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All of adrusi's Comments + Replies

Sam Altman's sister claims Sam sexually abused her -- Part 1: Introduction, outline, author's notes

This hypothesis seems like it should be at or near the top of the list. It explains a lot of Sam's alleged behavior. If she's exhibiting signs of psychosis then he might be trying to get her to get care, which would explain the strings-attached access to resources. Possibly she is either altering the story or misunderstanding about her inheritance being conditional on Zoloft, it might have been an antipsychotic instead.

On the other hand, while psychosis can manifest in subtle ways, I'm skeptical that someone whose psychosis is severe enough that they'd be ... (read more)

Blanchard's Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer

adrusi2y10

This is somewhat unconvincing on its own, because clearly at the very least the trans community does some Motte/Bailey on it.

Yeah I bet that does happen. A more charitable lens that explains some of what might come across that way, though, is that "women trapped in men's bodies" is a neat and succinct way to explain trans women to someone who it would otherwise take too long to explain to, in situations where an extended lecture would be impractical, inappropriate or unappreciated.

I think autogynephilia is correlated with gender identity?

In extension, it's... (read more)

2tailcalled2y

In "The Man Who Would Be Queen", Michael Bailey said that "men who desperately want to become women" was a much better way of thinking about AGP(TS)s, and this seems similarly succinct. Why go with "women trapped in men's bodies" over that?

Blanchard's Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer

adrusi2y129

The reason autogynephilia is controversial is because it's an alternative to the "woman trapped in a man's body" trope, an etiological story that undermines the "trans women are women" slogan and makes MtFs seem more relevantly M than F, despite their/our efforts.

I don't agree that's the reason that autogynephilia theory is controversial! Not that it isn't part of the story, but I'm pretty sure the main reason for the controversy is that it contradicts trans women's own understanding of their motivations for transitioning, and is often presented as to impl... (read more)

1tailcalled2y

This is somewhat unconvincing on its own, because clearly at the very least the trans community does some Motte/Bailey on it. I think a more directly convincing point is my prediction market, which only assigns 23% probability to feminine essence, and 61% probability to something that is neither feminine essence nor Blanchardianism: https://manifold.markets/tailcalled/if-a-solid-neurological-study-of-tr?r=dGFpbGNhbGxlZA Not sure what you mean by this. I think autogynephilia is correlated with gender identity?

5Ann2y

As a spectrumy programmer whose gametes are presumably ova, like 50% of my physical life and 75% of my online community friends are spectrumy trans people. My experience is also that we have a ridiculous amount in common, yes.

Blanchard's Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer

adrusi2y100

Not necessarily sexual fantasies themselves! Sexual fantasies are an indicator of the presence of an underlying sexual orientation towards that which is depicted in the fantasies

I see! This is something I associate with Ann Lawrence's contribution to the theory. I had Lawrence on my reading list last year, but I felt it was wise to pull back from that reading for a bit, so sorry if my criticism is a bit basic. I'll be going off just your comment here and what I've heard second hand from Lawrence's critiques, who might not be the best of rationalists.

I'll s... (read more)

Zack_M_Davis2y100

What account of "sexual orientation" allows calling autogynephilia without concordant sexual fantasies a "sexual orientation?"

I think it makes sense to posit some underlying latent variable as a cause of things like sexual fantasies about the target of attraction and courtship behaviors towards the target of attraction, even if those effects don't necessarily manifest in, e.g., someone with unusually low libido.

Lawrence points out that signs of eventual sexual orientation are often evinced by children long before such feelings take on an explicitly erot... (read more)

3tailcalled2y

I agree that it is unlikely that people who do not have autogynephilic sexual fantasies are autogynephilic. I'm not making the distinction between orientation vs fantasies as some sort of loophole to call trans women AGP without them showing any overtly erotic signs of autogynephilia, but instead to point out that I don't think the gender feelings would disappear just because one repressed the fantasies themselves (which in itself would be difficult because of how sexuality works). I think observations of how trans women share a bunch of traits are approximately worthless without a factor analysis that pins down whether those traits are related to each other or independent.

Blanchard's Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer

adrusi2y279

I'm trying to make sense of this. If I'm not mistaken you claim:

Autogynephilic sexual fantasies are causally responsible for late-onset not-purely-androphilic trans women's motivations for transition
Some late-onset trans women have never had autogynephilic sexual fantasies

This obviously doesn't make sense as-is. You briefly went into a theory of early-onset HSTS, late-onset not-otherwise-specified gender dysphoria, and you raised internalized misandry as a possible alternate instantiation of that "not-otherwise-specified". And that could resolve the issue ... (read more)

3tailcalled2y

Not necessarily sexual fantasies themselves! Sexual fantasies are an indicator of the presence of an underlying sexual orientation towards that which is depicted in the fantasies. His point in bringing up trans women like Ziz who supposedly had no signs of autogynephilia is to say that he is open to there being additional factors which explains those trans women. So he suggests that autogynephilia is a factor among those who have indicators of autogynephilia, and other things than autogynephilia are factors among those who do not have indicators of autogynephilia. I still need to look into the ASD programmer situation some more, but let's consider nerdy progressivism as another example that I know something more about. Macho men feel like it would be humiliating to be women. Plausibly, this makes them less likely to transition. Un-macho / nerdy-progressive men would thus be more likely to transition; even if being un-macho is not on its own sufficient to transition, when it becomes combined with other factors that contribute to transition, it can end up allowing those factors to be expressed rather than repressed. In particular, this would presumably also apply among autogynephiles, with macho autogynephiles being more likely to repress. So from a multicausal model you'd expect to see autogynephilic trans women differ from autogynephilic cis men along the same non-autogynephilia causes that contribute to other trans women.

Deflationism isn't the solution to philosophy's woes

adrusi4y50

I worry that this doesn't really end up explaining much. We think that our answers to philosophical questions are better than what the analytics have come up with. Why? Because they seem intuitively to be better answers. What explanation do we posit for why our answers are better? Because we start out with better intuitions.

Of course our intuitions might in fact be better, as I (intuitively) think they are. But that explanation is profoundly underwhelming.

This might actually be the big thing LW has over analytic philosophy, so I want to call attention to

... (read more)

1TAG4y

It's common for people from other backgrounds to get frustrated with philosophy. But it isn't a good argument to the effect that philosophy is being done wrong. Since it is a separate discipline to science , engineering, and so on, there is no particular reason to think that the same techniques will work. If there are reasons why some Weird Trick would work across all disciplines , then it would work in philosophy. But is there a one weird trick?

2Rob Bensinger4y

Those seem like fine partial explanations to me, as do the explanations I listed in the OP. I expect multiple things went right simultaneously; if it were just a single simple tweak, we would expect many other groups to have hit on the same trick.

Deflationism isn't the solution to philosophy's woes

adrusi4y191

I think an important piece that's missing here is that LW simply assumes that certain answers to important questions are correct. It's not just that there are social norms that say it's OK to dismiss ideas as stupid if you think they're stupid, it's that there's a rough consensus on which ideas are stupid.

LW has a widespread consensus on bayseian epistemology, physicalist metaphysics and consequentialist ethics (not an exhaustive list). And it has good reasons for favoring these positions, but I don't think LW has great responses to all the arguments again... (read more)

Rob Bensinger4y150

I would draw an analogy like this one:

Five hundred extremely smart and well-intentioned philosophers of religion (some atheists, some Christians, some Muslims, etc.) have produced an enormous literature discussing the ins and outs of theism and the efficacy of prayer, and there continue to be a number of complexities and unsolved problems related to why certain arguments succeed or fail, even though various groups have strong (conflicting) intuitions to the effect "claim x is going to be true in the end".

In a context like this, I would consider it an... (read more)

The Principle of Predicted Improvement

adrusi6y240

I also had trouble with the notation. Here's how I've come to understand it:

Suppose I want to know whether the first person to drive a car was wearing shoes, just socks, or no footwear at all when they did so. I don't know what the truth is, so I represent it with a random variable $H$ , which could be any of "the driver wore shoes," "the driver wore socks" or "the driver was barefoot."

This means that $P (H)$ is a random variable equal to the probability I assign to the true hypothesis (it's random because I don&... (read more)

Debt is an Anti-investment

adrusi7y120

I think there's some ambiguity in your phrasing and that might explain gjm's disagreement:

You seem to value the (psychological factor of having debt) at zero.

You seem to value the psychological factor of (having debt at zero).

These two ways of parsing it have opposite meanings. I think you mean the former but I initially read it as the latter, and reading gjm's initial comment, I think they also read it as the latter.

9ChristianKl7y

The crappiness of the English language. I meant the first.

Are ethical asymmetries from property rights?

adrusi7y50

I'm attracted to viewing these moral intuitions as stemming from intuitions about property because the psychological notion of property biologically predates the notion of morality. Territorial behaviors are found in all kinds of different mammals, and prima facie the notion of property seems to be derived from such behaviors. The claim, then, is that during human evolution, moral psychology developed in part by coopting the psychology of territory.

I'm skeptical that anything normative follows from this though.

4cousin_it7y

That means FAI might want to give us territoriality or some extrapolation of it, if that's part of what we enjoy and want. Not sure there's any deeper meaning to "normativity".

Notification update and PM fixes

adrusi7y30

Are there plans to support email notifications? Having to poll the notification tray to check for replies to posts and comments is not ideal.

4habryka7y

Yes, definitely. I just really want to avoid spamming people, and so want to be careful before we turn on email notifications. But he infrastructure is there, and I‘ve been doing some testing with it, so it should be ready soon.

Dispel your justification-monkey with a “HWA!”

adrusi7y10

What happens the next time the same thing happens? Am I, Bob, supposed to just “accept reality” no matter how many times Alice messes up and does a thing that harms or inconveniences me, and does Alice owe me absolutely nothing for her mistakes?

If Alice has, to use the phrase I used originally, "aquired a universal sense of duty," then the hope is that it is less likely for the same thing to happen again. Alice doesn't need to feel guilty or at fault for the actions, she just acknowledges that the outcome was undesirable, and that she sho... (read more)

2Said Achmiz7y

What you seem to be vaguely gesturing towards, in your last sentence, but what really deserves to be named explicitly and confronted head-on, is the notion of incentives. I have sometimes said that if you get nothing else from all the disciplines that study people and the patterns in which we interact—from psychology to sociology to economics to game theory—you should at least get this: You get what you incentivize. The notions of responsibility, obligation, fault, etc., are how we incentivize people to care about the consequences of their actions. Guilt and shame (and related emotions, such as outrage-at-betrayal) are the mechanisms, given to us by biological and socio-cultural evolution, that implement that caring in our minds—that place it firmly in ‘System 1’. Your idea relies on people being saints. They’re not. You get what you incentivize.

3Said Achmiz7y

This “universal sense of duty” didn’t prevent Alice from committing this mistake in the first place, so—in the absence of any credible signal to this effect, or specific action to ensure it—why, exactly, should we believe that it will prevent a re-occurrence? Ok. But I don’t see that in the OP’s examples. If you acknowledge that Alice should adjust her behavior to prevent similar future situations, then we’re halfway there. But that is important; and it is a pre-requisite to any offer by Bob to also adjust his future behavior to prevent Alice from making similar mistakes. The other half, however, is the notion of compensating the wronged party for one’s mistakes or violations of one’s obligations. You ignored that part of my question, but it’s at least as important as the other part. Do you not think that those who are at fault ought to (whenever possible) compensate those that have been harmed by their actions? Edit: Corrected wording which erroneously implied that adrusi was the OP.

2Said Achmiz7y

You’re missing a critical point: Alice’s behavior is socially agreed to be blameworthy, because there exists a social norml that Alice had the obligation not to behave as she did. Bob’s behavior is socially agreed to be perfectly OK, because there exists a social norm that Bob had no obligation to act otherwise than he did. Crucially, these are pre-existing norms, of which both Alice and Bob were aware—not any sort of arbitrary, post-hoc judgments. A person, such as Alice, is at fault when she violates an obligation that she knows she has, or acts otherwise than she knows she should (where ‘should’ means “acknowledges an obligation to behave this way”). No. We couldn’t. The norm is: did Bob have an obligation to do X, and did he violate that obligation by failing to do X? Then Bob is at fault. Otherwise, he is not. That is what fault is. The reason Alice is at fault here isn’t arbitrary, and the judgment of fault is not itself, directly based on some arbitrary norm. Alice had an obligation—which she has acknowledged that she had, and which she knows that she violated. That constitutes fault. If she had not had this obligation—that would be different. We could have different norms for who has what obligations. That is irrelevant to the matter at hand, because whoever has whatever obligations, the fact is that they are known in advanced and (in your examples, and in most similar real-life cases) acknowledged after the fact. That means that changing the norms concerning who has what obligations cannot change my analysis of the situations. Indeed, Bob does have this power. The question is, why does it fall to Bob, to use said power? Why not Alice? And if Alice does not give a satisfactory answer to this question, then it seems to me that Bob also has—and will (or, at least, should) give serious thought to using—another power that he has: the power of not associating with Alice henceforth, having written her off as an unreliable, untrustworthy person, lacking in i

Pareto improvements are rarer than they seem

adrusi7y80

I think philh is using it in the first way you described, just while honoring the fact that potential future deals factor into how desirable a deal is for each party. We do this implicitly all the time when money is involved: coming away from a deal with more money is desirable only because that money makes the expected outcomes of future deals more desirable. That's intuitive because it's baked into the concept of money, but the same consideration can apply in different ways.

Acknowledging this, we have to consider the strategic advantages that e... (read more)

Dispel your justification-monkey with a “HWA!”

adrusi7y50

I think I more or less try to live my life along the lines of HWA, and it seems to go well for me, but I wonder if that says more about the people I choose to associate with than the inherent goodness of the attitude. HWA works when people are committed to making things go better in the future regardless of whose fault it is. But not everyone thinks that way all the time. Some people haven't acquired a universal sense of duty, they only feel duty when they attribute blame to themselves, and feel a grudging sense of unfairness if asked to care about fi... (read more)

7Said Achmiz7y

This is an important point, and speaks to some of the concerns I had when reading the OP. I, for example, am one of the people you mention who “haven’t acquired a universal sense of duty” (nor do I have any plans for acquiring one; though this is a longer discussion, for another time). It seems to me that blame is important. We often speak of it disdainfully, and the word certainly has negative connotations, but it’s absolutely critical, in many, many situations, to be quite clear about whose fault something is. Why? Because without apportioning, and accepting, responsibility, we can’t change future behavior. I would be rather frustrated, if I were Bob, in the example scenarios Malcolm gives. Alice has done a bad or a wrong thing. Upon discovery of this, she says ‘hwa’, indicating that she has simply accepted the new reality, and so should I, and… what? That’s it? No accountability? (The line “what do we do now?”, in particular, is somewhat insulting; it is not ‘we’ who erred, after all, but you! —thus would I think, were I Bob.) What happens the next time the same thing happens? Am I, Bob, supposed to just “accept reality” no matter how many times Alice messes up and does a thing that harms or inconveniences me, and does Alice owe me absolutely nothing for her mistakes? That way lies the road to exploitative relationships, resentment, and the breakdown of critical social structures (both within relationships and in communities). Conversely, if I were Alice, I would feel guilt and shame if I spoke in the way example-Alice speaks, and rightly so. Alice has made a mistake, and wronged Bob thereby. In a small way, yes; nothing requiring the rending of garments and the pulling of hair, certainly. Still, the large is made out of the small, and the small in time becomes the large; so with patterns of behavior, and so in relationships. Were I Alice, I would feel compelled to (a) admit fault, and (b) either offer to take on the responsibility of correcting the situation

6MalcolmOcean7y

I appreciate the point you're making in your second paragraph. I think that the structures you're pointing at are something that we're on the same page about. Most of my energies are focused on the creation and development of contexts where post-blame/post-fault (essentially what you called "the spirit of HWA") is something that everyone is committed to, and I think that within such a context, "HWA" is actually helpful for consensus-building, as it gets the judgments out of the way so that the details can be explored together, and the parties can figure out what happened, why, and what to do next, and what collective story to tell about it—a story that doesn't have to invoke the guilt vs innocence dichotomy at all! But you're making a great point about how HWA (like pretty much any tool) can also be used coercively, to shut down people whose perspectives need to be heard in order for the group to function effectively. I think it's harder for (eg) business relationships than friendships, but all the more important because of it. But yeah, in order for it to facilitate the sharing of stories, you need the post-blame mindset, not just one little verbal tool. And you need that to be built into the context, not just something that's incidentally & inconsistently present. This is similar in a lot of ways to how rationality is fundamentally a way of thinking not a collection of tools. If you aren't truly truth-seeking, then you can use all of your rationality tools for rationalization. If you're not seeking to get out of coercive dynamics, then you can use HWA for obfuscation. (I want to note that a lot of the terms I'm using here (particularly "coercive") are sort of jargon on some levels; they have quite specific meanings to me that may not be apparent. I shall write more posts to explain these; in the meantime I figured it would make sense to write some sort of response here.)

One-Consciousness Universe

adrusi7y30

I'm not sure at this point what my goal was with this post, it would be too easy to fall into motivated reasoning after this back-and-forth. So I agree with you that my post fails to give evidence for "consciousness can be based on person-slices," I just don't know if I ever intended to give that positive conclusion.

I do think that person-slices are entirely plausible, and a very useful analytical tool, as Parfit found. I have other thoughts on consciousness which assume person-slices are a coherent concept. If this post is sufficient t... (read more)

One-Consciousness Universe

adrusi7y10

This is precisely the kind of gymnastics you need to do if you want to justify the foundational claim of altruism, that other people should matter to you. But what you've said is not sufficient to justify that. Why should I care about the person-slices the conscion visits if they are not my own?

1Matthew Barnett7y

Perhaps I did not make my point clear. If you are asking for me to justify the terminal value of altruism, I can't. By definition, terminal values cannot be justified by appealing to other values. However, I was simply pointing out that our concept of identity can break very easily, as you noted as well. If one thinks that all they should care about are "continuations of their current self" and then they think that only this chunk of matter is a continuation of their current self, then no, this is insufficient to justify altruism. However, as your post reveals, one can imagine switching between person slices spatially, just as one switches between time slices temporally. Asking "Why should I care about person-slices the conscion visits if they are not my own?" well, you've presupposed that they aren't your own. I am making the opposite connection.

One-Consciousness Universe

adrusi7y10

You posted this reply before I finished editing my previous comment to include its second clause, but I'll respond as though the order were more natural.

That's the wrong comparison to be making. Suppose the deist idea about the origin of the universe were dominant, and I proposed that God may not have created the universe. After all, deists, what created God? He was an unmoved mover? Well why couldn't the universe have just been an unmoved movse in the first place? Sound like you're just passing the recursive buck, deists! I'm not ... (read more)

4cousin_it7y

I think this is where the argument cracks. Person-slices could still seem suspect due to some other reasoning, not just due to religion. You're getting a positive conclusion ("consciousness can be based on person-slices") from nowhere.

One-Consciousness Universe

adrusi7y-10

I'm not trying to explain the theory of flow (not in this post, I do have some thoughts on the matter). I'm merely trying to induce doubt.

The conventional understanding of consciousness as the Christian soul doesn't explain anything, really, just like the "conscion." But because it's tied up in millennia of Christian scholarship, there are suppositions attached to it that are indefensible.

4cousin_it7y

Religious Bob: My continuity of experience is due to having a soul that continuously moves from one moment to the next. You: Imagine another theory, with a particle of consciousness permeating the universe. Religious Bob: Would that theory also predict continuity of experience? You: I don't know, just trying to induce doubt. Religious Bob: ...

One-Consciousness Universe

adrusi7y50

You've woven a story in which I am wrong, and it will be hard for me to admit that I am wrong. In doing so, you've made it tricky for to defend my point in the case that I'm not wrong.

You're accusing my "conscion" of being the same kind of mysterious answer as phlogiston. It would be, if I were seriously proposing it as an answer to the mystery of consciousness. I'm not.

I view this one-electron universe model as an ontological koan. It makes us think “hey, reality could be this way rather than the way we think it is and w

... (read more)

4cousin_it7y

We can't make conclusions about the feeling of flow (whether we should drop it, etc.) by comparing two theories neither of which have the gears to explain it. That's why I linked to the mysterious answers post.

More Babble

adrusi7y10

I'm inclined to think that the babble you've been describing is actually just thoughts, and not linguistic at all. You create thoughts by babble-and-prune and then a separate process converts the thoughts into words. I haven't thought much about how that process works (and at first inspection I think it's probably also structured as babble-and-prune), but I think it makes sense to think about it as separate.

If the processes of forming thoughts and phrasing them linguistically were happening at the same level, I'd expect it to be mo... (read more)

2SquirrelInHell7y

Haha, you seem to be on track: * yes, the process that converts thoughts to words is separate * however, caveat: the words are ALSO used for initialization of your concept network/tree, so these two might continue matching closely by default if you don't do any individual work on improving them * I can't give you a RCT for proof but I've had this idea for at least 7 months now (blog post) so I had lots of time to verify it * yes, training the concept network/tree directly looks completely different from training the verbal network/tree (though on some meta level the process of doing it is the same) * see this as an example of explicit non-verbal training (notes from improving my rationality-related abstract concept network) - the notes are of course in English, but it should be clear enough that this is not the point: e.g. I'm making up many of the words and phrases as I go because it doesn't matter for the concept network/tree if my verbal language is standard or not

More Babble

adrusi7y10

Are you referring to the second half of my comment? Because perhaps I wasn't clear enough. I'm confused what alkjash means, because some of their references to the babble graph seemed perfectly consistent with my understanding but I got the impression that overall we might not be talking about the same thing.if we are talking about the same thing then that whole section of my comment is irrelevant.

1SquirrelInHell7y

See other comments on this post, I think this is sufficiently resolved by now.

Babble

adrusi7y20

I've made a reply to your followup.

More Babble

adrusi7y30

This is a followup to my comment on the previous post.

This followup (Edit: alkjash's followup post, not my followup comment) addresses my stated motivation for suggesting that the babble-generator is based on pattern-matching rather than a mere entropy. I had said that there are too many possible ideas for a entropy to generate reasonable ones. For babble to be produced by a random walk along the idea graph is more plausible. It's not obvious that you couldn't produce sufficiently high-quality babble with a random-walk along a well-construct... (read more)

2alkjash7y

I think I was intentionally vague about the things you are emphasizing because I don't have a higher-resolution picture of what's going on. I mentioned that "random" means something like "random, biased by the weak, local filter," but your picture of pattern-matching seems like a better description of the kind of bias that's actually going on. Similarly, it's probably true that there are different levels of Babble going on, at some points you are pattern-matching with literal words, at other points you are using phrases or concepts or entire cached arguments, and I roughly defined the Babble graph to contain all of these things.

1SquirrelInHell7y

Aren't you by any chance attacking a strawman? There is no "privileged" level of models in the brain. Single English words, in particular, are not privileged in any way. When your models/neural connections are updated, so are your priors for babble. This is all dead obvious.

Babble

adrusi7y50

I've been thinking about this same idea, and I thought your post captured the heart of the algorithm (and damn you for beating me to it 😉). But I think you got the algorithm slightly wrong, or simplified the idea a bit. The “babble” isn't random, there are too many possible thoughts for random thought generation to ever arrive at something the prune filter would accept. Instead, the babble is the output of of a pattern matching process. That's why computers have become good at producing babble: neural networks have become competent pattern ... (read more)

3alkjash7y

I think I mostly agree and tried to elaborate a lot more in the followup. Could you provide more detail about your hypothetical-deductive model and in what ways that's different?

Rationalist Politicians

adrusi7y10

If a nerd won the presidency, it wouldn't be great because they would say "true" things. It would be great because they would actually be concerned with figuring out what is true. They might actually change their minds if they realized they were wrong.

If you agree with Trump, then let's allow that he "says true things." That doesn't mean that he embodies what would be great about a nerd in the Oval Office. If Trump says true things, it's because it gets him the support of certain segments of the population. If he had... (read more)