Perhaps much of what appears to be disagreement on how much dishonesty is permissible is in fact disagreement on how much words have meanings. I'll begin with a brief treatment of the reputation considerations for keeping one's word, and then complicate it. Continue reading
I've promoted Effective Altruism in the past. I will probably continue to promote some EA-related projects. Many individual EAs are well-intentioned, talented, and doing extremely important, valuable work. Many EA organizations have good people working for them, and are doing good work on important problems.
That's why I think Sarah Constantin’s recent writing on Effective Altruism’s integrity problem is so important. If we are going to get anything done, in the long run, we have to have reliable sources of information. This doesn't work unless we call out misrepresentations and systematic failures of honesty, and these concerns get taken seriously.
Sarah's post is titled “EA Has A Lying Problem.” Some people think this is overstated. This is an important topic to be precise on - the whole point of raising these issues is to make public discourse more reliable. For this reason, we want to avoid accusing people of things that aren’t actually true. It’s also important that we align incentives correctly. If dishonesty is not punished, but admitting a policy of dishonesty is, this might just make our discourse worse, not better.
To identify the problem precisely, we need language that can distinguish making specific assertions that are not factually accurate, from other conduct that contributes to dishonesty in discourse. I'm going to lay out a framework for thinking about this and when it's appropriate to hold someone to a high standard of honesty, and then show how it applies to the cases Sarah brings up. Continue reading
My friend Miri (quoted with permission) wrote this on Facebook a while back:
Midwesterners are intolerably passive aggressive. My family is sitting among some grass in the dunes because it's the only shady place and a park ranger drives by and says, "That grass you're sitting in--we try to protect that." I say the only thing that makes sense to say in response, which is, "Thanks for letting me know! We'll be careful with it." And I go back to my reading.
Then I look up and she's still there. I look at her for a few moments and she says, "You need to get out of there." I'm like, ok. Why can't you just say that the first time? Not everyone grew up in your damn convoluted culture. Say what you fucking mean.
In the comments, someone replied:
One of the best parts of NYC is that no one dances around what they mean to say here. On the contrary, once I heard a guy on the subway say, to confused-looking strangers, "Do you need some fucking help or what?”
This particular incident seems like obnoxious behavior on the part of the park ranger, but it got me curious about why this sort of norm seems to win out over more explicit communication in many places. Continue reading
You know how people make public health decisions about food fortification, and medical decisions about taking supplements, based on things like the Recommended Daily Allowance?
Well, there's an article in Nutrients titled A Statistical Error in the Estimation of the Recommended Dietary Allowance for Vitamin D. This paper says the following about the info used to establish the US recommended daily allowance for vitamin D:
The correct interpretation of the lower prediction limit is that 97.5% of study averages are predicted to have values exceeding this limit. This is essentially different from the IOM’s conclusion that 97.5% of individuals will have values exceeding the lower prediction limit.
Otto Von Bismarck is supposed to have said that there is a special providence for drunkards, fools, and the United States of America. The people of the United States of America have repudiated that providence, in order to become a normal country. That protection has now been withdrawn.
It is a normal outcome for a presidential election in the Americas, with a constitutional system modeled after that of the United States, to empower an authoritarian strongman. We are, after enjoying more than two hundred years of our special providence, finally experiencing a normal outcome. This is bad news, but it is most likely not catastrophic news.
In my pre-election post, I outlined two main bad things about Trump:
These things were real risks, and still are. They are very, very bad in expectation. But they are still fairly improbable. This is very bad news, but to run through the streets panicking would be committing a category error. To the extent that a Trump victory carries tail risk, we have already incurred that cost. We have already lost that measure. The only thing to do is manage the mainline scenarios.
(UPDATE: I basically endorse Paul Christiano's take on managing the tail risk.)
To respond reasonably to a Trump victory, we have to think clearly about the threats posed by a Trump regime, and the opportunities we have to change that.
I'm going to start by explaining why, while both those outcomes are real risks, the system is unlikely to suddenly collapse. Then I will explore what Trump's support means, and what we should do about it.
Continue reading
Anna Salamon, executive director of CFAR (named with permission), recently wrote to me asking for my thoughts on fundraisers using matching donations. (Anna, together with co-writer Steve Rayhawk, has previously written on community norms that promote truth over falsehood.) My response made some general points that I wish were more widely understood:
The 2016 US presidential election is likely unusually important, because Trump seems unusually likely to damage global coordination in ways that increase the risk of major wars – and to damage US political norms in ways that are likely to accelerate the decline of discourse and governance.
This is also an election in which the libertarian candidate has been unusually viable because he has any experience at all as a major government figure – despite his apparent lack of interest in the sorts of things a president needs to know about, such as other countries. Many people also want to register a protest vote with Green Party candidate Jill Stein, since they find Hillary Clinton's respectable establishment liberal misconstruals of the true and the good objectionable, and prefer disrespectable anti-establishment left-wing misconstruals of the true and the good.1
Many people agree that Trump is terrible and it would be much less bad if Clinton wins, but some people prefer a third-party candidate and are unwilling to simply back the lesser of two evils. Some people end up favoring a vote for Clinton on net; others favor a third party vote. Both types are distributed over many states.
A protest vote has the same value anywhere. Federal funding also becomes available for any party that gets more than 5% of the popular vote – and it seems like Johnson's share of the vote could pass that threshold. On the other hand, due to the US electoral college system, the cost of forgoing a Clinton vote has very different effect depending on which state you're voting in. In a "safe state" overwhelmingly likely to go to one of the two major candidates, your vote has very little effect on the outcome of the election. But in a "swing state" where the outcome is more in doubt, your vote has a comparatively large effect on the outcome. Scott Aaronson points out that this distinction creates the opportunity for gains from trade, and has been promoting the idea of vote-swapping in order to reconcile these interests. The idea is that one or more Clinton supporters in safe states pledge to vote for a particular third-party candidate, in exchange for a third-party voter pledging to vote for Clinton.
In a one-to-one swap, this keeps third party national percentages the same, but increases the chance the swing state goes for the desired candidate. This is enough to yield gains from trade if both sides share a preference for one major-party candidate over the other. But even if that's not true, a many-to-one swap can still create gains from trade, by increasing both the chance that the desired major-party candidate wins, the third-party candidate's share of the vote total.
One of my friends recently suggested that we can't trust this system not to be gamed by Trump voters. I think that this is mistaken. Continue reading
References
| ↑1 | This is not about the vaccines thing, which seems overblown – Stein seems basically correct there, that mandated vaccines are good but people have justified distrust in the medical establishment which needs to be addressed. |
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Sorry to write about Donald Trump again, but he’s such a good foil for talking about justice. I'll keep this short.
People have been talking about an incident in which he publicly tried to kiss a child without her consent.
This is wrong behavior, and it is also normal adult behavior.
It is a scandal that Donald J. Trump, who is probably a serial rapist, and has obviously committed multiple sexual assaults and bragged about them, is not in prison. The scandal is not that some exceptionally bad thing occurred, but that this is apparently the expected, normal outcome. That the women assaulted by Trump apparently believed that they had no legal recourse, that they did not think that this was unacceptable behavior that would be punished as such if they spoke up.
It is not additionally a scandal, given the apparent absence of rule of law in this country, that the Republican party has nominated this criminal for the Presidency of the United States. (The scandal there is that he seems totally uninterested in actually doing the job, and therefore likely to cause an unusually large amount of damage to the current world order, to no purpose. I'll try to write about this before election day.)
It is separately a scandal that it is normal adult behavior to kiss a child who clearly does not want to be kissed by you.
It is not additionally a scandal that the Republican presidential nominee engages in normal adult behavior in public.
If you think that this ought to be scandalous, the place to start is by objecting to it in the cases where you have the social power to change behavior - when you personally witness it. That’s the beginning of the process. The end of the process is that it’s actually scandalous when anyone - bad person or not - sexually assaults a child in public.
This (via Miri) is a piece by Margo, a social worker, talking about how people talk about social work as being unusually hard, and call social workers "saints." Margo doesn't much care for the assumption that social work is unusually hard, and I'm glad I read this, because it will temper the advice I read in this post, suggesting that the universally appreciated response to finding out someone's profession is to say that their job must be hard:
Continue reading