Apparently I left a tag open. The first paragraph is yours, whereas the second is my question.

Minor point. It is peculiar to talk about the "death of communism" when there are about as many communists in the world as there are Christians.

"Death of the Purported Worldwide Worker's Communist Revolution" is closer to the truth (and a mouthful).

How about "Death of Worldwide Revolutionary Communism"?

Haven't had a post this good in a while. With immediate application,too.

Err... did that post end up dying in a free speech happy death spiral?

Especially odd from a person who believes in the probable possibility of humanly irresistible bad arguments as a reason for not AI boxing. If there are minds that we can't let exist because they would make bad arguments that we would find persuasive this seems terribly close, from an aggregative utilitarian standpoint, to killing them.

I'm not an expert in the Rwandan genocide, but it's my impression that to a substantial extent the people behind it basically just made arguments (bad ones, of a primarily ad-hominem form like "Tutsis are like cockroaches") for killing them and people who listened to those arguments on the radio went along with it. At least with the benefit of hindsight I am reluctant to say that the people promoting that genocide should have been stopped forcibly. Similarly, it's my impression that Charles Manson didn't personally kill anyone. He merely told his followers ridiculous stories of what the likely results of their killing certain people would be.

It would be nice if, as Socrates claimed, a bad argument cannot defeat a good one, but if that was true we wouldn't need to overc... (read more)

Especially odd from a person who believes in the probable possibility of humanly irresistible bad arguments as a reason for not AI boxing. If there are minds that we can't let exist because they would make bad arguments that we would find persuasive this seems terribly close, from an aggregative utilitarian standpoint, to killing them.

Fine, let me rephrase: in the human art of rationality there's a flat law against meeting arguments with violence, anywhere in the human world. In the superintelligent domain, as you say, violence is not an ontological category and there is no firm line between persuading someone with a bad argument and reprogramming their brain with nanomachines. In our world there is a firm line, however.

Let me put it this way: If you can invent a bullet that, regardless of how it is fired, or who fires it, only hits people who emit untrue statements, then you can try to use bullets as part of a Bayesian analysis. Until then, you really ought to consider the possibility of the other guy shooting back, no matter how right you are or how wrong they are, and ask whether you want to start down that road.

If the other guy shoots first, of course, that's a whole different story that has nothing to do with free speech.

So what is your response to someone like Hitler? Assuming the thug won't listen? Die? Run? I mean before the AGI goes "phoom".

Eliezer, I first saw the distinction between "natural" and "supernatural" made the way you describe in something by Richard Carrier. It was probably a blog entry from 2007-01, which points back to a couple of his earlier writings. I had a quick look at the 2003 one, and it mentions a few antecedents.

anonymous:

"In the future (if we survive the next century) there will be enough technological progression to create essential Communism (no-one needs to work, everyone will have necessary resources to live incredible lives and so forth)."

-10 points for confusing means with ends.

From the article:

"[...]there is never an Idea so true that it's wrong to criticize any argument that supports it."

Or make jokes about it? Having a sense of humour ought to be mentioned as a primary piece of equipment in the Bias-Buster's toolkit. It's easy and fun... (read more)

Eli, you said:

In the superintelligent domain, as you say, violence is not an ontological category and there is no firm line between persuading someone with a bad argument and reprogramming their brain with nanomachines. In our world there is a firm line, however.

I don't think there is such a firm line. I think argument shades smoothly into cult brainwashing techniques.

Peter: It seems to me that we can draw a firm line, but on one side sits our very strictest most careful thought in the spirit of inquiry and on the other sits everything remotely aimed at influencing others, from legal argument to scientific defense of a position to advertising to flirtation to music (at least lyrical music) to conversation using body language and tones of voice to cult brainwashing techniques and protest rallies etc. It's very clear that we can't live entirely to one side of that line, or if we can, that we can only live on the side that contains, well, life, and also, sadly, violence.

Tom, I did not confuse ends and means.

"And it is triple ultra forbidden to respond with violence. There are a very few injunctions in the human art of rationality that have no ifs, ands, buts, or escape clauses."

I'm half-convinced that Eliezer put that one in just to see whether we'd spot him contradicting his own advice and pick up on it, so that he can catch us all out in the next post in this series. I think that

"no ifs, ands, buts, or escape clauses... Bad argument gets counterargument. Does not get bullet. Never. Never ever never for ever."

constitutes infinitely ma... (read more)

Anyway, an excellent post apart from the little "are you still awake" test at the end. It ties a lot of things together for me; i have always wondered about how to best describe the commonality between Stalinist Communism and fundamentalist religion, as I often find myself debating whether religion is a net cause of human suffering or not.

"Tom: If there was such a convincing eminar, perhaps it contains such a convincing argument that it's genunitely correct. Modify it to "Utterly Convincing and Irresistable Five-Minute Brainwashing Seminar On Why....." :)"

It was just an example; it was deliberately chosen to be as extreme as possible, to avoid grey-area questions. No human, so far as I can determine, has the intelligence to actually produce such a thing. Many less-extreme examples of this abound, eg., what should we do with blueprints for nuclear weapons? What about genetic databases which include deadly viruses? What about genetic databases which are .1% deadly viruses and 99.9% life-saving medical research? And on and on it goes.

From what I've read, virtually nobody in China is a communist now, just as people had stopped believing in the last days of the Soviet Union. In North Korea or among the rebels of Nepal there are still true-believers, but I don't think there are as many as there are Christians.

I find it useful to distinguish between the Chinese and the Swedish. I call the Chinese form of government "communism", and I call the Swedish form of government "socialism". If they are all sub-tribes of "Canadians" to you, then you don't prize dis... (read more)

And it is triple ultra forbidden to respond with violence.

I agree. However, here are my minority beliefs on the topic: unless you use Philosophical Majoritarianism, or some other framework where you consider yourself as part of an ensemble of fallible human beings, it's fairly hard to conclusively demonstrate the validity of this rule, or indeed to draw any accurate conclusions about what to do in these cases.

If I consider my memories and my current beliefs in the abstract, as not a priori less infallible than anyone else's, a "no exceptions to Freedo... (read more)

A rule of human rationality becomes flat when the probability of falsely perceiving an exception to the rule, vastly exceeds the probability of ending up in a real-world situation where it genuinely makes sense to violate the rule. Relative to modern Earth which includes many violent people and many difficult ethical dilemmas, but does not include the superbeing Omega credibly threatening to launch a black hole at the Sun if you don't shoot the next three Girl Scouts who try to sell you cookies.

I think a lot of the commenters to this thread are also missing the counterintuitive idea that once you fire a gun, the target or their survivors may shoot back.

Isn't the probability of ending up in a real world situation where the entire world is in terrible danger and only you can save it vastly smaller than that of falsely perceiving such a situation? Despite that, I'm glad Petrov made his decision. Expected costs and benefits have to be considered, not just probabilities, but then you are back in normal decision theory or at least normal but not yet invented "decision theory for biased finite agents".

Not murdering people for criticizing your beliefs is, at the very least, a useful heuristic.

Isn't the probability of ending up in a real world situation where the entire world is in terrible danger and only you can save it vastly smaller than that of falsely perceiving such a situation? Despite that, I'm glad Petrov made his decision.

Fair enough. s/probability of/expected utilities associated with/

But you can still end up with a "flat" rule for the human art of rationality, when the expected negative utilities associated from biased decisions that "the end justifies the means, in just this one case here", exceeds the expected... (read more)

Agreed Nominull, spectacularly useful. Definitely the sort of heuristic one would sensibly like to promote.

Rolf: It seems to me that you are trying to assert that it is normative for agents to behave in a certain manner because the agents you are addressing are presumably non-normative. The trouble is, using that strategy you guarantee no normative agents. The non-normative agents are not corrected by adopting your strategy, as it only mitigates their irrationalities, while any normative agents are adopting an inappropriate strategy. You can never cho... (read more)

In this case it seems that Eliezer is a bit biased toward defending his stated position, despite the fact that it is entirely obvious that his "flat rule" is in fact a leaky generalization.

For example, he keeps mentioning consequences that result from the response of the person attacked or the imitation of others. These consequences will not follow in every case. There will be no such consequences when no one (including the person attacked) will ever find out that one has responded to an argument with violence.

One can easily think of many theoret... (read more)

It seems to me Eleizer has arrived at a line of arguing that mirrors buddhusm and other similar systems. People are attached to certain ideas, concepts, beliefsystems etc, and when two opposing ideas clash together the result is killing, and a destructive spiral. The challenge is to transcend the situation, by being able to keep the mind cold when the rest of society goes amok. Unfortunately while scientists are good at discribing a situation, when it comes to giving normative advice they are mostly useless.

Another thing, faith is so often brought up as a... (read more)

Indeed; unknown has a good point. It's perfectly possible for violence to be the only action which will avert terrible outcomes, and it's perfectly possible for violence to not lead to further violence. As for

"A rule of human rationality becomes flat when the probability [expected utility] of falsely perceiving an exception to the rule, vastly exceeds the probability [expected utility] of ending up in a real-world situation where it genuinely makes sense to violate the rule."

why do special rules need to be invented here? A rational agent should a... (read more)

But you can still end up with a "flat" rule for the human art of rationality, when the expected negative utilities associated from biased decisions that "the end justifies the means, in just this one case here", exceeds the expected positive utilities from cases where the universe really does end up a better place from shooting someone who makes an argument you don't like after taking all side effects into account including encouragement of similar behavior by others.

That might deserve a post of it own...

There will be no such consequenc... (read more)

"You'd need a murder-suicide to pull this off properly..."

Reminds me of Agatha Christie's "Curtain". Of course this is fictional evidence, and in any case I was thinking of more obviously justified cases.

You can think of reasons to be violent, you can think of the good that violence might create, but consider this:

The only human being who is remembered as being completely good because he shot someone was Hitler, when he shot himself.

The list of possitive changes accomplished in the REFUSAL to shoot anyone is much longer.

I don't believe violence can ever have a positive effect, except when used to defend against greater violence.

In argument, short of the entirely impossible situation where an abominable idea is irrestable to everyone else, (and assuming tha... (read more)

Let me rephrase: Hitler's action (suicide) was for the good. Not he as a human being, or pretty much anything else he did. (With the exception of painting, those weren't bad.) I really should proofread this before I come off as saying something completely different.

It seems to me that normative statements like "let us go and serve other gods" aren't really something you can have a rational debate about. The question comes down to "which do you love more, your god or me", and the answer should always be "God"... according to God.

Similarly, one could have a rational debate about whether a command economy will outperform a market economy or vice versa (although the empirical evidence seems pretty one-sided), but a statement like "all people ought to be socially and economically equal" seems like something that just has to be accepted or rejected.

If you met John Barnes and he argued that he's doing the right thing, would it be appropriate to sock him in the jaw?

No, because the statement that "the only appropriate response to some arguments is a good swift sock in the jaw" is not itself one of the arguments whose appropriate response is a sock in the jaw. There may or may not be any such arguments, but socking him in the jaw is admitting that he is fundamentally right. Of course, it might be appropriate to sock him for some other reason :-)

One can argue that Buzz Aldrin had a special righ... (read more)

GW, to what extent should we treat people as we want them to treat us, and to what extent should we treat them the way they say is right and the way they treat others?

Sometimes it's polite to treat other people by their own standards, and it isn't an admission that their way is right and ours is wrong.

J Thomas: Ideally you knock him out and he falls down and hits his head on the floor, and when he wakes up he will be a chastened antisemite, a subdued antisemite, a far more submissive antisemite. He will not annoy you with logical argument.

Gosh, I hope no one ever tries anything similar on a Jew.

TGGP writes:

"I recognize that in some situations it could hypothetically be the case that free speech leads to bad outcomes, in which case I'd be alright with restricting it. I think such cases would be fantastically rare..."

What about the "Werther Effect"? Journalism guidelines are drafted on the assumption that it is real, and browsing through PubMed suggests that the evidence is strong enough.

So, if imitative suicide is facilitated through art or media stimuli in predictable ways, isn't the empirical question as to whether there are... (read more)

What about the "Werther Effect"? I'm not really that bothered by a bunch of people I don't know killing themselves. It's your life to make or take.

Unless you don't think suicide is a bad thing, I suppose. I think my more apathetic attitude toward human life separates me from transhumanists/immortalists. I discuss that a bit here. I'm thinking more along the lines of violent totalitarian ideologies that have a reasonable chance of taking over and really screwing things up.

You can see the Buzz Aldrin punch on Youtube.

I heard he also roundhouse kicked a holocaust denier through a plate glass window and karate chopped a 9/11 truther in the balls.

dutz, as paintings, yes, they weren't any good. But still, much better than genocide.

Violence may convince your opponent it isn't worth arguing with you. But it will convince your audience that you're an emotional, impulsive, irrational person, no matter how right you were.

People can see someone as less than human. Until they see the getting beaten with fire hoses, and then pity sinks in.

I think in the original context, Eliezer was talking about violence commited by a society/sect/police force against an individual.

I happen to believe a swift punch in the ... (read more)

DaCracka: I think these are two issues related in a different way. His paintings were not better than genocide. This is like saying butter is better than a smack in the face. This is kind of illogical. Though, if his paintings would have been better there would have been a chance to avoid this genocide, because the Academy would have accepted him and he might have become a painter instead of a dictator. About the violence thing. I agree nobody should react with violence to an argument. There are people out there who do so. They do it because they are eit... (read more)

guts, I would prefer butter to a slap in the face anyday. I'm sure you would, too.

The point I was making about the paintings, (in the tradition of the late Mr. Vonnegut,) is that Hitler was a person. Being a person, he should've stuck to painting, rather than violence. We should encourage more video games where people make art rather than shooting things. We should be less upset about children seeing naked people and more upset about them seeing dead ones.

In terms of a punch in the jaw:

We'd all agree that beating a child is wrong, and that Mike Tyson isn't... (read more)

That looks like a verbal argument to me. Kind of bare without any supporting evidence, but he might have been about to provide supporting evidence. Hard to tell what he was about to do.

About violence and society. What do we define by violence? Do we also define intrusion in our personal sphere, psychological re-programming, etc. as violent activities?
You should read Randall Collins.

What about the Resistance in countries that were occupied by Nazi Germany?
Did they actually accomplish anything? I think it was the violence of the opposing armies that actually ended Nazi occupation.

Thanks for pointing out Randall Collins.
Resistance certainly achieved something. I mentioned it as an example for 'justified' violence.

What did the Resistance accomplish? I already stated that it seemed to me that it was the opposing armies that got rid of the Nazis. If you disagree on that or have something else you think they did, state it.

Eliezer, your post appears to at least in part be animated by a frustration with people who are incapable/unwilling/don't make a serious enough effort to both pursue interesting tangents that could later be developed into other full-length conversations and stay on topic overall. Granted, this probably describes a vast majority of people. Nevertheless, presuming the straying from topic though tangent acknowledgment to be an affliction of conversation with all people unfortunately leads you imply a necessary trade-off between the values of rigorous word d... (read more)

Rolf: It seems to me that you are trying to assert that it is normative for agents to behave in a certain manner because the agents you are addressing are presumably non-normative.

On a semantic level, I agree; I actually avoided using the word "normative" in my comment because you had, earlier, correctly criticized my use of the word on my blog.

I try to consistently consider myself as part of an ensemble of flawed humans. (It's not easy, and I often fail.) To be more rigorous, I would want to condition my reasoning on the fact that I'm one of the... (read more)

About the word "supernatural"... isn't this whole concept not bogus?

This is obvious if we assume the there was No Design(er). However the same applies more widely. Anything that happens or exists will be natural by definition.

Consider this: Let's assume for arguments sake that Intelligent Design is correct. Then all of nature is created and hence unnatural by definition. Depending on the nature of the designer it might be the only really natural thing around.

Conclusion: So unless intelligence is considered supernatural, the simple conclusion must be that nothing supernatural exists.

This has of course been pointed out, but "And it is triple ultra forbidden to respond to criticism with violence... Does not get bullet. Never. Never ever never for ever." --- doesn't make sense. It's a bizarre authoritative / normative assertion completely out of place in all of this. And Eli knows that, I'm sure. I suspect that he's just had this directive beat into him in previous encounters, in objection to the "coldness" of purely utilitarian decision-making. If e.g. an argument-ending bullet is what it takes to ensure humanity gets off-planet, then the utilitarian answer is to shoot.

Of course.

There is one type of claim for which a bullet does provide relevant evidence: claims about bullets themselves, such as "Your bullets will not harm me." (For example, an armored vehicle that is supposed to protect its occupants from gunfire will certainly end up being tested against actual gunfire at some point before its design is put into widespread use.)

Not replying to the comment thread: I think the quote might actually be Deuteronomy 13:6-10 in the King James Version.

(Deuteronomy 13:7-11)

Talk about a successful meme strategy! No wonder we still have this religion today. It killed off its competitors.

Crosslinking:

If you don't place an appropriate burden of proof on each and every additional nice claim, the affective resonance gets started very easily. Look at the poor New Agers. Christianity developed defenses against criticism, arguing for the wonders of faith; New Agers culturally inherit the cached thought that faith is positive, but lack Christianity's exclusionary scripture to keep out competing memes. New Agers end up in happy death spirals around stars, trees, magnets, diets, spells, unicorns...

In the August 2010 open thread, Risto_Saarel... (read more)

Concerning many comments already here that I am not sure which one I should reply to:

Never an argument to warrant violence? Or OK against superintelligences but NO against humans? Do not suppose there's a sharp line between human and superintelligence situations. To me some of you may well be akin to superintelligences, that I cannot outwit. No absolute line between argument and verbal abuse either, when I think about it. Also, I think I have some examples of dangerous/disgusting arguments - nothing exists, you should die, your consciousness doesn't exist ... (read more)

Am I the only one who hears Eliezer's "Never ever never for ever" voiced roughly like HJPEV?

Not all wrongness is innocent error. Sometimes people are lying, consciously or unconsciously. This is violence directed at the listener to control their behavior. Even advertising that makes no false claims is often in this category, when it raises the salience of something for basically adversarial reasons. (Hard sells and infomercials are less like this, branding is more like this.) If it never ever never for ever gets bullet, then eventually a bunch of thugs barge into your nice unwalled garden (walls being a form of structural violence) and ruin it.

Se... (read more)

It's worth pointing that phrase "atheism is also a religion" is essentially an accusation. So, the notion that religion is a bad stuff is so ingrained even in beliviers mind, if they think that phrase "you have a religion" can be used as an acusation

(looks around at 2020)

The problem with arguing over words in this manner is that each side is attempting to "win" by picking a definition that lets them shut down the other side entirely, rather than finding common meaning so they can use the linguistic token for further communication.  It's a contest of social dominance, not a search for truth.  If you've ever tried to have an honest discussion with someone doing that you know exactly what I mean.  You let them have their definition of the word and just pick a different word for the purposes of the discussion to... (read more)