gjm

• gjm 31 Oct 2020 0:03 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: jacobjacob’s comment on: Bab­ble challenge: 50 con­se­quences of in­tel­li­gent ant colonies

  To be clear, I wasn’t com­ment­ing at all on the dis­qual­ifi­ca­tion of Eliz­a­beth’s and Slider’s ear­lier an­swers. (Ex­cept to what­ever ex­tent your re­gret­ful com­ments about last week’s re­sults re­lated to those an­swers, which it seems clear they can’t have for Eliz­a­beth’s since that was in an ear­lier week and it never oc­curred to me they did for Slider’s.)

  I hadn’t at all un­der­stood that your com­ment about the ten­nis player was a refer­ence to your own an­swer. Reread­ing what you wrote, it’s hard to see how I could have missed that … aha, it turns out you ed­ited it. (It used to say “Last week we tried a more di­rect bab­ble, on solv­ing a prob­lem in our lives. It felt a bit too me like the ten­nis player try­ing to swing their racket the same way as when they were do­ing a bi­cep curl. It felt like it went too di­rectly at the prob­lem, while mi­s­un­der­stand­ing the mechanism.” and now it says “Last week we tried a more di­rect bab­ble, on solv­ing a prob­lem in our lives. When I did it, I felt a bit like the ten­nis player try­ing to swing their racket the same way as when they were do­ing a bi­cep curl. I felt like I went too di­rectly at the prob­lem, while mi­s­un­der­stand­ing the mechanism.” (Bold­face added in the three places that changed.))

  I would sug­gest not ex­pect­ing an ex­er­cise like this to be prac­ti­cally use­ful for solv­ing prob­lems. If you’re go­ing to be in a box­ing match and you are do­ing bi­cep curls to get stronger[1], the fact that the ex­er­cise is not knock­ing any­one out should not fac­tor at all into how you feel about your progress, and try­ing to tweak the ex­er­cise so that it ac­tu­ally knocks peo­ple out would prob­a­bly not be an im­prove­ment.

  [1] I have no idea what­so­ever whether bi­cep curls would in fact help you get stronger in a way that would be use­ful in a box­ing match.

• gjm 30 Oct 2020 23:55 UTC

  5 points

  on: Why does His­tory as­sume equal na­tional in­tel­li­gence?

  Where does na­tional in­tel­li­gence come into this? It cer­tainly mat­ters how clever var­i­ous in­di­vi­d­u­als are, and as D0TheMath’s an­swer (which maybe should re­ally be a com­ment?) says it’s not at all un­usual for ac­counts of bat­tles etc. to point to how one gen­eral (etc.) out­smarted an­other.

  But when did a par­tic­u­lar his­tor­i­cal event ever hinge on one na­tion’s peo­ple be­ing (say) on av­er­age 5 IQ points smarter than an­other?

  Maybe if one na­tion is smarter over­all than an­other it’ll tend to have smarter peo­ple run­ning its mil­i­tary. But I’d ex­pect any such effect to be to­tally swamped by e.g. whether the clever­est peo­ple in the na­tion tend to go into the mil­i­tary rather than aca­demic re­search, trade, the priest­hood, etc. And by whether the na­tion’s mil­i­tary is run in a way that gives op­por­tu­nity for very clever peo­ple to flour­ish rather than get­ting into trou­ble for in­sub­or­di­na­tion. And by a whole lot of other fac­tors.

  I don’t see any rea­son to think that his­tory as­sumes equal “na­tional in­tel­li­gence”. I think his­tory gen­er­ally ig­nores “na­tional in­tel­li­gence” for the ir­rele­vance it is.

  (As far as par­tic­u­lar events go, any­way—and that’s what you asked about. Of course it might hap­pen that one na­tion grad­u­ally builds up a big eco­nomic ad­van­tage over an­other, and maybe that might be down to its peo­ple be­ing more in­ven­tive or harder work­ing or clearer-think­ing or some­thing. “Na­tional in­tel­li­gence” might plau­si­bly mat­ter there. Though again I sus­pect that what­ever such differ­ences there might be of­ten mat­ter less than other fac­tors. What does the na­tion en­courage its clever­est peo­ple to do, and how does that line up with what brings it most pros­per­ity? What things do its laws and cus­toms make easy or difficult, and how do those line up with what bring most pros­per­ity? What nat­u­ral re­sources are there? Etc., etc.)

• gjm 30 Oct 2020 2:55 UTC

  3 points

  on: Bab­ble challenge: 50 con­se­quences of in­tel­li­gent ant colonies

  (This text is just there so that ac­tual con­tent isn’t in the pre­view.)

  1. New re­search pro­grammes. This dis­cov­ery would give rise to a lot of them. I don’t think list­ing differ­ent ones is un­rea­son­able here, so here are some: [7]

     1. Care­ful ex­am­i­na­tion of the colonies them­selves. What al­gorithms are they ex­e­cut­ing? What are the com­mu­ni­ca­tion mechanisms? Is there dis­cernible struc­ture? How does it work?

     2. At­tempts to use similar mechanisms in silico. Just as biolog­i­cal neu­rons in­spired neu­ral net­works, there would be many at­tempts to model com­puter sys­tems on (sim­plifi­ca­tions of) ant colonies.

     3. In­ves­ti­ga­tion into what changed. Did it af­fect widely sep­a­rated colonies at the same time? (This would sug­gest di­v­ine in­ter­ven­tion, Shel­drake-style mor­phic res­o­nance, etc.) Did it spread from colony to colony, and if so how? What­ever the cause, is it some­thing we can some­how ap­ply to other sys­tems, or ap­ply mul­ti­ple times to one colony for ex­tra in­tel­li­gence? Does it sug­gest that some sin­gle change can make other com­plex but un­in­tel­li­gent sys­tems be­come in­tel­li­gent?

     4. Biolog­i­cal ex­am­i­na­tion of the in­di­vi­d­ual ants. What’s the na­ture of the com­mu­ni­ca­tion etc. that they do? Are there in­ter­est­ing differ­ences be­tween the ants in smarter ver­sus dim­mer colonies?

     5. Maybe there’d be a shakeup in philos­o­phy of mind. E.g., any­one who thinks that for some rea­son real think­ing can only hap­pen in hu­man brains, or in things that some­how share struc­ture or ma­te­ri­als with hu­man brains, now has an ac­tual con­crete coun­terex­am­ple. All those thought ex­per­i­ments about re­plac­ing neu­rons one by one have coun­ter­parts in­volv­ing re­plac­ing ants one by one, and maybe that can even ac­tu­ally be done.

     6. Do in­tel­li­gent ant colonies com­mu­ni­cate with one an­other? If so, how? Do we need to rewrite ev­ery­thing in lin­guis­tics?

     7. Ant-thro­pol­ogy. Are there ant-colony so­cieties? (Maybe not at first, if they only just gained sen­tience. So maybe we get to ob­serve so­cieties form­ing from scratch, which could be su­per-ex­cit­ing.)

  2. Changes in in­di­vi­d­ual hu­mans’ think­ing, aris­ing from know­ing about in­tel­li­gent ant colonies. [2]

     1. At the mo­ment, most peo­ple—even e.g. veg­e­tar­i­ans—don’t much mind harm­ing or kil­ling in­sects. If an in­sect might be a vi­tal part of an in­tel­li­gent sys­tem, maybe that changes.

     2. If there is a whole nother in­tel­li­gent species out there, maybe that makes other hu­mans seem more like us than be­fore. Per­haps racism, sex­ism, etc. would re­duce.

  3. Poli­ti­cal and quasi-poli­ti­cal con­se­quences. [8]

     1. It’s not clear to me whether na­tions should con­sider their in­tel­li­gent ant colonies peo­ple and/​or cit­i­zens, but I bet some peo­ple would be very in­sis­tent that they should and other peo­ple would be very in­sis­tent that they shouldn’t. (Per­haps sincerely, per­haps be­cause of per­ceived poli­ti­cal gain or loss.) The rights and welfare of in­tel­li­gent ant colonies would in­evitably be­come a poli­ti­cally sen­si­tive topic. In coun­tries with strong poli­ti­cal po­lariza­tion, pre­sum­ably par­tic­u­lar views on ant colonies would be­come part of the ma­jor poli­ti­cal coal­i­tions’ idea-clusters, which in turn might re­sult in some re­al­ign­ment as peo­ple with strong opinions on ants move from one coal­i­tion to an­other.

     2. If ant colonies gained any sort of rights or pro­tec­tions, a lot of peo­ple would re­sent that. (”… com­ing here, tak­ing our lawns, …”) This might spawn a new sort of an­gry pop­ulism, blam­ing all the world’s trou­bles on the ants.

     3. Con­versely, the ant colonies would provide an ex­cit­ing new metaphor for ex­trem­ists to use about hu­mans they didn’t like (peo­ple with the wrong colour of skin, the wrong re­li­gion, the wrong parentage, etc.).

     4. Le­gal changes to give ant colonies rights and re­spon­si­bil­ities would be a big deal in them­selves and might have in­ter­est­ing side effects (e.g., if it were done by broad­en­ing the defi­ni­tion of “per­son”, then maybe some other things be­sides hu­mans and ant colonies would sud­denly qual­ify).

     5. If in any places ant colonies gained the right to vote, or other ac­cess to poli­ti­cal power or lev­er­age, there could be ma­jor shifts in the bal­ance of power (even among hu­mans).

     6. Per­haps in some places hu­mans would try to wipe out ant colonies, see­ing them as ri­val claimants to the land or some­thing. It’s not clear to me how straight­for­ward this would be. If straight­for­ward, the main (lo­cal) con­se­quence would be that some would see these peo­ple as heroes while oth­ers would see them as mass-mur­der­ers; per­haps the de­bate might re­sem­ble ones about abor­tion. If not straight­for­ward, though, the con­se­quences might be more in­ter­est­ing. War be­tween hu­mans and ant colonies? (One can imag­ine the ant colonies hav­ing some in­ter­est­ing ways of strik­ing back.) Dras­tic anti-ant mea­sures with knock-on con­se­quences for other hu­mans, other an­i­mals, the en­vi­ron­ment, per­haps.

     7. If the ant colonies turned out to be bet­ter at defend­ing them­selves than one would im­me­di­ately ex­pect, at some point we might end up with hu­mans liv­ing un­der ant-colony rulers. I for one would wel­come our new in­sect over­lords. (This seems a re­ally un­likely out­come, be­cause we have tech­nol­ogy and pre­sum­ably they don’t. But per­haps that might change as rapidly as their in­tel­li­gence did, some­how.)

     8. Ants live more read­ily in some parts of the world than oth­ers. Places with more ant colonies might be at a sub­stan­tial eco­nomic ad­van­tage (sud­denly more work­ers, more in­no­va­tion, …) or dis­ad­van­tage (sud­denly build­ing be­comes harder, more so­cial fric­tion be­tween very differ­ent “peo­ple”, …), chang­ing the global bal­ance of power.

  4. Con­se­quences of com­mu­ni­ca­tion with ant colonies. [8]

     1. Th­ese things pre­sum­ably think in a way en­tirely differ­ent from ours. They will be a won­der­ful source of fresh ideas and per­spec­tives. There will be new in­ven­tions, new sci­en­tific the­o­ries, and the like (but with some lag time; we will need to ex­plain to the any colonies what prob­lems we are in­ter­ested in).

     2. Fa­cil­i­tat­ing such com­mu­ni­ca­tion will there­fore be valuable, and there will be peo­ple and or­ga­ni­za­tions do­ing it for money. A whole new pro­fes­sion! (Prob­a­bly one of many.)

     3. I bet there would be at least one new re­li­gion, maybe de­rived from what­ever ideas the ant colonies have that seem most mys­te­ri­ous to us, maybe re­gard­ing the colonies them­selves as a sign from the gods or some­thing.

     4. There would also be poli­ti­cal and so­cial move­ments in­spired by the ants.

     5. If ant colonies are in­tel­li­gent, per­haps they have (all of a sud­den!) art forms. Their art might be beau­tiful to us, some­how, but even if not it might be­come very valuable (as a way of sig­nal­ling one’s up-to-date-ness and open-mind­ed­ness, or just be­cause of scarcity), lead­ing no doubt to much con­tro­versy and ex­cite­ment among those who fol­low such things.

     6. Some peo­ple would fall in love with ant colonies, want to marry them, etc.

     7. Some peo­ple would want to be ant colonies, ask to be given the same le­gal sta­tus as an ant colony, etc. I sus­pect they would get about as much re­spect as fur­ries do at pre­sent, but their ex­is­tence would have some cul­tural im­pact.

     8. If an ant colony is, over­all, about as in­tel­li­gent as an av­er­age hu­man, I bet that means that it’s much smarter in some ways and much dim­mer in oth­ers. This means that col­lab­o­ra­tion be­tween hu­mans and ants might be su­per-effec­tive, with each filling in some of the other’s blind spots. Ex­pect hu­man-ant joint ven­tures to do won­der­ful things.

  5. Bul­lshit. [3]

     1. There would be a flood of books and the like by peo­ple claiming to have found brilli­ant new in­sights from the ants’ novel think­ing pat­terns, but who had in fact nei­ther had any origi­nal ideas nor de­rived any­thing gen­uinely new from the ant colonies.

     2. There would be a flood of books and the like claiming to con­vey spe­cific mes­sages from the ants, whose au­thors had in fact never re­ceived any such mes­sages or had badly mi­s­un­der­stood them.

     3. There would be a flood of books and the like by peo­ple claiming to have found brilli­ant new in­sights from the ex­is­tence of in­tel­li­gent ant colonies, but who in fact (etc., etc.).

  6. Ex­trap­o­la­tion. [2]

     1. If an ant colony of a mil­lion ants is about as clever as an av­er­age hu­man be­ing, what about a colony of ten mil­lion ants? What hap­pens if you bring two in­tel­li­gent colonies to­gether and en­courage their ants to min­gle a bit? Can you use the fact that smaller colonies aren’t in­tel­li­gent to con­duct some sort of breed­ing-for-smarts pro­gramme with­out be­ing viewed as a moral mon­ster? Maybe we can boot­strap a su­per­in­tel­li­gence. (The pos­si­ble con­se­quences of that, good and bad, are end­less, but I don’t think list­ing them is on topic here.)

     2. Ants don’t ap­pear to move or think very fast. Maybe we can simu­late an in­tel­li­gent ant colony (with­out much need to un­der­stand what it’s do­ing above the level of in­di­vi­d­ual ants) well enough to get some­thing of roughly hu­man-level in­tel­li­gence—but run­ning hun­dreds of times faster, or more. This is a pretty weak kind of su­per­in­tel­li­gence, but still po­ten­tially able to change the world.

  7. Things ant colonies could do bet­ter or differ­ently. [4]

     1. Per­haps an in­tel­li­gent ant colony can ob­serve the world in ways that are difficult for a hu­man be­ing, by send­ing ants to in­ves­ti­gate par­tic­u­lar things. If so, they would prob­a­bly open up new means of es­pi­onage, struc­tural in­spec­tion of build­ings, and so forth. I’m not sure how world-shak­ing this would be; prob­a­bly not very.

     2. Some va­ri­eties of petty crime would be eas­ier for ant colonies. A mil­lion co­or­di­nated ants could prob­a­bly kill a per­son (lots of stings, crawl into orifices and block breath­ing, etc.) and might then be able to re­treat leav­ing less ob­vi­ous sign of who did it than a hu­man could. (I as­sume they’ve got some way of get­ting around in hu­man spaces. Some sort of colony-on-wheels, per­haps; see be­low for a bit more on this.)

     3. Ant colonies might be able (and will­ing, if given suit­able in­cen­tives) to perform some kinds of highly in­tri­cate craft­work that hu­mans can’t prac­ti­cally do. (Con­sider e.g. leaf-cut­ter ants. They can prob­a­bly work on pa­per as well as on leaves.) This isn’t nec­es­sar­ily any bet­ter than what hu­mans can make ma­chines do, but for art/​craft pur­poses “made by in­tel­li­gent ant colonies” may be more ap­peal­ing than “made by a 3D printer”. So ex­pect some new art­forms even if the ant colonies them­selves don’t have art that in­ter­ests us.

     4. Ant-colony com­mu­ni­ca­tion might well be very difficult for hu­mans to in­ter­cept, pro­vid­ing new means of covert com­mu­ni­ca­tion for crim­i­nals, in­tel­li­gence agen­cies, etc.

  8. New things ant colonies might do hav­ing gained in­tel­li­gence. [3]

     1. They would want to be able to move around more effec­tively, in­ter­act with hu­mans more nat­u­rally, etc. Some­one, some­how, would figure out ways to do this (even if only be­cause some hu­mans would benefit from eas­ier ac­cess to the ant colonies). Maybe antmo­biles and the like would be­come a big area of busi­ness. (Or sev­eral. Ant­mo­biles and ant-in­ter­net, for in­stance, might both be a big deal, but I doubt they’d have much in com­mon.)

     2. Some would want to learn from us. At least some schools, uni­ver­si­ties, etc., would prob­a­bly be will­ing. I’ve no idea how that would work, but maybe some uni­ver­sity lec­tures would start hav­ing si­mul­ta­neous trans­la­tion into An­tish.

     3. Many would want to move from the lo­ca­tions where they formed to some place with other ant colonies they could in­ter­act with. Per­haps there would be ant-colony sub­urbs or ant-colony villages.

  9. Other. [13]

     1. Many re­li­gions would have some rad­i­cal re­think­ing to do. Ex­pect re­forms, schisms, new branches of the­ol­ogy, etc.

     2. Also, ex­pect (prob­a­bly hope­less) at­tempts at pros­ely­ti­za­tion among the ant colonies.

     3. Reli­gions that already took in­sects se­ri­ously might sud­denly get a lot of new con­verts. (Jainism is the ob­vi­ous ex­am­ple.)

     4. Quite aside from sys­tem­atic at­tempts to wipe out ant colonies, there are plenty of hu­mans already try­ing to kill ants. If some of those ants sud­denly be­come parts of in­tel­li­gent colonies, a lot of the hu­mans pre­sum­ably won’t have any idea that’s hap­pened. But the colonies will prob­a­bly figure out what’s what. Ex­pect a lot of cases where hu­mans are badly harmed or kil­led (in self-defence) by ant colonies, un­til we man­age to get all the hu­mans and all the ant colonies in­formed about the situ­a­tion. Which will prob­a­bly take a while.

     5. Maybe also ex­pect a wave of suicides, re­li­gious con­ver­sions, ner­vous break­downs, etc., from peo­ple who have wiped out a lot of ants be­fore dis­cov­er­ing that ant colonies can be in­tel­li­gent, and are now over­whelmed with guilt.

     6. If ant colonies gained any sort of le­gal pro­tec­tion, then build­ing on land oc­cu­pied by in­tel­li­gent ant colonies or maybe even build­ing on land that might be oc­cu­pied by in­tel­li­gent ant colonies would likely be­come ille­gal. (Un­less you re­lo­cated the ants. But they might not be any more will­ing to move than hu­mans usu­ally are.) Depend­ing on ex­actly what col­lec­tions of ants are in­tel­li­gent, and how con­fi­dent we are about that, this could make new build­ing hugely more difficult. Hence: more ex­pen­sive hous­ing and com­mer­cial rents, less ex­pan­sion of cities into sub­urbs, etc.

     7. If ant colonies are in­tel­li­gent, how can we be sure that col­lec­tions of ter­mites, bees, lo­custs, etc., aren’t too? It might sud­denly be­come much more difficult to deal with these pests, for fear that we might be com­mit­ting mur­der.

     8. I as­sume there are ecosys­tems in which ants form an im­por­tant part. In­clud­ing, e.g., as food for other an­i­mals. If enough of the ants are sud­denly parts of in­tel­li­gent colonies, which pre­sum­ably can find ways of avoid­ing too many of their num­ber be­com­ing din­ner, those ecosys­tems could be rad­i­cally changed, which could ul­ti­mately lead to dra­matic con­se­quences such as ex­tinc­tions.

     9. In some cases we may in­ter­vene to stop in­tel­li­gent ant colonies be­ing badly dam­aged by preda­tors. Ex­pect in­creased sales of prod­ucts that kill ant preda­tors.

     10. What­ever in­di­vi­d­ual (or re­search group) dis­cov­ered that ant colonies are in­tel­li­gent would in­stantly be fa­mous, pre­sum­ably get a No­bel prize, etc. (Does this count as the world chang­ing? It would cer­tainly change their world.)

     11. Wide­spread con­cern about hav­ing one’s house or office in­fil­trated by ants be­long­ing to colonies work­ing for one’s en­e­mies/​ri­vals/​gov­ern­ment/​in­sur­ers/​… would lead to ma­jor changes in how build­ings are de­signed, with at­ten­tion to keep­ing out un­wanted ants more rigor­ously.

     12. If in­tel­li­gent ant colonies can use the in­ter­net, own things, etc., then they will need to be able to iden­tify them­selves. Maybe this will just be a mat­ter of pass­words or some­thing, but I think more likely new recog­ni­tion and au­then­ti­ca­tion tech­nolo­gies will be de­vel­oped as a re­sult.

     13. Ex­tinc­tion of ev­ery­thing valuable in hu­man civ­i­liza­tion (as the re­sult of mas­sive nu­clear war, global pan­demic, etc.) just got some­what less likely. Most things that wipe us out don’t wipe out the ants too, and pre­sum­ably af­ter a while the ants will have records of a lot of what we have done.

• gjm 29 Oct 2020 15:33 UTC

  9 points

  on: Bab­ble challenge: 50 con­se­quences of in­tel­li­gent ant colonies

  I would be in­ter­ested in some elab­o­ra­tion on how you feel last week’s re­sponses were un­satis­fac­tory.

  I can’t speak for any­one else who an­swered, but I was treat­ing it as a game in the same way as in pre­vi­ous weeks, and I don’t see any ob­vi­ous rea­son why I shouldn’t have. If you want to ac­tu­ally solve a real prob­lem then you don’t just bab­ble, you bab­ble&prune, and the place for that is not for some­thing that ad­ver­tises it­self as a “Bab­ble Challenge”. (And if you want to ac­tu­ally solve a real prob­lem in your own life then you usu­ally do it in pri­vate, or with care­fully se­lected friends /​ ad­visers /​ ther­a­pists /​ what­ever, not out loud and in pub­lic.)

  So when you say “It felt a bit too me like the ten­nis player try­ing to swing their racket the same way as when they were do­ing a bi­cep curl.” what I read is “I in­vited peo­ple to do some bi­cep curls while hold­ing the racket, and they didn’t read my mind and figure out that I was ac­tu­ally hop­ing they’d play some real ten­nis shots.”.

• gjm 27 Oct 2020 1:29 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Ericf’s comment on: Does play­ing hard to get work? AB test­ing for romance

  es­pe­cially when what you re­ally want is a staple

  An am­plemaplesta­ple?

• gjm 26 Oct 2020 14:13 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Stuart Anderson’s comment on: The date of AI Takeover is not the day the AI takes over

  I don’t agree with your an­swer to your rhetor­i­cal ques­tion. A kitchen knife can cause in­jury and death pretty eas­ily, but while it can be a weapon I wouldn’t say that kitchen knives are “in­her­ently a weapons tech­nol­ogy”. A brick can cause in­jury and death pretty eas­ily too, and bricks are cer­tainly not “in­her­ently a weapons tech­nol­ogy”.

  I would only say that some­thing is “in­her­ently a weapons tech­nol­ogy” if (1) a ma­jor mo­ti­va­tion for its de­vel­op­ment is (broadly speak­ing) mil­i­tary and/​or (2) what it’s best at is caus­ing in­jury, de­struc­tion and death.

  Mili­tary or­ga­ni­za­tions have put quite a lot of effort into AI, but so have plenty of non-mil­i­tary or­ga­ni­za­tions and it looks to me as if the lat­ter have had much more (visi­ble) suc­cess than the former. And so far, the things AI has proven most use­ful for are things like dis­t­in­guish­ing cats from dogs, trans­lat­ing text, and beat­ing hu­mans at board games. Those (or things like them) may well have mil­i­tary ap­pli­ca­tions, but they aren’t weapons. (Not even when ap­plied mil­i­tar­ily. A bet­ter way of spot­ting en­emy tanks makes your weapons more effec­tive, but it isn’t it­self a weapon.)

  Both you and Dagon can point your fingers wher­ever you like. The more in­ter­est­ing ques­tion is where it’s use­ful to point your fingers.

• gjm 26 Oct 2020 1:34 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: jacobjacob’s comment on: Bab­ble challenge: 50 ways of solv­ing a prob­lem in your life

  Thanks!

• gjm 23 Oct 2020 21:12 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: adamzerner’s comment on: Should we use qual­ifiers in speech?

  Me too. I just saw the op­por­tu­nity for a bit of hope­fully-amus­ing snark­i­ness :-).

• gjm 23 Oct 2020 21:12 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: lsusr’s comment on: Should we use qual­ifiers in speech?

  Oh, that’s pos­si­ble. deluks917, my apolo­gies if I missed your joke and then tried to make the same one more clum­sily.

• gjm 23 Oct 2020 15:15 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Effec­tive Epidemiology

  My prej­u­dices run the same way as yours. The most en­courag­ing thing in the linked charts is that the frac­tion of staff in­fected doesn’t seem out­ra­geously large. (But I would be hap­pier if I could com­pare with cor­re­spond­ing in­fec­tion rates for the gen­eral pop­u­la­tion.)

• gjm 23 Oct 2020 15:13 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: PeterMcCluskey’s comment on: Effec­tive Epidemiology

  Schools make a lot of use of things made out of pa­per. Paper suffers in even quite light rain, es­pe­cially af­ter say 30-60 min­utes.

• gjm 23 Oct 2020 11:05 UTC

  2 points

  on: News ⊂ Advertising

  Here are some of the sto­ries on the BBC News home page (for me, right now):

  • The Bi­den/​Trump de­bate last night; the head­line says they ar­gued about “Covid, cli­mate and racism”.

  • Lock­down com­ing in Wales in the hope of get­ting the Plague suffi­ciently un­der con­trol that “Christ­mas trade” sur­vives.

  • Similar ar­ti­cle about England and Wales. (England is also tight­en­ing things up, though not to the point of full lock­down.)

  • Hu­man-in­ter­est story about a 3-year-old whose par­ents were kil­led in fight­ing in Nagorno-Karabakh.

  • More than 200 chil­dren’s au­thors have signed an open let­ter ask­ing the gov­ern­ment to provide chil­dren who get free school meals in termtime with sup­port dur­ing the holi­days. (The main op­po­si­tion party tried to get this to hap­pen but it was voted down.)

  • Hu­man-in­ter­est story about the first black TV pre­sen­ter in the UK (an award has just been named af­ter her).

  • A large cloth­ing re­tailer is con­sid­er­ing clos­ing all its shops in the UK and some other Euro­pean coun­tries be­cause they are in fi­nan­cial trou­ble.

  If you think these are “ad­ver­tis­ing”, could you in­di­cate who you think is pay­ing whom for them to be at the top of the BBC News home page, and why they think it worth pay­ing for?

  Of course the BBC, as a state-funded or­ga­ni­za­tion that doesn’t have ads, is a bit of a spe­cial case. Here are some of the sto­ries on the front page of the Guardian news­pa­per’s home page.

  • Link to a live-up­dat­ing thing on the Plague. (Head­lines right now: England’s death rate has in­creased for the first time in months, and a ma­jor city has moved into “tier 3” of re­stric­tions.)

  • A foot­baller is cam­paign­ing against “child food poverty” (he’s been post­ing a lot about it on Twit­ter). [This one seems not very news-like, though it re­lates to the same, ar­guably im­por­tant, gov­ern­ment mat­ter as the one with the au­thors from the BBC.]

  • Trump/​Bi­den de­bate.

  • Some new (not su­per-ex­cit­ing) doc­u­ments re­lat­ing Prince An­drew to Ghis­laine Maxwell (as­so­ci­ate of Jeffrey Ep­stein).

  • Some asy­lum-seek­ers in the UK are be­ing held in very bad con­di­tions.

  • Ed­ward Snow­den has been granted per­ma­nent res­i­dency in Rus­sia.

  Same ques­tion again. (The Guardian is not state-funded and does run ads, or at least I think it does (my web browsers block ads ag­gres­sively, so I don’t see ’em. For the avoidance of doubt, I un­der­stand that you’re sug­gest­ing that news sto­ries are them­selves ads; I men­tion run­ning ex­plicit ads or not merely as an in­di­ca­tion of what sort of or­ga­ni­za­tion I’m talk­ing about.)

  I wouldn’t be sur­prised if the thing about the foot­baller were paid for some­how by the foot­baller or their pub­li­cists. (Though I also wouldn’t be sur­prised if it’s just that the Guardian’s jour­nal­ists spend a lot of time on Twit­ter and like to write about what they see there.)

  My guess is that, with the pos­si­ble ex­cep­tion of the foot­baller story, none of these things is an “ad” ex­cept in the su­per-gen­er­al­ized sense where ev­ery­thing any­one pub­lishes is an “ad”. Of course I could be wrong. If you think so, I am will­ing to be per­suaded, but I would like to see some ev­i­dence. So far, it seems to me that all you’ve offered is as­ser­tions.

  For the avoidance of doubt, I am not in the least deny­ing that there’s a lot of “sub­marine PR” around, and that lots of news sto­ries are built around press re­leases that are put out by com­pa­nies and other or­ga­ni­za­tions pre­cisely with the ex­pec­ta­tion that jour­nal­ists will turn them into “news”. I think your claim is over­stated, not 100% wrong.

• gjm 23 Oct 2020 9:15 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: deluks917’s comment on: Should we use qual­ifiers in speech?

  Then why did you be­gin your com­ment with “I think”?

• gjm 23 Oct 2020 0:44 UTC

  11 points

  on: Bab­ble challenge: 50 ways of solv­ing a prob­lem in your life

  (The prob­lem I have se­lected is not nec­es­sar­ily the most im­por­tant one in my life; I con­fess I tried to pick one that would let me pro­duce lots of an­swers, be rea­son­ably re­lat­able for oth­ers, and not leak more per­sonal in­for­ma­tion than I am com­fortable with.)

  Prob­lem: I don’t have so much money that I feel able to re­tire with con­fi­dence that I won’t run out. (I am still rather younger than the age at which most peo­ple re­tire, but I would like to be able to do it early, al­though I might choose to re­tire only par­tially in var­i­ous ways.)

  Solu­tions (I am in­clud­ing par­tial solu­tions that definitely don’t solve the prob­lem com­pletely, and un­likely solu­tions that prob­a­bly don’t help at all but could, and stupid solu­tions that might solve the prob­lem or at least help with it, but at other un­ac­cept­able costs):

  1. Ad­just my level of para­noia about fu­ture ad­ver­sity. (Be­fore I am com­fortable re­tiring, I need to be con­fi­dent that even in quite im­prob­a­bly bad pos­si­ble fu­tures I will not run out.) [4]

     1. Take up Bud­dhist-style med­i­ta­tion or Sto­icism or some­thing of the sort, cul­ti­vat­ing an in­ner con­vic­tion that even the worst that can hap­pen (what­ever it is) is sur­viv­able.

     2. Per­suade my wife to take up with some­one else and bring our child with her, so that I no longer have to worry about the wellbe­ing of other peo­ple be­sides my­self. (This has ob­vi­ous ad­verse con­se­quences of its own. On the other hand, it is also an an­swer in cat­e­gory 2 be­low as well as in this cat­e­gory 1.)

     3. Do ex­ten­sive mod­el­ling of plau­si­ble fi­nan­cial fu­tures; the how-much-do-I-need heuris­tics I use are fairly con­ser­va­tive, and per­haps look­ing at it more closely will show that I don’t need to be so care­ful.

     4. Change my cur­rent policy of as­sum­ing (al­most cer­tainly very coun­ter­fac­tu­ally) that my par­ents will be im­mor­tal, squan­der all their money, choose to leave it to a dogs’ home rather than to me, etc. (I cur­rently make that as­sump­tion be­cause (a) I think it’s healthier psy­cholog­i­cally not to see one’s par­ents’ deaths as an op­por­tu­nity, (b) I think it’s healthier psy­cholog­i­cally to take re­spon­si­bil­ity for one’s own fi­nan­cial se­cu­rity, and (c) I don’t like rely­ing on things that are out­side my con­trol. I don’t ac­tu­ally think chang­ing this would be good over­all.)

  2. Re­duce how much money I feel I need in re­tire­ment. (Most of these, if im­ple­mented im­me­di­ately, also in­crease how much I can save, which also helps.) [11]

     1. Get out of the habit of eat­ing fancy food. Buy the cheap­est of ev­ery­thing and get used to it, find a reper­toire of fru­gal but ed­ible meals, stop cook­ing un­nec­es­sary things like cakes, etc.

     2. Stop buy­ing books.

     3. Stop up­grad­ing com­puter hard­ware; progress has slowed a lot, af­ter all.

     4. Move to a smaller house, thus re­duc­ing util­ity bills and cer­tain lo­cal taxes.

     5. Don’t have a house at all; live in a car­a­van or car, or a tent, or be­come a squat­ter. (This may also be a way of mak­ing 1.2 hap­pen.)

     6. Move to an area where things are cheaper.

     7. Move to a com­pletely differ­ent coun­try where things are much cheaper.

     8. Com­pletely give up driv­ing; walk, cy­cle and use pub­lic trans­port.

     9. Tell my child not to ex­pect any more than the barest min­i­mum as­sis­tance from me—no pay­ing of uni­ver­sity fees, no help buy­ing a house, etc. (This may also be a way of mak­ing 1.2 hap­pen.)

     10. Aban­don hob­bies that cost money, re­plac­ing them with ones that are free or nearly so.

     11. Con­tract a dis­ease that greatly short­ens my likely lifes­pan but doesn’t re­quire ex­pen­sive care be­fore my trag­i­cally pre­ma­ture death.

  3. Ac­quire more money. [19]

     1. Just keep on work­ing and sav­ing for a while.

     2. Ne­go­ti­ate ag­gres­sively with my em­ployer for a higher salary.

     3. Shop around ac­tively for jobs that might pay more.

     4. Iden­tify changes in my skills, be­havi­our, etc., that would make me more likely to be pro­moted, and im­ple­ment them.

     5. Switch from tech R&D (which is pretty well paid and mostly fun) to fi­nance (which is bet­ter paid but I would prob­a­bly find much less fun).

     6. Move to a city where salaries are higher. (In the UK, cur­rently work­ing in Cam­bridge, that prob­a­bly means Lon­don. Note that cost of liv­ing there is re­ally high so it would not ob­vi­ously be a win over­all.)

     7. Move to a com­pletely differ­ent coun­try where salaries are much higher. (That would mean the US. Not the same com­pletely differ­ent coun­try as in 2.7 above.)

     8. Wait for my par­ents to die.

     9. Turn to crime. If suffi­ciently un­prin­ci­pled, I could prob­a­bly find sev­eral ways of get­ting hold of quite a lot of money.

     10. Re­turn to my long-ago-aban­doned ca­reer in pure math­e­mat­ics and some­how solve one of the “Milen­nium Prob­lems”. (Not a strat­egy with a very high prob­a­bil­ity of suc­cess.)

     11. Gam­ble (e.g., lot­tery tick­ets). Nega­tive ex­pec­ta­tion, of course, but it could solve this prob­lem. Prob­a­bly more likely to than try­ing to prove the Rie­mann Hy­poth­e­sis.

     12. Start a com­pany and lead it to a suc­cess­ful exit.

     13. Sell some or­gans.

     14. Sell a lot of my ex­ist­ing pos­ses­sions. (Most things sell sec­ond-hand for much less than they were bought for new; this isn’t a great way to raise money.)

     15. Get di­vorced and marry some­one very rich.

     16. Be­come an artist and per­suade the art world that my cre­ations are (or, al­most as good, soon will be) su­per-valuable.

     17. Per­suade my wife to take a higher-paid job.

     18. Per­suade my child to take a job and hand the in­come over to me. (Difficult to make much money this way at her cur­rent age, even aside from eth­i­cal is­sues and the like.)

     19. Stop donat­ing to char­i­ties.

  4. Get other sources of money be­sides salary and in­vest­ment earn­ings/​growth. [8]

     1. Write a com­puter or phone app that peo­ple are will­ing to pay for and re­main so for the next sev­eral years.

     2. Buy a house (or apart­ments, or com­mer­cial prop­erty) and rent it out. Ob­vi­ously only any use if the rental in­come plus ap­pre­ci­a­tion minus ex­penses is more than I cur­rently get in ap­pre­ci­a­tion of other in­vest­ments.

     3. In­vent and patent some won­drous new in­ven­tion, and col­lect roy­alties. (Another low-prob­a­bil­ity strat­egy.)

     4. Write books. (Not too difficult to make very small amounts of money this way. More is un­for­tu­nately much harder.)

     5. Found a re­li­gious cult and let it be known that dona­tions are pleas­ing to the gods.

     6. Start a pyra­mid scheme, and watch the suck­ers’ money pour in.

     7. Get elected to high poli­ti­cal office. Let it be known that I take bribes.

     8. Get elected to high poli­ti­cal office. Let it be known that I might be will­ing to ar­range for reg­u­la­tions to favour cer­tain com­pa­nies. Just hap­pen to take nicely paid non-exec di­rec­tor­ships, ad­vi­sory posts, etc., with them af­ter leav­ing office. Of course this is not at all the same as 4.7 above, dear me no.

  5. Change the world in such a way as to in­val­i­date (pes­simistic) as­sump­tions im­plicit above. [5]

     1. Per­suade the gov­ern­ment of the coun­try where I live to im­ple­ment a ro­bust uni­ver­sal ba­sic in­come scheme.

     2. Develop a su­per­in­tel­li­gent AI, suffi­ciently well al­igned with hu­man­ity’s in­ter­ests that the near-mag­i­cal tech­nolo­gies it de­vel­ops usher in a new post-scarcity age.

     3. Develop a su­per­in­tel­li­gent AI, which doesn’t give a damn about hu­man­ity’s in­ter­ests but is suffi­ciently well al­igned with mine that the near-mag­i­cal tech­nolo­gies it de­vel­ops, or the near-mag­i­cal crim­i­nal schemes it thinks up, or what­ever, give me ev­ery­thing I need for the rest of my life.

     4. Lead a com­mu­nist rev­olu­tion, af­ter which pri­vate prop­erty is an ir­rele­vance and the glo­ri­ous all-benev­olent state will en­sure that ev­ery­one has ev­ery­thing they need.

     5. Create a new cryp­tocur­rency and per­suade ev­ery­one to start us­ing it in­stead of dol­lars, RMB, bit­coin, etc.

  6. Other. [3]

     1. Die. My fi­nan­cial needs for re­tire­ment are then zero. (This is an­other one that has a few down­sides.)

     2. Aban­don my prefer­ence for not need­ing to work. I still won’t feel com­fortably able to re­tire, but I won’t care any more.

     3. Once such a thing is pos­si­ble, get up­loaded. Vir­tual-me is prob­a­bly cheaper to run than real-me.

• gjm 22 Oct 2020 23:34 UTC

  4 points

  on: The Trou­ble With Babbles

  I have the same con­cern. My own solu­tion, to what­ever ex­tent it is one, is to try to make my an­swers rea­son­ably di­verse and cre­ative—which, yes, means do­ing some prun­ing—but also to al­low my­self to write a bor­ing an­swer or two if it seems like I am not go­ing to make it to 50 with­out do­ing so.

  I might ra­tio­nal­ize this by say­ing that the ac­tual skill that it’s use­ful to train is not “bab­bling” or “prun­ing”, both of which are im­ple­men­ta­tion de­tails, but “pro­duc­ing lots of po­ten­tially use­ful ideas”, and that even tak­ing some trou­ble to avoid bor­ing an­swers I still find my­self erring on the side of not-re­ally-use­ful ideas, which sug­gests that what­ever the un­der­ly­ing men­tal pro­cess I am at least do­ing some­thing bab­ble-ish over­all.

  (But that would be a ra­tio­nal­iza­tion. I think the ac­tual rea­son is that writ­ing bor­ing things feels un­satis­fy­ing.)

• gjm 22 Oct 2020 23:16 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Stuart Anderson’s comment on: The date of AI Takeover is not the day the AI takes over

  What does “in­her­ently a weapons tech­nol­ogy” mean? Given some tech­nol­ogy, how does one de­ter­mine whether or not it is “in­her­ently a weapons tech­nol­ogy”?

  I ask be­cause it seems to me that AI is clearly not “in­her­ently a weapons tech­nol­ogy” as I would use those words, and I sus­pect you mean some­thing differ­ent by them.

  Re­gard­less, any gen­er­al­iza­tion of AI that in­cludes (e.g.) pointed sticks and flint ar­row­heads is surely too broad for pre­sent pur­poses; even if “how do we stop hu­mans screw­ing ev­ery­thing up with what­ever tools they have available?” is a more im­por­tant ques­tion than “how do we stop AIs screw­ing up in ways that their mak­ers and own­ers would be hor­rified by?”, it’s a differ­ent ques­tion, with (prob­a­bly) differ­ent an­swers, and the lat­ter is the sub­ject here.

• gjm 22 Oct 2020 18:19 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Stuart Anderson’s comment on: Po­lice vi­o­lence: The veil of darkness

  I didn’t say any­thing about “so­cial norms”. Please stop mak­ing guesses at my opinions and mo­ti­va­tions; you keep get­ting them wrong.

  I don’t in the least think that my “pub­lic claims of offence” are a good rea­son for you to change your be­havi­our. I am ar­gu­ing that the pos­si­bil­ity that what you say, how you say it and where you say it might re­sult in many other peo­ple be­ing an­noyed, up­set or dis­tracted from things that are valuable to them might be a rea­son for you to change your be­havi­our.

  How­ever, it seems that any­thing I say that would in­volve your ac­tions be­ing mo­ti­vated at all by other peo­ple’s well-be­ing or prefer­ences just bounces off, liter­ally as if I hadn’t said it or had said some­thing en­tirely differ­ence. Per­haps you just 100% don’t care about any­one else but your­self, in which case in­deed I am wast­ing my time rais­ing such is­sues.

  In­deed I don’t make a dis­tinc­tion be­tween speech and ac­tion, be­cause speech is one va­ri­ety of ac­tion. Some­times it’s a va­ri­ety of ac­tion that has rel­a­tively slight con­se­quences: “sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me”, as the school­yard say­ing has it. But some­times not so much: the words “I sen­tence you to death”, said by the right per­son in the right con­text, are about as con­se­quen­tial as any ac­tion gets.

  I don’t know what “lex­i­cal traps” you think I’m try­ing to set, but I’m not try­ing to trap any­one, I don’t think you’re Satan, I can’t imag­ine why any­one would think that “who a per­son is makes ev­ery­thing they say wrong or a lie”. Again, it seems as if you’re ar­gu­ing with some imag­i­nary figure who is (for­give me for say­ing) much stupi­der than I ac­tu­ally am, and it’s not helping.

  I am glad to see that you agree that the ex­am­ples I gave are ones where say­ing par­tic­u­lar things would be a bad idea, but it seems as if you may have en­tirely mi­s­un­der­stood the point of those ex­am­ples, which was sim­ply to demon­strate that some­times say­ing a thing can have ad­verse con­se­quences for other peo­ple be­sides the per­son say­ing it. You’ve re­sponded as if I were say­ing that I would ex­pect you to say those things; I wouldn’t, and it’s not rele­vant whether you would.

  And, once again, the way you came into this dis­cus­sion—“Here’s a fun ex­per­i­ment: look up the cor­re­la­tion be­tween chil­dren raised by sin­gle moth­ers and crim­i­nal­ity in those chil­dren/​adults. Then look up the rates of sin­gle moth­er­hood in the black com­mu­nity.”—looks to me very much more like its goal is “spread­ing ide­ol­ogy” and not at all like bravely speak­ing out against in­jus­tice (your first at­tempt at fram­ing it) and even less like try­ing to challenge, re­fine and up­date your own ideas (your sec­ond at­tempt at fram­ing it).

  I dare say we are fun­da­men­tally differ­ent in var­i­ous re­spects, but noth­ing you’ve said gives me the im­pres­sion that your men­tal model of me has very much in com­mon with the re­al­ity.

• gjm 22 Oct 2020 16:48 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: jacobjacob’s comment on: Bab­ble challenge: 50 ways of solv­ing a prob­lem in your life

  Thanks. (I see that once again I have made an an­swer where I in­tended to make a com­ment. LW devs, if any are read­ing this: maybe con­sider whether there’s a way to make this mis­take harder to make? Though it’s pos­si­ble that I’m just uniquely care­less and no one else has the same prob­lem.)

• gjm 22 Oct 2020 11:42 UTC

  7 points

  on: Bab­ble challenge: 50 ways of solv­ing a prob­lem in your life

  I’m afraid I find the challenge state­ment in­con­sis­tent and con­fus­ing.

  First you say “hurled into ex­is­tence, fac­ing an empty uni­verse”. Then you talk about things like un­com­fortable chairs and math olympiad scores. And then you say “in your life”. Are you look­ing for each par­ti­ci­pant to iden­tify a spe­cific prob­lem they ac­tu­ally face? Or one a hy­po­thet­i­cal per­son might face? Or one some­one in an oth­er­wise empty uni­verse might face?

  I think you in­tend the first of those. But the rhetor­i­cal flour­ishes around the challenge all seem to point in other di­rec­tions, so I want to check.

• gjm 22 Oct 2020 11:37 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Stuart Anderson’s comment on: Po­lice vi­o­lence: The veil of darkness

  You say

  For ex­am­ple, you sug­gest that blam­ing black peo­ple is some­thing that is be­ing done too much, as if black peo­ple can­not and should not be held re­spon­si­ble for the crimes they vol­un­tar­ily com­mit. You also sug­gest White Man’s Bur­den as if the black iden­tity group­ing is more im­por­tant than in­di­vi­d­ual cir­cum­stances.

  So far as I can see, I have sug­gested nei­ther of those things, still less sug­gested them “as if”. I have said that you ap­par­ently think black peo­ple aren’t blamed[1] enough for crime; I haven’t men­tioned my own opinions on that point at all. Re­gard­less of whether they should be blamed more or less, or treated as more or less re­spon­si­ble, I cer­tainly do not think that black peo­ple can’t or shouldn’t be held re­spon­si­ble for the crimes they com­mit. (Though of course there are cir­cum­stances in which a per­son’s re­spon­si­bil­ity for a thing they do is greater or less—e.g., if I kid­nap your chil­dren and threaten to tor­ture them un­less you put some graf­fiti on a wall, then you should be held less re­spon­si­ble if you do in fact go and graf­fiti the wall—and some such cir­cum­stances may vary sys­tem­at­i­cally with race some­how.)

  I don’t know what you mean by “You also sug­gest White Man’s Bur­den”. The origi­nal “white man’s bur­den”, in Ki­pling’s poem with that ti­tle, was the obli­ga­tion to take over and rule places full of not-white peo­ple, For Their Own Good. I’m cer­tainly not sug­gest­ing that and I can’t see why you’d think I am, so you must mean some­thing else, but I don’t know what. Re­gard­less of what you mean by that and whether I’m sug­gest­ing it, I don’t know what it would even mean for it to be true that “the black iden­tity group­ing is more im­por­tant than in­di­vi­d­ual cir­cum­stances”. Some­times in­di­vi­d­ual cir­cum­stances are what mat­ter. Some­times things af­fect­ing a whole group are what mat­ter. Some­times both.

  I com­pletely agree that nei­ther you nor any­one should be pun­ished or ad­van­taged for what your an­ces­tors did in their bed­rooms, nor for who those an­ces­tors were. I have the im­pres­sion that you think I think oth­er­wise, but I don’t know why.

  I don’t know what you think I think about crime in black com­mu­ni­ties. (I re­mark that your use of the phrase “the black com­mu­nity” seems to me to have the same sort of prob­lems you are com­plain­ing about el­se­where. Are Thomas Sow­ell and Cor­nel West part of “the black com­mu­nity”? Are they mur­der­ing their neigh­bours?) It seems as if you are pick­ing a stereo­type and as­sum­ing I fit it, and I wish you wouldn’t do that. As for “de­mand gen­u­flec­tion to you and your neigh­bour­hood”, that seems to me much more para­noia than re­al­ity.

  [1] I take your point that blame and re­spon­si­bil­ity are not the same thing, and per­haps it would have been more ac­cu­rate if I’d said “When you see peo­ple not putting enough of the re­spon­si­bil­ity for crime on black peo­ple …” in­stead of “When you see peo­ple not blam­ing black peo­ple enough for crime …”.