All of Jiro's Comments + Replies

We know that the actual probability of theories that use the ideal gas law is 0. Under Bayesianism, any and all theories that make use of the ideal gas law would have no way to increase their probability.

The theory isn't "reality behaves according to the ideal gas law", the theory is "reality behaves in approximations to the ideal gas law".

While your insistence that I use colloquial rather than technical terms is cute, it’s also despicably ignorant and you’re not making strong arguments against the wider view of history I’m presenting.

It's a pretty basic principle of debate that you have to dispute things that people actually said. When "we" say that modern people are better than past people, that doesn't count the 1800s as modern, never mind the 1600s. If you don't want to call that "modern people", you can call it something else, but then your dispute is about the something else. The... (read more)

Who cares what “most people” think, they’re fucking wrong!

You are supposedly criticizing other people:

We want to believe that as moderns we are better, more rational, so much more wise than people of the past, and it is this very conceited and highly sympathetic view of ourselves that is just so unthinkably blind.

If you are criticizing other people, you have to criticize what they are actually talking about. And pretty much none of them are saying that moderns under your definition are better than religious people. People who believe that "we are ... (read more)

Their values of humility, honor, faith, and so on are so different from our own imperatives of competition, survival of the fittest, and so on.

Yet I don't keep slaves or have serfs. Your people of humility, honor, and faith did.

Maybe ancient people would have worked harder to ship slaves across oceans and displace more peoples, if only they had better sailing ships. They simply couldn’t afford to house prisoners in massive systems before the industrial era made food incredibly cheap.

I mean... yes? They had a problem doing lots of things well. Of... (read more)

Advocating for more lying seems like especially bad advice to give to people with poor social skills, because they lack the skills to detect if they’re succeeding at learning how to lie or if they’re just burning what little social capital they have for no gain.

I think the advice works better as "if it's a social situation, and the situation calls for what you consider to be a lie, don't let that stop you." You do not have to tell someone that you're not feeling fine when they ask how you're doing. You do not need to tell them that actually the color ... (read more)

The alternative theory is that political bias has gotten much greater, and the acceptable political beliefs are strongly in the direction of trusting some groups and not trusting others. By that theory, progressive movements are trusted more because they have better press. Realizing that you can increase trust by creating worker co-ops would then be an example of Goodhart's Law--optimizing for "being trusted" independently of "being trustworthy" is not a worthy goal.

I am not making the simple argument that religion makes for better societies, and I can see you’re totally confused here.

If all you're saying is that at least one thing was better in at least one religious society in at least one era, then I can't disagree, but there isn't much to disagree with either.

And I think you're making an excessively fine distinction if you're not arguing that religion makes for better societies, but you are arguing that religion doesn't damage society. (Unless you think religion keeps things exactly the same?)

Scott once had a post about how it's hard to get advice only to the people who need it.

Sam Bankman-Fried may have lied too much (although the real problem was probably goals that conflict with ours) but the essay here is aimed at the typical LW geek, and LW geeks tend not to lie enough.

I would think that if your "common ground" with someone is something 99% of humans agree with and which is absurdly broad anyway, you haven't really found common ground.

In the premodern Christian medieval context, slavery was all but completely forbidden

It feels like you're gerrymandering a time, place, and scenario to make the answer come out correctly. The medieval era was not the only era where Christianity was powerful, and you're just handwaving it away by saying that Christianity was an arm of the state after that (and ignoring the period before that--the Romans kept slaves even when they were Christian.) You're also including or not including Islam depending on whether it's convenient for your argument (they d... (read more)

We can happily and easily disprove the idea that Judeo-Christian cosmology “damages society” by comparing the modern secular society developing after 1500AD with that of the Christian society before it.

1. You're cherrypicking features of the society. I could respond by pointing to feudalism or slavery, for instance. Having less hospitality but no slavery seems overall positive.

2. I'm pretty sure you're exaggerating what hospitality requires. If it was actually required to feed and house all beggars who come to your door, people would be overwhelmed by

He asks “How interested are you in Widgets?” He has learnt from previous job interviews that, if he answers honestly, the interviewer will think he is any of lying, insane, or too weird to deal with, and not hire him, even though this is not in the best financial interests of the company, were they fully informed.

By the standard "intentionally or knowingly cause the other person to have false beliefs", answering 'honestly' would be lying, and answering in a toned down way would not (because it maximizes the truth of the belief that the interviewer gets).

In Materialist Conceptions of God, I wrote about how one can interpret religious claims as hyperstititions, beliefs that become true as a result of you believing in them.

While this works for some religious claims, it doesn't work for many of the most important ones. If heaven doesn't exist, believing in it, and even acting as though you want to go there, won't get you there. And believing that the world was created in seven literal days, and acting thus, not only doesn't cause the world to have been created in seven literal days, it leads you to damage the society around you.

Here’s how easy it is to run an LLM evaluation of a debate.

Running it through the LLM is easy.

Refuting the argument that you're using the LLM's output for takes longer, though.

The motte and bailey is:

1. "All I'm asking you to do is to run this through an LLM".

But

2. "Actually, that's not all I'm asking you to do. You also need to refute this whole post."

And your stated reason for not responding to any of it is that it’s inconvenient.

It's inconvenient to reply to lots of things, even false things. I probably wouldn't reply to a homeopath or a Holocaust denier, for instance, especially not to refute the things he says.

When someone in my family expresses their concern that Covid-19 vaccines are causing harm to the population, I can respond by: “I also think that it is very important to seriously monitor the adverse health effects of all drugs, in the case of [...]”.

If they said that the Jews are drinking the blood of Christian babies, would you reply that of course you think it's important to keep babies safe?

Your description of finding common ground is within a hairsbreadth of being concern trolling.

You're going heavy on the motivated reasoning here. The reason people don't want to respond to you is not that you're pure genius, it's that it isn't worth the effort.

You're also doing a motte and bailey on exactly what argument you're trying to make. If all you're saying is "sending X through an LLM produces Y", then yes, I could just try an LLM. But that's not all that you're saying. You're trying to draw conclusions from the result of the LLM. Refuting those conclusions is a lot of effort for little benefit.

The challenge was to simply run the argument provided above through your own LLM and post the results. It would take about 30 seconds.

If you claim that "Not one of you made a case. Not one of you pointed to an error.", that isn't going to be resolved by running the argument through an LLM. Pointing to an error means manually going through your argument and trying to refute it.

Not one of you made a case. Not one of you pointed to an error. And yet the judgment was swift and unanimous. That tells me the argument was too strong, not too weak. It couldn’t be refuted, so it had to be dismissed.

Believing that your post was voted down because it was too strong is very convenient for you, which means that your belief that it was voted down because it's too strong is likely motivated reasoning.

It's a lot easier to write BS than to refute it, so people don't usually want to bother exhaustively analyzing why BS is BS.

I support putting bank robbers in jail. Yet I refuse to support anything that would put myself in jail. I'm clearly supporting it in an imbalanced way that is beneficial to myself.

Even if we make the extremely conservative assumption that their deaths are only one 600,000th as bad, in terms of suffering, as humans deaths, insect suffering is still obviously the worst thing in the world.

But you pulled the number 600000 out of thin air.

People, when asked to name a small number or a large number, will usually name numbers within a certain range, and think "well, that number sounds good to me". That doesn't mean that the number really is small or large enough. It may be in normal situations--$600000 can buy a lot--but if you try t... (read more)

One refers to morality emerging spontaneously from intelligence—which I argue is highly unlikely without a clear mechanism.

That's not emerging artifically. That's emerging naturally. "Emerging artificially" makes no sense here, even as a concept being refuted.

If you think it could emerge artificially, you need to explain the mechanism, not just assert the possibility.

...

If you hardwire morality as a primary goal, then yes, the AGI might be moral.

I don't see you explaining any mechanism in the second quote. (And how is it possible for something to emerge artificially anyway?)

Your comment reads like it's AI generated. It doesn't say much, but damn if it doesn't have a lot of ordered and numbered subpoints.

Food gets used up quickly, but it takes a long while to use up housing, so banning new housing really isn't comparable to banning making food.

I don’t know where you’re getting this notion that speculation is evasion

The liar faces a conundrum. He can ask to modify the theory again, which is perfectly fine, but whatever he comes up with to accommodate “dog isn’t sick” fact will directly contradict the preceding “Gillian stole cookies but didn’t eat them” theory.

You've described this kind of speculation as specific to liars, yet innocent people will end up having to do it too.

If a client is either factually innocent or guilty-but-sober-minded, there’s no difficulty getting them to admit t

If they have no idea what is going on, but have been accused, they need to do what they can to maximize the chance of being believed. Sometimes this means responding with a theory. And such responses will look like evasion by your standards.

There aren't (useful) "other ways" for an innocent person with no direct knowledge to act, unless he gets lucky, like by catching the culprit.

But if the innocent person doesn't know what's going on (other than his own innocence), his alternative theory might not comport with reality--because he has no idea what's going on. All he can do is make hypotheses and try to confirm them. It may take several hypotheses before he gets it right. If you're going to "force liars to commit to a single alternative theory", you've put the innocent person in a position where unless he gets lucky and picks the right answer the first time, he can't defend himself because he committed to the theory and it turned out not to be true, and he doesn't get to change it.

There's no way for anyone to know that you didn't write the essay unless they already know that your username isn't an alias of the writer. You didn't write "here is a post by someone else" or anything else which makes clear that the post is not yours, let alone that you don't endorse it. In fact the essay starts with "In this essay, I will", making the normal assumption that the only person whose username is attached to the post is who "I" refers to.

If you're sharing it, but don't endorse it, you should say that you don't endorse it. If not, readers have a right to assume that you endorse it.

(And you seem to be in this limbo where you're sort of endorsing it but sort of not.)

The response wouldn't actually be lying, but it would be indistinguishable by an outsider from the kind of deflection that you describe here and that you consider part of lying.

And I don't think "this example is unrealistically convenient" lets you handwave this away. The exact response "maybe a friend of Gillian's stopped over" is specific to your example, but that type of response is not. If Jake is innocent in this scenario but accused of lying, the only possible response is to try to come up with ways to explain the available information. That's the exact same thing that would be deflection when done by a guilty person.

The same goes for wearing a suit. I don’t imply that anyone else should wear a suit, and the people around me don’t imply that I shouldn’t wear a suit. Telling other people what to do isn’t socially expensive because it costs “weirdness points”. It is socially expensive because people don’t like it when you tell them to do things they don’t want to do.

By that reasoning you could refuse to ever say "please" and "thank you". After all, you're not telling anyone else not to say "please" and "thank you".

There are two things going on in the vegan example t... (read more)

Refusing to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ would fall squarely in the category that people would have a reason to feel negative about.

It's not like wearing a suit in a swimming pool. Never saying "thank you" doesn't physically damage things. It just makes people upset because of the social inappropriateness, like the inappropriate suit.

This reasoning would justify violating any social convention whatsoever. "Refusing to say 'please' and 'thank you' signals confidence and self-esteem".

Yes, it does, but signalling those things and signalling social cluelessness are entwined. "My self esteem is more important than these petty rules" can mean that you think you are really important compared to the rules, or that the rules are unimportant compared to you. You're also overrating self-esteem. Signalling self-esteem is often a bad thing.

(Remember how fedoras became a sign of cluelessness? It's not very different from out of context suits.)

But, the social signalling game is exhausting.

Yes, but that doesn't mean that you can just avoid it and its consequences. Like war, you may not be interested in it, but it is interested in you. And if you can't avoid sometimes messing up, you can at least avoid making it worse than it has to be (such as by gratuitously wearing inappropriate clothes).

They have actually just genuinely had enough with the hall of mirrors game and have declared themselves to no longer be playing.

Yes, but he's acting like it's a triumphant success. Voluntarily decidin... (read more)

Spend your weirdness points wisely.

Wearing a suit in an inappropriate context is like wearing a fedora. It says "I am socially clueless enough to do random inappropriate things". The fact that people will eventually stop asking you about the suit does not mean that you are no longer saying this message, nor does it mean that people will stop listening to it.

And if your reaction is "I'm just not conforming. I'm not harming anyone, why do they care?", it's sending a message. Messages don't need to cause harm for people to react to them.

That’s because i

Because 1) they would be able to trade with (or threaten) humans and 2) even ignoring that, humans behave differently towards obvious sentients--anti-slavery movements and anti-whale-oil movements are not comparable.

This example is being chosen in hindsight. You could easily have E-coli being afraid that the apes would evolve into something that destroys them, or humans being afraid that dogs would evolve into something that would destroy them.

Also, if whales could argue like this, whale relations with humans would be very different, and hunting whales for lamp oil would be unlikely, or at least would be about the same status as hunting humans for slaves is now.

To make an analogy, which involves accusations of baby killing in a completely unrelated context, imagine an abortion opponent who calls someone a baby killer in a context where it's not obvious he's talking about abortion. When questioned on this, he replies "I sincerely think abortion is baby killing, so my description was accurate, to the best of my knowledge". What's wrong with his reasoning?

What's wrong with his reasoning is that if you're trying to honestly and accurately communicate, you need to describe someone's position in uncontroversial terms... (read more)

The important question to ask is “how many innocent people” are worth killing to achieve an end? A 2014 study estimated that 4% of death row inmates would be exonerated, had they remained under sentence of death indefinitely,

"Exonerated" doesn't usually mean "innocent", it typically means "is guilty of something slightly lesser".

We could have the exact same court procedures, just change the law on the books from 3–5 years to 3–5 fingers.

We could, but with actual humans, we won't.

Or are you just stating, without any justification

"By observing human beings" is not "without any justification". We know what societies that mutilate prisoners are like, because plenty of them have existed.

Also, individuals don't have to "become irrational" for the ones who are already irrational to gain more influence.

You won't find systems with none at all, but you can easily find systems with those aspects to a significantly larger or smaller degree.

I would agree that eight years of imprisonment can be as bad or worse as mutilation. But the problem is that punishing people by mutilation has different incentives than punishing them with jail--at least among actual human punishers. When you look at the history of societies that punish people by mutilation, you find that mutilation goes hand in hand (no pun intended) with bad justice systems--dictatorship, corruption, punishment that varies between social classes, lack of due process, etc. Actual humans aren't capable of implementing a justice system which punishes by mutilation but does so in a way that you could argue is fair.

We accept that innocent people die due to our actions all the time, and making a special exception here is an isolated demand for rigour.

This is also true for life imprisonment, actually. We'll be sentencing some innocent people to life imprisonment. And although perhaps some of them will be exonerated, it's a statistical certainty that not all of them will be, and a statistical certainty that therefore we will destroy some innocent people's lives piecemeal. But we're okay with that, or at least it doesn't get the ire that the death penalty does.

In f... (read more)

The idea that we can pay reparations for a mistake is bizarre even considering just widely accepted punishments. You can't imprison someone for 40 years, discover they're innocent, and "pay reparations" for the mistake--there's nothing you can pay someone to give them 40 years. Never mind paying reparations for mutilation, you can't do it for imprisonment.

Also, in practice, societies which cut off the hands of thieves are not societies where justice is served even ignoring the punishments themselves. Tyrants like cutting off hands precisely because it's a punishment that can't be reversed, and you don't have to wait 40 years for it to become permanent.

This smells like AI slop.

In this context, see https://blog.givewell.org/2011/08/18/why-we-cant-take-expected-value-estimates-literally-even-when-theyre-unbiased/ .

Are you going to remove everything from the rest of the argument which depends on the "always"?  Which seems to be all of it.

Now, what percent of the 33% of hierarchical societies that do not practise human sacrifice are Abrahamic?

This is like saying "I think that Rhode Islanders are all murderers.  What percentage of the people that do not murder are from Rhode Island?"  This is illogical; the reasoning is backwards.

Do you think that Japan is a hierarchial society?  Do you think that Japan performs human sacrifice?

I am sure of the logic of sacrifice in all cultures

You are trying to argue with the real world.

I know that idolatry doesn't lead to human sacrifice, because there are actual idolators who don't sacrifice humans. You are just saying "yes it does". No it doesn't. It's not hard to check the real world and see if your pronouncements match reality. They do not.

Idolatry always leads to human sacrifice because to prove your idol more important than the human soul the natural test is to sacrifice a human in the altar of the idol.

This is nonsense. You are pulling this from nowhere. I'm sure we could find some sun worshippers or nature worshippers who don't sacrifice any humans.

Also, this whole post reminds me of Sherlock Holmes style deductions. You know, the one where the detective says something that's mostly right most of the time, then makes a deduction based on something else that's mostly right, until he... (read more)