Where is the search engine whose algorithm gives priority to obscure but high quality sites?
the plutocrat overproduction thesis is underrated.
@cshentrup No, not necessarily.
As an existence proof (not usually good decision rule!), consider random choice. However you model your choice set or space, one can always choose a random item or point. It's an entirely distinct method from attaching utilities to items or points and choosing a maximum. It involves no intransitivities (it doesn't involve any rankings that might be intransitive!) or self-contradictions.
@cshentrup Absolutely! It's just a particular formalism in choice theory. There are lots of other ways to understand the world, behavior descriptively, choice prescriptively.
@whynothugo @raccoon @neil Sure. YMMV. I've been paying for a Zoom subscription (already $16 per month), so the extra control and privacy, plus the ability to integrate my own collaboration tools into meetings, is easily worth the extra $8 to me. I host meetings at least once a week.
(But I don't know that I needed a server this expensive. A cheaper droplet on digitalocean might have sufficed.)
@cshentrup when you estimate, you can offer a point estimate, but it's also wise to try to estimate the distribution, both the quantity and the shape of the uncertainty surrounding that "best estimate". an error i think the shut-up-and-multiply types frequently make, i think, is to underestimate the flatness of that probability distribution, or equivalently to overestimate the certainty of their point estimates.
@cshentrup i say it's a tautology, but not meaningless. it is not a thing we measure at all, it is the set of values we impose. it is the name that we give for what we are trying to maximize, but of course we get to choose what we wish to maximize. the tautology part comes in terms of "maximizing utility". decompressing that's the same as saying "maximize what we have chosen should be maximized."
@whynothugo @raccoon I think @neil has had some success on a #RaspberryPi https://neilzone.co.uk/2021/04/running-jitsi-on-a-raspberry-pi-4
I am running #Jitsi on a $24/month digital ocean Ubuntu instance, along with #HegdeDoc and maybe soon a few other collaboration-ish apps. So far it's worked great for me (admittedly small! 5-person-ish!) meetings.
(I haven't really tested or found the limits of my setup yet.)
@Alon (it doesn't for me, unless there's a hashtag. maybe it depends on what instance you're on.)
@jonathankoren what if they were always one and the same???
he heard a loud voice cry out "come on down!", but it wasn't downward he was going. he was going up.
@cshentrup it's turtles all the way down! if you want to formalize it. "utility" is just a tautological name for what you are after, and if you are modeling your decisionmaking formally, sure, eventually you'll choose what your models (including metamodels) maximize. 1/
@cshentrup but incorporating meta-models is a big choice! that is, you have a model of the world that is your best guess for how things work, but then you impose some probability that it's wrong and incorporate a variety of other models that you don't think are best, that in some sense you think wrong, with some probability, is a big deal. and then there's the problem of the choice of other models. how do you select & apply probabilities to worldviews you think not-best? /fin
@cshentrup (indirectly, outside of the language of utilitarianism or any kind of formalism, i get into these issues a bit here.) https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2023/08/14/fascism-as-triage/index.html
![Text:
Social affairs are not like natural sciences where usually ([not always]) one way of modeling the world is plainly](media_attachments/files/110/957/124/978/220/462/original/6e468b0e79deb77a.png)
Text: Social affairs are not like natural sciences where usually ([not always]) one way of modeling the world is plainly "best" and we should work from that story, discarding all the rest. Navigating social affairs requires developing a collection of different, often conflicting, accounts of how things work and making wise decisions about which accounts to use in different contexts and for different purposes. It is not only legitimate, but morally necessary, to consider the implications of different accounts before choosing which one you will let guide your actions. When policymakers accept "hard truths that can't be denied" (in modern parlance, we might hear "the science can't be denied"), we face a risk they might persuade themselves to do something awful. It's hubris to imagine there is any science so reliable in social affairs, and it is sin to allow any collection of (now studies or (then) political theories, to justify exclusion, elimination, disenfranchisement, collective punishment or penury in the name of your certainty in some greater good. If you would neither scruple to let your "hard truths" frame some hard action, nor derive any kind of moral and constructive action from your theory, what good to anvone is vour "science"? The rational choice is to draw from our portfolio of understandings multiple but actionable truths - the best we can come up with, but subject to a usefulness constraint - and then apply them constructively.
@cshentrup i think we agree on that. so we have "tendencies" of utilitarianism that we may agree are not its truest or best or correct version that if we are incautious we might use either to discredit useful and correct version, or ourselves adopt mistakenly and harmfully. there's lots useful and correct in utilitarianism, but we still have to be careful to weigh and balance versions of it or ideas presented in its name.
@cshentrup i'm not a huge fan. but he is a very big deal among people who consider themselves especially hardcore utilitarians (adjacent to so-called rationalists, effective altruists, etc.)
@cshentrup you hedge your bets depending on the certainties of your conclusions. if you are very sure of your utilitarian model, you torture some poor sod because you are sure it will save a quadrillion dust motes later. if you are less sure, you let other ways of understanding the world stay your hand a bit.
@dgar Ouch!
Is there a good way on this thing (Mastodon) to search ones own feed?
@cshentrup (no matter how deeply you think through a thing, you can still just be wrong. there is always model risk.)
@cshentrup the basic idea is (hedged in this post!) to take ones utilitarian models so seriously, when choosing a course of action, one should simply multiply modeled probabilities of outcomes by modeled utilities and choose whatever yields the biggest number, regardless of how counterintuitive or "wrong" it might seem. i take it as a bad form of utilitarian hubris, underestimating model risk and misunderstanding basic aspects of human cognition.
@cshentrup i don't think "shut up and multiply" has broadly led to higher quality inferences about social (or technological) affairs. https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/shut-up-and-multiply
perhaps you disagree!