denyeverywhere

Karma: 21

denyeverywhere 8 Nov 2023 3:47 UTC
13 points
−1
in reply to: ryan_b’s comment on: The 6D effect: When companies take risks, one email can be very powerful.
What makes you conclude that personal testimony weighs more under the law than written documents?
It doesn’t matter. Plaintiff wants to prove that an engineer told the CEO that the widgets were dangerous. So he introduces testimony from the engineer that the engineer told the CEO that the widgets were dangerous. Defendant does not dispute this. How much more weight could you possibly want? The only other thing you could do was to ask defendant to stipulate that the engineer told the CEO about the widgets. I think most lawyers wouldn’t bother.
Why would the defense prefer to basically concede the case than have their communication policy entered into evidence?
Because it makes it look like they’re trying to conceal evidence, which is much worse for them than simply maybe being negligent. This could it be grounds for punitive damages or an adverse inference ruling or both. It would also be so easy for plaintiff to score off of that the court might not even bother with an adverse inference
If I say I want you to turn over your email records to me in discovery to establish that an engineer had told you that your widgets were dangerous, but you instead destroy those records, the court will instruct the jury to assume that those records did contain that evidence. This is an adverse inference.
Even if there’s no adverse inference, just think about what happens. Defendant attempts to counter the testimony by saying that if this meeting took place there would be records, but there aren’t, so you must be lying. Plaintiff responds by showing that defendant had a policy designed to prevent such records from being created, so defendant knows that records would not exist whether the meeting took place or not, and thus his argument is disingenuous. Would you follow defendant’s strategy here? I wouldn’t.
Remember, they’re not conceding the whole case, just the fact that the engineer told them his opinion. What they’re going to do instead is admit that the first engineer told them, but that they asked some other other engineers to weigh in on the point, and those engineers disagreed. They decided to trust the other engineers and thus the resulting injury wasn’t negligent, it was just a mistake.
It seems to me even companies that always do the right thing don’t want to have to litigate about email chains where a bunch of people are talking out of their backside.
This is what I was saying before. And moreover, if the actual main effect of these policies was to prevent creation of discoverable records of real bad stuff the companies deserved to burn for, they’d probably risk trouble just for having them in the first place.
In my own case, I was working on a project where I thought it would be useful for us to have a copy of the entire WHOIS database. Under ICANN’s rules (IIRC), a registrar who got the WHOIS database in the first place was required to sell copies to organizations which meet certain criteria, which we definitely did. I was told that regardless of ICANN’s rules, registrars all just ignore that rule and refuse to sell the database. I said that in that case we should just flagrantly violate their ToS and scrape ourselves a full copy from their free lookup interface, and if they didn’t like it they could sell me a copy like they were required too. It’s not like they’d be able to stop me. Legal got in touch and said basically “Look, we’re not saying you’re wrong, but keep that off of discoverable channels. Proving that you’re right in court costs money.” Which of course was correct, and exactly what I was missing. As an engineer, I could establish that it was both feasible and legally winnable, but it takes a lawyer to know about the expected legal costs in the event of a conflict and how to minimize those. Anyway, we never ended up actually doing it for unrelated reasons.

denyeverywhere 11 Nov 2023 22:17 UTC
7 points
0
on: Who is Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) really, and how could he have done what he did? - three theories and a lot of evidence

I’ve been trying to figure out how someone who appears to believe deeply in the principles of effective altruism could do what SBF did. … It seems important to me to seek an understanding of the deeper causes of this disaster to help prevent future such disasters.

There’s a part of my brain screaming “Why are you leaving yourself wide open to affinity fraud? Are you trying to ensure ‘SBF 2: This Time It’s Personal’ happens or what?” However, I’ll ask him to be quiet and explain.

The problem was that you should never go around thinking “Somebody who believes in EA wouldn’t screw me, therefore this investment must be safe.” Instead you should think “The rate of return on this investment is not possible without crime, therefore I don’t know why somebody who claims to be an EA would do this, but I don’t have to know, I just have to stay away.” Or as I said in response to Zvi’s book review

You have to think: this man wouldn’t offer me free candy just to get in his unmarked van, that doesn’t make sense. I wouldn’t give anyone candy for that. What’s going on here?

It doesn’t matter why something is too good to be true. If it is, it must be a lie, and thus bad. Don’t take the deal. In case it’s not clear “taking the deal” can mean more than just investing with FTX; it also encompasses other sorts of relationships one might get into with SBF or FTX, like taking their money or allowing them to be a public symbol of you.

The point here is that understanding human psychology and motivations, especially where the human you’re trying to understand might be trying to trick you, is way harder than just knowing what sorts of returns are possible on capital investments with given amounts of risk. You can try to understand the SBFs of the world in the hopes of being able to identify them, but why do all that extra work? Just don’t trust anyone who says they can make you a 50% return on your investment in a year with zero risk (or comparable risk to T-bills) because every single one of them is lying and committing crimes.

denyeverywhere 8 Nov 2023 5:17 UTC
5 points
0
in reply to: quanticle’s comment on: The 6D effect: When companies take risks, one email can be very powerful.
Google did not pursue that strategy. Or at least, if they did, the article you linked doesn’t say so.
What I am saying that Google did not and would not do is that when Barton testified that
Google feared if Bing became the default search engine on Android, “then users would have a ‘difficult time finding or changing to Google.’”
Google would not respond that he was talking horseshit and if what he was saying was true, why isn’t there any evidence of it in our internal employee communications? They would not say this because DOJ would say that this corroborating evidence did not exist because Google took steps to ensure it would not.
When I worked at a different FAANG company, I was told in orientation to never use legal terminology in e-mail, for similar reasons.
Same here. I was told not to say that this new change would allow us to “Crush Yahoo in terms of search result quality”. But I understood the idea to be that since in real life what we were trying to do was just maximize search result quality, we shouldn’t let our jocularity and competitive spirit create more work for Legal.
Of course, maybe the real FAANG I worked for wasn’t Google and I’m just adapting the real story to Google for anonymity purposes. Who knows?

denyeverywhere 8 Nov 2023 4:57 UTC
5 points
−3
in reply to: quanticle’s comment on: The 6D effect: When companies take risks, one email can be very powerful.
It’s not that safe communication guidelines are damning. It’s that claiming that the lack of discoverable evidence corroborating your statement disproves it while simultaneously having conspired to ensure that discoverable evidence would not exist would be damning.

denyeverywhere 2 Apr 2024 1:32 UTC
3 points
2
in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: Do I count as e/acc for exclusion purposes?
I assume this is April Fools’ related, but I can’t really tell

It’s not.

I think there’s less cohesive leadership of LW parties than you seem to think

That sounds likely. To be fair, I’ve mostly heard of this from
- Beff Jezos & Beff-adjacent people whining about it on twitter
- Aella’s gangbang
And I probably adjusted too hard off of this. Like nobody goes around prominently saying “actually we don’t mind if e/acc show up, so long as they’re nice” that I know of, but there’s no reason to assume that they would.

Ask the host. If they’re unclear or unsure, go and see if you feel unwelcome or uncomfortable, and leave if so.

So my initial reaction to this was to feel slightly insulted, but I realize that probably wasn’t your intention.

I know how to go to parties. I’m not unusually awkward. I’m not a preacher. That’s not the problem here. I can usually get along with people as long as they’re not too nuts.

I asked this question because I believed that it very common for LW parties to specifically want to exclude people on philosophical grounds. If they do, and if their objection applies to me, I want them to succeed. I’ve heard stories of e/acc people trying to sneak into Berkeley parties incognito. That’s not my style.

Also, my model of the most likely circumstances where I was likely to attend such a party was an acquaintance—who recognized that I seemed like an LW kinda guy but wasn’t deeply familiar with my whole belief system—saying “Hey there’s this thing tonight we could go to.” So asking the host might not be practical; said host might already be drinking and playing board games or whatever degeneracy usually goes on. Thus if the e/acc ban was as widespread as I thought, it would make sense to know ahead of time.

denyeverywhere 10 Nov 2023 2:45 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: ryan_b’s comment on: The 6D effect: When companies take risks, one email can be very powerful.
The part that confuses me about this is twofold...

What you’re missing is how specific and narrow my original point was. The thing that makes it look like you are concealing evidence is only if you do two things simultaneously
- Challenge witness testimony by saying it’s not corroborated by some discoverable record.
- Have a policy whereby you avoid creating the discoverable record, periodically delete the discoverable record, or otherwise make it unlikely that the record would corroborate the testimony.
So basically you have to pick one or the other. And you’re probably going to pick the 2nd. So as a witness, you probably just aren’t going to have to worry about those kinds of challenges.

Defense counsel asks why, if the risk was so great and the witness so certain, they were unwilling to follow the clearly established procedure under section 34.B.II.c of the communication policy.

This is a really good and interesting point, but I ultimately don’t think it will work.

I’m going to say I just told my boss because I didn’t understand 34.B.II.c, nobody does. The fact that I didn’t follow the exception rule isn’t going to convince anyone that it didn’t happen. The jury will get to see the communication policy in its full glory. Plaintiff counsel will ask me whether anyone ever explained the policy or rule 34.B.II.c to me (of course not), if we had a class to make sure we understood how to use the policy in practice like we had for the company sexual harassment policy (of course there was no class). And failure to follow the exception rule won’t prove that I didn’t think it was as serious. I told my boss and colleagues. People knew. What good would getting out my legal dictionary and parsing the text of 34.B.II.c do as far as helping people address the issues I raised? I dunno, I never even considered it as a possibility. I’m just a simple country engineer who wanted people to fix a safety issue.

Linking this back to the OP, the strategy of sending an email to make the risk discoverable as suggested is reliant on converting the actual risks to a legal risk because the legal risk is a bigger factor in company decision making, and the goal is to make the company choose not to take the risk at all.

I’m not sure this makes sense, except as a psychological trick. Like, the legal risk is that the actual risk will manifest itself and then someone will sue. I feel like everyone just understands this clearly already. Remember I’ve already told everyone about the risk. If the risk manifests, of course we will be sued. So maybe by making the fact that I told them readily discoverable, they’ll be less likely to ignore it just because the idea that I’d be willing to testify about it is something they could ignore or not consider. This is plausible, but we have to compare it to other options. Like I could also just say “If this were to happen, I would testify that I thought it might happen and that I told you guys.” How well would that work compared to trying to make things discoverable? I dunno, it might work better.

Out of curiosity, did you get any static afterward, or was it just an “oops” and done?

Assuming you’re talking about my story, it was the basically the latter, although that might have had something to do with the fact that we abandoned the idea, so it was never going to come up. I’m pretty sure that I was quietly regarded as less reliable and less of the sort of clever operator who would instinctively keep them out of trouble, and that this affected my chances of advancement. No doubt I could have demonstrated growth in that regard and fixed the issue, but I didn’t stick around that company long enough for it to be relevant (again, for other reasons).

denyeverywhere 6 Nov 2023 9:52 UTC
3 points
1
on: Book Review: Going Infinite
We are taking many of the brightest young people. We are telling them to orient themselves as utility maximizers with scope sensitivity, willing to deploy instrumental convergence. Taught by modern overprotective society to look for rules they can follow so that they can be blameless good people, they are offered a set of rules that tells them to plan their whole lives around sacrifices on an alter, with no limit to the demand for such sacrifices. And then, in addition to telling them to in turn recruit more people to and raise more money for the cause, we point them into the places they can earn the best ‘career capital’ or money or ‘do the most good,’ which more often than not have structures that systematically destroy these people’s souls.
See, I don’t think that’s the problem. Or at least not the only one. And maybe not the important one. I think the issue was more of a failure-to-be-suspicious-of-too-good-to-be-true type of error, which seems common in these kinds of cases.
When Madoff blew up, my dad told me that what was going on was that lots of the people investing with Madoff knew the returns he was promising weren’t possible legitimately. So they assumed he must be screwing somebody, and this must be somebody else other than them. Unfortunately it turned out he was also screwing them. Whoops!
When Sam came along, people could have looked and said this seems like an unreasonably positive windfall. Therefore, I should be suspicious. The more unreasonably generous his donations, the more I should want to know more, to double-check everything. But they didn’t. Plenty of other people have made this mistake before, so I’m not being too critical here, but that’s what it takes. You have to think: this man wouldn’t offer me free candy just to get in his unmarked van, that doesn’t make sense. I wouldn’t give anyone candy for that. What’s going on here?
I’ve seen several reports of people saying that they in fact believed at the time that Sam must have been doing something slightly sketchy, and that maybe that was not such a good thing, but ultimately concluded that it wasn’t worth worrying about. The lesson we should have taken from Madoff is that it’s always worth worrying about. It could always be worse than your initial guess. People must not have seriously asked themselves “What’s the worst thing that could happen?” because the obvious answer would be “He’s another Madoff.”
Personally, if you had asked me what was going to happen with FTX in early 2022, I’d have said the same thing as Madoff. But I’m super-suspicious of everything to do with crypto so maybe this doesn’t count as extraordinary prescience. I’d probably have said the same thing in early 2021 too.

denyeverywhere 5 Nov 2023 7:41 UTC
3 points
−2
on: The 6D effect: When companies take risks, one email can be very powerful.
I feel like a flaw here is that given that we’re assuming that our hero is willing to both speak up about risks and provide evidence to lawyers suing his company when things go wrong (because he wanted to communicate those risks in discoverable form), how much actual benefit does this provide over just being willing to testify? If I testify that I told the CEO that our widgets could explode and kill you, the opposition isn’t going to be so stupid as to ask why there isn’t any record of me bringing this to the CEO’s attention. The first lawyer will be hardly able to contain his delight as he asks the court to mark “WidgetCo Safe Communication Guidelines” for evidence. The opposition would much rather just admit that it the conversation happened.

If there isn’t much benefit, then why would you take the risk of defying the company’s communication policies? You may have legal recourse in the event of retaliation, but you may not succeed. You don’t want to do something stupid just because you have legal recourse if it goes wrong. Especially if you have less stupid options that meet the case.

I think companies have these policies in part because not every discoverable document which can be used effectively against them in a lawsuit is necessarily an actual example of something that was an actual legal wrong that should be used against them. Sometimes you might have an innocuous concern which is effectively twisted into damning evidence by some shyster of a lawyer. You can ultimately prove that it is innocuous, but you have to spend millions of dollars in legal fees to do so. And so you take the $250,000 settlement offer said shyster proposes, which was his plan all along.

So then when you go to sue your former employer for firing you over your defiance of the company’s communication policy, the company’s lawyer says that they have legitimate concerns about frivolous lawsuits, they have a policy to help prevent this, and you refused to abide by it, so they fired you. They recognize that you couldn’t have been prevented from testifying about risks and your communication of those risks if they got sued and you were subpoenaed, so it’s not like they were trying to fire you to cover something up. So it wasn’t retaliation. So you lose.

denyeverywhere 15 Nov 2023 23:44 UTC
2 points
0
on: Loudly Give Up, Don’t Quietly Fade

the Bystander Effect is dumb

It’s dumber than you think.

Social relations and presence of others predict bystander intervention: Evidence from violent incidents captured on CCTV

denyeverywhere 6 Nov 2023 9:06 UTC
2 points
0
on: The Assumed Intent Bias
In your first example, it’s clear that expected loss is as important as intent. It’s not just that you probably don’t have a strong intent to misuse their data. It’s that the cost of you actually having this intent is pretty small when you only have access to whatever data is left on your laptop, compared to when you had access to a live production database or whatever. In other words, it’s not that they necessarily have some sort of binary model of intent to screw them. Even if they have some sort of distribution of the likelihood that either now or soon you will want to misuse the data, it doesn’t matter because the expected loss is so small in any model.
To impute a binary model of intent to screw them, they’d have to do something like this: Previously we had lots of people who just had root access to our production environment. We now want to tighten up and give everyone permission sets tailored to their actual job requirements. However, silentbob has been with us for a while and would have screwed us by now if that was their intent, so let’s just let them keep their old root account since that’s slightly less work and might slightly improve productivity.
In your second example, I’m involuntarily screaming NO NO NO DO NOT MAKE THAT CHANGE WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU before I even get to their reasoning. By the time I’ve read their reasoning I already want them fired. When you report the results of the A/B test data, I’m thinking: well of course the data showed that. How could you possibly think anything else could happen?
I’m starting to think I’ve been programming for too long. Like, I didn’t even have to think to know what would actually happen. I just felt it immediately.
In your third example, I don’t think that’s how gun enthusiasts usually reason about this point, but I respect that this isn’t really what you’re getting at.

denyeverywhere 6 Nov 2023 7:57 UTC
2 points
2
in reply to: AnthonyC’s comment on: The 6D effect: When companies take risks, one email can be very powerful.
I genuinely can’t think of a situation where this makes sense, either as a way to keep the email clean for discovery or anything vaguely related (like concerns about employees leaking to journalists). On the other hand, it makes a lot of sense for phishing prevention. Seriously, if you can think of an example, tell me. I’m stumped.

denyeverywhere 3 Apr 2024 20:37 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Do I count as e/acc for exclusion purposes?
Yes, I meant specifically the Bay Area scene, since that’s the only part of the LW community that’s accused of excluding e/acc-ers.

It’s interesting and relevant if you can say that in the NYC scene, this sort of thing is unheard of, and that you’re familiar enough with that scene to say so, but it isn’t 100% on point.

denyeverywhere 2 Apr 2024 21:01 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Do I count as e/acc for exclusion purposes?
Would you describe yourself as familiar with the scene at all? You seem to imply that you doubt that e/acc exclusion is an actual thing, but is that based on your experience with the scene?

I’m not suggesting that you’re wrong to doubt it (if anything I was most likely wrong to believe it), I just want to clarify what info I can take from your doubt.

denyeverywhere 2 Apr 2024 20:55 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: gwern’s comment on: Do I count as e/acc for exclusion purposes?
This is a good point, but I don’t intuitively see that it’s particularly strong evidence that it must be unusual. I would expect an event like this to have more explicit rules than the average party.

denyeverywhere 2 Apr 2024 20:36 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Ben Pace’s comment on: Do I count as e/acc for exclusion purposes?
This seems like good evidence and I don’t think you would make it up.

I’m rapidly coming to the conclusion that Beff & co are exaggerating/full-of-it/otherwise-inaccurate.

Possibly the Aella thing was an anomaly, but also the thing that they actually really wanted to go to, and they’re inaccurately (although not necessarily dishonestly) assuming it to be more widespread than it actually is.

denyeverywhere 2 Apr 2024 8:30 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Ben Pace’s comment on: Do I count as e/acc for exclusion purposes?
Would you describe yourself as plugged into the LW party scene in Berkeley?

denyeverywhere 2 Apr 2024 6:17 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Gerald Monroe’s comment on: Do I count as e/acc for exclusion purposes?
I wrote a long reply to your points, but ultimately decided it was a derail to original topic. I’ll PM you just for fun though.

denyeverywhere 2 Apr 2024 5:45 UTC
1 point
−2
in reply to: Brendan Long’s comment on: Do I count as e/acc for exclusion purposes?

I don’t think there’s anything misleading about that. Building AI that kills everyone means you never get to build the immortality-granting AI.

I didn’t say it wasn’t sensible. I said describing it that way was misleading.

If your short-term goal is in fact to decelerate the development of AI, describing this as “accelerating the development of Friendly AI” is misleading, or at least confused. What you’re actually doing is trying to mitigate X-risk. In part you are doing this in the hopes that you survive to build Friendly AI. This makes sense except for the part where you call it “acceleration.”

Incidentally, people don’t seem to say “Friendly AI” anymore. What’s up with that?

denyeverywhere 2 Apr 2024 2:31 UTC
1 point
−2
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Do I count as e/acc for exclusion purposes?
I think it counts. And while it’s not the typical LW party, do you really think that prohibition says nothing about the scene? That seems like an odd opinion to me.

denyeverywhere 2 Apr 2024 2:24 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Brendan Long’s comment on: Do I count as e/acc for exclusion purposes?
I think rationalists generally agree that speeding up the development of AGI (that doesn’t kill all of us) is extremely important

Didn’t Eli want a worldwide moratorium on AI development, with data center airstrikes if necessary?

Granted, I understood this to be on the grounds that we were at the point that AGI killing us was a serious concern. But still, being in favor of “speeding up AGI that doesn’t kill us” is kind of misleading if you think the plan should be
1. Slow down AGI to 0.
2. Figure out all of the alignment stuff.
3. Develop AGI with alignment as fast as possible.
I mean, sure, you want all 3 steps to happen as fast as possible, but that’s not why there’s a difference of opinion. There’s a reason why e/acc refer to the other side as “decels” and it’s not unwarranted IMO.

I would be more worried about getting kicked out of parties because you think “the NRC is a good thing”

Let’s say “An NRC would be a good thing (at least on the assumption that we don’t intend to be 100% libertarian in the short run)”. I’m not going to die on the hill of whatever they may have done recently.