you’ve spent years of your life, and your client has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars, litigating a case to get the ERA recognized as part of the constitution, and you have not gotten a ruling on whether the ERA is part of the constitution. Whereas if you sue the Archivist of the United States for not publishing the ERA as the 28th Amendment, then there really is no way for a judge to rule on the case without deciding whether the ERA is in fact the 28th Amendment. It’s the difference between giving a judge an opportunity to decide the issue, and putting them in a position where they must decide the issue.