Two recent changes to LessWrong that I made!

1. I have added two new reacts: "I'd bet this is false" and "I'd bet this is true".
2. You can now sort a given user's comments by 'top' i.e. by karma.

For the first one, if you want to let someone know you'd be willing to take a bet (or if you want to call someone out on their bullshit) you can now highlight the claim they made and use the react. The react is a pair of dice, because we're never certain about propositions we're betting on (and because 'a hand offering money' was too hard to make out at the small scale). Hopefully this will increase people's affordance to take more bets on the site!

These reacts replaced "I checked it's true" and "I checked it's false", which didn't get that much use, but were some of the most abused reacts (often used on opinions or statements-of-positions that were simply not checkable).

For the second, if you go to a user profile and scroll down to the comments, you can now sort by 'top', 'newest', 'oldest', and 'recent replies'. I find that 'top' is a great way to get a sense of a person's thoughts and perspective on the world, and I used to visit greaterwrong a lot for this feature. Now you can do it on LessWrong!

Here's a quick list of 7 things people sometimes do instead of losing arguments, when it would be too personally costly to change their position.

1. They pick a variable in the argument that is hard for the debaters to get closer to, and state that their raw-intuition is simply different to the person they're talking to. ("I just believe that human ingenuity will overcome problems like this, and you don't, and this isn't something we're easily going to be able to resolve." or "I think we're just not going to be able to resolve whether this city-wide intervention works or not without a good RCT.")
2. They undermine your ability to have an opinion in the argument. ("I'm afraid there's very advanced research papers you'd need to read to have an understanding of this" or "You have been wrong so many times on so many issues, I don't think you're worth trusting on this one")
3. They performatively don't understand basic ideas, or weaponize confusion. ("I'm sorry, could you explain your theory of 'ownership', I don't really understand what you mean when you say you own your company" or "I'm sorry, I'm not sure what it means to 'provoke'? I was just saying what I thought.")
4. They get emotionally irate i

Privacy: a tool for thinking for yourself

As part of some recent experiments with debates, today I debated Ronny Fernandez on the topic of whether privacy is good or bad, and I was randomly assigned the “privacy is good” side. I’ve cut a few excerpts together that I think work as a standalone post, and put them below.

At the start I was defending privacy in general, and then we found that our main disagreement was about whether it was helpful for thinking for yourself, so I focus even more on that after the opening statement.

This is an experiment. I'm down for feedback on whether to do more of this sort of thing (it only takes me ~2 hours), how I could make it better for the reader, whether to make it a top-level post, etc.

Epistemic status: soldier mindset. I will here be exaggerating the degree to which I believe my conclusions.

Opening Statement

My core argument is that, in general, the pressures for conformity amongst humans are crazy.

This is true of your immediate circle, your local community, and globally. Each one of these has sufficiently strong pressures that I think it is a good heuristic to actively keep secrets and things you think about and facts about your life separate fr... (read more)

I believe that when people write 'tap out' in comment sections, they are actually supposed to write 'bow out', in almost all cases I've read it.

I regularly see comment sections where someone, to indicate it's going to be their last comment, writes that they're 'tapping out' at this point. They rarely mean they're conceding the point, I'm pretty sure they're just respectfully ending their participation in the conversation. But that's not the standard meaning of the phrase in the place that it comes from.

Here's ChatGPT explaining the two phrases (emphasis added).

The phrase "tap out" originates from the world of combat sports, particularly Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and mixed martial arts (MMA). In these sports, a competitor signals submission or the desire to end a match by physically tapping their opponent, the mat, or even themselves. This act of tapping indicates that they can no longer continue the fight, either due to exhaustion, pain, or the risk of injury.

and

The phrase "bow out" means to gracefully or politely withdraw from a situation, activity, or role. It often implies a voluntary and dignified exit, often to avoid conflict or because it is the appropriate or respectful thing to do. The term can be used in various contexts, such as resigning from a job, ending participation in a project, or stepping down from a position of responsibility.

So I encourage any such people to change your usage accordingly!

Often I am annoyed when I ask someone (who I believe has more information than me) a question and they say "I don't know". I'm annoyed because I want them to give me some information. Such as:

"How long does it take to drive to the conference venue?" 

"I don't know." 

"But is it more like 10 minutes or more like 2 hours?" 

"Oh it's definitely longer than 2 hours."

But perhaps I am the one making a mistake. For instance, the question "How many countries are there?" can be answered "I'd say between 150 and 400" or it can be answered "195", and the former is called "an estimate" and the latter is called "knowing the answer". There is a folk distinction here and perhaps it is reasonable for people to want to preserve the distinction between "an estimate" and "knowing the answer".

So in the future, to get what I want, I should say "Please can you give me an estimate for how long it takes to drive to the conference venue?".

And personally I should strive, when people ask me a question to which I don't know the answer, to say "I don't know the answer, but I'd estimate between X and Y."

I often wish I had a better way to concisely communicate "X is a hypothesis I am tracking in my hypothesis space". I don't simply mean that X is logically possible, and I don't mean I assign even 1-10% probability to X, I just mean that as a bounded agent I can only track a handful of hypotheses and I am choosing to actively track this one.

• This comes up when a substantially different hypothesis is worth tracking but I've seen no evidence for it. There's a common sentence like "The plumber says it's fixed, though he might be wrong" where I don't want to communicate that I've got much reason to believe he might be wrong, and I'm not giving it even 10% or 20%, but I still think it's worth tracking, because strong evidence is common and the importance is high.
• This comes up in adversarial situations when it's possible that there's an adversarial process selecting on my observations. In such situations I want to say "I think it's worth tracking the hypothesis that the politician wants me to believe that this policy worked in order to pad their reputation, and I will put some effort into checking for evidence of that, but to be clear I haven't seen any positive evidence for that hypothesi

I don't normally just write-up takes, especially about current events, but here's something that I think is potentially crucially relevant to the dynamics involved in the recent actions of the OpenAI board, that I haven't seen anyone talk about:

The four members of the board who did the firing do not know each other very well.

Most boards meet a few times per year, for a couple of hours. Only Sutskever works at OpenAI. D'Angelo works senior roles in tech companies like Facebook and Quora, Toner is in EA/policy, and MacAulay at other tech companies (I'm not aware of any overlap with D'Angelo).

It's plausible to me that MacAulay and Toner have spent more than 50 hours in each others' company, but overall I'd probably be willing to bet at even odds that no other pair of them had spent more than 10 hours together before this crisis.

This is probably a key factor in why they haven't written more publicly about their decision. Decision-by-committee is famously terrible, and it's pretty likely to me that everyone pushes back hard on anything unilateral by the others in this high-tension scenario. So any writing representing them has to get consensus, and they're focused on firefighting and ge... (read more)

I've skimmed more than half of Anthropic's scaling policies doc. Key issues that stood out to me was the lack of incentive for any red-teamers to actually succeed at red-teaming. Perhaps I missed it, but I didn't see anything saying that the red-teamers had to necessarily not also have Anthropic equity. I also didn't see much other financial incentive for them to succeed. I would far prefer a world where Anthropic committed to put out a bounty of increasing magnitude (starting at like $50k, going up to like $2M) for external red-teamers (who signed NDAs) t... (read more)

"Slow takeoff" at this point is simply a misnomer.

Paul's position should be called "Fast Takeoff" and Eliezer's position should be called "Discontinuous Takeoff".

It is said that on this Earth there are two factions, and you must pick one.

1. The Knights Who Arrive at False Conclusions
2. The Knights Who Arrive at True Conclusions, Too Late to Be Useful

(Hat tip: I got these names 2 years ago from Robert Miles who had been playing with GPT-3.)

I think I've been implicitly coming to believe that (a) all people are feeling emotions all the time, but (b) people vary in how self-aware they are of these emotions.

Does anyone want to give me a counter-argument or counter-evidence to this claim?

I am still confused about moral mazes.

I understand that power-seekers can beat out people earnestly trying to do their jobs. In terms of the Gervais Principle, the sociopaths beat out the clueless.

What I don't understand is how the culture comes to reward corrupt and power-seeking behavior.

One reason someone said to me is that it's in the power-seekers interest to reward other power-seekers.

Is that true?

I think it's easier for them to beat out the earnest and gullible clueless people.

However, there's probably lots of ways that their sociopathic underlings ... (read more)

Striking paragraph by a recent ACX commenter (link):

I grew up surrounded by people who believed conspiracy theories, although none of those people were my parents. And I have to say that the fact that so few people know other people who believe conspiracy theories kind of bothers me. It's like their epistemic immune system has never really been at risk of infection. If your mind hasn't been very sick at least sometimes, how can you be sure you've developed decent priors this time?

Sometimes a false belief about a domain can be quite damaging, and a true belief can be quite valuable.

For example, suppose there is a 1000-person company. I tend to think that credit allocation for the success of the company is heavy tailed, and that there's typically 1-3 people who the company just would zombify and die without, and ~20 people who have the key context and understanding that the 1-3 people can work with to do new and live things. (I'm surely oversimplifying because I've not ever been on the inside with a 1000-person company.) In this situation it's very valuable to know who the people are who deserve the credit allocation. Getting the wrong 1-3 people is a bit of a disaster. This means that discussing it, raising hypotheses, bringing up bad arguments, bringing up arguments due to motivated cognition, and so on, can be unusually costly, and conversations about it can feel quite fraught. 

Other fraught topics include breaking up romantically, quitting your job, leaving a community club or movement. I think taboo tradeoffs have a related feeling, like bringing up whether to lie in a situation, whether to cheat in a situation, or when to exchange money for values ... (read more)

Er, Wikipedia has a page on misinformation about Covid, and the first example is Wuhan lab origin. Kinda shocked that Wikipedia is calling this misinformation. Seems like their authoritative sources are abusing their positions. I am scared that I'm going to stop trusting Wikipedia soon enough, which is leaving me feeling pretty shook.

Something I've thought about the existence of for years, but imagined was impossible: this 70s song by Italian Adriano Celentano. It fully registers to my mind as English. But it isn't. It's like skimming the output of GPT-2.

There's a game for the Oculus Quest (that you can also buy on Steam) called "Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes".

It's a two-player game. When playing with the VR headset, one of you wears the headset and has to defuse bombs in a limited amount of time (either 3, 4 or 5 mins), while the other person sits outside the headset with the bomb-defusal manual and tells you what to do. Whereas with other collaboration games, you're all looking at the screen together, with this game the substrate of communication is solely conversation, the other person is providing all of your inputs about how their half is going (i.e. not shown on a screen).

The types of puzzles are fairly straightforward computational problems but with lots of fiddly instructions, and require the outer person to figure out what information they need from the inner person. It often involves things like counting numbers of wires of a certain colour, or remembering the previous digits that were being shown, or quickly describing symbols that are not any known letter or shape.

So the game trains you and a partner in efficiently building a shared language for dealing with new problems.

More than that, as the game gets harder, often

Trying to think about building some content organisations and filtering systems on LessWrong. I'm new to a bunch of the things I discuss below, so I'm interested in other people's models of these subjects, or links to sites that solve the problems in different ways.

Two Problems

So, one problem you might try to solve is that people want to see all of a thing on a site. You might want to see all the posts on reductionism on LessWrong, or all the practical how-to guides (e.g. how to beat procrastination, Alignment Research Field Guide, etc), or all the literature reviews on LessWrong. And so you want people to help build those pages. You might also want to see all the posts corresponding to a certain concept, so that you can find out what that concept refers to (e.g. what is the term "goodhart's law" or "slack" or "mesa-optimisers" etc).

Another problem you might try to solve, is that while many users are interested in lots of the content on the site, they have varying levels of interest in the different topics. Some people are mostly interested in the posts on big picture historical narratives, and less so on models of one's own mind that help with dealing with emotions and trauma. Som

Reading this post, where the author introspects and finds a strong desire to be able to tell a good story about their career, suggests that a way of understanding how people will make decisions will be heavily constrained by the sorts of stories about your career that are definitely common knowledge.

I remember at the end of my degree, there was a ceremony where all the students dressed in silly gowns and the parents came and sat in a circular hall while we got given our degrees and several older people told stories about how your children have become men and women, after studying and learning so much at the university.

This was a dumb/false story, because I'm quite confident the university did not teach these people most important skills for being an adult, and certainly my own development was largely directed by the projects I did on my own dime, not through much of anything the university taught.

But everyone was sat in a circle, where they could see each other listen to the speech in silence, as though it were (a) important and (b) true. And it served as a coordination mechanism, saying "If you go into the world and tell people that your child came to university and gre... (read more)

I think in many environments I'm in, especially with young people, the fact that Paul Graham is retired with kids sounds nice, but there's an implicit acknowledgement that "He could've chosen to not have kids and instead do more good in the world, and it's sad that he didn't do that". And it reassures me to know that Paul Graham wouldn't reluctantly agree. He'd just think it was wrong.

I've finally moved into a period of my life where I can set guardrails around my slack without sacrificing the things I care about most. I currently am pushing it to the limit, doing work during work hours, and not doing work outside work hours. I'm eating very regularly, 9am, 2pm, 7pm. I'm going to sleep around 9-10, and getting up early. I have time to pick up my hobby of classical music.

At the same time, I'm also restricting the ability of my phone to steal my attention. All social media is blocked except for 2 hours on Saturday, whi... (read more)

I block all the big social networks from my phone and laptop, except for 2 hours on Saturday, and I noticed that when I check Facebook on Saturday, the notifications are always boring and not something I care about. Then I scroll through the newsfeed for a bit and it quickly becomes all boring too.

And I was surprised. Could it be that, all the hype and narrative aside, I actually just wasn’t interested in what was happening on Facebook? That I could remove it from my life and just not really be missing anything?

On my walk home from work today I realised that this wasn’t the case. Facebook has interesting posts I want to follow, but they’re not in my notifications. They’re sparsely distributed in my newsfeed, such that they appear a few times per week, randomly. I can get a lot of value from Facebook, but not by checking once per week - only by checking it all the time. That’s how the game is played.

Anyway, I am not trading all of my attention away for such small amounts of value. So it remains blocked.

Responding to Scott's response to Jessica.

The post makes the important argument that if we have a word whose boundary is around a pretty important set of phenomena that are useful to have a quick handle to refer to, then

• It's really unhelpful for people to start using the word to also refer to a phenomena with 10x or 100x more occurrences in the world because then I'm no longer able to point to the specific important parts of the phenomena that I was previously talking about
• e.g. Currently the word 'abuser' describes a small number of people during some of their lives. Someone might want to say that technically it should refer to all people all of the time. The argument is understandable, but it wholly destroys the usefulness of the concept handle.
• People often have political incentives to push the concept boundary to include a specific case in a way that, if it were principled, indeed makes most of the phenomena in the category no use to talk about. This allows for selective policing being the people with the political incentive.
• It's often fine for people to bend words a little bit (e.g. when people verb nouns), but when it's in the class of terms w

Yesterday I noticed that I had a pretty big disconnect from this: There's a very real chance that we'll all be around, business somewhat-as-usual in 30 years. I mean, in this world many things have a good chance of changing radically, but automation of optimisation will not cause any change on the level of the industrial revolution. DeepMind will just be a really cool tech company that builds great stuff. You should make plans for important research and coordination to happen in this world (and definitely not just decide to spend everything on a last-ditch effort to make everything go well in the next 10 years, only to burn up the commons and your credibility for the subsequent 20).

Only yesterday when reading Jessica's post did I notice that I wasn't thinking realistically/in-detail about it, and start doing that.

I talked with Ray for an hour about Ray's phrase "Keep your beliefs cruxy and your frames explicit".

I focused mostly on the 'keep your frames explicit' part. Ray gave a toy example of someone attempting to communicate something deeply emotional/intuitive, or perhaps a buddhist approach to the world, and how difficult it is to do this with simple explicit language. It often instead requires the other person to go off and seek certain experiences, or practise inhabiting those experiences (e.g. doing a little meditation, or getting in touch with their emotion of anger).

Ray's motivation was that people often have these very different frames or approaches, but don't recognise this fact, and end up believing aggressive things about the other person e.g. "I guess they're just dumb" or "I guess they just don't care about other people".

I asked for examples that were motivating his belief - where it would be much better if the disagreers took to hear the recommendation to make their frames explicit. He came up with two concrete examples:

• Jim v Ray on norms for shortform, where during one hour they worked through the same reasons