Original post:  http://bearlamp.com.au/no-negative-press-agreement/

What is a no negative press agreement?

A no negative press agreement binds a media outlet's consent to publish information provided by a person with the condition that they be not portrayed negatively by the press.

Why would a person want that?

In recognising that the press has powers above and beyond every-day people to publish information and spread knowledge and perspective about an issue that can be damaging to an individual.  An individual while motivated by the appeal of publicity, is also concerned about the potential damage caused by negative press.

Every person is the hero of their own story, from one's own perspective they performed actions that were justified and motivated by their own intention and worldview, no reasonable person would be able to tell their story (other than purposefully) in which they are spun as the negative conspirator of a plot, actively causing negative events on the world for no reason.

Historically, humans have been motivated to care more about bad news than good news, for reasons that expand on the idea that bad news might ring your death (and be a cause of natural selection) and good news would be irrelevant for survival purposes.  Today we are no longer in that historic period, yet we still pay strong attention to bad news.  It's clear that bad news can personally effect individuals - not only those in the stories, but others experiencing the bad news can be left with a negative worldview or motivated to be upset or distraught.  In light of the fact that bad news is known to spread more than good news, and also risks negatively affecting us mentally, we are motivated to choose to avoid bad news, both in not creating it, not endorsing it and not aiding in it's creation.

The binding agreement is designed to do several things:

• protect the individual from harm
• reduce the total volume of negative press in the world
• decrease the damage caused by negative press in the world
• bring about the future we would rather live in
• protect the media outlet from harming individuals

Does this limit news-maker's freedom to publish?

That is not the intent.  On the outset, it's easy to think that it could have that effect, and perhaps in a very shortsighted way it might have that effect.  Shortly after the very early effects, it will have a net positive effect of creating news of positive value, protecting the media from escalating negativity, and bringing about the future we want to see in the world.  If it limits media outlets in any way it should be to stop them from causing harm.  At which point any non-compliance by a media entity will signal the desire to act as agents of harm in the world.

Why would a media outlet be an agent of harm?  Doesn't that go against the principles of no negative press?

While media outlets (or humans), set out with the good intentions of not having a net negative effect on the world, they can be motivated by other concerns.  For example, the value of being more popular, or the direction from which they are paid for their efforts (for example advertising revenue).  The concept of competing commitment, and being motivated by conflicting goals is best covered by Scott under the name moloch.  

The no negative press agreement is an attempt to create a commons which binds all relevant parties to action better than the potential for a tragedy.  This commons has a desire to grow and maintain itself, and is motivated to maintain itself.  If any media outlets are motivated to defect, they are to be penalised by both the other press and the public.

How do I encourage a media outlet to comply with no negative press?

Ask them to publish a policy with regard to no negative press.  If you are an individual interested in interacting with the media, and are concerned with the risks associated with negative press, you can suggest an individual binding agreement in the interim of the media body designing and publishing a relevant policy.

I think someone violated the no negative press policy, what should I do?

At the time of writing, no one is bound by the concept of no negative press.  Should there be desire and pressure in the world to motivate entities to comply, they are more likely to comply.  To create the pressure a few actions can be taken:

• Write to media entities on public record and request they consider a no negative press policy, outline clearly and briefly your reasons why it matters to you.
• Name and shame media entities that fail to comply with no negative press, or fail to consider a policy.
• Vote with your feet - if you find a media entity that fails to comply, do not subscribe to their information and vocally encourage others to do the same.

Meta: this took 45mins to write.

Fact: the Internet is excruciatingly slow in many developing countries, especially outside of the big cities.

Fact: today's websites are designed in such a way that they become practically impossible to navigate with connections in the order of, say, 512kps. Ram below 4GB and a 7-year old CPU are also a guarantee of a terrible experience.

Fact: operating systems are usually designed in such an obsolescence-inducing way as well.

Fact: the Internet is a massive source of free-flowing information and a medium of fast, cheap communication and networking.

Conclusion: lots of humans in the developing world are missing out on the benefits of a technology that could be amazingly empowering and enlightening.

I just came across this: what would the internet 2.0 have looked like in the 1980s. This threw me back to my first forays in Linux's command shell and how enamoured I became with its responsiveness and customizability. Back then my laptop had very little autonomy, and very few classrooms had plugs, but by switching to pure command mode I could spend the entire day at school taking notes (in LaTeX) without running out. But I switched back to the GUI environment as soon as I got the chance, because navigating the internet on the likes of Lynx is a pain in the neck.

As it turns out, I'm currently going through a course on energy distribution in isolated rural areas in developing countries. It's quite a fascinating topic, because of the very tight resource margins, the dramatic impact of societal considerations, and the need to tailor the technology to the existing natural renewable resources. And yet, there's actually a profit to be made investing in these projects; if managed properly, it's win-win.

And I was thinking that, after bringing them electricity and drinkable water, it might make sense to apply a similar cost-optimizing, shoestring-budget mentality to the Internet. We already have mobile apps and mobile web standards which are built with the mindset of "let's make this smartphone's battery last as long as possible".

Even then, (well-to-do, smartphone-buying) thrid-worlders are somewhat neglected: Samsung and the like have special chains of cheap Android smartphones for Africa and the Middle East. I used to own one; "this cool app that you want to try out is not available for use on this system" were a misery I had to get used to. 

It doesn't seem to be much of a stretch to do the same thing for outdated desktops. I've been in cybercafés in North Africa that still employ IBM Aptiva machines, mechanical keyboard and all—with a Linux operating system, though. Heck, I've seen town "pubs", way up in the hills, where the NES was still a big deal among the kids, not to mention old arcades—Guile's theme goes everywhere.

The logical thing to do would be to adapt a system that's less CPU intensive, mostly by toning down the graphics. A bare-bones, low-bandwith internet that would let kids worldwide read wikipedia, or classic literature, and even write fiction (by them, for them), that would let nationwide groups tweet to each other in real time, that would let people discuss projects and thoughts, converse and play, and do all of those amazing things you can do on the Internet, on a very, very tight budget, with very, very limited means. Internet is supposed to make knowledge and information free and universal. But there's an entry-level cost that most humans can't afford. I think we need to bridge that. What do you guys think?

This is intended to eventually be a Main post and part of sequences on free will and religion.  It will be part of the Free Will sequence.

Please comment if you do or do not think this post is ready for Main.  I intend to move it there eventually.  As with any post at LessWrong, I'm completely open to criticism, but I hope it's directed at improving the quality of the thinking here rather than kneejerk opposition to my ideas.

------------------------------------------------------

The main point of this post is that I intend to convince every rationalist here, and every causal reader, to commit to allowing others to have free will.

First a bit of background.  I'm a conservative christian.  Growing up I considered myself a rationalist.  Now that I've known about Less Wrong for several years and have read the sequences, I no longer think I can classify myself that way <grin>.  Nowdays I usually consider myself a pragmatist.  "Being a rationalist" now carries with it a significant weight in my mind of formal Bayes Theorem and such that I've never had time to fully follow through and practice.  I also have a little fear that completely committing to be Bayesian would eventually put a huge conflict between my faith and Bayesian reasoning - just a little fear.  I've been reading Less Wrong for years now, they've all been resolve to my satisfaction.  I also haven't simply because looking at the math that gets thrown around here in Bayes Theorem discussion seems like it would take too much time for me to understand, and I'm already very busy (and, being an engineer and not a math major, a bit intimidating).

The main reason I come here is because this community thinks about thinking, which so few people around me do.  I crave that introspection that happens here, and so I'm drawn back to it.  Not always often, but enough to generally stay abreast of what's going on.  (I also have to admit to myself that I come back because you people are very smart, and I want you to think of me as smart too, and have your approval, but I try to keep that in check <grin>)

Now that I've been here (online only - no meetups yet) and learned with you over the years, another reason I stay here is because of the clear success of Evolutionary Psychology in predicting human behavior.  The clearest example I've ever had is this:

My children and I love to chase each other around the house.  It drives my wife crazy, especially when it happens right at bedtime.  At some point after I read about evolutionary psychology, this chain of logic dawned on me: The natural genetic behavior that's successful gets reinforced over generations -> Things you love to do naturally are joyful to you -> You pass those things on to your children through play the way lions play hunt with cubs ->  Human parents and children get true joy from chasing each other because their ancestors loved the hunt and were successful at it!

Now THAT was an eye opener!  It was the answer to a question I'd never known I had, which was this.  Why do children love to chase, and why do I love to chase them?  Because their ancestors survived that way and it was passed to them genetically.  I even like to playfully almost-catch-them-and-let-them-escape.  I even playfully let them catch me, too.  And we love it.

Religion has no answer to this question.  Religion doesn't even know how to ask this question.  But it flowed naturally out of Evolutionary Psychology just by my knowing that the concept existed!  Powerful!  Now, this post isn't really about religion so I won't go into why that doesn't break my faith.  I'll handle that it other posts.  The reason why I'm talking about it now is to get you to recognize that you are a tribal hunter by ancestry, even more fundamentally than you are the descendant of conquerors.  And knowing that Politics Is The Mind Killer, you'll listen to this next part, and take it seriously.

Less Wrong rationalists are growing, and being recognized by the religious community.  As militant Atheists.  It's reported that this is a new thing among atheists, this new desire to spread atheist philosophies as strongly as any religion spreads it's beliefs.  I've seen it in a couple places now, in about the last year.

I have a huge, scary concern for the future of our world.  It's not atheism.  And it's not religion.  I fear future wars.  As a military history enthusiast and a veteran I've learned a lot about war.  A lot.  And the principle is true that those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it.  Knowing that we are tribal animals I see aetheists as one tribe and religionists as another.  Now that I see the of growth and success of LW I see a future pattern emerging in the United States:

Few atheists among overwhelming Christians -> shrinking Christianity, growing Atheism -> atheism tribalness growing well connected and strong -> Natural tribal impulse to not tolerate different voices -> war between atheists and Christians.

Don't try to say this won't happen, and that Rationalists will always allow other people to believe differently.  Coherent Extrapolated Volition, Politics is the Mind Killer, and Eliezar' success in creating the LW and rationalist movement say otherwise.  Now, today, the commitment to altruism seems like a solution, but it isn't.  You all here are so very intelligent and you seriously look down on those of faith.  I see it all over the place.  It's a real blind spot that you can't see because it's inside your mental algorithms.  Altruism is very easily perverted into forcing other people because you know what is best for them.  It's not enough by itself.  It needs something else attached.

Someday there will come a time when new leaders will come up trough the rationalist movement who don't have Eliezar's  commitment to freedom.  And power corrupts even good, compassionate people.  So now I come to my request.

This principle needs to the rationalist movement.  A guarantee of free will for others that disagree with you, EVEN IF THEY ARE WRONG.  

I know religions have not always had this either.  Be better than the religions you despise.  Recognize that they also are tribal animals trying to become civilized tribal animals.  

I ask you personally to commit to making free will for all a part of your personal philosophy.  And I ask you to formalize that as part of Less Wrong, the Rationalist community, and your evangelical aetheism.  Plant the seed now so that is has time to grow. It is my fear that if you don't your children's children, and my childrens' children, will know a brutal war of philosophies unlike any we have ever seen.

In a future post I'll cover how religions are the empirically determined solution to problems that prevented civilization from arising,  and how rationalism is the modern, more specifically planned version.  And why religion is not evil like you think it is.

Sincerely,

Troshen

A new TED talk video just came out by Daniel Suarez, author of Daemon, explaining how autonomous combat drones with a capability called "lethal autonomy" pose a threat to democracy.  Lethal autonomy is what it sounds like - the ability of a robot to kill a human without requiring a human to make the decision.

He explains that a human decision-maker is not a necessity for combat drones to function.  This has potentially catastrophic consequences, as it would allow a small number of people to concentrate a very large amount of power, ruining the checks and balances of power between governments and their people and the checks and balances of power between different branches of government.  According to Suarez, about 70 countries have begun developing remotely piloted drones (like predator drones), the precursor to killer robots with lethal autonomy.

Daniel Suarez: The kill decision shouldn't belong to a robot

One thing he didn't mention in this video is that there's a difference in obedience levels between human soldiers and combat drones.  Drones are completely obedient but humans can throw a revolt.  Because they can rebel, human soldiers provide some obstacles to limit the power that would-be tyrants could otherwise obtain.  Drones won't provide this type of protection whatsoever.  Obviously, relying on human decision making is not perfect.  Someone like Hitler can manage to convince people to make poor ethical choices - but still, they need to be convinced, and that requirement may play a major role in protecting us.  Consider this - it's unthinkable that today's American soldiers might suddenly decide this evening to follow a tyrannical leader whose goal is to have total power and murder all who oppose.  It is not, however, unthinkable at all that the same tyrant, if empowered by an army of combat drones, could successfully launch such an attack without risking a mutiny.  The amount and variety of power grabs a tyrant with a robot army of sufficient power can get away with is unlimited.

Something else he didn't mention is that because we can optimize technologies more easily than we can optimize humans, it may be possible to produce killer robots in less time than it takes to build armies of human soldiers and with less expense than training and paying those soldiers.  Considering the salaries and benefits paid to soldiers and the 18 year wait time on human development, it is possible that an overwhelmingly large army of killer robots could be built more quickly than human armies and with fewer resources.

Suarez's solution is to push for legislation that makes producing robots with lethal autonomy illegal.  There are, obviously, pros and cons to this method.  Another method (explored in Daemon) is that if the people have 3-D printers, then the people may be able to produce comparable weapons which will then check and balance their government's power.  This method has pros and cons as well. I came up with a third method which is here.  I think it's better than the alternatives but I would like more feedback.

As far as I know, no organization, not even MIRI (I checked), is dedicated to preventing the potential political disasters caused by near-term tool AI (MIRI is interested in the existential risks posed by AGI).  That means it's up to us - the people - to develop our understanding of this subject and spread the word to others.  Of all the forums on the internet, LessWrong is one of the most knowledgeable when it comes to artificial intelligence, so it's a logical place to fire up a discussion on this.  I searched LessWrong for terms like "checks and balances" and "Daemon" and I just don't see evidence that we've done a group discussion on this issue.  I'm starting by proposing and exploring some possible solutions to this problem and some pros and cons of each.

To keep things organized, let's put each potential solution, pro and con into a separate comment.

I had an interesting recent conversation with a fellow academic that I think worth a blog post. It started with my commenting that I thought support for "diversity" in the sense in which the term is usually used in the academic context—having students or faculty from particular groups, in particular blacks but also, in some contexts, gays, perhaps hispanics, perhaps women—in practice anticorrelated with support for the sort of diversity, diversity of ideas, that ought to matter to a university.

I offered my standard example. Imagine that a university department has an opening and is down to two or three well qualified candidates. They learn that one of them is an articulate supporter of South African Apartheid. Does the chance of hiring him go up or down? If the university is actually committed to intellectual diversity, the chance should go up—it is, after all, a position that neither faculty nor students are likely to have been exposed to. In fact, in any university I am familiar with, it would go sharply down.

The response was that that he considered himself very open minded, getting along with people across the political spectrum, but that that position was so obviously beyond the bounds of reasonable discourse that refusing to hire the candidate was the correct response. 

The question I should have asked and didn't was whether he had ever been exposed to an intelligent and articulate defense of apartheid. Having spent my life in the same general environment—American academia—as he spent his, I think the odds are pretty high that he had not been. If so, he was in the position of a judge who, having heard the case for the prosecution, convicted the defendant without bothering to hear the defense. Worse still, he was not only concluding that the position was wrong—we all have limited time and energy, and so must often reach such conclusions on an inadequate basis—he was concluding it with a level of certainty so high that he was willing to rule out the possibility that the argument on the other side might be worth listening to.

An alternative question I might have put to him was whether he could make the argument for apartheid about as well as a competent defender of that system could. That, I think, is a pretty good test of whether one has an adequate basis to reject a position—if you don't know the arguments for it, you probably don't know whether those arguments are wrong, although there might be exceptions. I doubt that he could have. At least, in the case of political controversies where I have been a supporter of the less popular side, my experience is that those on the other side considerably overestimate their knowledge of the arguments they reject.

Which reminds me of something that happened to me almost fifty years ago—in 1964, when Barry Goldwater was running for President. I got into a friendly conversation with a stranger, probably set off by my wearing a Goldwater pin and his curiosity as to how someone could possibly support that position. 

We ran through a series of issues. In each case, it was clear that he had never heard the arguments I was offering in defense of Goldwater's position and had no immediate rebuttal. At the end he asked me, in a don't-want-to-offend-you tone of voice, whether I was taking all of these positions as a joke. 

I interpreted it, and still do, as the intellectual equivalent of "what is a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?" How could I be intelligent enough to make what seemed like convincing arguments for positions he knew were wrong, and yet stupid enough to believe them?