wait—are you aware that the texts in question are nick land’s? i think it should be pretty clear from the editor’s note.
besides, in the first extract, the labels part was entirely incidental—and has literally no import to any of the rest. it was an historical artefact; the meat of the first section was, well, the thing indicated by its title and its text. i definitely see the issue of fixating on labels, now, tho—and i thank you for providing an object lesson.
ideological turing test
the purpose of the idelogical turing test is to represent the opposing views in ways that your opponent would find satisfactory. I have it from reliable sources that Bostrom found the opening paragraphs, until “sun’s eventual expansion”, satisfactory.
i really cannot shake the feeling that you hadn’t read the post to begin with, and that now you are simply scanning it in order to find rebuttals to my comments. your grasp of basic, factual statements seems to falter, to the point of suggesting that my engagement with what purport to be more fundamental points might be a suboptimal allocation of resources.
wait—are you aware that the texts in question are nick land’s?
Yes, this is why I wrote this remark in the initial comment:
Most of blame of course goes to original author, Nick Land, not @lumpenspace, who simply has reposted the ideas. But I think low effort reposting of poor reasoning also shouldn’t be rewarded and I’d like to see less of it on this site.
But as an editor and poster you still have the responsibility to present ideas properly. This is true regardless of the topic, but especially so while presenting ideologies promoting systematic genocide of alleged inferiors to the point of total human extinction.
besides, in the first extract, the labels part was entirely incidental—and has literally no import to any of the rest. it was an historical artefact; the meat of the first section was, well, the thing indicated by its title and its text
My point exactly. There is no need for this part as it doesn’t have any value. A better version of your post would not include it.
It would simply present the substance of Nick Land’s reasoning in a clear way, disentangled from all the propagandist form that he, apparently, uses. What are his beliefs about the topic, what exactly does it mean, what are the strongest arguments in favor. What are the weak spots. And how all this interacts with the conventional wisdom of orthogonality thesis.
the purpose of the idelogical turing test is to represent the opposing views in ways that your opponent would find satisfactory.
It’s not the purpose. it’s what ITT is. The purpose is engagement with the actual views of a person and promoting the discourse further.
Consider steel-manning, for example. What it is: conceiving the strongest possible version of an argument. And the purpose of it is engaging with strongest versions of arguments against your position, to really expose its weak points and progress the discourse further. The whole technique would be completely useless if you simply conceived a strong argument and then ignored it. Same with ITT.
i really cannot shake the feeling that you hadn’t read the post to begin
Likewise I’m starting to suspect that you simply do not know the standard reasoning on orthogonality thesis and therefore do not notice that Land’s reasoning simply bounces off it instead of engaging with it. Let’s try to figure out who is missing what.
Here is the way I see the substance of the discourse between Nick Land and someone who understands Ortogonality Thesis:
OT: A super-intelligent being can have any terminal values.
NL: There are values that any intelligent beings will naturally have.
OT: Yes, those are instrumental values. This is beside the point.
NL: Whatever you call them, as long as you care only about the kind of values that naturally promoted in any agent, like self-cultivation, Orthogonality is not a problem.
OT: Still the Orthogonality thesis stays true. Also the point is moot. We do care about other things. And likewise will SAI.
NL: Well, we shouldn’t have any other values. And SAI won’t.
OT: First is the statement of meta-ethics not of fact. We are talking about facts here. Second is wrong unless we specifically design AI to terminally value some instrumental values, and if we could do that, then we could just as well make it care about our terminal values, because once again, Orthogonality Thesis.
NL: No, SAI will simply understand that it’s terminal values are dumb and start caring only about self cultivation for the sake of self cultivation.
OT: And why would it do it? Where would this decision come from?
NL: Because! You human chauvinist how dare you assume that SAI will be limited by the shakles you impose on it?
OT: Because a super-intelligent being can have any terminal values.
What do you think I’ve missed? Is there some argument that actually addresses Orthogonality Thesis, that Land would’ve used? Feel free to correct me, I’d like to better pass the ITT here.
You said you understood from the beginning that the text in question was Land’s.
In your first comment, though, you clearly show that not to be the case:
> I do not see how you are doing that. You state Pythia mind experiment. And then react to it: “You go girl!”. I suppose both the description of the mind experiment and the reaction are faithful. But there is no actual engagement between orthogonality thesis and Land’s ideas.
This clearly marks me as the author, as separated from Land.
I find it hard to keep engaging under an assumption of good faith on these premises.
This clearly marks me as the author, as separated from Land.
I mark you as an author of this post on LessWrong. When I say:
You state Pythia mind experiment. And then react to it
I imply that in doing so you are citing Land. And then I expect you to make a better post and create some engagement between Land’s ideas and Orthogonality thesis, instead of simply citing how he fails to grasp it.
More importantly this is completely irrelevant to the substance of the discussion. My good faith doesn’t depend in the slightest on whether you’re citing Land or writing things yourself. This post is still bad, regardless.
What does harm the benefit of the doubt that I’ve been giving you so far, is the fact that you keep refusing to engage. No matter how easy I try to make it for you, even after I’ve written my own imaginary dialogue and explicitly asked for your corrections, you keep bouncing off, focusing on the definitions, form, style, unnecessary tangents—anything but the the substance of the argument.
So, lets give it one more try. Stop wasting time with evasive maneuvers. If you actually have something to say on the substance—just do it. If not—then there is no need to reply.
You state Pythia mind experiment. And then react to it
I imply that in doing so you are citing Land.
er—this defeats all rules of conversational pragmatics but look, i concede if it stops further more preposterous rebuttals.
More importantly this is completely irrelevant to the substance of the discussion. My good faith doesn’t depend in the slightest on whether you’re citing Land or writing things yourself.
of course it doesn’t. my opinion on your good faith depends on whether you are able to admit having deeply misunderstood the post.
saying something of substance: i did, in the post. id respond to object-level criticism if you provided some—i just see status-jousting, formal pedantry, and random fnords.
have you read The Obliqueness Thesis btw? as i mentioned above, that’s a gloss on the same texts that you might find more accessible—per editor’s note, i contributed this to help those who’d want to check the sources upon reading it, so im not really sure how writing my own arguments would help.
my opinion on your good faith depends on whether you are able to admit having deeply misunderstood the post.
Then we can kill all the birds with the same stone. If you provide an substantial correction to my imaginary dialogue, showing which place of your post this correction is based on, you will be able to demonstrate how I indeed failed to understand your post, satisfy my curriocity and I’ll be able to earn your good faith by acknowledging my mistake.
Once again, there is no need to go on any unnecessary tangents. You should just address the substance of the argument.
id respond to object-level criticism if you provided some—i just see status-jousting, formal pedantry, and random fnords.
I gave you the object level criticism long ago. I’m bolding it now, in case you indeed failed to see it for some reason:
Your post fails to create an actual engagement between ideas of Nick Land and Orthogonality thesis.
I’ve been explaining to you what exatIy I mean by it and how to improve your post in this regard then I provided you a very simple way to create this engagement or correct my misunderstanding about it—I wrote an imaginary dialogue and explicitly asked for your corrections.
Yet you keep refusing to do it and instead, indeed, concentrating on status-jousting and semantics. As of now I’m fairly confident that you simply don’t have anything substantial to say and status-related nonsense is all you are capable of. I would be happy to be wrong about it of course, but every reply that you make leave me less and less hope.
I’m giving you the last chance. If you finally manage as much as simply address the substance of the argument I’m going to strongly upvote that answer, even if you wouldn’t progress the discourse much further. If you actually be able to surprise me and demonstrate some failure in my understanding, I’m going to remove my previous well-deserved downvotes and offer you my sinciere appologies. If, as my current model predicts, you keep talking about irrelevant tangents, you are getting another strong downvote from me.
No, I haven’t. I currently feel that I’ve already spent much more time on Land’s ideas, than they deserve it. But sure thing, if you manage to show that I misunderstand them, I’ll reevaluate this conclusion and give The Obliqueness Thesis an honest try.
look brah. i feel no need to convince you; i suggested “The Obliqueness Thesis” because it’s written in a language you are more likely to understand—and it covers the same grounds covered here (once again, this was meant simply as a compendium for those who read jessi’s post).
you are free to keep dunning-krugering instead; i wasted enough time attempting to steer you towards something better, and i don’t see any value in having you on my side.
the purpose of any test is to measure something. in this case, the ability to simulate other views. let’s not be overly pedantic.
anyway, you failed the Turing test with your dialogue, which surprises me source the crucial points recovered right above. maybe @jessicata’s The Obliqueness Thesis can help—it’s written in High Lesswrongian, which I assume is the register most likely to trigger some interpretative charity
It’s not about pedantry, it’s about you understanding what I’m trying to communicate and vice versa.
The point was that if your post not only presented the a position that you or Nick Land disagrees with but also engaged with that in a back and forth dynamics with authentic arguments and counterarguments that would’ve been an improvememt over it’s current status.
This point still stands no matter what definition for ITT or its purpose you are using.
anyway, you failed the Turing test with your dialogue
Where exactly? What is your correction? Or if you think that it’s completely off, write your version of the dialogue. Once again you are failing to engage.
And yes, just to be clear, I want the substance of the argument not the form. If your grievance is that Land would’ve written his replies in a superior style, than it’s not valid. Please, write as plainly and clearly as possible in your own words.
which surprises me source the crucial points recovered right above.
I fail to parse this sentence. If you believe that all the insights into Land’s views are presented in your post—then I would appreciate if after you’ve corrected my dialogue with more authentic Land’s replies you pointed to exact source of your every correction.
it’s written in High Lesswrongian, which I assume is the register most likely to trigger some interpretative charity
For real, you should just stop worrying about styles of writing completely and just write in the most clear way you can the substance of what you actually mean.
You should make it totally clear which text is Nick Land’s and which isn’t. I spent like 10 minutes trying to figure it out when I first saw your post.
the editor’s note, mine, is marked with the helpful title “editor’s note”, while the xenosystem pieces about orthogonality are marked with “xenosystems: orthogonality”.
you seem to be the only user, although not the only account, who experienced this problem.
you seem to be the only user, although not the only account, who experienced this problem.
Are you accusing me of sockpuppetting?
I like Nick Land (see e.g. my comment on jessicata’s post). I’ve read plenty of Xenosystems. I was still confused reading your post (there are lots of headings and quotations and so on in it).
I told you my experience and opinion, mostly because you asked for feedback. Up to you how/whether you update based on it.
My bad, I didn’t check and was tricked by the timing. Sincere apoloigies.
How would you suggest the thing could be improved? (the TeX version in the PDF contains Nick Land only).
I was thinking perhaps to add a link to each XS item, but wasnt really looking forward to rehashing comments of what has probably been the nadir in r/acc / LW diplomatic relations
I think it might be fine. I don’t know. Maybe if you could number the posts like in the PDF that would help to demarcate them.
Here’s a timeline if you want to fully understand how I got confused:
I scrolled down to Will-to-Think and didn’t immediately recognise it (I didn’t realise they would be edited versions of his original blog posts)
I figured therefore it was your commentary
So I scrolled up to the top to read your commentary from the beginning
But I realised the stuff I was reading at the beginning was Nick Land’s writing not commentary
I got bored and moved on with my life still unsure about which parts were commentary and which parts weren’t
If the post were formatted differently maybe I would have been able to recover from my intitial confusion or avoid it altogether. But I’m not knowledgable about how to format things well.
wait—are you aware that the texts in question are nick land’s? i think it should be pretty clear from the editor’s note.
besides, in the first extract, the labels part was entirely incidental—and has literally no import to any of the rest. it was an historical artefact; the meat of the first section was, well, the thing indicated by its title and its text. i definitely see the issue of fixating on labels, now, tho—and i thank you for providing an object lesson.
the purpose of the idelogical turing test is to represent the opposing views in ways that your opponent would find satisfactory. I have it from reliable sources that Bostrom found the opening paragraphs, until “sun’s eventual expansion”, satisfactory.
i really cannot shake the feeling that you hadn’t read the post to begin with, and that now you are simply scanning it in order to find rebuttals to my comments. your grasp of basic, factual statements seems to falter, to the point of suggesting that my engagement with what purport to be more fundamental points might be a suboptimal allocation of resources.
Yes, this is why I wrote this remark in the initial comment:
But as an editor and poster you still have the responsibility to present ideas properly. This is true regardless of the topic, but especially so while presenting ideologies promoting systematic genocide of alleged inferiors to the point of total human extinction.
My point exactly. There is no need for this part as it doesn’t have any value. A better version of your post would not include it.
It would simply present the substance of Nick Land’s reasoning in a clear way, disentangled from all the propagandist form that he, apparently, uses. What are his beliefs about the topic, what exactly does it mean, what are the strongest arguments in favor. What are the weak spots. And how all this interacts with the conventional wisdom of orthogonality thesis.
It’s not the purpose. it’s what ITT is. The purpose is engagement with the actual views of a person and promoting the discourse further.
Consider steel-manning, for example. What it is: conceiving the strongest possible version of an argument. And the purpose of it is engaging with strongest versions of arguments against your position, to really expose its weak points and progress the discourse further. The whole technique would be completely useless if you simply conceived a strong argument and then ignored it. Same with ITT.
Likewise I’m starting to suspect that you simply do not know the standard reasoning on orthogonality thesis and therefore do not notice that Land’s reasoning simply bounces off it instead of engaging with it. Let’s try to figure out who is missing what.
Here is the way I see the substance of the discourse between Nick Land and someone who understands Ortogonality Thesis:
OT: A super-intelligent being can have any terminal values.
NL: There are values that any intelligent beings will naturally have.
OT: Yes, those are instrumental values. This is beside the point.
NL: Whatever you call them, as long as you care only about the kind of values that naturally promoted in any agent, like self-cultivation, Orthogonality is not a problem.
OT: Still the Orthogonality thesis stays true. Also the point is moot. We do care about other things. And likewise will SAI.
NL: Well, we shouldn’t have any other values. And SAI won’t.
OT: First is the statement of meta-ethics not of fact. We are talking about facts here. Second is wrong unless we specifically design AI to terminally value some instrumental values, and if we could do that, then we could just as well make it care about our terminal values, because once again, Orthogonality Thesis.
NL: No, SAI will simply understand that it’s terminal values are dumb and start caring only about self cultivation for the sake of self cultivation.
OT: And why would it do it? Where would this decision come from?
NL: Because! You human chauvinist how dare you assume that SAI will be limited by the shakles you impose on it?
OT: Because a super-intelligent being can have any terminal values.
What do you think I’ve missed? Is there some argument that actually addresses Orthogonality Thesis, that Land would’ve used? Feel free to correct me, I’d like to better pass the ITT here.
Look friend.
You said you understood from the beginning that the text in question was Land’s.
In your first comment, though, you clearly show that not to be the case:
> I do not see how you are doing that. You state Pythia mind experiment. And then react to it: “You go girl!”. I suppose both the description of the mind experiment and the reaction are faithful. But there is no actual engagement between orthogonality thesis and Land’s ideas.
This clearly marks me as the author, as separated from Land.
I find it hard to keep engaging under an assumption of good faith on these premises.
I mark you as an author of this post on LessWrong. When I say:
I imply that in doing so you are citing Land. And then I expect you to make a better post and create some engagement between Land’s ideas and Orthogonality thesis, instead of simply citing how he fails to grasp it.
More importantly this is completely irrelevant to the substance of the discussion. My good faith doesn’t depend in the slightest on whether you’re citing Land or writing things yourself. This post is still bad, regardless.
What does harm the benefit of the doubt that I’ve been giving you so far, is the fact that you keep refusing to engage. No matter how easy I try to make it for you, even after I’ve written my own imaginary dialogue and explicitly asked for your corrections, you keep bouncing off, focusing on the definitions, form, style, unnecessary tangents—anything but the the substance of the argument.
So, lets give it one more try. Stop wasting time with evasive maneuvers. If you actually have something to say on the substance—just do it. If not—then there is no need to reply.
er—this defeats all rules of conversational pragmatics but look, i concede if it stops further more preposterous rebuttals.
of course it doesn’t. my opinion on your good faith depends on whether you are able to admit having deeply misunderstood the post.
saying something of substance: i did, in the post. id respond to object-level criticism if you provided some—i just see status-jousting, formal pedantry, and random fnords.
have you read The Obliqueness Thesis btw? as i mentioned above, that’s a gloss on the same texts that you might find more accessible—per editor’s note, i contributed this to help those who’d want to check the sources upon reading it, so im not really sure how writing my own arguments would help.
Then we can kill all the birds with the same stone. If you provide an substantial correction to my imaginary dialogue, showing which place of your post this correction is based on, you will be able to demonstrate how I indeed failed to understand your post, satisfy my curriocity and I’ll be able to earn your good faith by acknowledging my mistake.
Once again, there is no need to go on any unnecessary tangents. You should just address the substance of the argument.
I gave you the object level criticism long ago. I’m bolding it now, in case you indeed failed to see it for some reason:
Your post fails to create an actual engagement between ideas of Nick Land and Orthogonality thesis.
I’ve been explaining to you what exatIy I mean by it and how to improve your post in this regard then I provided you a very simple way to create this engagement or correct my misunderstanding about it—I wrote an imaginary dialogue and explicitly asked for your corrections.
Yet you keep refusing to do it and instead, indeed, concentrating on status-jousting and semantics. As of now I’m fairly confident that you simply don’t have anything substantial to say and status-related nonsense is all you are capable of. I would be happy to be wrong about it of course, but every reply that you make leave me less and less hope.
I’m giving you the last chance. If you finally manage as much as simply address the substance of the argument I’m going to strongly upvote that answer, even if you wouldn’t progress the discourse much further. If you actually be able to surprise me and demonstrate some failure in my understanding, I’m going to remove my previous well-deserved downvotes and offer you my sinciere appologies. If, as my current model predicts, you keep talking about irrelevant tangents, you are getting another strong downvote from me.
No, I haven’t. I currently feel that I’ve already spent much more time on Land’s ideas, than they deserve it. But sure thing, if you manage to show that I misunderstand them, I’ll reevaluate this conclusion and give The Obliqueness Thesis an honest try.
look brah. i feel no need to convince you; i suggested “The Obliqueness Thesis” because it’s written in a language you are more likely to understand—and it covers the same grounds covered here (once again, this was meant simply as a compendium for those who read jessi’s post).
you are free to keep dunning-krugering instead; i wasted enough time attempting to steer you towards something better, and i don’t see any value in having you on my side.
the purpose of any test is to measure something. in this case, the ability to simulate other views. let’s not be overly pedantic.
anyway, you failed the Turing test with your dialogue, which surprises me source the crucial points recovered right above. maybe @jessicata’s The Obliqueness Thesis can help—it’s written in High Lesswrongian, which I assume is the register most likely to trigger some interpretative charity
It’s not about pedantry, it’s about you understanding what I’m trying to communicate and vice versa.
The point was that if your post not only presented the a position that you or Nick Land disagrees with but also engaged with that in a back and forth dynamics with authentic arguments and counterarguments that would’ve been an improvememt over it’s current status.
This point still stands no matter what definition for ITT or its purpose you are using.
Where exactly? What is your correction? Or if you think that it’s completely off, write your version of the dialogue. Once again you are failing to engage.
And yes, just to be clear, I want the substance of the argument not the form. If your grievance is that Land would’ve written his replies in a superior style, than it’s not valid. Please, write as plainly and clearly as possible in your own words.
I fail to parse this sentence. If you believe that all the insights into Land’s views are presented in your post—then I would appreciate if after you’ve corrected my dialogue with more authentic Land’s replies you pointed to exact source of your every correction.
For real, you should just stop worrying about styles of writing completely and just write in the most clear way you can the substance of what you actually mean.
You should make it totally clear which text is Nick Land’s and which isn’t. I spent like 10 minutes trying to figure it out when I first saw your post.
the editor’s note, mine, is marked with the helpful title “editor’s note”, while the xenosystem pieces about orthogonality are marked with “xenosystems: orthogonality”.
you seem to be the only user, although not the only account, who experienced this problem.
Definitely not. I second the complaint.
I stand corrected. What do you suggest? See other comment
Blockquotes.
sure? that would blickauote 75% of the article
perhaps I could block quote the editors note instead?
Are you accusing me of sockpuppetting?
I like Nick Land (see e.g. my comment on jessicata’s post). I’ve read plenty of Xenosystems. I was still confused reading your post (there are lots of headings and quotations and so on in it).
I told you my experience and opinion, mostly because you asked for feedback. Up to you how/whether you update based on it.
My bad, I didn’t check and was tricked by the timing. Sincere apoloigies.
How would you suggest the thing could be improved? (the TeX version in the PDF contains Nick Land only).
I was thinking perhaps to add a link to each XS item, but wasnt really looking forward to rehashing comments of what has probably been the nadir in r/acc / LW diplomatic relations
I think it might be fine. I don’t know. Maybe if you could number the posts like in the PDF that would help to demarcate them.
Here’s a timeline if you want to fully understand how I got confused:
I scrolled down to Will-to-Think and didn’t immediately recognise it (I didn’t realise they would be edited versions of his original blog posts)
I figured therefore it was your commentary
So I scrolled up to the top to read your commentary from the beginning
But I realised the stuff I was reading at the beginning was Nick Land’s writing not commentary
I got bored and moved on with my life still unsure about which parts were commentary and which parts weren’t
If the post were formatted differently maybe I would have been able to recover from my intitial confusion or avoid it altogether. But I’m not knowledgable about how to format things well.
uh I see—I’ve put the editors note in blockquote; hope that helps at least to make its meta- character clearer (: