There are also people that genuinely prefer others’ well-being over a marginal increase in theirs—mostly wealthy or ascetic folks—and I think this is the target audience of EA evangelism. However, a lot of people don’t genuinely prefer others’ well-bing over a marginal increase in their own (or at least, the margin is pretty small), but these people still end up caught with Singer’s thought experiment, not realizing that the conclusions it leads them to (e.g. that they should donate to GiveWell) are inconsistent with their more fundamental values.
James Camacho
Karma: 209
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The ellipsis is, “genuinely prefer others’ well-being over a marginal increase in their own,” from the previous sentence.
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They have to be smarter to recognize their actual beliefs and investigate what is consistent with them. They have to be more honest, because there is social pressure to think things like, “oh of course I care about others,” and hide how much or little they care.
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I think the title is fine. The post mostly reads, “if you want a quantum analogue, here’s the path to take”.
Yeah, that was about the only sentence I read in the paper. I was wondering if you’d seen a theoretical justification (logos) rather than just an ethical appeal (ethos), but didn’t want to comb through the maths myself. By the way, fidelity won’t give the same posterior. I haven’t worked through the maths whatsoever, but I’d still put >95% probability on this claim.
Is there a reason they switched from divergence to fidelity when going quantum? You should want to get the classical Bayes’ rule in the limit as your density matrices become classical, and fidelity definitely doesn’t give you that.
Please avoid the abbreviation “MWI” until you’ve at least written “many-worlds interpretation” once. I had to do a ctrl+f and go to the eighth iteration of “MWI” before I could read your post, because all the information I was getting is this is something like UDASSA, and MWI is some information or decision theory term that I don’t know, but need to to even make sense of the first paragraph.
Then why is it too difficult for you to write down one of those definitions or theories where your criticism makes any sense?
Words demarcate the boundaries of meanings. You seem to be claiming there is some undefinable quality to the word “truth” that is useful to us, i.e. some unmeaningful meaning. Believe in epehemeral qualities all you like, but don’t criticize me for missing out on some “truths” that are impossible to discover anyway.
Millions of years ago, the world was pretty much zero sum. Animals weren’t great at planning, such as going back for reinforcements or waiting months to take revenge, so fights were brief affairs determined mostly by physical prowess, which wasn’t too hard to predict ahead of time. It was relatively easy to tell when you can get away with bullying a weaker animal for food, instead of hunting for your own.
When humans come along, with tools and plans, there is suddenly much less common knowledge when you get into a fight. What allies does this other human have to call upon? What weapons have they trained in? If they’re running away, are they just weaker, or are they leading you into a trap? If you actually can win the fight, you should take it, but the variance has shot up due to the unknowns so you need a higher expected chance of winning if you don’t want an unlucky roll to end your life. If you enter fights when you instictively feel you can win, then you will evolve to lower this instictual confidence.
You do know truth only means, “consistent with some set of assumptions (axioms)”? What does it mean to look for “true axioms”? That’s why I defer to useful ones.
I would say that I focus my thinking on the universes I can get sensory input showing the thinking is useful.
Re: this thread
The “guarantor” of your future is two things:
A belief that logic works.
Taking a Kolmogorov prior and Bayesian updating on new sense data.
Believing logic works has nothing to do with faith—it’s that you cannot do anything useful with the alternative. Then, once you’ve assumed logic and created maths, you just find the simplest explanations that fit with what you see. Will the future always be what you expect? No, but you can make claims with very high confidence, e.g. “in 99.99% of worlds where I receive the sense data I did, the Sun will actually rise tomorow.”
Just because you panic about the unknown does not mean the unknown will actually be a large factor in your reality.
Why do I believe this? Well I’ve seen this evolution in Risk. Newer players will overattack, using all their troops on the first few turns to take territories and break bonuses. They slowly evolve into turtles, keeping all their troops in one stack blocked by their own territories so they couldn’t do anything even if they wanted to, and only ever attacking one territory at a time. This is where most players stop their evolution, because after learning zeroth-order heuristics like, “the world is scary, better be super conservative,” the only way to further progress is to start modelling conflicts more than zero turns ahead.
The purpose of “underdog bias” is nearly the opposite of your best guess. It is because conflicts are too complicated for most people to model, and optional to get into. Even after several million years of evolution making brains smarter, humans still usually fail to see more than zero turns ahead in very simple games like Risk (e.g., if I break his bonus, and he goes right after me… well I can break his bonus now! Let’s do it!). If you can’t accurately model the effects of starting a conflict, but you’re also prone to getting into conflicts you think you can win (thanks evolution), the best hack is to make you believe you won’t win.
Some goods can have freeriders, and some cannot. To prevent freeriders on the roads, you need some form of policing. A toll booth or a military could work. While it’s possible to form different governments for different goods, this can lead to fighting between the police forces. Eventually one wins, gains a monopoly on power, and becomes the “legitimate” government.
As to...
Why not have each person deciding whether they value roads enough to subscribe to a road [tax], or whether they value an educated public enough to contribute to that?
It’s because of freeriders. This is why we have someone else decide how much the roads or public education are helping them. Maybe by putting a tax on gasoline or land around a school. I think if they overestimate how much value you’re getting out of the roads or schools, you should complain and ask them to change the tax code. For most areas, you’ll get more value than you paid in taxes, so you only have to spend mental energy when it becomes apparent that you’re not.
What if somebody doesn’t feel they get value out of foreign trade? Why should they pay? Similarly, if you own a ship and the Nazis might sink it, then why aren’t you paying to protect it, rather than demanding that everybody pay?
They shouldn’t. This can be solved directly by having tariffs (and for thousands of years, was what was done). This feels obvious, and my guess is there’s some woke mind virus at work, something like, “taxes are a fungible pool of money that everyone gets an equal say in its distribution.” If you don’t already believe that, and you’re trying to be the first person to collect taxes, you’ll collect them for a purpose, and refund any extra money, not find a new purpose for it.
what about the foreign trade value that came out of the goodwill PEPFAR and other USAID programs were creating?
Which is it? Are these countries very poor, where PEPFAR would be a huge percent of their GDP, or are they so rich that the goodwill generated exceeds the charity? Or, is it that they virtue signal to other, richer countries that America is a benevolent dictator, and it’s okay to keep the dollar hegemony? I think that is actually a really good reason to have USAID programs—it slows down other nations’ urgency to compete—but I also believe America’s hegemony has <10 years left. I think it’s still good to commit to goodwill, so that the next powers to be are more likely to be kind in return. That is the public good we’re funding, nothing else. Is it worth $20–40bn/year? Probably.
When it comes to foreign aid, the only consistent stance to have is: charity work, not government work.
Seeing that stuff as pure charity is deeply naive.
Deeply naive with a helping of arrogance. Why would you believe I didn’t consider goodwill, and then just decided it wasn’t worth it to add another few paragraphs going several rebuttals deeper? You’ll also find that I tend to respond to people with the same style of argumentation they employ. Such as, if you flippantly call something inconsistent, I’ll flippantly call it consistent.
A final defense: why spend money helping out people in other countries? A nation’s obligation is to its own! The people saved by foreign aid aren’t Americans, so why should we bother to help them?
I feel like the intellectual right takes the position that taxes are to solve public goods problems—roads, education, homelessness—not charity. I mostly agree with them here. Why? Anyone can donate their own money to charity. When you force people to donate to a charity of your choice, well maybe they would rather have had the extra fourteen dollars than save someone from HIV. This means you’re imposing a negative externality on them, and when you impose negative externalities, you should expect resistance. It can definitely be cheaper to quell said resistance than lower taxes, but hurting others because it makes you better off and you can is antithetical to ‘society’.
When it comes to foreign aid, the only consistent stance to have is: charity work, not government work.
Imagine we could spend .5% of the budget annually to stop the Nazi holocaust every decade or so.
It seems obvious the government shouldn’t do that, unless the Nazis are going to sink our ships or declare war on our economic allies. Usually this is the case, which is why the government does prevent holocausts. But not in places like Rwanda.
Disease does not respect borders—epidemics have a way of making it to the U.S.
The USA has ~30k new HIV infections per year. Even if we assume all of those come from sex tourism in HIV-ridden countries, that’s still ~$10bn in treatment costs. Does $6bn in PEPFAR decrease American HIV infections enough to offset the cost?
I know many (most? the vast majority?) LessWrongers care about strangers enough that they disprefer the extra $14. But not everyone has the same utility function, so relegate these non-public-goods problems to charity.
This was painful to read. I feel like three—maybe five—paragraphs would be sufficient to tell your story. As it is, I kept wondering why I’m learning jargon like “level 3 insights” or what bits of information an entire section added. My version:
Hacking Business School
Goodharting “insights”.
In business school, in-class conversations constitute a significant portion of your grade. These are scored roughly by:
-1: You said something that actively hurt the learning process (e.g. blatant falsehoolds or -isms).
0: You said nothing, or nothing useful.
1: You brought up points from the readings.
2: You did some analysis on the readings (e.g. expected cost of policy A vs. policy B).
3: An insight; something nonobvious, and nonobvious how to arrive there (this is what makes it different from a mere analysis).
Obviously we wanted the highest grades, but we also didn’t want to (1) spend many more hours searching for insights, or (2) rely on luck to generate them for us. Just because it is not obvious how to arrive at insights to the rest of the class—or even the professor—does not mean there is not a formula to find them. We started by noting down which comments received ’3’s, then Goodharted on this objective.
We found three kinds of insights: those based on prior knowledge, inductive reasoning, and deep deductive reasoning, where deep means going farther than most people would assume necessary. Unfortunately, as students, we didn’t have a wealth of prior experience to draw upon, and inductive reasoning is hard, like NP-hard, so only the third kind of insight seemed like a plausible path. However, searching deeper than everyone else for insights would obviously require more work, which we’re quite opposed to.
But then… we stumbled upon a solution. Any time someone stops a search is an opportunity to go a little deeper. If someone says, “let’s assume for now...” and the rest of the class is nodding along, well let’s check that assumption! Most of the time, our assumptions will be right, but even if they’re wrong 10% of the time, we can expect to find a “nonobvious insight”.
For example, one class our professor began an analysis, and in a leading-the-witness style asked us, “Which airline routes depreciate planes more: long or short flights?” The knee-jerk response from most of the class was longer routes—because the plane is being used more (per flight). No one’s brain registered the “per flight”, until I questioned if being “used more” really means it depreciates faster. Suddenly, an insight was generated: maybe it depreciates more in the air on longer routes, but shorter routes have more frequent takeoff and landing—which might actually make them worse for wear and tear!
This simple trick, to question everything, ended up being the best insight I made in that class.
I’m not really sure what you mean either. Here’s a simplified toy that I think captures what you’re saying:
A turtle starts at the origin.
We flip a series of coins—on heads we move +1 in the nth dimension, on tails −1 in the nth dimension.
After N coin flips, we’ll be somewhere in N-d space. It obviously can be described with N bits.
Why are we flipping coins, instead of storing that N-bit string and then reading them off one at a time? Why do we need the information in real time?
Well, suppose you only care about that particular N-bit string. Maybe it’s the code to human DNA. How are you supposed to write down the string before humans exist? You would have to do a very expensive simulation.
If you’re training a neural network on offline data, sure you can seed a pseudo-random number generator and “write the randomness” down early. Training robots in simulation translates pretty well to the real world, so you don’t lose much. Now that I think about it, you might be able to claim the same with VAEs. My issue with VAEs is they add the wrong noise, but that’s probably due to humans not finding the right algorithm rather than the specific distribution being expensive to find.
Partially-stochastic has a longer running time, because you have to predict which trajectories work ahead of time. Imagine having to guess the model weights, and then only use the training data to see if your guess checks out. Instead of wasting time finding a better guess, VAEs just say, “all guesses [for the ‘partially-stochastic’ bits] should be equally valid.” We know that isn’t true, so there’s going to be performance issues.
If you “want to stop smoking” or “want to donate more” but do not, you are either deluding yourself, lacking intelligence, or preferring ignorance. Deluding yourself can make you feel happier about yourself. “I’m the kind of person who wants to help out other people! Just not the kind who actually does [but let’s not think about that].” Arguably, this is what you really prefer: to be happy, whether or not your thoughts are conistent with your behavior. If you are smart enough, and really want to get to the bottom of any inconsistencies you find yourself exhibiting, you will, and will no longer be inconsistent. You’ll either bite the bullet and say you actually do prefer the lung cancer over the shakes, or actually quit smoking.
Are the majority of rationalists deluded or dishonest? Absolutely. As I said in my post, utilitarianism is not well-defined, but most rationalists prefer running with the delsuion.