Davis_Kingsley

• Davis_Kingsley 21 Jul 2015 20:35 UTC

  50 points

  on: MIRI’s 2015 Sum­mer Fundraiser!

  I just donated $200.00. Last year’s developments have been very promising and I look forward to seeing MIRI progress even further.

• Davis_Kingsley 22 Jul 2015 0:42 UTC

  13 points

  on: Spec­u­la­tive ra­tio­nal­ity skills and ap­pro­pri­able re­search or anecdote

  Disclaimer: I work for CFAR and might well be biased in this response. That said, at CFAR we don’t (re)name techniques or exercises in order to obscure what we teach or to try and grow an insular community—we do so to improve comprehension and skill acquisition.

  For instance, we used to call our class on implementation intentions “Implementation Intentions”, but we changed the name to TAP (Trigger-Action Planning) because that was much more memorable and provided a better handle for people to use the technique. (Compare “I’m going to make a TAP for that” to “I’m going to set up some implementation intentions for that”, or “How many TAPs have you set up recently?” to “How many goals have you created sets of implementation intentions for recently?”)

  In other words, our goal isn’t to hide the source of this material—in fact, we explicitly discuss the source material and provide links to relevant research in our workbooks—but rather to aid ease of use and ease of learning.

  As for the more general point, CFAR is quite interested in spreading the information that we teach, developing new techniques, and furthering the art and science of rationality.

  Several of our alumni have gone on to teach CFAR material to interested folks in their own area. We’ve provided multiple scholarships to people attending workshops with an explicit goal of taking what we teach and bringing it to underserved communities. We hold an alumni reunion yearly where CFAR staff and alumni share what they’ve learned and give mini-talks on the latest interesting developments in or promising avenues for rationality training.

  I suspect that, if anything, CFAR would like to be doing more to bring this material to a wider audience—there’s only so much time in the day, though!

Levels of Play

• Davis_Kingsley 18 Jan 2018 19:55 UTC

  4 points

  on: Aliveness

  Can I suggest picking a different name for this term? A similar but relevantly different concept exists in martial arts and has been discussed here before.

Ad­e­quacy as Levels of Play

• Davis_Kingsley 23 Jan 2018 0:15 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Gordon Seidoh Worley’s comment on: Ad­e­quacy as Levels of Play

  Huh, interesting. I should maybe edit this post with an alternate example, but I think the point more or less stands.

• Davis_Kingsley 23 Jan 2018 20:21 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Benquo’s comment on: Ad­e­quacy as Levels of Play

  Agreed. The modern Olympics used to mandate amateurism, and while this was originally classist in nature, it evolved into a means of preventing other excesses. (That said, amateurism is now gone from the Olympics for every sport other than wrestling). College sports in the NCAA currently have a weird pseudo-amateurism where student-athletes are not supposed to be compensated for their skills so as to prevent undue focus on athletics, but perks and benefits (of varying degrees of subtlety) are very obviously still present.

• Davis_Kingsley 24 Jan 2018 16:49 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Qiaochu_Yuan’s comment on: Ad­e­quacy as Levels of Play

  I think the problem with not recognizing speedrunning is less the absurdity heuristic and more just having the wrong information? There are many things that are not “respectable” or “mainstream” but are taken very seriously (many video games, fanfiction, editing certain Wikipedia pages, etc. etc.). My sense is that it’s quite possible for an outsider to assess this by checking out fan communities and the like.

“Backchain­ing” in Strategy

• Davis_Kingsley 10 Feb 2018 9:31 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: “Backchain­ing” in Strategy

  Hmm, I view those as medium-term goals, where this method can be quite effective—but note even there the threat of lost purposes. Decreasing the defense budget is likely a proxy for another, deeper, goal. If you build an organization and program dedicated to decreasing the defense budget and it turns out that other paths would have been more effective, you may find yourself constrained by the actions you’ve already taken.

  On the other hand, many of the early actions you might take do build up the sort of generalized advantage you might be able to use even if another scenario proves to be more relevant—but once you get far enough on the chain you risk overcommitting to one particular route or subproblem.

• Davis_Kingsley 12 Feb 2018 5:38 UTC

  8 points

  on: “Cheat to Win”: Eng­ineer­ing Pos­i­tive So­cial Feedback

  Good post! That said I personally think engaging with “haters” can be quite valuable. I’ve had positive interactions with many people despite very rocky beginnings—often, the difference between a hater and a supporter is just a few simple misunderstandings.

  Of course, there are some who will just go after you for destructive reasons, and it’s good to avoid them. But I think it pays to be careful about writing people off as haters—once you’ve adopted a policy of not engaging with “haters”, it becomes really easy and tempting to write off legitimate critics and thus miss out on relevant information and feedback.

• Davis_Kingsley 12 Feb 2018 9:07 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: John_Maxwell’s comment on: “Backchain­ing” in Strategy

  There are many other situations where this sort of thing applies, some with quite more serious consequences than a game of chess.

  For instance, during World War II the Imperial Japanese Navy had a strategy called Kantai Kessen (“naval fleet decisive battle”, often referred to simply as the Decisive Battle Doctrine), which was essentially a big backchain of this sort.

  Reasoning that a naval war between Japan and the United States would culminate in a decisive battle between the fleets and that winning this battle would win the war (as it had for the Japanese with the Battle of Tsushima against the Russians in 1905), Japanese strategists designed a war plan that focused heavily on putting themselves into a strong position to initate such a decisive battle, chaining back from this all the way to the level of what types of ships to build.

  However, this reasoning backfired. The Japanese fixation on concentrating forces for a major battle lead them to ignore elements of the war that could have given them an advantage. For instance, Japan never had a serious anti-commerce raiding strategy on either offense or defense; their submarines were focused on whittling down the enemy fleet in preparation for a final battle and they neglected attacks on US shipping and inadequately defended their own shipping from similar methods.

  By contrast, while the United States had begun the war with similar “decisive battle” ideas (these were quite in vogue thanks to Mahan’s influence), they were ironically forced to come up with a new strategy following heavy losses at Pearl Harbor. Their “island hopping” strategy focused on building incremental advantages and didn’t rely on staging a specific battle until circumstances presented that as the best option—and indeed proved far more effective.

  Now, there are of course other factors at work here—the US had very relevant industrial and commerce advantages, for instance—but this does seem a non-toy example where focusing on chaining backwards from a desired end point too far in the future led to serious strategic errors.

• Davis_Kingsley 13 Feb 2018 17:36 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: sarahconstantin’s comment on: “Cheat to Win”: Eng­ineer­ing Pos­i­tive So­cial Feedback

  I quite agree that deciding not to worry about certain things (barring very strong warnings/​overrides/​etc.) across given periods is reasonable. That said, I’ve still had quite favorable interactions that began with that sort of unhelpful criticism and turned into either helpful criticism or more cooperative interaction.

• Davis_Kingsley 15 Feb 2018 9:39 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: ryan_b’s comment on: “Backchain­ing” in Strategy

  1. I’m trying to draw parallels to things like “We’re going to win this war by winning a large naval set piece battle somewhat to the east of the line connecting the Bonin and Mariana Islands”. Overspecific final plans is one of the weaknesses that this approach can lead to.

  2. What constitutes advantage is usually somewhat overt. Even if the final goal is illegible, there are usually some promising trails to follow, and making progress on those is usually readily legible, as is building general capacity for your project/​group. It’s important to test early and test often, of course!

  3. I’m not quite sure what this question is cutting towards, could you perhaps rephrase it?

• Davis_Kingsley 15 Feb 2018 11:39 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: abramdemski’s comment on: “Backchain­ing” in Strategy

  Interesting suggestion! Is there a starting point you would recommend for this sort of study?

• Davis_Kingsley 16 Feb 2018 7:32 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: MakerOfErrors’s comment on: Ad­e­quacy as Levels of Play

  Excellent comment! I don’t agree completely but I appreciate your taking the time to engage in such detail.

  I think that concentrating efforts on the meta-game can be useful, and as you say can be one of the best ways to deal with situations that are currently extremely competitive. That being said, to me this seems almost evidence for competitiveness as a relevant aspect; these sorts of approaches become necessary only when applying standard methods won’t work because the level of competition is already high.

  In many fields, you can win by just showing up and “doing it right”—only in fields with serious competition, where you can reasonably expect that people have reached the limits of the current approaches, is the meta approach really necessary. That said, as you point out you often need to take a new approach in order to do something really revolutionary, even if it’s easy to beat the current competitors in the field...

• Davis_Kingsley 16 Feb 2018 17:50 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: Qiaochu_Yuan’s comment on: Do­ing good while clueless

  I find this claim very surprising—in many respects it seems in opposition to a lot of the models that are conventionally used here. (That doesn’t, of course, mean that it’s wrong.) I think the classic heuristics and biases view holds that many of our default intuitions are predictably inaccurate. In fact, I’ve often thought that this community doesn’t go far enough in skepticism of default “embodied concepts”—for instance, I believe there are many both in broader society and in this community for whom human sexuality is outright negative on net, and yet I see extremely few willing to entertain this notion, even as a hypothesis.

  I do think that the sort of view you describe is clearly much better than the old transhumanist “my body is a meat prison” view, but my sense was that comparatively few significantly endorsed that and little policy was based on it in any case.

  I’d be interested in hearing examples of scenarios where you believe important policies seem disaligned with embodied values; I find this claim very bold and am quite interested in figuring out whether there’s a good way to test it. If true, it could necessitate a serious realignment of many groups.

• Davis_Kingsley 17 Feb 2018 1:42 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Qiaochu_Yuan’s comment on: Do­ing good while clueless

  The classic heuristics and biases literature is about things like the planning fallacy; it has very little to say about intuitions about human value, which is more in the domain of experimental moral philosophy.

  Fair point, though I do think it provides at least weak evidence in this domain as well. That said, there are other examples of cases where intuitions about human value can be very wrong in the moment that are perhaps more salient, - addictions and buyer’s remorse come to mind.

  I’m willing to entertain this as a hypothesis, although I’d be extremely sad to live in this world. I appreciate your willingness to stick up for this belief; I think this is exactly the kind of getting-past-blindspots thing we need on the meta level even if I currently disagree on the object level.

  Thanks!

  So as I mentioned in another comment, I think basically all of the weird positions described in the SSC post on EAG 2017 are wrong. People who are worrying about insect suffering or particle suffering seem to me to be making philosophical mistakes and to the extent that those people are setting agendas I think they’re wasting everyone’s time and attention.

  I agree that these positions are mistakes. That said, I have three replies:

  1. I don’t think the people who are making these sorts of mistakes are setting agendas or important policies. There are a few small organizations that are concerned with these matters, but they are (as far as I can tell) not taken particularly seriously aside from a small contingent of hardcore supporters.

  2. I worry that similar arguments can very easily be applied to all weird areas, even ones that may be valid. I personally think AI alignment considerations are quite significant, but I’ve often seen people saying things that I would parse as “being worried about AI alignment is a philosophical mistake”, for instance.

  3. It is not clear to me that the “embodied” perspective you describe offers especially useful clarification on these issues. Perhaps it does in a way that I am too unskilled with this approach to understand? I (like you) think insect suffering and particle suffering are mistaken concepts and shouldn’t be taken seriously, but I don’t necessarily feel like I need an embodied perspective to realize that.

• Davis_Kingsley 17 Feb 2018 20:44 UTC

  13 points

  on: Circling

  (disclaimer: I’ve done a fair bit of circling and “authentic relating,” probably dozens of hours, but am by no means an expert.)

  Thanks for the post! I have had a lot of fun circling and in some cases I have seen it lead to interpersonal breakthroughs. Further, I perceive at least some applications to rationality. However, my sense is that circling falls into the same category as lucid dreaming, memory palaces, or various other interesting techniques—fun, but not really in alignment with the core spirit of rationality. Lucid dreaming can be used to train noticing confusion; circling can be used to train relevant skills as well. However, that doesn’t make either a core part of the program.

  I would recommend circling to many people as a fun and interesting exercise; I would not recommend it as the forefront of rationality development. I also notice that I feel a sense of apprehension around these communities becoming too intertwined, in part because many people in the circling community are, as you say, New Age hippie self-help guru types. As a result, I’ve intentionally shied away from exploring this area more despite quite appreciating it—I’m not sure the epistemics are there and I’m very worried about these sorts of ideas having an undue influence on the rationality development project.

• Davis_Kingsley 18 Feb 2018 5:12 UTC

  7 points

  on: [Meta] New mod­er­a­tion tools and mod­er­a­tion guidelines

  I quite dislike the idea of people being able to moderate their content in this fashion—that just isn’t what a public discussion is in my view—but thanks for being transparent about this change.