Trying to become stronger.
hath
Karma: 1,226
[Linkpost] The Story Of VaccinateCA
Cultivating And Destroying Agency
Deepmind’s Gopher—more powerful than GPT-3
The Apprentice Thread 2
Self-Responsibility
What do you do to deliberately practice?
You didn’t refute his argument at all, you just said that other movements do the same thing. Isn’t the entire point of rationality that we’re meant to be truth-focused, and winning-focused, in ways that don’t manipulate others? Are we not meant to hold ourselves to the standard of “Aim to explain, not persuade”? Just because others in the reference class of “movements” do something doesn’t mean it’s immediately something we should replicate! Is that not the obvious, immediate response? Your comment proves too much; it could be used to argue for literally any popular behavior of movements, including canceling/exiling dissidents.
Do I think that this specific contest is non-trivially harmful at the margin? Probably not. I am, however, worried about the general attitude behind some of this type of recruitment, and the justifications used to defend it. I become really fucking worried when someone raises an entirely valid objection, and is met with “It’s only natural; most other movements do this”.
Strong upvoted this comment because it led me to finally reading Friendship Is Optimal; would strong upvote twice if I could now that I see who posted the comment.
Possible alternate title: Felt Crazy is Constant.
Yeah, my reaction to this was “you could have done a much better job of explaining the context” but:
“Your writing would be easier to understand if you explained things,” the student said.
That was me, so I guess my opinion hasn’t changed.
Teaching 1984
Before we are allowed to start reading, we must listen to a PowerPoint in which the book is explained. The plot, the main character, the context, the terms, the setting; none of these are allowed to be discovered ourselves. The context I’ll grant her, but she could have explained the relevant history in five minutes. Instead we must be told what it is that we are supposed to understand from the book, as we cannot be trusted to pick up on the terms by ourselves. I understand that some of it might be confusing for students to read if they aren’t familiar with the book already, but 1984′s hobby of introducing new terms and settings (worldbuilding) isn’t an art highschoolers are incapable of understanding. People here have read The Hunger Games, or Divergent, or whatever other YA fiction is popular these days. They understand it, even when it talks about things that don’t exist in our life (District 13, the factions).
We are instructed to take notes as we read. It’s implied that these things will be on tests, that we will be asked to define the Newspeak terms and the plot elements. I imagine that that’s how they teach Newspeak to children in Oceania, too. Just because we read something in a class doesn’t mean that everything has to be memorized; when you ask students to remember what happens in books, and to recite the themes when prompted, you get SparkNotes, which serves as the answer key for this class. The teacher intends for you to understand the underlying themes. You’re supposed to understand the application of the concepts, and not just the pages of the textbook it was on. Yet, teachers optimize for what can be easily tested.
She begins to read the first chapter aloud. She pauses, at times, to explain the implications of what we read. “What do you notice about the names of the four Ministries?”, she asks. “They’re too nice?” a student responds. At least there’s student participation. She could have just lectured for the whole class.
But, then again, it could be that much worse. I mock how we start the book, but we’re doing a game for the entire grade to try to get us to understand 1984. People will get to roleplay as Thought Police, or Party members, or proles. When I asked the teacher, one-on-one, whether I’d enjoy the game, she said I would. Do I trust that? Somewhat. So, they’re trying.
There’s a post waiting to be written about the simulations/wargames that we played at my old school as part of history class. I think that those types of wargames are enjoyable, and that they teach more than whatever else the teacher would do. Yet, I fear that if word came down from the School Board, telling teachers that wargames are the new way to teach, more effective than anything else, it wouldn’t end well. From where I sit at the bottom of the authority food chain, I’ve seen dozens of well-intentioned interventions and regulations meant to help students learn, and almost none of them have any of the effect than the regulators expected. Part of this is due to teacher incompetence/apathy; part of this is due to simply miscommunicated intentions.
The saddest thing about this is that these students, these people with the potential to be legitimately creative and do so much more than they’re asked to do here, are being taught to see 1984 as their English textbook, in the sense that they must regard 1984 as the source for the questions on the test, and little else. I wouldn’t be surprised if we had to write essays on symbolism or themes. We’ve done this for Lord of the Flies and Macbeth so far this year. It’s horrible.
Get us out of here.
It’s done. They’re all strong upvoted. I keep hearing this voice, though:
“Any who disrespect the omniscient idols by misusing their knowledge for sordid financial gain will, after their death, be sent to the bottom-most layer of Hell, where venomous worms will gnaw at their organs from the inside forever, never to know rest or surcease from pain.” —Scott Alexander, Idol Words
To remove any remaining likelihood of karma and intellectual progress becoming decoupled, we would like to ask all users participating in the Good Hearts Project to really try hard to not be swayed by any unaligned incentives (e.g. the desire to give your friends money)
...I actually didn’t see this until now. Huh.
Wargaming was used to great effect in history classes+electives at a private middle school I went to; will write a post with more details sometime. Wargames were probably the closet that those kids had ever gotten to a truly open-ended challenge, and there were some very outside-the-box tactics employed. Definitely a better teaching tool than everything else used in high school/middle school.
Not even a “In 90% of possible worlds, we’re irreversibly doomed, but in the remaining 10%, here’s the advice that would work”?
It’s really interesting seeing the change in attitude toward low-effort asking-for-money posts. Earlier, people upvoted/put up with them; now people are actively punishing bullshit with strong downvotes. This is good for LW implementing monetary incentives in the future; we can punish Goodharters ourselves.
Yeah; my participation in this scheme was predicated on “Lightcone is occupied by smart people who 100% knew that this would be a result of today’s April Fool’s Day; therefore, playing along with the game is okay. Also, they can afford whatever comes as a consequence of today’s thing, provided nobody actually writes a bot (something I very briefly considered before deciding it’d be too much).”
I’m reminded of Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names, an essay on the problems with handling “weird” data inputs that are normal for the people involved.
I mean this completely seriously: now that MIRI has changed to the Death With Dignity strategy, is there anything that I or anyone on LW can do to help with said strategy, other than pursue independent alignment research? Not that pursuing alignment research is the wrong thing to do, just that you might have better ideas.