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Eli Tyre Profile picture
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23 Dec, 4 tweets, 2 min read
This seems to me like a deeply important thread, which I think I should work to wrap my head around. If the basic conceit is true, I think it should impact my world view about as much as say...learning about game theory.
It reminds me of some thoughts I had reading a @SamoBurja article. (Though I'm not claiming that my point is the same as @vgr's.)

"When I read this paragraph, I have a sense that the world is dominated / inhabited by not individuals, but institutions.
The individuals are like minos swimming in the ecosystem, but the world is really story of competing and interacting institutions.

Like, trying to get power as an individual is misguided. There are powerful behemoths walking the earth and you can't even close to compete.
(Well, actually, small teams might be able to compete, but teams are still not individuals.)"

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More from @EpistemicHope

Eli Tyre Profile picture
24 Dec
Reading about the history of slavery, one new realization is how terrified the South was of a slave uprising.

The masters lived in fear that one day the slaves would rise up and either 1) murder the whites in their beds or 2) turn the tables and enslave the whites.
That was a persistent background fear.
Most sources talk about the motivation for the civil war (and other stuf) as "protecting the Southern way of life" and that does seem like a real thing. But I think "the southern way of life" was wrapped up with a visceral fear for their lives.
Read 27 tweets
Eli Tyre Profile picture
21 Dec
@Insect_Song But...the label "bad actor." I think that that label is useful, and I don't particularly dispute it's use here, but that doesn't mean that I don't think it is useful to empathize with the internal state of bad-actors (unless you're doing that as insulation from manipulation).
@Insect_Song "Bad actor" to me, is like a boundary that a person is setting, but it doesn't preclude understanding the fuck up that results from conflicting first-person perspectives that are each laying claim to some burden of proof thing.
@Insect_Song Like, the thing that is happening there seems like an usually crisp example of a thing that is happening all the time, between people who are behaving correctly in their own world.
Read 4 tweets
Eli Tyre Profile picture
21 Dec
Someone asked me why I retweeted this.

This is an amazing case study in poor communication. Everyone I talk to is is much better than this, but the dynamics here are writ-large versions of mistakes that we are probably making.
I'm looking at this thinking "What went wrong here, and what general pattern, or piece of skill, would have been needed to avoid what went wrong?"
First pass: Is the core thing that's happening here about which things should be assumed to be willful misunderstanding and which things should be assumed to to be honest mistakes? That is, where do you allocate charity?

But that isn't it yet.
Read 4 tweets
Eli Tyre Profile picture
21 Dec
Thread:

Why is it that Bioethics, as a field, doesn't look like a bunch of (less smart) Bostroms, weighing tradeoffs and steering towards overall good outcomes, but instead looks like a bunch of people promoting harmful polices in the name of morality?
@yashkaf Also, this is a good example of the virtue of humorlessness. @JeffLadish asked a (mostly?) joke question, but I reflexively took it seriously.

Which led me to actually think about, and, I think, attain some new insight about the world.
I do, dispositional, process all questions literally, even when I know that they are ironic or phatic.

That's not to say that this kind of investigation precludes humor, or vice versa. Probably there is some better synthesis. But also, this attitude is adaptive.
Read 4 tweets
Eli Tyre Profile picture
21 Dec
@JeffLadish I think because the reward structure of being a bio-ethicist rewards saying level-headed sounding, cautious-sounding, conventional wisdom?

Though I'm not sure why that is.
@JeffLadish I guess if you want to radically improve the world, you mostly don't go into a field that is about opining on other people's work, you go into something like Engineering and do the work?
@JeffLadish I note that Nick Bostrom is what a Bioethicist should be: he thinks hard about tradeoffs and risks, and crystalizes concepts like the Unilateralist's curse and black ball technologies.

But this is starting from a place of "The world could be vastly better. How do we get there?"
Read 34 tweets
Eli Tyre Profile picture
20 Dec
Something that I am surprised and confused by:

I would have expected that when the pandemic hit that there would be a flurry of innovative solutions to the problem of "meetings and social interactions online."

But it seems like there was very little of that.
There's Zoom, of course, and a few platforms on the model of gather.town.

But...that's about it?

(Maybe there are lots more, but I haven't heard of them?)
I'm thinking about this now because the Rationality Community had its secular solstice tonight, which was held on a custom app that was designed to allow a few hundred people from all over the world to sing songs together, without it being terrible.
Read 8 tweets

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