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"which would be a huge hassle and time cost for whoever speaks out"
Wait - so if leaders were complicit, yet admitting to that would be a hassle, then it's better that they not mention their complicity? I'm afraid of a movement that makes such casual justifications for hiding malefactors and red flags. I'm going to keep showing outsiders what you all say to each other! :O
You're welcome to side with convenience; I am not commanding you to perform Dirichlet. Yet! If you take that informality, you give-up accuracy. You become MoreWrong, and should not be believed as readily as you would like.
"From this informal perspective, clarity and conciseness matters far more than empirical robustness."
Then you are admitting my critique: "Your community uses excuses, to allow themselves a claim of epistemic superiority, when they are actually using a technique which is inadequate and erroneous." Yup. Thanks for showing me and the public your community's justification for using wrong techniques while claiming you're right. Screenshot done!
Oh, you entirely missed my purpose: I was sharing this with your community, as a courtesy. I publish on different newsletters online, and I wrote for that audience ABOUT your community. And, the fact that you're not interested in learning about Dirichlet, when it's industry-standard (demonstrating its superiority empirically, not with anecdotes you find palatable). So, no, I don't plan to present myself in a way you approve of, as a pre-requisite to you noticing that Bayes is out-dated by 260 years of improvements. Dirichlet, logically, would NOT have been published and adopted in 1973 and since, if it were in fact inferior to Bayes.
You evidence the same spurious assumptions and lack of attention to core facts - Dirichlet is an improvement, obviously, by coming along later and being adopted generally. I also addressed the key information which Dirichlet provides, which Bayes' Theorem is incapable of generating: a Likelihood Distribution across possible Populations, and the resultant Confidence Interval, as well as weighting your estimate to Minimize the Cost of being Wrong. Those are all key, valuable information that Bayes' Theorem will not give you on its own. When Scott Alexander claims "Bayes' Theorem; all else is commentary" he leaves-out critical, incomparable improvements in our understanding.
Alistair, I regret to inform you that after four years of Leverage's Anti-Avoidance Training, the cancer has spread: the EA Community at large is now repeatedly aghast that outsiders are noticing their subtle rug-sweeping of sexual harassment and dismissal of outside critique. In barely a decade, the self-described rats are swum 'round a stinking sh!p. I'm still amazed that, for the last year, as I kept bringing-forth concerns and issues, the EA members each insisted 'no problems here, no, never, we're always so perfect....' Yep. It shows.
This aged well... and it reads like what ChatGPT would blurt, if you asked it to "sound like a convincingly respectful and calm cult with no real output." Your 'Anti-Avoidance,' in particular, is deliciously Orwellian. "You're just avoiding the truth, you're just confused..."
I was advocating algal and fish farming, including bubbling air into the water and sopping-up the fish poop with crabs and bivalves - back in 2003. Spent a few years trying to tell any marine biologist I could. Fish farming took-off, years later, and recently they realized you should bubble air and catch the poop! I consider that a greater real-world accomplishment than your 'training 60+ people on anti-avoidance of our pseudo-research.' Could you be more specific about Connection Theory, and the experimental design of the research you conducted and pre-registered, to determine that it was correct? I'm sure you'd have to get into some causality-weeds, so those experimental designs are going to be top-notch, right? Or, is it just Geoff writing with the rigor of Freud on a Slack he deleted?
Third Generation Bay Area, here - and, if you aren't going to college at Berkeley or swirling in the small cliques of SF among 800,000 people living there, yeah, not a lot of polycules. I remember when Occupy oozed its way through here that left a residue of 'say-anything-polyamorists' who were excited to share their 'pick-up artist' techniques when only other men where present. "Gurus abuse naïve hopefuls for sex" has been a recurring theme of the Bay, every few decades, but the locals don't buy it.
I am terrified that you were downvoted to obscurity. These posts, the ones that EA hides, are the ones the public needs to see the most.
I am terrified that you were so thoroughly downvoted... "EA only wants to hear shallow critiques, not deep ones" seems to be happening vigorously, still.
It's a bad sign that you were being downvoted! I gave you my upvote!
Another wonderful example of "so simple, why didn't anyone try it before" just this week:
Robert Murray-Smith's wind generators seem to have a Levelized Cost comparable to the big turbines, yet simple and cheap, redundant:
Thank you! I remember hearing about Bayesian updates, but rationalizations can wipe those away quickly. From the perspective of Popper, EAs should try "taking the hypothesis that EA..." and then try proving themselves wrong, instead of using a handful of data-points to reach their preferred, statistically irrelevant conclusion, all-the-while feeling confident.
continuing my response:
When Gregory Lewis said to you that "If the objective is to persuade this community to pay attention to your work, then even if in some platonic sense their bar is 'too high' is neither here nor there: you still have to meet it else they will keep ignoring you." He is arguing an ultimatum: "if we're dysfunctional, then you still have to bow to our dysfunction, or we get to ignore you." That has no standing in epistemics, and it is a bad-faith argument. If he were to suppose his organization's dysfunction with the probability with which he askes you to doubt your own work, he would realize that "you gotta toe the line, even if our 'bar' is nonsense" is just nonsense! Under the circumstance where they are dysfunctional, Gregory Lewis is lounging in it!
The worst part is that, once their fallacies and off-hand dismissals are pointed-out to them, when they give no real refutation, they just go silent. It's bizarre, that they think they are behaving in a healthy, rational way. I suspect that many of them aren't as competent as they hope, and they need to hide that fact by avoiding real analysis. I'd be glad to talk to any Ai Safety folks in the Bay, myself - I'd been asking them since December of last year. When I presented my arguments, they waved-away without refutation, just as they have done to you.
Thank you for speaking up, even as they again cast doubt: where Gregory Lewis supposed that the way to find truth was that "We could litigate which is more likely - or, better, find what the ideal 'bar' insiders should have on when to look into outsider/heterodox/whatever work, and see whether what has been presented so far gets far enough along the ?crackpot/?genius spectrum to warrant the consultation" He entirely ignores the proper 'bar' for new ideas: consideration of the details, and refutation of those details. If refutation cannot be done by them, then they have no defense against your arguments! Yet, they claim such a circumstance is their victory, by supposing that some 'bar' of opinion-mongering should decide a worthy thought. This forum is very clearly defending its 'tuft' from outsiders; the 'community' here in the Bay Area is similarly cliquish, blacklisting members and then hiding that fact from prospective members and donors.
Whoo. Last cross-post for the night, I think I've responded to the major points... and I hope this shows a bit more of the complexity underneath my simplistic presentation!
How quickly it rains down depends on a few factors, and we can tip those in our favor:
--> Humid Rise - humidity (just the h2o molecule) is only 18g/mol, while oxygen molecules are 32g/mol, so humid air is quite buoyant! Especially considering that water vapor reflects heat (infrared) back to the ground, creating a heat bulge beneath it. The result is that, once humidity begins to rise, it naturally pulls air in from all around it, along the ground. It begins to drive convection. Yet! That humid rise is normally billowy and easily dispersed by cross-breezes, which means that the humidity cannot rise high quickly; it mostly travels far overland, or stays in place. Your rain wanders to an unexpected location! We want to form rain clouds nearby, instead, so we need that humidity to rise really high, quickly, without being torn apart by cross-breezes. That's where the solar concentrators help, with their tall tower at 1200C and radiant, they blast infrared into all the water vapor around them, pummeling a plume high up, carrying that vapor. Up high enough, the air pressure drops, which is key for causing a rapid cooling, and the formation of nice heavy clouds. The faster we take air from the ground up to a few kilometers, the more water it'll still be holding. [[Only a fraction of one gram per m3 is needed for the thinnest clouds, but we could toss a few grams up and it'll come down soon. We want the water to rain, evaporate, and rain down again, in as many cycles as it can. That gives plants time to grab it, in numerous locations, as well as time for the ground to catch some.]] When we look at water-demand for plants in the wild vs. water-resilient greenhouses, we can drop water demand ten-fold because nine-tenths of the water was lost in the leaves to evapotranspiration! As a result, if that leaf-sweat keeps rising and falling as rain as it travels further South, then the same bucket of water ends up getting ten times the use (assuming ground water is eventually used, as well).
--> Albedo - the desert rock is pretty bright, so the addition of vegetation and especially any water-bodies (!) will multiply the solar absorption, which will drive that heat-bulge and evaporation for humidity-buoyancy, to help loft water vapor and form clouds. This is how the Amazon does it - most of her clouds are her armpit fog, caused by solar-to-thermal foliage!
--> Vortices - the solar concentrators themselves can be rigged with a few flanges, to nudge their inflowing convection as it quickens toward the center, to spin that up-draft, helping it stay coherent and push higher, for rains nearby. Any Youtube video on Rocket Stoves by Robert Murray-Smith is best for enjoying such a vortex!
--> Swales - I love swales. I've been preaching swales since 2010. I heard, almost immediately, when Sepp Holzer started pitching his "crater gardens" ... which were dug by an excavator, four feet deep. I was aghast - my favorite swales are micro-swales, a few inches deep, in flakey soils that rain seasonally, to catch it as it dribbles. That's what they're doing in the Sahel, south of Sahara, to stop the deserts. By halting the flow of water along the ground, keeping it for seep, roots, and another evaporation, you prolong the residence-time of each ton of water, leading to a greater equilibrium stock - that is, a high normal lake line, because each ton of water rarely ever leaves.
And, as to infrastructure before success - California could probably boost rains enough to help farmers and forests, here, without needing to conquer an entire desert the size of Europe!
Another cross-post from Lesswrong about a detailed example, the entire Sahara:
Thank you for diving into the details with me, and continuing to ask probing questions!
The water brought-in by the Sahara doesn't depend upon the area of the source; it's the humidity times the m3 per second arriving. Humidity is low on arrival, reaching only 50% right now in Tunisia, their winter drizzles! The wind speed is roughly 2m/sec coming in from the sea, which is only 172,800m/day of drift. Yet! That sea-breeze is a wall of air a half kilometer high - that is why it can hold quite a bit.
If we need +10% of a 500m tall drift, that's 50m; if we can use solar concentrators to accelerate convection, we can get away with less. And, we're allowed to do an initial row that follows the shoreline closely, while a second row is a quarter kilometer inland, running parallel to the shore, where mixing of air lets you add another round of evaporate. So, we could have four rows across the northern edge of the Sahara, each row as thick as it needs to be to hit high humidity, and 10m tall, to send +10% moisture over the entire 9 million km2 of the Sahara.
How much water would we be pumping? The Sahara carries 172,800m/day flow per m2 intake surface x 500m tall x 4,000km coastline at 10g h2o per m3 = 3.5 billion tons per day, a thousand or so dead seas. (About 1.25 Trillion tons a year, enough to cover the 9 Million km2 with 139mm of rain, on average, if it had fallen instead of being sopped-up by adiabatic heat.)
We need 10% of that, or a hundred and eighty dead seas. It seems monstrous, but much of the coastline there is low for miles, so pumping 1 ton to the top of 10m at even just 20% efficiency costs 500kJ. If you want to pump that in a day, using solar, you'll need 1/4th of a square foot of solar. That 1 ton, if we cross the threshold and it becomes surplus rain, will water 3 square meters their annual budget... and the solar is paying for that amount of irrigation every day; 1,000 m2 of rains from a dinner plate of solar, each year. It's that energy efficiency, combined with dead simple capital expenditures, which would make something so insane potentially feasible. I'd pick California to try, first!
500kJ per ton, for 350Mil tons per day - that's 175TJ per day, or 2 GW. That's a nuclear power plant. To pump enough water, continuously, to irrigate 9 million km2, potentially feeding a billion people, once we dig swales! (Check out Africa's better-than-trees plan: "Demi-Lune" swales that catch sparse, seasonal rain, to seep into the ground, with minimal tools and labor!)
These details might help see the complexities
[[a cross-post of my comment from the Lesswrong cross-post of the original post, in that thread of comments!]]
Let's start at a more practical scale: make the Negev Bloom.
The Negev is 12,000 km2, which, if we want grasslands, needs some 300mm extra rain or more each year. That's 3.6 billion tons per year, or just 10Mt a day. With 20g/m3 humidity, we'll need passage of 500 billion m3 of air-flow each day. With convection driven by solar concentrators (those same which drive the pumps) to increase wind velocity during the day to 4m/s, across trays stacked 12.5m high, provides 50m3/sec, 4.32 million m3 per day across each meter of intake.
Next, we pump rows inland, as each humid layer rises, to capture drier air as they mix and move-past. Additional solar concentrators power these, and conveniently, the concentrators' intense heat pushes humid air higher than it would during gentle billowing convection, rising to cool & enter the cloud-cycle faster. We would only be prevented from extending more rows if the elevation rises too high, or we create so much humidity and cloud-cover that our solar concentrators cease. Let's just say we have four rows.
With 4.32 million m3 per meter of intake width, we'll need 116,000 meters... that's only 72 miles. With our four rows, that's a length of coast 18 miles long. The Gaza Strip is enough to water the Negev.
And, as I mentioned in an earlier response to you, the vast majority of the humidity released by the Persian Gulf, Dead Sea, Red Sea, Mediterranean, is being used to fight-against the immense downdraft of adiabatically-heated and ultra-dry upper atmosphere, which is descending because of the boundary between Hadley and Ferrel cells. So, yes, there are billions of tons of water evaporating, and no rain!
Yet, we know from geological records as recent as 9,000 bc, the Sahara was wet, with vast lakes - because of a slight increase in humidity above the threshold for accumulation. The deserts are not 'infinitely' dry, such that all water never results in rain. Rather, they are just below a 'threshold', with water added by evaporation in huge amounts, and a slightly huger amount being taken away by adiabatic downdraft. If we add just a portion of humidity, we are doing exactly what occurred across the Sahara repeatedly, and it led to accumulation, because it was enough to cross the desiccation threshold. Our own soil records prove that the desert can be green, with just a little more water than it currently evaporates.
We have repeated evidence of good designs being ignored for a decade or more; hence the Silicon Valley axiom: "10 years ahead of time is as good as wrong." Similarly, good designs can be appallingly simple, and go unnoticed - for example, Torggler's swinging-door design (watch on YouTube; there is no way to explain it properly, because it is so bizarrely simple).
Another example is the original river-clean-up buoy-net system, debuted decades ago, and promptly ignored, despite grabbing all the plastic before it entered the ocean. We continued to hope for 'something to clean up the plastic' and grasped, later, at the Ocean Clean-Up guy who gave a TED talk. He got millions of dollars, and eventually he heard about the river-scooping buoy bot, and he began promoting it. Without that TED-talker's promotion, it's likely we'd all still not know about the more-effective and simpler and safer river-bot. This happens all the time.
Similarly, in 2007, Leapfrog licensed from Anoto a unique dot-pattern, to print on regular paper (tiny dots, you can't see) such that an optic on a 'pen' could read the coordinates, and use an on-board computer and audio to output based upon what it saw you writing. So, you could draw a drum set, and tap each drum to hear it play. Leapfrog was making kid's workbooks and tailored software. I told them to put the dots on clear adhesive plastic, to convert any existing computer screen into a touchscreen. I faxed them my details, granted them license (they held all the others, and I didn't want to compete), and they proceeded to ignore me for six years. Leapfrog spun-off the pen and dots, to Livescribe, who was still stuck on how 'paper is the answer'. By 2013, they'd licensed my touchscreen to Panasonic, who bottled it up inside their $400 tablet that wowed the Germany Electronics Expo with its artistic precision. Artistic precision you could have had in 2007, and you still can't, because Panasonic is camping on the license.
Don't pretend that every simple idea must have already been discovered, or must obviously come into use, if it is known. Human reticence to new ideas is often the bigger barrier.
The primary reason no one already mentioned such a solution is: you can't capture the water. Just like Tesla's hope for free energy, rain from the sky is difficult to market. Yet, I propose it for the governments who have viable lands; they would see tax returns which would make it valuable, as long as it rained in some of the desert.
Here are the less contentious parts, I hope?
"Ben Delo's involvement with EA just quietly stopped being talked about without any kind of public reflection on what could be done better moving forwards."
"Failing to share information because you suspect it will make me less supportive or more critical of your views, decisions, or actions smells of overconfidence and makes you difficult to trust, and this has regularly happened to me in my engagement with EA."
Yes, exactly. Thank you! EA Berkeley had to remove their leader just two years ago, for reasons that none of the membership there is willing to even mention - which makes it sound particularly bad, which means that 'the fact that EA is keeping that bad stuff hidden' is even worse.
Similarly, EA Berkeley members were targeted by a higher-up for blacklisting, and mentioned such in emails to me, only to go silent on the matter until I brought-up the blacklisting as an issue on their slack. At that point, they mentioned that "we've been in private talks with the Blacklister, asking them to stop their behavior" - nothing public until absolutely necessary.
The EA houses in Berkeley, who are a magnet for EA Berkeley campus members to move-into (most residents are post-grads who were EA Berkeley prior to graduation and moving into the EA house), had repeatedly splurged unnecessarily, and when I pointed this out, the near-universal response on the EA Berkeley slack was 'well, that's them, not us. We're not responsible for anyone else in our org if they're committing petty fraud.' The slack poster Charles He even suggested that I be banned from their slack, for 'disrupting' things by bringing-up their bad behavior!
EA definitely has a brand they're protecting, and other posters seem to be bumping into other icky spots under the surface, too! (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/eoLwR3y2gcZ8wgECc/hubris-and-coldness-within-ea-my-experience) & "Power dynamics: What procedures exist for protecting parties in asymmetric power relationships? Are there adequate opportunities for anonymous complaints or concerns to be raised? How are high-status individuals held accountable in the event of wrongdoing?" from (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/sEpWkCvvJfoEbhnsd/the-ftx-crisis-highlights-a-deeper-cultural-problem-within)
Further: when I have posted new ideas on this forum, I was repeatedly strawmanned by EA members until other members eventually pointed-out that I was being strawmanned, and those who did so never admitted and apologized; they just downvoted every comment I made, as a team. EA protects the trolls who downvote-mafia and misrepresent, while looking for reasons to exclude 'non-aligned views'.
Oh, no - not 'because-dating-already', nor as a favor, nor her aspiring to use beauty, or being unqualified. Rather, if people doing the hiring are selecting among excellent candidates, yet their selection favors people who those same authorities hope to try dating. It's the hirer, not the one hired, who I call into question; as I said originally "hoping to hire-in" which places agency and blame with those being biased in their hiring.
Also, I don't expect a flat 'gender disparity' to be indicative of this sort of hiring - rather, internal measure of co-worker and boss relationships would show if the social graph is incestuous. And, though it isn't reasonable to say "the funder of a charity was hiring inappropriately, so the charity must also be doing so," - and, at the same time, "a bunch of young college kids with money who all live and hang out together, dating each other," is the shared characteristic that I argue warrants inclusion of that risk.
Thank you! You are welcome to check - the dismissals had begun, in multiple threads, before a peep from me; they were the initial replies. I became hot in response, only then, which your forum abhors - and I understand that I am downvoted for it! I don't expect you to give me a soap-box in your living room, when I keep offending you.
I can also drop my guise, which I understand if you find doubly offensive: a troll-trap.
After being misrepresented repeatedly, this time I intentionally included the word 'nerd', to see if that would be enough to ignore the other points - YET! I didn't expect that you would take my critique of hiring as a strike against the woman, who is a thoughtful and diligent member of your community, and would definitely do an excellent job assisting! I'm glad to speak in her favor - the question was why, with her quick hire, others languished in comparison? And I pointed to the risk of men in power pulling a 1950's-style 'I get $90k as researcher, and I date my $50k secretary'. THAT is where my heart-strings leapt to shout!
"I can also see it being possible that you bumped into situations where people were trying to sort out interpersonal issues privately, and you got wind of it and tried to make it public."
Thank you for responding! And, no, that is not accurate. The leader of EA Berkeley was ousted; that's not an 'interpersonal issue, privately'. That's the organization wanting to protect a brand by leaving their problems unmentioned, which is exactly the dishonesty part. I believe I've rebutted your argument - unless you have more to add?
Additionally, I understand if you took offense that I said 'nerd' - I'm happy to apologize to anyone in the Berkeley group who was offended or hurt, in person, with anyone else present they wish. Unfortunately, with Bankman's incestuous corporate structure updating my assumptions, I do believe it is right to ask: are they dating their PAs? That's a question for internal review, privacy, yet the statistical results should be public.
Thank you again for engaging with a rebuttal!
In other threads, my arguments were repeatedly misrepresented or unaddressed, while comments consisted of 'we shouldn't fund this, it's not appropriate' when I specified at the outset that I was not seeking funding; 'this should be posted somewhere else', etc. And only in a few instances, out of dozens of responses, have EA commenters addressed the substance of what I wrote.
Behaving decently is nice; that doesn't remove the point I was asking about: ignoring the other arguments I brought-up. It seems, repeatedly, that the call of appropriateness is used to ignore the substance of the other arguments; which continues to be the case, in this thread.
Does that absolve EA of the other points? Finding a flaw with the speaker or one of their points, to ignore the rest of the argument, seems to be a pattern amongst forum-commenters here - followed by mass downvotes.
I'd also like to ask clarification about your last sentence: I said 'nerds', and that may be what you found particularly offensive, there; or, that I hypothesize that men in those organizations are hiring hoping for a date? I am not attempting to 'blame a woman' for getting a job, by the way - I am pointing to the people who are doing the hiring for potentially selfish reasons.
Well, there's a simple empirical measure, rather than relying on whether an argument is approved-of or not: Do any of them date? Are they hoping to keep that fact hidden?
"Ben Delo's involvement with EA just quietly stopped being talked about without any kind of public reflection on what could be done better moving forwards."
"Failing to share information because you suspect it will make me less supportive or more critical of your views, decisions, or actions smells of overconfidence and makes you difficult to trust, and this has regularly happened to me in my engagement with EA."
Yes, exactly. Thank you! EA Berkeley had to remove their leader just two years ago, for reasons that none of the membership there is willing to even mention - which makes it sound particularly bad, which means that 'the fact that EA is keeping that bad stuff hidden' is even worse.
Similarly, EA Berkeley members were targeted by a higher-up for blacklisting, and mentioned such in emails to me, only to go silent on the matter until I brought-up the blacklisting as an issue on their slack. At that point, they mentioned that "we've been in private talks with the Blacklister, asking them to stop their behavior" - nothing public until absolutely necessary.
The EA houses in Berkeley, who are a magnet for EA Berkeley campus members to move-into (most residents are post-grads who were EA Berkeley prior to graduation and moving into the EA house), had repeatedly splurged unnecessarily, and when I pointed this out, the near-universal response on the EA Berkeley slack was 'well, that's them, not us. We're not responsible for anyone else in our org if they're committing petty fraud.' The slack poster Charles He even suggested that I be banned from their slack, for 'disrupting' things by bringing-up their bad behavior!
EA definitely has a brand they're protecting, and other posters seem to be bumping into other icky spots under the surface, too! (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/eoLwR3y2gcZ8wgECc/hubris-and-coldness-within-ea-my-experience) & "Power dynamics: What procedures exist for protecting parties in asymmetric power relationships? Are there adequate opportunities for anonymous complaints or concerns to be raised? How are high-status individuals held accountable in the event of wrongdoing?" from (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/sEpWkCvvJfoEbhnsd/the-ftx-crisis-highlights-a-deeper-cultural-problem-within)
Further: when I have posted new ideas on this forum, I was repeatedly strawmanned by EA members until other members eventually pointed-out that I was being strawmanned, and those who did so never admitted and apologized; they just downvoted every comment I made, as a team. EA protects the trolls who downvote-mafia and misrepresent, while looking for reasons to exclude 'non-aligned views'.
I also wonder about the hiring for AI Safety, here in the Bay: after talking to people who struggled to get hired as a PA in AI Safety, despite a background in CS and an interest in AI and safety for 5 years... while a pretty girl with a psych background got hired as PA immediately, multiple offers? It sounds like the nerds at Berkeley are hoping to hire-in a Bankman-sized polycule as PAs.
Moderation of the boards, to point-out misrepresentations and fallacies, would put it on par with the philosophy message board I moderated in the 90s. New folks shouldn't have to defend themselves from EA regulars' misrepresentations.
And, the selection of judges seems an arcane cabal... did you notice the irony, that your own, privately selected judges are the ones who determine if critique of themselves is valid? That's equivalent to being "judge in your own trial".
I also fear that, by offering a prize to the 'best', you are then able to disregard all those who 'didn't make the prize-threshold'. You gave only two months for it, while other organizations have a suggestion box that is always available, without judges dismissing all but the 'best'.
Oh, darn - I can't tell you this stuff, because you had already closed the contest by the time word of it had trickled to me.
Thank you for your detailed critique! I'm glad to hear firm arguments - we are two halves of progress, Speculator and Skeptic. Isn't the Constitution the means by which the Government inherits the Will of the People? Such that, though the oath is directly to the Constitution, it is ultimately to the People? The founders didn't want a direct link, due to the whims of the majority and the moment... yet, we are not slaves to our own Constitution, instead its recipient?
Hmm... I suppose we're looking at the "preferred agent" as different members: I think of the People as the privileged agents, with statesmen taking an oath to those People, which seems to be a breach of their oath of office if they intentionally misrepresent their goals in office. You favor the statesmen, even when the evidence of history is that voters are repeatedly fooled because there is no reliable account of politicians' actions?
[Also, the existence of Representative government, by the way, is the admission that each voter not be burdened with every task of verification, and this seems to be another instance of that.]
When someone offers "what if we measure, to verify their claim?" - that is what destroys democracy, by limiting the speech of active politicians. Is that correct? Because it seems that "allowing politicians to lie on campaign to voters, thereby deceiving them in their vote and making that vote a lie" seems worse than limiting candidates' extravagant claims , only.
Thank you!
1. Keeping promises is hard, being truthful seems to be hard to them... I'm not sure why their relative difficulty makes any difference? Could you outline the steps in that argument a bit more?
2. If the amendment operates by criteria, rather than dictate, it's aligned with what I originally described. For example, "Make Everything Fantastic" would only be rated true if nothing declined. There are objective metrics for these things, and in those cases of ambiguity, you side on "broken promise" for safety. I don't pretend to have perfect mechanism design on my first try, either - that's why I shared a rough thought which might be developed further. I value investigating questions like "what is the repercussion of not admitting a broken promise?" Yet, the existence of such questions does not invalidate the task. It might be worth looking into. Do you see that?
3. Again, I'm missing your arguments. You're making a claim, and then stating its consequent, without stating its necessary cause(s). What makes this intractable? Leaving-out your arguments implies that you assume you are right, which isn't the "Scout's Mindset" that I heard about...
"may politicize the courts" turned into "that would be really bad". Did you have additional critique? I have a hunch that, if I'd stood in the Second Continental Convention and said, "What if the check-and-balance the courts could wield over the Legislature and Executive included making them admit their broken campaign promises?" Ben might wink! "A Democracy, if you can keep it..." meant you'd have to take active steps to preserve the spirit, as laws become loopholes and citizens become consumers.
So, it's been a pattern among the hundreds of academics and dozens of engineers I've met - academics like to say "I have a single flaw, so your proposal is impossible/untenable." Good engineers, giving constructive criticism, say "Well, that won't work, unless you find a way to..." Do you have any constructive criticism? I'd be honored!
Apologies for forming a separate thread - I was just informed that the author posted here, as well.
Here is the link, if you are curious: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xEyzE2DGSiMQGjqmz/a-response-to-openphil-s-r-and-d-model
Thank you!
Thank you for recognizing that my concern was not addressed. I should mention, I am also not operating from an assumption of 'intrinsically against me' - it's an unusually specific reaction that I've received on this forum, in particular. So, I'm glad that you have spoken-up in favor of due consideration. My stomach knots thank you :)
Yes, I understand that funding can let me hire people to do that work - and I don't need funding to free my time. I understand that, if I delay for the sake of doing-it-alone, then I am responsible for that additional harm. It doesn't make sense for me to run a simulation or lobby by myself; and I've been in the position of hiring people, as well as working with people who are internally motivated. I hoped to find the internally motivated people, first - that's why I asked EA for connections, instead of just posting something on a job site.
When did you edit your response? You were saying something else, originally...
Yes, I can imagine the world where I respond to the misrepresentations with politeness - I did that for twenty years, and the misrepresentations continued, along with so many other forms of bullying. I have seen the world from that lens, and I learned that it's better for me to stand-up to misrepresentations, even if that means the bully doesn't like me.
I apologize for lumping your funding-suggestion along-side others' funding-misrepresentation. I see that you are looking for ways to make it possible, and funding is what came to mind. Thank you.
(I am still surprised that funding is continually the first topic, after I specify that the government is the best institution to finance such a project. EA would go bankrupt, if they tried to stop hurricanes...)
And, I understand if people don't consider my proposal promising - I am not demanding that they divert resources, especially funds which are best spent on highest guaranteed impact! Yet, there is a cliquishness in excluding diverse dialogue based upon "social capital/reputation" - I hope you can see that the social graph's connectivity falls apart when we cut those ties.
It's also odd that the only data-point used to evaluate me would be the slice of time immediately after I'd been prodded repeatedly. I wish I could hand you the video-tapes of my life, and let you evaluate me rightly. When I am repeatedly misrepresented, defending myself, then you don't see a representative slice of who I am.
Worst of all, no measure of my persona or character is a measure of the worth of a thought. If I am not a good fit for making it happen, then the best I can do I find someone who fits that well. The idea itself stands or falls on its own merits, and measuring me ignores that. I won't know if it's worth doing until I have a simulation, at least. I don't know how anyone else has certainty on the matter, especially from such a noisy proxy as "perceived tone via text message".
I agree! So, consider the scenario: I stand-up and ask "does anyone know someone I might talk to?" and the response I get is "but we don't want to give you money". I correct that misrepresentation, repeatedly, until I suspect that I am being trolled - and my self-defense is used as a reason to ignore me. If I hadn't been poked-in-the-eye repeatedly, those introductions would begin on a pleasant footing.
Core to this problem: each of you are focusing on how I can "get better results by playing nice". I am focusing on "I was misrepresented, and that should be considered first, in the moral calculus." If I roll-over every time someone bullies me, then I'll be liked by a whole lot of bullies. That doesn't sound like a win, to me.
Thank you for letting me know.
I should also add this note: there is a double-standard in communication, here. I was asked repeatedly to 'calm down and speak nicely, because only then will we listen' - meanwhile, the ones who misrepresented were given a pass to lead the listener by the nose along imputations such as "because you posted a lot, no one is going to listen to you." They got that pass, easily, with the header "being brutally honest"/"honestly". Should I just begin all my posts with "just being brutally honest", so that no one uses my tone as a reason to ignore the content of what I say?
[Jeff deleted his response, yet it was still helpful!]
I was responding to Jeff - and thank you, Jeff, for clarifying that downvotes can hide me.
In my response to him, I was expressing my concern that a subset of the Forum has the power to hide my self-defense, so that my correction of their misrepresentation goes unnoticed, while their misrepresentations stand in full view.
Another EA Forum post, just recently ("Bad Omens in Current Community Building") was trying to bring to the community's attention that, among other things, EA is sometimes perceived as cultish or cliquish. I hope you can all see that, when my correction of others' misrepresentations are downvoted to obscurity, then that concern of cliquishness is real.
Thank you for the clarification. It's still worrisome that a subset, by downvoting, can ensure that my correction of their misrepresentation goes un-noticed, while their misrepresentation of me stands in full view. There was another post on the Forum, recently, talking about how outsiders worry that EA is a cult or a clique - I hope you can see where that concern is coming from, when my self-defense is downvoted to obscurity, while the misrepresentations stand.
My posts where I expressed what had been misrepresented and requested apologies have been deleted. And now, you apologize, after those deletes. I am suspicious. Why is your crew hiding the times I clarified and defended myself?
In truth, you DID talk about "Anthony getting EA funding" when you said "My hot take here is that if you spend $1B of EA money..." SO, don't lie to me. You did, in fact, say that I would take funding. I hope your apology is real, and not just covering face by pretending you did nothing to misrepresent me. You did misrepresent me. Can you admit that?
It seems someone is deleting my posts, when I have not said anything in those posts except my own self-defense and what has been done to me. Here it is, again:
I am waiting for an apology from them - I don't know why I should be pleasant after repeatedly being disrespected. That sounds like you're asking me to "be a good little girl, and let them be mean to you, because if you're good enough, then they'll start to be nice." It's not a fault upon me that I should 'be nice until they like me' - they misrepresented me, which is the issue, NOT "lack of engagement".
For some reason, my original response is not showing up. I definitely did NOT make any attack on anyone, during my comment. I don't see why it would be deleted - I request a review of whoever deleted my response. Here it is, again:
"We rich white people would give you so much more respect if you poor black people spoke nicely when you complained." <--- this argument has been used a thousand times, around the world, to get people to cower while you continue to disrespect them. I won't cower; I am right to be upset, and I expect an apology for being misrepresented by them. I am not wrong for requesting this.
Further, again, I am not talking about "lack of engagaement" - ONLY your people have made that claim, and I dismiss it each time you've made it. I continue to point-out: I have been repeatedly misrepresented. I deserve an apology.
"We rich white people would give you so much more respect if you poor black people spoke nicely when you complained." <--- this argument has been used a thousand times, around the world, to get people to cower while you continue to disrespect them. I won't cower; I am right to be upset, and I expect an apology for being misrepresented by them. I am not wrong for requesting this.