lbThingrb

Karma: 229

lbThingrb Jul 24, 2018, 12:08 AM
2 points
in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: Who Wants The Job?
Apologies for the stark terms if it felt judgmental or degrading!
No worries! I mostly just wrote that comment for the lulz. And the rest was mostly so people wouldn’t think I was using humor to obliquely endorse social Darwinism.

lbThingrb Jul 22, 2018, 6:59 PM
1 point
in reply to: Gurkenglas’s comment on: Who Wants The Job?
I’ve never heard of anyone doing this directly. Has anyone else? If not, there’s probably a reason. I suppose occupational certification programs serve a similar filtering function. Anyway, your suggestion might be more palatable if it were in the form of a deposit refundable if and only if the applicant shows up/answers the phone for scheduled interviews. You would also need a trusted intermediary to hold the deposits, or else we would see a flood of fake job-interview-deposit scams. And even if you had such a trusted intermediary, I suspect that, in a world in which job-interview deposits were the norm, scammers would find all sorts of creative ways to impersonate that intermediary convincingly enough to fool a lot of desperate, marginally employable marks.
Also, the deposit would have to be quite small for low-wage entry-level jobs whose applicant pool would include a lot of people who can’t reliably scrounge up 20 bucks, and even then, some would be hindered by limited/expensive access to basic financial services like checking accounts and electronic payments. Maybe those are mostly people you’re trying to filter out? Then again, who is the ideal applicant, from the minimum-wage employer’s perspective? Someone reliable and competent, of course, but also someone who really needs the money, and so will be highly motivated. So, someone who wouldn’t normally be desperately poor, but happens to be at the moment. Maybe access to those applicants is worth enough to some employers that they’re willing to pay the price of similar-looking applicants flaking on their interviews and such.

lbThingrb Jul 22, 2018, 5:58 PM
10 points
in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: Who Wants The Job?
It’s really unclear, as a society, how to get them into a position where they can provide as much value as the resources they take.
Harvest their reusable organs, and melt down what remains to make a nutrient paste suitable for livestock and the working poor?
(Kidding! But that sort of thing is always where my mind wanders when people put the question in such stark terms, perhaps because I myself am a chronically unemployed “taker” (mental illness). Anyway, one of the long-term goals of AI and automation research, as I understand it, is to turn everyone into takers (“full unemployment”). Meanwhile, one of the long-term goals of transhumanism is to be able to cure all of the various disorders and disabilities that render a large fraction of currently umemployed people unemployable. Until at least one of those goals is achieved, we will continue to have an unemployable underclass. I guess progress towards the transhumanist goal, or better public policy, could make that underclass smaller, but right now more people seem to be worrying about progress on the AI/automation front making it larger.)

lbThingrb Jul 22, 2018, 5:24 PM
1 point
on: Who Wants The Job?
I’m curious if anyone has recollections of what it was like trying to hire for similar positions in recent years, when the unemployment rate was much higher. That is to say, how much of this is base-rate human flakiness, and how much is attributable to the tight labor market having already hoovered up almost all the well-functioning adults?

lbThingrb Jul 3, 2018, 2:21 AM
12 points
on: Are ethical asymmetries from property rights?
I’m not actually sure what to make of that—should we write off some moral intuitions as clearly evolved for not-actually-moral reasons … ?
All moral intuitions evolved for not-actually-moral reasons, because evolution is an amoral process. That is not a reason to write any of them off, though. Or perhaps I should say, it is only a reason to “write them off” to the extent that it feels like it is, and the fact that it sometimes does, to some people, is as fine an example as any of the inescapable irrationality of moral intuitions.
If we have the moral intuition, does that make the thing of moral value, regardless of its origins?
Why would one ever regard anything as having moral value, except as a consequence of some moral intuition? And if one has a second moral intuition to the effect that the first moral intuition is invalid on account of its “origins,” what is one to do, except reflect on the matter, and heed whichever of these conflicting intuitions is stronger?
This actually gets at a deeper issue, which I might as well lay out now, having to do with my reasons for rejecting the idea that utilitarianism, consequentialism, or really any abstract principle or system of ethics, can be correct in a normative sense. (I think I would be called a moral noncognitivist, but my knowledge of the relevant literature is tissue-thin.) On a purely descriptive level, I agree with Kaj’s take on the “parliamentary model” of ethics: I feel (as I assume most humans do) a lot of distinct and often conflicting sentiments about what is right and wrong, good and bad, just and unjust. (I could say the same about non-ethical value judgements, e.g. beautiful vs. ugly, yummy vs. yucky, etc.) I also have sentiments about what I want and don’t want that I regard as being purely motivated by self-interest. It’s not always easy, of course, to mark the boundary between selfishly and morally motivated sentiments, but to the extent that I can, I try to disregard the former when deciding what I endorse as morally correct, even though selfishness sometimes (often, tbh) prevails over morality in guiding my actions.
On a prescriptive level, on the other hand, I think it would be incoherent for me to endorse any abstract ethical principle, except as a rule of thumb which is liable to admit any number of exceptions, because, in my experience, trying to deduce ethical judgements from first principles invariably leads to conclusions that feel wrong to me. And whereas I can honestly say something like “Many of my current beliefs are incorrect, I just don’t know which ones,” because I believe that there is an objective physical reality to which my descriptive beliefs could be compared, I don’t think there is any analogous objective moral reality against which my moral opinions could be held up and judged correct or incorrect. The best I can say is that, based on past experience, I anticipate that my future self is likely to regard my present self as morally misguided about some things.
Obviously, this isn’t much help if one is looking to encode human preferences in a way that would be legible to AI systems. I do think it’s useful, for that purpose, to study what moral intuitions humans tend to have, and how individuals resolve internal conflicts between them. So in that sense, it is useful to notice patterns like the resemblance between our intuitions about property rights and the act-omission distinction, and try to figure out why we think that way.

lbThingrb Jul 2, 2018, 11:58 PM
1 point
on: Are ethical asymmetries from property rights?
• You are not required to create a happy person, but you are definitely not allowed to create a miserable one
Who’s going around enforcing this rule? There’s certainly a stigma attached to people having children when those children will predictably be unhappy, but most people aren’t willing to resort to, e.g., nonconsensual sterilization to enforce it, and AFAIK we haven’t passed laws to the effect that people can be convicted, under penalty of fine or imprisonment, of having children despite knowing that those children would be at high risk of inheriting a severe genetic disorder, for example. Maybe this is just because it’s hard to predict who will have kids, when they will have them, and how happy those kids will be, thereby making enforcement efforts unreasonably costly and invasive? I don’t know, just commenting because this supposed norm struck me as much weaker than the other ones you name. Very interesting post overall though, this isn’t meant as criticism.

lbThingrb Jun 11, 2018, 4:51 AM
5 points
on: Oops on Commodity Prices
“A shy person cannot learn, an impatient person cannot teach”
The translation you linked actually gives “A person prone to being ashamed cannot learn,” which is even more on the nose. Does anyone have any advice on how to deal with this issue? I have a pretty severe case of it, especially because I tend to take a lot (a lot) longer than other people to do pretty much every kind of work I’ve ever tried, independently of how much intelligence I needed to apply to it. Aside from seeking medical advice for that problem (which hasn’t helped much) the obvious thing to do was try to exploit my comparative advantage in intelligence, so at least I’d be focusing on the most valuable kind of work I was capable of. Trouble is, when you do smart-people stuff, you soon find yourself surrounded by, and often in competition with, other smart people, and being too slow to keep up looks an awful lot like being too dumb or lazy (except that people get confused to the extent that they notice I’m not actually dumb or lazy). It’s hard enough trying to get over the fear of “learning in public” without having to explain that, due to an ill-defined, poorly understood disability that seems to afflict hardly anyone but me, I’m going to continue being surprisingly unproductive no matter how how patient anyone who tries to teach me is willing to be.
I actually tried, for several years, to be less outspoken and convey less confidence in my written voice. My impression is that the attempt didn’t work for me, and caused me some emotional and intellectual damage in the meanwhile. I think verbally; if I try to verbalize less, I think less.
That’s interesting. Lately I’ve been noticing a lot how most people on the internet write in a manner that conveys much more self-confidence than I feel when I write, even when they write about things they probably shouldn’t feel so confident about. I think my writing style noticeably conveys my lack self-confidence, but that might just be the illusion of transparency getting the better of me. Anyway, I’ve also noticed over the years that my internal monologue mostly consists of me talking out of my ass quite boldly about topics of which I am ignorant. I don’t seem to have any difficulty squelching that voice when it comes time to share my thoughts with others, for better or worse.

lbThingrb 8 Apr 2018 7:20 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Vaniver’s comment on: Global insect declines: Why aren’t we all dead yet?
The Wikipedia link on amphibian decline mentioned the effects of artificial lighting on the behavior of insect prey species as a possible contributor. I suppose it’s possible that that’s a factor in the observations from the German study as well, particularly since they only looked at flying insects. But the observations were apparently made in nature preserves, so one would think that artificial lighting wouldn’t be that common in those habitats. There could still be indirect effects, though.

lbThingrb 7 Apr 2018 19:50 UTC
1 point
on: Is Rhetoric Worth Learning?
• How to be aware of other people’s points of view without merging with them
...
• How to restrain yourself from anger or upset
• How to take unflattering comments or disagreement in stride
...
• How to resist impulses to evade the issue or make misleading points
...
• How to understand another person’s perspective
It wasn’t the reason I got into it in the first place, but I have found mindfulness practice helpful for these things. I think that’s because mindfulness involves a lot of introspection and metacognition, and those skills transfer pretty well to modeling other people, and are useful for restraining unhelpful emotional impulses. In particular, knowing how to recognize and restrain anger in oneself, I strongly suspect, makes one better at anticipating how one’s words might set off other people’s anger, and coming up with strategies to avert or de-escalate such confrontations. It’s analogous to a phenomenon that I expect will sound familiar to LW readers, which is that getting better at noticing mistakes and biases in one’s own thinking also makes one better at noticing them in other people’s thinking.

lbThingrb 7 Apr 2018 19:16 UTC
2 points
in reply to: sarahconstantin’s comment on: Is Rhetoric Worth Learning?
Toastmasters? Never tried them myself, but I get the impression that they aim to do pretty much the thing you’re looking for.

lbThingrb 14 Jul 2017 3:18 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Becoming stronger together
Groups of friends often coalesce around common interests. This group of friends coalesced around a common interest in rationality and self-improvement. That this is possible to do is potentially useful information to other people who are interested in rationality and self-improvement and making new friends.