My thoughts and picks from judging the contest.
Many of my picks narrowly missed prizes and weren’t upvoted much at the time, so check it out.
technicalities
Karma: 5,840
What I learned from the criticism contest
I think she means the little blurbs in this post.
We’ve done pro bono stuff before, to each according to need.
Unclear if research consultancies count as infra, but Arb answer hard questions for people.
The sense of a start
There is a vast amount of philosophical progress. But almost all of it is outside philosophy. Jaw-dropping list, just on the topic of democracy; things that Rousseau writing on democracy suffers from lacking:
“Historical experiences with developed democracies
Empirical evidence regarding democratic movements in developing countries
Various formal theorems regarding collective decision making and preference aggregation, such as the Condorcet Jury-Theorem, Arrow’s Impossibility-Results, the Hong-Page-Theorem, the median voter theorem, the miracle of aggregation, etc.
Existing studies on voter behavior, polarization, deliberation, information
Public choice economics, incl. rational irrationality, democratic realism”
...
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0020174X.2022.2124542
Huge congrats, welcome to the team
Announcing “Effective Dropouts”
I noticed this a while ago. I don’t see large numbers of low-quality low-karma posts as a big problem though (except that it has some reputation cost for people finding the Forum for the first time). What really worries me is the fraction of high-karma posts that neither original, rigorous, or useful. I suggested some server-side fixes for this.
PS: #3 has always been true, unless you’re claiming that more of their output is private these days.
The ladder of EA weirdness
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Obligation to the global poor
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Obligation to farmed nonhumans
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Obligation to wild nonhumans
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n. Obligation to potential humans and nonhumans
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m. Obligation to take psychedelics / dissolve the self
o. Obligation to electrons
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p. Obligation to acausally trade with those outside the light cone
q. Obligation to acausally trade with those elsewhere in the multiverse
r. Obligation to entities somewhere inside the universal prior
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“Having inside views”: just having your own opinion, whether or not you shout about it and whether or not you think that it’s better than the outside view.
“Having strong inside views...”: asserting your opinion when others disagree with it, including against the majority of people, majority of experts, etc.
(1) doesn’t seem that agenty to me, it’s just a natural effect of thinking for yourself. (2) is very agenty and high-status (and can be very useful to the group if it brings in decorrelated info), but needs to be earned.
strangely
It does look strange! But it was pretty intentional: see this post for the rationale.
Recently people have been massively expanding university and “quality press” coverage. But these are relatively low-risk ways of doing mass outreach and the original rationale might stand.
Well done on public correction! That’s always hard.
It’s key to separate out “social agency” from the rest of the concept, and coining that term makes this post worthwhile on its own. Your learned helplessness is interesting, because to me the core of agency is indeed nonsocial: fixing the thing yourself, thinking for yourself, writing a blog for yourself, taking responsibility for your own growth (including emotional growth, wisdom, patience, and yes chores).
has inside views
I think you mean “has strong inside views which overrule the outside view”. Inside views are innocuous if you simultaneously maintain an “all things considered” view.
Because of a quirk of the instructors and students that landed in our sample, ESPR 2021 went a little too hard on agency. We try to promote agency and wisdom in equal measure, which usually ends up sounding a lot like this post. Got there in the end!
thanks.
The irony of you and me is that we’re digging around in a privacy advocate’s data exhaust. But at least it’s out of love.
Here’s mine