David Hornbein

Karma: 474

David Hornbein 29 May 2023 19:23 UTC
5 points
3
in reply to: Ruby’s comment on: You now can enable reacts on your own posts! (and other react info)
I’m strongly against letting anyone insert anything into the middle of someone else’s post/comment. Nothing should grab the microphone away from the author until they’ve finished speaking.
When Medium added the feature that let readers highlight an author’s text, I found it incredibly disruptive and never read anything on Medium ever again. If LW implemented inline reader commentary in a way that was similarly distracting, that would probably be sufficient to drive me away from here, too.

David Hornbein 27 May 2023 0:10 UTC
9 points
0
on: Why is violence against AI labs a taboo?
You can imagine an argument that goes “Violence against AI labs is justified in spite of the direct harm it does, because it would prevent progress towards AGI.” I have only ever heard people say that someone else’s views imply this argument, and never actually heard someone actually advance this argument sincerely; nevertheless the hypothetical argument is at least coherent.
Yudkowsky’s position is that the argument above is incorrect because he denies the premise that using violence in this way would actually prevent progress towards AGI. See e.g. here and the following dialogue. (I assume he also believes in the normal reasons why clever one-time exceptions to the taboo against violence are unpersuasive.)

David Hornbein 14 May 2023 17:51 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Alex K. Chen’s comment on: Common knowledge facts about Leverage Research 1.0
Yes, in 2013 and 2014.

David Hornbein 13 Feb 2023 2:54 UTC
20 points
6
in reply to: DragonGod’s comment on: Elements of Rationalist Discourse
I would expand “acts to make the argument low status” to “acts to make the argument low status without addressing the argument”. Lots of good rationalist material, including the original Sequences, includes a fair amount of “acts to make arguments low status”. This is fine—good, even—because it treats the arguments it targets in good faith and has a message that rhymes with “this argument is embarrassing because it is clearly wrong, as I have shown in section 2 above” rather than “this argument is embarrassing because gross stupid creeps believe it”.
Many arguments are actually very bad. It’s reasonable and fair to have a lower opinion of people who hold them, and to convey that opinion to others along with the justification. As you say, “you shouldn’t engage by not addressing the arguments and instead trying to execute some social maneuver to discredit it”. Discrediting arguments by social maneuvers that rely on actual engagement with the argument’s contents is compatible with this.

David Hornbein 3 Feb 2023 2:01 UTC
5 points
4
on: My Model Of EA Burnout
What is “EA burnout”? Personally I haven’t noticed any differences between burnout in EAs and burnout in other white-collar office workers. If there are such differences, then I’d like to know about them. If there aren’t, then I’m skeptical of any model of the phenomenon which is particular to EA.

David Hornbein 14 Jan 2023 0:12 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: gwern’s comment on: Smallpox vaccines are widely available, for now
My impression from rather cursory research is that serious or long-lasting side effects are extremely rare. I would guess that most of the health risk is probably concentrated in car accidents on the way to/from the vaccine clinic. Minor side effects like “the injection site is mildly sore for a couple weeks” are common. Injection with the bifurcated needle method also produced a small permanent scar (older people often have these), although all or most of the current vaccinations are done with the subcutaneous injection method common with other vaccines and so do not produce scarring.
I naively guess that from the perspective of society at large the biggest cost of the vaccine program is the operational overhead of distribution and administration, not the side effects; and that on the personal scale the biggest cost is the time it takes to register for and receive the vaccine, rather than the side effects.
As to the benefit side of the equation, the risks of outbreak are extremely conjectural and rely on several layers of guesswork about technology development and adversarial political decisions—two areas which are notoriously hard to predict—so I don’t have much to say on that front beyond “make your best guess”.

Smallpox vaccines are widely available, for now

David Hornbein13 Jan 2023 20:02 UTC

19 points

5 comments1 min readLW link

David Hornbein 8 Aug 2022 4:35 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Noosphere89’s comment on: Ngo and Yudkowsky on scientific reasoning and pivotal acts
Black’s development of specific heat capacity and latent heat is widely attested, including in the Wikipedia articles on Black and on the history of thermodynamics. I don’t recall where I first saw the claim.

David Hornbein 4 Aug 2022 3:24 UTC
10 points
in reply to: Eli Tyre’s comment on: Ngo and Yudkowsky on scientific reasoning and pivotal acts
Yudkowsky is correct. The advance that made the steam engine useful was Watt’s separate condenser. The separate condenser was based on the research of Joseph Black, who did much of the work of quantifying thermodynamics. Black was a close friend of Watt, lent Watt money to finance his R&D, and introduced Watt to his first business partner John Roebuck.
Before Watt, the early, crude steam engines like Savery’s and Newcomen’s were preceded by early, crude research on pressure from scientists like Papin. These engines were niche tools with only one narrow economically-useful application (pumping water out of mines).
The linked article is completely wrong in claiming Carnot’s work was the “First Stirrings of Thermodynamics”, and wrong in treating Watt’s invention of the separate condenser as a sideshow.

David Hornbein 23 Jul 2022 19:54 UTC
6 points
1
on: Changing the world through slack & hobbies
There are investments you can’t make from a structured, nine-to-five, narrowly teleological environment. … The best search strategies for complex problems like life generally don’t seek out particular homogeneous objectives, but interesting novelty. The search space is too complicated and unknown for linear objective-chasing to work. … you cannot pursue interesting novelty—things that no one else is doing or which you have never seen before, or the little threads of nagging curiosity or doubt—by chasing along known direct value gradients. But that’s where the treasure is.
—Quit Your Job

David Hornbein 21 Jun 2022 19:52 UTC
22 points
7
on: Relationship Advice Repository
Registering that I much prefer the format of the older repositories you link to, where additions are left as comments that can be voted on, over the format here, where everything is in a giant list sorted by topic rather than ranking. For any crowdsourced repository, most suggestions will be mediocre or half-baked, but with voting and sorting it’s easy to read only the ones that rise to the top. I’d also be curious to check out the highest-voted suggestions on this topic, but not curious enough to wade through an unranked list of (I assume) mostly mediocre and half-baked ideas to find them.

David Hornbein 8 Jun 2022 19:58 UTC
47 points
5
in reply to: David Johnston’s comment on: AGI Ruin: A List of Lethalities
I disagree strongly. To me it seems that AI safety has long punched below its weight because its proponents are unwilling to be confrontational, and are too reluctant to put moderate social pressure on people doing the activities which AI safety proponents hold to be very extremely bad. It is not a coincidence that among AI safety proponents, Eliezer is both unusually confrontational and unusually successful.
This isn’t specific to AI safety. A lot of people in this community generally believe that arguments which make people feel bad are counterproductive because people will be “turned off”.
This is false. There are tons of examples of disparaging arguments against bad (or “bad”) behavior that succeed wildly. Such arguments very frequently succeed in instilling individual values like e.g. conscientiousness or honesty. Prominent political movements which use this rhetoric abound. When this website was young, Eliezer and many others participated in an aggressive campaign of discourse against religious ideas, and this campaign accomplished many of its goals. I could name many many more large and small examples. I bet you can too.
Obviously this isn’t to say that confrontational and insulting argument is always the best style. Sometimes it’s truth-tracking and sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes it’s persuasive and sometimes it isn’t. Which cases are which is a difficult topic that I won’t get into here (except to briefly mention that it matters a lot whether the reasons given are actually good). Nor is this to say that the “turning people off” effect is completely absent; what I object to is the casual assumption that it outweighs any other effects. (Personally I’m turned off by the soft-gloved style of the parent comment, but I would not claim this necessarily means it’s inappropriate or ineffective—it’s not directed at me!) The point is that this very frequent claim does not match the evidence. Indeed, strong counterevidence is so easy to find that I suspect this is often not people’s real objection.

David Hornbein 31 Jan 2022 6:48 UTC
8 points
4
in reply to: Taymon Beal’s comment on: Vavilov Day Discussion Post
The solution to your first problem may not be easy, but it is obvious: those who want community holidays with different emphasis and/or more variety of holidays can create those holidays. The culture belongs to those who put in the work to create it, both in practice and in justice. This goes double if you’re correct that “we currently don’t have enough rationalist holidays and people are desperate for more” (which I have no independent opinion on).

David Hornbein 10 Dec 2021 13:13 UTC
9 points
in reply to: NunoSempere’s comment on: Conversation on technology forecasting and gradualism
The idea of “hardware overhang” from Chinese printing tech seems extremely unlikely. There was almost certainly no contact between Chinese and European printers at the time. European printing tech was independently derived, and differed from its Chinese precursors in many many important details. Gutenberg’s most important innovation, the system of mass-producing types from a matrix (and the development of specialized lead alloys to make this possible), has no Chinese precedent. The economic conditions were also very different; most notably, the Europeans had cheap paper from the water-powered paper mill (a 13th-century invention), which made printing a much bigger industry even before Gutenberg.

David Hornbein 10 Nov 2021 4:35 UTC
18 points
in reply to: Kerry Vaughan’s comment on: Transcript for Geoff Anders and Anna Salamon’s Oct. 23 conversation
“6 Karma across 11 votes” is, like, not good. It’s about what I’d expect from a comment that is “mildly toxic [but] does raise [a] valid consideration” and “none of the offenses … are particularly heinous”, as you put it. (For better or worse, comments here generally don’t get downvoted into the negative unless they’re pretty heinous; as I write this only one comment on this post has been voted to zero, and that comment’s only response describes it as “borderline-unintelligible”.) It sounds like you’re interpreting the score as something like qualified approval because it’s above zero, but taking into account the overall voting pattern I interpret the score more like “most people generally dislike the comment and want to push it to the back of the line, even if they don’t want to actively silence the voice”. This would explain Rob calibrating the strength of his downvote over time.

David Hornbein 22 Oct 2021 3:47 UTC
4 points
on: Petrov Day Retrospective: 2021
While the Petrov Day ritual might be innocuous, it is a scary precedent if LessWrong/EA Forum organizers freely shape the moral symbolic landscape this way, without the checks and balances of broader community discussion.
I think this is fair. and this makes me realize that the LessWrong team has more power (and therefore more responsibility) than we previously credited oursevles with. We set out to build culture, including ritual and tradition, but it’s another matter to start defining the boundaries of good and bad. I think possibly this should be done, but again probably with more community consultation.

I don’t find this precedent scary. IMO forum moderators (and other leaders of voluntary easy-to-exit communities) should generally be bold and decisive in shaping the communities they’re responsible for. Maintaining a space like LW requires leaders with freedom of action and the ability to make controversial moves. Community discussion has its place, but that place should be as a source of feedback and advice to a person/team with ownership, not a line-item veto. By all means incorporate reactions and complaints into the design of future events iff you feel it’s warranted, but your wording here makes me suspect that you might be feeling too beholden to the loudest unhappy people, and I encourage you not to worry too much about that. (There will always be some unhappy people!)
The LW team has earned its power and responsibility by creating this space. If you hadn’t, we wouldn’t be here.

David Hornbein 19 Oct 2021 21:11 UTC
43 points
in reply to: Avi’s comment on: My experience at and around MIRI and CFAR (inspired by Zoe Curzi’s writeup of experiences at Leverage)
While “Vassar’s group” is informal, it’s more than just a cluster of friends; it’s a social scene with lots of shared concepts, terminology, and outlook (although of course not every member holds every view and members sometimes disagree about the concepts, etc etc). In this way, the structure is similar to social scenes like “the AI safety community” or “wokeness” or “the startup scene” that coordinate in part on the basis of shared ideology even in the absence of institutional coordination, albeit much smaller. There is no formal institution governing the scene, and as far as I’ve ever heard Vassar himself has no particular authority within it beyond individual persuasion and his reputation.
Median Group is the closest thing to a “Vassarite” institution, in that its listed members are ²⁄₃ people who I’ve heard/read describing the strong influence Vassar has had on their thinking and ¹⁄₃ people I don’t know, but AFAIK Median Group is just a project put together by a bunch of friends with similar outlook and doesn’t claim to speak for the whole scene or anything.

David Hornbein 15 Oct 2021 0:38 UTC
14 points
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Zoe Curzi’s Experience with Leverage Research
I’m personally interested, and also I think having information like this collected in one place makes it much easier for everyone to understand the history and shape of the movement. IMO an employment history of those orgs would make for a very valuable top-level post.

David Hornbein 30 Sep 2021 23:26 UTC
9 points
in reply to: gjm’s comment on: Common knowledge facts about Leverage Research 1.0
No comment on your larger point but
Saying that someone is in a cult (though I note that most people have been pretty careful not to use quite that terminology) isn’t an accusation. Not at the person in question, anyway.
“You are in a cult” is absolutely an accusation directed at the person. I can understand moral reasons why someone might wish for a world in which people assigned blame differently, and technical reasons why this feature of the discourse makes purely descriptive discussions unhelpfully fraught, but none of that changes the empirical fact that “You are in a cult” functions as an accusation in practice, especially when delivered in a public forum. I expect you’ll agree if you recall specific conversations-besides-this-one where you’ve heard someone claim that another participant is in a cult.

David Hornbein 29 Sep 2021 6:36 UTC
16 points
in reply to: ESRogs’s comment on: Common knowledge facts about Leverage Research 1.0
Geoff Anders was the first one to teach it at CFAR workshops, I think in 2013. This is the first time I’ve heard claims of independent invention, at the time all the CFAR people who mentioned it were synced on the story that Anders was a guest instructor teaching a technique that Leverage had developed. (Andrew Critch worked at CFAR at the time. I don’t specifically remember whether or not I heard anything about goal factoring from him.)

David Hornbein

Smal­lpox vac­cines are widely available, for now

Smallpox vaccines are widely available, for now