I think that on this particular spectrum, there are two locally stable attractors for closed social systems, though these attractors have different effects on the nonsocial environment, which can eventually push a system into the other attractor—this is approximately why there’s a large cyclical element to history.
So if a system isn’t clearly falling towards one attractor or the other, we can infer that it’s a frontier between other systems that are changing over time, and doesn’t self-govern.
I agree that there are more complicated intermediate cases in between the extremes, which are easier to analyze because they are simpler.
Your analogy to the relation between touch and violence is logical, but I think that it relies on false albeit facially plausible premises. Our sensitivity to touch is highly socially conditioned and therefore contingent. It seems to have much more to do with negotiating territorial boundaries and dominance relations (e.g. who’s allowed to touch whom in what ways) than safety in a sense that isn’t mediated by such social positioning.
As a parent I see other parents tightly control how their babies are allowed to play with mine. Even under circumstances where there is no likely serious bodily harm from touch, they are anxious about the prospect of young children working out their own differences, anxious about permitting wrong kind of intimacy or conflict, and visibly working to inculcate these anxieties in their children.
I think our attitudes towards speech are similarly mediated by considerations of territoriality and dominance, such that “taking offense” has to do with demonstrating one’s power to suppress adverse speech within one’s territory, sphere of influence, or dominance field, rather than the anticipation of harm outside of such considerations.
Finally, I don’t think the “even a small chance of violence” argument works for speech. The potential benefits of information exchange are very high, speech is a considerably less direct tool for harming someone than touch is, and the main way it’s effective is by arguments, which can be refuted if wrong. It doesn’t seem to me like there’s a locally stable equilibrium where speakers have to be constantly on guard against the perception of speech-violence, but speech is largely interpreted descriptively, unless it’s something like a predator-prey or farmer-domesticate relation where one group uses speech for violence, while the other group uses speech for production. If we assume rough equality, then the locally stable attractors are judicially mediated descriptive speech, and antisemantic power games.
That does seem like it’s overtly concerned with developing an explanation, but it seems concerned with deviance rather than corruption, so it’s on a different topic than the ones I complain about in the OP. I was aware of that one already, as I replied with a comment at the time.
Naively, I would’ve guessed it was because you didn’t work at CFAR (unless you did and I missed it?)
The attendee who told me about it never worked at CFAR, and neither did a couple other people I knew who went. Also I did guest-instruct at a CFAR workshop once.
If the transition from less to more disagreeableness doesn’t come along with an investigation of why agreeableness seemed like a plausible strategy and what was learned, then we’re still stuck trying to treat an adversary as an environment.
Habryka (or my steelman of him) raises a valid point: If members of a language community predominantly experience communication as part of a conflict, then someone trying to speak an alternate, descriptive dialect can’t actually do that without establishing the credibility of that intent through adequate, contextually appropriate differential signaling costs.
I wish there were more attention paid to the obvious implications of this for just about any unironic social agenda relying on speech to organize itself: if you actually can’t expect to be understood nondramatically when talking about X, then you actually can’t nondramatically propose X, whether that’s “do the most good” or “make sure the AI doesn’t kill us all” or “go to Mars” or “develop a pinprick blood test” or anything else that hasn’t already been thoroughly ritualized.
I’m aware that you’ve complained about these problems, but I’m specifically calling for the development and evaluation of explanatory models, which is a different activity. If you’ve done much of that in your public writing I missed it—anything you’d like to point me to?
The main effects of the sort of “AI Safety/Alignment” movement Eliezer was crucial in popularizing have been OpenAI, which Eliezer says was catastrophic, and funding for “AI Safety/Alignment” professionals, whom Eliezer believes to predominantly be dishonest grifters. This doesn’t seem at all like what he or his sincere supporters thought they were trying to do.
I’ve written extensively on this sort of perverse optimization, but I don’t see either serious public engagement with my ideas here, or a serious alternative agenda.
For instance, Ben Pace is giving me approving vibes but it didn’t occur to him to respond to your message by talking about the obvious well-publicized catastrophic failures I mentioned in the OP. And it seems like you forgot about them too by the time you wrote your comment.
I remember being told by an attendee that I hadn’t been invited to a CFAR postmortem weekend because I’m “not a STEM person.” Since I did statistical programming professionally for five years and have an MS in Mathematics and Statistics from an elite-ish university, I can only interpret that as meaning I’m unwilling to use technical math to dissociate from substantive humanities problems.
I have to rate all the time spent that didn’t result in improvements visible from the outside as nothing but costs paid to sustain internal narcissistic supply; I can’t credit it as an attempt to solve or even discuss a problem unless I receive further evidence. The uniformly positive things I’ve heard about “Don’t Create the Torment Nexus II: If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies” implies not much in the way of new perspective or even consensus that one is needed.
Thanks for closing the loop on the game of telephone. Oops, not sure how I misremembered about TurnTrout. Will delete that bit.
The former. There should have been a lot of open-minded postmortem discussion, not just a pivot.
Unless you’ve observed that you tend to unendorsedly let things slide once you’re fed. In that case, better do something about the problem while you’re hangry.
I don’t think those are good examples to emulate; they were, however, some of the nearer things I’d been exposed to as a teenager, to the sort of mindset I’m arguing for, and some of the nearer things I expect the typical reader here has been exposed to, to what I mean. The following paragraph is where I bring up specific nonfictional examples of the sort of thing I mean (Feynman’s explanation of triboluminescence, explanations of early metalworking, etc.) If I were writing the article now, I’d make that distinction much more clear and explicit; maybe that would be the core point, even.
Possibly I should instead try to get to know and talk with the more curious and conscientious sorts of auto mechanics, inventors, etc, and seek out social contexts where material problems are being investigated and solved routinely instead of posting here.
Robinson Crusoe type stories and time-travel stories are appealing in part because they can inflate the density at which such undersupplied problem-solving stories show up in a single narrative. This doesn’t seem the best, much like I would rather not learn about the ethics of conflict through The Lord of the Rings. Maybe it was unclear that I was trying to report an unmet need and then suggest a solution, much as someone might describe their prior pastry addiction before describing the benefits of a breakfast of fresh fruit.
On the other hand, I think there ought to be room for writing from a confused perspective trying to become unconfused.
Update: I didn’t. I’m still confused about whether I ought to, as the costs of false positives seem high.
It seems like your implied objection is that Robinson Crusoe and time-travel stories are fantastical; the one being extreme edge cases, the other being impossible, and both being fictional; and that therefore they are bad examples of “the ordinary means by which [people] navigate their lives.” This is true.
The reason I cited such bad examples is that good examples of an activity people obviously have done a lot of—investigate and figure things out about their perceived environment and not just the symbolic simulacrum of that environment—are underrepresented in literature, vs drama and symbol-manipulation. Ayn Rand singled out Calumet K, for instance, as a rare example of a novel about a person at work solving problems that were not just drama. Eliyahu Goldratt’s books have similar virtues.
At least some scholars see a meaningful difference between “original intent” and “original public meaning.”
You might be more interested in Porcfest than LessOnline: https://substack.com/home/post/p-167363791
I agree with this as stated, and think it’s consistent with the perspective I’ve articulated. The crux might be the extent to which ritualized conflict can and does deviate strongly from physical conflict, and relatedly whether legalizing (high-skill) duels would be proepistemic, albeit less so than reviving accessible courts of law, denormalizing ritualized legal boilerplate, and both legalizing bets and and normalizing them as the sort of thing you do if you’re serious.