The way I see it, society is basically a big ultimatum game: the rich get to steer it in whatever way they choose, and the masses can either accept what they do or smash everything and go back to the “stone age”. So that sets the terms of the ongoing negotiation. It’s hard to have something like a wealth ceiling because it’s hard for millions of people to commit to being okay with someone having $100,000,000 but blowing up the world if someone has $100,000,001.
clone of saturn
Karma: 2,146
No, it’s not possible for it to be negative. You’re not allowed to murder people even if you save an equal or greater number. If you invented a machine that had a 49% chance of killing me and a 51% chance of making me immortal, and you pointed it at me without permission, you would be committing a heinous crime and I’d be perfectly justified in self-defense. AI CEOs are doing the same thing at a much larger scale.
Along similar lines, should we consider Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, etc. to be more evil than Hitler, in terms of the expected number of people they will murder?
There’s no objective answer to whether acausal extortion works or not, it’s a choice you make. You can choose to act on thoughts about acausal extortion and thereby create the incentive to do acausal extortion, or not. I would recommend not doing that.
It works for getting the typical LMArena user to click the like button, but it’s not clear that it works for persuasion or anything else. Personally I find the style very offputting and usually stop reading when I notice it.
This is an important topic, but this post seems like it was written by AI.
I don’t know how people get the idea that this type of reckless behavior is anything remotely like what Gwern’s essay recommends.
GW deals with this by blocking scrolling and blanking out the page until the relevant anchor tag has loaded.
How do you envision that happening, concretely? It seems to me that elites are elite because they are simply the best at doing whatever it takes to maintain their power, and any replacement elite would have to do similar things or itself be replaced. If it were possible for the majority to govern society for their own benefit from the bottom up, we’d be living in a communist utopia already.
How do you evaluate the cost/benefit of buying more flour than necessary and bringing the wrong wine versus being a slave to your phone at all times?
It pretty much guarantees extinction, but people can have different opinions on how bad that is relative to disempowerment, S-risks, etc.
We don’t know of an alignment target that everyone can agree on, so solving alignment pretty much guarantees misuse by at least some people’s lights.
Test?
I’m still not convinced it’s a good idea to get enlightened, but thanks for the detailed explanation.
Of course you’re right that there are no perfectly clear bright-line rules that would completely fix these problems, the question is whether there is a clear enough rule that would ameliorate the problems. You would have substituted a judgment call on whether all of Said’s comments across the whole site were on net beneficial, with a much easier judgment call on whether a given note is sufficient or not. And whether Said’s comments were net beneficial was evidently such a close call that you dithered about this decision for literal years, which would seem to indicate that a relatively small nudge would have tipped his contributions to the positive side.
Also, if the door to Said changing his behavior was so completely closed, I’m really confused about what all those hundreds of hours were spent on.
This is a response to asking him to be, in full generality, more tactful or “prosocial,” not to asking him to follow a clear bright-line rule. I’ll grant that Said may not be willing or able to be tactful enough in all situations, yet there seems to be rough consensus that his comments have a lot of value in other situations, so my suggestion would be to try to delineate those situations.
Sure, I don’t mean to imply that Said is beyond reproach, or that all his comments were necessarily good. Just that I think insofar as this post was an attempt to address the reasons Said-defenders felt he needed so much defending, it has failed.
That’s fair enough, but it only demonstrates that he wasn’t willing to unilaterally and proactively do this, not that he wouldn’t have cooperated if you had imposed it on him. It’s baffling to me that you spent hundreds of hours on this issue without (apparently) even attempting to impose a compromise that would have brought out the best in both Said and his detractors.
What you’re doing here is conflating contempt based on group membership with contempt based on specific behaviors. Sneer-clubbers will sneer at anyone they identify as a Rationalist simply for being a Rationalist. Said Achmiz, in contrast, expresses some amount of contempt for people who do fairly specific and circumscribed things like write posts that are vague or self-contradictory or that promote religion or woo. Furthermore, if authors had been willing to put a disclaimer at the top of their posts along the lines of “This is just a hypothesis I’m considering. Please help me develop it further rather than criticizing it, because it’s not ready for serious scrutiny yet.” my impression is that Said would have been completely willing to cooperate. But possible norms like that were never seriously considered because, in my opinion, LW’s issue is not not the “LinkedIn attractor” but the “luminary attractor”. I think certain authors here see how Eliezer Yudkowsky is treated by his fans and want some of that sweet acclamation for themselves, but without legitimately earning it. They want to make a show of encouraging criticism, but only in a kayfabe, neutered form that allows them to smoothly answer in a way that only reinforces their status. And Oliver Habryka and the other mods apparently approve of this behavior, or at least are unwilling to take any effective steps to curb it, which I find very disappointing.
Sorry, I didn’t intend to fearmonger. I agree with pretty much everything else in this comment. European social democracies seem pretty nice, and communism isn’t necessarily always the worst thing in the world (although I usually avoid saying that on LW because it gets me downvoted). However, communism didn’t end up working out anything like the way early communists envisioned, and countries that ended up communist or social democratic had to go through specific historical events that ended up making them that way. Right now billionaires seem unwilling to make concessions because they think under the current circumstances they will win in a showdown with the public, and I don’t really see why they’re wrong. Why do you think they’re wrong?