so okay i’m actually annoyed by a thing… lemme see if i can articulate it.
I clearly have orders of magnitude more of the relevant evidence to ascertain a claim about MAPLE’s chances of producing ‘crazy’ ppl as you’ve defined—and much more even than most MAPLE people (both current and former).
Plus I have much of the relevant evidence about my own ability to discern the truth (which includes all the feedback I’ve received, the way people generally treat me, who takes me seriously, how often people seem to want to back away from me or tune me out when I start talking, etc etc).
A bunch of speculators, with relatively very little evidence about either, come out with very strong takes on both of the above, and don’t seem to want to take into account EITHER of the above facts, but instead find it super easy to dismiss any of the evidence that comes from people with the relevant data. Because of said ‘possibility they are crazy’.
And so there is almost no way out of this stupid box,; this does not incline me to try to share any evidence I have, and in general, reasonable people advise me against it. And I’m of the same opinion. It’s a trap to try.
It is both easy and an attractor for ppl to take anything I say and twist it into more evidence for THEIR biased or speculative ideas, and to take things I say as somehow further evidence that I’ve just been brainwashed. And then they take me less seriously. Which then further disinclines me to share any of my evidence. And so forth.
This is not a sane, productive, and working epistemic process? As far as I can tell?
Literally I was like “I have strong evidence” and Ben’s inclination was to say “strong evidence is easy to come by / is everywhere” and links to a relevant LW article, somehow dismissing everything I said previously and might say in the future with one swoop. It effectively shut me down.
And I’m like.…
what is this “epistemic process” ya’ll are engaged in
[Edit: I misinterpreted Ben’s meaning. He was saying the opposite of what I thought he meant. Sorry, Ben. Another case of ‘better wrong than vague’ for me. 😅]
To me, it looks like [ya’ll] are using a potentially endless list of back-pocket heuristics and ‘points’ to justify what is convenient for you to continue believing. And it really seems like it has a strong emotional / feeling component that is not being owned.
[edit: you → ya’ll to make it clearer this isn’t about Oliver]
I sense a kind of self-protection or self-preservation thing. Like there’s zero chance of getting access to the true Alief in there. That’s why this is pointless for me.
Also, a lot of online talk about MAPLE is sooo far from realistic that it would, in fact, make me sound crazy to try to refute it. A totally nonsensical view is actually weirdly hard to counter, esp if the people aren’t being very intellectually honest AND the people don’t care enough to make an effort or stick through it all the way to the end.
I mean, I am not sure what you want me to do. If I had taken people at their word when I was concerned about them or the organizations they were part of, and just believed them on their answer on whether they will do reckless or dangerous or crazy things in the future, I would have gotten every single one of the cases I know about wrong.
Like, it’s not impossible but seems very rare that when I am concerned about the kind of thing I am concerned about here and say “hey I am worried that you will do a crazy thing” that my interlocutor goes “yeah, I totally might do a crazy thing”. So the odds ratio on someone saying “trust me, I am fine” is just totally flat, and doesn’t help me distinguish between the different worlds.
So would a sane, productive and epistemic process just take you at your word? I don’t think so, that seems pretty naive to me. But I have trouble reading your comment as asking for anything else. As you yourself say, you haven’t given me any additional evidence, and you don’t want to go into the details.
I also don’t know what things you are claiming about my psychology here. I haven’t made many comments on Maple or you, and the ones I have made seem reasonably grounded to me, so I don’t know on what basis you are accusing me of “endless list of back-pocket heuristics and points”. I don’t know how it’s convenient for me to think that my friends and allies and various institutions around me tend to do reckless and dangerous things at alarming rates. Indeed, it makes me very sad and I really wish it wasn’t so.
To be clear, I wouldn’t particularly dismiss concrete evidence you give about MAPLE being a fine environment to be in. I would be surprised if you e.g. lied about verifiable facts, and would update if you told me about the everyday life there (of course I don’t know in which direction I would update, since I would have already updated if I could predict that, but I don’t feel like evidence you are giving me is screened off by me being concerned about you going ‘crazy’ in the relevant ways, though of course I am expecting various forms of filtered evidence which will make the updates a bit messier)
I think if you ask people a question like, “Are you planning on going off and doing something / believing in something crazy?”, they will, generally speaking, say “no” to that, and that is roughly more likely the more isomorphic your question is to that, even if you didn’t exactly word it that way. My guess is that it was at least heavily implied that you meant “crazy” by the way you worded it.
To be clear, they might have said “yes” (that they will go and do the thing you think is crazy), but I doubt they will internally represent that thing or wanting to do it as “crazy.” Thus the answer is probably going to be one of, “no” (as a partial lie, where no indirectly points to the crazy assertion), or “yes” (also as a partial lie, pointing to taking the action).
In practice, people have a very hard time instantiating the status identifier “crazy” on themselves, and I don’t think that can be easily dismissed.
I think the utility of the word “crazy” is heavily overestimated by you, given that there are many situations where the word cannot be used the same way by the people relevant to the conversation in which it is used. Words should have the same meaning to the people in the conversation, and since some people using this word are guaranteed to perceive it as hostile and some are not, that causes it to have asymmetrical meaning inherently.
I also think you’ve brought in too much risk of “throwing stones in a glass house” here. The LW memespace is, in my estimation, full of ideas besides Roko’s Basilisk that I would also consider “crazy” in the same sense that I believe you mean it: Wrong ideas which are also harmful and cause a lot of distress.
Pessimism, submitting to failure and defeat, high “p(doom)”, both MIRI and CFAR giving up (by considering the problems they wish to solve too inherently difficult, rather than concluding they must be wrong about something), and people being worried that they are “net negative” despite their best intentions, are all (IMO) pretty much the same type of “crazy” that you’re worried about.
Our major difference, I believe, is in why we think these wrong ideas persist, and what causes them to be generated in the first place. The ones I’ve mentioned don’t seem to be caused by individuals suddenly going nuts against the grain of their egregore.
I know this is a problem you’ve mentioned before and consider it both important and unsolved, but I think it would be odd to notice both that it seems to be notably worse in the LW community, but also to only be the result of individuals going crazy on their own (and thus to conclude that the community’s overall sanity can be reliably increased by ejecting those people).
By the way, I think “sanity” is a certain type of feature which is considerably “smooth under expectation” which means roughly that if p(person = insane) = 25%, that person should appear to be roughly 25% insane in most interactions. In other words, it’s not the kind of probability where they appear to be sane most of the time, but you suspect that they might have gone nuts in some way that’s hard to see or they might be hiding it.
The flip side of that is that if they only appear to be, say, 10% crazy in most interactions, then I would lower your assessment of their insanity to basically that much.
I still find this feature, however, not altogether that useful, but using it this way is still preferable over a binary feature.
I also think you’ve brought in too much risk of “throwing stones in a glass house” here. The LW memespace is, in my estimation, full of ideas (...) that I would also consider “crazy”
That seems to me like an extra reason to keep “throwing stones”. To make clear the line between the kind of “crazy” that rationalists enjoy, and the kind of “crazy” that is the opposite.
As an insurance, just in the (hopefully unlikely) case that tomorrow Unreal goes on a shooting spree, I would like to have it in writing—before it happened—that it happened because of ideas that the rationalist community disapproves of.
Otherwise, the first thing everyone will do is: “see, another rationalist gone crazy”. And whatever objection we make afterwards, it will be like “yeah, now that the person is a bad PR, everyone says ‘comrades, this is not true rationalism, the true rationalism has never been tried’, but previously no one saw a problem with them”.
(I am exaggerating a lot, of course. Also, this is not a comment on Unreal specifically, just on the value of calling out “crazy” memes, despite being perceived as “crazy” ourselves.)
The ‘endless list’ comment wasn’t about you, it was a more ‘general you’. Sorry that wasn’t clear. I edited stuff out and then that became unclear.
I mostly wanted to point at something frustrating for me, in the hopes that you or others would, like, get something about my experience here. To show how trapped this process is, on my end.
I don’t need you to fix it for me. I don’t need you to change.
I don’t need you to take me for my word. You are welcome to write me off, it’s your choice.
I had written a longer comment, illustrating how Oliver was basically committing the thing that I was complaining about and why this is frustrating.
The shorter version:
His first paragraph is a strawman. I never said ‘take me at my word’ or anything close. And all previous statements from me and knowing anything about my stances would point to this being something I would never say, so this seems weirdly disingenuous.
His second paragraph is weirdly flimsy, implying that ppl are mostly using the literal words out of people’s mouths to determine whether they’re lying (either to others or to themselves). I would be surprised if Oliver would actually find Alice and Bob both saying “trust me i’m fine” would be ‘totally flat’ data, given he probably has to discern deception on a regular basis.
Also I’m not exactly the ‘trust me i’m fine’ type, and anyone who knows me would know that about me, if they bothered trying to remember. I have both the skill of introspection and the character trait of frankness. I would reveal plenty about my motives, aliefs, the crazier parts of me, etc. So paragraph 2 sounds like a flimsy excuse to be avoidant?
But the IMPORTANT thing is… I don’t want to argue. I wasn’t interested in that. I was hoping for something closer to perspective-taking, reconciliation, or reaching more clarity about our relational status. But I get that I was sounding argumentative. I was being openly frustrated and directing that in your general direction. Apologies for creating that tension.
FTR, the reason I am engaging with LW at all, like right now…
I’m not that interested in preserving or saving MAPLE’s shoddy reputation with you guys.
But I remain deeply devoted to the rationalists, in my heart. And I’m impacted by what you guys do. A bunch of my close friends are among you. And… you’re engaging in this world situation, which impacts all of us. And I care about this group of people in general. I really feel a kinship here I haven’t felt anywhere else. I can relax around this group in a way I can’t elsewhere.
I concern myself with your norms, your ethical conduct, etc. I wish well for you, and wish you to do right by yourselves, each other, and the world. The way you conduct yourselves has big implications. Big implications for impacts to me, my friends, the world, the future of the world.
You’ve chosen a certain level of global-scale responsibility, and so I’m going to treat you like you’re AT THAT LEVEL. The highest possible levels with a very high set of expectations. I hold myself AT LEAST to that high of a standard, to be honest, so it’s not hypocritical.
And you can write me off, totally. No problem.
But in my culture, friends concern themselves with their friends’ conduct. And I see you as friends. More or less.
If you write me off (and you know me personally), please do me the honor of letting me know. Ideally to my face. If you don’t feel you are gonna do that / don’t owe me that, then it would help me to know that also.
Literally I was like “I have strong evidence” and Ben’s inclination was to say “strong evidence is easy to come by / is everywhere” and links to a relevant LW article, somehow dismissing everything I said previously and might say in the future with one swoop. It effectively shut me down.
Oh, this is a miscommunication. The thing I was intending to communicate when I linked to that post was that it is indeed plausible that you have observed strong evidence and that your confidence that you are in a healthy environment is accurate. I am saying that I think it is not in-principle odd or questionable to have very confident beliefs. I did not mean this to dismiss your belief, but to say the opposite, that your belief is totally plausible!
Oh, okay, I found that a confusing way to communicate that? But thanks for clarifying. I will update my comment so that it doesn’t make you sound like you did something very dismissive.
I feel embarrassed by this misinterpretation, and the implied state of mind I was in. But I believe it is an honest reflection about something in my state of mind, around this subject. Sigh.
so okay i’m actually annoyed by a thing… lemme see if i can articulate it.
I clearly have orders of magnitude more of the relevant evidence to ascertain a claim about MAPLE’s chances of producing ‘crazy’ ppl as you’ve defined—and much more even than most MAPLE people (both current and former).
Plus I have much of the relevant evidence about my own ability to discern the truth (which includes all the feedback I’ve received, the way people generally treat me, who takes me seriously, how often people seem to want to back away from me or tune me out when I start talking, etc etc).
A bunch of speculators, with relatively very little evidence about either, come out with very strong takes on both of the above, and don’t seem to want to take into account EITHER of the above facts, but instead find it super easy to dismiss any of the evidence that comes from people with the relevant data. Because of said ‘possibility they are crazy’.
And so there is almost no way out of this stupid box,; this does not incline me to try to share any evidence I have, and in general, reasonable people advise me against it. And I’m of the same opinion. It’s a trap to try.
It is both easy and an attractor for ppl to take anything I say and twist it into more evidence for THEIR biased or speculative ideas, and to take things I say as somehow further evidence that I’ve just been brainwashed. And then they take me less seriously. Which then further disinclines me to share any of my evidence. And so forth.
This is not a sane, productive, and working epistemic process? As far as I can tell?
Literally I was like “I have strong evidence” and Ben’s inclination was to say “strong evidence is easy to come by / is everywhere” and links to a relevant LW article, somehow dismissing everything I said previously andmightsay in the future with one swoop. It effectively shut me down.And I’m like.…what is this “epistemic process” ya’ll are engaged in[Edit: I misinterpreted Ben’s meaning. He was saying the opposite of what I thought he meant. Sorry, Ben. Another case of ‘better wrong than vague’ for me. 😅]
To me, it looks like [ya’ll] are using a potentially endless list of back-pocket heuristics and ‘points’ to justify what is convenient for you to continue believing. And it really seems like it has a strong emotional / feeling component that is not being owned.
[edit: you → ya’ll to make it clearer this isn’t about Oliver]
I sense a kind of self-protection or self-preservation thing. Like there’s zero chance of getting access to the true Alief in there. That’s why this is pointless for me.
Also, a lot of online talk about MAPLE is sooo far from realistic that it would, in fact, make me sound crazy to try to refute it. A totally nonsensical view is actually weirdly hard to counter, esp if the people aren’t being very intellectually honest AND the people don’t care enough to make an effort or stick through it all the way to the end.
I mean, I am not sure what you want me to do. If I had taken people at their word when I was concerned about them or the organizations they were part of, and just believed them on their answer on whether they will do reckless or dangerous or crazy things in the future, I would have gotten every single one of the cases I know about wrong.
Like, it’s not impossible but seems very rare that when I am concerned about the kind of thing I am concerned about here and say “hey I am worried that you will do a crazy thing” that my interlocutor goes “yeah, I totally might do a crazy thing”. So the odds ratio on someone saying “trust me, I am fine” is just totally flat, and doesn’t help me distinguish between the different worlds.
So would a sane, productive and epistemic process just take you at your word? I don’t think so, that seems pretty naive to me. But I have trouble reading your comment as asking for anything else. As you yourself say, you haven’t given me any additional evidence, and you don’t want to go into the details.
I also don’t know what things you are claiming about my psychology here. I haven’t made many comments on Maple or you, and the ones I have made seem reasonably grounded to me, so I don’t know on what basis you are accusing me of “endless list of back-pocket heuristics and points”. I don’t know how it’s convenient for me to think that my friends and allies and various institutions around me tend to do reckless and dangerous things at alarming rates. Indeed, it makes me very sad and I really wish it wasn’t so.
To be clear, I wouldn’t particularly dismiss concrete evidence you give about MAPLE being a fine environment to be in. I would be surprised if you e.g. lied about verifiable facts, and would update if you told me about the everyday life there (of course I don’t know in which direction I would update, since I would have already updated if I could predict that, but I don’t feel like evidence you are giving me is screened off by me being concerned about you going ‘crazy’ in the relevant ways, though of course I am expecting various forms of filtered evidence which will make the updates a bit messier)
I think if you ask people a question like, “Are you planning on going off and doing something / believing in something crazy?”, they will, generally speaking, say “no” to that, and that is roughly more likely the more isomorphic your question is to that, even if you didn’t exactly word it that way. My guess is that it was at least heavily implied that you meant “crazy” by the way you worded it.
To be clear, they might have said “yes” (that they will go and do the thing you think is crazy), but I doubt they will internally represent that thing or wanting to do it as “crazy.” Thus the answer is probably going to be one of, “no” (as a partial lie, where no indirectly points to the crazy assertion), or “yes” (also as a partial lie, pointing to taking the action).
In practice, people have a very hard time instantiating the status identifier “crazy” on themselves, and I don’t think that can be easily dismissed.
I think the utility of the word “crazy” is heavily overestimated by you, given that there are many situations where the word cannot be used the same way by the people relevant to the conversation in which it is used. Words should have the same meaning to the people in the conversation, and since some people using this word are guaranteed to perceive it as hostile and some are not, that causes it to have asymmetrical meaning inherently.
I also think you’ve brought in too much risk of “throwing stones in a glass house” here. The LW memespace is, in my estimation, full of ideas besides Roko’s Basilisk that I would also consider “crazy” in the same sense that I believe you mean it: Wrong ideas which are also harmful and cause a lot of distress.
Pessimism, submitting to failure and defeat, high “p(doom)”, both MIRI and CFAR giving up (by considering the problems they wish to solve too inherently difficult, rather than concluding they must be wrong about something), and people being worried that they are “net negative” despite their best intentions, are all (IMO) pretty much the same type of “crazy” that you’re worried about.
Our major difference, I believe, is in why we think these wrong ideas persist, and what causes them to be generated in the first place. The ones I’ve mentioned don’t seem to be caused by individuals suddenly going nuts against the grain of their egregore.
I know this is a problem you’ve mentioned before and consider it both important and unsolved, but I think it would be odd to notice both that it seems to be notably worse in the LW community, but also to only be the result of individuals going crazy on their own (and thus to conclude that the community’s overall sanity can be reliably increased by ejecting those people).
By the way, I think “sanity” is a certain type of feature which is considerably “smooth under expectation” which means roughly that if p(person = insane) = 25%, that person should appear to be roughly 25% insane in most interactions. In other words, it’s not the kind of probability where they appear to be sane most of the time, but you suspect that they might have gone nuts in some way that’s hard to see or they might be hiding it.
The flip side of that is that if they only appear to be, say, 10% crazy in most interactions, then I would lower your assessment of their insanity to basically that much.
I still find this feature, however, not altogether that useful, but using it this way is still preferable over a binary feature.
That seems to me like an extra reason to keep “throwing stones”. To make clear the line between the kind of “crazy” that rationalists enjoy, and the kind of “crazy” that is the opposite.
As an insurance, just in the (hopefully unlikely) case that tomorrow Unreal goes on a shooting spree, I would like to have it in writing—before it happened—that it happened because of ideas that the rationalist community disapproves of.
Otherwise, the first thing everyone will do is: “see, another rationalist gone crazy”. And whatever objection we make afterwards, it will be like “yeah, now that the person is a bad PR, everyone says ‘comrades, this is not true rationalism, the true rationalism has never been tried’, but previously no one saw a problem with them”.
(I am exaggerating a lot, of course. Also, this is not a comment on Unreal specifically, just on the value of calling out “crazy” memes, despite being perceived as “crazy” ourselves.)
The ‘endless list’ comment wasn’t about you, it was a more ‘general you’. Sorry that wasn’t clear. I edited stuff out and then that became unclear.
I mostly wanted to point at something frustrating for me, in the hopes that you or others would, like, get something about my experience here. To show how trapped this process is, on my end.
I don’t need you to fix it for me. I don’t need you to change.
I don’t need you to take me for my word. You are welcome to write me off, it’s your choice.
I just wanted to show how I am and why.
I had written a longer comment, illustrating how Oliver was basically committing the thing that I was complaining about and why this is frustrating.
The shorter version:
His first paragraph is a strawman. I never said ‘take me at my word’ or anything close. And all previous statements from me and knowing anything about my stances would point to this being something I would never say, so this seems weirdly disingenuous.
His second paragraph is weirdly flimsy, implying that ppl are mostly using the literal words out of people’s mouths to determine whether they’re lying (either to others or to themselves). I would be surprised if Oliver would actually find Alice and Bob both saying “trust me i’m fine” would be ‘totally flat’ data, given he probably has to discern deception on a regular basis.
Also I’m not exactly the ‘trust me i’m fine’ type, and anyone who knows me would know that about me, if they bothered trying to remember. I have both the skill of introspection and the character trait of frankness. I would reveal plenty about my motives, aliefs, the crazier parts of me, etc. So paragraph 2 sounds like a flimsy excuse to be avoidant?
But the IMPORTANT thing is… I don’t want to argue. I wasn’t interested in that. I was hoping for something closer to perspective-taking, reconciliation, or reaching more clarity about our relational status. But I get that I was sounding argumentative. I was being openly frustrated and directing that in your general direction. Apologies for creating that tension.
FTR, the reason I am engaging with LW at all, like right now…
I’m not that interested in preserving or saving MAPLE’s shoddy reputation with you guys.
But I remain deeply devoted to the rationalists, in my heart. And I’m impacted by what you guys do. A bunch of my close friends are among you. And… you’re engaging in this world situation, which impacts all of us. And I care about this group of people in general. I really feel a kinship here I haven’t felt anywhere else. I can relax around this group in a way I can’t elsewhere.
I concern myself with your norms, your ethical conduct, etc. I wish well for you, and wish you to do right by yourselves, each other, and the world. The way you conduct yourselves has big implications. Big implications for impacts to me, my friends, the world, the future of the world.
You’ve chosen a certain level of global-scale responsibility, and so I’m going to treat you like you’re AT THAT LEVEL. The highest possible levels with a very high set of expectations. I hold myself AT LEAST to that high of a standard, to be honest, so it’s not hypocritical.
And you can write me off, totally. No problem.
But in my culture, friends concern themselves with their friends’ conduct. And I see you as friends. More or less.
If you write me off (and you know me personally), please do me the honor of letting me know. Ideally to my face. If you don’t feel you are gonna do that / don’t owe me that, then it would help me to know that also.
Oh, this is a miscommunication. The thing I was intending to communicate when I linked to that post was that it is indeed plausible that you have observed strong evidence and that your confidence that you are in a healthy environment is accurate. I am saying that I think it is not in-principle odd or questionable to have very confident beliefs. I did not mean this to dismiss your belief, but to say the opposite, that your belief is totally plausible!
Oh, okay, I found that a confusing way to communicate that? But thanks for clarifying. I will update my comment so that it doesn’t make you sound like you did something very dismissive.
I feel embarrassed by this misinterpretation, and the implied state of mind I was in. But I believe it is an honest reflection about something in my state of mind, around this subject. Sigh.