Raymond D

• Raymond DNov 16, 2021, 11:42 PM

  1 point

  in reply to: dkirmani’s comment on: Why Save The Drown­ing Child: Ethics Vs Theory

  Well, I basically agree with everything you just said. I think we have quite different opinions about what politics is, though, and what it’s for. But perhaps this isn’t the best place to resolve those differences.

• Raymond DNov 16, 2021, 9:31 PM

  1 point

  in reply to: dkirmani’s comment on: Why Save The Drown­ing Child: Ethics Vs Theory

  Ok I think this is partly fair, but also clearly our moral standards are informed by our society, and in no small part those standards emerge from discussions about what we collectively would like those standards to be, and not just a genetically hardwired disloyalty sensor.

  Put another way: yes, in pressured environments we act on instinct, but those instincts don’t exist in a vacuum, and the societal project of working out what they ought to be is quite important and pretty hard, precisely because in the moment where you need to refer to it, you will be acting on System 1.

• Raymond DNov 16, 2021, 9:25 PM

  2 points

  in reply to: Yair Halberstadt’s comment on: Why Save The Drown­ing Child: Ethics Vs Theory

  I’m not sure I’m entirely persuaded. Are you saying that the goal of ethics is to accurately predict what people’s moral impulse will be in arbitrary situations?

  I think moral impulses have changed with times, and it’s notable that some people (Bentham, for example) managed to think hard about ethics and arrive at conclusions which massively preempted later shifts in moral values.

  Like, Newton’s theories give you a good way to predict what you’ll see when you throw a ball in the air, but it feels incorrect to me to say that Newton’s goal was to find order in our sensory experience of ball throwing. Do you think that there are in fact ordered moral laws that we’re subject to, which our impulses respond to, and which we’re trying to hone in on?

• Raymond DNov 9, 2021, 2:12 PM

  1 point

  in reply to: Zvi’s comment on: Sub­stack Ho?

  Migration—they have a team that will just do it for you if you’re on the annual plan, plus there’s an exporting plugin (https://​​ghost.org/​​docs/​​migration/​​wordpress/​​)

  Setup—yeah there are a bunch of people who can help with this and I am one of them

  I’ll message you

• Raymond DNov 6, 2021, 5:25 PM

  18 points

  on: Sub­stack Ho?

  Massive conflict of interest: I blog on ghost, know and like the people at ghost, and work at a company that moved from substack to ghost, get paid to help people use ghost, and a couple more COIs in this vein.

  But if you’re soliciting takes from somebody from wordpress I think you might also appreciate the case for ghost, which I simply do think is better than substack for most bloggers above a certain size.

  Re your cons, ghost:

  1 - has a migration team and the ability to do custom routing, so you would be able to migrate your content

  3 - supports total theme customisation

  4 - supports analytics add-ons which would give you these details

  5 - supports custom excerpts—doesn’t even have to be the first bit of the post

  6 - is built on open-source software, and you have the option of self-hosting

  Some other pros:

  • really nice post editor

  • the upper limit of what you can do with add-ons and custom html injection is really high

  Notable points against would be:

  • no mechanism for discovery like substack’s

  • harder to set up than substack

  • analytics, commenting, and email click-through are not native, they’re separate add-ons (although imo pretty easy to add)

  • I am not personally sure how hard migrating comments from wordpress would be

  • I don’t know how to compare what degree of support you’d get from substack versus ghost

  • below a certain subscription threshold, more expensive (unlike substack’s percentage fee ghost charges a rate that scales with subscribers)

  • just the big meta point that I am really biased here—I really don’t want to give the impression of neutrality

• Raymond DNov 6, 2021, 3:03 PM

  14 points

  on: Speak­ing of Stag Hunts

  I’d like to throw out some more bad ideas, with fewer disclaimers about how terrible they are because I have less reputation to hedge against.

  Inline Commenting

  I very strongly endorse the point that it seems bad that someone can make bad claims in a post, which are then refuted in comments which only get read by people who get all the way to the bottom and read comments. To me the obvious (wrong) solution is to let people make inline comments. If nothing else, having a good way within comments to point to what part of the post you want to address feels like a strict win, and given that we already have pingbacks I think letting sufficiently good comments exist alongside the post would also be good. This could also be the kind of thing that a poster can enable or disable, and that a reader can toggle visibility on.

  Personal Reputation

  I don’t have great models for how reputation should or does work on LessWrong. The second of these is testable though—I’d be curious to see what happened if prominent accounts, before commenting, flipped a coin, and in half of all cases posted through a random alt. Of course it may not be a bad thing if respected community figures get more consideration, but it would just be interesting to know how much of an effect it had. There are loads of obvious ways to hedge against this, all themed around anonymisation at different levels, but I think here it’s less of a ‘can’ and more of a ‘should’, so I’d be curious to hear anyone else’s thoughts on that.

  Curated Comments

  I agree that there are comments that are epistemically not so great. There’s some underlying, very complicated question about ‘who gets to decide what comments people should read’, and I have some democratic instinct which resists any centralisation. But it does feel like some comments are notably higher-effort, or particularly at risk of brigading. I reckon a full prediction market-style moderation system would be a mess, but it seems like it wouldn’t be that hard if, when someone made a comment, they could submit it for curation as ‘a particularly carefully considered, relevant, and epistemically hygienic response’ which, if approved, would be bumped above non-curated comments, with some suitable minor penalty for failed attempts or notes of feedback.

  Debate as a model

  In formal debate (or at least the kind I did) you distinguish between a point of information and a point of order. When you try to lodge a point of information, the opposing speaker can choose whether they’d like to be interrupted, and you’re just interjecting some relevant facts. A point of order, though, is made to the chair, when there’s a procedural violation, and it can very much interrupt you. I’m not sure how you’d extend this to lesswrong but it feels like a useful distinction in a similar context.

• Raymond DNov 4, 2021, 11:52 AM

  9 points

  in reply to: Bucky’s comment on: The Opt-Out Clause

  I’m really enjoying the difference between the number of people who claimed they opted out and the number of people who explicitly wrote the phrase

• Raymond DNov 3, 2021, 10:35 PM

  2 points

  in reply to: cata’s comment on: The Opt-Out Clause

  ah whoops thanks!

• Raymond DNov 3, 2021, 10:31 PM

  1 point

  in reply to: lsusr’s comment on: The Opt-Out Clause

  What’s the procedure?