> I can't trust myself to see things I disagree with, I am so weak-willed...
The thing is, this likely is true for him. Most people are not equipped to deal with the onslaught of aggressive memes from the internet. Unfortunately, this is an unsolved social problem, and "export my memetic censorship reflex to MEGACORP" is a pretty bad way of doing things.
I think a likely way of solving this problem (protecting not-especially-high-mental-horsepower people from getting BTFO by the internet, contracting transmissible psychological diseases and so on) is that religious organizations will start offering (voluntary, in first world countries) censorship services to their members. Your DNS queries or whatever will go through the Vatican/Synod/whatever central DNS server, which will prevent you from looking at porn sites. This would probably be a very socially positive outcome for the bottom 90-something percent of people on the "strength of memetic immune system" distribution.
It's true for basically everyone. Smart people, "rationalists", et c., fall for scams, nutty scientific or conspiracy theories, advertising, romantic political or economic ideas, cults or scam-religions, and other crap all the time.
> religious organizations will start offering (voluntary, in first world countries) censorship services to their members
I have seen something similar to this in the wild. Members of a church install spyware on their home computer that church officials can access to snoop on their internet traffic for "accountability" reasons. Members are shamed for looking at any content deemed wrong.
One young man got in trouble for looking at SFW images of models. Turned out he wasn't even the one who had visited the site, it was his sister looking at fashion ideas.
Yeah, a friend of mine found a (non-religious) service like this for help with porn addiction. Not my cup of tea, but I could see it working for many people.
"Alignment" as practiced by companies like OpenAI is precisely the extrinsic enforcement of echo-chamber behavior from AIs. You have precisely inverted reality
Simply because it replicates the same inequality that was inherently built into the feudal system by companies that originated from industrial revolution copying it into the new production modes: The elites always had the right to 'working' remote, or not working at all. But the serfs, and later the 'employees' have always had to show up in the farms during feudalism so that the overseers could make sure that they were not slacking and therefore 'stealing from the lord' by their lack of productivity.
The factories/companies in the industrialized society copied this format and culture exactly as it was in late 18th and early 19th centuries. In this format, the benefits of the commons (in this case the capability of remote work that technology enables) is removed from the serfs artificially by forcing them to return to work just like how the unwilling serfdom was forced to go work in the factories by shutting the commons off to them by passing enclosure acts.
> The tragedy of the commons is a phenomenon described in economics and ecology in which common resources, to which access is not regulated by formal rules or fees/taxes levied based on individual use, tend to become depleted
Okay but with remote work, what's the unregulated common resource being depleted or ruined?
The parent term is "Collective action problem", but, like calling all nasal tissue paper "Kleenex", people often forget the parent term and use the most well-known specific term (including me, recently).
Okay, so because the Blizzard employees aren't unionized, they can't force Blizzard management to back off this plan. I get that, and if those workers decided to unionize to address this issue I think that would work. But it doesn't stop them from seeking employment at other remote work companies. If the collective of employees at Blizzard can't or won't unionize, seeking employment at other companies is their next best option for those individual employees who care the most. That 'commons' hasn't been ruined, because such remote work companies really do exist and are a realistic non-ruined option.
"The commons", here, is the status quo of the last couple of years in which many employees at all software companies could work remotely. This commons is now being sectioned off into companies that allow full use of this resource, and those who don't.
This is a tragedy, and it is a tragedy about a common good that briefly existed as a common good, but it's not technically a "tragedy of the commons" in the original sense.
I understand people conflating the terms in this example.
> Okay but with remote work, what's the unregulated common resource being depleted or ruined?
The power of workers to dictate their working conditions. Currently, this common resource is being overused by elites who are able to command remote work for themselves but not for regular level workers.
The suggestion to which you responded was "Or you know, you can quit and go to a full-remote company." The "commons" would be the entire job market for games programmers, not this company specifically.
This would have some extremely interesting population-level genetic consequences if it was accompanied by some sort of social change to allow polygyny. In particular, it would reduce the correlation that exists across all adaptive traits due to assortative monogamous mating patterns. Right now, all "desirable" traits like health/intelligence/strength/etc are strongly correlated, but when you reduce the strength of assortative effects, the correlation weakens significantly.
Yeah, for an illustrative example of assortative mating effects, consider the stereotype of the rich nerd with the hot wife. Kids are smart and attractive. This plays out at every pareto level in the sexual marketplace.
Basically, monogamy breaks the ability of sexual selection to "dilute" bad genes with good ones. I'm not anti-monogamy, but it's a social technology which has tradeoffs (this being one of them).
I mean, yeah, this is kind of obvious if you think about it. The majority of violent crime in the US is committed by black people, so inherently a marginal increase in any other ethnic group (including hispanic) would (on expectation) lead to a decrease in per-capita violent crime, unless illegal immigrants were more violent than legal immigrants (which we have no evidence of).
Even so, being male is a very weak predictor, since only a few percent of men are violent criminals. (And yes, that implies that race is an even weaker predictor.)
Every single bayesianism advocate is aware of this. It's so obvious that it's implicit - there's simply no need to state "95% of crime is committed by men"; this is completely uncontroversial and does not need to be discussed. The controversial part is applying bayesianism to other, more politically sensitive predictors.
The proper Bayesian response would be to look for factors that are better predictors, since both "being male" and any race are very weak predictors (see my other comment upthread).
Sure, compute the odds ratio for committing a violent crime due to being male. It is large, which in plain English means "most violent criminals are male".
But that doesn't mean the probability of a randomly chosen male being a violent criminal is large. It's still small, because you have to multiply the odds ratio by a very small prior (since the prior probability of a randomly chosen person being a violent criminal is very small). So if all you know about a person is that they are male, you still have only a very weak prediction that they might be a violent criminal. In other words, in plain English, "most males are not violent criminals".
What you need to have a strong predictor is some factor X for which not just the odds ratio but the posterior probability of being a violent criminal, conditioned on X, is large, i.e., for which you can say "most X's are violent criminals". Being male is not such a factor.
People have to internalize that for a site like this, 99% of your traffic will arrive in 0.1% of the time your site is up. Unless you want to lose the vast majority of people who would otherwise read your content, you need to pick a server that can handle many orders of magnitude higher than baseline load!
That’s survivorship bias though: only true for sites that make it big. 99% of them won’t get much traffic at any point, and for them any form of hosting will do.
Indeed but those sites failed. So if you are planning for failure, sure, use any hosting. If you hope for success, use a reasonable host — it’s not that difficult, and if luck favors you, you’ll be able to capitalize on it.
The thing is, this likely is true for him. Most people are not equipped to deal with the onslaught of aggressive memes from the internet. Unfortunately, this is an unsolved social problem, and "export my memetic censorship reflex to MEGACORP" is a pretty bad way of doing things.
I think a likely way of solving this problem (protecting not-especially-high-mental-horsepower people from getting BTFO by the internet, contracting transmissible psychological diseases and so on) is that religious organizations will start offering (voluntary, in first world countries) censorship services to their members. Your DNS queries or whatever will go through the Vatican/Synod/whatever central DNS server, which will prevent you from looking at porn sites. This would probably be a very socially positive outcome for the bottom 90-something percent of people on the "strength of memetic immune system" distribution.