All of SamLL's Comments + Replies

Hello and goodbye.

I'm a 30 year old software engineer with a "traditional rationalist" science background, a lot of prior exposure to Singularitarian ideas like Kurzweil's, with a big network of other scientist friends since I'm a Caltech alum. It would be fair to describe me as a cryocrastinator. I was already an atheist and utilitarian. I found the Sequences through Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.

I thought it would be polite, and perhaps helpful to Less Wrong, to explain why I, despite being pretty squarely in the target demographi... (read more)

4Eliezer Yudkowsky
Try to keep in mind selection effects. The post was titled Failed Utopia - people who agreed with this may have posted less than those who disagreed. I confess to being somewhat surprised by this reaction. Posts and comments about gender probably constitute around 0.1% of all discussion on LessWrong.
4A1987dM
Did you use a Rawlsian veil of ignorance when judging it? From a totally selfish point of view, I would very, very, very much rather be myself in this world than myself in that scenario (given that, among plenty of other things, I dislike most people of my gender), but think of, say, starving African children or people with disabilities. I don't know much about what it feels like to be in such dire straits so I'm not confident that I'd rather be a randomly chosen person in Failed Utopia 4-2 than a randomly chosen person in the actual world, but the idea doesn't sound obviously absurd to me.
4Kawoomba
Since I cannot imagine anything but a few cherry picked examples that could have led to your impression, let me use some of my own (the number of cases is low): The extremely positive reception of Alicorns "Living Luminously" sequence (karma +50 for the main post alone, Anja's great and technical posts (karmas +13, +34, +29) all indicate that good content is not filtered along gender lines, which it should be if there were some pervasive bias. Even asserting that understanding anyone of the other gender is "like trying to understand an alien" does not imply any sort of male superiority complex. If you object to sexism as just pointing out that there are differences both based on culture and genetics, well you got me there. Quite obviously there are, I assume you don't live in a hermaphrodite community. Why is it bad when/if that comes up? Forbidden knowledge? Are you sure that's the rationalist thing to do? Gender imbalance and a few misplaced or easily misinterpreted remarks need not be representative of a community, just as a predominantly male CS program at Caltech and frat jokes need not be representative of College culture.
2earthwormchuck163
Why not stay around and try to help fix the problem?

Thanks for writing this. It's true that LW has a record of being bad at talking about gender issues; this is a problem that has been recognized and commented on in the past. The standard response seems to have been to avoid gender issues whenever possible, which is unfortunate but maybe better than the alternative. But I would still like to comment on some of the specific things you brought up:

assertions that understanding anyone of the other gender is like trying to understand an alien, for example.

I think I know the post you're referring to, I didn'... (read more)

OK, look, literally a five-year-old would say "but what about my friends who are girls". That the author writes a 'superintelligence' who does not address this objection, and a main character who does not mention any, say, coworkers, board-game-playing rivals, or recreational hockey team members who are women, gives an overwhelming, and overwhelmingly unpleasant, impression that women are solely romance and sex objects. That's not only gross, it's a very common failure mode of "we're too smart to be sexist" male tech geeks. And, indeed, downthread you can see other commenters talking about how great a utopia this sounds like.

-1Eugine_Nier
And the AI would reply "if you had never met said friends, would you still miss them? Sounds like a clear case of sunk cost bias."
9[anonymous]
That is, the point of the entire exercise, i.e., to show one out of a gazillion possible failure modes that can happen if you get FAI almost (but not quite) right -- a theme that shows up time and time again in EY's fiction. Acting like the superintelligence character is some kind of Author Avatar is really ignorant of... well, everything else he's written. That's why this a "Failed Utopia" and not a "Utopia." How long does the plot take -- perhaps ten minutes? We see the main character in a moment of extreme shock, and then, extreme grief -- an extreme grief that is vitally important to the moral of the story (explicitly: "I didn't want this, even though the AI was programmed to be 'friendly'"). Adding anyone else to the plot dilutes this point. That's the bloody point. FAI is hard.

This story, as well as other gender-related issues within the Sequences, mean that despite them containing what seems to be to be a lot of value, I definitely would not recommend them to anyone else without large disclaimers, in a similar fashion to how Eliezer refers to Aumann.

This story irresistibly reads to me as the author endorsing or implicitly assuming:

1) There are exactly two genders, and everyone is a member of exactly one; 2) Everyone is heterosexual; 3) Humans have literally 0 use for members of the other gender other than romance.

[anonymous]110

1) There are exactly two genders, and everyone is a member of exactly one; 2) Everyone is heterosexual; 3) Humans have literally 0 use for members of the other gender other than romance.

As a general aesthetic rule, avoiding works of literature that do not contain explicit evidence of these facts doesn't sound particularly fun.

In particular, however, notice that we were told a story about a single protagonist who is an apparently-heterosexual male with an apparently-heterosexual female partner. The other characters aren't human. How exactly do you make it relevant to the plot that all of us homosexual males live in pleasure domes on the terrraformed shores of Titan?

Registered to post this.

I was linked to the Sequences and was going through them, mostly impressed, when I hit this post.

Eliezer's assessment that the human species can be clearly divided into exactly two sexes, and that dealing with the one you are not a member of is like dealing with an alien species, struck me in an extremely analogous way to how Robert Aumann's Orthodox Judaism struck Eliezer: a usually intelligent person buying wholeheartedly into a local cultural construct that, to my fairly simple observation and deduction, should be assigned very ... (read more)