Adam Zerner
… ok, I take it back, it seems like you are reading my comments and apparently (sort of, mostly) understanding them… but then where the heck did the above-quoted totally erroneous summary of my view come from?!
I don’t have the strongest grasp of what rule consequentialism actually means. I’m also very prone to thinking about things in terms of expected value. I apologize if either of these things has lead to confusion or misattribution.
My understanding of rule consequentialism is that you choose rules that you think will lead to the best consequences and then try to follow those rules. But it is also my understanding that it is often a little difficult to figure out what rules apply to what situations, and so in practice some object level thinking about expected consequences bleeds in.
It sounds like that is not the case here though. It sounds like here you have rules you are following that clearly apply to this decision to post the tenth comment and you are not thinking about expected consequences. Is that correct? If not would you mind clarifying what is true?
Anyhow, to answer your question… uh… I already answered your question. I explain some relevant “rules” in the thread that I linked to.
I would appreciate it if you could outline 1) what the rules are and 2) why you have selected them.
So in this hypothetical calculation which you allude to, “the effects on Bob” (in the sense that we are discussing) should be weighted at exactly zero.
Hm. I’d like to clarify something here. This seems important.
It’s one thing to say that 1) “tough love” is good because despite being painful in the short term, it is what most benefits the person in the long term. But it is another thing to say 2) that if someone is “soft” then their experiences don’t matter.
This isn’t a perfect analogy, but I think that it is gesturing at something that is important and in the ballpark of what we’re talking about. I’m having trouble putting my finger on it. Do you think there is something useful here, perhaps with some amendments? Would you like to comment on where you stand on (1) vs (2)?
I’ll also try to ask a more concrete question here. Are you saying a) by taking the effects on Bob into account it will lead to less good consequences for society as a whole (ie. Bob + everyone else), and thus we shouldn’t take the effects of Bob into account? Or are you saying b), that the effects on Bob simply don’t matter at all?
Thanks for clarifying, Said. That is helpful.
I skimmed each of the threads you linked to.
One thing I want to note is that I hear you and agree with you about how these comments are taking place in public forums and that we need to consider their effects beyond the commenter and the person being replied to.
I’m interested in hearing more about why you expect your hypothetical tenth comment in this scenario we’ve been discussing to have a net positive effect. I will outline some things about my model of the world and would love to hear about how it meshes with your model.
Components of my model:
People generally don’t dig too deeply into long exchanges on comment threads. And so the audience is small. To the extent this is true, the effects on Bob should be weighed more heavily.
This hypothetical exchange is likely to be perceived as hostile and adversarial.
When perceived that way, people tend to enter a soldier-like mindset.
People are rather bad at updating their believes when they have such a mindset.
Being in a soldier mindset might cause them to, I’m not sure how to phrase this, but something along the lines of practicing bad epidemics, and this leading to them being weaker epistemically moving forward, not stronger.
I guess this doesn’t mesh well with the hypothetical I’ve outlined, but I feel like a lot of times the argument you’re making is about a relatively tangential and non-central point. To the extent this is true, there is less benefit to discussing it.
The people who do read through the comment thread, the audience, often experience frustration and unhappiness. Furthermore, they often get sucked in, spending more time than they endorse.
(I’m at the gym on my phone and was a little loose with my language and thinking.)
One possibility I anticipate is that you think that modeling things this way and trying to predict such consequences of writing the tenth comment is a futile act consequentialist approach and one should not attempt this. Instead they should find rules roughly similar to “speak the truth” and follow them. If so, I would be interested in hearing about what rules you are following and why you have chosen to follow those rules.
This is not an accurate summary.
Hm. I’m realizing that I’ve been presuming that you are at least roughly consequentialist and are trying to take actions that lead to good consequences for affected parties. Maybe that’s not true though.
But if it is true, here is how I am thinking about it. We can divide affected parties into 1) you, 2) Bob, and 3) others. We’ve stipulated that with the tenth comment you expect it to negatively affect Bob. So then, I’d think that’d mean that your reason for posting the tenth comment is that you expect the desirable consequences for you and others to outweigh the undesirable consequences for Bob.
Furthermore, you’ve emphasized “public benefit” and the fact that this is a public forum. You also haven’t indicated that you have particularly selfish motives that would make you want to do things that benefit you at the expense of others, at least not to an unusual degree. So then, I presume that the expected benefit to the third group—others—is the bulk of your reason for posting the tenth comment.
It seems like you’re trying very hard to twist my words so as to make my views fit into your framework. But they don’t.
I’m sorry that it came across that way. I promise that I am not trying to twist your words. I just would like to understand where you are coming from.
Thank you for clarifying that your motivation in writing the tenth comment is to altriusitically benefit the general public at large. That you are making a conscious attempt to win in this scenario by writing the tenth comment.
I suspect that this is belief in belief. Suppose that we were able to measure the impact of your tenth comment. If someone offered you a bet that this tenth comment would have a net negative overall impact on the general public, at 1-to-1 odds, for a large sum of money, I don’t think you would take it because I don’t think you actually predict the tenth comment to have this net positive impact.
Well, why should that reason not still apply to the tenth comment, just as it did to the first…?
Because you have more information after the first nine comments. You have reason to believe that Bob finds the discussion to be unpleasant, that you are unlikely to update his beliefs, and that he is unlikely to update yours.
I don’t accept this “causing harm to Bob” stipulation.
Hm. “Cause” might be oversimplifying. In the situation I’m describing let’s suppose that Bob is worse off in the world where you write the tenth comment than he is in the counterfactual world where you don’t. What word/phrase would you use to describe this?
I will again note that I find it perplexing to have to explain this. The alternative view (where one views a discussion in the comments on a LessWrong post as merely an interaction between two individuals, with no greater import or impact) seems nigh-incomprehensible to me.
My belief here is that impact beyond the two individuals varies. Sometimes lots of other people are following the conversation. Sometimes they get value out of it, sometimes it has a net negative impact on them. Sometimes few other people follow the conversation. Sometimes zero other people follow it.
I expect that you share this set of beliefs and that basically everyone else shares this set of beliefs.
Let me make this more concrete. Suppose you are going back and forth with a single user in a comments thread—call them Bob—and there have been nine exchanges. Bob wrote the ninth comment. You get the sense that Bob is finding the conversation unpleasant, but he continues to respond anyway.
You have the option of just not responding. Not writing that tenth comment. Not continuing to respond in that comment thread at all. (I don’t think you’d dispute this.)
And so my question is: why write the tenth comment? You point out that, as a public discussion forum, when you write that tenth comment in response to Bob, it is not just for Bob, but for anyone who might read or end up contributing to the conversation.
But that observation itself is, I think you’d agree, insufficient to explain why it’d make sense to write the tenth comment. To the extent your goals are altruistic, you’d have to posit that this tenth comment is having a net benefit to the general public. Is that your position? That despite potentially causing harm to Bob, it is worth writing the tenth comment because you expect there to be enough benefit to the general public?
Thank you for the response.
Given your beliefs, I understand why you won’t apply this “softer, gentler” writing style. You would find it off-putting and you think it would do harm to the community.
There is something that I don’t understand and would like to understand though. Simplifying, we can say that some people enjoy your engagement style and others don’t. What I don’t understand is why you choose to engage with people who clearly don’t enjoy your engagement style.
I suspect that your thinking is that the responsibility falls on them to disengage if they so desire. But clearly some people struggle with that (and I would pose the same question to them as well: why continue engaging). So from your perspective, if you’re aiming to win, why continue to engage with such people?
Does it make you happy? Does it make them happy? Is it an altruistic attempt to enforce community norms?
Or is it just that duty calls and you are not in fact making a conscious attempt to win? I suspect this is what is happening.
(And I apologize if this is too “gentle”, but hey, zooming out, being agent-y, and thinking strategically about whether what you’re doing is the best way to win is not easy. I certainly fail at it the large majority of the time. I think pretty much everyone does.)
(Sorry about the edit Said, and thank you for calling it out and stating your intent. I was going to DM you but figured you might not receive it due to some sort of moderation action, which is unfortunate. I figured there’d be a good chance that you’d see the edit and so I’d wait a few hours before replying to let you know I had edited the comment.)
Yeah, I hear ya. I don’t see any low hanging fruit here such as attempting to apply NVC. What I mean is that I think there are solutions out there that we haven’t discovered yet. And not in the distant sense of “have nanobots rewire Said’s brain”; I suspect that The Art really does contain solutions that aren’t super distant or high-tech.
I spent a few minutes trying to do so and feel overwhelmed. I’m not motivated to continue.
Edit:
If you wouldn’t mind, I’d appreciate a concise summary. No worries if you’d prefer not to though.
In particular, I’m wondering why you might think that your approach to commenting leads to more winning than the more gentle approach I referred to.
Is it something you enjoy? That brings you happiness? More than other hobbies or sources of entertainment? I suspect not.
Are your motivations altruistic? Maybe it’s that despite being not fun to you personally, you feel you are doing the community a service by defending certain norms. This seems somewhat plausible to me but also not too likely.
My best guess is that the approach to commenting you have taken is not actually a thoughtful strategy that you expect will lead to the most winning, but instead is the result of being unable to resist the impulse of someone being wrong on the internet. (I say this knowing that you are the type of person who appreciates candidness.)
That makes sense. I am not familiar with such previous conversations, haven’t really been following any of this, and didn’t read the OP too thoroughly. I am not motivated to dig up previous conversations. If you or someone else would like to I’d appreciate it, but no worries if not.
This outcome makes me a little sad. I have a sense that more is possible.
How would this situation play out in a world like dath ilan? A world where The Art has progressed to something much more formidable.
Is there some fundamental incompatibility here that can’t be bridged? Possibly. I have a hunch that this isn’t the case though. My hunch is that there is a lot of soldier mindsetting going on and that once The Art figures out the right Jedi mind tricks to jolt people out of that mindset and into something more scout-like, these sorts of conflicts will often be resolvable. From The Scout Mindset:
My path to this book began in 2009, after I quit graduate school and threw myself into a passion project that became a new career: helping people reason out tough questions in their personal and professional lives. At first I imagined that this would involve teaching people about things like probability, logic, and cognitive biases, and showing them how those subjects applied to everyday life. But after several years of running workshops, reading studies, doing consulting, and interviewing people, I finally came to accept that knowing how to reason wasn’t the cure-all I thought it was.
Knowing that you should test your assumptions doesn’t automatically improve your judgement, any more than knowing you should exercise automatically improves your health. Being able to rattle off a list of biases and fallacies doesn’t help you unless you’re willing to acknowledge those biases and fallacies in your own thinking. The biggest lesson I learned is something that’s since been corroborated by researchers, as we’ll see in this book: our judgment isn’t limited by knowledge nearly as much as it’s limited by attitude.
I’m not sure what those Jedi mind tricks would look like of course, but I’ll hypothesize that they’d look something like what is recommended in Nonviolent Communication (NVC). Specifically, starting off making sure each side feels that they are understood before moving on to any attempts at argument. Or maybe people in the field of conflict resolution have some answers.
I have a question for you, Said.
If I understand correctly, a big part of the problem is that people perceive your comments as having a certain hostile-flavored subtext. You deny that this subtext is actually present and fault them for inferring things that you hadn’t stated explicitly.
I strongly suspect that you are capable of writing in such a way where people don’t perceive this hostile-flavored subtext. A softer, gentler type of writing.
Assuming that you are in fact capable of this type of writing, my question is why you choose to not write in this manner.
Ah, it looks like Zach is working on https://ailabwatch.org/, which is pretty much what I was envisioning. Very cool.
I just saw (but didn’t read) the post Anthropic is Quietly Backpedalling on its Safety Commitments. I’ve seen similar posts before.
I wonder: maybe it’d make sense to have some sort of watchdog organization officially tracking this sort of stuff. And maintaining a wall of shame-ish website. Maybe such a thing would make backpedalling on safety more costly for organizations, thus changing their calculus and causing them to spend incrementally more effort on safety.
Claude estimated for me a 1-in-100 to 1-in-1,000 chance of getting sick on a flight as a baseline. Let’s say 1-in-500. Ballparking the value of avoiding some sort of illness at $500, the baseline cost is $1. So then, if booking a later flight leads to a 20-100% decreased risk of illness, it doesn’t seem like it’d save more than a dollar or so in EV.
If you value avoiding illness at something higher like $5,000, then the expected savings are more like $10 or so, which maybe becomes worth it, although if you value avoiding illness that highly might be worth wearing a P100 mask or something, in which case the value of a later flight goes down to something more like $1, I’d guesstimate.
but realistically no, an hour is still fine even if you are trying to maintain full peace of mind.
I think an important consideration here is that belief updates don’t necessarily translate to peace of mind. I feel like I know a variety of people who like to get to the airport way earlier than necessary despite a logical understanding that doing so doesn’t actually reduce their risk of missing their flight a measurable amount.
Very interesting! I’d be interested in seeing some microCOVID-style expected value estimates here. Like, approximately how much does this reduce your risk: from what to what? And how does this translate to EV? How valuable is it to avoid such illness?
My guess is that it’s only worth a few dollars at most, in which case it isn’t something I’d want to bother with. But if the benefit gets into the $25-50+ range, I’d be thinking about it for my next flight.
So, Where is Everyone?
At Planet Fitness? Ha.
But to be serious, if I understand correctly, Planet Fitness tries to make itself a place where the 97% feel comfortable enough to go to the gym. A place where the median person isn’t pushing 6 plates on the bench press and 14 on the leg press. It’d be cool if that sort of thing happened in more domains.
Interesting. I couldn’t care less about being better at fixing mouse wheels, but I think I took away a more general lesson from this post, and I think this lesson is a valuable one.
If I were in your shoes, the thought to attempt to fix the mouse wheel wouldn’t have even occurred to me. It wouldn’t have been in my “things I might be able to fix” bucket.
Then if you prompted me to ask myself the question—“should I try to fix this?”—after busting the cache and re-evaluating my belief, I’d have arrived at the same conclusion: no. I’d have assumed that doing so would be too tricky and high effort.
In general, I tend to get intimidated by these sorts of things that require you to “open up the hood”. I tend to assume that doing so is going to be too messy. I’m a programmer and this applies to reading source code of libraries I’m using too. When I run into issues I’ll check the GitHub issues, but if that doesn’t prove fruitful, I usually give up.
But at least in the example of the mouse wheel, I would have been wrong.[1] And having a concrete, grounded example of being wrong about this general sort of thing is helpful. Moving forward, I’m going to try to be more open-minded. Spending a Yoda timer or two to brainstorm is probably a good approach in many situations.
- ^
Well, I’m not sure if I would have reasoned about it as well and successfully as you did, but it’s at least plausible that I would have.
- ^
This is starting to feel satisfying, like I understand where you are coming from. I have a relatively strong curiosity here; I want to understand where you’re coming from.
It sounds like there are rules such as “saying things that are true, relevant and at least somewhat important” that you strongly believe will lead to the best outcomes for society. These rules apply to the decision to post the tenth comment, and so you follow the rule and post the comment.
So to be clear would it be accurate to say that you would choose (a) rather than (b) in my previous question? Perhaps with some amendments or caveats?
I’m trying to ask what you value.
And as for listing out your entire moral philosophy, I am certainly not asking for that. I was thinking that there might be 3-5 rules that are most relevant and that would be easy to rattle off. Is that not the case?