All of Dumbledore's Army's Comments + Replies

Thanks for the comment, and I agree that it would be helpful if the debate on this topic could focus on the question of 'how do we encourage people to take up a less harmful addiction' -- like vaping vs smoking -- rather than typically jumping to the question of ban / don't ban.

"Except whatever they got addicted to before the legalization of online sports betting, it apparently led to much lower bankruptcy rates etc." 

Yes, Zvi gives evidence on bankruptcy rates. However, that is not the only kind of harm. Sports gambling doesn't have direct health effects the way that drug or alcohol addictions do. Different types of addictions hit relationships, and sports gambling isn't good for relationships, but it's plausibly less harmful than a porn addiction. Sports gambling leaves people functional and able to hold down a job, again ... (read more)

Hard disagree to point 1. The fact that humanity hasn't tried to hide is not counter-evidence to the Dark Forest theory. If the Dark Forest is correct, the prediction is that all non-hiding civilisations will be destroyed. We don't see anyone else out there, not because every civilisation decided to hide, but because only hiders survived.

To be clear: the prediction of the Dark Forest theory is that if humanity keeps being louder and noisier, we will at some point come to the attention of an elder civilisation and be destroyed. I don't know what probability... (read more)

A parable to elucidate my disagreement with parts of Zvi's conclusion:

Jenny is a teenager in a boarding school. She starts cutting herself using razors. The school principal bans razors. Now all the other kids can't shave and have to grow beards (if male) and have hairy armpits. Jenny switches to self-harming with scissors. The school principal bans scissors. Now every time the students receive a package they have to tear it open with their bare hands, and anyone physically weak or disabled has to go begging for someone to help them. Jenny smashes a mirror... (read more)

I agree with your first paragraph. I think the second is off-topic in a way that encourages readers, and possibly you yourself, to get mind-killed. Couldn’t you use a less controversial topic as an example? (Very nearly any topic is less controversial.) And did you really need to compound the problem by assigning motivations to other people whom you disagree with? That’s a really good way to start a flame war.

I spent eighteen months working for a quantitative hedge fund. So we were using financial data -- that is accounts, stock prices, things that are inherently numerical. (Not like, say, defining employee satisfaction.) And we got the data from dedicated financial data vendors, the majority from a single large company, who had already spent lots of effort to standardise it and make it usable. We still spent a lot of time on data cleaning.

The education system also tells students which topics they should care about and think about. Designing a curriculum is a task all by itself, and if done well it can be exceptionally helpful. (As far as I can tell, most universities don't do it well, but there are probably exceptions.)

A student who has never heard of, say, a Nash equilibrium isn't spontaneously going to Google for it, but if it's listed as a major topic in the game theory module of their economics course, then they will. And yes, it's entirely plausible that, once students know what to goo... (read more)

As Richard Kennaway said, there are no essences of words. In addition to the points others have already made, I would add: Alice learns what the university tells her to. She follows a curriculum that someone else sets. Bob chooses his own curriculum. He himself decides what he wants to learn. In practice, that indicates a huge difference in their relative personalities, and it probably means that they end up learning different things.

While it's certainly possible that Bob will choose a curriculum similar to a standard university course, most autodidacts en... (read more)

The argument given relies on a potted history of the US. It doesn't address the relative success of UK democracy - which even British constitutional scholars sometimes describe as an elective dictatorship that notoriously doesn't give a veto to minorities. It doesn't address the history of France, Germany, Italy, Canada, or any other large successful democracy, none of which use the US system, most of which aren't even presidential,

If you want to make a point about US history, fine. If you want to talk about democracy, please try drawing from a sample size larger than one.

Although clown attacks may seem mundane on their own, they are a case study proving that powerful human thought steering technologies have probably already been invented, deployed, and tested at scale by AI companies, and are reasonably likely to end up being weaponized against the entire AI safety community at some point in the next 10 years.

I agree that clown attacks seem to be possible. I accept a reasonably high probability (c70%) that someone has already done this deliberately - the wilful denigration of the Covid lab leak seems like a good candidate,... (read more)

Do you still think your communication was better than the people who thought the line was being towed, and if so then what's your evidence for that?

We are way off topic, but I am actually going to say yes. If someone understands that English uses standing-on-the-right-side-of-a-line as a standard image for obeying rules, then they are also going to understand variants of the same idea. For example, "crossing a line" means breaking rules/norms to a degree that will not be tolerated, as does "stepping out of line". A person who doesn't grok that these are... (read more)

To recap:

1. original poster johnswentsworth wrote a piece about people LARPing their jobs rather than attempting to build deeper understanding or models-with-gears
2. aysja added some discussion about people failing to notice that words have referents, as a further psychological exploration of the LARPing idea, and added tow/toe the line as a related phenomenon. They say "LARPing jobs is a bit eerie to me, too, in a similar way. It's like people are towing the line instead of toeing it. Like they're modeling what they're "supposed" to be doing, or something, r

Not sure I understand what you're saying with the "toe the line" thing.

The initial metaphor was ‘toe the line’ meaning to obey the rules, often reluctantly. Imagine a do-not-cross line drawn on the ground and a person coming so close to the line that their toe touched it, but not in fact crossing the line. To substitute “tow the line”, which has a completely different literal meaning, means that the person has failed to comprehend the metaphor, and has simply adopted the view that this random phrase has this specific meaning.

I don’t think aysja adopts t... (read more)

NB: the link to the original blog on the Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics is now broken and redirects to a shopping page.

Yes. But I think most of us would agree that coercively-breeding or -sterilising people is a lot worse than doing the same to animals. The point here is that intelligent parrots could be people who get treated like animals, because they would have the legal status of animals, which is obviously a very bad thing.

And if the breeding program resulted in gradual increases in intelligence with each generation, there would be no bright line where the parrots at t-minus-1 were still animals but the parrots at time t were obviously people. There would be no fire a... (read more)

You ask if we could breed intelligent parrots without any explanation of why we would want to. In short, because we can doesn’t mean we should. I’m not 100% against the idea, but anyone trying this seriously needs to think about questions like:

• At what point do the parrots get legal rights? If a private effort succeeds in breeding intelligent parrots without government buy-in, it will in effect be creating sapient people who will be legally non-persons and property. There are a lot of ways for that to go wrong.
• ETA: presumably the researchers will want to ke

@andeslodes, congratulations on a very good first post. You clearly explained your point of view, and went through the text of the proposed Act and the background of the relevant Senators in enough detail to understand why this is important new information. I was already taking the prospect of aliens somewhat-seriously, but I updated higher after this post. 

I notice that Metaculus is at a just 1.1% probability confirmed alien tech by 2030, which seems low.

I had not, and still don't know about it, can you post a link?

Thank you for taking the time to highlight this. I hope that some LessWrongers with suitable credentials will sign up and try to get a major government interested in x-risk.

I see a lot of people commenting here and in related posts on the likelihood of aliens deliberately screwing with us and/or how improbable it is that advanced aliens would have bad stealth technology or ships that crash. So I wanted to add a few other possible scenarios into the discussion:

 - Earth is a safari park where people go to see the pristine native wildlife (us). Occasionally some idiot tourist gets too close and disturbs that wildlife despite the many very clear warnings telling them not to. (Anyone who has ever worked with human tourists wi... (read more)

Possible yes, but if all advanced civs are highly prioritising stealth, that implies some version of the Dark Forest theory, which is terrifying.

I can come up with a hypothesis about the behaviour of the sources: the drones you send to observe and explore a planet might be disposable. (Eg we’ve left rovers behind on Mars because it’s not worth the effort to retrieve them from the gravity well.) Although if the even-wilder rumours about bio-alien corpses are true, that one fails too. 

But the broader picture: that there are high-tech aliens out there who we haven’t observed doing things like building Dyson spheres or tiling the universe with computronium? They’re millions of years ahead of us an... (read more)

I don’t think the hyperloop matters one way or the other to your original argument (which I agree with). Someone can be a genius and still make mistakes and fail to succeed at every single goal. (For another example, consider Isaac Newton who a) wasted a lot of time studying alchemy and still failed to transform lead into gold and b) screwed up his day job at the Royal Mint so badly that England ended up with a de facto gold standard even though it was supposed to have both silver and gold currency. He’s still a world-historic genius for inventing calculus.)

OP discusses CFCs in the main post. But yes, that’s the most hopeful precedent. The problem being that CFCs could be replaced by alternatives that were reasonably profitable for the manufacturers, whereas AI can’t be.

The child labour example seems potentially hopeful for AI given that fears of AI taking jobs are very real and salient, even if not everyone groks the existential risks. Possible takeaway: rationalists should be a lot more willing to amplify, encourage and give resources to protectionist campaigns to ban AI from taking jobs, even though we are really worried about x-risk not jobs.

Related point: I notice that the human race has not banned gain-of-function research even though it seems to have high and theoretically even existential risks. I am trying to thi... (read more)

One more question for your list: what industries have not been subject to this regulatory ratchet and why not?

I‘m thinking of insecure software, although others may be able to come up with more examples. Right now software vendors have no real incentive to ship secure code. If someone sells a connected fridge which any thirteen-year-old can recruit into their botnet, there’s no consequence for the vendor. If Microsoft ships code with bugs and Windows gets hacked worldwide, all that they suffer is embarrassment[1]. And this situation has stayed stable since... (read more)

There are already countries where prostitution is legal including the Netherlands, the UK and the US state of Nevada. (Not a complete list, just the first three I thought of off the top of my head.) None of them require people to prostitute themselves rather than accessing public benefits. 

Likewise, there are countries, including the USA where it's legal to pay people for donating human eggs, and probably other body parts. So far as I know, no state in the US requires women to attempt that before accessing welfare, and the US welfare system is less generous than European ones. 

Empirically, your concern seems not to have any basis in fact. 

Thanks, that’s a good example. I’ll think about it.

I think I overstated slightly. And I’m focusing on the rationale for taking away options as much as the taking away itself. I’d restate to something like: taking people’s options away for their own good, because you think they will make the wrong decisions for themselves, is almost always bad. 
 

There’s a discussion further down the thread about arms race dynamics, where you take away options in order to solve a coordination problem, where I accept that it is sometimes a good idea. Note that the arms race example recognises that everyone involved ... (read more)

The game theory example ignores the principal-agent effect. We are not talking about you rationally choosing to give up some of your options. We are talking about someone else, who is not well-aligned with you, taking away your options, generally without input from you.

I’m also introverted and nerdy bordering on autistic, so I can’t make a claim that my experiences are different from yours in that sense. I think some of my perspective comes from growing up in developing countries and knowing what real poverty looks like, even though I haven’t experienced it myself. And some of my perspective is that I value my own personal autonomy very highly, so I oppose people who want to take autonomy away from others, and that feeling seems to be stronger than it is for most people. 

This strikes me as a fully general argument against making any form of moral progress. Some examples: 

1. An average guy in the 1950s notices that the main argument against permitting homosexuality seems to be "God disapproves of it".  But he doesn't believe in God. Should he note that there is a strong cultural guardrail against "sexual deviancy" according to the local cultural definition, and oppose the gay rights movement anyway?
   1. Does the answer to this question change by the 1990s when the cultural environment is shifting? Or by the 2020s? If so,

"...an important thing to reiterate is that creating a world where people have good options is good, but banning a bad option isn't the way to do it." This is very well-phrased and I strongly agree. In fact, I think you have managed to summarise my view better than I did myself!

But is the free tuberculosis treatment in India because kidney selling was banned? Or because countries which get to a certain development level try to give at least some basic free healthcare to their people? In a counterfactual where India had legalised kidney selling for the last twenty years, do you think they would not have free treatment for tuberculosis? 

Just so you know, there are a lot of people disagreeing with me on this page, and you are the only one I have downvoted.  I'm surprised that someone who has been on LessWrong as long as you would engage in such blatant strawmanning. Slavery? Really?

Agree, which makes it even more heinous that governments prevent people from doing it. 

I actually agree that there are situations where preventing an arms race is a good idea. (And I wish there were a realistic proposal for a government to do something about the education credentials arms race.) But look at the different justifications: 

1. There is an arms race where each individual is doing what is in their own rational best interest, but the result is collectively damaging, we need a government to solve this coordination failure
2. Those poor people are too dumb to make their own decisions, we should ban them from doing X for their own good.

Thanks for a steelman. Can you give any real life example of where taking away bad options has led to the creation of better options? Or conversely, can you think of any real life examples where a government said something like "we've allowed sex for rent, now we can ignore the housing crisis"? 

I notice that the large majority of the bad options I can think of are ultimately the result of poverty. But even in the current world there are few governments strongly focused on reducing poverty among their own citizens and none I know of focused on reducing... (read more)

Thanks for the comment. I think tenants are still better off with a legal contract than not. Analogously, a money-paying tenant with a legal contract has some protections against a landlord raising rents, and gets a notice period and the option to refuse and go elsewhere; a money-paying tenant who pays cash in hand to an illegal landlord probably has less leverage to negotiate. (Although there will be exceptions.) Likewise, a sex-paying tenant is better off with a legal contract.

I realise that the law won’t protect everyone and that some people will have b... (read more)

It is weird and it’s extra-weird that everywhere from Carthage to Greece to China failed to use an efficient system for writing numbers. It’s not like there was just one outlier which kept a traditional system. 

And I wonder if the use of traditional systems for writing delayed the development of calculus and advanced mathematics too.

Epistemic status: thinking out loud

My most-puzzling why-did-this-take-so-long example is the base-ten system for writing numbers, using zero*. Wikipedia tells me this was invented in India in the 7th century AD and spread gradually into Europe after that. But this seems to be millennia late. There were plenty of highly organised empires trying to administer everything from military logistics to tax systems to pyramid-building with Roman numerals or worse. See here for the Babylonian version, for example. 

So far as I can tell, once you have writing and... (read more)

WEIRD = Western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic 

Typo: “A counter-terrorism analyst is prlike it'ivy to a lot of secret information throughout the course of their job.”

Someone has actually written up a scientific paper discussing the hypothesis that the PETM or other events in the geologic record was caused by a prior industrial civilisation. (If you're one of the authors, I apologise for telling you something you already know, but if you're not, I thought you might be interested.) The short version is that there's no smoking gun, but they can't rule it out either. 

One item the authors don't go into, which I think is relevant, is the question of whether there are missing fossil fuels. Google tells me that pretty muc... (read more)

This seems like a good situation to try re-writing some incentives. Are there any lawyers who can comment on whether the FDA could be sued for wrongful death if any baby did starve? Are any rationalists members of parents’ groups who could be persuaded to attempt such a lawsuit? This seems like the sort of situation where loudly and publicly threatening to sue the FDA and cause them massive bad publicity might actually cause a change in policy - the FDA probably prefers changing policy to being sued, even if the lawsuit’s odds of success are only 50:50.

I’d second Peter McCluskey‘s suggestion of fertile soil. So far as I know, the clearest case is the Chaco Canyon civilisation where pollen studies have proved that what is now an inhospitable desert in Nevada used to be a green and pleasant land before the civilisation destroyed itself through deforestation making them unable to keep their topsoil. (And wow, they destroyed it so thoroughly that the place is still desert centuries later.) 

I‘m also leaning towards the idea that at least some other ancient civilisations destroyed themselves in a similar ... (read more)

This is an interesting question. Thank you for asking it.