Sequences

Re-reading Rationality From AI To Zombies
Reflections on Premium Poker Tools

Comments

It sounds like with "factual lies" you're saying that certain lies are about something that can easily be verified, and thus you're unlikely to convince other people that you're being truthful. Is that accurate? If so, that definitely makes sense. It seems like it's almost always a bad idea to lie in such situations.

Why do you say that sympathy lies are not very consequential (assuming they are successful)? My model is that defendants have a pretty large range for how hard they could work on the case, working harder increases the odds of of winning by a good amount, and how hard they work depends a good amount on how sympathetic they are towards the defendant.

And yes, absolutely my job relies heavily on building trust and rapport with my clients. It occupies at least around 80% of my initial conversations with a client.

Gotcha. Makes sense. It's interesting how frequently a job that is on it's surface about X is largely, even mainly about Y. With X being "legal stuff" and Y being "emotional stuff" here (I'm being very hand-wavy).

Another example: I'm a programmer and I think that for programming, X is "writing code" and Y is "empathizing with users and working backwards from their most pressing needs". In theory there is a division of labor and the product manager deals with the Y, but in practice I've found that even in companies that try to do this heavily (smaller, more startup-y companies don't aim to divide the labor as much), Y is still incredibly important. Probably even more important than X.

Very good point. I mistakenly assumed that the only goal is to communicate one's ideas, but in retrospect it is obvious that things like -- I'm not sure how to describe this. Aesthetics? Artfulness? How well it flows? -- matter as well, and that such things are a big part of what you were going for in this post. Therefore I take back what I said and think it makes a lot of sense to use colorful, non-simple words.

I'm glad I learned this. I'm going to keep it in mind when I read things and hopefully incorporate it into my own writing as well.

I am not a lawyer and don't know (much) more about how this stuff works than the average person. From my perspective, there are pros and cons to a defendant lying to a public defender.

Pros:

  • Assuming your lie is successful and it earns you sympathy, the public defender might:
    • Work harder.
    • Spend some political capital they have access to on your case.
    • Avoid working against you. Maybe if you don't explicitly earn their sympathy they'll be "in bed with the prosecutors" and share what you tell them in confidence with the prosectors in an attempt to get you convicted.

Cons:

  • Assuming your lie is successful:
    • The prosecution might realize the truth, and your lawyer will be unprepared to defend you against their arguments.
  • Assuming your lie is unsuccessful:
    • The inverse of the "Pros" section, pretty much.

It doesn't seem to me like "be completely honest with your lawyer" is always the right approach to take. It seems likely that how sympathetic they are to you is very important and I can imagine realistic situations where there are lies you can tell that a) are unlikely to be figured out and b) earn you a lot of sympathy in such a way that the pros probably outweigh the cons.

Separately, there is the question of what is reasonable for the average defendant to expect. Maybe I am wrong, but if I am, it doesn't seem to me that the average defendant has access to enough information to justifiably expect this. I think they'd need to know much more about a) how court cases work and b) the culture that public defenders are a part of.

There is also the point that being under so much stress, the defendants are probably cognitively impaired in some meaningful way, and so expectations of their ability to reason and make good decisions should be correspondingly lower.

But at the same time... yes, I'm sure that a lot of defendants lie in situations where they are pretty likely to get caught, and where it is pretty clearly a bad idea to do so. My guess is that some form of wishful thinking is what explains this. ("I really, really, really don't want anyone to know that I touched that gun! Maybe I can just tell the lawyer that I didn't touch it and no one will ever figure it out.").

If so, I'd imagine that a big part of the job of a defense attorney would be something along the lines of what therapists do: building rapport, earning trust, developing a "therapeutic alliance".

Nit: I found myself not knowing what various words in the post mean (marionette, chicanery) and not being super comfortable with others (surreptitiously). I strongly suspect that a non-trivial proportion of other readers are in the same boat and that using simpler words would be an improvement (see Write Simply by Paul Graham).

Good point. Makes sense that it'd be important for such people.

Laptop chargers are also an object for which it's trivial to own multiple, at a low cost and high (potential) advantage.

I don't see why there is a high potential advantage here. I'd expect:

  • Most people to be able to find a friend or a nice person at a coffee shop with a charger they can borrow.
  • Most people to be able to get a new charger within a day or so (in person store or online + pay for faster shipping).
  • Going a day or so without a laptop not to sacrifice much in terms of fun. I actually expect it to be a net positive there since it'd force you to do something like go for a walk or read a book. It also has the benefit of exercising your "boredom muscles".
  • Going a day or so without a laptop not to sacrifice much in terms of your career. Maybe your boss is frustrated with you in the short term, but I don't expect that to lead to any actual consequences like being meaningfully more likely to get fired or not get a promotion.

I really enjoyed this exercise. I had to think a bunch about it, and I'm not even sure how good my response is. After all, the responses that people contributed in the comments are all pretty varied IMO. I think this points towards it being a good exercise. I'd love to see more exercises like this.

Student: That sounds like a bunch of BS. Like we said, you can't go back after the fact and adjust the theories predictions.

Student: Ok. I tried that and none of my models are very successful. So my current position is that the Newtonian model is suspect, my other models are likely wrong, there is some accurate model out there but I haven't found it yet. After all, the space of possible models is large and as a mere student I'm having trouble pruning this space.

Load More