But, well, I’m not sure what alternative theory of people’s behavior that you (Richard) think I should be embracing instead.
I’d be really very surprised if you hadn’t before heard the argument about nobody having infinite time, bad signal:noise ratios, etc. In fact I’m confident I’ve made this argument to you sometime in the last ~year. Of course, resolving that one would require digging into object-level details, which hasn’t exactly been a fruitful endeavour in the past, maybe because of different thresholds that various individuals have for what signal:noise ratio they find tolerable, and the contingent facts about reality that permit people with different thresholds from you in particular to successfully contribute to advancing the state of human knowledge, even if they don’t want to deal with random nutpickers who once in a blue moon will point out a meaningful error in their post, while their other 100 comments are wrong, confused by something that almost nobody else is confused by, focusing on some random triviality that isn’t load-bearing for the core argument… etc. (Numbers made up; I am, again, establishing some least convenient possible world so that we can skip to the part where we agree that there’s a spectrum and get to arguing about where on the spectrum we should live.)
Perhaps you think that Richard doesn’t endorse this argument, and so you shouldn’t bother to bring it up as a hypothesis? But you asked about what theory you should be embracing. I propose the above theory: I don’t believe you’ve provided much evidence (that I can recall) that your threshold is, in this way, better for advancing the state of rationality/the frontier of human knowledge/etc.
resolving that one would require digging into object-level details, which hasn’t exactly been a fruitful endeavour in the past,
I do wonder if there’s some way to make this kind of debate something like an order of magnitude more efficient using LLMs. By “this kind” I mean “a big huge sprawling debate across many different posts and comments through years, where one or more interlocutors keep forgetting bits about another interlocutor’s perspective and/or not understanding it well enough to bring the relevant facts & arguments to bear in a progressful context for thinking it through”. The help I’m imagining is something like “scrape a big database of all posts and all comments involved in the debate; then have one or more participants talk to an LLM with things like....
how would the other side respond to this; use quotations from their past writing
arguing against the other side with LLM as devil’s advocate
doing ITTs
asking if the other side has addressed X
asking if the other side seems to understand X, care about X, etc.
etc.
....until they reach quasi-equilibrium with something they actually want to put directly to another person. Maybe more efficient because it reduces redundant labor on both sides, and in particular helps with the annoying “routing” task where two clashing perspectives keep having to figure out which standard paragraph from its own perspective’s library of paragraphs is relevant to whatever the other person is confused about. (And maybe psychically easier to argue with a neutral LLM where you don’t have to be defending yourself, upholding boundaries, prosecuting a conflict, etc.)
In fact I’m confident I’ve made this argument to you sometime in the last ~year.
Indeed, it was only 84 days ago. I’m listening if you have a response to my last comment in that thread, in which I agreed that censorship to maintain the signal-to-noise threshold is good. I then linked to a compilation of Achmiz’s favorites of his own comments and offered the judgments of myself and Jessica Taylor that Achmiz’s work is well above the threshold of being worthy of published on Less Wrong.
Now, maybe you think Taylor (former MIRI employee, inventor of quantilizers and co-author of the logical induction paper, and 7x Curated author) and I (9x Curated, 4x Best of Less Wrong, 3x Less Online invited author) have terrible judgment about what advances the state of rationality/the frontier of human knowledge/&c. Is that your position? Happy to dig into the details if you want.
I’d be really very surprised if you hadn’t before heard the argument about nobody having infinite time, bad signal:noise ratios, etc. In fact I’m confident I’ve made this argument to you sometime in the last ~year. Of course, resolving that one would require digging into object-level details, which hasn’t exactly been a fruitful endeavour in the past, maybe because of different thresholds that various individuals have for what signal:noise ratio they find tolerable, and the contingent facts about reality that permit people with different thresholds from you in particular to successfully contribute to advancing the state of human knowledge, even if they don’t want to deal with random nutpickers who once in a blue moon will point out a meaningful error in their post, while their other 100 comments are wrong, confused by something that almost nobody else is confused by, focusing on some random triviality that isn’t load-bearing for the core argument… etc. (Numbers made up; I am, again, establishing some least convenient possible world so that we can skip to the part where we agree that there’s a spectrum and get to arguing about where on the spectrum we should live.)
Perhaps you think that Richard doesn’t endorse this argument, and so you shouldn’t bother to bring it up as a hypothesis? But you asked about what theory you should be embracing. I propose the above theory: I don’t believe you’ve provided much evidence (that I can recall) that your threshold is, in this way, better for advancing the state of rationality/the frontier of human knowledge/etc.
I do wonder if there’s some way to make this kind of debate something like an order of magnitude more efficient using LLMs. By “this kind” I mean “a big huge sprawling debate across many different posts and comments through years, where one or more interlocutors keep forgetting bits about another interlocutor’s perspective and/or not understanding it well enough to bring the relevant facts & arguments to bear in a progressful context for thinking it through”. The help I’m imagining is something like “scrape a big database of all posts and all comments involved in the debate; then have one or more participants talk to an LLM with things like....
how would the other side respond to this; use quotations from their past writing
arguing against the other side with LLM as devil’s advocate
doing ITTs
asking if the other side has addressed X
asking if the other side seems to understand X, care about X, etc.
etc.
....until they reach quasi-equilibrium with something they actually want to put directly to another person. Maybe more efficient because it reduces redundant labor on both sides, and in particular helps with the annoying “routing” task where two clashing perspectives keep having to figure out which standard paragraph from its own perspective’s library of paragraphs is relevant to whatever the other person is confused about. (And maybe psychically easier to argue with a neutral LLM where you don’t have to be defending yourself, upholding boundaries, prosecuting a conflict, etc.)
Indeed, it was only 84 days ago. I’m listening if you have a response to my last comment in that thread, in which I agreed that censorship to maintain the signal-to-noise threshold is good. I then linked to a compilation of Achmiz’s favorites of his own comments and offered the judgments of myself and Jessica Taylor that Achmiz’s work is well above the threshold of being worthy of published on Less Wrong.
Now, maybe you think Taylor (former MIRI employee, inventor of quantilizers and co-author of the logical induction paper, and 7x Curated author) and I (9x Curated, 4x Best of Less Wrong, 3x Less Online invited author) have terrible judgment about what advances the state of rationality/the frontier of human knowledge/&c. Is that your position? Happy to dig into the details if you want.