Viliam_Bur

Karma: 22,205

Viliam_Bur Apr 2, 2015, 11:07 AM
3 points
in reply to: MathiasZaman’s comment on: How has lesswrong changed your life?
Almost the same for me (just replace Python with Android or Unity, and “playing videogames I don’t really enjoy” with “reading websites I don’t really enjoy”).

Viliam_Bur Apr 1, 2015, 9:20 PM
0 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: How has lesswrong changed your life?

I don’t really expect a huge change, because rationality is all about aiming the arrow better, but it does not change how strong you pull the bow or how many arrows you have in the quiver.

To continue in your metaphor, a small improvement in aiming can in some situations significantly increase the ratio of arrows that hits the target. Of course assuming that precision was the problem, instead of e.g. distance or lack of arrows. Returning from the metaphor, the benefits of (LW-style) rationality probably also depend on what kind of problems you solve, and what kind of irrational things you were doing before.

What would be the kind of situation where one gets a lot of quick gains from rationality? Seems like a situation where people have to make decisions which later have a big impact on the outcome. (Not the kind where the smart decision is merely 10% more effective than the usual decision; unless those 10% allow you to overcome some critical threshold.)

Decisions like choosing a school, a carreer, a life partner, whether to join a cult, or move to a different city, etc. Or possibly creating useful habits that give you a multiplier on what you were already doing, such as using space repetiton or pomodoros, avoiding planning fallacy or other biases, etc. -- Either doing a few good big changes, or developing reliable good habits. (Also, avoiding big bad changes, and getting rid of bad habits.)

Viliam_Bur Mar 31, 2015, 4:22 PM
1 point
in reply to: Epictetus’s comment on: Status—is it what we think it is?

it seems to me that most people are willing to settle for a certain status depending on how good the benefits are and the difficulties involved in getting there.

It is also my impression that people who “prefer being low status” are actually just afraid of possible punishment for claiming too much status.

Suggested experiment: Select a group of people who “prefer being low status” and let them interact with each other for a long period of time. Prediction: Some members of the group will gradually become more comfortable with acting high-status within the group.

Viliam_Bur Mar 31, 2015, 4:09 PM
6 points
on: What have we learned from meetups?

What do you suppose are the dominant positive outcomes of your meetups?

Meeting interesting people.

Unfortunately, at the meetups I’ve organized we didn’t get further.

Viliam_Bur Mar 31, 2015, 4:01 PM
2 points
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Effective Sustainability—results from a meetup discussion

Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment

Really?

Viliam_Bur Mar 31, 2015, 8:02 AM
2 points
in reply to: gjm’s comment on: [meta] New LW moderator: Viliam_Bur
Or perhaps to make it easy to read: “1 point” with “+2 −1″ in the tooltip.

Viliam_Bur Mar 30, 2015, 9:36 AM
0 points
in reply to: brazil84’s comment on: [meta] New LW moderator: Viliam_Bur
At the moment I am reading this, there seem to be no votes (no upvotes, no downvotes) on two of those three comments:
- http://lesswrong.com/lw/1s4/open_thread_february_2010_part_2/1myj
- http://lesswrong.com/lw/1ir/you_be_the_jury_survey_on_a_current_event/1bnt
At least this is how I interpret “0 points, 0% positive”. If someone would downvote it, it would not be 0% positive.

Viliam_Bur Mar 30, 2015, 9:27 AM
0 points
in reply to: Vaniver’s comment on: Political topics attract participants inclined to use the norms of mainstream political debate, risking a tipping point to lower quality discussion
Not anymore, but yeah, this is where my frustration is coming from. Also, for every obvious example of voting manipulation, there are more examples of “something seems fishy, but there is no clear definition of ‘voting manipulation’ and if I go down this slippery slope, I might end up punishing people for genuine votes that I just don’t agree with, so I am letting it go”. But most of these voting games seem to come from one faction of LW users, which according to the surveys is just a tiny minority.

(When the “progressives” try to push their political agenda on LW—and I don’t remember them doing this recently—at least they do it by writing accusatory articles, and by complaining about LW and rationality on other websites, not by playing voting games. So their disruptions do not require moderator oversight.)

Viliam_Bur Mar 30, 2015, 7:39 AM
2 points
in reply to: Epictetus’s comment on: Political topics attract participants inclined to use the norms of mainstream political debate, risking a tipping point to lower quality discussion
In recent months there were a few comments with flame-war potential which were quickly “downvoted into oblivion”, but the next day their karma was above zero.

Either it means we have a group of people who prevent their “side” from being downvoted below zero (although they don’t bother to upvote it highly when it already is above zero), or we have a group of people who believe in something like “no comment should be downvoted just because it has a flame-war potential” who prevent downvoting below zero in principle regardless of the side. I don’t know which one of these options it is, since all comments where I have seen this happen were from one “side” (maybe even from one user, I am not sure).

Viliam_Bur Mar 30, 2015, 7:34 AM
3 points
in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: Political topics attract participants inclined to use the norms of mainstream political debate, risking a tipping point to lower quality discussion
SSC is one-person dictatorship with a benevolent dictator. It would be much worse there if people could play voting games in comments: upvoting everyone on their “side” and downvoting everyone on the opposing “side”.

Also, on SSC people are banned more often than on LW, although most of the bans are temporary.

Viliam_Bur Mar 27, 2015, 12:30 PM
4 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Political topics attract participants inclined to use the norms of mainstream political debate, risking a tipping point to lower quality discussion

An alternative without programming changes would be biweekly “incisive open threads”, similar to Ozy’s race-and-gender open threads

Feel free to start a “political thread”. Worst case: the thread gets downvoted.

However, there were already such threads in the past. Maybe you should google them, look at the debate and see what happened back then—because it is likely to happen again.

and downvoting customarily tabood in them.

Not downvoting brings also has its own problems: genuinely stupid arguments remain visible (or can even get upvotes from their faction), people can try winning the debate by flooding the opponent with many replies.

Another danger is that political debates will attract users like Eugine Nier / Azathoth123.

Okay, I do not know how to write it diplomatically, so I will be very blunt here to make it obvious what I mean: The current largest threat to the political debate on LW is a group called “neoreactionaries”. They are something like “reinventing Nazis for clever contrarians”; kind of a cult around Michael Anissimov who formerly worked at MIRI. (You can recognize them by quoting Moldbug and writing slogans like “Cthulhu always swims left”.) They do not give a fuck about politics being the mindkiller, but they like posting on LessWrong, because they like the company of clever people here, and they were recruited here, so they probably expect to recruit more people here. Also, LessWrong is pretty much the only debate forum on the whole internet that will not delete them immediately. If you start a political debate, you will find them all there; and they will not be there to learn anything, but to write about how “Cthulhu always swims left”, and trying to recruit some LW readers. -- Eugine Nier was one of them, and he was systematically downvoting all comments, including completely innocent comments outside of any political debate, of people who dared to disagree with him once somewhere. Which means that if a new user happened to disagree with him once, they usually soon found themselves with negative karma, and left LessWrong. No one knows how many potential users we may have lost this way.

I am afraid that if you start a political thread, you will get many comments about how “Cthulhu always swims left”, and anyone who reacts negatively will be accused of being a “progressive” (which in their language means: not a neoreactionary). If you will ask for further explanation, you will either receive none, or a link to some long and obscurely written article by Moldbug. If you downvote them, they will create sockpuppets and upvote their comments back; if you disagree with them in debate, expect your total karma to magically drop by 100 points overnight.

Therefore I would prefer simply not doing this. But if you have to do it, give it a try and see for yourself. But please read the older political threads first.

Viliam_Bur Mar 27, 2015, 10:22 AM
3 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Political topics attract participants inclined to use the norms of mainstream political debate, risking a tipping point to lower quality discussion
I like your example and “learning environment” vs “testing environment”.

However, I am afraid that LW is attractive also for people who instead of improving their rationality want to do other things; such as e.g. winning yet another website for their political faction. Some people use the word “rationality” simply as a slogan to mean “my tribe is better than your tribe”.

There were a few situations when people wrote (on their blogs) something like: “first I liked LW because they are so rational, but then I was disappointed to find out they don’t fully support my political faction, which proves they are actually evil”. (I am exaggerating to make a point here.) And that’s the better case. The worse case is people participating on LW debates and abusing the voting system to downvote comments not beause those comments are bad from the espistemic rationality point of view, but because they were written by people who disagree (or are merely suspect to disagree) with their political tribe.

Viliam_Bur Mar 27, 2015, 10:11 AM
1 point
in reply to: dlarge’s comment on: Welcome to Less Wrong! (7th thread, December 2014)

Is this sort of compulsion common amongst LWers?

Speaking for myself, (a) I am not good at playing social games, therefore I hate environments where things like signalling are the only important thing, and (b) joining any faction feels to me like indirectly supporting all their mistakes, which I would rather avoid.

Viliam_Bur Mar 27, 2015, 10:08 AM
3 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Welcome to Less Wrong! (7th thread, December 2014)

is morality necessarily subjective?

If “subjective” means “a completely different alien species would likely care about different things than humans”, then yes. You also can’t expect that a rock would have the same morality as you.

If “subjective” means “a different human would care about completely different things than me” then probably not much. It should be possible to define a morality of an “average human” that most humans would consider correct. The reason it appears otherwise is that for tribal reasons we are prone to assume that our enemies are psychologically nonhuman, and our reasoning is often based on factual errors, and we are actually not good enough at consistently following our own values. (Thus the definition of CEV as “if we knew more, thought faster, were more the people we wished we were, had grown up farther together”; it refers to the assumption of having correct beliefs, being more consistent, and not being divided by factional conflicts.)

Of course, both of these answers are disputed by many people.

Viliam_Bur Mar 27, 2015, 9:52 AM
12 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Welcome to Less Wrong! (7th thread, December 2014)

I absolutely need to have a really well thought out answer to this question in order to maintain the respect of friends and family, some of whom credit Historical Jesus as one of the top reasons for their faith.

Yep. On the social level I get it, but on another level, it’s a trap.

The trap works approximately like this: “I will allow you not to believe in my bullshit, but only if you give me a free check to bother you with as many questions as I want about my bullshit, and you have to explore all of these questions seriously, give me a satisfactory answer, and of course I am allowed to respond by giving you even more questions”.

If you agree on this, you have de facto agreed that the other side is allowed to waste unlimited amounts of your time and attention, as a de facto punishment for not believing their bullshit. -- Today you are asked to make to make a well-researched opinion about Historical Jesus, which of course would take a few weeks or months to do a really serious historical research; and tomorrow it will be either something new, e.g. a well-researched opinion about the history of the Church, or about the history of Crusades, or about the history of Inquisition, or whatever. Alternatively, they may point at some parts of your answer about the Historical Jesus and say: okay, this part is rather weak, you have to bring me a well-researched opinion about this part. For example, you were quoting Josephus and Tacitus, so now give me a full research about both of them, how credible they are, what other claims they made, etc.

Unless the other side gives up (which they have no reason to; this games costs them almost nothing), there are only two ways this can end. First, you might give up, and start pretending to be religious again. Second, after playing a few rounds of this game, you refuse to play yet another round… in which case the other side will declare their victory, because it “proves” your atheism is completely irrational.

Well, you might play a round or two of this game just to show some good will… but it is a game constructed so that you cannot win. The real goal is to manipulate you into punishing yourself and feeling guilty. -- Note: The other side may not realize they are actually doing this. They may believe they are playing a fair game.

Viliam_Bur Mar 26, 2015, 3:57 PM
12 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Political topics attract participants inclined to use the norms of mainstream political debate, risking a tipping point to lower quality discussion

After you get a taste of LW, every other internet forum feels stupid

And why do you think this is so? Are all participants on this forum genetically superior, and they have to prove it by giving a DNA sample before registering the user account? Or could it be because some topics and some norms of the debate attract some kind of people (and the few exceptions are then removed by downvoting)? Any other hypothesis?

If you propose another hypothesis, please don’t just say “well, it is because you are (for example) more intelligent or more reasonable” without adding an explanation about how specifically this website succeeds in attracting the intelligent and/or reasonable people, without attracting the other kinds of people, so the newcomers who don’t fit the norm are not able to simply outvote the old members and change the nature of the website dramatically. (Especially considering that this is a community blog, not one person’s personal blog such as Slate Star Codex.)

Viliam_Bur Mar 26, 2015, 3:28 PM
2 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Social prerequisites of rationality
This may seem like a small difference, but in some companies employers can give inputs into the process, and in other companies they are just told to shut up… or maybe they are asked to voice their opinion, but then their opinion is completely ignored in a completely obvious manner.

I am talking here about autonomy, as one of the conditions for “flow”. Some workplaces have it, some don’t.

For example, as the boss of the computer game company, I could be micromanaging my employees and on a random whim override their best work with my half-baked ideas for no good reason… or I could be not doing this. Like, I make the decision about whether we are making a first-person shooter or a turn-based strategy, but my graphic people decide how long teeth will the ogres in the game have, because that is their competence.

The crushing form of power is if I start walking around, ask my graphic people to show me the pictures they made, and (despite having zero graphical talent) tell them to make this or that random change, throwing their ideas out of the window, wasting a lot of their work, ruining the consistency of the style, etc., simply because I am the boss and I can show them how little their opinions, skill, and lifelong experience matter in face of the power structure.

(Is this similar to what you called “rubbing the power in people’s faces”, or did you imagine something completely different?)

Viliam_Bur 26 Mar 2015 15:20 UTC
4 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Michael Oakeshott’s critique of something-he-called-rationalism

From a pro-pirate angle, with an explicit goal to kill pop culture.

That’s just another form of politics.

Have you read the parts of Sequences about politics and motivated reasoning? (Short version is that “I will start chanting our slogans and give you selected arguments about why my side is better than the other side” does not contribute to epistemic rationality, and so we should not do it here.)

Viliam_Bur 26 Mar 2015 15:13 UTC
2 points
in reply to: skeptical_lurker’s comment on: [POLITICS] Jihadism and a new kind of existential threat

Look at the Ukraine—part of the population identified as Ukrainian, part as Russian, and it lead to a civil war.

As far as I know, this is how one side of the conflict explains it. The other side has a different opinion on what actually happened. Specifically, that the reason for starting the war was Russian soldiers (soldiers coming from Russia, not the local minorities) crossing the border and, well, starting the war.

Viliam_Bur 26 Mar 2015 15:08 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: [POLITICS] Jihadism and a new kind of existential threat

what led you to offer a suggestion in the area about which you know practically nothing? … You probably wouldn’t offer advice on how all the surgeons in the world should operate, so why did you take it upon yourself to suggest changing religions for a billion people?

I thought that saying “perhaps someone who knows more … could tell whether … might be a way to …” was a sufficient disclaimer.

If I had an idea about how all the surgeons in the world might operate better (e.g. trying tools from materials with different physical properties, having other surgeons watch the operation on video in real time and offer advice when asked by the main surgeon, etc.), yeah, I might ask in the same way whether someone had thought about it.