Taymon Beal

• Taymon BealSep 24, 2018, 2:09 PM

  1 point

  in reply to: c0rw1n’s comment on: Modes of Petrov Day

  No, we didn’t participate in this in Boston. Our Petrov Day is this Wednesday, the actual anniversary of the Petrov incident.

• Taymon BealSep 23, 2018, 3:26 AM

  4 points

  on: Modes of Petrov Day

  Some disconnected thoughts:

  In Boston we’re planning Normal Mode. (We rejected Hardcore Mode in previous years, in part because it was a serious problem for people who underwent significant inconvenience to be able to attend.)

  I’m good at DevOps and might be able to help the Seattle folks make their app more available if they need it.

  I happened to give a eulogy of sorts for Stanislav Petrov last year.

  I’m currently going through the latest version of the ritual book and looking for things to nitpick, since I know that a few points (notably the details of the Arkhipov story) have fallen into dispute since last year.

  I’d be curious to know what considerations are affecting your decisions to possibly change Petrov Day.

• Taymon BealSep 17, 2018, 1:01 AM

  14 points

  on: Berkeley REACH Sup­port­ers Up­date: Septem­ber 2018

  Thanks for this update!

  I have a question as a donor, that I regret not thinking of during the fundraising push. Could you identify a few possible future outcomes, that success or failure on could be measured within a year, that if achieved would indicate that REACH was probably producing significant value from an EA perspective (as opposed to from a community-having-nice-things perspective)? And could you offer probability estimates on those outcomes being achieved?

  I certainly understand if this would be overly time-consuming, but I’d feel comfortable donating more if I had a good answer to this in hand.

  Edit: Kelsey on Discord proposed a few possible outcomes that might (or might not, depending on how you envision REACH working) be answers to this question:

  • The regular meetups REACH hosts get ~50 people to attend at least four EA meetups a year when they wouldn’t have attended any.

  • As a result of the things they learned at those meetups, at least ten people change where they’re donating to or what they’re prioritizing in the next year.

  • At least five people join the community via REACH events/​staying there/​interacting with people staying there, and at least one of them is doing useful work in an EA priority area.

Petrov Day in Boston

Bos­ton SSC Meetup

• Taymon BealSep 8, 2018, 7:49 PM

  3 points

  in reply to: Evan_Gaensbauer’s comment on: Ask Us Any­thing: Sub­mit Ques­tions About What We Think SSC is Wrong About, and Why

  Then I think the post should have waited until those arguments were up, so that the discussion could be about their merits. The problem is the “hyping it up to Be An Internet Event”, as Ray put it in a different subthread; since the thing you’re hyping up is so inflammatory, we’re left in the position of having arguments about it without knowing what the real case for it is.

• Taymon BealSep 8, 2018, 4:42 PM

  4 points

  in reply to: Evan_Gaensbauer’s comment on: Ask Us Any­thing: Sub­mit Ques­tions About What We Think SSC is Wrong About, and Why

  I think it’s an antisocial move to put forth a predictably inflammatory thesis (e.g., that an esteemed community member is a pseudo-intellectual not worth reading) and then preemptively refuse to defend it. If the thesis is right, then it would be good for us to be convinced of it, but that won’t happen if we don’t get to hear the real arguments in favor. And if it’s wrong, then it should be put to bed before it creates a lot of unproductive social conflict, but that also won’t happen as long as people can claim that we haven’t heard the real arguments in favor (kind of like the motte-and-bailey doctrine).

  I don’t doubt your sincerity in that you’re doing this because you don’t believe the thesis yourself, but your friend does. But I don’t think that makes it okay. If your friend, or at least someone who actually believes the thesis, is not going to explain why it should be taken seriously, then it’s bound to be net negative for intellectual progress and you shouldn’t post it.

• Taymon BealSep 8, 2018, 4:31 PM

  3 points

  in reply to: Evan_Gaensbauer’s comment on: Ask Us Any­thing: Sub­mit Ques­tions About What We Think SSC is Wrong About, and Why

  Unless a comment was edited or deleted before I got the chance to read it, nobody but you has used the word “violence” in this thread. So I don’t understand how an argument about the definition of “violence” is in any way relevant.

• Taymon BealJun 30, 2018, 2:52 AM

  10 points

  in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: Last Chance to Fund the Berkeley REACH

  Hmmm. Do you think that’s a bug, or a feature?

  LessWrong seems like a bit of a weird example since CFAR’s senior leadership were among the people pushing for it in the first place. IIRC even people working at EA meta-orgs have encountered difficulties and uncertainty trying to personally fund projects through the org.

• Taymon BealJun 30, 2018, 2:42 AM

  17 points

  on: Last Chance to Fund the Berkeley REACH

  I’ve just pledged $40 per month.

  I could afford to pay more. I’d do so if I ever actually visited REACH, but I live thousands of miles away (and did give a small donation when I visited for the pre-EA Global party, and will continue to do so if I ever come back). I’d also pay more if I were more convinced that it was a good EA cause, but the path from ingroup reinforcement to global impact is speculative and full of moral hazard and I’m still thinking about it.

  My pledge represents a bet that REACH will ultimately make a difference in my life by some causal pathway not yet visible. Perhaps I ultimately wind up in the Bay and it helps me connect to the community there, or perhaps its success ultimately facilitates other community-building projects that aren’t so geographically limited (which is a thing I’d really like to see). It’d be nice to be able to wait and see, but that won’t work if REACH runs out of startup capital and dies—so I’m taking the risk.

• Taymon BealJun 30, 2018, 2:24 AM

  10 points

  in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: Last Chance to Fund the Berkeley REACH

  This is a problem I’ve been thinking about for awhile in a broader EA context.

  It’s claimed fairly widely that EA needs a lot more smallish projects, including ones that aren’t immediately legible enough to be fundable by large institutional donors (e.g., because the expected value depends on assessments of the competence and value alignment of the person running the project, which the large institutional funders can’t assess). It’s also claimed (e.g., by Nick Beckstead of OpenPhil at EA Global San Francisco 2017) that smallish earning-to-give donors’ best bet to do the most good is to use their local knowledge to find and fund promising opportunities that the big institutional donors aren’t already covering.

  This creates a seemingly obvious opportunity for an EA org to make it easier for donors to crowdfund these kinds of projects. E.g., by being a 501(c)(3) they can funnel donations from DAFs, which individuals can’t accept. (For me, at least, this is a bigger deal than tax deductibility; my DAF is overprovisioned relative to my personal savings right now, so I’d rather make donations from there.)

  The two obvious hypotheses for why nobody’s already doing this are 1) all the EA meta-orgs are too constrained on staff time to set it up, and 2) it doesn’t actually work because the level of oversight required to avoid undue legal and/​or reputational risk would destroy the efficiency gains. I would very much like to know to what extent each of these is the case.

• Taymon BealJun 23, 2018, 2:31 AM

  4 points

  in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Us­ing the LessWrong API to query for events

  Re: local events: Although I haven’t checked this with Scott, my default assumption for the SSC sidebar is that keeping it free of clutter and noise is of the highest importance. As such, I’m only including individual events that a human actually took explicit action to advertise, to prevent the inclusion of “weekly” events from groups that have since flaked or died out.

  (This is also why the displayed text only includes the date and Google-normalized location, to prevent users from defacing the sidebar with arbitrary text.)

  LW proper may have different priorities. Might be worth considering design options here for indicating how active a group is.

• Taymon BealJun 23, 2018, 2:26 AM

  4 points

  in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Us­ing the LessWrong API to query for events

  So correct me if I’m wrong here, but the way timezones seem to work is that, when creating an event, you specify a “local” time, then the app translates that time from whatever it thinks your browser’s time zone is into UTC and saves it in the database. When somebody else views the event, the app translates the time in the database from UTC to whatever it thinks their browser’s time zone is and displays that.

  I suppose this will at least sometimes work okay in practice, but if somebody creates an event in a time zone other than the one they’re in right now, it will be wrong, and if you’re viewing an event in a different time zone from your own, it’ll be unclear which time zone is meant. Also, Moment.js’s guess as to the user’s time zone is not always reliable.

  I think the right way to handle this would be to use the Google Maps API to determine, from the event’s location and the given local time, what time zone the event is in, and then to attach that time zone to the time stored in the database and display it explicitly on the page. Does this make sense?

• Taymon BealMay 29, 2018, 1:27 AM

  1 point

  in reply to: Taymon Beal’s comment on: Us­ing the LessWrong API to query for events

  Also, two other questions:

  • Is there any way to link the new event form to have a type box prechecked? How hard is this to implement in Vulcan?

  • How do time zones of events work?

• Taymon BealMay 29, 2018, 12:32 AM

  1 point

  on: Us­ing the LessWrong API to query for events

  Thanks. I’d originally written up a wishlist of server-side functionality here, but at this point I’m thinking maybe I’ll just do the sorting and filtering on the client, since this endpoint seems able to provide a superset of what I’m looking for. It’s less efficient and definitely an evil hack, but it means not needing server-side code changes.

  I’ll note that filter: "SSC" doesn’t work in the GraphiQL page; events that don’t match the filter still get returned.

  More generally, the way the API works now basically means that you can only ask for things that correspond to features of the lesswrong.com web client. In effect, the server-side implementations of those features are what you’re exposing as the API. There’s an additional problem with this besides it just being limiting: you’re likely to want to change those features later, and you risk breaking third-party clients if you do. If you want to support those clients, maybe they should instead use a more general API for querying the database (although I’m not sure exactly how to implement that while maintaining security).

• Taymon BealFeb 25, 2018, 10:13 PM

  1 point

  in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: Meta-tations on Moder­a­tion: Towards Public Archipelago

  I think I agree that if you see that as the development of explicit new norms as the primary point then Facebook doesn’t really work and you need something like this. I guess I got excited because I was hoping that you’d solved the “audience is inclined towards nitpicking” and “the people I most want to hear from will have been prefiltered out” problems, and now it looks more like those aren’t going to change.

• Taymon BealFeb 25, 2018, 9:12 PM

  3 points

  in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Meta-tations on Moder­a­tion: Towards Public Archipelago

  I guess there’s an inherent tradeoff between archipelago and the ability to shape the culture of the community. The status quo on LW 2.0 leans too far towards the latter for my tastes; the rationalist community is big and diverse and different people want different things, and the culture of LW 2.0 feels optimized for what you and Ben want, which diverges often enough from what I want that I’d rather post on Facebook to avoid dealing with that set of selection effects. Whether you should care about this depends on how many other people are in a similar position and how likely they are to make valuable contributions to the project of intellectual progress, vs. the costs of loss of control. I’m quite confident that there are some people whose contributions are extremely valuable and whose style differs from the prevailing one here—Scott Alexander being one, although he’s not active on Facebook in particular—but unfortunately I have no idea whether the costs are worth it.

• Taymon BealFeb 25, 2018, 8:38 PM

  1 point

  in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Meta-tations on Moder­a­tion: Towards Public Archipelago

  Yes, this was what I was trying to suggest.

• Taymon BealFeb 25, 2018, 7:25 AM

  7 points

  on: Meta-tations on Moder­a­tion: Towards Public Archipelago

  Thanks for articulating why Facebook is a safer and more pleasant place to comment than LW. I tried to post pretty much this on a previous thread but wasn’t able to actually articulate the phenomenon so didn’t say anything.

  That being said, I still feel like I’d rather just post on Facebook.

  There are two specific problems with Facebook as a community forum that I’m aware of. The first is that the built-in archiving and discovery tools are abysmal, because that’s not the primary use case for the platform. Fortunately, we know there’s a technical solution to this, because Jeff Kaufman implemented it on his blog.

  The second problem is that a number of prominent people in the community are ideologically anti-Facebook and we don’t want to exclude them. There’s a partial technical solution for this; a site that mirrored Facebook comments could also let users comment directly and interleave those comments with the Facebook ones. But I don’t think those comments could be made to show up on Facebook, so the conversation would still be fractured. I admit I would probably care more about this if not for my disagreement with the central claim that Facebook is uniquely evil.

  Other than that, Facebook seems to have the whole “archipelago” thing pretty much solved.

  Meanwhile, if I post on LessWrong I still expect to be heavily nitpicked, because I expect the subset of the community that’s active on this site to be disproportionately prone to nitpicking. Similarly, certain worldviews and approaches to problem-solving are overrepresented here relative to the broader community, and these aren’t necessarily the ones I most want to hear from.

  Maybe this just boils down to the problem of my friends not being on here and it’s not worth your time to try to solve. But it still feels like a problem.

• Taymon BealJan 31, 2018, 12:07 AM

  17 points

  on: Ar­bital postmortem

  Thanks for the informative writeup.

  I already said all of this on Facebook, but just to reiterate:

  • I believed from the first announcement, and continue to believe, that much of the value of Arbital as it exists is in the software itself. (By comparison, if Wikipedia stopped existing, MediaWiki would still be important and valuable.)

  • I, personally, want my own Arbital instance that I can use to write about EA donation opportunities. (I think Malcolm Ocean has said he wants one too.)

  • If and when it gets open sourced under any of the usual open source licenses, I will contribute documentation, automation scripts, and/​or settings cleanup as needed to make it self-hostable.