This post’s purpose is not clear. What are you trying to do with it? If you don’t give a fuck about keeping appearances, why have you written this? Is it a protest against current norms? Is it an invitation to others to also disregard norms?
This post is also just rude. Keep your ad hominems to yourself.
I think there is high variance in the growth rate of developing countries. My own country (Iran) certainly does not seem to be converging much. I also think that the areas where most convergence happens are the areas that are more materialistic; The medical textbooks get imported (and somewhat learned), but the institutions and attitudes that produced the textbooks in the first place, not so much.
Which would be more dystopian to you, DNA engineering to ensure the distribution of human behavior will not include unilateral destruction, or super surveillance?
I personally think DNA engineering at least has some positive points, too, while surveillance is purely a necessary evil.
Expected utility as the doer believes? Otherwise the system is too complex for the karma to actually work well. It’s also probably deterministic …
I definitely think the more broad appeal of fiction does make it worthwhile as an outreach effort (though it needs to be explicitly educational. Mother of Learning, for all its good writing, doesn’t teach how to think better.). The concepts touched in the fictional works (that I remember) were all very low-inferential distance from the common culture, so they were confined to beginner concepts without an in-depth overview. For example, the Frozen fanfic by Wales touches on AI safety and effective altruism, and is fun and beautiful, but I did not learn anything from it.
As you say, fiction teaches less concepts and teaches them less well. I do think it might teach more memorably though.
I have heavily updated on you being a bad faith actor. If you seriously believe your argument is not significantly pro-censorship, I suggest studying censorship historically in cases it clashes with your political views. Then compare those historical cases with what you advocate. Political censorship always believes itself to be something else. As the theocracy I live in says on my textbooks, “Freedom is not to do what anyone wants. Freedom is doing what the divine leader says.” Or as famous fiction has it, “war is peace.”
This is a good link-list. It seems undiscoverable here though. I think thinking on how you can make such lists discoverable is useful. Making it a top-level post seems an obvious improvement.
I don’t know :) I guess the idea itself is definitely sound, but implementing it correctly might be a challenge.
I had written a good answer here, but it got deleted because I accidentally tapped a link. Comments should save drafts … The TLDR of it is:
Censorship serves the elite and has historically been used to oppress and not empower.
It does not matter that people are evil [OUTGROUP HERE]. I have personally known people who openly said they were terrorists-if-opportunity-allows, nazis (literal Hitler supporters), thieves, etc. NONE OF THEM did anything out of the ordinary. Their incentives made them act just like others. See this book for a treatise on how mere capitalism mitigated apartheid racism.
Even if censorship worked, it is inherently wrong itself. It is a form of manipulation and oppression. I don’t say its benefits could not trump its costs, but there definitely are costs which are often neglected. Our society generally does not care about people’s intellectual integrity and dignity. That doesn’t mean those don’t matter.
This will be a distracting overhead though. Also, there can be many comments on a single paragraph.
I think greaterwrong has an option to hide karma.
Has anyone considered a hackernews-style section? I know there is already support for posting links, but:
They act as posts, while their function is not at all like that in Hackernews. E.g.,
I don’t want my subscriptions to people show me their submitted links. At not as post notifications.
Hackernews thrives by banning editorialization. You can only submit a link with its original title (or a sufficiently neutral title in case the original title sucks. They have guidelines on their site, iirc.). The poster has no privilege over other users.
There is a culture of posting relevant links that the community finds useful. We do not have such a culture here, because we do not provide the medium and guidelines for it.
This links section will create a distributed content aggregator for our community. Considering finding relevant content in our current era is a hard problem, this can be very useful. I think a lot of us here are distasteful of surroundings ourselves with news outlets, for example. It’d be great if we could get a filtered important news list through the community. Adding features such as an RSS feed for links with X+ karma will be helpful in this endeavor.
Also see lobsters.
I am curious, why isn’t the greaterwrong frontend getting adopted as the primary UI? It’s much faster, much more touch-friendly, customizable, and generally rocks. Its only downpoint is that it lacks features compared to LW, which should be solved in, say, 6 months? That would be a major QoL improvement. The LW UI frequently hangs on my iPad, it’s so bloated.
Is it hard to make here and Lesswrong more compatible? I am thinking of a cross-posting feature that has comments of both forums. Linking the accounts (for subscriptions, for example. Karma maybe.) also seems nice.
I think this has bad effects also. It’ll make the site appeal more to “normal” people, and look less serious. It also doesn’t give us any useful information, but take up real estate and use up attention. It might make groupthink more prevalent, too; I personally have found my thinking is most honest when I am thinking alone and don’t plan to share them socially.
Can you add a “research summary” tag for posts like this? Other suggestions: “book summary,” “podcast/talk summary,” “summary.”
If EA gets the tag feature from Lesswrong, there can easily be a repository of summaries of important papers. That seems quite valuable, given the alternative is science journalism which is geared towards random results and a more unsophisticated audience. Update: EA does have tags. I’ll ping in the relevant post for a “research summary” tag. Mentioning writing summaries of research papers on an EA advice page is a good way to spread the norm. Based on research on learning (and common sense), this will also help the author to consolidate their new insights in their own brain.
Can’t you release the backups on torrent in the event of a legal shutdown? Without actually admitting that you “leaked” the data, of course. Considering how successful piracy has been, making a first-party backup persist on the net seems like a low hanging fruit to me.
This is a good marketing strategy, but it risks becoming “Moloch;” The popular cause (originally intended as marketing) might eat away the others.
Other than that, why do you expect EA to more successful than other groups? Big, popular, entrenched problems are seldom easily exploitable. In the case of inequality; There are some conservative suggestions I have heard that seem worth trying out (e.g., public minority-only schools with strong selection filters and high academic/behavioral standards), but are readily dismissed because they are not politically desirable. So the challenge is to present ideas that are simultaneously appealing and effective and actualizable and new. I don’t see EA having much luck. Posting this from the Middle East, it is laughably clear to me that this is very ineffective use of resources.
Can you provide some links on the latest IFR estimates? A quick Google search leads me to the same 0.5% ballpark.