Love it! As a DM and parent (albeit of a 1 years old) reading this really made me smile and think through all the things I have in the house that I can design games around :) Thank you for the write-up!
DusanDNesic
Karma: 355
This sounds a bit like davidad’s agenda in ARIA, except you also limit the AI to only writing provable mathematical solutions to mathematical questions to begin with. In general, I would say that you need possibly better feedback loops than that, possibly by writing more on LW, or consulting with more people, or joining a fellowship or other programs.
To add to the anecdata, I’ve heard it advised (like Raemon below) and started using it occasionally. It has been good for me, although not transformative—possibly I come from different baseline of how important the change is, I don’t apologise constantly, but as I’ve learned, it used to be more than I should.
Hmm, but that has trade-off with not showing up as suspect to X-ray. So maybe a mix of approaches makes it quite expensive to smuggle drugs and thus limit supply/raise price/drop consumption
If all that is lost could be defined, it would, by definition, not be lost once definition is expanded that much.
There is this video: https://youtu.be/OfgVQKy0lIQ on why Asian parents don’t say “I love you” to their kids, and it analyzes how the same word in different languages has different meaning. I would also add—to different people as well. So whatever you classify is always missing something in the gaps. It’s the issue of legibilizing (in Seeing Like a State terms) - in trying to define it, you restrict it to only those things.
A lot of the meaning of the word Love is contained within me, with my emotions, with my messy mind thinking fuzzy thoughts. If I restricted it to only defined categories I am bound to lose something. Instead, I enjoy the fullness of it by keeping it ill defined and exploring it’s multitudes.
Perhaps it’s simply the case that the answer is “you are missing a human universal” to the question in the topic. If you tried to define humour, analyze jokes, divide them in categories, and extract the hormones triggered in response to some stimuli caused by a certain joke, I would say you did not (on a certain level) understand humour better than a child who made a good joke and enjoy a good laugh.
Finale example I heard recently brought up again is Mary’s room knowledge argument—no amount of classification of blue, understanding of light spectrum data etc replaces the experience of seeing blue. Likewise with love.
To bring it back to your original question about understanding it in order to communicate to others—this is less found in books and more in self exploration through relationships with others. (I speak from perspective of someone in a happy long term romantic relationship with 0 issues and best communication I can imagine, none of which came from books on either of our sides).
I’m not sure—in dissecting the Frog something is lost while knowledge is gained. If you do not see how analysis of things can sometimes (not always!) diminish them, then that may be the crux. I agree with Wbrom above—some things in human experience are irreducible, and sometimes trying to get to a more atomic level means that you lose a lot in the process, in the gaps between the categories.
This sounds like a case of the Rule of Equal and Opposite Advice: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/24/should-you-reverse-any-advice-you-hear/ I’m sure for some people more honesty would be harmful, but it does sound like the caveats here make it clear when not to use it. I more agree with questions Tsvi raises in the other thread than with “this is awful advice”. I can imagine that you are a person for whom more honesty is bad, although if you followed the caveats above it would be imo quite rare to do it wrong. I think the authors do a good job of outlining many cases where it goes wrong.
Is a lot of the effect not “people who read ACX trust Scott Alexander”? Like, the survey selects for most “passionate” readers, those willing to donate their free time to Scott for research with ~nothing in return. Him publicly stating on his platform “I am now much less certain of X” is likely to make that group of people be less certain of X?
[Closed] PIBBSS is hiring in a variety of roles (alignment research and incubation program)
Retrospective: PIBBSS Fellowship 2023
Great post Anna, thanks for writing—it makes for good thinking.
It reminds me of The Use and Abuse of Witchdoctors for Life by Sam[]zdat, in the Uruk Series (which I highly recommend). To summarize, our modern way of thinking denies us the benefits of being able to rally around ideas that would get us to better equilibria. By looking at the priest calling for spending time in devoted prayer with other community members and asking, “What for?” we end up losing the benefits of community, quiet time, and meditation. While we are closer to truth (in territory sense), we lost something, and it takes conscious effort to realize it is missing and replace it. It is describing the community version of the local problem of a LessWronger not committing to a friendship because it is not “true”—in marginal cases, believing in it can make it true!
(I recommend reading the whole series, or at least the article above, but the example it gives is “Gri-gri.” “In 2012, the recipe for gri-gri was revealed to an elder in a dream. If you ingest it and follow certain ritual commandments, then bullets cannot harm you.”—before reading the article, think about how belief in elders helps with fighting neighboring well-armed villages)
PIBBSS Speaker events comings up in February
Apply to the PIBBSS Summer Research Fellowship
I assume Jan 1st 2025 is the natural day for a sequel :D
Finding reliable sources is 99% of the battle, and I have yet to find one which would for sure pass the “too good to check” situation: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/too-good-to-check-a-play-in-three
Some people on this website get that for some topics, acoup blog does that for history, etc, but it’s really rare, and mostly you end up with “listen to Radio Liberty and Pravda and figure out the truth if you can.”
On a style side, I agree with other commenters that you have selected something where even after all the reading I am severely not convinced your criticism is correct under every possible frame. Picking something like a politician talking about the good they have done, despite actually being corrupt or something much more narrow in focus and black-and-white, leaving you much less surface to defend. Here, it took a lot of text, I am unsure what techniques I have learned since your criticisms require more effort to again check for validity. You explained that sunk cost fallacy pushed you for this example, but it’s still not too late to add a different example, put this one into Google doc and make it optional reading and note your edit. People may read this in the future, and no reason not to ease the concept for them!
On phone, don’t know how to format block quotes but: My response to your Ramaswamy example was to skip ahead without reading it to see if you would conclude with “My counterarguments were bullshit, did you catch it?”.
This was exactly what I did, such a missed opportunity!!
I also agree with other things you said, and to contribute a useful phrase, your response to BS: ” is to notice when I don’t know enough on the object level to be able to know for sure when arguments are misleading, and in those cases refrain from pretending that I know more than I do. In order to determine who to take how seriously, I track how much people are able to engage with other worldviews, and which worldviews hold up and don’t require avoidance techniques in order to preserve the worldview.” Sounds a bit like Epistemic Learned Helplessness by Scott: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/03/repost-epistemic-learned-helplessness/ Which I think is good when you are not in a live debate—saying “I dunno, maybe” and then later spending time thinking about it and researching it to see if the argument is true or not, meanwhile not updating.
Thank you for this—this is not a book I would generally pick up in my limited reading time, but this has clarified a lot of terms and thinking around probabilities!
My experience is much like this (for context I’ve spoken about AIS to common public, online but mostly offline, to audiences from students to politicians). The more poetic, but also effective and intuitive way to call this out (while sacrificing some accuracy but I think not too much) is: “we GROW AI”. It puts it in categories with genetic engineering and pharmaceutical fairly neatly, and shows the difference between PowerPoint and ChatGPT in how they are made and why we don’t know how it works. It is also more intuitive compared to “black box” which is a more technical term and not widely known.
Hello Gabriel! We plan to run this group ~3 times a year, so you should be able to apply for next round, around January/February, which would start in Feb/March. (not confirmed, just estimates).
To answer things which Raymond did not, it is hard for me to say who has the agenda which you think has good chances for solving alignment. I’d encourage you to reaching out to people who pass your bar perhaps more frequently than you do and establish those connections. Your limits on no audio or video do make it hard to participate in something like the PIBBSS Fellowship, but perhaps worth taking a shot at it or others. See if people whose ideas you like are mentoring in some programs—getting to work with them in structured ways may be easier than otherwise.