But the profit-aligned corporations are made of people, as you say, and once the leaders are personally affected by the „deterioration of the ecology necessary for human life to persist“, they will seriously try to stop it. That, I guess, is the difference to how AI would behave by default. (And in the thought experiment that you quote, unlimited capabilities are assumed, so the deterioration can be stopped.)
I am not talking about sci-fi magic and unlimited capabilities. What I am saying is very concrete and obvious: profits are misaligned with long-term ecological viability. The evidence for this is very clear as well because the biosphere is now full of synthetic chemicals and their byproducts which were created by profit-aligned companies and corporations.
"After the loss Kasparov questioned whether Deep Blue's team had cheated in order to beat him, but in a fascinating new short documentary by FiveThirtyEight and ESPN, it's shown that the momentous victory — and the notorious 44th move that led to it — was actually the result of a computer error."
But the video actually says the error occurred in the first game, which Kasparov won, rather than in the second, which he lost and after which he suggested he had been cheated.
Thanks! Just looked into this further. The guidelines say you should use the original title when submitting a story. But what if this title is uninformative and the subtitle is too long? Then you have to summarise. I don't think it's acceptable for a moderator to edit this summary, without giving any notice to readers (this was done several times to me). He should kill the whole submission instead if he doesn't like the title.
Apart from that, I guess it would be much better if submitters had a chance to indicate why they find their submission interesting. Just a thought.
It's fine to make a title short enough to fit the limit. It's fine to use a subtitle if that's more informative or less baity. What's not fine is to rewrite the title to put your own spin on the story.
Stories are not the property of the submitter. Being first to post a story confers no privilege to tell others how to perceive it.
In my view, reflecting the content as neutrally as possible is one of the most important principles of HN. HN readers can and should evaluate stories for themselves.
It sounds like you'll be unhappy with the above, but I hope not. It would be nice to see you sooner than another seven years!
Thank you for the explanation! In my 2nd paragraph I had older stories in mind where it's most likely a case of "either I submit it or nobody does". I can see now how my proposal is bad in the "normal" case of hot, new stories.
There should be enough interesting stories out there with good, informative, neutral original titles that it won't be another seven years.
From the guidelines: "If you want to add initial commentary on the link, write a blog post about it and submit that instead". This would seem to explicitly allow telling others how to perceive a story, so I don't really see how the privilege thing can be the crucial point. But reading dang's comment I realised how an inferior title might damage the prospects of a story that would have been submitted under a better title by someone else.
It feels better if you do the same backwards: for every x hours of work on the main project you reward yourself with an hour of surfing.
Also, saying you have to do something is disempowering language that drives you to rebellion. Remember yourself why you want to do it. Think of the consequences of both doing it and not doing it. If after that you still don't want to do it, don't do it.
Neither of these arguments even attempts to refute the central point of the essay. In case anyone wants to try it, the central point is that in an organization organized as a tree structure, structural forces tend to give each person freedom in inverse proportion to the size of the whole tree.
If I hadn't already done it, I wouldn't bother with it now, though, because:
Even these dishonest DH5s are ...
Roth's contribution is CLEARLY NOT DISHONEST (couldn't resist the uppercase here). I get the impression that the chance you would ever take advantage of any refutations to plug holes and thus further improve the standard of your essay collection is precisely zero. It's all about "picking a winner" (this term actually appears in paulgraham.com/disagree.html) instead of advancing towards the truth. Readers of your essays will do best by just enjoying the incredible density of ideas, then deciding for themselves which ones to accept, rather than following the "comment" link at the bottom.
If anyone has a link to an instance where Paul Graham helps the search for the truth by conceding a nontrivial point in an argument, I would be grateful. That would help repair my impression, and probably some other people's as well.
Roth's contribution is probably not dishonest, it's just shoddy thinking.
Paul is not saying that there's some kind of moral or ethical imperative to working in small groups. He just observes that it works well. So there is no fallacy, though I can see how Roth could have gotten this mixed up.
Second, it is just silly to try to refute the notion that we might be good at and enjoy anything we might have evolved to do. For one thing, that's clearly the case -- evolution works well. For another thing, PG's not trying to prove anything, he's relating his personal experience and forwarding a theory that might explain it.
The fact that people were so bothered by this is the most telling fact. As Abbie Hoffman used to say, if someone ever says something that gets your goat, they struck gold!
Refuting the proof of a central point rather than the central point itself must be considered DH6 in Paul Graham's hierarchy. Roth probably took that for granted. I certainly would. Otherwise I hereby claim P = NP and preemptively accuse anyone not accepting this of deliberate dishonesty and bad spirit and categorise their disagreement as "formally possibly up to DH5 but effectively DH1 at most".
"Even as high as DH5 we still sometimes see deliberate dishonesty, as when someone picks out minor points of an argument and refutes those. Sometimes the spirit in which this is done makes it more of a sophisticated form of ad hominem than actual refutation. For example, correcting someone's grammar, or harping on minor mistakes in names or numbers. Unless the opposing argument actually depends on such things, the only purpose of correcting them is to discredit ones's opponent."
How do you measure the spirit? An author may detect bad spirit everywhere and take all DH5-but-not-DH6 disagreements as effectively DH1.
Anyway, the quoted paragraph seems very harsh on many small-point DH5 disagreers. Some people just feel the "duty" (xkcd.com/386) to correct mistakes, without being deliberately dishonest. And there is a lot of uncharted importance space between grammar mistakes and the central point. As an example, what if the central point were correct and worthy but illustrated by two examples, one of them bad? The argument doesn't depend on it, but is it still clear that the only purpose of correcting the author is to discredit him?
Why not generalize DH6 from "stating the central point and refuting it" to "refuting a point and commenting on its importance"? Then you could even correct grammar mistakes, just add explicitly that you're aware that as a grammar mistake it's minor. DH6 would no longer imply power or effort, but, as pointed out in the essay, it already doesn't imply truth.
You seem to imply in the essay that disagreeing comments are more valuable than agreeing ones, though:
"And when you agree there's less to say. You could expand on something the author said, but he has probably already explored the most interesting implications. When you disagree you're entering territory he may not have explored"
That does not imply they are more valuable; rather, it is human nature to respond to a statement that you feel you can "correct". It is an ego boost, if nothing else.
To me, cooperative, exploratory statements are the most valuable.
"That is a interesting opinion, I've never heard that perspective. But what about case xyz, have you considered that."
In that context, it is much easier to build up interesting information trees, rather than simply staying stuck on one (often minor or irrelevant) node.
Very interesting distinction between phatic and referential language. Thanks from me, too, for these terms.
You say phatic language is about maintaining the connection. If I understand this correctly then there's a role for it also with people one does know well. If you prefer referential conversation and meet someone who's completely restricted to that part of language, you may initially enjoy the conversations a lot. But, after some time (this could be months or years), despite their referential content they may appear increasingly "empty": you realise you're still completely replaceable as a conversation partner by a random new person.
These terms come from Roman Jakobson's model of the functions of language. (Jakobson is the legendary structuralist linguist of whom it was said that he spoke 36 languages, each with a foreign accent.) The model had six functions; the others were emotive, conative (issuing a command), metalingual, and poetic.
The bit about using phatic language mostly with people one doesn't know well is not from Jakobson. I made it up, and it's probably wrong. I didn't go over that sentence 20-50 times :).
It was just that I recently had this thought that language could be divided into a "smalltalk" component, where the content is replaceable but not the conversation partner, and an "info" component, where the partner is replaceable but not the content. I have no clue about linguistics but I vaguely remember that this may correspond to competing theories how language evolved. "Phatic language is about maintaing the connection" seemed to fit perfectly.
But as there are four other components according to Jakobson, I should be careful. Added Jakobson to my reading list.
