Romney is rightfully being held, feet to fire, for a group battering of another student while they attended high school—because such sadism is a trait of character and can’t be explained otherwise.
I was going to upvote your comment until I got to this point. Aside from the general mindkilling, this looks like the fundamental attribution error, and moreover, we all know that people do in fact mature and change. Bringing up external politics is not helpul in a field where there’s already concern that AI issues may be becoming a mindkilling subject themselves on LW. Bringing up such a questionable one is even less useful.
That’s LW “rationality” training for you—”fundamental error of attribution” out of context—favored because it requires little knowledge and training in psychology. Such thinking would preclude any investigation of character. (And there are so many taboos! How do you all tolerate the lockstep communication required here?)
Paul Meehl, who famously studied clinical versus statistical prediction empirically, noted that even professionals, when confronted by instance of aberrant behavior, are apt to call it within normal range when it clearly isn’t. Knowledge of the “fundamental error of attribution” alone is the little bit of knowledge that’s worse than total ignorance.
Ask yourself honestly whether you would ever or have ever done anything comparable to what Yudkowsky did in the Roko incident or what Romney did in the hair cutting incident.
You can’t dismiss politics just because it kills some people’s minds, when so much of the available information and examples come from politics. (There are other reasons, but that’s the main one here.) Someone who can’t be rational about politics simply isn’t a good rationalist. You can’t be a rationalist about the unimportant things and rationalist about the important ones—yet call yourself a rationalist overall.
I’m sure I wouldn’t have done what Romney did, and not so sure about whether I would have done what Yudkowsky did. Romney wanted to hurt people for the fun of it. Yudkowsky was trying to keep people from being hurt, regardless of whether his choice was a good one.
It seems almost unfair to criticize something as a problem of LW rationality when in your second paragraph you note that professionals do the same thing.
Ask yourself honestly whether you would ever or have ever done anything comparable to what Yudkowsky did in the Roko incident or what Romney did in the hair cutting incident.
I’m not sure. A while ago, I was involved in a situation where someone wanted to put personal information of an individual up on the internet knowing that that person had an internet stalker who had a history of being a real life stalker for others. The only reason I didn’t react pretty close to how Eliezer reacted in the quoted incident is that I knew that the individual in question was not going to listen to me and would if anything have done the opposite of what I wanted. In that sort of context, Eliezer’s behavior doesn’t seem to be that extreme. Eliezer’s remarks involve slightly more caps than I think I would use in such a circumstance, but the language isn’t that different.
This does connect to another issue though- the scale in question of making heated comments on the internet as opposed to traumatic bullying, are different. The questions I ask myself for what it would take to do something similar to what Eliezer did are very different than the same questions for the Romney incident.
Your basic statement does it seem have some validity. One could argue that the Romney matter reflects the circumstances where he was at the time, and what was considered socially acceptable as forms of interaction or establishing dominance hierarchies. Through most of human history, that sort of behavior would probably be considered fairly tame. But this is a weak argument- even if it was due to the circumstances that Romney was in at the time, there’s no question that those were his formative years, and thus could plausibly have had a permanent impact on his moral outlook.
You can’t dismiss politics just because it kills some people’s minds, when so much of the available information and examples come from politics.
The problem is that even as relevant examples come from politics, those are precisely the examples that people are least likely to agree actually demonstrate the intended point in question. For example, in this case, many people who aren’t on the left will downplay the Romney bullying. Given that I’m someone who dislikes Romney (both in terms of personality and in terms of policy) and am not convinced that this is at all fair, using such a controversial example seems unwise. Even if one needs to use political examples, one can use examples from 10 or 15 or 30 years ago that are well known but have had their tribalness diminish in time. For example, in this context one could use a variety of examples connected to Richard Nixon.
Someone who can’t be rational about politics simply isn’t a good rationalist. You can’t be a rationalist about the unimportant things and rationalist about the important ones—yet call yourself a rationalist overall.
Well, we can acknowledge that we’re better at being rational in some areas than we are in others. Frankly, I wouldn’t mind and for reasons essentially similar to your remark would endorse some amount of reduction of the no-politics rule here. Where that becomes a problem is when one tries to connect politics to other potentially controversial issues.
When Mitt Romney was in high school, he and some friends bullied a kid who looked (and later turned out to be) homosexual. At one point, Romney and some others grabbed the guy, held him down, and cut off a bunch of his hair with scissors.
I was going to upvote your comment until I got to this point. Aside from the general mindkilling, this looks like the fundamental attribution error, and moreover, we all know that people do in fact mature and change. Bringing up external politics is not helpul in a field where there’s already concern that AI issues may be becoming a mindkilling subject themselves on LW. Bringing up such a questionable one is even less useful.
That’s LW “rationality” training for you—”fundamental error of attribution” out of context—favored because it requires little knowledge and training in psychology. Such thinking would preclude any investigation of character. (And there are so many taboos! How do you all tolerate the lockstep communication required here?)
Paul Meehl, who famously studied clinical versus statistical prediction empirically, noted that even professionals, when confronted by instance of aberrant behavior, are apt to call it within normal range when it clearly isn’t. Knowledge of the “fundamental error of attribution” alone is the little bit of knowledge that’s worse than total ignorance.
Ask yourself honestly whether you would ever or have ever done anything comparable to what Yudkowsky did in the Roko incident or what Romney did in the hair cutting incident.
You can’t dismiss politics just because it kills some people’s minds, when so much of the available information and examples come from politics. (There are other reasons, but that’s the main one here.) Someone who can’t be rational about politics simply isn’t a good rationalist. You can’t be a rationalist about the unimportant things and rationalist about the important ones—yet call yourself a rationalist overall.
I’m sure I wouldn’t have done what Romney did, and not so sure about whether I would have done what Yudkowsky did. Romney wanted to hurt people for the fun of it. Yudkowsky was trying to keep people from being hurt, regardless of whether his choice was a good one.
That’s a reasonable answer.
It seems almost unfair to criticize something as a problem of LW rationality when in your second paragraph you note that professionals do the same thing.
I’m not sure. A while ago, I was involved in a situation where someone wanted to put personal information of an individual up on the internet knowing that that person had an internet stalker who had a history of being a real life stalker for others. The only reason I didn’t react pretty close to how Eliezer reacted in the quoted incident is that I knew that the individual in question was not going to listen to me and would if anything have done the opposite of what I wanted. In that sort of context, Eliezer’s behavior doesn’t seem to be that extreme. Eliezer’s remarks involve slightly more caps than I think I would use in such a circumstance, but the language isn’t that different.
This does connect to another issue though- the scale in question of making heated comments on the internet as opposed to traumatic bullying, are different. The questions I ask myself for what it would take to do something similar to what Eliezer did are very different than the same questions for the Romney incident.
Your basic statement does it seem have some validity. One could argue that the Romney matter reflects the circumstances where he was at the time, and what was considered socially acceptable as forms of interaction or establishing dominance hierarchies. Through most of human history, that sort of behavior would probably be considered fairly tame. But this is a weak argument- even if it was due to the circumstances that Romney was in at the time, there’s no question that those were his formative years, and thus could plausibly have had a permanent impact on his moral outlook.
The problem is that even as relevant examples come from politics, those are precisely the examples that people are least likely to agree actually demonstrate the intended point in question. For example, in this case, many people who aren’t on the left will downplay the Romney bullying. Given that I’m someone who dislikes Romney (both in terms of personality and in terms of policy) and am not convinced that this is at all fair, using such a controversial example seems unwise. Even if one needs to use political examples, one can use examples from 10 or 15 or 30 years ago that are well known but have had their tribalness diminish in time. For example, in this context one could use a variety of examples connected to Richard Nixon.
Well, we can acknowledge that we’re better at being rational in some areas than we are in others. Frankly, I wouldn’t mind and for reasons essentially similar to your remark would endorse some amount of reduction of the no-politics rule here. Where that becomes a problem is when one tries to connect politics to other potentially controversial issues.
What’s that about? (PM me if it’s still taboo.)
When Mitt Romney was in high school, he and some friends bullied a kid who looked (and later turned out to be) homosexual. At one point, Romney and some others grabbed the guy, held him down, and cut off a bunch of his hair with scissors.