Dacyn(David Simmons)

• Dacyn 14 Jan 2022 15:47 UTC

  1 point

  on: Do­ing “good”

  And so, knowing that the true cumulative impact of a donation is never certain, why did I still choose to donate?

  Why did you phrase it like this—what does being certain about the cumulative impact have to do with the choice of whether to donate or not? Why isn’t the expected impact more important?

  This is a serious question, I have the same psychological issue where certainty of a positive outcome is sometimes more important than positive expected value. But I don’t yet have a rule which allows me to predict when this psychological effect will come into play.

• Dacyn 13 Jan 2022 18:10 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Midnight_Analyst’s comment on: On Virtue

  I want to distinguish this mental action from the behaviours that result from it. I’m trying not to make claims directly about who and what should be outwardly praised.

  I totally agree that this is an important distinction (it is the distinction the post I linked to is about), and when I talked about Virtue Points in my comment I was meaning the mental action. But mental actions still have effects, which is why the first sentence of my comment isn’t self-contradictory.

  On the connection to involuntary suffering, fair enough, but then you shouldn’t call it “Virtue Points”. That already means something else.

• Dacyn 13 Jan 2022 13:35 UTC

  1 point

  on: On Virtue

  From the perspective of the collective, the point of awarding Virtue Points is so that people know what traits to signal to remain in good graces with the community. From the perspective of the individual, a lot of the time that will feel like doing the Right Thing and not getting rewarded, due to phenomena discussed here.

  Since involuntary suffering doesn’t show up in this paradigm, I think it is irrelevant to the notion of Virtue Points.

• Dacyn 7 Jan 2022 17:03 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Valentine’s comment on: Sig­nal­ing isn’t about sig­nal­ing, it’s about Goodhart

  Hmm, I am trying to see if it is really the same puzzle?? The self-deception I see, since if you get the opposite of whatever you choose then it motivates you to self-deceive so that you’ll choose the opposite of whatever you want to get. But then why is the alternative death? Ah well, maybe it’ll make sense to me later.

• Dacyn 7 Jan 2022 14:48 UTC

  4 points

  on: Rad­i­cal open­ness—say things that oth­ers strongly dislike

  I think having the confidence to express what you are actually thinking gives a big advantage. Such a person is able to see more. They can think about uncomfortable and inconvenient ideas that most people would instinctively self-censure.

  The exact opposite is true. If you commit to yourself to not immediately taking any thought you have and shouting it from the rooftops, this gives you the mental space to think “uncomfortable and inconvenient ideas that most people would instinctively self-censure”. It’s just that once you have these ideas in your thought-space, you have to think more about how to express them than just “put them in my latest song”. Good secrets take a while to express properly.

• Dacyn 7 Jan 2022 14:22 UTC

  1 point

  on: Sig­nal­ing isn’t about sig­nal­ing, it’s about Goodhart

  This is all true.

  And yet.

  Very rarely, but I would guess at least once in your life, you will be faced with a decision whose outcome is so important that all of this is stripped away, like rationalization. At which point you are faced with the decision: to signal, or not to signal. But it is not clear which choice corresponds to which outcome: does treating it as a signal correspond to signalling more, or to signalling less, as suggested by Dagon’s comment?

  Would you rather be trustworthy, or trusted?

  The OP suggests that maybe we can have both, but what if that’s not always the case? And what if the outcome you get, is the exact opposite of the outcome you choose?

  I have no good solutions here, my stopgaps are “double-check important decisions through people you trust” and “cooperate with yourself, even if you seem like a selfish person”.

• Dacyn 1 Jan 2022 11:26 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Firm­ing Up Not-Ly­ing Around Its Edge-Cases Is Less Broadly Use­ful Than One Might Ini­tially Think

  OK, fair enough. So you are asking something like “is it ever ethical to keep a secret?” I would argue yes, because different people are entitled to different parts of your psyche. E.g. what I am willing to share on the internet is different from what I am willing to share in real life. Or am I missing something again?

• Dacyn 31 Dec 2021 19:51 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Firm­ing Up Not-Ly­ing Around Its Edge-Cases Is Less Broadly Use­ful Than One Might Ini­tially Think

  Is it ethically mandatory always to behave as if you know all information which you do, in fact, know?

  Maybe I am missing the point, but since you do know all information which you do in fact, know, wouldn’t behaving as if you do just mean behaving… the way in which you behave? In which case, isn’t the puzzle meaningless?

  On the other hand, if we understand the meaning of the puzzle to be illuminated by elriggs’ first reply to it, we could rephrase it (or rather its negation) as follows:

  Is it ever ethically acceptable to play a role, other than one of our common “game” roles like poker player, surprise party thrower, etc.

  I would answer this question as “yes”, but with a further appeal to honesty in my reasoning: I think that sometimes the inferential distance between you and the people around you is so great that the only way you can try to bridge it is by putting yourself into a role that they can understand. I can give more details over PM but am reluctant to share publically.

• Dacyn 31 Dec 2021 18:52 UTC

  2 points

  on: Ta­boo Truth

  What if you feel the need to proclaim your taboo truth, but you aren’t quite sure what it is yet?

  Then you will find yourself drawn to those situations in which you can proclaim basically any truth without fear of undue repercussion, and then once you will there you will find yourself pontificating.

  Is this a good position to be in? Knowing what the taboo truth is in more detail might lead you to being forced to proclaim it earlier, or else give up on it, which is presumably why its detail has been occluded to you.

  (incidentally, I at first read the title as “apply Rationalist Taboo to the word ‘truth’ ” which could also be an interesting exercise)

• Dacyn 20 Dec 2021 10:32 UTC

  1 point

  on: The Mar­tial Art of Rationality

  -”Deliberately we decide that we want to seek only the truth; but our brains have hardwired support for rationalizing falsehoods.”

  Deciding that you want to seek only the truth will not give you the truth. This is because, as you say, our brains have hardwired support for rationalizing falsehoods. What I have found to be a better strategy is self-cooperation. Your mind makes its existence known on several different levels like the vocal, the subvocal but still audible, the purely silent but still internally audible, and eventually laughter and similar responses. Each of these levels has different information about the world, and may be willing to share it with the higher levels as long as it does not end up feeling betrayed. But a naive attitude of “I want the truth!” is exactly what is likely to lead to such a betrayal. To put it another way, if a friend told you a secret and then you immediately went to tell that secret to someone else, would they be likely to continue to trust you after that? Even if you said that you were sharing the secret in the name of “truth”? Self-trust works the same way.

• Dacyn 22 Nov 2021 11:35 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Benquo’s comment on: My ex­pe­rience at and around MIRI and CFAR (in­spired by Zoe Curzi’s writeup of ex­pe­riences at Lev­er­age)

  -”Jessica is reporting a perverse optimization where people are penalized more for talking confusedly about important problems they’re confused about, than for simply ignoring the problems.”

  I feel like “talking confusedly” here means “talking in a way that no one else can understand”. If no one else can understand, they cannot give feedback on your ideas. That said, it is not clear that penalizing confused talk is a solution to this problem.

• Dacyn 22 Nov 2021 8:24 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Meta-dis­cus­sion from “Cir­cling as Cousin to Ra­tion­al­ity”

  This is a great answer. I will have to incorporate concepts like “interlocutor” and “author” into my worldview.

  If I may ask a somewhat metaphorical question, what determines who the interlocutor and author are in a context which is not so clear-cut as an online interaction? Like, if I ask a question in a talk, does that mean the presenter is the author and I am the interlocutor? Is DSL the author and JB the interlocutor? Or maybe the other way around? I may even go so far as to claim that in a context like this one, I am the author and my conversationmate was the interlocutor!!

• Dacyn 22 Nov 2021 4:44 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Meta-dis­cus­sion from “Cir­cling as Cousin to Ra­tion­al­ity”

  So, I like this comment (and strong-upvoted it) because you are placing your concept of “obligation” out in the open for scrutiny. I have a question though. Here someone responded to a request for information after I said I would be “surprised” by the information they now claim to have provided. Would you say that I have an obligation to react to their response, i.e. either admit that I lost an argument, or take the effort to see whether I agree with their interpretation of the information? Right now I am not motivated to do the latter.

  If this doesn’t fall under your definition of “obligation”, what would you say are the key differences between this scenario and the scenarios where you think people do have an obligation?

Dal­las SSC Meetup #11

Dal­las SSC Meetup #10

Dal­las SSC Meetup #9 (New Time+Lo­ca­tion)

Dal­las SSC Meetup #8

Dal­las SSC Meetup #7

• Dacyn 13 Sep 2019 13:46 UTC

  1 point

  on: The Real Rules Have No Exceptions

  the rule as stated, together with the criteria for deciding whether something is a “legitimate” exception, is the actual rule.

  The approach I describe above merely consists of making this fact explicit.

  This would be true were it not for your meta-rule. But the criteria for deciding whether something is a legitimate exception may be hazy and intuitive, and not prone to being stated in a simple form. This doesn’t mean that the criteria are bad though.

  For example, I wouldn’t dream of formulating a rule about cookies that covered the case “you can eat them if they’re the best in the state”, but I also wouldn’t say that just because someone is trying to avoid eating cookies means they can’t eat the best-in-state cookies. It’s a judgement call. If you expect your judgement to be impaired enough that following rigid explicitly stated rules will be better than making judgement calls, then OK, but it is far from obvious that this is true for most people.

• Dacyn 24 Aug 2019 16:00 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Andrew Jacob Sauer’s comment on: Tor­ture and Dust Specks and Joy—Oh my! or: Non-Archimedean Utility Func­tions as Pseu­do­graded Vec­tor Spaces

  The OP didn’t give any argument for SPECKS>TORTURE, they said it was “not the point of the post”. I agree my argument is phrased loosely, and that it’s reasonable to say that a speck isn’t a form of torture. So replace “torture” with “pain or annoyance of some kind”. It’s not the case that people will prefer arbitrary non-torture pain (e.g. getting in a car crash every day for 50 years) to a small amount of torture (e.g. 10 seconds), so the argument still holds.