Great post!
> a client can show me where they buried their dozen murder victims and I wouldn’t be allowed to tell a soul, even if an innocent person is sitting in prison for their crimes.
For any Alaskan serial murderers reading this, do note that this does not apply to you. Your Alaskan attorney can breach attorney-client privilege to prevent an innocent person from going to jail. See Rule 1.6(b)(1)(C).
I don’t think I see the problem. Chevron deference is, as you say, about whether courts defer to agencies interpretations statutes. It comes up when an agency thinks one interpreation is best, and a court thinks a different interpretation is the best reading of the statute, but that the agencies prefered interpreation is still a plausible reading of the statute. In that case, under Chevron, the court defers to the agencies interpreation. Do away with Chevron, and the court will follow what it thinks is the best reading of the statute. This is, I should note, the background of what courts usually do and did before Chevron. Chevron is an anomaly.
In terms of implications, I think it is true that agencies will tend to interpret their mandates broadly, and so doing away with Chevron deference will, at the margin, reduce the scope of some agencies powers. But I don’t see how it could lead to the end of the administrative state as we know it. Agencies will still have jobs to do that are authorized statute, and courts will still let agencies do those jobs.
So what does AI regulation look like? If it looks like congress passing a new statute to either create a new agency or authorize an existing agency to regulate AI, then whether Chevron gets overturned seems irrelevant—congress is quite capable of writing a statute that authorizes someone to regulate AI, with or without Chevron. If it looks like an existing agency reading an existing statute correctly to authorize it to regulate some aspect of AI, then again, that should work fine with or without Chevron. If, on the other hand, it looks like an existing agency over-reading an existing statute to claim authority it does not have to regulate AI, then (1) that seems horribly undemocratic, though if the fate of humanity is on the line then I guess that’s ok, and (2) maybe the agency does it anyway, and it takes years to get fought out in court, and that buys us the time we need. But if the court ruling causes the agency to not try to regulate AI, or if the years long court fight doesn’t buy enough time, we might actually have a problem here. I think this argument needs more details fleshed out. What particular agency do we think might over-read what particular statute to regulate AI? If we aren’t already targeting a particular agency with arguments about a particular statute, and have a reasonable chance of getting them to regulate for AI safety rather than AI ethics, then worrying about the courts seems pointless.
In the automatic response they told me that they expect to give me the decision before this deadline.
Contrary to the promise, I don’t get any response.
There is an obvious disconnect here. A statement that someone “expects” to do something is not a promise, especially not when made in an automated response. If Igor misread this as a promise, and given that he has not provided exact quotes of the other alleged promises, it seems quite plausible that nobody ever promised anything, and that Igor was imprudent in re-arranging his life based on a pending grant application. If I’m right about that, then Igor has defamed EAIF by accusing them of “lies”.
I think many people should be less afraid of lawsuits, though I’m not sure I’d say “almost everyone.”
I wouldn’t draw much from the infrequency of lawsuits being filed. Many disputes are resolved in the shadow of the legal system, without an actual court being involved. For example, I read a number of cases in law school where one person sued another after a car accident. Yet when I actually got into a car accident myself, no lawsuit was ever filed. I talked to my insurance company, the other driver presumably talked to their insurance company, the two companies talked to each other, money flowed around, things were paid for. Much more efficient than bringing everybody into a courtroom, empaneling a jury, and paying lawyers in fancy suits to make arguments. The insurance companies knew what the law was, knew who would have to pay money to who, and so they were able to skip over the whole courtroom battle step, and go directly to the payment step. This is what usually happens when an area of law is mature—the potential parties, sometimes with good advice from their attorneys, reach similar conclusions about the likely outcome of a potential lawsuit, and this allows them to reach an agreement outside of court. Lawsuits are much more likely to happen when the law is more ambiguous, and therefor the parties can have significantly different estimations of the outcome of the suit. So the frequency of lawsuits is often a measure of how much disagreement there is about an area of law. Other times it reflects a requirement to actually go to court to do something (like debt collection or mortgage foreclosure). But I don’t think it is a good measure of the likelihood of having to pay out money for some arguable violation of the law.
Also, many contracts contain arbitration clauses, which also prevent conflicts from making it into a courtroom.
The notion of lawyers being overly conservative I think is also an incomplete description of that dynamic. A good lawyer will tell you how much you can expect a potential lawsuit to cost, and therefor whether it is more or less than the expected benefit of the action. If your lawyer won’t do this, you should fire them and hire someone else. As an illustration, think about universities violating the free speech and due process rights of their students, and getting sued for it. They do this because the cost of not doing it (in public relations, angry students/faculty/donors, Title IX lawsuits) is more than the cost of a potential constitutional lawsuit, and they know it. How do they know it? Because their lawyers told them so.
I think sometimes people don’t want to take the advice of lawyers they perceive as overly conservative, even when they should. People trying to build something or make a deal will often get very excited about it, and only want to see the ways it can go well. Lawyers have seen, or at least studied, many past conflicts, and so they can often see more clearly what conflicts might arise as a result of some project, and advise clients on how to avoid them. That is often what clients pay lawyers for. But to the client, it can often feel like the lawyer putting an unnecessary damper on the shiny project they are excited about.
There is also the moral aspect. Laws often have a moral point behind them. Sometimes when people refrain from doing things to avoid being sued, they are refraining from doing immoral things. And sometimes when people disregard legal advice, do a thing, and get sued, they actually did an immoral thing. To take an example that I watched closely at the time, and that connects to one of Alyssa’s examples, during the 2014-2015 school year Rolling Stone published an article, based on a single young woman’s account, of gang rape being used as a form of fraternity initiation at UVA. Rolling Stone did not do the sort of fact checking that is standard in journalism. (If memory serves the Columbia School of Journalism put out a report detailing the failures here). Over the course of several months, the story fell apart, it turned out to be a complete fabrication. And Rolling Stone was sued, and had to pay out. I can imagine Rolling Stone’s lawyers advising them not to publish that article without doing some more fact checking, and those lawyers would have been right on the law. But more fact checking also would have been the morally correct thing to do. Even in the case of abuse/rape, defamation law does have a moral point to make—you shouldn’t make up stories about being abused/raped and present them as the truth.
Finally, as an ex-lawyer, I unreservedly endorse Alyssa’s advice not to take on six figures of debt to go to law school without researching the job market.
I think you are using an inapplicable definition of “community”. Your example of a D&D group calls to mind a “community” in the sense of “a group of single digit number of people who are in the same room socially interacting on a recurring basis.” In this sense of the word, neither EA nor rationality is a community. I agree that we should not expect Ben/Alice/Chloe to be in the same community with Kat/Emerson, for this narrow sense of community. And my assumption is that they weren’t on the day before Ben made his post. And that is fine.
There is a broader sense of the word “community”, which we might define as “an extended social network with shared identity and values”, which does apply to EA and rationality. I don’t see a reason why two people in a legal dispute shouldn’t be able to remain in this sort of community.
I find the general response to the threat of a libel suit to be deeply concerning. It is true that libel suits, and lawsuits generally, are expensive, time consuming, and generally unpleasant for everyone involved, including the victors. That is why I think NL ultimately made the right decision not to sue. That said, I also think that it is important not to use social pressure to discourage lawsuits. And I think we can all see this when we look at other communities from an outside perspective. When a community mistreats its members badly enough, it is important that the law be there as an escape hatch, and attempting to interfere with that by creating norms against lawsuits is therefor likely to be very harmful. The Amish famously will never seek recourse in the secular legal system, no matter how bad the wrong or what the circumstances are. Does anyone here admire this aspect of the Amish culture? Cults also famously use all kinds of pressure tactics to prevent members from seeking out the law. This is bad. We should not be like this. So when I see the way Habryka for example talks about the threat of a libel suit in this case, or Gwern, or a number of others, that sets off alarm bells for me. I don’t think Habryka is a cult leader right now, but I do think he is veering uncomfortably in that direction and I hope he changes course.
A real court would apply complex rules of evidence, which sometimes involve balancing but often are more categorical. But yes, it’s a different notion of public interest than whatever one rando thinks is public interest.
I agree that there is a significant difference between cases where the accused knows the identity of the accuser and cases where they do not, and we should split our analysis.
In cases where the accused does not know the identity of the accuser, I think the accusations would necessarily be so vague that I wouldn’t update much on them, and I would hope other rationalists and EAs wouldn’t either, but clearly there is a significant contingent of people in these communities who do not share my epistemic scruples. Given that, I don’t know, seems a mess. But your rule that only the accused should share the identity of the accuser seems too absolute—surely accusers are sometimes in the wrong, and sometimes malicious, and in that case having their identities publicly known seems good. Yes that will result in some amount of social punishment, and if the accusations were false and malicious, then I think that is good.
The case where the accused does know the identity of the accuser is where my above logic about the accused appearing retaliatory would suggest it is better for a third party to name the accuser.
A lot of this reads like you are trying to apply the structure of an experiment to a thing that is, um, not an experiment. Like, we all learn the steps of an experiment in school (where they often incorrectly call the experimental method “the scientific method”). But there are whole sciences, like astronomy, and cosmology, and geology, that don’t do experiments, they just make observations and analyze them in the context of what we already know from experiments in other areas of science. That is what LIGO does. We can’t do experiments on gravitational ways, because we don’t have the capacity to produce gravitational waves. All we can do is observe them. And that is still a perfectly valid scientific endeavor. And in particular, it is a scientific endeavor in which the notion of a “control” doesn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense. Now, I don’t have the technical competence to evaluate these kinds of high level physics things for myself, I don’t know the math of general relativity, so I’m not going to try. But I generally trust the scientific community, and I’m not going to update much on a blog post that seems to misunderstand what these things are trying to do.
Why do you think that third parties shouldn’t name an accuser? If an accusation is being handled in the court of public opinion, presumably it is because the public has an interest in the truth of the matter, and therefor I would think that any member of the public who has relevant evidence ought to be able to present it. If the accusation depends on the credibility of the accuser, then the identity of the accuser seems like relevant evidence. If anything, I’d think the accused should be particularly hesitant to name the accuser, at least as a strategic matter, for fear of appearing retaliatory. Third parties, not being under that constraint, might be in a better position to name the accuser.
I like the idea of a dashboard, but I’m not at all sold on using consumption as a proxy for progress. To take an obvious example, the computer I am on now uses fewer watts than the computer I was on a decade ago, and will therefor show up as a decrease in energy use. Yet it is superior by every metric that we judge computers by. A Tesla will get more miles for the same amount of energy compared to a traditional gas car. In general, I think we may be at a point in history where progress takes the form of producing better quality products with fewer inputs, and a dashboard that focuses on consumption will incorrectly show that as regression.
This may be more difficult to actually get numbers for, but I think a better sort of metric might be output over input—number of watt-hours divided by number of hours of human labor used to produce those watt-hours.
I share your unease with the “raising awareness” mode of activism. I’m not really sold on these extra simulacra levels as an explanation of that unease. Especially levels 9 and 10, an evolutionary explanation just isn’t interchangeable with an explanation of a biological mechanism. Similarly, a memetic explanation just isn’t interchangeable with a simulacra explanation, a memetic explanation just isn’t an explanation of what psychological process causes a person to utter a sentence, it is an explanation of why certain sentences are uttered given a psychological environment.
For me at least, I think the uneasiness with “raising awareness” is more that it is transparently ineffective altruism. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people “raising awareness” of x type of cancer or of sexual assault or whatever, as though there was anyone on the planet who didn’t know that these things exist. And it seems wildly implausible to me that wearing a ribbon or whatever is actually going to cause anybody to think of a new solution or implement an existing solution more effectively. “Raising awareness” comes off as very transparent pure signaling, simulacra level 3 or 4, and often rather expensive signaling, and I don’t like that.
That case is from the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, a federal appellate court. It is binding precedent not only in New Hampshire, but also in Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Puerto Rico. And it is the only federal appellate court to have ruled on the issue, which means it is still the most definitive interpretation of the law that there is for the entire country. The ruling is not based on details of statutory wording or legislative intent, so your suggestion that other courts might rule differently based on those things is completely baseless.
And it does seem very nature to this retired free speech lawyer. In any free speech case, the government has the burden of showing (1) that there is a significant governmental interest at stake, and (2) that the statute is narrowly tailored to that interest. The government has to present evidence for these two things, and they couldn’t. As the court notes, the constitution “is not satisfied by the assertion of abstract interests”. The country was a very different place a century ago, some states do allow you to photograph a ballot, and the state was not able to point to a single instance of a person photographing a ballot as part of a vote buying scheme. That seems like a good reason to think that it isn’t actually a problem. And even if it were, the court points to two problems with narrow tailoring. One, that the statute prohibits a lot of highly protected political speech, such as the original posts hypothetical. Two, vote buying is already illegal, and there is no reason to think that statutes prohibiting vote buying are inadequate.
Note that nothing in that analysis is particular to the New Hampshire statute, it applies equally well to any statute that prohibits people from taking pictures of their ballots. Again, this is a federal appellate court, and the only one to have addressed this issue, so it is the strongest law there is throughout the entire country.
At least in the US, donations to political parties, political campaigns, political action committees, etc, are already not tax deductable (which I take is what you mean by “tax back”). In fact, the amount that a person can donate to such an entity is even limited. See https://blog.turbotax.intuit.com/tax-deductions-and-credits-2/are-your-political-campaign-contributions-tax-deductible-11380/. In the US, tax deductible donations are for 501c3 organizations (named for the section of the internal revenue code in which they are described), and such organizations are already forbidden from engaging in partisan politics and severely limited in the amount of lobbying they can do.
The standard proposed here has broader implications than party politics. To pick two hypothetical organizations, the Tough On Crime Institute would be the opposite of the Criminal Justice Reform Association, so by this standard, neither should get tax back. My initial reaction is that I don’t want that result, I want both organizations out there making their cases stronger, not weaker. But I could be talked out of this.
I’m also not sure why the Against Unicorns Foundation wouldn’t be a legally valid charity. It might not be a very popular one, but an argument can certainly be made that destroying unicorns prevents them from suffering, and preventing animal suffering is generally regarded as good and specifically listed as a charitable purpose in section 501c3. I don’t think regulators would or should question the validity of that purpose. So by this standard, the Unicorn Conservation Society would also not get tax back? This doesn’t seem right.
I agree that these different sorts of communities exist along a continuum. What startles me is that you seem to think that the intimacy of the something of the smaller community can and should be scaled to the larger sort of community. To my mind, it is inherently a property of the small size. Trying to scale it sets of loud alarm bells. I’m not sure to what extent I endorse this, but possibly one way of summarizing the problems of overly controlling organizations like cults is that they try to take the intimacy or something of a small community and scale it.
I also strongly disagree with your presumption that we are talking about “Going from having [the understanding that we do not use libel suits within the community], to not having it”. I have never understood the rationalist community to have such a norm. From where I am sitting, Habryka is trying to create such a norm out of nothing, and I am not ok with that.
As I believe I have said already, I agree that libel suits, and law suits generally, can be damaging, and I certainly do not encourage anyone to use them. I’m just pointing out that having a norm against using lawsuits can be even more damaging.
It’s an interesting idea, but I worry that it would only make these platforms more polarizing. I’m imagining a social justice recommender algorithm, which promotes the most extreme and censorious social justice positions, and maybe flags people taking not-so-woke positions (say against affirmative action) for unfriending/unfollowing. One could imagine something similar coming from the political right. And then these platforms become even more polarizing.
I did not know this. How long has this been around?
Still strikes me as a really bad idea to ignore the norms that actual financial markets have developed over centuries of experience, but I am curious if this will actually solve the problem of judges biased by having a position in their own markets.
Can you articulate what exactly the property of small communities is that we are talking about, and what its benefits are? I still am not forming a coherent picture of what the heck you are talking about because, again, the thing I was trying to point to in making this distinction I think is inherently a property of small groups.
Are you seriously now claiming that all of society has a norm against lawsuits? I think that is just obviously wrong, particularly for the US. And the misappropriation of the more traditional “arguments get arguments, not bullets” is just astoundingly oblivious. Lawsuits are a kind of argument! They are an example of the thing we are supposed to do instead of bullets!
No, I cannot empirically observe that the rationalist community has operated by such a norm. I can empirically observe that I know of no instance where one rationalist has actually filed a libel suit against another, but this is much more likely to be due to either (1) my ignorance of such a suit, or (2) the low rate of actually filing libel lawsuits in society at large combined with the small size of the rationalist community. I know of no instance of a rationalist going to space either, but I’m pretty sure we don’t have a norm against it. I’d never heard anyone speak of such a norm until the NL drama. That is significant evidence that there is no such norm.
May I ask which city you live in?
I’d like to see discussion on how a persons behavior should change after they have had covid, how much should we trust that immunity.
“The MOOC is based on the first course in Yale’s MBA program apparently. He claims it isn’t watered down, but probably a smart 10yo could follow it.”
That is about what I would expect of an MBA program.
I find this position rather disturbing, especially coming from someone working at a university. I have spent the last sixish years working mostly with high school students, occasionally with university students, as a tutor and classroom teacher. I can think of many high school students who are more ready to make adult decisions than many adults I know, whose vulnerability comes primarily from the inferior status our society assigns them, rather than any inherent characteristic of youth.
As a legal matter (and I believe the law is correct here), your implication that someone acts in loco parentis with respect to college students is simply not correct (with the possible exception of the rare genius kid who attends college at an unusually young age). College students are full adults, both legally and morally, and should be treated as such. College graduates even more so. You have no right to impose a special concern on adults just because they are 18-30.
I think one of the particular strengths of the rationalist/EA community is that we are generally pretty good at treating young adults as full adults, and taking them and their ideas seriously.