Understanding crowds out prediction error, it does not necessarily crowd out negative emotions, which is part of the point of this article.
No, it actually does. Which is the point of my comment :P
When I say “prediction error” I don’t mean that you verbally say stuff like “I predict X” and not having bets scored in your favor. I mean that thing where your brain expects one thing, and sensory data coming up suggesting not that, and you get all uncomfortable because reality isn’t doing what it’s “supposed to”.
In other words, your actual predictions, not necessarily the things that you declare your predictions to be.
I can feel disgust at someone I know who could do so much more while still helping them. Possibly one phrasing of it as based on your calculator example, is there’s no need for there to be a “lower expectations” step.
You could, yes, but it would require mismodeling them as someone who could do more than they actually can given the very real limitations which you may or may not understand yet. I can stay as furious as I want at the calculator, but only if I shut out of my mind the fact that of course it can’t work without a battery, stupid. The fact that I might say “I know I know, there’s no battery but...” doesn’t negate the fact that I’m deliberately acting without this knowledge. It just means I’m flinching away from this aspect of reality.
And it turns out, that’s not a good idea. Accurately modeling people, and credibly conveying these accurate models so that they can recognize and trust that you have accurately modeled them, is incredibly important for helping people. Good luck getting people to open themselves to your help while you view them as disgusting.
I can still have the dominant negative emotion that the calculator and the calculator company did not include a battery, even if I understand why.
This is just kicking the can one step further. You can still be annoyed, but you can no longer be annoyed at “the stupid calculator!” for not working. You have to be annoyed at the company for not including batteries—if you can pull that one off.
But hey, why did they not include batteries? If it turns out that it’s illegal for whatever reason and they literally can’t because the authorities check, where goes your annoyance now?
If your reasoning results in “I can’t have negative emotions about things where I deeply understand the causes”, then I think you’ve made a misstep.
You could, yes, but it would require mismodeling them as someone who could do more than they actually can given the very real limitations which you may or may not understand yet.
They could have done more. The choices were there in front of them, and they failed to choose them.
I will feel more positive flavored emotions like kindness/sadness if they’re pushed into hard choices where they have to decide between becoming closer to their ideal or putting food on the table; with the converse of feeling substantially less positive when the answer is they were browsing dazedly browsing social media.
With enough understanding I could trace back the route which led to them relying more and more on social media as it fills some hole of socialization they lack, is easy to do, … and still retain my negative emotions while holding this deeper understanding.
Accurately modeling people, and credibly conveying these accurate models so that they can recognize and trust that you have accurately modeled them, is incredibly important for helping people. Good luck getting people to open themselves to your help while you view them as disgusting.
I disagree that I am inaccurately modeling them, because I dispute the absolute connection between negative emotion and prediction error in the first place. I can understand them. I can accurately feel the mental pushes that push against their mind; I’ve felt them myself many times. And yet still be disquieted, disappointed in their actions.
Regardless, I do not have issues getting along with someone even if I experience negative emotions about how they’ve failed to reach farther in the past—just like I can do so even if their behavior, appearance, and so on are displeasing. This will be easier if I do something vaguely like John’s move of ‘thinking of them like a cat’, but it is not necessary for me to be polite and friendly.
Word-choice implication nitpick: Common usage of lower expectations means a mix of literal prediction and also moral/behavioral standards. I might have a ‘low expectation’ in the sense that a friend rarely arrives on time while still holding them ‘high expectations’ in the what-is-good sense!
This is just kicking the can one step further. You can still be annoyed, but you can no longer be annoyed at “the stupid calculator!” for not working. You have to be annoyed at the company for not including batteries—if you can pull that one off.
No, I can be annoyed at the calculator and the company. There’s no need for my annoyance to be moved down the chain like I only have 1 Unit of Annoyance to divvy out.
Or, you can view it as cumulative if that makes more sense, that it ties back into the overall emotions on the calculator. If I learn that supplying batteries is illegal, my annoyance with the company does decrease, but then it gets more moved primarily to the authorities. Some remains still, and I’m still annoyed at the calculator despite understanding why it doesn’t have a battery.
I do think the calculator metaphor starts to break apart, because a calculator is not the system that feeds-back-on-itself to then decide on no batteries.
Humans are complex, and I love them for it, their decisions, mindset, observations, thought processes, and so much more loop back in on themselves to shape the actions they take in the world. …That includes both their excellent actions where they do great things, reach farther, become closer to their ideals… as well as when they falter, when they get ground down by short-term optimization leaving them unable to focus on ways to improve themselves, and find themselves falling short.
But that does mean my negative emotions will be more centered on humans, on their beliefs and more. Some of this negative evaluation bleeds off to social media companies optimizing short-form content feeds, or society in vague generality for lack of ambition, but as I said before it isn’t 1 Unit of Annoyance to spread around like jam.
That is, you’re talking this like the concept of blame, when negative emotions and blame are not necessarily the same thing.
Paired with this: You appear to be implicitly taking a hard determinist sort of stance, wherein concepts like blame and ‘being able to choose otherwise’ start dissolving, but I find that direction questionable in the first-place. We can still judge people’s decisions, it is normal that their actions are influenced by their interactions with the world, and I can still feel negative emotions about their choices. That they were not able to do better, that their decisions did not go elsewise, that they failed to reinforce good decisions and more.
I do take a hard deterministic stance, so I’d like to hear your thoughts here. Do you agree w/ the following?
People literally can’t make different choices due to determinism
Laws & punishments are still useful for setting the right incentives that lead to better outcomes
You’re allowed to have negative emotions given other people’s actions (see #1), but those emotions don’t necessarily lead to better outcomes or incentives
I remember being 9 years old & being sad that my friend wasn’t going to heaven. I even thought “If I was born exactly like them, I would’ve made all the same choices & had the same experiences, and not believe in God”. I still think that if I’m 100% someone else, then I would end up exactly as they are.
I think the counterfactual you’re employing (correct me if wrong) is “if my brain was in their body, then I wouldn’t...” or “if I had their resources, then I wouldn’t...”, which is saying you’re only [80]% that person. You’re leaving out a part of them that made them who they are.
Now, you could still argue #2, that these negative emotions set correct incentives. I’ve only heard second-hand of extreme situations where that worked [1], but most of the time backfires
Son calls their parent after a while “Oh son, you never call! Shame shame”
Child says their sorry, but the parent demands them to show/feel remorse or it doesn’t count.
One of my teacher’s I still talk to pushed a student against the wall, yelling at them that they’re wasting their life w/ drugs/etc, fully expecting to get fired afterwards. They didn’t get fired & the student cleaned up (I believe this was in the late 90′s though)
Yes. But also that people are still making those choices.
Yes. But I would point out that ‘punishment’ in the moral sense of ‘hurt those who do great wrongs’ still holds just fine in determinism for the same reasons it originally did, though I personally am not much of a fan
Yes, just like I can be happy in a situation where that doesn’t help me.
“if my brain was in their body, then I wouldn’t...” or “if I had their resources, then I wouldn’t...”, which is saying you’re only [80]% that person. You’re leaving out a part of them that made them who they are.
No, it is more that I am evaluating from multiple levels.
There is
basic empathy: knowing their own standards and feeling them, understanding them.
‘idealized empathy’: Then I often have extended sort of classical empathy where I am considering based on their higher goals, which is why I often mention ideals. People have dreams they fail to reach, and I’d love them to reach further, and yet it disappoints me when they falter because my empathy reaches towards those too.
Values: Then of course my own values, which I guess could be considered the 80% that person, but I think I keep the levels separate; all the considerations have to come together in the end. I do have values about what they do, and how their mind succeeds.
Some commenters seemingly don’t consider the higher ideals sort or they think of most people in terms of short-term values; others are ignoring the lens of their own values.
So I think I’m doing multiple levels of emulation, of by-my-values, in-the-moment, reflection, etc. They all inform my emotions about the person.
I remember being 9 years old & being sad that my friend wasn’t going to heaven. I even thought “If I was born exactly like them, I would’ve made all the same choices & had the same experiences, and not believe in God”. I still think that if I’m 100% someone else, then I would end up exactly as they are.
And I agree. If I ‘became’ someone I was empathizing with entirely then I would make all their choices.
However, I don’t consider that notably relevant!
They took those actions, yes influenced by all there is in the world, but what else would influence them? They are not outside physics.
Those choices were there, and all the factors that make up them as a person were what decided their actions.
If I came back to a factory the next day and notice the steam engine failed, I consider that negative even when knowing that there must have been a long chain of cause and effect. I’ll try fixing the causes… which usually ends up routing through whatever human mind was meant to work on the steam engine as we are very powerful reflective systems. For human minds themselves that have poor choices? That often routes back through themselves.
I do think that the hard-determinist stance often, though of course not always, comes from post-Christian style thought which views the soul as atomically special, but that they then still think of themselves as ‘needing to be’ outside physics in some important sense rather than fully adapting their ontology. That choices made within determinism are equivalent to being tied up by ropes, when there is actually a distinction between the two scenarios.
Now, you could still argue #2, that these negative emotions set correct incentives. I’ve only heard second-hand of extreme situations where that worked [1], but most of the time backfires
A negative emotion can still push me to spend more effort on someone, though it usually needs to be paired with a belief that they could become better. Just because you have a negative emotion doesn’t mean you only output negative-emotion flavored content.
I’ll generally be kind to people even if I think their choices are substantially flawed and that they could improve themselves.
I do think that the example of your teacher is one that can work, I’ve done it at least once though not in person, and it helped but it definitely isn’t my central route. This is effectively the ‘staging an intervention’ methodology, and it can be effective but requires knowledge and benefits greatly from being able to push the person.
But, as John is making the point, a negative emotion may not be what people are wanting, because I’m not going to have a strong kindness about how hard someone’s choices were… when I don’t respect those choices in the first place. However, giving them full positive empathy is not necessarily good either, it can feel nice but rarely fixes things.
Which is why you focus on ‘fixing things’, advice, pointing out where they’ve faltered, and more if you think they’ll be receptive. They often won’t be, because most people have a mix of embarrassment at these kinds of conversations and a push to ignore them.
You appear to be implicitly taking a hard determinist sort of stance, wherein concepts like blame and ‘being able to choose otherwise’ start dissolving, but I find that direction questionable in the first-place.[...] If your reasoning results in “I can’t have negative emotions about things where I deeply understand the causes”, then I think you’ve made a misstep.
I certainly understand why you think that. I used to think that myself. I pushed back myself when I first heard someone take such a “ridiculous” stance. And yet, it proved to be true, so I changed my mind.
The thing that I was missing then, and which you’re missing now, is that the bar for deep careful analysis is just a lot higher than you think (or most anyone thinks). It’s often reasonable to skimp out and leave it as “because they’re bad/lazy/stupid”/”they shouldn’t have” or whatever you want to round it to, but these things are semantic stopsigns, not irreducible explanations.
Pick an issue, any issue, and keep at the analysis until you do get to something irreducible. Okay, so you’ve kicked the can one step further and are upset with the people who banned shipping batteries or whatever. Why did they do it? Keep asking “Why? Why? Why?” like a curious two year old, until there is no more “why?”. If, after you feel like you’ve hit the end of the road, you still have annoyance with the calculator itself, go back and ask why? “I’m annoyed that the calculator doesn’t work… without batteries?” How do you finish the statement of annoyance?
The way I was initially convinced of this was by picking something fake, subjecting myself to that “overconfident” guy’s incessant questioning, with an expectation of proving to him that it was endless. It wasn’t, he won. Since then I’ve done it with many more real things, and the answer is always the same. Empirically, what happens, is that you can keep going and keep going, until you can’t, and at that point there’s just no more negative around that spot because it’s been crowded out. It doesn’t matter if it’s annoyance, or sadness, or even severe physical pain. If you do your analysis well, the experience shifts, and loses its negativity.
If you’re feeling “badness” and you think you have a full understanding, that feeling of badness itself contains the clues about where you’re wrong.
They could have done more. The choices were there in front of them, and they failed to choose them.
This is a bit of a distraction, but Thane covered it pretty well:
In other words, there are reasons for their choices. Do you understand why they chose the way they did?
Regardless, I do not have issues getting along with someone even if
Notice the movement of goal posts here? I’m talking about successfully helping people, you’re saying you can “get along”. Getting along is easy. I’m sure you can offer what passes as empathy to the girl with the nail in her head, instead of fighting her like a beliggerent dummy.
But can you exclaim “You got a nail in your head, you dummy!” and have her laugh with you, because you’re obviously correct? If you can’t trivially get her to agree that the problem is the nail, and figure out with you what to do about it, then your mismodeling is getting in the way.
This higher level of ability is achievable, and the path to get there is better modeling than you thought possible.
The thing that I was missing then, and which you’re missing now, is that the bar for deep careful analysis is just a lot higher than you think (or most anyone thinks). It’s often reasonable to skimp out and leave it as “because they’re bad/lazy/stupid”/”they shouldn’t have” or whatever you want to round it to, but these things are semantic stopsigns, not irreducible explanations.
No, I believe I’m fully aware the level of deep careful analysis, and I understand why it pushes some people to sweep all facets of negativity or blame away, I just think they’re confused because their understanding of emotions/relations/causality hasn’t updated properly alongside their new understanding of determinism
“I’m annoyed that the calculator doesn’t work… without batteries?” How do you finish the statement of annoyance?
Because I wanted the calculator to work, I think it is a good thing for calculators in stores to work, I am frustrated that the calculator didn’t work… none of this is exotic, nor is it purely prediction error.
(nor do prediction error related emotions have to go away once you’ve explained the error… I still feel emotional pain when a pet dies even if I realize all the causes why; why would that not extend to other emotions related to prediction error?)
Empirically, what happens, is that you can keep going and keep going, until you can’t, and at that point there’s just no more negative around that spot because it’s been crowded out. It doesn’t matter if it’s annoyance, or sadness, or even severe physical pain. If you do your analysis well, the experience shifts, and loses its negativity.
You assert this but I still don’t agree with it. I’ve thought long and hard about people before and the causes that make them do things, but no, this does not match my experience. I understand the impulse that encourages sweeping away negative emotions once you’ve found an explanation, like realizing that humanities’ lack of coordination is a big problem, but I can still very well feel negative emotions about that despite there being an explanation.
In other words, there are reasons for their choices. Do you understand why they chose the way they did?
Relatively often? Yes.
I don’t blame people for not outputting the code for an aligned AGI because it is something that would have been absurdly hard to reinforce in yourself to become the kind of person to do that.
If someone has a disease that makes so they struggle to do much at all, I am going to judge them a hell of a lot less. Most humans have the “disease” that they can’t just smash out the code for an aligned AGI.
I can understand why someone is not investing more time studying, and I can even look at myself and relatively well pin down why, and why it is hard to get over that hump… I just don’t dismiss the negative feeling even though I understand why.
They ‘could have’, because the process-that-makes-their-decisions is them and not some separate third-thing.
I fail to study when I should because a combination of short-term optimized positive feeling seeking which leads me to watching youtube or skimming X, a desire for faster intellectual feelings that are easier gotten from arguing on reddit (or lesswrong) than slowly reading through a math paper, because I fear failure, and much more. Yet I still consider that bad, even if I got a full causal explanation it would have still been my choices.
Regardless, I do not have issues getting along with someone even if I experience negative emotions about how they’ve failed to reach farther in the past—just like I can do so even if their behavior, appearance, and so on are displeasing. This will be easier if I do something vaguely like John’s move of ‘thinking of them like a cat’, but it is not necessary for me to be polite and friendly.
Notice the movement of goal posts here? I’m talking about successfully helping people, you’re saying you can “get along”. Getting along is easy. I’m sure you can offer what passes as empathy to the girl with the nail in her head, instead of fighting her like a beliggerent dummy.
I don’t have issues with helping people, there “goalposts” moved forward again, despite nothing in my sentence meaning I can’t help people. My usage of ‘get along’ was not the bare minimum meaning.
Getting along with people in the nail scenario often means being friendly and listening to them. I can very well do that, and have done it many times before, while still thinking their individual choices are foolish.
I don’t think your comment has supplied much more beyond further assertions that I must surely not be thinking things through.
No, I believe I’m fully aware the level of deep careful analysis,
How did you arrive at this belief? Like, the thing that I would be concerned with is “How do I know that Russel’s teapot isn’t just beyond my current horizon”?
and I understand why it pushes some people to sweep all facets of negativity or blame away,
Oh no, nothing is being swept away. Definitely not that. More on this with the grieving thing below.
>nor do prediction error related emotions have to go away once you’ve explained the error...
The prediction error goes away when you update your prediction to match reality, not when you recite an explanation for why your current beliefs are clashing. You can keep predicting poorly all you want. If you want to keep feeling bad and getting poor results, I guess.
With a good explanation, you don’t have to.
I still feel emotional pain when a pet dies even if I realize all the causes why
Yes, you’re still losing your pet, and that still sucks. That’s real, and there’s no getting away from what’s real. You don’t get to accurate maps painlessly, let alone effortlessly. There’s no “One simple trick for not having to feel negative emotions!”.
The question is how this works. It’s very much not as simple as “Okay, I said he ded now I’m done grieving”. Because again, that’s not your predictions. The moment that you notice the fact that “he’s dead” is true can be long before you start to update your actual object level beliefs, and it’s a bit bizarre but also completely makes sense that it’s not until you start to update your beliefs that it hits you.
Even after you update the central belief, and even after you resolve all the “But why!?” questions that come up, you still expect to see everyone for Christmas. Until you realize that you can’t because someone is no longer alive, and update that prediction too. You think of something you’d have wanted to show him, and have to remember you can’t do that anymore. There are a bazillion little ways that those we care about become entwined with our lives, and grieving the loss of someone important is no simple task. You actually have to propagate this fact through to all the little things it effects, and correct all the predictions that required his life to fulfil.
Yet as you grieve, these things come up less and less frequently. Over time, you run out of errant predictions like “It’s gonna be fun to see Benny when—Oh fuck, no, that’s not happening”. Eventually, you can talk about their death like it’s just another thing that is, because it is.
You assert this but I still don’t agree with it. I’ve thought long and hard about people before and the causes that make them do things, but no, this does not match my experience.
Is it possible, do you think, that the way you’re doing analysis isn’t sufficient, and that if you were to be more careful and thorough, or otherwise did things differently, your experience would be different? If not, how do you rule this out, exactly? How do you explain others who are able to do this?
I don’t have issues with helping people, there “goalposts” moved forward again,
:) I appreciate it, thanks.
Getting along with people in the nail scenario often means being friendly and listening to them. I can very well do that, and have done it many times before, while still thinking their individual choices are foolish.
I’m holding the goal posts even further forward though. Friendly listening is one thing, but I’m talking about pointing out that they’re acting foolish and getting immediate laughter in recognition that you’re right. This is the level of ability that I’m pointing at. This is what is what’s there to aim for, which is enabled by sufficiently clear maps.
I don’t think your comment has supplied much more beyond further assertions that I must surely not be thinking things through.
It contained a bit more than that. I checked to make sure I wasn’t being too opaque (it happens), but Claude can show you what you missed, if you care.
The big thing I was hoping you’d notice, is that I was trying to make my claims so outrageous and specific so that you’d respond “You can’t say this shit without providing receipts, man! So lets see them!”. I was daring you to challenge me to provide evidence. I wonder if maybe you thought I was exaggerating, or otherwise rounding my claims down to something less absurd and falsifiable?
Anyway, there are a few things in your comment that suggest you might not be having fun here. If that’s the case, I’m sorry about that. No need to continue if you don’t want, and no hard feelings either way.
How did you arrive at this belief? Like, the thing that I would be concerned with is “How do I know that Russel’s teapot isn’t just beyond my current horizon”?
Empirical evidence of being more in tune with my own emotions, generally better introspection, and in modeling why others make decisions. Compared to others.
I have no belief that I’m perfect at this, but I do think I’m generally good at it and that I’m not missing a ‘height’ component to my understanding.
Is it possible, do you think, that the way you’re doing analysis isn’t sufficient, and that if you were to be more careful and thorough, or otherwise did things differently, your experience would be different? If not, how do you rule this out, exactly? How do you explain others who are able to do this?
Because, (I believe) the impulse to dismiss any sort of negativity or blame once you understand the causes deep enough is one I’ve noticed myself. I do not believe it to be a level of understanding that I’ve failed to reach, I’ve dismissed it because it seems an improper framing.
At times the reason for this comes from a specific grappling with determinism and choice that I disagree with.
For others, the originating cause is due to considering kindness as automatically linked with empathy, with that unconsciously shaping what people think is acceptable from empathy.
In your case, some of it is tying it purely to prediction that I disagree with, because of some mix of kindness-being-the-focus, determinism, a feeling that once it has been explained in terms of the component parts that there’s nothing left, and other factors that I don’t know because they haven’t been elucidated.
Empirical exploration as in your example can be explanatory. However, I have thought about motivation and the underlying reasons to a low granularity plenty of times (impulses that form into habits, social media optimizing for short form behaviors, the heuristics humans come with which can make doing it now hard to weight against the cost of doing it a week from now, how all of those constrain the mind...), which makes me skeptical. The idea of ‘shift the negativity elsewhere’ is not new, but given your existing examples it does not convince me that if I spent an hour with you on this that we would get anywhere.
“because they’re bad/lazy/stupid”/”they shouldn’t have” or whatever you want to round it to, but these things are semantic stopsigns, not irreducible explanations.
This, for example, is a misunderstanding of my position or the level of analysis that I’m speaking of. Wherein I am not stopping there, as I mentally consider complex social cause and effect and still feel negative about the choices they’ve made.
Yet as you grieve, these things come up less and less frequently. Over time, you run out of errant predictions like “It’s gonna be fun to see Benny when—Oh fuck, no, that’s not happening”. Eventually, you can talk about their death like it’s just another thing that is, because it is.
Grief like this exists, but I don’t agree that it is pure predictive remembrance. There is grief which lasts for a time and then fades away, not because my lower level beliefs are prediction to see them—away from home and a pet dies, I’m still sad, not because of prediction error but because I want (but wants are not predictions) the pet to be alive and fine, but they aren’t. Because it is bad, to be concise.
You could try arguing that this is ‘prediction that my mental model will say they are alive and well’, with two parts of myself in disagreement, but that seems very hard to determine the accuracy as an explanation and I think is starting to stretch the meaning of prediction error.
Nor does the implication that ‘fully knowing the causes’ carves away negative emotion follow?
I’m holding the goal posts even further forward though. Friendly listening is one thing, but I’m talking about pointing out that they’re acting foolish and getting immediate laughter in recognition that you’re right. This is the level of ability that I’m pointing at. This is what is what’s there to aim for, which is enabled by sufficiently clear maps.
This is more about socialization ability, though having a clear map helps. I’ve done this before, with parents and joking with a friend about his progress on a project, but I do not do so regularly nor could I do it in arbitrarily.
Joking itself is only sometimes the right route, the more general capability is working a push into normal conversation, with joking being one tool in the toolbox there.
I don’t really accept the implication ‘and thus you are mismodeling via negative emotions if you can not do that consistently’. I can be mismodeling to the degree that I don’t know precisely what words will satisfy them, but that can be due to social abilities.
The big thing I was hoping you’d notice, is that I was trying to make my claims so outrageous and specific so that you’d respond “You can’t say this shit without providing receipts, man! So lets see them!”. I was daring you to challenge me to provide evidence. I wonder if maybe you thought I was exaggerating, or otherwise rounding my claims down to something less absurd and falsifiable?
When you don’t provide much argumentation, I don’t go ‘huh, guess I need to prod them for argumentation’ I go ‘ah, unfortunate, I will try responding to the crunchy parts in the interests of good conversation, but will continue on’. That is, the onus is on you to provide reasons. I did remark that you were asserting without much backing.
I was taking you literally, and I’ve seen plenty of people fall back without engaging—I’ve definitely done it during the span of this discussion, and then interpreting your motivations through that. ‘I am playing a game to poke and prod at you’ is uh.....
Anyway, there are a few things in your comment that suggest you might not be having fun here. If that’s the case, I’m sorry about that. No need to continue if you don’t want, and no hard feelings either way.
A good chunk of it is the ~condescension. Repeated insistence while seeming to mostly just continue on the same line of thought without really engaging where I elaborate, goalpost gotcha, and then the bit about Claude when you just got done saying that it was to ‘test’ me; which it being to prod me being quite annoying in-of-itself.
Of course, I think you have more positive intent behind that. Pushing me to test myself empirically, or pushing me to push back on you so then you can push back yourself on me to provide empirical tests (?), or perhaps trying to use it as an empathy test for whether I understand you. I’m skeptical of you really understanding my position given your replies.
I feel like I’m being better at engaging at the direct level, while you’re often doing ‘you would understand if you actually tried’, when I believe I have tried to a substantial degree even if nothing precisely like ‘spend two hours mapping cause and effect of how a person came to these actions’.
Hm. Given the way you responded here, I don’t think it’s worth my time to continue. Given the work you put into this comment I feel like I at least owe you an explanation if you want one, but I’ll refrain unless you ask.
No, it actually does. Which is the point of my comment :P
When I say “prediction error” I don’t mean that you verbally say stuff like “I predict X” and not having bets scored in your favor. I mean that thing where your brain expects one thing, and sensory data coming up suggesting not that, and you get all uncomfortable because reality isn’t doing what it’s “supposed to”.
In other words, your actual predictions, not necessarily the things that you declare your predictions to be.
You could, yes, but it would require mismodeling them as someone who could do more than they actually can given the very real limitations which you may or may not understand yet. I can stay as furious as I want at the calculator, but only if I shut out of my mind the fact that of course it can’t work without a battery, stupid. The fact that I might say “I know I know, there’s no battery but...” doesn’t negate the fact that I’m deliberately acting without this knowledge. It just means I’m flinching away from this aspect of reality.
And it turns out, that’s not a good idea. Accurately modeling people, and credibly conveying these accurate models so that they can recognize and trust that you have accurately modeled them, is incredibly important for helping people. Good luck getting people to open themselves to your help while you view them as disgusting.
This is just kicking the can one step further. You can still be annoyed, but you can no longer be annoyed at “the stupid calculator!” for not working. You have to be annoyed at the company for not including batteries—if you can pull that one off.
But hey, why did they not include batteries? If it turns out that it’s illegal for whatever reason and they literally can’t because the authorities check, where goes your annoyance now?
If your reasoning results in “I can’t have negative emotions about things where I deeply understand the causes”, then I think you’ve made a misstep.
They could have done more. The choices were there in front of them, and they failed to choose them.
I will feel more positive flavored emotions like kindness/sadness if they’re pushed into hard choices where they have to decide between becoming closer to their ideal or putting food on the table; with the converse of feeling substantially less positive when the answer is they were browsing dazedly browsing social media. With enough understanding I could trace back the route which led to them relying more and more on social media as it fills some hole of socialization they lack, is easy to do, … and still retain my negative emotions while holding this deeper understanding.
I disagree that I am inaccurately modeling them, because I dispute the absolute connection between negative emotion and prediction error in the first place. I can understand them. I can accurately feel the mental pushes that push against their mind; I’ve felt them myself many times. And yet still be disquieted, disappointed in their actions.
Regardless, I do not have issues getting along with someone even if I experience negative emotions about how they’ve failed to reach farther in the past—just like I can do so even if their behavior, appearance, and so on are displeasing. This will be easier if I do something vaguely like John’s move of ‘thinking of them like a cat’, but it is not necessary for me to be polite and friendly.
Word-choice implication nitpick: Common usage of lower expectations means a mix of literal prediction and also moral/behavioral standards. I might have a ‘low expectation’ in the sense that a friend rarely arrives on time while still holding them ‘high expectations’ in the what-is-good sense!
No, I can be annoyed at the calculator and the company. There’s no need for my annoyance to be moved down the chain like I only have 1 Unit of Annoyance to divvy out. Or, you can view it as cumulative if that makes more sense, that it ties back into the overall emotions on the calculator. If I learn that supplying batteries is illegal, my annoyance with the company does decrease, but then it gets more moved primarily to the authorities. Some remains still, and I’m still annoyed at the calculator despite understanding why it doesn’t have a battery.
I do think the calculator metaphor starts to break apart, because a calculator is not the system that feeds-back-on-itself to then decide on no batteries.
Humans are complex, and I love them for it, their decisions, mindset, observations, thought processes, and so much more loop back in on themselves to shape the actions they take in the world. …That includes both their excellent actions where they do great things, reach farther, become closer to their ideals… as well as when they falter, when they get ground down by short-term optimization leaving them unable to focus on ways to improve themselves, and find themselves falling short. But that does mean my negative emotions will be more centered on humans, on their beliefs and more. Some of this negative evaluation bleeds off to social media companies optimizing short-form content feeds, or society in vague generality for lack of ambition, but as I said before it isn’t 1 Unit of Annoyance to spread around like jam.
That is, you’re talking this like the concept of blame, when negative emotions and blame are not necessarily the same thing. Paired with this: You appear to be implicitly taking a hard determinist sort of stance, wherein concepts like blame and ‘being able to choose otherwise’ start dissolving, but I find that direction questionable in the first-place. We can still judge people’s decisions, it is normal that their actions are influenced by their interactions with the world, and I can still feel negative emotions about their choices. That they were not able to do better, that their decisions did not go elsewise, that they failed to reinforce good decisions and more.
I do take a hard deterministic stance, so I’d like to hear your thoughts here. Do you agree w/ the following?
People literally can’t make different choices due to determinism
Laws & punishments are still useful for setting the right incentives that lead to better outcomes
You’re allowed to have negative emotions given other people’s actions (see #1), but those emotions don’t necessarily lead to better outcomes or incentives
I remember being 9 years old & being sad that my friend wasn’t going to heaven. I even thought “If I was born exactly like them, I would’ve made all the same choices & had the same experiences, and not believe in God”. I still think that if I’m 100% someone else, then I would end up exactly as they are.
I think the counterfactual you’re employing (correct me if wrong) is “if my brain was in their body, then I wouldn’t...” or “if I had their resources, then I wouldn’t...”, which is saying you’re only [80]% that person. You’re leaving out a part of them that made them who they are.
Now, you could still argue #2, that these negative emotions set correct incentives. I’ve only heard second-hand of extreme situations where that worked [1], but most of the time backfires
Son calls their parent after a while “Oh son, you never call! Shame shame”
Child says their sorry, but the parent demands them to show/feel remorse or it doesn’t count.
Guilt tripping in general, lol
What do you think?
One of my teacher’s I still talk to pushed a student against the wall, yelling at them that they’re wasting their life w/ drugs/etc, fully expecting to get fired afterwards. They didn’t get fired & the student cleaned up (I believe this was in the late 90′s though)
Yes. But also that people are still making those choices.
Yes. But I would point out that ‘punishment’ in the moral sense of ‘hurt those who do great wrongs’ still holds just fine in determinism for the same reasons it originally did, though I personally am not much of a fan
Yes, just like I can be happy in a situation where that doesn’t help me.
No, it is more that I am evaluating from multiple levels. There is
basic empathy: knowing their own standards and feeling them, understanding them.
‘idealized empathy’: Then I often have extended sort of classical empathy where I am considering based on their higher goals, which is why I often mention ideals. People have dreams they fail to reach, and I’d love them to reach further, and yet it disappoints me when they falter because my empathy reaches towards those too.
Values: Then of course my own values, which I guess could be considered the 80% that person, but I think I keep the levels separate; all the considerations have to come together in the end. I do have values about what they do, and how their mind succeeds.
Some commenters seemingly don’t consider the higher ideals sort or they think of most people in terms of short-term values; others are ignoring the lens of their own values.
So I think I’m doing multiple levels of emulation, of by-my-values, in-the-moment, reflection, etc. They all inform my emotions about the person.
And I agree. If I ‘became’ someone I was empathizing with entirely then I would make all their choices. However, I don’t consider that notably relevant! They took those actions, yes influenced by all there is in the world, but what else would influence them? They are not outside physics. Those choices were there, and all the factors that make up them as a person were what decided their actions.
If I came back to a factory the next day and notice the steam engine failed, I consider that negative even when knowing that there must have been a long chain of cause and effect. I’ll try fixing the causes… which usually ends up routing through whatever human mind was meant to work on the steam engine as we are very powerful reflective systems. For human minds themselves that have poor choices? That often routes back through themselves.
I do think that the hard-determinist stance often, though of course not always, comes from post-Christian style thought which views the soul as atomically special, but that they then still think of themselves as ‘needing to be’ outside physics in some important sense rather than fully adapting their ontology. That choices made within determinism are equivalent to being tied up by ropes, when there is actually a distinction between the two scenarios.
A negative emotion can still push me to spend more effort on someone, though it usually needs to be paired with a belief that they could become better. Just because you have a negative emotion doesn’t mean you only output negative-emotion flavored content. I’ll generally be kind to people even if I think their choices are substantially flawed and that they could improve themselves.
I do think that the example of your teacher is one that can work, I’ve done it at least once though not in person, and it helped but it definitely isn’t my central route. This is effectively the ‘staging an intervention’ methodology, and it can be effective but requires knowledge and benefits greatly from being able to push the person.
But, as John is making the point, a negative emotion may not be what people are wanting, because I’m not going to have a strong kindness about how hard someone’s choices were… when I don’t respect those choices in the first place. However, giving them full positive empathy is not necessarily good either, it can feel nice but rarely fixes things. Which is why you focus on ‘fixing things’, advice, pointing out where they’ve faltered, and more if you think they’ll be receptive. They often won’t be, because most people have a mix of embarrassment at these kinds of conversations and a push to ignore them.
I certainly understand why you think that. I used to think that myself. I pushed back myself when I first heard someone take such a “ridiculous” stance. And yet, it proved to be true, so I changed my mind.
The thing that I was missing then, and which you’re missing now, is that the bar for deep careful analysis is just a lot higher than you think (or most anyone thinks). It’s often reasonable to skimp out and leave it as “because they’re bad/lazy/stupid”/”they shouldn’t have” or whatever you want to round it to, but these things are semantic stopsigns, not irreducible explanations.
Pick an issue, any issue, and keep at the analysis until you do get to something irreducible. Okay, so you’ve kicked the can one step further and are upset with the people who banned shipping batteries or whatever. Why did they do it? Keep asking “Why? Why? Why?” like a curious two year old, until there is no more “why?”. If, after you feel like you’ve hit the end of the road, you still have annoyance with the calculator itself, go back and ask why? “I’m annoyed that the calculator doesn’t work… without batteries?” How do you finish the statement of annoyance?
The way I was initially convinced of this was by picking something fake, subjecting myself to that “overconfident” guy’s incessant questioning, with an expectation of proving to him that it was endless. It wasn’t, he won. Since then I’ve done it with many more real things, and the answer is always the same. Empirically, what happens, is that you can keep going and keep going, until you can’t, and at that point there’s just no more negative around that spot because it’s been crowded out. It doesn’t matter if it’s annoyance, or sadness, or even severe physical pain. If you do your analysis well, the experience shifts, and loses its negativity.
If you’re feeling “badness” and you think you have a full understanding, that feeling of badness itself contains the clues about where you’re wrong.
This is a bit of a distraction, but Thane covered it pretty well:
In other words, there are reasons for their choices. Do you understand why they chose the way they did?
Notice the movement of goal posts here? I’m talking about successfully helping people, you’re saying you can “get along”. Getting along is easy. I’m sure you can offer what passes as empathy to the girl with the nail in her head, instead of fighting her like a beliggerent dummy.
But can you exclaim “You got a nail in your head, you dummy!” and have her laugh with you, because you’re obviously correct? If you can’t trivially get her to agree that the problem is the nail, and figure out with you what to do about it, then your mismodeling is getting in the way.
This higher level of ability is achievable, and the path to get there is better modeling than you thought possible.
No, I believe I’m fully aware the level of deep careful analysis, and I understand why it pushes some people to sweep all facets of negativity or blame away, I just think they’re confused because their understanding of emotions/relations/causality hasn’t updated properly alongside their new understanding of determinism
Because I wanted the calculator to work, I think it is a good thing for calculators in stores to work, I am frustrated that the calculator didn’t work… none of this is exotic, nor is it purely prediction error. (nor do prediction error related emotions have to go away once you’ve explained the error… I still feel emotional pain when a pet dies even if I realize all the causes why; why would that not extend to other emotions related to prediction error?)
You assert this but I still don’t agree with it. I’ve thought long and hard about people before and the causes that make them do things, but no, this does not match my experience. I understand the impulse that encourages sweeping away negative emotions once you’ve found an explanation, like realizing that humanities’ lack of coordination is a big problem, but I can still very well feel negative emotions about that despite there being an explanation.
Relatively often? Yes. I don’t blame people for not outputting the code for an aligned AGI because it is something that would have been absurdly hard to reinforce in yourself to become the kind of person to do that.
If someone has a disease that makes so they struggle to do much at all, I am going to judge them a hell of a lot less. Most humans have the “disease” that they can’t just smash out the code for an aligned AGI.
I can understand why someone is not investing more time studying, and I can even look at myself and relatively well pin down why, and why it is hard to get over that hump… I just don’t dismiss the negative feeling even though I understand why. They ‘could have’, because the process-that-makes-their-decisions is them and not some separate third-thing.
I fail to study when I should because a combination of short-term optimized positive feeling seeking which leads me to watching youtube or skimming X, a desire for faster intellectual feelings that are easier gotten from arguing on reddit (or lesswrong) than slowly reading through a math paper, because I fear failure, and much more. Yet I still consider that bad, even if I got a full causal explanation it would have still been my choices.
I don’t have issues with helping people, there “goalposts” moved forward again, despite nothing in my sentence meaning I can’t help people. My usage of ‘get along’ was not the bare minimum meaning.
Getting along with people in the nail scenario often means being friendly and listening to them. I can very well do that, and have done it many times before, while still thinking their individual choices are foolish.
I don’t think your comment has supplied much more beyond further assertions that I must surely not be thinking things through.
How did you arrive at this belief? Like, the thing that I would be concerned with is “How do I know that Russel’s teapot isn’t just beyond my current horizon”?
Oh no, nothing is being swept away. Definitely not that. More on this with the grieving thing below.
The prediction error goes away when you update your prediction to match reality, not when you recite an explanation for why your current beliefs are clashing. You can keep predicting poorly all you want. If you want to keep feeling bad and getting poor results, I guess.
With a good explanation, you don’t have to.
Yes, you’re still losing your pet, and that still sucks. That’s real, and there’s no getting away from what’s real. You don’t get to accurate maps painlessly, let alone effortlessly. There’s no “One simple trick for not having to feel negative emotions!”.
The question is how this works. It’s very much not as simple as “Okay, I said he ded now I’m done grieving”. Because again, that’s not your predictions. The moment that you notice the fact that “he’s dead” is true can be long before you start to update your actual object level beliefs, and it’s a bit bizarre but also completely makes sense that it’s not until you start to update your beliefs that it hits you.
Even after you update the central belief, and even after you resolve all the “But why!?” questions that come up, you still expect to see everyone for Christmas. Until you realize that you can’t because someone is no longer alive, and update that prediction too. You think of something you’d have wanted to show him, and have to remember you can’t do that anymore. There are a bazillion little ways that those we care about become entwined with our lives, and grieving the loss of someone important is no simple task. You actually have to propagate this fact through to all the little things it effects, and correct all the predictions that required his life to fulfil.
Yet as you grieve, these things come up less and less frequently. Over time, you run out of errant predictions like “It’s gonna be fun to see Benny when—Oh fuck, no, that’s not happening”. Eventually, you can talk about their death like it’s just another thing that is, because it is.
Is it possible, do you think, that the way you’re doing analysis isn’t sufficient, and that if you were to be more careful and thorough, or otherwise did things differently, your experience would be different? If not, how do you rule this out, exactly? How do you explain others who are able to do this?
:) I appreciate it, thanks.
I’m holding the goal posts even further forward though. Friendly listening is one thing, but I’m talking about pointing out that they’re acting foolish and getting immediate laughter in recognition that you’re right. This is the level of ability that I’m pointing at. This is what is what’s there to aim for, which is enabled by sufficiently clear maps.
It contained a bit more than that. I checked to make sure I wasn’t being too opaque (it happens), but Claude can show you what you missed, if you care.
The big thing I was hoping you’d notice, is that I was trying to make my claims so outrageous and specific so that you’d respond “You can’t say this shit without providing receipts, man! So lets see them!”. I was daring you to challenge me to provide evidence. I wonder if maybe you thought I was exaggerating, or otherwise rounding my claims down to something less absurd and falsifiable?
Anyway, there are a few things in your comment that suggest you might not be having fun here. If that’s the case, I’m sorry about that. No need to continue if you don’t want, and no hard feelings either way.
Empirical evidence of being more in tune with my own emotions, generally better introspection, and in modeling why others make decisions. Compared to others. I have no belief that I’m perfect at this, but I do think I’m generally good at it and that I’m not missing a ‘height’ component to my understanding.
Because, (I believe) the impulse to dismiss any sort of negativity or blame once you understand the causes deep enough is one I’ve noticed myself. I do not believe it to be a level of understanding that I’ve failed to reach, I’ve dismissed it because it seems an improper framing.
At times the reason for this comes from a specific grappling with determinism and choice that I disagree with.
For others, the originating cause is due to considering kindness as automatically linked with empathy, with that unconsciously shaping what people think is acceptable from empathy.
In your case, some of it is tying it purely to prediction that I disagree with, because of some mix of kindness-being-the-focus, determinism, a feeling that once it has been explained in terms of the component parts that there’s nothing left, and other factors that I don’t know because they haven’t been elucidated.
Empirical exploration as in your example can be explanatory. However, I have thought about motivation and the underlying reasons to a low granularity plenty of times (impulses that form into habits, social media optimizing for short form behaviors, the heuristics humans come with which can make doing it now hard to weight against the cost of doing it a week from now, how all of those constrain the mind...), which makes me skeptical. The idea of ‘shift the negativity elsewhere’ is not new, but given your existing examples it does not convince me that if I spent an hour with you on this that we would get anywhere.
This, for example, is a misunderstanding of my position or the level of analysis that I’m speaking of. Wherein I am not stopping there, as I mentally consider complex social cause and effect and still feel negative about the choices they’ve made.
Grief like this exists, but I don’t agree that it is pure predictive remembrance. There is grief which lasts for a time and then fades away, not because my lower level beliefs are prediction to see them—away from home and a pet dies, I’m still sad, not because of prediction error but because I want (but wants are not predictions) the pet to be alive and fine, but they aren’t. Because it is bad, to be concise.
You could try arguing that this is ‘prediction that my mental model will say they are alive and well’, with two parts of myself in disagreement, but that seems very hard to determine the accuracy as an explanation and I think is starting to stretch the meaning of prediction error. Nor does the implication that ‘fully knowing the causes’ carves away negative emotion follow?
This is more about socialization ability, though having a clear map helps. I’ve done this before, with parents and joking with a friend about his progress on a project, but I do not do so regularly nor could I do it in arbitrarily. Joking itself is only sometimes the right route, the more general capability is working a push into normal conversation, with joking being one tool in the toolbox there. I don’t really accept the implication ‘and thus you are mismodeling via negative emotions if you can not do that consistently’. I can be mismodeling to the degree that I don’t know precisely what words will satisfy them, but that can be due to social abilities.
When you don’t provide much argumentation, I don’t go ‘huh, guess I need to prod them for argumentation’ I go ‘ah, unfortunate, I will try responding to the crunchy parts in the interests of good conversation, but will continue on’. That is, the onus is on you to provide reasons. I did remark that you were asserting without much backing.
I was taking you literally, and I’ve seen plenty of people fall back without engaging—I’ve definitely done it during the span of this discussion, and then interpreting your motivations through that. ‘I am playing a game to poke and prod at you’ is uh.....
A good chunk of it is the ~condescension. Repeated insistence while seeming to mostly just continue on the same line of thought without really engaging where I elaborate, goalpost gotcha, and then the bit about Claude when you just got done saying that it was to ‘test’ me; which it being to prod me being quite annoying in-of-itself.
Of course, I think you have more positive intent behind that. Pushing me to test myself empirically, or pushing me to push back on you so then you can push back yourself on me to provide empirical tests (?), or perhaps trying to use it as an empathy test for whether I understand you. I’m skeptical of you really understanding my position given your replies.
I feel like I’m being better at engaging at the direct level, while you’re often doing ‘you would understand if you actually tried’, when I believe I have tried to a substantial degree even if nothing precisely like ‘spend two hours mapping cause and effect of how a person came to these actions’.
Hm. Given the way you responded here, I don’t think it’s worth my time to continue. Given the work you put into this comment I feel like I at least owe you an explanation if you want one, but I’ll refrain unless you ask.