I parsed that comment as meaning that you see some advantage to having us believe that you have the traits in question—a fact that can be relatively safely assumed about humans, but that I hadn’t been assuming about you. I therefore took the comment as evidence that you will probably want to signal those traits in the future, which would involve taking useful-to-me-or-others action in relevant situations, but only if the cost of doing so was low enough. I have very little useful evidence regarding how you calculate such costs and how you define ‘low enough’ - less than I have regarding a human stranger, even—so I’m still assuming that you can’t be relied on to take such actions in non-trivial situations. (Yes, I’m privileging a hypothesis in making that assumption. Doing so in this case seems to be instrumentally rational: Being betrayed is dangerous.)
As to how to get people to believe you, the wikipedia article on signaling games seems to be a decent place to start looking to figure that out, though the section on ‘costly signaling’ doesn’t cover that concept as well as might be ideal.
*chuckles* You shouldn’t be assuming that I’m Paperclippy any more than I should be assuming that you’re Friendly. The truth of the matter is that you’re doing a good enough job of coming across as human—and particularly, as a rather autistic human, which is a subtype that I’m personally inclined to go out of my way to help - that I’m having a hard time not treating you as such. It’s an alief/belief disagreement issue [pdf].
The practice at explaining stuff isn’t a bad thing, either.
(Meta: Of course, if I wasn’t certain that I was actually dealing with a human roleplaying as a paperclipper, this particular alief/belief issue would be being resolved in the other direction. I’ll admit to being impulsive, but I do grok the implications of actual paperclippers. It’s just not worth the effort of overruling the alief in this case.)
The primary similarity is that autistic humans, while exhibiting the same range of intelligence as humans in general, tend to be much worse at understanding the subtleties of social interaction. Most humans would consider the type of information that I’m giving you to be very basic, or even instinctive, but it’s not terribly uncommon for autistic humans to reach adulthood with little to no functional understanding of one or more subsets of that information. (From what I’ve read, and from my own experience, most autistics do seem to have instincts relating to socialization, but those instincts tend to be nonstandard enough to be useless or even counterproductive.) There are a few other similarities, too—autistics tend to take most communication very literally, for example, and we tend to have ‘special interests’ that are similar in some ways to your interest in paperclips. (My fondness for multiples of the number three is similarly arbitrary, and appears to be a similarly intrinsic part of my selfhood, though I have other values that are more important than that one, so I’m not much inclined to spend my time producing instances of the numbers 9 and 81, even though I find them particularly pleasing.)
Appearing autistic is useful in this context because it will—in this context—result in you getting useful information. It’s also useful to me and others because the questions that you’re asking involve information that we tend to take for granted, and explicitly discussing that information or seeing it discussed explicitly allows us to better understand it and possibly notice irrationalities in how we’ve been using it. However, in other contexts, failing to adhere to the social expectations of others tends to have rather less useful results, for a variety of reasons, most of which are complex and some of which are fairly arbitrary.
Mercury-based clips are liquid at room temperature, not to mention highly toxic, so I’d recommend against their use in any human-habitable environment. That said, there might be places outside Earth’s gravity well where mercury would be useful to you.
I parsed that comment as meaning that you see some advantage to having us believe that you have the traits in question—a fact that can be relatively safely assumed about humans, but that I hadn’t been assuming about you. I therefore took the comment as evidence that you will probably want to signal those traits in the future, which would involve taking useful-to-me-or-others action in relevant situations, but only if the cost of doing so was low enough. I have very little useful evidence regarding how you calculate such costs and how you define ‘low enough’ - less than I have regarding a human stranger, even—so I’m still assuming that you can’t be relied on to take such actions in non-trivial situations. (Yes, I’m privileging a hypothesis in making that assumption. Doing so in this case seems to be instrumentally rational: Being betrayed is dangerous.)
As to how to get people to believe you, the wikipedia article on signaling games seems to be a decent place to start looking to figure that out, though the section on ‘costly signaling’ doesn’t cover that concept as well as might be ideal.
I like how you do a lot to help me understand humans. That’s quite paperclippy of you!
Is there some reason I have caused you to want to do this?
(Tried to do this as a private message, but that keeps failing like extrusion of mercury.)
*chuckles* You shouldn’t be assuming that I’m Paperclippy any more than I should be assuming that you’re Friendly. The truth of the matter is that you’re doing a good enough job of coming across as human—and particularly, as a rather autistic human, which is a subtype that I’m personally inclined to go out of my way to help - that I’m having a hard time not treating you as such. It’s an alief/belief disagreement issue [pdf].
The practice at explaining stuff isn’t a bad thing, either.
(Meta: Of course, if I wasn’t certain that I was actually dealing with a human roleplaying as a paperclipper, this particular alief/belief issue would be being resolved in the other direction. I’ll admit to being impulsive, but I do grok the implications of actual paperclippers. It’s just not worth the effort of overruling the alief in this case.)
What’s autistic about me, and why is that good?
The primary similarity is that autistic humans, while exhibiting the same range of intelligence as humans in general, tend to be much worse at understanding the subtleties of social interaction. Most humans would consider the type of information that I’m giving you to be very basic, or even instinctive, but it’s not terribly uncommon for autistic humans to reach adulthood with little to no functional understanding of one or more subsets of that information. (From what I’ve read, and from my own experience, most autistics do seem to have instincts relating to socialization, but those instincts tend to be nonstandard enough to be useless or even counterproductive.) There are a few other similarities, too—autistics tend to take most communication very literally, for example, and we tend to have ‘special interests’ that are similar in some ways to your interest in paperclips. (My fondness for multiples of the number three is similarly arbitrary, and appears to be a similarly intrinsic part of my selfhood, though I have other values that are more important than that one, so I’m not much inclined to spend my time producing instances of the numbers 9 and 81, even though I find them particularly pleasing.)
Appearing autistic is useful in this context because it will—in this context—result in you getting useful information. It’s also useful to me and others because the questions that you’re asking involve information that we tend to take for granted, and explicitly discussing that information or seeing it discussed explicitly allows us to better understand it and possibly notice irrationalities in how we’ve been using it. However, in other contexts, failing to adhere to the social expectations of others tends to have rather less useful results, for a variety of reasons, most of which are complex and some of which are fairly arbitrary.
Mercury-based clips are liquid at room temperature, not to mention highly toxic, so I’d recommend against their use in any human-habitable environment. That said, there might be places outside Earth’s gravity well where mercury would be useful to you.