Benquo
Karma: 8,456 (LW), 0 (AF)
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Thank you, fixed
Ah, if you literally just mean it increases variance & risk, that’s true in the very short term. In context it sounded to me like a policy argument against doing so, but on reflection it’s easy to read you as meaning the more reasonable thing. Thank you for explaining.
I don’t think the 100% tax rate argument works, for several reasons:
100% is not the short-run maximum extraction rate (Cf “Laffer Curve,” which is explicitly short-term).
USGOVT is not really an agent here, some extractors taking all they can are subjectvto the top marginal tax rate & reallocating to themselves using subtler mechanisms like monetary policy and financial regulation (and deregulation, cyclically), boondoggles, other regulatory capture...
If you count other extraction points such as credentialism + high college tuition + need-based financial aid (mostly involving loans), hospital bills, lifetime extraction rate may be a lot higher.
Your notion of trust seems like it’s conflation of two opposite things meant by the word.
The first relates to coordination towards clarity, a norm of using info to improve the commons. The second is about covering for each other in an environment where information is mainly used to extract things from others.
Related: http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/humility-argument-honesty/ http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/against-neglectedness/ http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/model-building-and-scapegoating/
This seems like a general argument that providing evidence without trying to control the conclusions others draw is bad because it leads to errors. It doesn’t seem to take into account the cost of reduced info glow or the possibility that the gatekeeper might also introduce errors. That’s before we even consider self-serving bias!
Related: http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/humility-argument-honesty/
TLDR: I literally do not understand how to interpret your comment as NOT a general endorsement of fraud and implicit declaration of intent to engage in it.
Right now people covertly getting away with unobjectionable stuff are making it easy to punish honest people who do the thing openly. Plausible that the former should in fact pay costs for their complicity. The addendum to this Overcoming Bias post seems relevant:
OK, maybe there are three main types: 1) abstainers – those who don’t want promiscuity, 2) stoners – those who do want promiscuity, are willing to admit it, and use drugs to help get it, and 3) cheaters – those who want promiscuity, but aren’t willing to admit it, don’t use drugs to get it, and compete with stoners for partners. Groups 1&3 together support anti-drug laws, while groups 2&3 together keep punishments of promiscuity weak.
Seems like the implication is “would damage [in a just world]” vs “will damage [in our actual world].”
Blackmailers are privateers in the war on hypocrisy
14 is still half an order of magnitude above 5, and I don’t think neo-Nazis are particularly close to the most complex coordination thousands of people can achieve with a standardized set of words.
But it seems to me—though perhaps I’m just being dim—that the only possibly way to appreciate that P was Zack’s epistemological point is to be aware not only of the political (not-very-sub) subtext of the article (which, you’ll recall, is the thing I originally said it was wrong not to mention) but also of the context where people were addressing that specific political issue in what Zack considers a too-subjective way.
That’s not actually an important part of the content of Zack’s article. It is only relevant in the context of your claim that Zack was responding to a very different specific thing not directly referenced in his article. I am not saying that the fact that you were wrong means that the true cause should have been obvious. I am saying that the fact that you were wrong should make you doubt that you were obviously right.
If people’s models have a specific glitch, laying out what the undamaged version ought to look like is legitimate, and shouldn’t have to exist solely in reference to the specific instance of the glitch. Truth doesn’t have to make reference to error to be true—it just has to match reality.
I still think it’s clear that Zack’s main purpose in writing the article was to promote a particular object-level position on the political question.
Why would you think that? Why would this post be a remotely effective way to do that? Why is that even a plausible thing Zack’s trying to do here? Can you point to an example of someone who was actually persuaded?
I feel like I’ve done way too much work explaining my position here and you haven’t really explained the reasoning behind yours.
A productive thing to do here would be to try to reconcile the claim that a large number of people can’t reasonably be expected to read more than a few words, and the claim that something like EA or Rationalism is possible at anything like the current scale. These are in obvious tension.
Another claim to reconcile with yours would be a claim that there’s anything like law going on, or really anything other than gang warfare.
This was definitely not initially obvious to everyone, and I expect many people still have the impression that the victories were not due to unfair AI advantages. I think you should double crux with Raemon on how many words people can be expected to read.
You’re massively underestimating the upper bound.
I’ve interacted a bunch recently with members of a group of about 2 million people who recite a 245-word creed twice daily, and assemble weekly to read from an 80,000 word text such that the whole text gets read annually. This is nowhere near a complete accounting of engagement with verbal canon within the group. Each of these practices is preceded and followed by an additional standardized text of substantial length, and many people study full-time a much larger canonical text claiming to interpret the core text.
They also engage in behavior patterns that, while they don’t necessarily reflect detailed engagement by each person with the content of the core text, do reflect a lot of fine-grained responsiveness to the larger interpretive canon.
You might be closer for what can be done very quickly (within a single generation) under current conditions. But a political movement plenty of people are newly worried about which likely has thousands of members has a 14-word creed.
Gonna try a point-by-point version in case that’s clearer.
It isn’t clear to me what this error is meant to be. If it’s something like “thinking that there must be a definite objectively-correct division of all things into bleggs and rubes” then I agree that it’s an error but it’s an error already thoroughly covered by EY’s and SA’s posts linked to in the article itself, and in any case it doesn’t seem to me that the article is mostly concerned with making that point; rather, it presupposes it.
I know from conversations elsewhere that Zack is responding to the opposite error—the claim that because the usual rule for separating Bleggs from Rubes is pragmatically motivated, it has no implications for edge cases. If you’re making wrong guesses about what political position Zack is taking, you should really reconsider your claim that it’s obvious what his political position is. This needs to be generalized, because it’s obnoxious to have to bring in completely extraneous info about motives in order to figure out whether a post like this is political. Bothering to explain this at all feels a bit like giving in to extortion, and the fact that I expect this explanation to be necessary is a further update against continued substantive engagement on Lesswrong.
In any case, it seems to me that the main point of the linked article is not to correct some epistemic error, but to propose a particular position on the political issue it’s alluding to, and that most of the details of its allegory are chosen specifically to support that aim. [...] Constructing a hypothetical situation designed to match your view of a politically contentious question and drawing readers’ attention to that matchup is not “depoliticized” in any useful sense.
This seems like a proposal to cede an untenable amount of conversation territory. If a controversial political position becomes associated with a particular epistemic error, then discussing that specific error becomes off-limits here, or at least needs to be deprecated as political. I don’t know what that results in, but it’s not a Rationalist community.
I do in fact think that Zack’s purpose in posting the article here is probably at least in part to promote the political position for which the article is arguing, and that if that isn’t so—if Zack’s intention was simply to draw our attention to a well-executed bit of epistemology—then it is likely that Zack finds it well-executed partly because of finding it politically congenial. In that sense, I do think it’s probably a “political act”.
A clear implication of Something to Protect is that people can’t be Rationalists unless getting the right answer has some practical importance to them.
The rest of your comment seems to be making a substantially wrong guess about Zack’s position on gender in a way that—to me, since I know something about Zack’s position—is pretty strong evidence that Zack succeeded in stripping out the accidental specifics and focusing on the core epistemic question. The standard you’re actually holding Zack to is one where if you—perhaps knowing already that he has some thoughts on gender—can project a vaguely related politically motivated argument onto his post, then it’s disingenuous to say it’s nonpolitical.
Thanks for trying. I have limited time and got a sense for where we seem to have split from each other about halfway through your comment so I’ll mainly respond to that. You brought up a bunch of stuff very specific to gender issues that I don’t think is relevant in the second half.
There’s an underlying situation in which Zack made some arguments elsewhere about gender stuff, and prominent people in the Rationalist community responded with an argument along the lines of “since categories are in the map, not in the territory, there’s no point in saying one categorization is more natural than another, we might as well just pick ones that don’t hurt people’s feelings.”
These people are claiming a position on epistemology that Zack thinks is substantially mistaken. Zack is faced with a choice. Either they’re giving a politically motivated anti-epistemology in order to shut down the conversation and not because they believe it—or they’re making a mistake.
If we take the argument literally, it’s worth correcting regardless of one’s specific opinions on gender identity.
If we all know that such arguments aren’t meant to be taken literally, but are instead meant to push one side of a particular political debate in that context, then arguing against it is actually just the political act of pushing back.
But part of how bad faith arguments work is that they fool some people into thinking they’re good-faith arguments. Even if YOU know that people don’t mean what they say in this case, they wouldn’t say it unless SOMEONE was likely to be honestly mistaken.
“You’re doing too much politics here” is not a helpful critique. It doesn’t give Zack enough information to get clued in if he’s not already, and leaves the key controversial premise unstated. If your actual position is, “come on, Zack, everyone on this site knows that people aren’t making this mistake honestly, posts like this one by Scott are mindkilled politics and engaging with them lowers the quality of discourse here,” then you need to actually say that.
Personally, I DON’T see people behaving as though it were common knowledge that people claiming to be making this mistake are actually just lying. And if we write off people like Scott we might as well just close down the whole project of having a big Rationalist community on the internet.
It’s offensive to me that there’s even a question about this.
I downvoted bc the description is disingenuous only if it’s common knowledge that the Rationalist project is so doomed that an attempt to correct a politically motivated epistemic error via an otherwise entirely depoliticized fictional example in a specifically Rationalist space is construed as a political act.
Fine to argue that this is the case (thus contributing to actual common knowledge), but insinuating it seems like a sketchy way of making it so.
It seems like you’re talking about fairness in a way that isn’t responsive to Rekrul’s substantive point, which was about whether the test was unevenly favoring the AI on abilities like extremely high APM, unrelated to what we’d intuitively consider thinking, not about whether the test was generally uninformative.
It seems to me like you changed the subject halfway through your comment, from systemic to marginal effects. I’m on the record as having very different opinions about the two.
Your description of the crux seems too extreme to me, but I do think it’s pretty likely—and certainly not obviously false as Zvi seems to think—that in a world without privacy, nasty power structures would pay a heavy price.