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Open thread, Oct. 27 - Nov. 2, 2014
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Comments (400)
An good semi-rant by Ken White of popehat on GamerGate. I recommend it as an excellent example of applied rationality and sorting out through the hysterics.
Meh, he seems to be trying to hard to pretend to be wise. One of the more egregious examples:
That's like saying "Violence is wrong no matter who does it, therefore if an armed gang invades your neighborhood you should passively comply".
He does a better job of it than most people I know :-) It's not that I completely agree with him, but he writes well and makes a lot of valid points.
The biggest objection to his position is, essentially, Yvain's post on weak men.
Sarah Hoyt has a good description of the problems with the post here.
Meh. It's a rant and not a particularly well-thought-out one.
This article discusses a paper that seems interesting from the perspective of effective altruism and how peoples behavior changes based on where they think their money might be going:
http://www.vox.com/2014/10/30/7131345/overhead-free-donations-charity-fundraising-seed-matching-gneezy
If you want a link directly to the paper, that link is both in the article and reposted here:
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/346/6209/632
Short summary: When considering donations, people in the study donated more when they know their donation is not going to overhead.
I keep finding the statistic that "one pint of donated blood can save up to 3 lives!" But I can't find the average number of lives saved from donating blood. Does anyone know/is able to find?
What do you mean with "lives saved by donating blood" in the first place?
Quantity people who would die without any blood donations
Liters of blood donated
That's not a pretty useful number if you want to make personal decisions based on it. If our Western system would need more blood, raising the incentives for donations isn't that hard.
WHO prefers all blood donations to be unpaid:
"Regular, unpaid voluntary donors are the mainstay of a safe and sustainable blood supply because they are less likely to lie about their health status. Evidence indicates that they are also more likely to keep themselves healthy."
Interesting. So the core question seems to be: "How much value is produced by healthy blood donors making decisions to donate without incentives, compared to blood that's "brought"".
Bought blood has been subject of an interesting debate:
"Since increased blood shortages are to be expected anyway in the near future, all measures improving the supply of safe blood, including monetary compensation, should be objectively discussed without prejudice."
"Paid blood donation still has its defenders, who cite economic doctrines denying the existence of altruism per se, the inability of most countries with exclusively voluntary donations to achieve self-sufficiency and the supposedly successful use of selected groups of paid donors."
"Majority would consent to free blood donation only in case of emergency or as a family replacement..."
"Several countries are already self-sufficient in blood and blood products, based on a voluntary, unpaid donor system."
"The European Association of the Plasma Products [...] believes that the most important aspect of self-sufficiency is a sufficient supply of safe and efficacious product; the question of paid or unpaid donations is of lower importance."
The expression "can save up to" should immediately trigger your bullshit detector. It's a reliable signal that the following number is meaningless.
I've seen a few discussions recently where people seem to argue past one another because they're using different senses of the terms "subjective" and "objective".
Some things are called "subjective" because they are parametrized by subject. For instance, everyone who can see has a field of vision, but no two people have the same field of vision (because two people can't stand in the same spot at the same time). However, we can reason and calculate accurately about someone else's field of vision.
Other things are called "subjective" because they are internal to a subject. For instance, since humans are not telepathic we don't have access to the thoughts or mood of another person. The only way we can discover them is by being told about them — or, theoretically, brain-scans — and even this doesn't convey how it feels to be that person.
NY Times on the wrongness of political party-related discrimination.
David Brooks is more or less correct about the US where the two mainstream parties are not very distinguishable. He is entirely wrong about many other places of the world. There are enough countries where someone's political views are "a marker for basic decency".
P.S. I am amused by a piece of incidental research he cites:
That is called blatant racism and in case of s/black/white/ would be cause for much hand-wringing, soul-searching, and probably obligatory "diversity training" for everyone.
I doubt this generalizes very well.
There have clearly been cases in the history of the world where one party made it clear that they really did intend to hurt or kill their perceived opponents. And then, after acceding to power, went on to do just that.
I've seen remarks here on LW from at least one person in a central European country that he or she felt increasingly personally unsafe due to particular political factions in that country producing increasingly violent rhetoric. I would not tell that person that he or she would be wrong to shun people who advocated political violence against him or her.
Here in the U.S., it sure seems that political eliminationist rhetoric (of the "All the Other Party should be killed as traitors" sort) is produced largely as a form of commercial entertainment, not serious political advocacy. But I say that from a position of relative security and privilege ....
I've recently started a tumblr dedicated to teaching people what amounts to Rationality 101. This post isn't about advertising that blog, since the sort of people that actually read Less Wrong are unlikely to be the target audience. Rather, I'd like to ask the community for input on what are the most important concepts I could put on that blog.
(For those that would like to follow this endeavor, but don't like tumblr, I've got a parallel blog on wordpress)
Noticing confusion is the first skill I tried to train up last year, and is definitely a big one, because knowing what your models predict and noticing when they fail is a very valuable feedback loop that prevents you from learning if you can't even notice it.
Picturing what sort of evidence would unconvince you of something you actively believe is a good exercise to pair with the exercise of picturing what sort of evidence would convince you of something that seems super unlikely. Noticing unfairness there is a big one.
Realizing when you are trying to "win" at truthfinding, which is... ugh.
Map and territory - why is rationality important in the first place?
Excercises in small rational behaviours. E.g. people genrally are very reluctant to apologize about anything, even if the case means little to them and a lot to the other person. Maybe it's "if I apologize, that will mean I was a bad person in the first place" thinking, maybe something else.
It's a nice excercise: if somebody seems to want something from you or apparently is angry with you when you did nothing wrong, stop for a moment and think: how much will it cost me to just say "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to offend you". After all, those are just words. You don't have to "win" every confrontation and convince the other person you are right and their requirements are ridiculus. And if you apologize, in fact you both will have a better day - the other person will feel appreciated and you will be proud you did something right.
(A common situation from my experience is that somebody pushes me in a queue, I say "excuse me, but please don't stand so close to me/don't look over my arm when I'm writing the PIN code etc." and then the pusher often starts arguing how my behaviour is out of line - making both of us and the cashier upset)
Come to think of it, it's a lot like Quirrell's second lesson in HPMoR...
Taking stock of what information you have, and what might be good sources for information, well in advance of making a decision.
Admitting you are wrong.
Highly related: When you even might be wrong, get curious about that possibility rather than scared of it.
Where are you right, while most others are wrong? Including people on LW!
Residing in the US and taking part in US society (eg by pursuing a career) is deeply problematic from an ethical point of view. Altruists should seriously consider either migrating or scaling back their career ambitions significantly.
I would suggest ANZAC, Germany, Japan, or Singapore. I realized after making this list that those countries have an important property in common, which is that they are run by relatively young political systems. Scandinavia is also good. Most countries are probably ethically better than the US, simply because they are inert: they get an ethical score of zero while the US gets a negative score.
(This is supposed to be a response to Lumifer's question below).
For reference, ANZAC stands for the "Australia and New Zealand Army Corps" that fought in WWI. If you mean "Australia and New Zealand", then I don't think there's a shorter way of saying that than just listing the two countries.
"the Antipodes"
Do you follow some kind of utilitarian framework where you could quantify that problem? Roughly how much money donated to effective charities would make up the harm caused by participating in US society.
Thanks for asking, here's an attempt at an answer. I'm going to compare the US (tax rate 40%) to Singapore (tax rate 18%). Since SG has better health care, education, and infrastructure than the US, and also doesn't invade other countries or spy massively on its own citizens, I think it's fair to say that 22% extra of GDP that the US taxes its citizens is simply squandered.
Let I be income, D be charitable donations, R be tax rate (0.4 vs 0.18), U be money usage in support of lifestyle, and T be taxes paid. Roughly U=I-T-D, and T=R(I-D). A bit of algrebra produces the equation D=I-U/(1-R).
Consider a good programmer-altruist making I=150K. In the first model, the programmer decides she needs U=70K to support her lifestyle; the rest she will donate. Then in the US, she will donate D=33K, and pay T=47K in taxes. In SG, she will donate D=64K and pay T=16K in taxes to achieve the same U.
In the second model, the altruist targets a donation level of D=60, and adjusts U so she can meet the target. In the US, she payes T=36K in taxes and has a lifestyle of U=54K. In SG, she pays T=16K of taxes and lives on U=74K.
So, to answer your question, the programmer living in the US would have to reduce her lifestyle by about $20K/year to achieve the same level of contribution as the programmer in SG.
Most other developed countries have tax rates comparable or higher than the US, but it's more plausible that in other countries the money goes to things that actually help people.
I think given the same skill level the programmer-altruist making 150K while living in Silicon Valley might very well make 20K less living in Germany, Japan or Singapore.
I don't know what opportunities in Europe or Asia look like, but here on the US West Coast, you can expect a salary hit of $20K or more if you're a programmer and you move from the Silicon Valley even to a lesser tech hub like Portland. Of course, cost of living will also be a lot lower.
This is just plain wrong. Mostly because Singapore and the US are different countries in different circumstances. Just to name one, Singapore is tiny. Things are a lot cheaper when you're small. Small countries are sustainable because international trade means you don't have to be self-sufficient, and because alliances with larger countries let you get away with having a weak military. The existence of large countries is pretty important for this dynamic.
Now, I'm not saying the US is doing a better job than Singapore. In fact, I think Singapore is probably using its money better, albeit for unrelated reasons. I'm just saying that your analysis is far too simple to be at all useful except perhaps by accident.
Things are a lot cheaper when you're large. It's called "economy of scale".
Yes, both effects exist and they apply to different extents in different situations. A good analysis would take both (and a host of other factors) into account and figure out which effect dominates. My point is that this analysis doesn't do that.
Interesting. This is in contrast to which societies? To where should altruists emigrate?
If anyone cares, the effective altruism community has started pondering this question as a group. This might work out for those doing direct work, such as research or advocacy: if they're doing it mostly virtually, what they need the most is Internet access. If a lot of the people they'd be (net)working with as part of their work were also at the same place, it would be even less of a problem. It doesn't seem like this plan would work for those earning to give, as the best ways of earning to give often depend on geography-specific constraints, i.e., working in developed countries.
Note that if you perceive this as a bad idea, please share your thoughts, as I'm only aware of its proponents claiming it might be a good idea. It hasn't been criticized, so it's an idea worthy of detractors if criticism is indeed to be had.
Fundamentally the biggest reason to have a hub and the biggest barrier to creating a new one is coordination. Existing hubs are valuable because a lot of the coordination work is done FOR you. People who are effective, smart, and wealthy are already sorted into living in places like NYC and SF for lots of other reasons. You don't have to directly convince or incentivize these people to live there for EA. This is very similar to why MIRI theoretically benefits from being in the Bay Area: They don't have to pay the insanely high a cost to attract people to their area at all, vs to attract them to hang out with and work with MIRI as opposed to google or whoever. I think it's highly unlikely that even for the kind of people who are into EA that they could make a new place sufficiently attractive to potential EAs to climb over the mountains of non-coordinated reasons people have to live in existing hubs.
I've signed up for cryonics, invest in stocks through index funds, and recognize that the Fermi paradox means mankind is probably doomed.
It would be a lot harder to make a machine that actually is conscious (phenomenally conscious, meaning it has qualia) than it would be to make one that just acts as if is conscious (in that sense). It is my impression that most LW commenters think any future machine that acts conscious probably is conscious.
Diet and exercise generally do not cause substantial long term weight loss. Failure rates are high, and successful cases keep off about 7% of they original body weight after 5 years. I strongly suspect that this effect does not scale, you won't lose another 7% after another 5 years.
It might be instrumentally useful though for people to believe that they can lose weight via diet and exercise, since a healthy diet and exercise are good for other reasons.
There is a pretty serious selection bias in that study.
I know some people who lost a noticeably amount of weight and kept it off. These people did NOT go to any structured programs. They just did it themselves.
I suspect that those who are capable of losing (and keeping it off) weight by themselves just do it and do not show up in the statistics of the programs analyzed in the meta-study linked to. These structured programs select for people who have difficulty in maintaining their weight and so are not representative of the general population.
"Healthy diet" and dieting are often two different things.
Healthy diet might mean increasing the amount of vegetables in your diet. That's simply good.
Reducing your calorie consumption for a few months and then increasing it in what's commonly called the jo-jo effect on the other hand is not healthy.
What do you mean by 'progress'? There is more than one conceivable type of progress: political, philosophical, technological, scientific, moral, social, etc.
What's interesting is there is someone else in this thread who believes they are right about something most others are wrong about. ZankerH believes there hasn't been much political or social progress, and that moral progress doesn't exist. So, if that's the sort of progress you are meaning, and also believe that you're right about this when most others aren't, then this thread contains some claims that would contradict each other.
Alas, I agree with you that arguing on the Internet is bad, so I'm not encouraging you to debate ZankerH. I'm just noting something I find interesting.
Are these consistent with each other? Should it at least be "Some "people" are worth more than others"?
I think this could be better put as "what do you believe, that most others don't?" - being wrong is, from the inside, indistinguishable from being right, and a rationalist should know this. I think there have actually been several threads about beliefs that most of LW would disagree with.
I think you are wrong. Identifying a belief as wrong is not enough to remove it. If someone has low self esteem and you give him an intellectual argument that's sound and that he wants to believe that's frequently not enough to change the fundamental belief behind low self esteem.
Scott Alexander wrote a blog post about how asking a schizophrenic for weird beliefs makes the schizophrenic tell the doctor about the faulty beliefs.
If you ask a question differently you get people reacting differently. If you want to get a broad spectrum of answers than it makes sense to ask the question in a bunch of different ways.
I'm intelligent enough to know that my own beliefs about the social status I hold within a group could very well be off even if those beliefs feel very real to me.
If you ask me: "Do you think X is really true and everyone who disagrees is wrong?", you trigger slightly different heuristics than in me than if you ask "Do you believe X?".
It's probably pretty straightforward to demonstrate this and some cognitive psychologist might even already have done the work.
General :
There are absolutely vital lies that everyone can and should believe, even knowing that they aren't true or can not be true.
/Everyone/ today has their own personal army, including the parts of the army no one really likes, such as the iffy command structure and the sociopath that we're desperately trying to Section Eight.
Systems that aim to optimize a goal /almost always/ instead optimize the pretense of the goal, followed by reproduction pressures, followed by the actual goal itself.
Political :
Network Neutrality desires a good thing, but the underlying rule structure necessary to implement it makes the task either fundamentally impossible or practically undesirable.
Privacy policies focused on preventing collection of identifiable data are ultimately doomed.
LessWrong-specific:
"Karma" is a terrible system for any site that lacks extreme monofocus. A point of Karma means the same thing on a top level post that breaks into new levels of philosophy, or a sufficiently entertaining pun. It might be the least bad system available, but in a community nearly defined by tech and data-analysis it's disappointing.
The risks and costs of "Raising the sanity waterline" are heavily underinvestigated. We recognize that there is an individual valley of bad rationality, but haven't really looked at what this would mean on a national scale. "Nuclear Winter" as argued by Sagan was a very, very overt Pascal's Wager: this Very High Value event can be avoided, so much must avoid it at any cost. It /also/ certainly gave valuable political cover to anti-nuclear war folk, may have affected or effected Russian and US and Cuban nuclear policy, and could (although not necessarily would) be supported from a utilitarian perspective... several hundred pages of reading later.
"Rationality" is an overloaded word in the exact sort of ways that make it a terrible thing to turn into an identity. When you're competing with RationalWiki, the universe is trying to give you a Hint.
The type of Atheism that is certain it will win, won't. There's a fascinating post describing how religion was driven from its controlling aspects in History, in Science, in Government, in Cleanliness ... and then goes on to describe how religion /will/ be driven from such a place on matters of ethics. Do not question why, no matter your surprise, that religion remains on a pedestal for Ethics, no matter how much it's poked and prodded by the blasphemy of actual practice. Lest you find the answer.
((I'm /also/ not convinced that Atheism is a good hill for improved rationality to spend its capital on, anymore than veganism is a good hill for improved ethics to spend its capital on. This may be opinion rather than right/wrong.))
MIRI-specific:
MIRI dramatically weakens its arguments by focusing on special-case scenarios because those special-case situations are personally appealing to a few of its sponsors. Recursively self-improving Singularity-style AI is very dangerous... and it's several orders of complexity more difficult to describe that danger, where even minimally self-improving AI still have potential to be an existential risk and requires many fewer leaps to discuss and leads to similar concerns anyway.
MIRI's difficulty providing a coherent argument to predisposed insiders for its value is more worrying than its difficulty working with outsiders or even its actual value. Note: that's a value of "difficulty working with outsiders" that assumes over six-to-nine months to get the Sequences eBook proofread and into a norm-palatable format. ((And, yes, I realize that I could and should help with this problem instead of just complaining about it.))
Desirability issues aside, "believing X" and "knowing X is not true" cannot happen in the same head.
I agree, and it's something I could, maybe should, help with instead of just complaining about. What's stopping you from doing this? If you know someone else was actively doing the same, and could keep you committed to the goal in some way, would that help? If that didn't work, then, what would be stopping us?
In organized form, I've joining the Youtopia page, and the current efforts appear to be either busywork or best completed by a native speaker of a different language, there's no obvious organization regarding generalized goals, and no news updates at all. I'm not sure if this is because MIRI is using a different format to organize volunteers, because MIRI doesn't promote the Youtopia group that seriously, because MIRI doesn't have any current long-term projects that can be easily presented to volunteers, or for some other reason.
For individual-oriented work, I'm not sure what to do, and I'm not confident the best person to do it. There are also three separate issues, of which there's not obvious interrelation. Improving the Sequences and accessibility of the Sequences is the most immediate and obvious thing, and I can think of a couple different ways to go about this :
The obvious first step is to make /any/ eBook, which is why a number of people have done just that. This isn't much more comprehensible than just linking to the Sequences page on the Wiki, and in some cases may be less useful, and most of the other projects seem better-designed than I can offer.
Improve indexing of the Sequences for online access. This does seem like low-hanging fruit, possibly because people are waiting for a canonical order, and the current ordering is terrible. However, I don't think it's a good idea to just randomly edit the Sequences Wiki page, and Discussion and Main aren't really well-formatted for a long-term version-heavy discussion. (And it seems not Wise for my first Discussion or Main post to be "shake up the local textbook!") I have started working on a dependency web, but this effort doesn't seem produce marginal benefits until large sections are completed.
The Sequences themselves are written as short bite-sized pieces for a generalized audience in a specific context, which may not be optimal for long-form reading in a general context. In some cases, components that were good-enough to start with now have clearer explanations... that have circular redundancies. Writing bridge pieces to cover these attributes, or writing alternative descriptions for the more insider-centric Sequences, works within existing structures, and providing benefit at fairly small intervals. This requires fairly deep understanding of the Sequences, and does not appear to be a low-hanging fruit. (And again, not necessarily Wise for my first Discussion or Main post to be "shake up the local textbook!")
But this is separate from MIRI's ability to work with insiders and only marginally associated with its ability to work with outsiders. There are folk with very significant comparative advantages (ie, anyone inside MIRI, anyone in California, most people who accept their axioms) on these matters, and while outsiders have managed to have major impact despite that, they were LukeProg with a low-hanging fruit of basic nonprofit organization, which is a pretty high bar to match.
There are some possibilities -- translating prominent posts to remove excessive jargon or wordiness (or even Upgoer Fiving them), working on some reputation problems -- but none of these seem to have obvious solutions, and wrong efforts could even have negative impact. See, for example, a lot of coverage in more mainstream web media. I've also got a significant anti-academic streak, so it's a little hard for me to understand the specific concern that Scott Alexander/su3su2u1 were raising, which may complicate matters further.
This is one of the things that keep me puzzled. How can proofreading a book by a group of volunteers take more time than translating the whole book by a single person?
Is it because people don't volunteer enough for the work because proofreading seems low status? Is it a bystander effect, where everyone assumes that someone else is already working on it? Are all people just reading LW for fun, but unwilling to do any real work to help? Is it a communication problem, where MIRI has a lack of volunteers, but the potential volunteers are not aware of it?
Just print the whole fucking thing on paper, each chapter separately. Bring the papers to a LW meetup, and ask people to spend 30 minutes proofreading some chapter. Assuming many of them haven't read the whole Sequences, they can just pick a chapter they haven't read yet, and just read it, while marking the found errors on the paper. Put a signature at the end of the chapter, so it is known how many people have seen it.
I used to work as a proofreader for MIRI, and was sometimes given documents with volunteers' comments to help me out. In most cases, the quality of the comments was poor enough that in the time it took me to review the comments, decide which ones were valid, and apply the changes, I could have just read the whole thing and caught the same errors (or at least an equivalent number thereof) myself.
There's also the fact that many errors are only such because they're inconsistent with the overall style. It's presumably not practical to get all your volunteers to read the Chicago Manual of Style and agree on what gets a hyphen and such before doing anything.
I'm just reading LW for fun and unwilling to do any real work to help, FWIW.
It's the 'norm-palatable' part more than the proofreading aspect, unfortunately, and I'm not sure that can be readily made volunteer work
As far as I can tell, the proofreading part began in late 2013, and involved over two thousand pages of content to proofread through Youtopia. As far as I can tell, the only Sequence-related volunteer work on the Youtopia site involves translation into non-English languages, so the public volunteer proofreading is done and likely has been done for a while (wild guess, probably somewhere in mid-summer 2014?). MIRI is likely focusing on layout and similar publishing-level issues, and as far as I've been able to tell, they're looking for a release at the end of the year that strongly suggests that they've finished the proofreading aspect.
That said, I may have outdated information: the Sequence eBook has been renamed several times in progress for a variety of good reasons, and I'm not sure Youtopia is the current place most of this is going on, and AlexVermeer may or may not be lead on this project and may or not be more active elsewhere than these forums. There are some public project attempts to make an eReader-compatible version, though these don't seem much stronger from a reading order perspective.
In fairness, doing /good/ layout and ePublishing does take more specialized skills and some significant time, and MIRI may be rewriting portions of the work to better handle the limitations of a book format -- where links are less powerful tools, where a large portion of viewer devices support only grayscale, and where certain media presentation formats aren't possible. At least from what I've seen in technical writing and pen-and-paper RPGs, this is not a helpfully parallel task: everyone needs must use the same toolset and design rules, or all of their work is wasted. There was also a large amount of internal MIRI rewriting involved, as even the early version made available to volunteer proofreaders was significantly edited.
Less charitably, while trying to find this information I've found references to an eBook project dating back to late 2012, so nine months may be a low-end estimate. Not sure if that's the same project or if it's a different one that failed, or if it's a different one that succeeded and I just can't find the actual eBook result.
Thanks for the suggestion. I'll plan some meetups around this. Not the whole thing, mind you. I'll just get anyone willing at the weekly Vancouver meetup to do exactly that: take a mild amount of time reviewing a chapter/post, and providing feedback on it or whatever.
It is extremely important to find out how to have a successful community without sociopaths.
(In far mode, most people would probably agree with this. But when the first sociopath comes, most people would be like "oh, we can't send this person away just because of X; they also have so many good traits" or "I don't agree with everything they do, but right now we are in a confict with the enemy tribe, and this person can help us win; they may be an asshole, but they are our asshole". I believe that avoiding these - any maybe many other - failure modes is critical if we ever want to have a Friendly society.)
Are you directing this at LW? Ie. is there a sociopath that you think is bad for our community?
Well, I suspect Eugine Nier may have been one, to show the most obvious example. (Of course there is no way to prove it, there are always alternative explanations, et cetera, et cetera, I know.)
Now that was an online behavior. Imagine the same kind of person in real life. I believe it's just a question of time. Using the limited experience to make predictions, such person would be rather popular, at least at the beginning, because they would keep using the right words that are tested to evoke a positive response from many lesswrongers.
Why do you suspect so? Gaming ill-defined social rules of an internet forum doesn't look like a symptom of sociopathy to me.
You seem to be stretching the definition too far.
Abusing rules to hurt people is at least a weak evidence. Doing it persistently for years, even more so.
A "sociopath" is not an alternative label for [someone I don't like.] I am not sure what a concise explanation for the sociopath symptom cluster is, but it might be someone who has trouble modeling other agents as "player characters", for whatever reason. A monster, basically. I think it's a bad habit to go around calling people monsters.
I know; I know; I know. This is exactly what makes this topic so frustratingly difficult to explain, and so convenient to ignore.
The thing I am trying to say is that if a real monster would come to this community, sufficiently intelligent and saying the right keywords, we would spend all our energy inventing alternative explanations. That although in far mode we admit that the prior probability of a monster is nonzero (I think the base rate is somewhere around 1-4%), in near mode we would always treat it like zero, and any evidence would be explained away. We would congratulate ourselves for being nice, but in reality we are just scared to risk being wrong when we don't have convincingly sounding verbal arguments on our side. (See Geek Social Fallacy #1, but instead of "unpleasant" imagine "hurting people, but only as much as is safe in given situation".) The only way to notice the existence of the monster is probably if the monster decides to bite you personally in the foot. Then you will realize with horror that now all other people are going to invent alternative explanations why that probably didn't happen, because they don't want to risk being wrong in a way that would feel morally wrong to them.
I don't have a good solution here. I am not saying that vigilantism is a good solution, because the only thing the monster needs to draw attention away is to accuse someone else of being a monster, and it is quite likely that the monster will sound more convincing. (Reversed stupidity is not intelligence.) Actually, I believe this happens rather frequently. Whenever there is some kind of a "league against monsters", it is probably a safe bet that there is a monster somewhere at the top. (I am sure there is a TV Tropes page or two about this.)
So, we have a real danger here, but we have no good solution for it. Humans typically cope with such situations by pretending that the danger doesn't exist. I wish we had a better solution.
I can believe that 1% - 4% of people have little or no empathy and possibly some malice in addition. However, I expect that the vast majority of them don't have the intelligence/social skills/energy to become the sort of highly destructive person you describe below.
That's right. The kind of person I described seems like combination of sociopathy + high intelligence + maybe something else. So it is much less than 1% of population.
(However, their potential ratio in rationalist community is probably greater than in general population, because our community already selects for high intelligence. So, if high intelligence would be the only additional factor -- which I don't know whether it's true or not -- it could again be 1-4% among the wannabe rationalists.)
I would describe that person as a charismatic manipulator. I don't think it requires being a sociopath, though being one helps.
The kind of person you described has extraordinary social skills as well as being highly (?) intelligent, so I think we're relatively safe. :-)
I can hope that a people in a rationalist community would be better than average at eventually noticing they're in a mind-warping confusion and charisma field, but I'm really hoping we don't get tested on that one.
Returning to the original question ("Where are you right, while most others are wrong? Including people on LW!"), this is exactly the point where my opinion differs from the LW consensus.
For a sufficiently high value of "eventually", I agree. I am worried about what would happen until then.
I'm hoping that this is not the best answer we have. :-(
https://allthetropes.orain.org/wiki/Hired_to_Hunt_Yourself
I think it's extremely likely that any system for identifying and exiling psychopaths can be co-opted for evil, by psychopaths. I think rules and norms that act against specific behaviors are a lot more robust, and also are less likely to fail or be co-opted by psychopaths, unless the community is extremely small. This is why in cities we rely on laws against murder, rather than laws against psychopathy. Even psychopaths (usually) respond to incentives.
How do you even reliably detect sociopaths to begin with? Particularly with online communities where long game false social signaling is easy. The obviously-a-sociopath cases are probably among the more incompetent or obviously damaged and less likely to end up doing long-term damage.
And for any potential social apparatus for detecting and shunning sociopaths you might come up with, how will you keep it from ending up being run by successful long-game signaling sociopaths who will enjoy both maneuvering themselves into a position of political power and passing judgment and ostracism on others?
The problem of sociopaths in corporate settings is a recurring theme in Michael O. Church's writings, but there's also like a million pages of that stuff so I'm not going to try and pick examples.
All cheap detection methods could be fooled easily. It's like with that old meme "if someone is lying to you, they will subconsciously avoid looking into your eyes", which everyone has already heard, so of course today every liar would look into your eyes.
I see two possible angles of attack:
a) Make a correct model of sociopathy. Don't imagine sociopaths to be "like everyone else, only much smarter". They probably have some specific weakness. Design a test they cannot pass, just like a colorblind person cannot pass a color blindness test even if they know exactly how the test works. Require passing the test for all positions of power in your organization.
b) If there is a typical way sociopaths work, design an environment so that this becomes impossible. For example, if it is critical for manipulating people to prevent their communication among each other, create an environment that somehow encourages communication between people who would normally avoid each other. (Yeah, this sounds like reversing stupidity. Needs to be tested.)
It seems to me there may be more value in finding out how to have a successful community with sociopaths. So long as the incentives are set up so that they behave properly, who cares what their internal experience is?
(The analogy to Friendly AI is worth considering, though.)
Ok, so start by examining the suspected sociopath's source code. Wait, we have a problem.
What do you mean with the phrase "sociopath"?
A person who's very low on empathy and follows intellectual utility calculations might very well donate money to effective charities and do things that are good for this community even when the same person fits the profile of what get's clinically diagnosed as sociopathy.
I think this community should be open for non-neurotypical people with low empathy scores provided those people are willing to act decently.
I'd rather avoid going too deeply into definitions here. Sometimes I feel that if a group of rationalists were in a house that is on fire, they would refuse to leave the house until someone gives them a very precise definition of what exactly does "fire" mean, and how does it differ on quantum level from the usual everyday interaction of molecules. Just because I cannot give you a bulletproof definition in a LW comment, it does not mean the topic is completely meaningless.
Specifically I am concerned about the type of people who are very low on empathy and their utility function does not include other people. (So I am not speaking about e.g. people with alexithymia or similar.) Think: professor Quirrell, in real life. Such people do exist.
(I once had a boss like this for a short time, and... well, it's like an experience from a different planet. If I tried to describe it using words, you would probably just round it to the nearest neurotypical behavior, which would completely miss the point. Imagine a superintelligent paperclip maximizer in a human body, and you will probably have a better approximation. Yeah, I can imagine how untrustworthy this sounds. Unfortunately, that also is a part of a typical experience with a sociopath: first, you start doubting even your own senses, because nothing seems to make sense anymore, and you usually need a lot of time afterwards to sort it out, and then it is already too late to do something about it; second, you realize that if you try to describe it to someone else, there is no chance they would believe you unless they already had this type of experience.)
I'd like to agree with the spirit of this. But there is the problem that the sociopath would optimize their "indecent" behavior to make it difficult to prove.
Steve Sailer's description of Michael Milken:
Is that the sort of description you have in mind?
I really doubt the possibility to convey this in mere words. I had previous experience with abusive people, I studied psychology, I heard stories from other people... and yet all this left me completely unprepared, and I was confused and helpless like a small child. My only luck was the ability to run away.
If I tried to estimate a sociopathy scale from 0 to 10, in my life I have personally met one person who scores 10, two people somewhere around 2, and most nasty people were somewhere between 0 and 1, usually closer to 0. If I wouldn't have met than one specific person, I would believe today that the scale only goes from 0 to 2; and if someone tried to describe me how the 10 looks like, I would say "yeah, yeah, I know exactly what you mean" while having a model of 2 in my mind. (And who knows; maybe the real scale goes up to 20, or 100. I have no idea.)
Imagine a person who does gaslighting as easily as you do breathing; probably after decades of everyday practice. A person able to look into your eyes and say "2 + 2 = 5" so convincingly they will make you doubt your previous experience and believe you just misunderstood or misremembered something. Then you go away, and after a few days you realize it doesn't make sense. Then you meet them again, and a minute later you feel so ashamed for having suspected them of being wrong, when in fact it was obviously you who were wrong.
If you try to confront them in front of another person and say: "You said yesterday that 2 + 2 = 5", they will either look the other person in the eyes and say "but really, 2 + 2 = 5" and make them believe so, or will look at you and say: "You must be wrong, I have never said that 2 + 2 = 5, you are probably imagining things"; whichever is more convenient for them at the moment. Either way, you will look like a total idiot in front of the third party. A few experiences like this, and it will become obvious to you that after speaking with them, no one would ever believe you contradicting them. (When things get serious, these people seem ready to sue you for libel and deny everything in the most believable way. And they have a lot of money to spend on lawyers.)
This person can play the same game with dozens of people at the same time and not get tired, because for them it's as easy as breathing, there are no emotional blocks to overcome (okay, I cannot prove this last part, but it seems so). They can ruin lives of some of them without hesitation, just because it gives them some small benefit as a side effect. If you only meet them casually, your impression will probably be "this is an awesome person". If you get closer to them, you will start noticing the pattern, and it will scare you like hell.
And unless you have met such person, it is probably difficult to believe that what I wrote is true without exaggeration. Which is yet another reason why you would rather believe them than their victim, if the victim would try to get your help. The true description of what really happened just seems fucking unlikely. On the other hand their story would be exactly what you want to hear.
No, that is completely unlike. That sounds like some super-nerd.
Your first impression from the person I am trying to describe would be "this is the best person ever". You would have no doubt that anyone who said anything negative about such person must be a horrible liar, probably insane. (But you probably wouldn't hear many negative things, because their victims would easily predict your reaction, and just give up.)
Not a person, but I've had similar experiences dealing with Cthulhu and certain political factions.
Sure, human terms are usually applied to humans. Groups are not humans, and using human terms for them would at best be a metaphor.
On the other hand, for your purpose (keeping LW a successful community), groups that collectively act like a sociopath are just as dangerous as individual sociopaths.
I'm not saying that the topic is meaningless. I'm saying that if you call for discrimination of people with a certain psychological illness you should know what you are talking about.
Base rates for clinical psychopathy is sometimes cited as 5%. In this community there are plenty of people who don't have a properly working empathy module. Probably more than average in society.
When Eliezer says that he thinks based on typical mind issues that he feels that everyone who says: "I feel your pain" has to be lying that suggests a lack of a working empathy module. If you read back the first April article you find wording about "finding willing victims for BDSM". The desire for causing other people pain is there. Eliezer also checks other things such as a high belief in his own importance for the fate of the world that are typical for clinical psychopathy. Promiscuous sexual behavior is on the checklist for psychopathy and Eliezer is poly.
I'm not saying that Eliezer clearly falls under the label of clinical psychopathy, I have never interacted with him face to face and I'm no psychologist. But part of being rational is that you don't ignore patterns that are there. I don't think that this community would overall benefit from kicking out people who fill multiple marks on that checklist.
Yvain is smart enough to not gather the data for amount of LW members diagnosed with psychopathy when he asks for mental illnesses. I think it's good that way.
If you actually want to do more than just signaling that you like people to be friendly and get applause, than it makes a lot of sense to specify which kind of people you want to remove from the community.
I am not an expert on this, but I think the kind of person I have in mind would not bother to look for willing BDSM victims. From their point of view, there are humans all around, and their consent is absolutely irrelevant, so they would optimize for some other criteria instead.
This feels to me like worrying about a vegetarian who eats "soy meat" because it exposes their unconscious meat-eating desire, while there are real carnivores out there.
I am not even sure if "removing a kind of people" is the correct approach. (Fictional evidence says no.) My best guess at this moment would be to create a community where people are more open to each other, so when some person harms another person, they are easily detected, especially if they have a pattern. Which also has a possible problem with false reporting; which maybe also could be solved by noticing patterns.
Speaking about society in general, we have an experience that sociopaths are likely to gain power in different kinds of organizations. It would be naive to expect that rationalist communities would be somehow immune to this; especially if we start "winning" in the real world. Sociopaths have an additional natural advantage that they have more experience dealing with neurotypicals, than neurotypicals have with dealing with sociopaths.
I think someone should at least try to solve this problem, instead of pretending it doesn't exist or couldn't happen to us. Because it's just a question of time.
What do you mean by "harm". I have to ask because there is a movement (commonly called SJW) pushing an insanely broad definition of "harm". For example, if you've shattered someone's worldview have you "harmed" him?
Not per se, although there could be some harm in the execution. For example if I decide to follow someone every day from their work screaming at them "Jesus is not real", the problem is with me following them every day, not with the message. Or, if they are at a funeral of their mother and the priest is saying "let's hope we will meet our beloved Jane in heaven with Jesus", that would not be a proper moment to jump and scream "Jesus is not real".
(a) What exactly is the problem? I don't really see a sociopath getting enough power in the community to take over LW as a realistic scenario.
(b) What kind of possible solutions do you think exist?
Human beings frequently like to think of people they don't like and understand as evil. There various very bad mental habits associated with it.
Academic psychology is a thing. It actually describes how certain people act. It describes how psychopaths acts. They aren't just evil. Their emotional processes is screwed in systematic ways.
Translated into every day language that's: "Rationalists should gossip more about each other." Whether we should follow that maxime is a quite complex topic on it's own and if you think that's important write an article about it and actually address the reasons why people don't like to gossip.
You are not really addressing what I said. It's very likely that we have people in this community who fulfill the criteria of clinical psychopathy and I also remember an account of a person who said they trusted another person from a LW meetup who was a self declared egoist too much and ended up with a bad interaction because they didn't take the openness the person who said that they only care about themselves at face value.
Given your moderator position, do you think that you want to do something to garden but lack power at the moment? Especially dealing with the obvious case? If so, that's a real concern. Probably worth addressing more directly.
Unfortunately, I don't feel qualified enough to write an article about this, nor to analyze the optimal form of gossip. I don't think I have a solution. I just noticed a danger, and general unwillingness to debate it.
Probably the best thing I can do right now is to recommend good books on this topic. That would be:
I admit I do have some problems with moderating (specifically, the reddit database is pure horror, so it takes a lot of time to find anything), but my motivation for writing in this thread comes completely from offline life.
As a leader of my local rationalist community, I was wondering about the things that could happen if the community becomes greater and more successful. Like, if something bad happened within the community, I would feel personally responsible for the people I have invited there by visions of rationality and "winning". (And "something bad" offline can be much worse than mere systematic downvoting.) Especially if we would achieve some kind of power in real life, which is what I hope to do one day. I want to do something better than just bring a lot of enthusiastic people to one place and let the fate decide. I trust myself not to start a cult, and not to abuse others, but that itself is no reason for others to trust me; and also, someone else may replace me (rather easily, since I am not good at coalition politics); or someone may do evil things under my roof, without me even noticing. Having a community of highly intelligent people has the risk that the possible sociopaths, if they come, will likely also be highly intelligent. So, I am thinking about what makes a community safe or unsafe. Because if the community grows large enough, sooner or later problems start happening. I would rather be prepared in advance. Trying to solve the problem ad-hoc would probably totally seem like a personal animosity or joining one faction in an internal conflict.
In the ideal world we could fully trust all people in our tribe to do nothing bad. Simply because we have known a people for years we could trust a person to do good.
That's no rational heuristic. Our world is not structured in a way where the amount of time we know a person is a good heuristic for the amount of trust we can give that person.
There are a bunch of people I meet in the topic of personal development whom I trust very easily because I know the heuristics that those people use.
If you have someone in your local LW group who tells you that his utility function is that he maximizes his own utility and who doesn't have empathy that would make him feel bad when he abuses others, the rational thing is to not trust that person very much.
But if you use that as a criteria for kicking people out you people won't be open about their own beliefs anymore.
In general trusting people a lot who tick half of the criterias that constitute clinical psychopathy isn't a good idea.
On the other hand LW is per default inclusive and not structured in a way where it's a good idea to kick out people on such a basis.
Intelligent sociopaths generally don't go around telling people that they're sociopaths (or words to that effect), because that would put others on their guard and make them harder to get things out of. I have heard people saying similar things before, but they've generally been confused teenagers, Internet Tough Guys, and a few people who're just really bad at recognizing their own emotions -- who also aren't the best people to trust, granted, but for different reasons.
I'd be more worried about people who habitually underestimate the empathy of others and don't have obviously poor self-image or other issues to explain it. Most of the sociopaths I've met have had a habit of assuming those they interact with share, to some extent, their own lack of empathy: probably typical-mind fallacy in action.
Can you express what you want to protect against while tabooing words like "bad", "evil", and "abuse"?
I think the other half is the more important one: to have a successful community, you need to be willing to be arbitrary and unfair, because you need to kick out some people and cannot afford to wait for a watertight justification before you do.
The best ruler for a community is an uncorruptible, bias-free, dictator. All you need to do to implement this is to find an uncorruptible, bias-free dictator. Then you don't need a watertight justification because those are used to avoid corruption and bias and you know you don't have any of that anyway.
There is also that kinda-important bit about shared values...
I'm not being utopian, I'm giving pragmatic advice based on empirical experience. I think online communities like this one fail more often by allowing bad people to continue being bad (because they feel the need to be scrupulously fair and transparent) than they do by being too authoritarian.
The thing is from what I've heard the problem isn't so much sociopaths as ideological entryists.
I think I know what you mean. The situations like: "there is 90% probability that something bad happened, but 10% probability that I am just imagining things; should I act now and possibly abuse the power given to me, or should I spend a few more months (how many? I have absolutely no idea) collecting data?"
Inequality is a good thing, to a point.
I believe in a world where it is possible to get rich, and not necessarily through hard work or being a better person. One person owning the world with the rest of us would be bad. Everybody having identical shares of everything would be bad (even ignoring practicalities). I don't know exactly where the optimal level is, but is it closer to the first situation than the second, even if assigned by lottery.
I'm treating this as basically another contrarian views thread without the voting rules. And full disclosure I'm too biased for anybody to take my word for it, but I'd enjoy reading counterarguments.
My intuition would be that inequality per se is not a problem, it only becomes a problem when it allows abuse. But that's not necessarily a function of inequality itself; it also depends on society. I can imagine a society which would allow a lot of inequality and yet would prevent abuse (for example if some Friendly AI would regulate how you are allowed to spend your money).
Do you think we currently need more inequality, or less?
In the US I would say more-ish. I support a guaranteed basic income, and any benefit to one person or group (benefitting the bottom without costing the top would decrease inequality but would still be good), but think there should be a smaller middle class.
I don't know enough about global issues to comment on them.
My thoughts on the following are rather disorganized and I've been meaning to collate them into a post for quite some time but here goes:
Discussions of morality and ethics in the LW-sphere overwhelmingly tend to short-circuit to naive harm-based consequentialist morality. When pressed I think most will state a far-mode meta-ethical version that acknowledges other facets of human morality (disgust, purity, fairness etc) that would get wrapped up into a standardized utilon currency (I believe CEV is meant to do this?) but when it comes to actual policy (EA) there is too much focus on optimizing what we can measure (lives saved in africa) instead of what would actually satisfy people. The drunken moral philosopher looking under the lamppost for his keys because that's where the light is. I also think there's a more-or-less unstated assumption that considerations other than Harm are low-status.
Seeking LWist Caricatures
I've written the existence of a cult-like "Bayesian Conspiracy" of mostly rebellious post-apocalypse teens - and now I'm looking for individuals to populate it with. What I /want/ to do is come up with as many ways that someone who's part of the LW/HPMOR/Sequences/Yudkowsky-ite/etc memeplex could go wrong, that tend not to happen to members of the regular skeptical community. Someone who's focused on a Basilisk, someone on Pascal's Mugging, someone focused on dividing up an infinity of timelines into unequal groups...
Put another way, I've been trying to think of the various ways that people outside the memeplex see those inside it as weirdos.
(My narrative goal: For my protagonist to experience trying to be a teacher. I'd be ecstatic if I could have at least one of the cultists be able to teach her a thing or two in return, but since I've based her knowledge of the memeplex on mine, that's kind of tricky to arrange.)
I can't guarantee that I'll end up spending more than a couple of sentences on any of this - but I figure that the more ideas I have to try building with, the more likely I will.
(Also asked on Reddit at https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/2kopgx/qbst_seeking_lwist_caricatures/ .)
The person who airs fringe supremacist (or even eliminationist) views ... then is surprised and offended when members of the targeted groups shun him or her instead of arguing the points as if they were a matter of abstract intellectual interest.
No, wait, that's probably not LW-specific enough.
The person who uses ev psych to justify their romantic preferences to potential and current partners. (There's a generalisation of this that I'm not sure how to describe, but I've fallen into it when talking with friends about the game-theoretical value of friendship.)
One possible generalization: Being insecure about personal preferences, and so seeking to show that one's personal likes are rooted directly in something universal — something outside one's own personal history, culture, subculture, upbringing, etc.
If the problem is that you shouldn't have to justify your romantic preferences then I can see where you are coming from, but if you do want a justification, what is wrong with evo psych?
Evo psych tends to be too general and too unproven.
Someone who applies useful effective behaviors towards the achievement of a ridiculous or reprehensible end goal.
I think I have this one covered; my character entry is simply "I wanna be a pony!".
(And, now that I think about it, my protagonist has said that if they don't have any other end goals they can think of, they're going to act as if their end goal is to "read comics".)
When judging how weird a community is, people often approximate a kind of "weirdness Pagerank" by looking at people the community holds in high esteem. I think Yudkowsky can come across as weird and offputting to some folks (not in person, but online. This is a bit of a tangent, but I think it is very interesting to think about the systematic ways our online and offline personas differ and why they do so). If people perceive that, their alarms immediately go off and they conclude folks are brainwashed since they are not seeing the weirdness themselves.
This can add some useful background detail. My protagonist is acting as a pseudo-Yudkowsky to the group, and has already been called the "Mad Queen" at least once.
The lurker, who may not be gaining as much utility as they would if they participated. However, they still receive the same (or a degree of) connotations from those outside the memeplex, due to their association with the group. These percepts from the outside may be either good or bad.
Calculating Bayes rule for everything can be quite weird for a lot of people. I remember a case where someone found it weird that another person asked on LW how to do a Bayesian calculation for the likelihood that a specific girl likes him.
Calculating probabilities for many everyday issues is hugely weird for many people. You might even have to take care to make it sound believable even if you do describe a real world character.
I remember an anecdote of a person doing an utility calculation that suggest having sex without a condom and being exposed to the chance of getting AIDS is quite okay.
Another of those things that CFAR preaches that can be seen as pretty weird is purposeful comfort zone extension. It's the kind of topic where you also have to worry about believability if you just tell real world stories.
And rightly so. The great majority of people are badly calibrated, can't estimate priors properly, etc. If they tried to calculate probabilities for "many everyday issues" I would bet most of them would land straight in the valley of bad rationality.
Luke's IAMA on reddit's r/futurology in 2012 was pretty great. I think it would be cool if he did another, a lot has changed in 2+ years. Maybe to coincide with the December fundraising drive?
If he could not repeat the claim that UFAI is so easily compressible it could "spread across the world in seconds" through the internet, that would be quite helpful, actually. Even in the rich world, with broadband, transferring an intelligent agent all across the world will take whole hours, especially given the time necessary for the bugger to crack into and take control of the relevant systems (packaging itself as a trojan horse and uploading itself to 4chan in a "self-extracting zip" of pornography will take even longer).
I just sent a message to Luke. Hopefully he will notice it.
Two years ago, I wrote this cringe-worthy thing.
I can't tell if things have gotten worse, or if they've stayed the same. I lean toward worse.
4 years ago, I asked a psychiatrist about my soul-crushing Akrasia issues. He prescribed Focalin, at 5mg/day for the first week, then 10mg/day for the second. The first week saw improvements--I didn't feel like I had much choice over what I wound up focusing on, but I actually finished things--the second week did not work at all, and a pile of unpleasant things all hit at once on one of those nights. So we switched to Prozac, nothing came of it, and here we are.
For reasons, skills that are basic and trainable for most people are down-right mutant to me. (It's almost as though any problems that aren't sheltered-nerd problems amplified by blindness are blindness problems amplified by sheltered nerdiness. There exist blind nerds without this suite of doom-problems, but on investigation nothing seems to generalize.)
I didn't mention psychiatric problems in the 2012 post because all the psych professionals I've spoken to don't seem to believe I have them. But I'm pretty sure I have symptoms of ADHD-PI. And Schizoid Personality. And Avoidant Personality. And Social Anxiety. And Atypical Depression but I'm pretty sure that's a response to everything else. Whether any of these is actually the case is unknown to me, and all of the above mean that finding a professional to ask (then actually telling them everything) is stupidly difficult. Then they need to be competent.
I really have no idea what the best starting place would be. I'm trying to find another psychiatrist (though I dunno if I can actually communicate the problems), I've exhausted the less dramatic training facility and the return-to-college option, and am considering one of the National Federation of the Blind training centers (as a general rule, everyone who is not a member finds the NFB offputting, but it's pretty much their programs or nothing, if the internet is to be believed).
TL;DR: My life sucks and if I can't fix it soon, I will start complaining that decent wireheading is not yet available.
Instead of a psychiatrist maybe a psychologist might be the better option?
Can anyone recommend any good books/resources on dyspraxia?
Ideally suitable for adults with a reasonable background understanding of psychology. Most of the stuff I've been able to find has been aimed for teachers/parents.
Bayesianism and Causality, or, Why I am only a Half-Bayesian (Judea Pearl)
“The bulk of human knowledge is organized around causal, not probabilistic relationships, and the grammar of probability calculus is insufficient for capturing those relationships.”
How communities Work, and What Wrecks Them
Behavior patterns that grind communities down: endless contrarianism, axe-grinding, persistent negativity, ranting, and grudges.
I agree about all of that except for contrarianism (and yes, I'm aware of the irony). You want to have some amount of contrarianism in your ecosystem, because people sometimes aren't satisfied with the hivemind and they need a place to go when that happens. Sometimes they need solutions that work where the mainstream answers wouldn't, because they fall into a weird corner case or because they're invisible to the mainstream for some other reason. Sometimes they just want emotional support. And sometimes they want an argument, and there's a place for that too.
What you don't want is for the community's default response to be "find the soft bits of this statement, and then go after them like a pack of starving hyenas tearing into a pinata made entirely of ham". There need to be safe topics and safe stances, or people will just stop engaging -- no one's always in the mood for an argument.
On the other hand, too much agreeableness leads to another kind of failure mode -- and IMO a more sinister one.
The article talked about endless contrarianism, where people disagree as a default reaction, instead of because of a pre-existing difference in models. I think that is a problem in the LW community.
On the contrary, from my experience it isn't.
Sorry, I could not resist the opportunity. But seriously, I don't often see people disagreeing for the sake of disagreeing. More often, they'll point out different aspects, or their own perspective on a topic. To be honest, support and affirmation are perhaps a bit rarer than they should be, but I've rarely perceived disagreement to be hostile, as opposed to misunderstanding, or legitimate and resolvable via further discussion.
More datapoints, anyone?
If other people disagree with what I write they usually do it for the sake of disagreeing. However if I disagree... ;)
Are there lists of effective charities for specific target domains? For social reasons, I sometimes want to donate to a charity focused on some particular cause; but given that constraint, I'd still like to make my donation as effective as possible.
Training horses to indicate whether they want to wear a blanket or have a blanket taken off
This could be a big deal for the bestiality debate (although conducting the necessary training without falling afoul of the original ethical concerns would probably be a trick).
A general training in do want, don't want for ordinary things like blankets and types of food could go a long way to solving the problem.
Warning: this comment is a ramble without a conclusion. Horses participating in tell culture? Cool. Preferences and consent are complicated.
This line of thinking seems to lead to some interesting places about the idea of consent.
I'm increasingly of the opinion that the whole notion of "consent" is socially constructed (that is, learned) — that it is desirable but cannot be assumed to be natural or inherent. People have to learn, not only to ask others' consent, but to recognize when their consent is being asked: not only to ask "Do you want this?" but to know when someone wants them to have and express a preference.
Indeed, the idea of developing preferences of one's own has to be learned. (Possibly the whole notion of having an identity, too.)
People raised in very controlling households seem to have trouble with this — with formulating and communicating preferences and seeking consent, rather than just ① going ahead and doing things that affect others and then seeing how those others react, or ② expecting others to do the reciprocal. They expect interactions to be, not necessarily forced, but certainly not negotiated. "Better to ask forgiveness than seek permission" is one thing as a maxim for decision-making in a bureaucratic office, but quite another thing in personal relationships!
This leads to communications problems between these folks and people who have been taught to exchange consent. For instance, "Would you like to do thus-and-so with me?" for one person can mean "I expect you to do thus-and-so with me and will be disappointed or angry if you don't" whereas for another it can mean "I actually don't know if thus-and-so would be worth doing for us; what do you think?"
Previously I thought that this difference was that (to put it overly strongly) people from controlling households had had their free will beaten out of them — that they had been abused or neglected in a way that made them alieve that people would not respect their preferences or dissent, and so did not bother to express any. But now I think the opposite: "just do stuff and see how others react" is the state of nature, whereas "formulate and express preferences and negotiate with others" is socially constructed.
And as a society, it seems we are demanding more and more of it. That sounds like a pretty good thing to me, especially for people whose preferences would otherwise be denied or disregarded. But it isn't free or obvious; it's a big structure of socially-constructed-stuff that people have to learn.
Computationally speaking, preferences aren't free. Even if we model people as agents with utility functions (which I'm not sure we should!), having a utility function doesn't mean having explicit knowledge of what your utility function is! In order to express preferences, an agent has to notice facts about itself, notice regularities about those facts, figure out what it might want another agent to do ... and so on. All that requires brain power.
Teaching a horse to express preferences — that it can communicate something that will influence its handler's actions, to get something done that it can't do for itself — seems like a pretty big deal. Affirmatively communicating about a specific action is more "consent-like" than, say, merely expressing an emotional state of dissatisfaction or contentment.
I get the sense that people who live with animals generally do have a notion of what the animals like or dislike. But that isn't the same as communicating preferences or consent.
On zoophilia/bestiality, I at one point thought something like: "A dog or horse can obviously express dissatisfaction with physical acts it doesn't like — by pulling away, kicking, biting, etc. Some animals can clearly 'propose' sexual acts with humans, such as a dog humping a person's leg. And we don't expect people to seek animals' consent to a hell of a lot of things that we do expect them to seek consent from humans — such as medical treatment or being put in a cage. So what's the big deal?"
But a dog humping someone's leg isn't proposing a sexual act or consenting to one; it's initiating one. If a human did the equivalent, to random people they didn't have an existing relationship with, well, we wouldn't want to put up with that sort of thing.
People (and, I suspect, horses) have different degrees of insight into their own preferences. It is perfectly possible to be wrong about your preferences: to believe that you would be happier if you ate a bag of candy, when in fact you would give yourself a stomachache and be less happy.
Consent is really tricky.
Imagine a woman sitting at the bar. The woman knows what she's doing and knows that when she smiles in a certain way at a man there a 90% chance that the man will approach her, however only in 10% of the cases the man has an idea that the woman did something to make the woman approach.
If the woman initiates an interaction like that does she have informed consent? Is there some ethical imperative for her to inform the man that she initiated the interaction?
To frame the question in another way, if all you are doing is trigger the system 1 of the other person do let the person engage in certain actions, but you never ask a question to give system 2 the opportunity to reflect, do you have consent?
Guess cultures are really tricky!
If it is indeed the case that everyone knows for certain what the signals mean, then they can be very specific communications of intent and consent: there is not actually any guessing going on! But if the point of using facial expressions and gestures rather than words is that the former are deniable, then it probably can't be the case that everyone knows for certain: deniability relies on ambiguity.
If two people have slightly different interpretations of what the signals mean, then they can end up with extremely divergent interpretations of what happened in a particular exchange.
For that matter, if everyone in the bar grew up in the same town and went to the same schools, that's a pretty different situation from if the bar is an assemblage of people from wildly different backgrounds who happen to have landed in the same location.
(I may be computing from stereotypes in saying this ... but I expect that guess cultures prize uniformity, and fear diversity as a source of confusion; whereas tell cultures may consider uniformity boring, and prize diversity as a source of novelty.)
Sexually, it seems to me that if all you are doing is triggering the System 1 of the other person and neither person is waiting around for System 2 to engage and reflect, that may be very hot indeed — Erica Jong's "zipless fuck" — but the failure modes are correspondingly huge.
It's possible to send signal A and the other person not understanding what the signal means and doing nothing.
But it's also possible that they don't understand the signal but the signal causes them to feel a certain emotion and that emotion lets them engage in an action without them having any idea of the casual chain.
The more I learn about how humans work the more I get those practical ethical dilemmas. Even worse, to really know what I'm doing I have to experiment and I'm curious ;)
That seems like a huge leap in terms of capability, though, to add the free parameter of "condition to be started/stopped" somehow.
Suppose I was an unusual moral, unusually insightful used car saleswoman. I have studied the dishonest sales techniques my colleagues use, and because I am unusually wise, worked out the general principles behind them. I think it is plausible that this analysis is new, though I guess it could already exist in an obscure journal.
Is it moral of me to publish this research, or should I practice the virtue of silence?
Obviously the dishonest car salesman is just an example so don't get too tied up on the efficiency of the second hand car market.
Robert Cialdini did something a bit like this in researching his book "Influence", and so far as I can tell pretty much everyone agrees it's a good thing he wrote it.
I suspect attitudes to your doing this would depend on what your publication looked like. You could write
(As an unusually moral person you probably wouldn't actually want to write the first of those books. But some others in a similar situation might.)
My gut reaction to the first would be "ewww", to the second would be "oh, someone trying to drum up sales by attention-grabbing hype",and to the third would be "hey, that's interesting". Other people's guts may well differ from mine. Cialdini's book is mostly the third, with a little touch of the second.
And read by people who want to read the first ;)
And also who want to read the second or the third. But yes, of course, writing for one audience won't stop others taking advantage.
I estimate that 95% of readers of Cialdini read it for business.
I think it depends very much on the case.
There are things in the social skill space that I discovered via experimentation that I don't openly share.
Sales man aren't the only people who care about getting people to make decisions. In medicine compliance is pretty important and choice engineering as a field isn't completely evil.
Understanding our decision making can also give us insight into issues like akrasia.
There have been discussions here in the past about whether "extreme", lesswrong-style rationality is actually useful, and why we don't have many extremely successful people as members of the community.
I've noticed that Ramit Sethi often uses concepts we talk about here, but under different names. I'm not sure if he's as high a level as we're looking for as evidence, but he appears to be extremely successful as a businessman. I think he started out in life/career coaching, and then switched to selling online courses when he got popular. His stuff is generally around the theme of "how to win at life", but focused on his own definition of that, which is mainly having a profitable and interesting career. (He has a lot of free content which is only inconvenience-walled by being part of a mailing list - this video is one of those things.)
I'm curious if anyone else here knows of him, and what you think of him.
I'm not sure if the community has been around long enough for this to be a useful kind of a measurement. Success doesn't happen in an instant and there's a lot of turnover. People who are already successful don't have much pressure to join in.
Additionally, "extreme success" is usually defined in zero sum terms that make it definitionally extremely rare, in addition to the strong influence of chance in whether one achieves success in most fields. So a community as small as ours with "not many extremely successful people" may still be completely worthwhile and have a high rate of extreme success per capita compared to most groups.
Side point: I've found material like his, "concepts we talk about here, but under different names", extremely useful when I want to explain the idea of rationality to someone without having to work around the lesswrong lingo and trying to have a conversion while tabooing all the lesswrong phases and cached thoughts.
Yes! In my opinion, it's a great habit to be on the lookout for things under a different name. This is the "academic coordination problem:" things are often rediscovered again and again, because people have incentives to write but not to read.
Fully agree that he uses concepts used with less wrong, under different names. And I've seen him referenced frequently on less wrong as somewhere to look for rational financial / career advice.
I follow his free material, it has provided me with inspiration/direction/confidence to aggressively pursue increased compensation, successfully. I've been tempted to purchase his material before, but am always discouraged last second by the smell of snake oil.
I've been doing the same thing, for a while. I also get turned off a bit by the snake oil, and I've been following some of the mailing lists long enough that the content starts to feel repetitive. I might still buy, if he ever put out anything inexpensive (doesn't seem likely, but Jeff Walker did a while ago even though his business has a similar strategy, so it might happen..).
I wonder if everyone gets that slight snake oil feeling from him? And in particular, whether the kinds of marketing he's using still work when the reader recognizes what tactic is being used.
I stumbled across an article about Amelia, a program that can supposedly perform low-level human jobs like call center operator. A brief search hasn't turned up anything particularly illuminating. Has this been discussed on LW before?
On the one hand, everything I read about her sounds sufficiently vague that I suspect it's hype (and possibly native advertising). Still, I'm curious about the underlying tech - is it some kind of substantial improvement over past attempts, or is she just Siri++ in the way that Eugene Goostman was a slightly better chatbot?
Probably Siri-- in the way that Eugene Goostman was a slightly worse chatbot.
The manufacturer's website is only merely illustrative.
“Every few years over the past decade we ask our people ‘What are the dumb things we do? What is stopping you doing your job?’
A look at the cost of bad self-imposed regulations in businesses.
The outside view.... (The whole link is quoted.)
Hey, does anyone else struggle with feelings of loneliness?
What strategies have you found for either dealing with the negative feelings, or addressing the cause of loneliness, and have they worked?
Sometimes negative emotions are just bad weather -- you have to get stuff done anyways. I also agree with and second sensible advice below on dealing with causes.
Joining clubs is good - especially if you're willing to put in enough work for it to be implicitly joining a social scene (unfortuanately, this bit has plenty of caveats, but trial and error sometimes works fine). Do you make music? There are scenes for that. Dance, ditto. Playing card games, ditto.
LW is almost big enough to work for this, actually - certainly if one lives in a big city.
In my experience, "dealing with the negative feelings" is useless, because if you deal with them today and you're still lonely tomorrow, the feelings will just come back. It's better to find people who are interested in the same things as you, and hang out with them.
Do you feel lonely because you spent your time alone or because you will you don't connect with the people with whom you spend your time?
Two separate problems.
Not feeling connected with people, or, increasingly feeling less connection with people.
I actively socialize myself, and this helps, but the other thing maybe suggests to me I'm doing something wrong.
(Edit: to clarify, my empathy thingy works as well (maybe better) than it ever has, I just feel like the things I crave from social interactions are getting harder to acquire. Like, people "getting" you, or having enough things in common that you can effectively talk about the stuff that interests you. So, like, obviously, one of the solutions there is to hang out with more bright-and-happy CFAR-ish/LW-ish/EA-ish people.)
www.meetup.com can be a good place to find groups of likeminded people.
I found the Nonviolent Communication method extremely helpful for feeling more connected to my friends.
I did a little research to find out whether there are free survey sites that offer "check all answers that apply" questions.
Super Simple Survey probably does, but goddamned if I'll deal with their website to make sure.
On the almost free side, Live Journal enables fairly flexible polls (including checkboxes) for paid accounts, and you can get a paid account for a month for $3. Live Journal is a social media site.
Doodle poll, select "free text" might work.
http://support.doodle.com/customer/portal/articles/645362-how-to-create-a-poll-
It has been experimentally shown that certain primings and situations increase utilitarian reasoning; for instance, people are more willing to give the "utilitarian" answer to the trolley problem when dealing with strangers, rather than friends. Utilitarians like to claim that this is because people are able to put their biases aside and think more clearly in those situations. But my explanation has always been that it's because these setups are designed to maximise the psychological distance between the subject and the harm they're going to inflict - the more people are confronted with the potential consequences of their actions, the less likely they are to make the utilitarian mistake. And now, a new paper suggests that I was right all along! Abstract:
However, given my low opinion of such experiments, perhaps I should be very careful about uncritically accepting evidence that supports my priors.
Field studies are hard work :-D
They needed the native habitat for the alcohol consumption.
I highly doubt the subjects were drunk enough to have trouble figuring out that 5 > 1. So one could equally offer an interpretation that e.g. drunk people answered honestly, while sober people wanted to signal that they were too caring to kill someone under any circumstances.
It's a fascinating result, but I don't think the interpretation is a slam dunk.
I doubt this. I conjecture that more people lie and say they would be utilitarian than lie and say they would not be utilitarian. I hope that I would do the utilitarian thing, but I am not sure that I actually would be able to get myself to do it. (Maybe I would be more likely to actually do it if I were drunk)
On LW sure, being utilitarian is the thing you want to signal here. Ordinary people in a bar? I highly doubt it. Being unwilling to kill is far, far more socially acceptable than the utilitarian answer.
I've been wondering whether utilitarianism undervalues people's loyalty to their own relationships and social networks.
Someone has created a fake Singularity Summit website.
(Link is to MIRI blog post claiming they are not responsible for the site.)
Today I had an aha moment when discussing coalition politics (I didn't call it that, but it was) with elementary schoolers, 3rd grade.
As a context: I offer an interdisciplinary course in school (voluntary, one hour per week). It gives a small group of pupils a glimpse of how things really work. Call it rationality training if you want.
Today the topic was pairs and triple. I used analogies from relationships: Couples, parents, friendships. What changes in a relationship when a new element appears. Why do relationships form in the first place? And this revealed differences in how friendships work among boys and among girls. And that in this class at this moment at least the girl friendships were largely coalition politics: "If you do this your are my best friend," or "No we can't be best friends if she it your best friend." For the boys it appears to be at least wquantitatively different. But maybe just the surface differs.
I the end I represented this as graphs (kind of) on the board. And the children were delighted to draw their own coalition diagrams, even abbreviating names by single letters. You wouldn't have bet that these diagrams were from 3rd grade.
How did you deal with the prospect of one of the kids being emotional hurt by the whole process of being explicit about relationships?
I of course have an eye on the emotional wellbeing of the children. But I'm not really clear what kind of emotional hurt you mean. Being exposed to e.g. be the loner possibly? I probably wouldn't try it in this relatively direct way if the group weren't that small (4 children) when I can keep the discourse inspirational and playful at all time.
Yes. Getting children to openly state: "We can't be best friend because you are best friends with X" seems to ask for trouble but if you have enough presence in the room to keep the discourse inspirational and playful it might be fine.
Ah yes. "We can't be best friend because you are best friends with X" wasn't literally said with respect to someone in the room. Something like that was quoted by a girl as an example thus it wasn't personal in that moment but I assume that it is a real statement too.
I wonder what would happen if we trained monkeys to reveal this kind of detalis with us.
You may be interested in "Chimpanzee Politics", by Frans de Waals (something like that), which is about exactly that (observing a group of Chimps in a zoo, and how their politics and alliances evolves, with a couple coups).
Great! Added to my Amazon whislist ;)
But maybe we could. Considering the tricky setups scientists use to compare the intelligence of mice and rats I'd think that it should be possible to devise an experiment which teaches monkeys to reveal their clan structure. I'm thinking along the line of first training association of buttons with clan members (photos) and the allowing to select groups which should get or not get a treat.
I posted a link to the 2014 survey in the 'Less Wrong' Facebook group, and some people commented they filled it out. Another friend of mine started a Less Wrong account to comment that she did the survey, and got her first karma. Now I'm curious how many lurkers become survey participants, and are then incenitivized to start accounts to get the promised karma by commenting they completed it. If it's a lot, that's cool, because having one's first comment upvoted after just registering an account on Less Wrong seems like a way of overcoming the psychological barrier of 'oh, I wouldn't fit in as an active participant on Less Wrong...'
If you, or someone you know, got active on Less Wrong for the first time because of the survey, please reply as a data point. If you're a regular user who has a hypothesis about this, please share. Either way, I'm curious to discover how strong an effect this is, or is not.
My first comment was after I completed the 2014 survey. I've only been lurking for about a month, and this was the first survey I've participated in.
I have been an on-and-off lurker for ~15 months, and only recently created an account (not because of the survey though). I have participated in both 2013 and 2014's surveys.
Those who are currently using Anki on a mostly daily or weekly basis: what are you studying/ankifying?
To start: I'm working on memorizing programming languages and frameworks because I have trouble remembering parameters and method names.
Geography: "what direction [relative to central london] is this tube stop in?", English counties (locations), U.S. states (locations, capitals), Canadian territories and provinces (locations and capitals), countries (locations, capitals, and at some point I'll add flags). (Most of these came from ankiweb originally, but I had to add reverse cards.)
Bayes: conversions between odds, probabilities and decibels (specific numbers and more recently the general formulas)
Miscellaneous: the NATO phonetic alphabet, logs (base 2 of 1.25, 1.5, 1.75, and base 10 of 2 through 9), some words I can never remember how to spell (this turns out not to help), some computer stuff (the order of the arguments in python's
datetime.strptime, and the difference between aleft joinand aright join), some definitions in machine learning, some historical dates (e.g. wars, first moon landing, introduction of the model T), some historical inflation rates, some astronomical facts.Also a deck based on the twelve virtues of rationality essay. (This one and most of the bayes one I found through LW.)
I'm not sure most of this is useful, but most of it hasn't cost me significant effort either.
if you memorize logs, I recommend memorizing natural logs of primes. This is all you need to quickly calculate natural log, log2, and log10 of any integer.
You get ln of any number by adding together the natural logs of the prime factors, and you get log_m of n by the formula
log_m(n)=ln(n)/ln(m)
(maybe memorize ln(10) too to make the calculation a little easier)
I can't do real division in my head, but if I wanted to maximise my logarithm-ability while minimizing my number of cards, I would go for logs base (probably 10) of primes, and 1/log(e) and 1/log(2).
But I'm not too fussed about minimizing cards, or about natural logs. Learning more primes might be helpful, but I can get them approximately. E.g. I don't have log_10(11) memorized, but I know it's between log_10(10) and log_10(2*6) which are 1 and 1.08, and it would be closer to the latter (my calculator says 1.041, which is slightly lower than I would have guessed, but if I put it in Anki I'd only go to 1.04 anyway).
These days, most of my time on Anki is on Japanese (which I'm learning for fun) and Chinese (which I already know, but I'm brushing up on tones and characters).
Looking through my decks, I also have decks on:
(also a few minor decks with very few cards)
I review those pretty much every day (I sometimes leave a few unfinished, depending on how much idle time I have in queues, transport, etc.)
That's fantastic. How many cards total do you have, and how many minutes a day do you study?
Apparently I have 6887 cards (though that includes those I suspended because they're boring, useless, too difficult, duplicated, or possibly wrong; I tend to often suspend cards instead of deleting them); of those around 3000 are Chinese pinyin cards I automatically created with a Python script (I set them up to get between 1 and 5 new ones per day, depending on how busy I tend to be), 1000 are Japanese (the biggest deck of manually-entered cards), and the remaining decks rarely go over 300 cards.
I study probably between 20 and 40 minutes per day, usually in public transit or during "downtime" (waiting in line, carrying the baby around the house hoping for him to sleep, in the restroom, the elevator...). The time depends of how many new cards I entered recently.
The following model is my new hypothesis for generating better OKCupid profiles for myself while remaining honest.
I brainstorm what I want to include in my profile in a positive way without lying. This may include goal-factoring on what honest signals I'm trying to send. Then, I see how what I brainstormed fits into the different prompts on OKCupid profiles.
I generate multiple clause-like chunks for each item/object/quality of myself I'm trying to express in my profile. I then A/B test the options for each item across a cross-section of individuals similar to the ones I would want to attract on OKCupid. This may include random assignment to conditions to participants to some extent. I would still need to think of metrics or ratings for this to best suit my goals.
Construct complete paragraphs for the various sections of my profile using whichever were the most successful Caveats: I would want enough experimental control to ensure the test participants were people I could trust to respond honestly, and without trolling me. However, this would decrease random selection. How much should I care about random selection, and thus external validity, in this case?
Otherwise, what do you think of the model? What's wrong with it? If it's not completely awful, I'll play-test it with an OKCupid profile just for the value of information, and see if we can't learn something.
Just test it and report back the result :) That will teach you and us many things we can't see right now.
It had never occurred to me that the term "applause light" could be taken so literally.
Politician, noun: a person who cheers in-group values professionally.
My friend recently attended an event at which Ray Kurzweil and an urban planner named Richard Florida were speaking. He didn't like Richard Florida as a speaker, citing how Richard Florida 'sounded just like a politician', and was speaking 'only in applause lights'. I noted it was funny to use 'applause light' in that context, as an auditorium where the speaker looks over a crowd while bathed in light, saying things specifically to garner applause, is just about the most literal interpretation of 'applause light' I could think of.
"Applause lights" is a metaphor based on a concrete thing that really exists