Lexico

• LexicoSep 21, 2014, 9:46 PM

  2 points

  in reply to: kalium’s comment on: Link: quo­tas-microag­gres­sion-and-meritocracy

  I’ve also went from a steady 23 total karma all in dead posts from a couple of weeks ago, and went down to 14 after posting this. I’m still rather new here, but I do remember reading that downvote stalking had become an issue in the past. Did LW ever resolve any policies to help combat that?

Link: quo­tas-microag­gres­sion-and-meritocracy

• LexicoAug 5, 2014, 8:47 PM

  10 points

  on: Why are peo­ple “put off by ra­tio­nal­ity”?

  Looking at this topic more broadly than solely in terms of HPMOR and it’s reviews, I would argue that for many people their exposure to the concept of rationality is predominantly made up of half rationalists.

  Rationality is hard. It gives us tools that allow us to update old preconceptions of the world. However in practice we will often fail in our rationality due to insufficient information or other cognitive limits while still identifying our actions as being superior due to rational principles. It is very off putting to see others claiming superiority yet still be full of flaws in reasoning due to bounded rationality. From your perspective you might clearly see a flaw in their reasoning, perhaps one you can’t communicate well, even if from their perspective they have applied rationality.

  This creates cognitive dissonance for accepting the idea that rationalism leads to better reasoning.

  EY wrote a bit about the dangerous of being half a rationalist within the body of this post if you want to continue this train of thought.

• LexicoJul 26, 2014, 3:36 AM

  1 point

  in reply to: Vulture’s comment on: Poli­tics is hard mode

  I think it’s more that there seems to be a cluster that will vocally declare anything that is short of the clinical definition of PTSD trigger, to be completely invalid morally. IE there is no moral value or obligation to markup our language with these warnings and it is completely the responsibility of others to toughen up and handle it.

  This is in opposition to the viewpoint of side two who argue that we should invest effort to create more pleasant and safer environments.

  Hence side 2 and 3 argue different moral claims while side 1 associates the term without considering moral obligations in the use of language.

• LexicoJul 24, 2014, 6:45 AM

  2 points

  in reply to: DanielLC’s comment on: Alpha Mail

  You might want to make the signal hard to find. If it’s your test for intelligence, the harder it is to find the alpha mail and construct a response, the higher the level of intelligence it would select for.

  Maybe no puzzles are seen from our perspective simply because we aren’t on the order of magnitude of the level of intelligence that any who have the power to simulate a universe like ours would be looking for.

• LexicoJul 24, 2014, 3:18 AM

  3 points

  in reply to: Scott Alexander’s comment on: Poli­tics is hard mode

  I do think there exist quite a large number of groups who would fall into the category of the politics tribe. In fact from what I’ve seen much of the spectrum of social activists.

  From there point of view they may identify the status quo that is considered apolitical from the main stream point of view, to in fact have harmful effects for some. On these issues they identify 3 groups.

  Those who agree with them that the status quo has issues. Those who disagree and wish to actively maintain the status quo. Those who have not engaged with the issue but inadvertently are supporting their political enemies due to Status Quo Bias

• LexicoJul 24, 2014, 3:10 AM

  1 point

  in reply to: Scott Alexander’s comment on: Poli­tics is hard mode

  I think at least in my case, what associations I have behind the symbol “politics” is a bit different from the way you view it. I see how your arguments are consistent from that perspective, so I think that a lot of the difference in view might come from that difference.

  In my view something that is political need not be something related to any formal party politics, but includes the set of any group power dynamics.

  In my case I can imagine political people as both people who are interested in partisan conflicts, but also I would consider the main skill of managers of people to fundamentally be to manage the politics of the group.

• LexicoJul 22, 2014, 7:07 PM

  1 point

  in reply to: Lexico’s comment on: Poli­tics is hard mode

  As a continuation of that idea though. One of the prerequisites of factionalization /​ triblization is the existence in enough variance in viewpoints to create distinct independent clusters. Others in the same cluster become the in group, and those outside of the cluster become the out group.

  However, while variance is required for clustering, clustering isn’t always present with high variance. You can still have more uniform distributions with large spreads.

  Being aware that clustering effects are more likely in areas of high variance seems to me to a a good heuristic to internalize.

• LexicoJul 22, 2014, 6:33 PM

  2 points

  in reply to: Scott Alexander’s comment on: Poli­tics is hard mode

  I wonder if the number of comments might be a better heuristic for measuring the variance in people’s perspective on the article. If you look at those 3 examples, the first had the most comments, but the least upvotes and lowest percentage positive.

  If someone feels that they are in agreement and their viewpoint is already present in the discussion they might have a lower likelihood of adding another comment, but if there is a larger variance in the viewpoints on an issue than people would be more likely to have what they feel is unique information to add to the discussion.

• LexicoJul 22, 2014, 7:37 AM

  6 points

  on: Poli­tics is hard mode

  As a less wrong lurker this thread did a great job at putting into words the main reason I’ve been very hesitant to get more involved with the community.

  I do think that anything politic is some of the hardest materiel to have any sort of discussion about while remaining rational and effective and not falling prey to our bias.

  On the other hand from my experience I strongly agree that what is and isn’t political is highly contextual and variable for different people. I worry that the aggregate limits of what can and cannot be discussed as political are to a degree driven by the group dynamics itself and can lead to group think fail cases. This can lead to fragmentation where different groups with different biases in their group makeup will still settle on different limits for what is political and apolitical, and create barriers between any sort of integration between those cultures.

  An issue that is highly political from one perspective but not from another might still get discussed at some great length if the majority don’t find that given topic political. This then creates a mine field that those in the minority that can be hard to address. Trying to address this problem in the first place often requires someone with a minority viewpoint trying to inform others that from their perspective something that was apolitical to the speaker was still political for others.

  But then again this is a hard problem. I would argue that at the very least, the current approach of politics as a mind killer does have a lot of failure cases that can be harmful for the community, especially when it creates divides between a majority opinion on what is and isn’t political. Any progress the community can make to improve the methods we use to deal with this problem to help minimize the failure cases is a step in the right direction. I don’t see anyway this problem is one that can be solved with a greedy heuristic approach an optimal method. It’s a fundamentally social problem, and social cognition is far too complicated and chaotic to ever be fully reduced.