“In the day I would be reminded of those men and women,
Brave, setting up signals across vast distances,
Considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.”
Emrik
...what? I haven’t been outside for a spell, and I knew things were bad, but that’s just broken.
(We can fix it, though! With faith, patience, and a whole lot of sitting in office chairs!)
Actually appreciate this comment. I should’ve been more clear about when I was using universal vs existential quantifiers and anything in between. I do not advocate that everyone should withhold anger, because perhaps (as is likely) some people do in fact know much more than me, and they know enough that anger is justified.
I should clarify that the harm I envision is not mostly about Sam or others at FTX. It’s the harm I imagine indirectly caused to the movement, and by the movement, by condoning insufficiently-informed bandwagons of outrage and pile-on ridicule. It harms our alignment, our epistemic norms, and our social culture; and thereby harms our ability to do good in the world.
Anger, ostracism—heck, even violence—seems less likely to misfire than ridicule. Ridicule is about having fun at another’s expense, and that’s just an exceedingly dangerous tool even when wielded with good intentions (which I highly doubt has been the primary motivation most people have had for using it).
(Thanks for highlighting these questions.)
I don’t object to people condemning him if they know more than me. I clarified what I meant in response to David’s comment below.
Mh, crux is wrong. My objections are consistent with my past behaviour in similar situations.
I am not categorically defending Sam from everything. I am conditionally defending him from a subset of things. Though I think his welfare is important, my primary purpose here isn’t about that. (I do think his welfare matters, just as anyone should have their core dignity as a sentient being respected, regardless of who they are or what they’ve done.)
I would write something equivalent to this post regardless of whether I believed Sam had done something unethical,[1] because I think some of the community’s response was, in part, unhealthy and dangerous either way.
When it involves outrage, our epistemic rigour and reluctance to defer to mass opinion should be much stricter than baseline. What happened instead was that people inferred Sam’s guilt by how confidently outraged their peers were. And because in our present culture it’s really hard to believably signal condemnation without also signalling confidence, this is a recipe for explosive information cascades/bandwagons. This is extremely standard psychology, and something we should as a high-trust community be unceasingly wary of. For this reason primarily, we should be very—but not infinitely—reluctant to enforce “failing to condemn” as a crime.
I don’t object to people condemning his actions, especially not to the people who are clearly conditionalising their condemnation on seeing specific evidence. I’m not claiming other people don’t know more than me, and they might have much stronger reasons to be confident.
Ridicule is more tangential to the harm, and has much more associative overlap with cruelty compared to anger and condemnation. Ridicule doesn’t even pretend to be about justice (usually). If ridicule must be used, it works better as a tool for diminishing people in power, when you want them to have less power; when someone is already at the bottom, ridicule is cruelty. (Maybe the phase shift in power was so sudden that people failed to notice that they are now targeting someone who’s suddenly very vulnerable to abuse.)
- ^
I have my object-level probabilities, but part of my point is how expected I am to reveal them, which makes me think I should leave it ambiguous, at least in public. “Which side are you on?!” ← Any social instincts that pressure a resolution to this question should be scrutinised with utmost suspicion.
[Wasn’t trying to attack the FB group. I’m glad it exists.]
But I was more curious to ask: why do you say Against Pandemics is extremely shady? It’s the first time I’ve heard of them.
I assume nonprofits and independents who were kept afloat by FTX money have to find alternative sources of funding (or otherwise be forced to shut down). But do you mean they should abstain from even doing that?
Welcome to the forum! I agree that EAs often have a really troubling relationship with their own feelings, and scruples to a fault. If you have strong reason to believe that Sam acted unethically, I have no objections against directing your feelings of anger at him. But I would urge people to carry their anger with dignity, both for the sake of community norms and their own sense of self-worth.
While I agree that humour is a great de-stressor, I have faith in our ability to find alternative ways to entertain ourselves that don’t involve kicking someone while they’re down.
:)
In favour of compassion, and against bandwagons of outrage
I haven’t updated appreciably in this direction after this, but I appreciate you calling attention to it.
Curated posts could resurface to the frontpage at exponentially decaying intervals.
Counteracts recency bias. Enables longer-term discussions.
Increases exposure (and over a more varied reader population) to the most important ideas.
Efficiently[4] increases collective memory of the best contributions.
We might uncover and dislodge some flawed assumptions that reached universal acceptance in the past due to information cascades.
Given recency bias combined with the fact that people are very reluctant to write things that have been written about before, we could theoretically be losing wisdom over time instead of accumulating it. Especially since the movement is growing fast, and newcomers weren’t here when a particular piece of wisdom was under discussion the first time around.
Wrote a shortform on it. Would be cool to have, imo! : )
The ‘frontpage time window’ is the duration a post remains on the frontpage. With the increasing popularity of the forum, this window becomes shorter and shorter, and it makes everyone scramble to participate in the latest discussions before the post disappears into irrelevancy.
I call it the “jabber loop”. As long as we fear being exposed as clueless about something, we’re incentivised to read what we expect other people will have read, and what they’re likely to bring up in conversation.
This seems suboptimal if it biases us towards only appreciating what’s recent and crowds out the possibility of longer, more patient, discussions. One solution to this could be spaced-repetition curated posts.[1]
When a post gets curated, that should indicate that it has some long-term value. So instead of (or in addition to) pinning it on top of the frontpage, the star could indicate that this post will resurface to the frontpage at a regular interval that decays exponentially (following the forgetting curve).[2][3]
Some reasons this could be good
It lets readers know that this discussion will resurface, so their contributions could also have lasting value. Comments are no longer write-and-forget, and you have a real chance at contributing more long-term.
It efficiently[4] increases collective memory of the best contributions.
It can help us scrutinise ideas that got inculcated as a fundamental assumption early on. We might uncover and dislodge some flawed assumptions that reached universal acceptance in the past due to information cascades.
As we gain more information and experience over time, we might stand a better chance at discover flaws in previously accepted premises. But unless there’s something (like spaced-repetition curation) that prompts the question into public debate again, we don’t get to benefit from that increased capacity, and we may just be stuck with the beliefs that got accepted earlier.
Given that there’s a large bias to discuss what’s recent, combined with the fact that people are very reluctant to write up ideas that have already been said before, we might be stuck with a bit of a paradox. If the effects were strong enough, we could theoretically be losing wisdom over time instead of accumulating it. Especially since the movement is growing fast, and newcomers weren’t here when a particular piece of wisdom was a hot topic the first time around.
- ^
There are other creative ways the forum could use spaced repetition to enhance learning, guide attention, and maximise the positive impact of reminders at the lowest cost.
It could either be determined individually (e.g. personal flashcards similar to Orbit), collectively (e.g. determined by people upvoting it for ‘long-term relevancy’ or something), or centrally (e.g. by Lizka and other content moderators).
- ^
Andy Matuschak, author of Quantum Country and Evergreen Notes, calls this a timefwl text. He also developed Orbit, a tool that should help authors integrate flashcards into their educational writings. If the forum decided to do something like this, he might be eager to help facilitate it. Idk tho.
- ^
Curators could still decide to un-curate a post if it’s no longer relevant or they don’t think the community benefits from retaining it in their epistemic memepool.
- ^
I highly recommend Andy’s notes on spaced repetition and learning in general.
- Nov 11, 2022, 9:20 PM; 5 points) 's comment on EA Forum feature suggestion thread by (
- Nov 17, 2022, 10:26 PM; 2 points) 's comment on Elliot Temple’s Quick takes by (
I don’t have opinions on any of the specific details, but what I do have is a feeling that darkness has stuck a great blow against us. There’s stuff that needs to get done, and recent events have imperiled our ability to do them. I’m scared, but most of all I want to help make up for the loss. Not by trying harder, but by persevering in the things I do with what I have to do them with.
“To save the world, I will start by doing the proper and humble things I know how to do within the confines of my own life.”
To clarify, was it this sentence you found confrontational? (I’m not counter-arguing, I am genuinely asking, because I seem to lack an eye for this sort of thing, or alternatively I’m usually right and most people are wrong. The truth is probably in the middle somewhere if I were to guess.)
I haven’t followed this much but someone who seems to know things says that a lot of Nathan Young’s claims (here and on Twitter) are sort of false/overblown.
Thanks for writing this up! One of the big advantages to independent research imo is that it’s much easier to pivot whenever you want, without having to justify yourself to anyone (well, depends on what kind of independence you have). Let’s you iterate across projects much faster, so it’s easier to end up finding a project that’s truly worth your time.
(There are more arguments why subforums would be cool, but I shouldn’t be spending time elucidating them rn unless anyone’s curious >.<)
Yes, and I would love a meta-research/rationality/socioepistemology subforum!
It would be usefwl because it might get easier to find and talk to the people who are especially interested in the topic. And because posts on the frontpage gets eaten by the time window in a swish and a swosh, it rarely leads to lasting discussion and people feel like they have to hurry (which is partly positive, partly negative).
The tag system would work just the same if people used it (I would actually prefer it), but since tag usage is inconsistent, people can’t rely on it.[1]
- ^
Solutions to inconsistent tag usage could be to prevent people from clicking the “post” button before they’ve added at least one tag, or paying someone to manually tag posts, or making an AI help you do it, etc.
- ^
I found this image from Lin’s map of pandemic preparedness really helpfwl. I think it could be profoundly usefwl to have a list of dense infographics like these for various cause areas. Backchaining is something that experts can do for the community; forward-chaining involves more near-term and individual variables that newcomers have to sort out for themselves. Having maps backchained like this lets newcomers identify the available proxy-goals, and forward-chain from their own situation to connect up to any of the pathways on the graphic.
I made an entry to Arbital on absorbing barriers to test it out, copied below. Sorta want to bring Arbital back (with some tweaks), or implement something similar with the tags on the EA forum. It’s essentially a collaborative knowledge net, and it could have massive potential if people were taught how to benefit from and contribute to it.
An absorbing barrier in a dynamical system is the state in possibility space from which it may never return.
It’s a term from Taleb, and the canonical example is when you’re playing poker and you’ve lost too much to keep playing. You’re out of the game.
In longtermism, the absorbing barrier could be extinction or a dystopian lock-in.
In the St. Petersburg Paradox, the absorbing barrier is the first lost bet.
In conservation biology, the extinction threshold of a species is an absorbing barrier where a parameter (eg. population size) dips below a critical value where they are no longer able to reproduce to replace their death rate, leading to gradual extinction.
In evolutionary biology, the error threshold is the rate of mutation above which DNA loses too much information between generations that beneficial mutations cannot reach fixation (stability in the population). In the figure below, the model shows the proportion of population carrying a beneficial hereditary sequence over the mutation rate. The sequence only reaches fixation when the mutation rate (1-Q) goes about ~0.05. This either prevents organisms from evolving in the first place, or, when the mutation rate suddenly increases due to environmental radiation, may constitute an extinction threshold.
A system is said to undergo a Lindy effect if its expected remaining lifespan is proportional to its age. It also describes a process where the distance from an absorbing barrier increases over time. If a system recursively accumulates robustness to extinction, it is said to have Lindy longevity.
In biology, offspring of r-selected species (Type III) usually exhibit a Lindy effect as they become more adapt to the environment over time.
In social dynamics, the longer a social norm has persisted, the longer it’s likely to stick around.
In programming, the longer a poor design choice at the start has persisted, the longer it’s likely to remain. This may happen due to build-up of technical debt (eg. more and more other modules depend on the original design choice), making it harder to refactor the system to accommodate a better replacement.
In relationships, sometimes the longer a lie or an omission has persisted, the more reluctant its originator is likely to be correct it. Lies may increase in robustness over time because they get entangled with other lies that have to be maintained in order to protect the first lie, further increasing the reputational cost of correction.
When playing a game—in the maximally general sense of the term—that you’d like to keep playing for a very long time, avoid naïvely calculating expected utilities without taking the expected cost of absorbing barriers into account. Aim for strategies that take you closer to the realm of Lindy longevity.