Sequences

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

Comments

The subtext here seems to be that such references are required. I disagree that it should be.

It is frequently helpful but also often a pain to dig up, so there are tradeoffs at play. For this post, I think it was fine to omit references. I don't think the references would add much value for most readers and I suspect Romeo wouldn't have found it worthwhile to post if he had to dig up all of the references before being able to post.

Ah yeah, that makes sense. I guess utility isn't really the right term to use here.

Yeah, I echo this.

I've gone back and forth with myself about this sort of stuff. Are humans altruistic? Good? Evil?

On the one hand, yes, I think lc is right about how in some situations people exhibit just an extraordinary amount of altruism and sympathy. But on the other hand, there are other situations where people do the opposite: they'll, I dunno, jump into a lake at a risk to their own life to save a drowning stranger. Or risk their lives running into a burning building to save strangers (lots of volunteers did this during 9/11).

I think the explanation is what Dagon is saying about how mutable and context-dependent people are. In some situations people will act extremely altruistically. In others they'll act extremely selfishly.

The way that I like to think about this is in terms of "moral weight". How many utilons to John Doe would it take for you to give up one utilon of your own? Like, would you trade 1 utilon of your own so that John Doe can get 100,000 utilons? 1,000? 100? 10? Answering these questions, you can come up with "moral weights" to assign to different types of people. But I think that people don't really assign a moral weight and then act consistently. In some situations they'll act as if their answer to my previous question is 100,000, and in other situations they'll act like it's 0.00001.

I would be willing to pay someone to help draft a LessWrong post for me about this; I think it's important but my writing skills are lacking.

I'm not looking to write a post about this, but I'd be happy to go back and forth with you in the comments about it (no payment required). Maybe that back and forth will help you formulate your thoughts.

For starters, I'm not sure if I understand the bias that you are trying to point to. Is it that people assume others are more altruistic than they actually are? Do any examples come to your mind other than this?

Discord threads do have a significant drawback of lowering visibility by a lot, and people don't like to write things that nobody ever sees.

Meh. If you start a thread under the message "Parent level message" in #the-channel the UI will indicate that there are "N Messages" in a thread belonging to "Parent level message". It's true that those messages aren't automatically visible to people scrolling through the main channel, they'd have to click to open the thread, but if your audience isn't motivated to do that it seems to me like they aren't worth interacting with in the first place.

I do prefer how Slack treats threads though. They're more light and convenient to use in Slack.

I wish more people used threads on platforms like Slack and Discord. And I think the reason to use threads is very similar to the reason why one should aim for modularity when writing software.

Here's an example. I posted this question in the #haskell-beginners Discord channel asking whether it's advisable for someone learning Haskell to use a linter. I got one reply, but it wasn't as a thread. It was a normal message in #haskell-beginners. Between the time I asked the question and got a response, there were probably a couple dozen other messages. So then, I had to read and scroll through those to get to the response I was interested in, and to see if there were any other responses.

Each of the messages were part of a different conversation. I think of it as something like this:

Conversation A; message 1
Conversation A; message 2
Conversation B; message 1
Conversation C; message 1
Conversation A; message 3
Conversation C; message 2
Conversation A; message 4
Conversation B; message 2

There is a linear structure for something that more naturally structured as a tree.

Function Programming Discord server
  #haskell-beginners channel
    Conversation A
      Message 1
      Message 2
      Message 3
      Message 4
    Conversation B
      Message 1
      Message 2
    Conversation C
      Message 1
      Message 2

In writing software, imagine that you have three sub-problems that you need to solve. And imagine if you approached this by doing something like this:

// stuff for sub-problem #1
// stuff for sub-problem #1
// stuff for sub-problem #2
// stuff for sub-problem #3
// stuff for sub-problem #1
// stuff for sub-problem #3
// stuff for sub-problem #1
// stuff for sub-problem #2

We generally prefer to avoid writing code this way. Instead, we prefer to take a more modular approach and do something like this:

solveSubProblemOne();
solveSubProblemTwo();
solveSubProblemThree();

function solveSubProblemOne() {
  ...
}

function solveSubProblemTwo() {
  ...
}

function solveSubProblemThree() {
  ...
}

By writing the code in a modular fashion, you can easily focus on the code related to sub-problem #1 and not have to sift through code that is unrelated to sub-problem #1. On the other hand, the more imperative non-modular version makes it difficult to tell what code is related to what sub-problem.

Similarly, using threads on platforms like Slack and Discord make it easy to see what messages belong to what conversations. 

And like software, the importance of this gets larger as the "codebase" becomes more involved and complex. Imagine a Slack channel with lots and lots of conversations happening simultaneously without threads. That is difficult to manage. But if it's a small channel with only two or three conversations happening simultaneously, that is more manageable.

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).

Load More