Programmer, rationalist, chess player, father, altruist.
cata
Karma: 2,627
This isn’t quite what you asked for, but I did feel a related switch.
When I was a kid, I thought that probably people in positions of power were smart people working towards smart goals under difficult constraints that made their actions sometimes look foolish to me, who knew little. Then there was a specific moment in my early 20s, when the political topic of the day was the design of Obamacare, and so if you followed the news, you would see all the day-to-day arguments between legislators and policy analysts about what would go in the legislation and why. And the things they said about it were so transparently stupid and so irredeemably ridiculous, that it completely cured me of the idea that they were the thing I said up above. It was clear to me that it was just a bunch of people who weren’t really experts on the economics of healthcare or anything, and they weren’t even aspiring to be experts. They were just doing and saying whatever sort of superficially seemed like it would further their career.
So now I definitely have no internal dissonance about trusting myself to make decisions about what work to do, because I don’t take seriously the idea that someone else would be making any better decision, unless it’s some specific person that I have specific evidence about.
I am surprised by this, for example. Can you give examples of some of your controversial takes on any issues? I am wondering if you just do not have very controversial takes.
Controversial is obviously relative to the audience, but I have lots of opinionated beliefs that might make various audiences mad at me. Some different flavors include
I am roughly a total utilitarian, which involves lots of beliefs about what actions are moral that all kinds of people might strongly disagree with. For example, I don’t agree that inequality is intrinsically bad.
I roughly agree with (my understanding of) Zack Davis’s arguments about the superiority of cluster-of-traits-based definitions of gender words, rather than self-ID based definitions, which I am sure would make many trans people mad.
I think it’s ridiculous for suicide to be illegal and marginal efforts to increase the availability of suicide seem great.
I frequently criticize my coworkers’ ideas of what to work on as being bad or not worth doing.
Stuff like correlation between IQ and ethnicity is a bit more controversial, but my takes are usually much more controversial than that. I often wonder what would have happened if the US had wiped out USSR’s main cities post WW2 and established global hegemony (wipe out any nation that doesn’t submit, maintain nuclear monopoly). I have genuine respect and admiration for people like hitler or the unabomber, more than for a lot of the people I see around me, despite disagreeing with their object level opinions (I’m not a nazi or an anarchoprimitivist).
I am not very knowledgeable about or interested in history or social science, so I have less strong opinions about things like this, and don’t talk about them very often. For example, my opinion about IQ and ethnicity is that the obvious group differences seem to obviously suggest some kind of genetic difference, but I know psychologists have some complicated statistical argument for why that may not be the case, so therefore I don’t know.
I note, however, that I can’t think of the last time before now that I have ever been in a conversation where it seemed like my views on IQ and ethnic groups were relevant, so I don’t have a problem with pissing people off by expressing them. Is this different for you? How do you end up in discussions about it with people who will then be offended when you say your opinion? Is it some kind of thing where you participate in social media conversations about it which then broadcast your opinions to basically random people? (I don’t use any platform like that.)
Do you expect to ever become at all famous in your life?
Definitely not. It sounds very annoying. I am not altruistic enough to want to do something that involves being substantially famous.
I can send a list of examples of people whose lives have been ruined by this. Do you claim I am misjudging the probability this happens to me personally?
Probably, if it’s a big consideration to you. I think it seems like a tail risk that isn’t very substantial, unless your life depends on the approval of others in a somewhat atypical way. (Perhaps it does, if your life involves being famous.)
Do you have actual experience in bio security? I doubt most people in EA circles or even many academics would provide you with any of the funding or connections required to work in bio security if this is your current stance on the matter.
No, I just quoted this because it was the example you gave. I know little about biosecurity and I don’t intend my remarks to extend to “infohazard” kinds of information. Perhaps you know things about the biosecurity nonprofit world that I don’t. However, I know something about the kinds of things that some EA grantmakers like SFF consider, and I don’t see why being the kind of person who speaks their mind about controversial beliefs would make them less likely to fund you.
I am 37 and I am a partially retired programmer after a ~20 year career. I basically try to maximize clarity while obeying normal politeness norms, prioritizing clarity and honesty over politeness where the topic is important (e.g. delivering actionable criticism or bad news.) I would say that during my career I received very strong evidence that this is an effective communication style for working well with others. For example, I have had numerous coworkers spontaneously tell me that they respected my straightforwardness, and seek out my feedback on what they were thinking. I have also had coworkers who were hurt by my criticism, but the balance seems clear to me.
I certainly have no “hot takes which I feel uncomfortable sharing with people around me”, nor would I ever “assume...whatever they [I] tell anyone could eventually end up being broadcasted by a famous person on the internet”, which sounds pathologically anxious. I don’t start random arguments with random people unbidden, because that’s impolite, but I would not consider concealing my beliefs about something true and important.
My comparative advantage in the world is my ability to make and fix practical things. If I aspired to be a professional persuader, or a political operator in a large organization, and I was talented at persuasion and manipulation, maybe I would behave differently. But I wouldn’t behave differently if I were to “run a research nonprofit working on biosecurity” for example.
I think most people who regularly conceal or lie about their beliefs are doing so because of emotional anxiety and conflict avoidance that is not based on a sober judgment of the consequences. If they reflected on the fact that they know well who in their lives is straightforward and trustworthy, and who is an untrustworthy bullshitter, then they would realize that it’s a huge benefit to join the first category, and typically disproportionate to any risk. I have the good fortune to naturally be not very socially anxious, leading me to a better path.
Lucas Watson, who co-wrote Hanano Puzzle 2, just published an exceptional new game, I Wanna Lockpick, which I would put in your tier 1.
One thing which I really enjoyed about it is that it uses its mechanics to build interesting puzzles in all of the different puzzle categories above, and mixes them freely, so it feels like there is a nice variety of kinds of thinking involved.
Thanks, I didn’t realize that this PC fan idea had made air purifiers so much better since I bought my Coway, so this post made me buy one of the Luggable kits. I’ll share this info with others.
I disagree with the summarization suggestion for the same reason that I disagree with many of the items—I don’t have (much of) the problem they are trying to solve, so why would I expend effort to attack a problem I don’t have?
The most obvious is “carrying extra batteries for my phone.” My phone never runs out of battery; I should not carry batteries that I will never use. Similarly: I don’t have a problem with losing things, such that I need extra. (If I had extra, I would plausibly give them away to save physical space!) I don’t find myself wishing I remembered more of my thoughts, such that I should take the effort to capture and retain them. And I don’t feel the need to remember more than I already do about the stuff that I read, so that makes me not inclined to take time away from the rest of my life and spend it remembering more things.
Are you really saying you think everything on this list is “obviously” beneficial? I probably only agree with half the stuff on the list. For example, I certainly disagree that I should “summarize things that I read” (?) or that I should have a “good mentor” by emailing people to request that they mentor me.
I specifically think it’s well within the human norm, i.e. that most of the things I read are written by a person who has done worse things, or who would do worse things given equal power. I have done worse things, in my opinion. There’s just not a blog post about them right now.
Speaking for myself, I don’t agree with any of it. From what I have read, I don’t agree that the author’s personal issues demonstrate “some amount of poison in them” outside the human norm, or in some way that would make me automatically skeptical of anything they said “entwined with soulcrafting.” And I certainly don’t agree that a reader “should be aware” of nonspecific problems that an author has which aren’t even clearly relevant to something they wrote. I would give the exact opposite advice—to try to focus on the ideas first before involving preconceptions about the author’s biases.
If you wanted other people to consider this remark, you shouldn’t have deleted whatever discussion you had that prompted it, so that we could go look.
Yes, I basically am not considering that because I am not aware of the arguments for why that’s a likely kind of risk (vs. the risk of simple annihilation, which I understand the basic arguments for.) If you think the future will be super miserable rather than simply nonexistent, then I understand why you might not have a kid.
I don’t agree with that. I’m a parent of a 4-year-old who takes AI risk seriously. I think childhood is great in and of itself, and if the fate of my kid is to live until 20 and then experience some unthinkable AI apocalypse, that was 20 more good years of life than he would have had if I didn’t do anything. If that’s the deal of life it’s a pretty good deal and I don’t think there’s any reason to be particularly anguished about it on your kid’s behalf.
Thanks for the post. Your intuition as someone who has observed lots of similar arguments and the people involved in them seems like it should be worth something.
Personally as a non-involved party following this drama the thing I updated the most about so far was the emotional harm apparently done by Ben’s original post. Kat’s descriptions of how stressed out it made her were very striking and unexpected to me. Your post corroborates that it’s common to take extreme emotional damage from accusations like this.
I am sure that LW has other people like me who are natural psychological outliers on “low emotional affect” or maybe “low agreeableness” who wouldn’t necessarily intuit that it would be a super big deal for someone to publish a big public post accusing you of being an asshole. Now I understand that it’s a bigger deal than I thought, and I am more open to norms that are more subtle than “honestly write whatever you think.”
I am skeptical of the gender angle, but I think it’s being underdiscussed that, based on the balance of evidence so far, the person with the biggest, most effective machine gun is $5000 to the richer and still anonymous, whereas the people hit by their bullets are busy pointing fingers at each other. Alice’s alleged actions trashing Nonlinear (and 20-some former people???) seem IMO much worse than anything Lightcone or Nonlinear is being even accused of.
(Not that this is a totally foregone conclusion—I noticed that Nonlinear didn’t provide any direct evidence on the claim that Alice was a known serial liar outside of this saga.)
Are little kids welcome?
I just had a surprisingly annoying version of a very mundane bug. I was working in Javascript and I had some code that read some parameters from the URL and then did a bunch of math. I had translated the math directly from a different codebase so I was absolutely sure it should be right; yet I was getting the wrong answer. I
console.logged the inputs and intermediate values and was totally flummoxed because all the inputs looked clearly right, until at some point a totally nonsense value was produced from one equation.Of course, the inputs and intermediate values were strings that I forgot to parse into Javascript numbers, so everything looked perfect until finally it plugged them into my equation, which silently did string operations instead of numeric operations, producing an apparently absurd result. But it took a good 20 minutes of me plus my coworker staring at these 20 lines of code and the log outputs until I figured it out.
I think the most basic and true explanation is that the companies we are thinking about started out with unusually high-quality products, which is why they came to our notice. Over time, the conditions that enabled them to do especially good work change and their ability tends to regress to the mean. So then the product gets worse.
Related ideas:
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High-quality product design is not very legible to companies and it’s hard for them to select for it in their hiring or incentive structure.
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Companies want to grow for economy-of-scale reasons, but the larger a company is the more challenging it is to organize it to do good work.
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Of course, doing nothing at all seems ridiculous, particularly so for companies whose investors all invested on the premise of dramatic growth.
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In many cases, a company probably originally designed a product that they themselves liked, and they happened to be representative enough of a potential market that they became successful and their product was well-liked. Then the next step is to try to design for a mass market that is typically unlike themselves (since companies are usually made up of a kind of specific homogeneous employee base.) That’s much harder and they may guess wrong about what that mass market will like.
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I have no inside information. My guess is #5 with a side of 1, 6, and “the letter wasn’t legally binding anyway so who cares.”
I think that the lesson here is that if your company says “Work here for the principles in this charter. We also pay a shitload of money” then you are going to get a lot of employees who like getting paid a shitload of money regardless of the charter, because those are much more common in the population than people who believe the principles in the charter and don’t care about money.
Interesting. I agree, I didn’t even notice that Bb3 would be attacking a4, I was just thinking of it as a way to control the d-file. I hadn’t really thought about how good that position would be if white just did “not much.”
I also hadn’t really thought about exactly how much better black was after the final position in the Qxb5 line (with Bxd5 exd5), it was just clear to me black was better and the position was personally appealing to me (it looks kind of one-sided, where white has no particular counterplay and black can sit around maneuvering all day to try to pick up a pawn.) Very difficult for me to guess whether it should be objectively winning or not.
Fun exercise, thanks for making it!
How’s the childcare situation looking? Last I heard it wasn’t clear and the organizers were seeing how much interest there was in it.