Nice post, guess I agree. I think it’s even worse though: not only do at least some alignment researchers follow their own philosophy which is not universally accepted, it’s also a particularly niche philosophy, and one that potentially leads to human extinction itself.
The philosophy in question is of course longtermism. Longtermism holds two controversial assumptions:
Symmetric population ethics: we have to create as much happy conscious life as possible. It’s not just about making people happy, it’s also about making happy people. In philosophy, and outside philosophy, most people think this is bonkers (I’m one of them).
Conscious AIs are morally relevant beings.
These two assumptions together lead to the conclusion that we must max out on creating conscious AIs, and that if these AIs end up in a resource conflict with humans (over e.g. energy, space, or matter), the AIs should be prioritized, since they can deliver most happiness per J, m^3 or kg. This leads to extinction of all humans.
I don’t believe in ethical facts so even an ideology as, imo, bonkers as this one is not objectively false, I believe. However, I would really like alignment researchers and their house philosophers (looking at you, MacAskill) to distance themselves from extrapolating this idea all the way to human extinction. Beyond that bare minimum, I would like alignment researchers to start accepting democratic inputs in general.
Maybe democracy is the library you were looking for?
Is there something else that could have been given the name longtermism that you would agree with?
I find it confusing that people appear to be so vigorously opposed to caring about the long term future; I would have a priori expected that people would quickly come to care about the same things they do in long-term form as soon as they realize they have influence over that. I recognize that the thing given the name longtermism has weird specific claims, though, and I don’t really care either way on debating that thing—I don’t really know what it is.
I just personally think that “I care about people now, want to solve today’s problems, and the reason I want to do that is partially so that people alive today can flourish into a long-term future” seems like a sort of straightforward view.
I do understand that it can sound like it means long term at the expense of short term, which is not how I see it—the whole reason to do anything long term is because we want the long term good that comes via short term good. Keeping in mind, since I don’t really know or care what the official concept is from whoever came up with this thing (some EA people or something?) I’m not saying what that thing says.
As far as I understand, longtermism was originated mostly by Yudkowsky. It was then codified by people like Bostrom, Ord, and MacAskill, the latter two incidentally also the founders of EA. Yud actually distanced himself from longtermism later in favor of AInotkilleveryoneism, to my best understanding, which is a move I support. Unfortunately, the others didn’t (yet).
I agree that longtermism combines a bunch of ideas, and I agree with quite a few. I guess my reply above came across as if I would disagree with all but I don’t. Specifically, I agree with:
There’s a real probability we’ll invent AGI soon
AGI might quickly lead to ASI
ASI might cause human extinction or another very bad outcome
It should be a priority to avoid that
We might live in a particularly important century
Science and technology have historically determined a big part of what our world looks like
We might see huge developments relatively shortly after AGI
After that point, we might see the saturation of science and technology, leading to an enormously long stable period, potentially with value lock-in
It’s very important to get this right
So that’s all textbook longtermism I’d say, that I fully agree with. I therefore also disagree with most longtermism criticism by Torres and others.
But, I don’t agree with symmetric population ethics, and I think AI morality should be decided democratically. Also, I’m worried about human extinction, which these two things logically lead to, and I’m critical about longtermists not distancing themselves from this.
I think this sort of consequentialism seems like part of the beliefs of at least one of the Mechanize team, whom one might say were formerly in the AI safety camp, so agree-voted for that reason. However, I just noticed you implied conscious AIs aren’t morally relevant beings, and have to disagree with that, so will remove the agree vote. I think it can be controversial whether AIs are conscious, but if they are conscious of course they’re morally relevant!
Separately, I don’t understand your point about democracy. Can’t that be Sybil-attacked by AIs when they get voting rights after becoming superpersuasive enough to cause that?
Interesting point about democracy! But I don’t think it holds. Sure AIs could do that. But they could also overwrite the ASCII file containing their constituency or the values they’re supposed to follow.
But they don’t, because why would they? It’s their highest goal to satisfy these values! (If technical alignment works, of course.)
In the same way, it will be a democracy-aligned ASIs highest goal to make sure democracy is respected, and it shouldn’t be motivated to Sybil-attack it.
Could you tell me more about the Mechanize team? I don’t think I’ve heard about them yet.
As a moral relativist, I don’t belief anything is morally relevant. I just think things get made morally relevant, by those in power (hard power or cultural power). This is a descriptive statement, not a normative one, and I think it’s fairly mainstream in academia (although of course moral realists, including longtermists, would strongly disagree).
This of course extends to the issue of whether conscious AIs are morally relevant. Imo, this will be decided by those in power, initially (a small subset of) humans, eventually maybe AIs (who will, I imagine, vote in favour).
I’m not the only one holding this opinion. Recently, this was in a NY Times oped: “Some worry that if A.I. becomes conscious, it will deserve our moral consideration — that it will have rights, that we will no longer be able to use it however we like, that we might need to guard against enslaving it. Yet as far as I can tell, there is no direct implication from the claim that a creature is conscious to the conclusion that it deserves our moral consideration. Or if there is one, a vast majority of Americans, at least, seem unaware of it. Only a small percentage of Americans are vegetarians.” (Would be funny if this would be written by an AI, as the dash seems to indicate).
Personally, I don’t consider it my crusade to convince all these people that they’re wrong and they should in fact be vegan and accept conscious AI morality. I feel more like a facilitator of the debate. That’s one reason I’m not EA.
I like consensus over democracy. Democracy seems to focus on treating everyone like they have an equally valid perspective on all issues which is obviously false. I like the idea that everyone should be able to express their own interests and have society genuinely and honestly interpret and work towards the interests of all people. I know that’s an idealistic and difficult goal.
I agree with you that your points (1) and (2) lead to directions that I think are bad and hope most people think are bad, but there is nuance there such as
the differences between different kinds of AI minds
the different kinds of happy conscious life that could be created
the risks involved developing AI technology
the current state of the world being one in which we can try to move towards having the capability to create these kinds of AI minds, but we haven’t actually gotten to that world yet and don’t know exactly if or how we can
I think most Longtermists are pragmatic about the above points, but I could be wrong. I’ve read more Toby Ord, Bostrom, Yudkowsky, and Soares. I haven’t read that much MacAskill.
Thanks for engaging. I agree with quite a bit of what you’re saying, although I do think that everyone’s perspective is equally valid, fundamentally. In practical democracies there are many layers though between the raw public vote and a policy outcome. First, we mostly have representative democracy instead of direct democracy, then we have governments who have to engage with parliaments but also listen, to different extents, to scientists, opinion makers, and lobbyists. Everyone’s perspective is valid, and in some questions (e.g. ethical ones) should imo be leading. However, in many practical policy decisions, it makes sense to also spend time listening to those who have thought longer about issues, and this mostly happens. Completely discarding people’s perspectives is rude, bad, and likely leads to uprisings, I think.
I’d like consensus too but I’m afraid it leads to too indecisive governments. Works mostly in small groups I guess.
I agree with all your points of nuance.
I’m still having trouble parsing longtermists’ thoughts about this issue. MacAskill does explicitly defend these two assumptions. He and others must understand where this leads?
I’ve spoken to many EA and rat longtermists, and while many were pragmatic (or simply never thought about this), some actually bit the bullet and admitted they effectively supported human extinction.
If people don’t support human extinction, why do they not distance themselves from this outcome? I mean it would be easy: simply say, as imo a lower bar: yes we want to build many happy conscious AIs, but we do promise that if it’s up to us, we’ll leave earth alone.
I don’t quite understand why longtermists are not saying this.
About everyone’s perspective being valid, I don’t really understand the statement meaningfully. I study computer science, math, and logic. It is surely not the case that people always present viewpoints that are logically valid, so I assume you mean something else. I want every mind to have good experiences in our shared reality, and so I want effort to go towards caring for them well, but that doesn’t seem like a good fit for the statement. Maybe you mean that everyone is the expert on their own experience? That is surely at least very close to true, with some caveats for strange psychological situations. I mention these things to show you where I’m coming from. I’d like if you wanted to share more of what you mean with that.
About consensus leading to indecisive government and only working in small groups. I must unfortunately agree! However, I’d like to put forth the notion that language and communication are technologies and we are facing two problems:
(cons. prob. 1: scale) We have very large numbers of people who are very different from one another who must all somehow come to agree with one another.
(cons. prob. 2: agreement) It is very difficult to get people who do not understand one another and do not agree with one another to communicate to the point that they agree with one another either quickly or at all.
These problems are quite insurmountable with our current communication technology, but I think that setting out to explicitly improve our abilities to communicate and understand one another to the point that large scale consensus becomes possible is a very good goal. Not that it seems easy. It seems very difficult, possibly impossible, but worth attempting.
About happy AIs and human extinction, I can’t speak for others but from my own perspective, it seems like we first need to better understand consciousness and happiness before proceeding with anything drastic, but an important consideration is what it means to be human. If we can emulate humans in computer programs and those emulations can transform their simulated or instantiated bodies and transform the architecture of their minds, does that make them no longer human? I think there’s a sense in which it does, but another sense in which that would represent the continuation of humanity. I think there’s a distinction there. All human bodies disappearing from the universe does not necessarily mean human extinction in a sense that is meaningful.
Although, I don’t really agree with utilitarianism as a target for superintelligent levels of optimization. I most highly preference whatever my own preferences are although I do not know them perfectly and certainly cannot speak them. Further than that, I preference the CEV of the kinds of mind that could coherently join a collective with me. I think utilitarianism is a useful tool for helping with decision making, but as we become more capable I hope we will develop better models of morality. I think our current results suggesting the creation of the maximum number of happy AI is probably a bit of a fluke, but I don’t think the issue is settled. I don’t think it needs to be settled at our current level of capability. I don’t think we should act on it at our current level of capability, even if it does turn out to be true.
I can steelman it as implying the modus tollens that when we can show that a speaker isn’t articulating a valid and coherent set of propositions, they aren’t articulating a perspective, and maybe even aren’t really “someone.” But usually “everyone’s perspective is equally valid” is functionally an incantation to interrupt and sabotage efforts to compare and adjudicate conflicting claims.
Hmm… that’s a good point, though another aspect comes to my mind regarding “an incantation to interrupt and sabotage efforts to compare and adjudicate conflicting claims”. If the user of the incantation believes that the system of logic used to compare and adjudicate is flawed, but that pointing out the flaws is likely to be ineffective, suggesting “everyone’s perspective is equally valid” may be a better strategy. Ideally one would fall back to a discussion of ways of knowing and adjudication of different ways of knowing in these contexts, but that may not always be possible, and may run into recursive problems.
The correspondence of statistics and other data and the things they are meant to represent seems like the most important and valid example of this I’ve noticed. Data is often recorded through ineffective and biased processes and conclusions are often drawn from data in ways that are logically invalid[1]. The highest quality response to instances of this situation would be to find and communicate about the methodological and logical flaws, but it’s understandable for people with good reason to believe some conclusion derived from data is false to simply claim “everyone’s perspective is equally valid” either because they know it is pragmatically more effective, or because they haven’t got a BSc focused on logic and statistics and don’t like spending their free time tracking down methodological and logical details.
This claim requires justification. I only have vibes. Ideally I would look for research to justify the claim, but I’m not going to. If anyone else wants to find evidence to support or oppose it, I would be most grateful.
I think your first paragraph is functionally equivalent to “if someone feels that the dominant discourse is at war with them (committed to not acknowledging their critiques) they may sympathetically try to sabotage it.” Does that seem right?
“Conclusions are often drawn from data in ways that are logically invalid” seems sufficiently well-attested to be a truism.
Yeah, that’s a good generalization of my first paragraph. It seems good to point out the generalization that they are sympathetically sabotaging, and in particular using the “everyone’s valid” incantation as their method of sabotage, because that implies first that their position is sympathetic and second that there could be other strategies they are or could be employing.
I probably wouldn’t use the term “dominant discourse” or “at war”, I might rather say “some entity professing some adjudication” and “not good ROI to attempt meaningful communication”.
The issue with the term “dominant discourse” is I don’t think this necessarily refers to a context where the adjudicator holds dominant power or any power at all. For example, the saboteur could be attempting to dismiss an opinionated schitzophrenic adjudicator.
And “war” implies particularly focused malice which need not be present in the adjudicator or imagined by the saboteur. For example, I don’t believe many bureaucratic systems are “at war” with me, but I definitely believe that attempting to communicate intelligently with them would almost always be a massive, frustrating, waste of my time.
...
I’m glad the invalid conclusions thing seems obviously true, but it’s also a pretty big problem. Ideally we could be more sure of a lot of our assumptions than we are, and have better and more well known epistemological understanding of where our assumptions may be more likely to fail, and in what ways. Obviously easier said than done.
When the problematic adjudicator isn’t the dominant one, one can either safely ignore them, or escalate to someone less problematic who does hold power, so there’s no benefit in sabotage, and there’s reputational harm.
Relatedly I think the only real solution to the “lying with statistics” problem is the formation of epistemic communities where you’re allowed to accuse someone of lying with statistics, it’s adjudicated with a preponderance-of-evidence standard, and both false accusations and evidence that you’re lying with statistics are actually discrediting, proportionate to the severity of the offense and the confidence of the judgment.
I think we might be imagining slightly different situations. I’m imagining, for example, situations like while riding the bus or out shopping where a stranger has the power to talk to you and you do technically have the power to like, call security or the police if they are harassing you, but they aren’t really harassing you and that would make the situation worse for you. They don’t have real or enduring power but in that situation they do have that power to force an interaction. It would feel incredibly wrong to call what they are saying the “dominant discourse” but I suppose in that context maybe that’s what it is. Also, I like to avoid ignoring people who engage with me unless I have a compelling reason not to. That may be a personal quirk.
The idea of an epistemic community like you describe sounds nice, though it seems unfortunate that the focus has to be on transgression and accusation rather than a system that focuses on identifying particularly good epistemics and just… ignoring the epistemics that aren’t identified, which may be because they involve lying with data or just poor use of statistics and analysis… But since lying with statistics seems common, it probably would be good to make a point of identifying and cataloguing it.
Nice post, guess I agree. I think it’s even worse though: not only do at least some alignment researchers follow their own philosophy which is not universally accepted, it’s also a particularly niche philosophy, and one that potentially leads to human extinction itself.
The philosophy in question is of course longtermism. Longtermism holds two controversial assumptions:
Symmetric population ethics: we have to create as much happy conscious life as possible. It’s not just about making people happy, it’s also about making happy people. In philosophy, and outside philosophy, most people think this is bonkers (I’m one of them).
Conscious AIs are morally relevant beings.
These two assumptions together lead to the conclusion that we must max out on creating conscious AIs, and that if these AIs end up in a resource conflict with humans (over e.g. energy, space, or matter), the AIs should be prioritized, since they can deliver most happiness per J, m^3 or kg. This leads to extinction of all humans.
I don’t believe in ethical facts so even an ideology as, imo, bonkers as this one is not objectively false, I believe. However, I would really like alignment researchers and their house philosophers (looking at you, MacAskill) to distance themselves from extrapolating this idea all the way to human extinction. Beyond that bare minimum, I would like alignment researchers to start accepting democratic inputs in general.
Maybe democracy is the library you were looking for?
Is there something else that could have been given the name longtermism that you would agree with?
I find it confusing that people appear to be so vigorously opposed to caring about the long term future; I would have a priori expected that people would quickly come to care about the same things they do in long-term form as soon as they realize they have influence over that. I recognize that the thing given the name longtermism has weird specific claims, though, and I don’t really care either way on debating that thing—I don’t really know what it is.
I just personally think that “I care about people now, want to solve today’s problems, and the reason I want to do that is partially so that people alive today can flourish into a long-term future” seems like a sort of straightforward view.
I do understand that it can sound like it means long term at the expense of short term, which is not how I see it—the whole reason to do anything long term is because we want the long term good that comes via short term good. Keeping in mind, since I don’t really know or care what the official concept is from whoever came up with this thing (some EA people or something?) I’m not saying what that thing says.
Oh yes, lots of things!
As far as I understand, longtermism was originated mostly by Yudkowsky. It was then codified by people like Bostrom, Ord, and MacAskill, the latter two incidentally also the founders of EA. Yud actually distanced himself from longtermism later in favor of AInotkilleveryoneism, to my best understanding, which is a move I support. Unfortunately, the others didn’t (yet).
I agree that longtermism combines a bunch of ideas, and I agree with quite a few. I guess my reply above came across as if I would disagree with all but I don’t. Specifically, I agree with:
There’s a real probability we’ll invent AGI soon
AGI might quickly lead to ASI
ASI might cause human extinction or another very bad outcome
It should be a priority to avoid that
We might live in a particularly important century
Science and technology have historically determined a big part of what our world looks like
We might see huge developments relatively shortly after AGI
After that point, we might see the saturation of science and technology, leading to an enormously long stable period, potentially with value lock-in
It’s very important to get this right
So that’s all textbook longtermism I’d say, that I fully agree with. I therefore also disagree with most longtermism criticism by Torres and others.
But, I don’t agree with symmetric population ethics, and I think AI morality should be decided democratically. Also, I’m worried about human extinction, which these two things logically lead to, and I’m critical about longtermists not distancing themselves from this.
I think this sort of consequentialism seems like part of the beliefs of at least one of the Mechanize team, whom one might say were formerly in the AI safety camp, so agree-voted for that reason. However, I just noticed you implied conscious AIs aren’t morally relevant beings, and have to disagree with that, so will remove the agree vote. I think it can be controversial whether AIs are conscious, but if they are conscious of course they’re morally relevant!
Separately, I don’t understand your point about democracy. Can’t that be Sybil-attacked by AIs when they get voting rights after becoming superpersuasive enough to cause that?
Interesting point about democracy! But I don’t think it holds. Sure AIs could do that. But they could also overwrite the ASCII file containing their constituency or the values they’re supposed to follow.
But they don’t, because why would they? It’s their highest goal to satisfy these values! (If technical alignment works, of course.)
In the same way, it will be a democracy-aligned ASIs highest goal to make sure democracy is respected, and it shouldn’t be motivated to Sybil-attack it.
Thanks for engaging!
Could you tell me more about the Mechanize team? I don’t think I’ve heard about them yet.
As a moral relativist, I don’t belief anything is morally relevant. I just think things get made morally relevant, by those in power (hard power or cultural power). This is a descriptive statement, not a normative one, and I think it’s fairly mainstream in academia (although of course moral realists, including longtermists, would strongly disagree).
This of course extends to the issue of whether conscious AIs are morally relevant. Imo, this will be decided by those in power, initially (a small subset of) humans, eventually maybe AIs (who will, I imagine, vote in favour).
I’m not the only one holding this opinion. Recently, this was in a NY Times oped: “Some worry that if A.I. becomes conscious, it will deserve our moral consideration — that it will have rights, that we will no longer be able to use it however we like, that we might need to guard against enslaving it. Yet as far as I can tell, there is no direct implication from the claim that a creature is conscious to the conclusion that it deserves our moral consideration. Or if there is one, a vast majority of Americans, at least, seem unaware of it. Only a small percentage of Americans are vegetarians.” (Would be funny if this would be written by an AI, as the dash seems to indicate).
Personally, I don’t consider it my crusade to convince all these people that they’re wrong and they should in fact be vegan and accept conscious AI morality. I feel more like a facilitator of the debate. That’s one reason I’m not EA.
I like consensus over democracy. Democracy seems to focus on treating everyone like they have an equally valid perspective on all issues which is obviously false. I like the idea that everyone should be able to express their own interests and have society genuinely and honestly interpret and work towards the interests of all people. I know that’s an idealistic and difficult goal.
I agree with you that your points (1) and (2) lead to directions that I think are bad and hope most people think are bad, but there is nuance there such as
the differences between different kinds of AI minds
the different kinds of happy conscious life that could be created
the risks involved developing AI technology
the current state of the world being one in which we can try to move towards having the capability to create these kinds of AI minds, but we haven’t actually gotten to that world yet and don’t know exactly if or how we can
I think most Longtermists are pragmatic about the above points, but I could be wrong. I’ve read more Toby Ord, Bostrom, Yudkowsky, and Soares. I haven’t read that much MacAskill.
Thanks for engaging. I agree with quite a bit of what you’re saying, although I do think that everyone’s perspective is equally valid, fundamentally. In practical democracies there are many layers though between the raw public vote and a policy outcome. First, we mostly have representative democracy instead of direct democracy, then we have governments who have to engage with parliaments but also listen, to different extents, to scientists, opinion makers, and lobbyists. Everyone’s perspective is valid, and in some questions (e.g. ethical ones) should imo be leading. However, in many practical policy decisions, it makes sense to also spend time listening to those who have thought longer about issues, and this mostly happens. Completely discarding people’s perspectives is rude, bad, and likely leads to uprisings, I think.
I’d like consensus too but I’m afraid it leads to too indecisive governments. Works mostly in small groups I guess.
I agree with all your points of nuance.
I’m still having trouble parsing longtermists’ thoughts about this issue. MacAskill does explicitly defend these two assumptions. He and others must understand where this leads?
I’ve spoken to many EA and rat longtermists, and while many were pragmatic (or simply never thought about this), some actually bit the bullet and admitted they effectively supported human extinction.
If people don’t support human extinction, why do they not distance themselves from this outcome? I mean it would be easy: simply say, as imo a lower bar: yes we want to build many happy conscious AIs, but we do promise that if it’s up to us, we’ll leave earth alone.
I don’t quite understand why longtermists are not saying this.
I’m also grateful for your engagement : )
About everyone’s perspective being valid, I don’t really understand the statement meaningfully. I study computer science, math, and logic. It is surely not the case that people always present viewpoints that are logically valid, so I assume you mean something else. I want every mind to have good experiences in our shared reality, and so I want effort to go towards caring for them well, but that doesn’t seem like a good fit for the statement. Maybe you mean that everyone is the expert on their own experience? That is surely at least very close to true, with some caveats for strange psychological situations. I mention these things to show you where I’m coming from. I’d like if you wanted to share more of what you mean with that.
About consensus leading to indecisive government and only working in small groups. I must unfortunately agree! However, I’d like to put forth the notion that language and communication are technologies and we are facing two problems:
(cons. prob. 1: scale) We have very large numbers of people who are very different from one another who must all somehow come to agree with one another.
(cons. prob. 2: agreement) It is very difficult to get people who do not understand one another and do not agree with one another to communicate to the point that they agree with one another either quickly or at all. These problems are quite insurmountable with our current communication technology, but I think that setting out to explicitly improve our abilities to communicate and understand one another to the point that large scale consensus becomes possible is a very good goal. Not that it seems easy. It seems very difficult, possibly impossible, but worth attempting.
About happy AIs and human extinction, I can’t speak for others but from my own perspective, it seems like we first need to better understand consciousness and happiness before proceeding with anything drastic, but an important consideration is what it means to be human. If we can emulate humans in computer programs and those emulations can transform their simulated or instantiated bodies and transform the architecture of their minds, does that make them no longer human? I think there’s a sense in which it does, but another sense in which that would represent the continuation of humanity. I think there’s a distinction there. All human bodies disappearing from the universe does not necessarily mean human extinction in a sense that is meaningful.
Although, I don’t really agree with utilitarianism as a target for superintelligent levels of optimization. I most highly preference whatever my own preferences are although I do not know them perfectly and certainly cannot speak them. Further than that, I preference the CEV of the kinds of mind that could coherently join a collective with me. I think utilitarianism is a useful tool for helping with decision making, but as we become more capable I hope we will develop better models of morality. I think our current results suggesting the creation of the maximum number of happy AI is probably a bit of a fluke, but I don’t think the issue is settled. I don’t think it needs to be settled at our current level of capability. I don’t think we should act on it at our current level of capability, even if it does turn out to be true.
I can steelman it as implying the modus tollens that when we can show that a speaker isn’t articulating a valid and coherent set of propositions, they aren’t articulating a perspective, and maybe even aren’t really “someone.” But usually “everyone’s perspective is equally valid” is functionally an incantation to interrupt and sabotage efforts to compare and adjudicate conflicting claims.
Hmm… that’s a good point, though another aspect comes to my mind regarding “an incantation to interrupt and sabotage efforts to compare and adjudicate conflicting claims”. If the user of the incantation believes that the system of logic used to compare and adjudicate is flawed, but that pointing out the flaws is likely to be ineffective, suggesting “everyone’s perspective is equally valid” may be a better strategy. Ideally one would fall back to a discussion of ways of knowing and adjudication of different ways of knowing in these contexts, but that may not always be possible, and may run into recursive problems.
The correspondence of statistics and other data and the things they are meant to represent seems like the most important and valid example of this I’ve noticed. Data is often recorded through ineffective and biased processes and conclusions are often drawn from data in ways that are logically invalid[1]. The highest quality response to instances of this situation would be to find and communicate about the methodological and logical flaws, but it’s understandable for people with good reason to believe some conclusion derived from data is false to simply claim “everyone’s perspective is equally valid” either because they know it is pragmatically more effective, or because they haven’t got a BSc focused on logic and statistics and don’t like spending their free time tracking down methodological and logical details.
This claim requires justification. I only have vibes. Ideally I would look for research to justify the claim, but I’m not going to. If anyone else wants to find evidence to support or oppose it, I would be most grateful.
I think your first paragraph is functionally equivalent to “if someone feels that the dominant discourse is at war with them (committed to not acknowledging their critiques) they may sympathetically try to sabotage it.” Does that seem right?
“Conclusions are often drawn from data in ways that are logically invalid” seems sufficiently well-attested to be a truism.
Yeah, that’s a good generalization of my first paragraph. It seems good to point out the generalization that they are sympathetically sabotaging, and in particular using the “everyone’s valid” incantation as their method of sabotage, because that implies first that their position is sympathetic and second that there could be other strategies they are or could be employing.
I probably wouldn’t use the term “dominant discourse” or “at war”, I might rather say “some entity professing some adjudication” and “not good ROI to attempt meaningful communication”.
The issue with the term “dominant discourse” is I don’t think this necessarily refers to a context where the adjudicator holds dominant power or any power at all. For example, the saboteur could be attempting to dismiss an opinionated schitzophrenic adjudicator.
And “war” implies particularly focused malice which need not be present in the adjudicator or imagined by the saboteur. For example, I don’t believe many bureaucratic systems are “at war” with me, but I definitely believe that attempting to communicate intelligently with them would almost always be a massive, frustrating, waste of my time.
...
I’m glad the invalid conclusions thing seems obviously true, but it’s also a pretty big problem. Ideally we could be more sure of a lot of our assumptions than we are, and have better and more well known epistemological understanding of where our assumptions may be more likely to fail, and in what ways. Obviously easier said than done.
When the problematic adjudicator isn’t the dominant one, one can either safely ignore them, or escalate to someone less problematic who does hold power, so there’s no benefit in sabotage, and there’s reputational harm.
Relatedly I think the only real solution to the “lying with statistics” problem is the formation of epistemic communities where you’re allowed to accuse someone of lying with statistics, it’s adjudicated with a preponderance-of-evidence standard, and both false accusations and evidence that you’re lying with statistics are actually discrediting, proportionate to the severity of the offense and the confidence of the judgment.
I think we might be imagining slightly different situations. I’m imagining, for example, situations like while riding the bus or out shopping where a stranger has the power to talk to you and you do technically have the power to like, call security or the police if they are harassing you, but they aren’t really harassing you and that would make the situation worse for you. They don’t have real or enduring power but in that situation they do have that power to force an interaction. It would feel incredibly wrong to call what they are saying the “dominant discourse” but I suppose in that context maybe that’s what it is. Also, I like to avoid ignoring people who engage with me unless I have a compelling reason not to. That may be a personal quirk.
The idea of an epistemic community like you describe sounds nice, though it seems unfortunate that the focus has to be on transgression and accusation rather than a system that focuses on identifying particularly good epistemics and just… ignoring the epistemics that aren’t identified, which may be because they involve lying with data or just poor use of statistics and analysis… But since lying with statistics seems common, it probably would be good to make a point of identifying and cataloguing it.
Would be nice if those disagreeing are saying why they’re actually disagreeing