Post #1523017
2026-04-22 12:23 UTC
Replies (6)
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@lagrangeinterpolator@awful.systems 2026-04-22 13:17
The fire code thing really is an excellent example of LessWrong Brain. Fire truck drivers insist on needlessly large trucks (no citation) which makes roads 30% wider than they would otherwise be (no citation) which has “probably” “non-trivially” contributed to larger cars (no citation) leading to enough additional road fatalities to cancel out the lives saved by stricter fire codes (no citation). The LessWrong Brain argument starts with a deliberately contrarian conclusion and proves it with a Rube Goldberg chain of logical syllogisms. Of course, citations are strictly optional, and they are free to misinterpret them as they see fit. The only real standard of each claim is “looks good to me”, but you are supposed to be impressed that they managed to string a dozen of them together to reveal some shocking, deep truth of the world that nobody else knows about. The AI 2027 nonsense is an infamous example of this. He uses the word “fermi” which is cult jargon based on Fermi estimation, a.k.a. guessing shit with back-of-the-envelope calculations. Not exactly what you want if you want to convince people to reform fire codes, especially if you have zero citations for anything. I guess people just aren’t rational enough, and the only reason the fire codes are so irrational is because people are emotional about fire codes. Firefighters are apparently revered as heroes, when it is really the case that the LWers who should be the heroes. After all, firefighters merely save people from fires, while LWers rent multimillion dollar mansions to save quadrillions of hypothetical people from hypothetical basilisks!
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@Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems 2026-04-22 13:43
Unfortunately there are a few things that make courts pretty tricky to implement in practice for things like the rationality, AI safety and EA communities. Badly implemented courts also can just make things worse by creating a clear target for attack and pressure. Seems very tricky, but probably we should have more courts (or maybe not, I would need to write the post to figure it out). yesss yesss lesswrong people’s tribunals and struggle sessions let’s gooooooooo
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@CinnasVerses@awful.systems 2026-04-22 17:18
I think building codes and zoning reform are good topics to get into in rich English-speaking countries but you have to 1) learn from actual experts not x.com/wiseAss1488, and 2) engage in local politics and policy and not just post to nerds around the world.
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@Soyweiser@awful.systems 2026-04-22 17:32
Fire codes are the root of all evil Ah somebody got told by their landlord not to do something. (I remember our student housing landlord (a big org) was regularly claiming ‘fire codes’ as an excuse to get rid of stuff in semi public areas. The actual fire codes didn’t demand this btw, it was just the excuse they used to stop students from filling everything with random trash).
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@maol@awful.systems 2026-04-25 19:53
I knew some people who lived in Switzerland for a bit and they joked that it was a libertarian paradise because you can drink and smoke when you're a teenager, the age of consent is 16 and everyone is issued a gun as part of their military service. I didn't expect anyone to take it seriously.... Afaik Switzerland does have a unique system of federated democratic governance, one of the oldest democratic systems in Europe. The downside is that women weren't able to vote in some Swiss cantons until the 90s.
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@maol@awful.systems 2026-04-25 19:48
> Fire accidents seem to have the unique combination of producing extremely strong emotional responses by people in a local community, while also often being traceable to an o-ring like failure that you can over-index on. Gee, why would people get emotional about friends and family being burnt alive. How bizarre. Also I am not a fire expert by any means whatsoever and maybe I'm missing this guy's point. But pretty much every account I have ever read of a fire that killed a lot of people is like "the building did not meet fire safety standards and the management had been dodging calls from the fire safety inspectors. Multiple people said the building was unsafe. On the night the fire happened the fire exits were chained shut." Like, read about [this horrendous fire that happened near where I live](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stardust_fire). There is no need to bring up o-rings. Fires in residential buildings and entertainment venues are not the same as fires on NASA spaceships. Also fire codes do not control the size of fire engines. That's a bad decision made by firefighters.