aantthony

That’s what I thought too. For example if they “control” for factors like IQ or social economic status, then the correlations will be reduced.

This isn’t a surprise unless you think the delay of gratification is itself the cause of success (seems like a straw man so they can claim to “challenge” the original study)

There is more info from one of the authors here which includes the preregistration document: https://x.com/jess_sperber/status/1818100487964496119

Edit: Also, I think the associations of 0.17 prove the title is false

Which one is more respectful is a different question. The lowest entropy option would still be the most likely gender specific pronoun. This would depend on the language, of course.

I’m not asserting why they were developed in the first place. The comment is just about which one is used, supposing that they already exist.

Choosing the more stereotypical option (even if it’s only 51%) is a more efficient encoding in an LLM model.

One interesting thing to do is use a model directly like Llama and then query the next-token probability logits for "he" and "she" (assuming you set up the sentence in such a way).

For example:

"A doctor was examining the patient when ___"

What this makes apparent is that increasing model temperature will select the less stereotypical option more often.

IMO this is getting at a deeper truth that the use of a gender in language, and historically defaulting to "he", was not about creating a bias, but instead it was a pattern which maximises information density and minimises useless information. Randomising the gender as is done today packs useless information into it.

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There is also one more kind of undefined, which is undefined as a type: the string value "undefined" for `typeof undefined`

Ah, yes. The definition I tried to use was from Wikipedia, in full: "In mathematics, a set is countable if either it is finite or it can be made in one to one correspondence with the set of natural numbers." I missed the part where it said finite. Thank you for correcting that.

If you take your sequence construction, then by removing duplicates from the sequence, this new sequence would allow finding a "next" element.

If a set is countable, then there exists a mapping which is a one-to-one correspondence between the items and the natural numbers (that’s the definition of countable). This correspondence would always allow you to determine the “next” item (by converting to a natural, incrementing, then converting back). However there could be multiple mappings (sorted differently, for instance) and so it’s more specifically, whether it’s possible to have a next function.

In other words, there can be multiple next functions, but a set is countable iff there is at least one of them.

I want the staking mechanism to incentivise truth. Binary votes don't provide such a system. Binary votes (aka polls) can be useful to gauge opinions, but are insufficient to aggregate knowledge, and can easily be manipulated. Take for instance the stock market. If all a trader could do was make a binary decision of "Is this company good?" and they only get one vote, that doesn't generate any useful information. But instead ask them how much they're willing to pay for a share, then now we have high quality data about the value of a company, and that is hard to manipulate.

Hey, thanks. Yes I’ve seen them. Trustory was pretty cool. They started with fact-based statements I think, but then transitioned to any kind of debate. Ended up closing down though: https://medium.com/trustory-app/why-trustory-is-shutting-dow...

I agree with you this is important.

verifiably false speech

Since social media companies can't be trusted to make that decision, I'm more worried that what they censor was true speech. Why? Because if it was false, they could just show the truthful information like Twitter did. Basic facts are contentious nowadays (e.g. number of genders in humans). They're going to get it wrong, so it's just too dangerous to censor.

My guess is pretty much never

I'm not able to know how often it could prevent such slander in those times, but we can look at the incentives. In those times, the authorities (church, newspapers) had central control over the main narrative, which is still mostly true today, but is beginning to fall. Back then, it seems you could slander minorities and there was pretty much no way for minorities to defend against it. In contrast, the upper classes had a means (duelling as an example) as an incentive against slander, and that imposes a cost on it. On social media there is no cost to publish lies. Verifact seeks to impose a cost on lies because you need to have something at stake. So I think if it existed at the time, Verifact would make it more costly to slander minorities, and it would be more profitable to disprove all kinds of pseudoscientific beliefs such as racial superiority and Nazi eugenics. Of course though, Verifact requires access to communication channels and tokens and that wouldn't be viable in those times.

authorities of their own choice, one could easily choose more forward-thinking judges

Yeah could be interesting. I'd just want to make sure people don't create echo-chambers or follow others based on political opinions rather than facts. Perhaps letting people 'invest' in the judgment decisions of others would help, and you'd get notified when they stake.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts.

What is the process for overturning a ruling?

The staking is open for 7 days, so discussion and adding more stakes is fine during that phase. But after 7 days, since it's tokens, it cannot reverse the transaction. However, I plan to allow "re-posting" the Tweet, and then it will show the new updated consensus (with a button to view the old one).

... to convince people that you understand the human relationship with truth-seeking well enough to optimize the process with technology. That will take some thoughtful writing.

Yeah, exactly right. That has been very challenging so far, but I'm making some progress, and working on this. Is there anything on the subject that has made a difference for you personally, perhaps for ideas and inspiration?

Thanks

Thanks for your feedback.

Just to be clear, its more than a show of hands because you choose how many tokens you want to stake. So in the Reddit example, if those 5% were willing to stake more, they’d have majority.

I chose to not go with a choose your trust model because I think the truthfulness information is a ‘what’ question, and checking ‘who’ only goes so far. But once those trustworthy users earn more tokens, they should have a larger influence on the system. Perhaps that would interest you?

Hey everyone,

This is a project I'm working on to get more truth on the internet. If deemed factual by the network, you gain more tokens from those who voted opposite to you. It uses the logarithmic market scoring rule (LMSR), and after one side holds a majority for 7 days, that side is paid out (no real money is involved yet, points are all free).

What do you think?

Yep you are right. I should have said geocentricity.

I also reject platonism. I really don't mean to imply changing these norms was easy, or is only a matter of putting the information out there disregarding material conditions and then just hoping for the best.

It seems that having free speech is a necessary, although not sufficient, condition to improve society. It's a principle worth defending.

Communism collapsed intellectually in the West after the economic collapse of the USSR and the relevant death tolls. I know China is communist, but in democratic countries, for the most part, communism is an idea that died off.

Both flat earth and geocentricity were ideas that died out, but yes, geocentricity.

Yes that is a good point. The link I gave mentions that study, and says it has failed replication attempts. I think the truth is more nuanced - there are ways it can be more effective and yes sometimes counter-effective. But that doesn't mean we should just give up fact-checking entirely. I think there are several ways we can make corrective fact checking more convincing to people and am working on building a collaborative fact-checker https://verifact.io to try to do that

No.

stevebmark said "I've never seen a bad or immoral or harmful idea die out when more people learn about it and scrutinize it"

So I gave examples of some ideas that did in fact die out when people learned about them and scrutinized them. My argument was that it's naive to think censoring ideas this time will be on the right side of history.

That people thought the Earth was flat before Galileo is a meme. Even Ancient Greeks knew it was round.

Well knowledge wasn't spread as easily, and could be lost. People knew, then they didn't and so on. It doesn't detract from my point that flat earth is an example of an idea that died off when more people learn about it and scrutinize it.

In the end, slavery wasn't abolished by debates: it was abolished by literally sending troops to shoot slave owners.

Abolishment of slavery took many angles since it was a massive change of society. Sure, you can pick one country where it required a war. But that doesn't mean the battle of ideas aspect is any less important. Even to rally troops you need to convince them their ideas are worth fighting for.

(communism) still accepted widely enough to turn Russia into Soviet Union

Sure, and then we saw the results, and the bad idea died off (mostly)

My comment wasn't about whether people knew these practices were occurring. People knew they were occurring.

The mere public existence of an idea (like in some dusty old book that nobody reads) is not sufficient to change majority option, no.

I meant they didn't know the truth about them. They obviously knew that slavery was occurring.

Why has the goalpost moved from an idea dying out, to dying out within one day? And who is "we"?

Most of them _everyone_ knew about for thousands, or even tens of thousands of years

That's not true. People didn't know about it. When the sunlight came, people changed their beliefs relatively quickly compared to how long the false beliefs were held. Sometimes within a few years, but generally within a generation.

What evidence do you have for this? I've never seen a bad or immoral or harmful idea die out when more people learn about it and scrutinize it.

There is a significant amount of evidence for it. For example, one could measure the effects of showing people fact-checks, and it has been demonstrated that it does indeed work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fact-checking#Effects

And there are countless ideas that have died out when more people learn. It's easy to forget about them, precisely because they do die off. A few big ones that were held by the majority but died out:

- flat earth (before Galileo)

- pro-slavery views

- human sacrifice

- caning children

- hanging

- smoking is good for you

- communism

- laws against gay marriage

In fact, social pressure is one of the most effective tools against hate and ignorance like this

It can be used to enforce hate and ignorance as well. It's naive to think that the way you propose enforcing it would be different to all other times in history when it was used.

Fascistic/authoritarian control of platforms is not compatible with the principles of free speech that allow our society to be free. Calling for censorship based on any wing, is wrong. People should be allowed to express their views, and platforms which repress that should be avoided.

I think the censorship is for political reasons rather than for misinformation. David Icke has been spreading misinformation for years (e.g. lizard people) but that isn't political. COVID-19 is.

Thanks for your response.

3. I agree its not justified to say all authorities by their nature are untrustworthy, and that was an escalation of rhetoric. But I would say this though, that “authorities” (in scare quotes) are untrustworthy if they are claiming to be authorities but don’t have any merit. So in some sense, we ought to be sceptical of anyone who claims to be an authority.

I didn’t read this as a conspiracy. There are many incentives at play, probably too many things to grasp and points like 4 that come out of nowhere (may have some significance, but didn’t fit into the argument well).

Theses doctors aren’t the poster child for democracy. I don’t think anyone’s claiming they are. Personally I think they were just in the right place at the right time to become a part of this censorship war.

Overall I think your criticisms are fair.

One of the author's points (for example) was that "Experts get things wrong for reasons that are innocent", gave a few examples why and explained how this means Facebook's process has a central problem due to its emphasis on “authoritative” opinions. Whether or not you agree with it, it is a point he made. And if you're going to strawman their entire post to "hey censorship is bad" and then say it's a poor argument, you ought to actually tell us why.