which in turn I fundamentally see as a consequence of epistemic learned helplessness run rampant
Not sure I follow. It seems to me that the position you’re pushing, that learning from people who disagree is prohibitively costly, is the one that goes with learned helplessness. (“We’ve tried it before, we encountered inferential distances, we gave up.”)
Suppose there are two execs at an org on the verge of building AGI. One says “MIRI seems wrong for many reasons, but we should try and talk to them anyways to see what we learn.” The other says “Nah, that’s epistemic learned helplessness, and the costs are prohibitive. Turn this baby on.” Which exec do you agree with?
This isn’t exactly hypothetical, I know someone at a top AGI org (I believe they “take seriously the idea that they are a computation/algorithm”) who reached out to MIRI and was basically ignored. It seems plausible to me that MIRI is alienating a lot of people this way, in fact. I really don’t get the impression they are spending excessive resources engaging people with different worldviews.
Anyway, one way to think about it is talking to people who disagree is just a much more efficient way to increase the accuracy of your beliefs. Suppose the population as a whole is 50⁄50 pro-Skub and anti-Skub. Suppose you learn that someone is pro-Skub. This should cause you to update in the direction that they’ve been exposed to more evidence for the pro-Skub position than the anti-Skub position. If they’re trying to learn facts about the world as quickly as possible, their time is much better spent reading an anti-Skub book than a pro-Skub book, since the pro-Skub book will have more facts they already know. An anti-Skub book also has more decision-relevant info. If they read a pro-Skub book, they’ll probably still be pro-Skub afterwards. If they read an anti-Skub book, they might change their position and therefore change their actions.
Talking to an informed anti-Skub in person is even more efficient, since the anti-Skub person can present the very most relevant/persuasive evidence that is the very most likely to change their actions.
Applying this thinking to yourself, if you’ve got a particular position you hold, that’s evidence you’ve been disproportionately exposed to facts that favor that position. If you want to get accurate beliefs quickly you should look for the strongest disconfirming evidence you can find.
None of this discussion even accounts for confirmation bias, groupthink, or information cascades! I’m getting a scary “because we read a website that’s nominally about biases, we’re pretty much immune to bias” vibe from your comment. Knowing about a bias and having implemented an effective, evidence-based debiasing intervention for it are very different.
BTW this is probably the comment that updated me the most in the direction that LW will become / already is a cult.
So I think my orientation on seeking out disagreement is roughly as follows. (This is going to be a rant I write in the middle of the night, so might be a little incoherent.)
There are two distinct tasks: 1)Generating new useful hypotheses/tools, and 2)Selecting between existing hypotheses/filtering out bad hypotheses.
There are a bunch of things that make people good at both these tasks simultaneously. Further, each of these tasks is partially helpful for doing the other. However, I still think of them as mostly distinct tasks.
I think skill at these tasks is correlated in general, but possibly anti-correlated after you filter on enough g correlates, in spite of the fact that they are each common subtasks of the other.
I don’t think this (anti-correlated given g) very confidently, but I do think it is good to track your own and others skill in the two tasks separately, because it is possible to have very different scores (and because of side effects of judging generators on reliability might make them less generative as a result of being afraid of being wrong, and similarly vise versa.)
I think that seeking out disagreement is especially useful for the selection task, and less useful for the generation task. I think that echo chambers are especially harmful for the selection task, but can sometimes be useful for the generation task. Working with someone who agrees with you on a bunch of stuff and shares your ontology allows you to build deeply faster. Someone with a lot of disagreement with you can cause you to get stuck on the basics and not get anywhere. (Sometimes disagreement can also be actively helpful for generation, but it is definitely not always helpful.)
I spend something like 90+% of my research time focused on the generation task. Sometimes I think my colleagues are seeing something that I am missing, and I seek out disagreement, so that I can get a new perspective, but the goal is to get a slightly different perspective on the thing I am working on, and not on really filtering based on which view is more true. I also sometimes do things like double-crux with people with fairly different world views, but even there, it feels like the goal is to collect new ways to think, rather than to change my mind. I think that for this task a small amount of focusing on people who disagree with you is pretty helpful, but even then, I think I get the most out of people who disagree with me a little bit, because I am more likely to be able to actually pick something up. Further, my focus is not really on actually understanding the other person, I just want to find new ways to think, so I will often translate things to something near by my ontology, and thus learn a lot, but still not be able to pass an ideological Turing test.
On the other hand, when you are not trying to find new stuff, but instead e.g. evaluate various different hypotheses about AI timelines, I think it is very important to try to understand views that are very far from your own, and take steps to avoid echo chamber effects. It is important to understand the view, the way the other person understands it, not just the way that conveniently fits with your ontology. This is my guess at the relevant skills, but I do not actually identify as especially good at this task. I am much better at generation, and I do a lot of outside-view style thinking here.
However, I think that currently, AI safety disagreements are not about two people having mostly the same ontology and disagreeing on some important variables, but rather trying to communicate across very different ontologies. This means that we have to build bridges, and the skills start to look more like generation skill. It doesn’t help to just say, “Oh, this other person thinks I am wrong, I should be less confident.” You actually have to turn that into something more productive, which means building new concepts, and a new ontology in which the views can productively dialogue. Actually talking to the person you are trying to bridge to is useful, but I think so is retreating to your echo chamber, and trying to make progress on just becoming less confused yourself.
For me, there is a handful of people who I think of as having very different views from me on AI safety, but are still close enough that I feel like I can understand them at all. When I think about how to communicate, I mostly think about bridging the gap to these people (which already feels like and impossibly hard task), and not as much the people that are really far away. Most of these people I would describe as sharing the philosophical stance I said MIRI selects for, but probably not all.
If I were focusing on resolving strategic disagreements, I would try to interact a lot more than I currently do with people who disagree with me. Currently, I am choosing to focus more on just trying to figure out how minds work in theory, which means I only interact with people who disagree with me a little. (Indeed, I currently also only interact with people who agree with me a little bit, and so am usually in an especially strong echo chamber, which is my own head.)
However, I feel pretty doomy about my current path, and might soon go back to trying to figure out what I should do, which means trying to leave the echo chamber. Often when I do this, I neither produce anything great nor change my mind, and eventually give up and go back to doing the doomy thing where at least I make some progress (at the task of figuring out how minds work in theory, which may or may not end up translating to AI safety at all).
Basically, I already do quite a bit of the “Here are a bunch of people who are about as smart as I am, and have thought about this a bunch, and have a whole bunch of views that differ from me and from each other. I should be not that confident” (although I should often take actions that are indistinguishable from confidence, since that is how you work with your inside view.) But learning from disagreements more than that is just really hard, and I don’t know how to do it, and I don’t think spending more time with them fixes it on its own. I think this would be my top priority if I had a strategy I was optimistic about, but I don’t, and so instead, I am trying to figure out how minds work, which seems like it might be useful for a bunch of different paths. (I feel like I have some learned helplessness here, but I think everyone else (not just MIRI) is also failing to learn (new ontologies, rather than just noticing mistakes) from disagreements, which makes me think it is actually pretty hard.)
Not sure I follow. It seems to me that the position you’re pushing, that learning from people who disagree is prohibitively costly, is the one that goes with learned helplessness. (“We’ve tried it before, we encountered inferential distances, we gave up.”)
I believe they are saying that cheering for seeking out disagreement is learned helplessness as opposed to doing a cost-benefit analysis about seeking out disagreement. I am not sure I get that part either.
I was also confused reading the comment, thinking that maybe they copied the wrong paragraph, and meant the 2nd paragraph.
I am interested in the fact that you find the comment so cult-y though, because I didn’t pick that up.
I am interested in the fact that you find the comment so cult-y though, because I didn’t pick that up.
It’s a fairly incoherent comment which argues that we shouldn’t work to overcome our biases or engage with people outside our group, with strawmanning that seems really flimsy… and it has a bunch of upvotes. Seems like curiosity, argument, and humility are out, and hubris is in.
Not sure I follow. It seems to me that the position you’re pushing, that learning from people who disagree is prohibitively costly, is the one that goes with learned helplessness. (“We’ve tried it before, we encountered inferential distances, we gave up.”)
Suppose there are two execs at an org on the verge of building AGI. One says “MIRI seems wrong for many reasons, but we should try and talk to them anyways to see what we learn.” The other says “Nah, that’s epistemic learned helplessness, and the costs are prohibitive. Turn this baby on.” Which exec do you agree with?
This isn’t exactly hypothetical, I know someone at a top AGI org (I believe they “take seriously the idea that they are a computation/algorithm”) who reached out to MIRI and was basically ignored. It seems plausible to me that MIRI is alienating a lot of people this way, in fact. I really don’t get the impression they are spending excessive resources engaging people with different worldviews.
Anyway, one way to think about it is talking to people who disagree is just a much more efficient way to increase the accuracy of your beliefs. Suppose the population as a whole is 50⁄50 pro-Skub and anti-Skub. Suppose you learn that someone is pro-Skub. This should cause you to update in the direction that they’ve been exposed to more evidence for the pro-Skub position than the anti-Skub position. If they’re trying to learn facts about the world as quickly as possible, their time is much better spent reading an anti-Skub book than a pro-Skub book, since the pro-Skub book will have more facts they already know. An anti-Skub book also has more decision-relevant info. If they read a pro-Skub book, they’ll probably still be pro-Skub afterwards. If they read an anti-Skub book, they might change their position and therefore change their actions.
Talking to an informed anti-Skub in person is even more efficient, since the anti-Skub person can present the very most relevant/persuasive evidence that is the very most likely to change their actions.
Applying this thinking to yourself, if you’ve got a particular position you hold, that’s evidence you’ve been disproportionately exposed to facts that favor that position. If you want to get accurate beliefs quickly you should look for the strongest disconfirming evidence you can find.
None of this discussion even accounts for confirmation bias, groupthink, or information cascades! I’m getting a scary “because we read a website that’s nominally about biases, we’re pretty much immune to bias” vibe from your comment. Knowing about a bias and having implemented an effective, evidence-based debiasing intervention for it are very different.
BTW this is probably the comment that updated me the most in the direction that LW will become / already is a cult.
So I think my orientation on seeking out disagreement is roughly as follows. (This is going to be a rant I write in the middle of the night, so might be a little incoherent.)
There are two distinct tasks: 1)Generating new useful hypotheses/tools, and 2)Selecting between existing hypotheses/filtering out bad hypotheses.
There are a bunch of things that make people good at both these tasks simultaneously. Further, each of these tasks is partially helpful for doing the other. However, I still think of them as mostly distinct tasks.
I think skill at these tasks is correlated in general, but possibly anti-correlated after you filter on enough g correlates, in spite of the fact that they are each common subtasks of the other.
I don’t think this (anti-correlated given g) very confidently, but I do think it is good to track your own and others skill in the two tasks separately, because it is possible to have very different scores (and because of side effects of judging generators on reliability might make them less generative as a result of being afraid of being wrong, and similarly vise versa.)
I think that seeking out disagreement is especially useful for the selection task, and less useful for the generation task. I think that echo chambers are especially harmful for the selection task, but can sometimes be useful for the generation task. Working with someone who agrees with you on a bunch of stuff and shares your ontology allows you to build deeply faster. Someone with a lot of disagreement with you can cause you to get stuck on the basics and not get anywhere. (Sometimes disagreement can also be actively helpful for generation, but it is definitely not always helpful.)
I spend something like 90+% of my research time focused on the generation task. Sometimes I think my colleagues are seeing something that I am missing, and I seek out disagreement, so that I can get a new perspective, but the goal is to get a slightly different perspective on the thing I am working on, and not on really filtering based on which view is more true. I also sometimes do things like double-crux with people with fairly different world views, but even there, it feels like the goal is to collect new ways to think, rather than to change my mind. I think that for this task a small amount of focusing on people who disagree with you is pretty helpful, but even then, I think I get the most out of people who disagree with me a little bit, because I am more likely to be able to actually pick something up. Further, my focus is not really on actually understanding the other person, I just want to find new ways to think, so I will often translate things to something near by my ontology, and thus learn a lot, but still not be able to pass an ideological Turing test.
On the other hand, when you are not trying to find new stuff, but instead e.g. evaluate various different hypotheses about AI timelines, I think it is very important to try to understand views that are very far from your own, and take steps to avoid echo chamber effects. It is important to understand the view, the way the other person understands it, not just the way that conveniently fits with your ontology. This is my guess at the relevant skills, but I do not actually identify as especially good at this task. I am much better at generation, and I do a lot of outside-view style thinking here.
However, I think that currently, AI safety disagreements are not about two people having mostly the same ontology and disagreeing on some important variables, but rather trying to communicate across very different ontologies. This means that we have to build bridges, and the skills start to look more like generation skill. It doesn’t help to just say, “Oh, this other person thinks I am wrong, I should be less confident.” You actually have to turn that into something more productive, which means building new concepts, and a new ontology in which the views can productively dialogue. Actually talking to the person you are trying to bridge to is useful, but I think so is retreating to your echo chamber, and trying to make progress on just becoming less confused yourself.
For me, there is a handful of people who I think of as having very different views from me on AI safety, but are still close enough that I feel like I can understand them at all. When I think about how to communicate, I mostly think about bridging the gap to these people (which already feels like and impossibly hard task), and not as much the people that are really far away. Most of these people I would describe as sharing the philosophical stance I said MIRI selects for, but probably not all.
If I were focusing on resolving strategic disagreements, I would try to interact a lot more than I currently do with people who disagree with me. Currently, I am choosing to focus more on just trying to figure out how minds work in theory, which means I only interact with people who disagree with me a little. (Indeed, I currently also only interact with people who agree with me a little bit, and so am usually in an especially strong echo chamber, which is my own head.)
However, I feel pretty doomy about my current path, and might soon go back to trying to figure out what I should do, which means trying to leave the echo chamber. Often when I do this, I neither produce anything great nor change my mind, and eventually give up and go back to doing the doomy thing where at least I make some progress (at the task of figuring out how minds work in theory, which may or may not end up translating to AI safety at all).
Basically, I already do quite a bit of the “Here are a bunch of people who are about as smart as I am, and have thought about this a bunch, and have a whole bunch of views that differ from me and from each other. I should be not that confident” (although I should often take actions that are indistinguishable from confidence, since that is how you work with your inside view.) But learning from disagreements more than that is just really hard, and I don’t know how to do it, and I don’t think spending more time with them fixes it on its own. I think this would be my top priority if I had a strategy I was optimistic about, but I don’t, and so instead, I am trying to figure out how minds work, which seems like it might be useful for a bunch of different paths. (I feel like I have some learned helplessness here, but I think everyone else (not just MIRI) is also failing to learn (new ontologies, rather than just noticing mistakes) from disagreements, which makes me think it is actually pretty hard.)
I believe they are saying that cheering for seeking out disagreement is learned helplessness as opposed to doing a cost-benefit analysis about seeking out disagreement. I am not sure I get that part either.
I was also confused reading the comment, thinking that maybe they copied the wrong paragraph, and meant the 2nd paragraph.
I am interested in the fact that you find the comment so cult-y though, because I didn’t pick that up.
It’s a fairly incoherent comment which argues that we shouldn’t work to overcome our biases or engage with people outside our group, with strawmanning that seems really flimsy… and it has a bunch of upvotes. Seems like curiosity, argument, and humility are out, and hubris is in.