All of spencerg's Comments + Replies

I asked him if he'd come on to be interviewed as part of it, and he said he'd be interested. I believe he is not opposed to me doing the episode.

Thanks for your comment. Some thoughts:

"But a lot of your pro-DAE evidence seems to me to fail this test. E.g. ok, he lied to the customers and to the Congress; why is this substantial evidence of DAE in particular?"

Because E is evidence in favor of a hypothesis H if:

P(E given H is true) > P(E given H is false)

And the strength of the evidence is determined by the ratio:

bayes factor = P(E given H is true)/P(E given H is false)

In my view there isn't really any other reasonable mathematical definition of evidence other than the bayes factor (or transformat... (read more)

I’m glad to see that Nonlinear’s evidence is now public, since Ben’s post did not seem to be a thorough investigation. As I said to Ben before he posted his original post, I knew of evidence that strongly contradicted his post, and I encouraged him to temporarily pause the release of his post so he could review the evidence carefully, but he would not delay. [cross posted this comment on EA forum]

At the top it says it’s a link post and links to the full post, I thought that would make it clear that it’s a link post not a full post.

It’s difficult to keep three versions in sync as I fix typos and correct mistakes, which is why I prefer to not have three separate full versions.

The reason I talk about DAE and not NPD is because DAE and NPD are different conditions, and while I took seriously while investigating this the possibility that NPD was the cause, I didn’t find enough evidence for that explanation, whereas I found a lot of evidence for DAE. If you think I’m wrong, and see significant evidence for NPD I’d be interested to see that evidence.

Not to say that DAE and NPD have nothing to do with each other, but they aren’t the same.

I would never say to someone who was abused by someone with NPD that they are merely experiencing... (read more)

Thanks for letting me know

There were clear ways in which he was really bad at things, but also, clear ways that he was really good at some things.  The FTX exchange is not something easy to build, and it's much harder still to make it into a successful exchange like he did. Seems pretty clear he was really skilled at some things, despite his big weaknesses. But I don't think it can be dismissed as just that he was bad at stuff.  Also, him being bad at stuff doesn't explain highly unethical actions that he appears to have taken.

I do go into that - see the full version on my blog.

It's more specific than sociopathy.  Also, terms like sociopath/psychopath are problematic because people have a lot of associations with those terms, not all of them accurate, and so I thought it would be better to be more precise about what I mean and also to avoid terms that people have connations around.

You're using a different word "utility" than I am here. There are at least three definitions of that word. I'm using the one from hedonic utilitarianism (since that's what most EAs identify as), not the one from decision theory (e..g., "expected utility maximization" as a decision theory), and not the one from economics (rational agents maximizing "utility"). 

If we want to look at general principles rather than specific cases, if the original post had not contained a bunch of serious misinformation (according to evidence that I have access to) then I would have been much more sympathetic to not delaying.

But the combination of serious misinformation + being unwilling to delay a short period to get the rest of the evidence I find to be a very bad combination.

I also don’t think the retaliation point is a very good one, as refusing to delay doesn’t actually prevent retaliation.

I don’t find the lost productivity po... (read more)

Hi all, I wanted to chime in because I have had conversations relevant to this post with just about all involved parties at various points. I've spoken to "Alice" (both while she worked at nonlinear and afterward), Kat (throughout the period when the events in the post were alleged to have happened and afterward), Emerson, Drew, and (recently) the author Ben, as well as, to a much lesser extent, "Chloe" (when she worked at nonlinear). I am (to my knowledge) on friendly terms with everyone mentioned (by name or pseudonym) in this post. I wish well... (read more)

The way you define values in your comment:

"From the AI "engineering" perspective, values/valued states are "rewards" that the agent adds themselves in order to train (in RL style) their reasoning/planning network (i.e., generative model) to produce behaviours that are adaptive but also that they like and find interesting (aesthetics). This RL-style training happens during conscious reflection."

is just something different than what I'm talking about in my post when I use the phrase "intrinsic values." 

From what I can tell, you seem to be arguing:

 ... (read more)

Hi Caerulea-Lawrence, thanks for your comment. The reason we say: "If you don’t understand that worldview, then you’ll be unable to predict what these groups will do. You will also struggle to communicate with them in a way that they care about, or persuade them to do things differently." is not because we are trying to convince anyone to have a particular worldview with this piece - it's because we are trying to motivate people to see other perspectives even if they are still stuck in their own perspective. That is, there are instrumental reasons to try t... (read more)

Many hundreds of people read this piece, and whenever we received feedback from people who identified with one of the worldviews, if they believed their views were being misrepresented, we made adjustments in line with their feedback when we felt that the case they made was convincing (but like we acknowledged in the piece, we're not going to be covering everyone's perspective here). Your characterization of what the world looks like from the point of view of a Social Justice Advocate seems like something that a Social Justice Advocate would genuinely disagree with.

I'm surprised you see this as coming from a conservative perspective, because neither Amber nor I are conservatives. You're right that there are lots of other views that are not addressed in this piece. We focused on a small list of some of the most popular views, and of course, any one individual will have some differences in opinion with the world view that best represents them, as we mentioned in the piece.

Thank you! Fixed :)

Thanks for the cost estimates on producing transcripts, that's helpful! 

Oh whoops, that was definitely a mistake on my part, I meant to include that one, sorry for the oversight! I updated the post!

Nice idea, thanks for the suggestion!

Unfortunately, we don't have transcripts for these! Sorry about that. I recommend listening at 1.5x-2.5x speed.

Hi, I'm not sure if this works automatically with cross-posting - depends what you mean exactly. You'd have to set it up on each website you want the cards to appear on.

Hi Yoav! Sorry for the troubles, we'll investigate - I just sent you a private message via LessWrong, could you take a look? Thanks! 

Thanks :)   Glad you think so!

A few thoughts on this:

• I don't think Orbit existed when we started working on Thought Saver (or if it did, we didn't know about it). When Quantum Country came out I wasn't aware (not sure if anyone was aware?) at the time that it was part of a larger project (maybe it wasn't yet at that point?)

• Thought Saver has a different focus than Orbit (e.g., Thought Saver is not focussed on embedded essays - it just seems that way because the LessWrong team asked if we could add that feature since they wanted to try embedded flashcard quizzes). Thought Saver is mo... (read more)

Hi Yoav! It should be putting them all into the same deck. If you click the search bar it should show all your decks. Can you click feedback in the upper right and tell us what you see there? We've never encountered an issue like the one you're describing. We'd like to help you get to the bottom of it.

Thanks!

Fair enough, though I disagree with these points. For one thing, this feature already works, so I don't expect it will take any significant amount of time from the LessWrong dev team. 

But to respond to your more specific points, from my perspective:

(1) there is a common misconception that flashcards and/or spaced repetition is mainly useful for facts and definitions. It is also very useful for concepts ("a generative adversarial network is..."), takeaways (e.g., "the most important three points this post makes are..."), connections between ideas ("X a... (read more)

Yep, you can import from csv file format and export (your own decks) to csv file format using Thought Saver.

A big shout-out to David for making this feature happen :) 

Nice, I like the way you broke it up!

Thanks for the feedback Mary!

Sorry to hear you didn’t like it. What we’re the aspects that turned you off? Do you mean the flash cards and exercises or something else?

Interesting question - to what extent is ego depletion (insofar as it occurs) related to rising marginal cost of effort? It feels to me that is part of what's going on, but maybe not all of it. For instance, some forms of effort feel like their marginal cost only goes up gradually, and others more steeply. Motivation also seems relevant (it can go down over time) and that seems to have less to do with marginal cost from what I can tell.

Haha, I hope you managed to get it done :) 

Thanks for this very thoughtful reply Kaj, I really appreciate the time you took to break down your thoughts on each strategy! :) 

Good point! I actually had that as a footnote in the original post, but accidentally didn't port it over when I constructed the article here. Thanks for the feedback.

Agreed that people's internal mental states can be wildly different even while their external behavior is about the same. Yet there is a temptation to assume that similar external behavior implies similar mental states.

That's interesting. One thing I'll note about "energy" is that I suspect it can be subdivided further. For instance, I think that mental fatigue (e.g., after doing hard math problems for an hour) differs from physical fatigue (e.g., after lifting weights hard for an hour) which differs from sleepiness (e.g., when you haven't slept for a long time), and I also suspect that mental slowness (e.g., like some people get upon waking or when drunk) is a fourth thing. It sometimes seems pep/enthusiasm are yet another thing that it's meaningful to distinguish from the others (you can feel a lack of fatigue without having pep).

Hi Kaj, thanks for your comments, I find them really interesting! I was not intending the article to be about how to become Ty (internally). I think Ty has a bunch of traits that are difficult to replicate (note: Ty is a real person, but Ty is not their real name - they agreed with everything I said about them in the article and I used their details with permission). I do, however, think it is feasible to behave in ways that are more like Ty, through other means (e.g., by applying specific strategies). So I agree that the strategies aren't about making one... (read more)

Ty IS a real person! (used with permission, but Ty is not their name)

Hi Vladimir, thanks for your comments. Could you elaborate on what you would like to see more justification for when you say ("insufficient readily available justification")? I'd also be interested to know what framing seemed "somewhat arbitrary." 

In the section "Nine Traits of Self-Controlled Behavior" my claim is that those pretty self-evidently are traits that (i) differ non-negligibly between people and (ii) can manifest as "self-controlled behavior." Are there items in that list that you think don't differ between people, or that you don't think ... (read more)

Interesting, thanks for letting me know - could you say a bit more about what feels negatively framed about it, and what it would be like to make it positly framed?

Hi Austin, I'm glad you found the article useful! :) 

Good catch, thanks for pointing that out!

That's helpful feedback, thanks Alex!

Good point! Somehow I didn't notice that :) 

Thank you for pointing that out, it would have been better if I had spoken more carefully. I definitely don't think that uncertainty is in the territory. Please interpret "there is great uncertainty in X" as "our models of X produce very uncertain predictions."