jbeshir

Karma: 205

jbeshir 24 Dec 2012 2:51 UTC
3 points
in reply to: gjm’s comment on: New censorship: against hypothetical violence against identifiable people
I think in this context, “asking about” might include raising for neutral discussion without drawing moral judgements.

The connection I see between them is that if someone starts neutral discussion about a possible action, actions which would reasonably be classified as advocacy have to be permitted if the discussion is going to progress smoothly. We can’t discuss whether some action is good or bad without letting people put forward arguments that it is good.

jbeshir 24 Dec 2012 1:47 UTC
2 points
in reply to: wedrifid’s comment on: New censorship: against hypothetical violence against identifiable people
I think that a discussion in which only most people are mindkilled can still be a fairly productive one on these questions in the LW format. LW is actually one of the few places where you would get some people who aren’t mindkilled, so I think it is actually good that it achieves this much.

They seem fairly ancillary tor LW as a place for improving instrumental or epistemic rationality, though. If you think testing the extreme cases of your models of your own decision-making is likely to result in practical improvements in your thinking, or just want to test yourself on difficult questions, these things seem like they might be a bit helpful, but I’m comfortable with them being censored as a side effect of a policy with useful effects.

jbeshir 14 Nov 2012 11:31 UTC
2 points
in reply to: wedrifid’s comment on: Open Thread, November 1-15, 2012
Ah, I see. That makes sense. They weren’t actually asked to remove the whole of the quoting, just to remove some unrelated lines, which has been complied with, so there’s no unimplemented requests as far as I know.

Of course, it might just have not asked for because having it pulled at this point could cause a worse mess than leaving it up, with more reputation damage. Some third party moderator could request it to avoid that issue, but I think at this point the horse is long gone and going to the work of closing the barn door might not be worth it.

It’d be reasonable for a hypothetical moderator taking an appropriate action to request they replace the whole thing with a summary, though; that makes sense.

jbeshir 14 Nov 2012 7:55 UTC
9 points
in reply to: wedrifid’s comment on: Open Thread, November 1-15, 2012
Quoting without permission was clearly a mistake, but describing it as a “rather clear privacy agreement” is not particularly apt; Freenode policy on this is written as strong advice rather than “rules” as such, and the channel itself had no clear policy. As it was, it was mostly a social convention violation. I thus have to disagree that an indefinite ban for ignorance of advice or an unwritten policy would be an appropriate or optimum response. What’s happened so far- the person being corrected quite sharply here and on the channel, and a clear privacy agreement added to the IRC channel topic for next time- seems like a reasonable remedy.

More specifically, the Freenode policy item in question is entitled “If you’re considering publishing channel logs, think it through.”, the section on constant public logging by the channel staff says “should” throughout, and the bit at the end about quoting publicly as a user ends with “Avoid the temptation to publish or distribute logs without permission in order to portray someone in a bad light. The reputation you save will most likely be your own.” rather than stating that it is actually a violation of anything in particular.

What is fairly solid Freenode policy, though, is that unofficial channels of things have to use the ## format, and # format is reserved for generally official project channels. I don’t know if the Less Wrong site admins and #lesswrong admins overlap, but if hypothetically Less Wrong wanted to disaffiliate #lesswrong, it is actually entirely possible for Less Wrong administrators to force #lesswrong to, at the least, migrate to ##lesswrong or a different IRC network.

As a #lesswrong user since I started reading the Sequences originally, though, I don’t think this is a good idea. Having a real-time discussion channel is a nice thing for those that benefit from it. The IRC channel, listed on the wiki, was the first place I gravitated towards for discussing LW stuff, preferring it to comments. It is fairly Less Wrong focused; links to and discussions of Less Wrong posts are the key focus, even with a lot of other interesting conversations, evaluations, thoughts, etc, perhaps having more actual conversation time. What you remember as having bled over is unrepresentative, I feel.

jbeshir 14 Nov 2012 0:56 UTC
8 points
0
in reply to: Shmi’s comment on: Open Thread, November 1-15, 2012

“The morally (and socially) appropriate thing to do” would be to learn the difference between a chat and a public forum before jumping to hasty conclusions.

The conclusions drawn, while erroneous, were erroneous for reasons unrelated to the difference between an IRC channel and a public forum. They were not wrong to think that they were being insulted because they were wrong to post logs. Strongly establishing that they made an error in quoting from the channel here does not establish that their issue is groundless.

Conflation of issues like this is exactly why it is normally a faux pas to mention errors by a person unrelated to their complaint when responding to it, and bring them up separately.

Edit: To be more specific about the conflation I’m pointing at… the “hasty conclusions” they came to are not made less plausible by knowing about the “difference between a chat and a public forum”. Knowing that quoting is not socially normal does not make the conclusion “the things said were serious insults and there are unfriendly social norms here” less likely. That lack of knowledge thus does not invalidate the conclusion, or the presence of issues or mistakes leading them to that conclusion.

Edit 2: And to be more specific about why this matters… it’s a claim which doesn’t actually make any sense which is a snappy comeback. It’s not actually a rebuttal to what it’s replying to, because they don’t conflict, seeing as they’re talking about moral/socially correct actions for different people, but it takes the form of one, carrying negative signals about what it replies to which it doesn’t actually justify. It also conveys substantial negative connotations towards the person complaining, and rhetoric running people down isn’t nice. It not making sense is a thing which should be noticed, so it can be deliberately discounted.

jbeshir 14 Nov 2012 0:46 UTC
14 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Open Thread, November 1-15, 2012

This is just so utterly over the top I’m mystified that it was taken as anything but ritual insulting for the purpose of bonding/hazing in an informal group.

You’ve been lucky to avoid seeing jokes like this more often when moving around the Internet, then. Over the top jokes at the expense of minority groups are popular when representing actual opinions, not just as jokes to people you already know, particularly in communities where those opinions are accepted norms and the group in question is an acceptable target. The desire to score points often leads to gross caricatures of such acceptable targets being thrown around. It’s repugnant, but not that unusual. I’ve seen plenty of worse things said about gay people when trawling things.

To anyone who knows that these opinions aren’t actually accepted norms, from time spent in #lesswrong, they’re obvious jokes. But for a fairly new arrival, in the absence of this knowledge, and possibly with more experience of genuinely unpleasant communities, it’s not an unreasonable interpretation.

jbeshir 14 Nov 2012 0:22 UTC
12 points
in reply to: Shmi’s comment on: Open Thread, November 1-15, 2012
It’s true that with all the information available now, a simple private message would have cleared it up. It’s also true, though, that with all the information available now, simply not saying those specific lines would have avoided the whole issue in the first place. It was not realistic to expect either party to have known that at the time.

It isn’t reasonable to expect someone who feels they have been insulted, and who has already responded in public with complaints like “what a disgusting thing to say”, and observed everyone fail to care, to go PM the person- the very high status person- with a direct complaint. As far as they’re concerned, they already tried complaining and the person didn’t care. There would be no reason for them to expect this to be productive, and it would likely feel very intimidating. No one in the channel seemed a reasonable source for help; the operators were presumably fine with it, gwern being one of them.

Considering the situation myself, with the knowledge that one would actually have in the situation, the only reasonable alternative to asking for help on Less Wrong itself is leaving the channel, and we should be glad they didn’t take that option, because if they did, we not only lose them, but never know why, and lose the chance to reduce the odds of this happening in future.

And as far as gwern was concerned, he was just joking and startling was playing along. He didn’t recognise that this was actual offence at the time, and that’s not something he can be blamed for either. Double illusion of transparency never stopped being a thing.

This mess did not arise because either party was an idiot, and advice and reactions to it are going to need to be more complex than “should have just done the obvious thing, stupid”. There are some good results already. The clarification to those around now that the people in the channel do not collectively-or-in-general endorse the views, which were originally said as a joke, is at the least a good thing. This should also at least result in some updating on the probable meaning of other people’s responses.

Avoiding misunderstandings like this happening again is not an easy problem. To an extent I’d expect events like this to be an ongoing cost of operating a community where jokes of that nature are accepted. One shouldn’t expect moderation policy debates to be one-sided. But I think we can do better. The ombudsman idea is interesting. Another is anyone in the channel saying something which clarifies the situation when someone seems like they might be insulted; I feel kinda guilty for not doing this myself when the first quoted event happened (I’m Namegduf there), since I was around at the time and talked to at least one other person who was genuinely bothered by it. There’s useful discussion to be had there.

jbeshir 11 Nov 2012 0:52 UTC
16 points
in reply to: Douglas_Knight’s comment on: Open Thread, November 1-15, 2012

No one has ever prefaced such a statement with “for your purposes.” There is a reason for that.

It actually occurs fairly often. A good reason to prefix such a statement with “for your purposes”, is to indicate that modelling a statement as true is effective for achieving your purposes, without getting into a more complex discussion of whether it actually is true or not.

For example, “for your purposes, the movement of objects is described by Newtonian physics”. The statement after “for your purposes” is ill-defined (what exactly does ‘described’ mean?) as an actual claim about the universe, but the sentence as a whole is a useful empirical and falsifiable statement, saying that you can assume Newtonian physics are accurate enough for whatever you’re currently doing.

As a second example, it might be true to say to an individual walker arriving at a bridge, “for your purposes, the bridge is safe to walk over”, while for the purposes of a parade organiser, they cannot simply model the bridge as safe to walk over, but may need to consider weight tolerances and think in terms of more precise statements about what the bridge can support.

For your purposes as a human being in a typical situation who doesn’t want to signal negative things about and to any and all transgender people, you should behave in line with gender identity as innate. It is a reasonable piece of advice relating to social etiquette in this area.

It isn’t necessary to get into demonstrating the probable truth of this (including breaking down the definition of ‘innate’) to give this advice and the original quote decided to avoid starting that argument, which seems like a reasonable call.

Statements like this do make some assumptions about what your purposes are- in the bridge example I gave, the speaker is assuming the walker is not a parade organiser considering leading a parade over the bridge. Such assumptions and guesses about the audience’s purposes are unavoidable when giving advice, though, and this particular one seems quite reasonable. In no case do these assumptions “subjugate” you to make them correct.

jbeshir 4 Nov 2012 2:05 UTC
49 points
on: 2012 Less Wrong Census/Survey
Took the survey; doing all the extra tests for the last few extra questions was fairly interesting, not having done many personality tests or taken online IQ tests before.

jbeshir 7 Sep 2012 21:13 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Viliam_Bur’s comment on: Rationality Quotes September 2012
This is interesting, particularly the idea of comparing wage growth against welfare growth predicting success of “free money” welfare. I agree that it seems reasonably unlikely that a welfare system paying more than typical wages, without restrictions conflicting with the “detached from work” principle, would be sustainable, and identifying unsustainable trends in such systems seems like an interesting way to recognise where something is going to have to change, long-term.

I appreciate the clarification; it provides what I was missing in terms of evidence or reasoned probability estimates over narrative/untested model. I’m taking a hint from feedback that I likely still communicated this poorly, and will revise my approach in future.

Back on the topic of taking these ideas as principles, perhaps more practical near-term goals which provide a subset of the guarantee, like detaching availability of resources basic survival from the availability of work, might be more probably achievable. There are a wider range of options available for implementing these ideas, and of incentives/disincentives to avoid long-term use. An example which comes to mind is providing users with credit usable only to order basic supplies and basic food. My rough estimate is that it seems likely that something in this space could be designed to operate sustainably with only the technology we have now.

On the side, relating to generation Facebook, my model of the typical 16-22 year old today would predict that they’d like to be able to buy an iPad, go to movies, afford alcohol, drive a nice car, go on holidays, and eventually get most of the same goals previous generations sought, and that their friends will also want these things. At younger ages, I agree that parental pressure wouldn’t be typically classified as “peer pressure”, but I still think it likely to provide significant incentive to do school work; the parents can punish them by taking away their toys if they don’t, as effectively as for earlier generations. My model is only based on my personal experience, so mostly this is an example of anecdotal data leading to different untested models.

jbeshir 6 Sep 2012 20:49 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Viliam_Bur’s comment on: Rationality Quotes September 2012
It is true that in the long run, things could work out worse with a guarantee of sufficient food/supplies for everyone. I think, though, that this post answers the wrong question; the question to answer in order to compare consequences is how probable it is to be better or worse, and by what amounts. Showing that it “could” be worse merely answers the question “can I justify holding this belief” rather than the question “what belief should I hold”. The potential benefits of a world where people are guaranteed food seem quite high on the face of it, so it is a question well worth asking seriously… or would be if one were in a position to actually do anything about it, anyway.

Prisoners’ dilemmas amongst humans with reputation and social pressure effects do not reliably work out with consistent defection, and models of societies (and students*) can easily predict almost any result by varying the factors they model and how they do so, and so contribute very little evidence in the absence of other evidence that they generate accurate predictions.

The only reliable information that I am aware of is that we know that states making such guarantees can exist for multiple generations with no obvious signs of failure, at least with the right starting conditions, because we have such states existing in the world today. The welfare systems of some European countries have worked this way for quite a long time, and while some are doing poorly economically, others are doing comparably well.

I think that it is worth assessing the consequences of deciding to live by the idea of universal availability of supplies, but they are not so straightforwardly likely to be dire as this post suggests, requiring a longer analysis.

jbeshir 11 Jun 2012 6:55 UTC
1 point
in reply to: vi21maobk9vp’s comment on: Conspiracy Theories as Agency Fictions
The problem with this argument is that there are costs to causing things to happen via spreading misinformation; you’re essentially biasing other people doing expected utility evaluations by providing inaccurate data to them. People drawing conclusions based on inaccurate data would have other effects; in this example, some people would avoid flying, suffering additional costs. People are also likely to continue to support the goals the conspiracy theory pushes towards past the point that they actually would have the greater expected utility without the conspiracy theory’s influence on probability estimates, causing bad decisions later.

It’s possible that after factoring all this in, it could be worthwhile in some cases. But given the costs involved I think, prior to any deeper study of the situation, it would be more likely harmful than beneficial in this specific example.

jbeshir 9 Jun 2012 21:05 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Paul Crowley’s comment on: Conspiracy Theories as Agency Fictions
Looking at the press association example, I think that one problem here is that similar ideas are being blurred, and given a single probability instead of separate ones.

A lot of the theories involving press/politician association involve conspiracy to conceal specific, high impact information from the public, or similar levels of dysfunction of the media. Most of these are low probability (I can’t think of any counterexamples offhand); as far as I know either no or a very small percentage of such theories have been demonstrated as true over time.

Different theories involving association have different probabilities. The Leveson Inquiry is providing reasonably strong evidence for influence and close social connections, so the proposition that that existed would seem to have been fairly accurate.

I don’t know what exactly you heard described as a conspiracy theory, in the fairly large space of possible theories, but it seems to me that that example is a good case where it is important to review the evidence for, and recognise fallacies (including overestimation of the probability of agency) in a specific theory, rather than decide what classification of theory it falls into, and judge it based on whether theories in that classification are generally “conspiracy theories”.