It seems to me like academia is more like a caste or a class, which share many adverse features with cults (high demand, loyalty oriented), but differ by having well defined stereotyped relations with other castes or classes within a society.
Benquo
Karma: 13,520
I laid out a partial answer in the comments on my blog:
The depraved aren’t just unbound by the rules, but compelled to signal opposition to them, which makes their behavior simple enough that it should be feasible for rational actors to manipulate effectively to protect their own interests when necessary, much as one wouldn’t particularly fare well in a dominance contest with a gorilla or unarmed combat with a lion, but in nearly all circumstances it’s easy to avoid this and get what one wants anyway.
I lay out what I mean in a bit more detail here: https://benjaminrosshoffman.com/levels-of-republicanism/ https://benjaminrosshoffman.com/towards-optimal-play-as-villager-in-a-mixed-game/
But, yes, we’re thinking under the gun here, as this is not an adequately solved problem. Even very lame attempts so far have massively outperformed the normal case of no attempt at all; the Calvinists produced a 300 year golden age by constructing a pronormative identity whose theory of conflict seems to have been, “there is some sort of pseudoagentic adversary to normativity.”
He’s not responding to my messages these days, so it’s hard for me to know.
There are separate memory settings that I now adjust when I want a genuinely independent instance.
It wasn’t intended as commentary on Lesswrong in particular, though I’ve been fairly open about my opinion that Lesswrong is disappointingly unresistant to this trend in the broader culture.
A simple example https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/11/a-bet-is-a-tax-on-bullshit.html
In the very simplest sense accountability is the sort of keeping track that lets people owe things at all, detect inventory loss, calculate track records, understand which things increase or decrease crop yields, etc. Higher dimensional accountability involves the notion that something someone can owe is an adequate explanation for what they said or did.
I reviewed this article and much of it isn’t up to my general standard so I rewrote much of the introductory sections. An effective way to preferentially encourage writing you like would be to visibly preferentially engage with its content.
Thanks for telling me.
Do you take antipyretics like NSAIDs or acetaminophen/paracetamol/tylenol when you get sick or for pain? If so, then you might not be aware of your unsuppressed baseline incidence of fevers.
That conditions on prior beliefs about whether uploads are conscious and whether consciousness is what causes you to talk about being conscious, not on whether the uploads are conscious.
I’m not going to express any further opinions about Said here but agree otherwise with this post; it seems to me that the explanation of the ban was not an honestly mistaken application of good principles, but an appeal to bad principles. If an appeal to feelings can be reduced to legitimate considerations motivating those feelings then one should do so; if not, the appeal is illegitimate. I took the ban as a confirmation of a policy of unprincipled and unbounded submission to threats by the people (or personas) whose feelings are supposed to matter, which seems to be disjoint from those who mean to be accountable for their speech and behavior.
This reminds me of how when asking LLMs to write things up for me, one thing I do to make them bearable to read is ask them to look for the ubiquitous “Not X, Y” formulations in their first drafts, and replace them with positive qualifiers on Y that clearly rule out X. Often this not only masks the LLM tic, but achieves greater relevant specificity and therefore information density.
The Open Source Wish Project as you characterize it, ruling out a series of specifically undesired outcomes, seems stupider than e.g. adding positive qualifiers like “I want my mother to outlast the fire in this building, alive, well, and physically accessible to her loved ones,” since each of those qualifiers probably rules out a great many other possible undesired outcomes one might otherwise have to have ruled out separately. This may not be adequate to specify human values in a superintelligence’s reward function, but it’s good for getting clearer science writing than I’d otherwise get to read.
On the object level this seems unobjectionable and true. But the example of criminal defense isn’t just a good one for providing examples, but an unusually appealing one. With motivated prosecutors and proceduralized courts, cornering liars can be sufficient for making progress past the lie. In other circumstances, this can be much less true, e.g. when liars are trying to signal bad faith rather than good.
What’s needed for many circumstances of public life is some strategy for how good faith ought to confront brazen bad faith, as right now such encounters frequently end with both sides feeling like they won. The first step is for more good-faith players to discuss the problem.
After the World Wars American public discourse looks to me like it declined very clearly.
Presidential debates shouldn’t suffer from e.g. improvements in access creating the false impression of reduced elite quality. Compare the Nixon-Kennedy debate, the Ford-Carter debate, and the Trump-Biden debate. N-K were dishonest but trying to fool voters who were trying to track arguments and figure out what was going on. I recently watched Nixon’s Checkers speech too; it’s famous as an innovative subject-changing appeal to emotion but to my contemporary ears the main thing that stood out was that most of the speech was an appeal to reason that would be tedious to someone who wasn’t thinking explicitly in terms of argument and evidential value.
Back to debates. F-C was sound bites designed to give the superficial impression of argument. T-B was just trading personal insults. I watched the unofficial version on Rumble where RFK Jr inserted himself and there was a strong contrast between the officially included debaters and RFK Jr, who just … answered the questions, like it was still the ’90s.
“A threat of libel” is worded as though threatening to sue someone for an injury were aggression, but an actionable injury was not. The substance of your comment reads to me consistently with this. The OP suffers from a similar flaw.
I am appalled that a private citizen threatening a libel suit against a third party would be reason for a ban. Especially with no indication that you checked whether someone had actually libeled them.
COINTELPRO includes more than one example. Do you think that the FBI stopped doing their job immediately after the Church Committee hearings or that they kept doing their job but it made no difference?
The Wikipedia entry says Carter specifically banned political assassinations, which by omission implies a considerable remaining mandate to do COINTELPRO and MKULTRA style stuff.
The implied near-orthogonality of competence and evil breaks down specifically in the context of power relations. The competence that gets you to the top of a pecking order is competence at suppressing rival coordination, and that’s constituted by dispositions you can’t cleanly factor out and still have the same person. Stalin’s paranoia was the manner in which he suppressed a palace coup. Sometimes people really do compromise themselves or narrow their metaphysics to embed conflict, as the price of being quick enough on the draw to maintain power.
A Putin free of the need to spend most of his attention suppressing his subordinates’ capacity to overthrow him is a Putin who suddenly has a ton of degrees of freedom he didn’t have before, which would likely be disorienting, overwhelming, and maybe even painful, like an upper middle class neurotic going to their first silent meditation retreat.
Not endorsing Kelsey’s position, though. The idea that it’s okay to kill Putin because he’s a bad guy is ghoulish and reflects what seems like a dearth of curiosity as to what the near counterfactuals are; I think the simplest explanation is probably just uncritically accepting American political propaganda. If Kelsey could manage Russia better from Putin’s position than he can then she should be trying to either overthrow or better yet advise him, but should also be a bit confused about why someone kinder and wiser isn’t already doing the job.
Relevant: Civil Law and Political Drama, Should EA Be at War with North Korea?
Do you have any specific arguments to offer here?
Making explicit a tacit element of my replies that may not have been clear: I don’t think “principal-agent problems” functions as an alternative explanation here; it seems like a mere description of an aspect of my explanation, which additionally (partially) answers the question of why these principal-agent problems are so pronounced while others don’t seem to matter much.