MY

mako yass

Bio

Participation
1

Longtermist writer, principled interactive system designer. https://aboutmako.makopool.com

Consider browsing my Lesswrong profile for interesting frontier (fringe) stuff https://www.lesswrong.com/users/makoyass

Comments
138

Topic Contributions
2

not really, just didn't want to draw too much attention to it.

I guess if we you saw a lot of noise in the prediction, random misspellings, tortured grammar, you'd reject.

(Well I declare that the message is very short.
What would 48bits of entropy, in grammatically and semantically correct text, look like? Edit: I guess, if I could assume I could think of 4 synonyms for every word in the paragraph, the paragraph would only have to be a bit over 24 words long for me to be able to find something. Fortunately, it's only 11 words long.)

But would he describe the paper that way to his brother, who he knows is left-center? He'd likely want to tell Max that it isn't an extreme paper, and if he were a right-winger, he'd likely believe it.

It's also possible that Max wasn't cognisant that his brother had published in that paper and so they may have not thought to talk about it, from what I can tell, Per has worked for a lot of more prominent publications than that.

mako yass
5mo126

I'm curious as to what kind of potentially existentially relevant proposal the NDF would have submitted? What did they think they had to offer?

(registering a tentative guess: sha256sum ..52ca22c6cd32)

Good to know what the typical spread is like.

These are some of the incidents that article cites as being representative of Nya Dagbladet's problems, are they as described?

On its website, Nya Dagbladet publishes right-wing extremist content such as the racist myth of an ongoing “population replacement”, Holocaust revisionism, claims that Muslims are attempting to conquer Europe, and conspiracy theories related to the covid-19 pandemic.

For several years, Nya Dagbladet has also had a pro-Russian orientation. In September, the platform published an article based on a fake report incorrectly said to have been produced by an American think tank. The article became notorious after it was shared by the Embassy of Russia in Sweden.

mako yass
5mo-2-2

Move on from what aspect of EA? I can't really imagine how a person would move on from the general concept of an extended community for reasoned, quantified, applied moral philosophy?

I'm sympathetic even though my background in technology and futurism has persistently drawn my attention away from things like this, so I might also be a bit clueless, but that might shed light on why we haven't discussed this much yet and I think we'd be very open to hosting those discussions and the associated communities.
I'd be super interested to see a historian or anthropologist attempt to estimate the moral weight of the preservation of cultural knowledge or artifacts, and weigh it against other work.

As a starting point... how many people should one be willing to kill to save the mona lisa? The answer that most people will give (we learn from the one absurd trolley problem level that was about that) is "none". This doesn't necessarily mean that the mona lisa isn't worth the millions that have been spent preserving it, but to me it does strongly suggest it and I don't know where to go from there... (It's always possible in surveys like this that the respondents are just being cowardly and aren't expressing their true values I guess...)


My current state of understanding about this problem area would be, like... Yeah I think we should digitize the hell out of everything then subsidize politically neutral permastorage practices, and from listening to Ada Palmer's podcast I've become aware that most ancient documents haven't been digitized yet? Which is interesting, but I also don't think digitizing them all before they rot will be especially difficult and is probably largely already happening? Analysis of the records can come much later and doesn't need funding right now, and if the scans are good, it's not obvious to me what the benefits are of keeping the physical objects in tact?

I'd guess that preserving, or recording living cultures is probably a lot more pressing and a lot more difficult. I want to see lots of recordings of artfully conducted interviews to capture cultural knowledge. I wish that most indigenous belief systems had not been destroyed by missionaries. I wish that they had been woven into a survivable syncretion of scientific industrial cultures so that they could have survived and contributed what they had. I'd be personally interested in working on that kind of thing.

It is a joke, but it's an appropriate one.

EA has a pathology of insisting that we defer to data even in situations where sufficient quantities of data can't be practically collected before a decision is necessary.

And that is extremely relevant to EA's media problem.

Say it takes 100 datapoints over 10 years to make an informed decision. During that time:

  • The media ecosystem, the character of the discourse, the institutions (there are now prediction markets involved btw) and the dominant moral worldviews of the audience has completely changed, you no longer need the answer to the question this data answers.
  • You have already been assassinated for not engaging in a principled and decisive way.

I should assume that I'm talking to someone who has this pathology and needs me to explain what the alternative to "defer to data" even is: Get better at interpreting the data you already have. Seek theories of communication that're general enough and robust enough that you don't strictly need to collect further data to validate them. Test them anyway, but you can't wait for the tests to conclude before deploying.

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