I think the status risk is real, but also a bit overblown, because polite society isn’t the whole world. If needed, you can make money outside it, have a social circle, and lead an interesting life. When people commit suicide after being canceled, I think it’s more because none of their polite society friends would stand by them rather than signal morality. But if you already know that about polite society, and have friends and family independent from it, you should be fine for the foreseeable future.
cousin_it(Vladimir Slepnev)
Karma: 27,722
Yeah, this makes more sense. For the scheme to work, the proportion of rich people multiplied by the disparity between rich and poor has to be high enough.
I think the example works fine with numbers like “the welfare effect of $1 is a hundred times larger for this poor person than that rich person”
Let’s say each noble has 10000 dollars, each peasant has 1 dollar, and peasants get 100x more utility per dollar. Then each noble’s utility is simply 10000+1x100, because each of 1000000 peasants has weight 1/1000000 which cancels out. Now let’s take 1 dollar from each noble and distribute it to peasants. That’s 1000 dollars total, so 0.001 dollars per peasant. Now each noble’s utility is 9999+(1+0.001)x100, which is a decrease. What am I missing?
In the Soviet Union when someone said or thought something wrong, the local party leaders would advice their employers who would then remove them from the ability to work.
Were people in the USSR getting barred from their constitutional duty to work? I was born there and it sounds weird. You can say many other bad things but not this one.
I believe the major change is that now people lose their jobs due to online mobbing and rage mobs can cancel someone’s entire ability to avoid homelessness through Twitter assaults and Facebook campaigns.
Has anyone ended up poor or homeless due to cancel culture?
If welfare is logarithmic in income, you can get huge utility by giving a dollar to someone who has almost no money. I think that’s what makes the numbers work out in your example, and at the same time makes it unrealistic.
That’s fair. Though I’m also worried that when Alice and Bob exchange beliefs (“I believe in global warming” “I don’t”), they might not go on to exchange evidence, because one or both of them just get frustrated and leave. When someone states their belief first, it’s hard to know where to even start arguing. This effect is kind of unseen, but I think it stops a lot of good conversations from happening.
While if you start with evidence, there’s at least some chance of conversation about the actual thing. And it’s not that time-consuming, if everyone shares their strongest evidence first and gets a chance to respond to the other person’s strongest evidence. I wish more conversations went like that.
For some reason it’s not as annoying to me when you do it. But still, in most cases I’d prefer to learn the actual evidence that someone saw, rather than their posterior beliefs or even their likelihood ratios (as your conversation with Hal Finney here shows very nicely). And when sharing evidence you don’t have to qualify it as much, you can just say what you saw.
Seeing you write about this problem, in such harsh terms as “formerly-known-as-rationality community” and “effects are iffier and getting worse”, is surprising in a good way.
Maybe talking clearly could help against these effects. The American talking style has been getting more oblique lately, and it’s especially bad on LW, maybe due to all the mind practices. I feel this, I guess that, I’d like to understand better… For contrast, read DeMille’s interview after he quit dianetics. It’s such a refreshingly direct style, like he spent years mired in oblique talk and mind practices then got fed up and flipped to the opposite, total clarity. I’d love to see more of that here.
To me, doing things because they are important seems to invite this kind of self-deception (and other problems as well), while doing things because they are interesting seems to invite many good outcomes. Don’t know if other people have the same experience, though.
Maybe the most actionable path is to try influencing employers. For example, Google doesn’t require college degrees for some jobs, but there’s still a difference between not requiring degrees (but still preferring candidates with degrees) and ignoring degrees. One phrase to watch for is “degree or equivalent work experience”. I’d be happier if Google’s hiring process officially ignored degrees, and the same for other tech companies. But I don’t know if anyone’s campaigning for that kind of thing.
Your question is pretty abstract, so my answer will be abstract too: if you’re ready to own the negative consequences of your action should they arise, then take the action, otherwise don’t. Whatever arguments you read here, they won’t be a valid excuse for you later, it’s on you.
So we can continuously raise the required stakes for each wager, until either (1) the market approximately clears
I think the resulting odds won’t reflect the probability of anything, because they depend a lot on whether Alice or Bob is more risk-tolerant (=rich).
Also, it seems to me that your scheme works best for yes/no questions. For anything more complicated, Alice and Bob can cooperate to mislead Judy, which is especially scary in case of AIs. I’m not sure how to fix that problem: it seems to require a way for a non-expert to check the work of a malicious expert, not just adjudicate between two experts.
Yeah, I made a pointlessly longer calculation and got the same answer. (And by varying the prior from 0.5 to other values, you can get any other answer.)
One of Eliezer’s favorite writing tools is framing things as a two-sided conflict: atheism vs religion, MWI vs Copenhagen, Bayes vs frequentism, and even when presenting his views about AI he was always riffing off the absurdity of opposing views. That’s fun to read and makes the reader care about the thing. I think it worked on us for basically the same reason that criticism-as-entertainment works.
I’m not Scott, but I think he’s arguing against using force to violate rights (kill people or shut them up). He’s not against using force to defend rights (when someone tries to kill you or shut you up).
I think I see another drawback of these kinds of techniques: when someone criticizes your thing, your first thought is “let’s analyze why the person said that”, rather than “wait, is my thing bad?” It’s worrying that the thing you’re defending happens to teach that kind of mental move.
To me the problem of embedded agency isn’t about fitting a large description of the world into a small part of the world. That’s easy with quining, which is mentioned in the MIRI writeup. The problem is more about the weird consequences of learning about something that contains the learner.
Also, I love your wording that the problem has many faucets. Please don’t edit it out :-)
Thank you for writing this. I was trying to express the same kind of feelings, but you did it better.
It seems you’re thinking of Bob as someone who’s already pretty assertive and just needs tactical advice, and in that case I agree it can be good advice. But for someone who’s less assertive, they might interpret the advice as basically “be more meek”, especially if there’s pressure to follow it. For such people, I don’t think the first exercise should involve lowering of boundaries. Instead it’d be something like practicing saying “no” and laughing in someone’s face, until it no longer feels uncomfortable. Doing these kinds of things certainly helped me.
For income, maybe try to get a job in industry. For status, if nobody spoke up against the canceling, I’m not sure such status is worth regaining.