Interestingly, this is actually ameliorated by culture being cut along socioeconomic lines. So the people who try to wear a given style mostly have similar wealth, and therefore most of the variation in their stylistic quality is not caused by wealth variation.
SilentCal
Karma: 1,470
One point you neglect that would be especially relevant in the AGI scenario is leakiness of accumulated advantage. When the advantage is tech, the leaks take the pretty concrete form of copying the tech. But there’s also a sense that in a globalized world, undeveloped nations will often grow faster, catching up to the more prosperous nations.
Leakiness probably explains why Britain was never strong enough to conquer Europe despite having the Industrial Revolution first.
I thought you were suggesting I shouldn’t have posted this on frontpage, in which case we’d obviously disagree. If not, then we agree.
I don’t consider the second point a disagreement, since we’re both sort of ambivalent. I’m pretty sure there are people who would think I’m unambiguously wrong not to be signed up, and they’re who I was looking for.
On the first point—this actually seems substantial, maybe worth pursuing. I think initial-distribution measures carry a substantial risk of backfiring and making the poor poorer, while redistribution does not—seems hard to expect the same results if this is the case. This isn’t necessarily a crux for me, but I’ll hear more about your position before I try to find a proper DC.
I agree that on LW 1.0, this would belong under discussion rather than main. But as far as I can tell, LW 2.0 non-frontpage posts have much less visibility than old discussion posts, to the point that this type of thread would not be viable.
Perhaps our double crux is “Non-frontpage LW 2.0 posts are a viable platform for open-type threads”? Or maybe it’s “It’s better to be unable to have open-type threads than to crowd the front page with them”?
In economic policy, redistribution measures (e.g. UBI) are a better idea than trying to change the initial distribution (e.g. minimum wage).
It is not especially irrational to forego cryonics.
Productive Disagreement Practice Thread: Double Crux
So I was actually considering in-thread discussion to be a valid option—‘one-on-one’ meaning, in that case, that only two people would participate in a given subthread. If you think that’s too optimistic, I might reconsider it. But I will definitely try to make the top point clearer, maybe
Discussions are to be one-on-one. Do not jump into anyone else’s thread.
Productive Disagreement Practice Thread: Meta and Planning
I find this easier to parse from a non-neutral perspective: If all bad comments are (currently) overtly bad, you might think we could ban overt bad comments and win at moderation. But in fact, once the ban is in effect, the bad commenters might switch to covert bad comments instead.
The ban isn’t necessarily wrong, but this effect has to be considered in the cost-benefit analysis.
That’s the correct solution for food weights, but this is sort of beyond philh’s point, which is just that those you govern will adapt their behavior to the rules you put in place.
These differences are so profound and far-reaching—and so especially relevant for people with “our sort” of minds—that I hesitate to even begin enumerating them (though I’ll attempt to, upon request; but they should be obvious, I think!
I request this enumeration, if your offer extends to interlopers and not just Duncan.
(The differences I can think of are instant vs asynchronous communication, nonverbal+verbal vs. verbal only, and speaking only to one another vs. having an audience. But I don’t see why these are *inevitably* so profound and far-reaching.
This makes me want to try it :)
Would anyone else be interested in a (probably recurring if successful) “Productive disagreement practice thread”? Having a wider audience than one meetup’s attendance should make it easier to find good disagreements, while being within LW would hopefully secure good faith.
I imagine a format where participants make top-level comments listing beliefs they think likely to generate productive disagreement, then others can pick a belief to debate one-on-one.
″...unless you think that, from inside a single universe, you can derive sensible priors for the frequency with which all universes, both designed and undesigned, can support life?”
The corresponding line in part 2 would be
″...unless you think that, from inside a single Cold War outcome, you can derive sensible priors for the frequency with which all Cold War outcomes can support life?”
Which we kind of can, but imprecisely.
In part 4, it would be
″...unless you think that, from inside a single uranium-ball-outcome, you can derive sensible priors for the frequency with which all uranium-ball-outcomes leave us alive?”
Which we very obviously can.
Very important concept to give a name to. I upvote you today, because by tomorrow I’ll be convinced everything here has always been common knowledge.
That said, a lot of things are Out To Get You, but not You in particular, and the Get Ready approach ends up not being that hard. This is probably dangerous advice, but also true.
Examples: Credit cards. Sure, they charge merchant fees to keep the lights on, but the real money comes from borrowing. But I, and probably a lot of readers here, find it almost trivially easy to enjoy the convenience of a credit card without ever paying a cent in interest. Passive investing with Fidelity is also this way, everything is an upsell to make you buy a managed product, but for a true believer in passive investing it’s trivially easy to ignore.
Heck, I’ve even played a few free mobile games that I found worth playing for free, and have never felt close to tempted to put any cash into one. And I’ve been known to strategically use a free trial of a product I don’t want enough to pay for. I don’t think I’ve ever missed a cancellation on one of them.
The trick here, of course, is being a different person from the average target of these things.
Though another common feature of these things is that they mostly don’t lose money on me, they just don’t make any. Game downloads cost nothing, credit cards have merchant fees, and Fidelity index funds charge expense ratio. So they have no incentive to eliminate those they can’t Get.
Hacking aromanticism is the wrong framing for this, IMO—fighting romantic insecurity has much wider applicability. You can be open to relationships and still want to be able to be single without feeling like a failure.
The trouble with judging ideas by their proponents is that there could be confounders. For instance, if intelligent people are more often in white-collar jobs than blue-collar, intelligent people might tend to favor laws benefiting white-collar workers even when they’re not objectively correct. Even selecting for benevolence might not be enough—maybe benevolent people tend to go into the government, and people who are benevolent by human standards are still highly ingroup-biased. Then you’d see more benevolent people tending to support more funds and power going to the government, whether or not that’s a good idea.
Agreed, with the addendum that human intuition has trouble fathoming the ‘perfect knowledge of the other’ scenario. If seeing red caused Mary to want to see more color, we’d be tempted to describe it as her ‘learning’ the pleasure of color, whether or not Mary’s predictions about anything changed.
Epistemic status: devil’s advocate
The web browser is your client, because the display is the content.
Why did web forums, rather than closed NNTP networks, become the successor to Usenet? One possibility is that the new internet users weren’t savvy enough to install a program without having CDs of it stacked on every available public surface. But another is that web sites, able to provide a look and feel appropriate to their community, plainly outcompeted networks of plaintext content. The advantages aren’t necessarily just aesthetic; UI ‘nudges’ might guide users to pay attention to the same things at the same times, allowing a more coordinated and potentially more tailored set of discussion norms.
Notice that on mobile, users have rejected the dominance of the browser—in favor of less standardization and interoperability, via native apps that dispense with HTML.
Put another way, a web community does have a comparative advantage at designing a UI for itself, because UIs are not interchangeable.
Why speak in riddles? Because sometimes solving a puzzle teaches you more than being the solution.
As an observation about coffee, Zizek’s statement is true in its way but not especially useful. His broader point is “you should think about history and context more.” So he presents you with two physically identical items, coffee without milk and coffee without cream, so that you can be surprised by noticing that there’s potentially an important difference, and that surprise will make you update towards considering context and history as well as present physical makeup.