jimmy comments on Dark Arts of Rationality - LessWrong

136 Post author: So8res 19 January 2014 02:47AM

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Comment author: jimmy 18 January 2014 02:19:53AM 2 points [-]

I make no claims that the described practices are safe, and in fact I make a number of explicit disclaimers stating that they are not safe.

I don't mean to imply that we disagree or that you didn't put a big enough disclaimer.

I was trying to highlight what the differences were between what happens when you allow yourself to use the "sometimes Dark Arts is the way to go" frame over the "Instead of using Dark Arts, I will study them until I can separate the active ingredient from the Dark" frame, and one of the big ones is the dangers of Dark Arts.

still others complain about both at once.

:) "active ingredients aren't dark"+"inactive ingredients are"

I get the impression that my mental model of when self-deception is optimal differs from your own. I don't currently have time to try to converge these models right now, but suffice to say that your arguments are not addressing my model the divergence point.

Fair enough

Regardless, I think we can both agree that self-deception is optimal sometimes, under controlled scenarios in which the agent has a strong understanding of the situation. I think we also agree that such things are dangerous and should be approached with care

I'll agree with that in a weak sense, but not in stronger senses.