Kaj_Sotala(Kaj Sotala)

Karma: 47,042

Kaj_Sotala 26 Jul 2024 16:47 UTC
3 points
−2
in reply to: Vaniver’s comment on: Universal Basic Income and Poverty
Agree that a real source would be better but I think a Claude-source is better than nothing at all, especially in a case where the point is just to get the rough magnitudes and the details don’t need to be exact. I’m not sure if editing my comment to just the first paragraph would be an improvement.
We’ve all seen the reports on how LLMs get good results on standardized exams and tests of general knowledge, so on this kind of question I’d presume it to be basically reliable (again, as long as we’re talking just rough estimates and magnitudes, and take care not to ask leading questions). If my comment had instead included my own Fermi calculation or a random Wikipedia link, I’m guessing that that would have been more accepted, even though I doubt it would have been more reliable.

Kaj_Sotala 26 Jul 2024 15:25 UTC
11 points
5
in reply to: cousin_it’s comment on: Universal Basic Income and Poverty
Agree; also this post doesn’t seem to address e.g. the fact that the relative sizes of the social classes used to be quite different, and that today there exists a sizeable middle class rather than society being much more starkly divided into the poor vs. the wealthy.
[EDIT: replaced Claude’s estimate of social class sizes with the following:]
E.g. this paper cites economist Thomas Piketty’s research as the original source, shows the share of property owned by the middle 40% of the population in Britain going from 10% to 40% between 1780 and 2015, with the top 10% of the population had 85-90% of the property up to around 1940.
Piketty (2020) has also been able to provide more distributional detail for the two most recent centuries, as shown in his Figure 5.4, reproduced here with permission (Piketty, 2020, p. 195). His estimates show that 1780–1800 saw a slight decline (from 89% to 86%) in the wealth proportion of the top 10% of private property holders, and an equivalent significant rise (from 10% to 13%) in the wealth held by the ‘middle 40%’, with the bottom 50% remaining at little more than 1% [...]
From [1910], however, the wealth of the top 10% began a gradual (1910–42) and then precipitate (1942–90) decline. By 1990, their share of national wealth had been almost cut in half to 48%, while the share of the ‘patrimonial middle class’ – the next 40% – had risen to 42%. Even the lowest 50% now had a 10% share in the nation’s wealth, while the top 1% had ‘only’ 18%.
So even if you buy the argument that there’s a meaningful sense in which poverty hasn’t been eliminated, the fraction of people who are middle class rather than poor has gone drastically up. And maybe a UBI won’t be able to push poverty down to 0%, just as past progress hasn’t, but it could quite possibly contribute another significant reduction.

Kaj_Sotala 25 Jul 2024 15:14 UTC
4 points
2
in reply to: Arthur Conmy’s comment on: You should go to ML conferences
It sounded as if you were suggesting doing this for random papers,
I presumed that Jan meant doing it for papers that had survived the previous “read the titles” and “read the abstracts” filtering stages.

Kaj_Sotala 25 Jul 2024 9:02 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: Apply now: Get “unstuck” with the New IFS Self-Care Fellowship Program
(I was one of the people editing the post and I’m helping out with the course) Here’s my current take.

Kaj_Sotala 13 Jul 2024 13:32 UTC
7 points
−4
in reply to: Dweomite’s comment on: Pantheon Interface
Personally I like it and didn’t have the association to “demons” at all, probably because I’ve seen this comic go around enough times to make the distinction clear.

Kaj_Sotala 13 Jul 2024 13:30 UTC
10 points
0
on: Pantheon Interface
Whoa this is an amazing idea! Thanks for implementing it.
- Is there some rule that determines which daemons chime in on which lines, or is it purely random?
- Warning for others: don’t open Pantheon in two browser tabs at once and then go ahead to write stuff in one of them, expecting it to get saved—when you close the browser, it might also save the contents from the tab that you wrote almost nothing in, overwriting the storage that has more. (This is not a criticism, I imagine this to be tricky to fix and I should’ve thought of it myself.)
- Viewing the chain-of-thought for some of the daemons, I felt like a lot of ideas they had come up with in the first stage were better questions than the ones they finally settled on. (Unfortunately, I can’t show examples because I lost the state.) Possibly this was because I was hoping to use it for brainstorming some ideas, and some responses that I would have found useful would have been the bots just asking follow-up questions about specific ideas I had. But since those questions were relatively obvious, they were ranked low on the “surprisingness” metrics. This makes me think that besides the choice of daemons, there could also be a setting for what kinds of comments you might find the most useful (that would swap between sets of chain-of-thought prompts) - in some contexts it’s useful to also hear the obvious comments/questions, whereas in some other it’s not. For now I’ll just edit the chain-of-thought prompts manually.

Kaj_Sotala 1 Jul 2024 21:26 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Daniel Kokotajlo’s comment on: Daniel Kokotajlo’s Shortform
I’m curious about the assertion that speed is theoretically unnecessary.
Isn’t that the principle behind vertical takeoff aircraft? Or do you mean something else?

Kaj_Sotala 6 Jun 2024 18:50 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Wei Dai’s comment on: Former OpenAI Superalignment Researcher: Superintelligence by 2030
See this post
That link gives me a “Sorry, you don’t have access to this draft”

Kaj_Sotala 4 Jun 2024 14:38 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: Cookiecarver’s comment on: Awakening
I guess you could reap some benefits out of it even without actually believing in Christianity, but those seem much smaller than the ones you can get out of meditation. Also I think some of the happiness benefit Christians get is from being in a supportive community, and I already have non-religious communities that make me feel happy.

Kaj_Sotala 4 Jun 2024 6:32 UTC
6 points
4
in reply to: Cookiecarver’s comment on: Awakening
I find that the day-to-day benefits in terms of suffering less already make meditation worth it. I’m not sure why rebirth would be necessary if my current life can already be made much better.

Kaj_Sotala 4 Jun 2024 6:29 UTC
3 points
1
in reply to: Mascal's Pugging’s comment on: Awakening
Interesting. I’ve generally had the position that while the Buddha was no doubt a great innovator, he was still just one guy who lived thousands of years ago. And that it’d probably be a better use of time to read all the more recent meditation teachers who can draw on the thousands of years of progress since then, and can synthesize the most valuable pieces of Buddha’s teaching with the things that have been learned since then.

Nevertheless, your challenge made me interested and I got a copy of “In the Words of the Buddha” now. It does seem interesting.

Kaj_Sotala 3 Jun 2024 10:49 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: SpectrumDT’s comment on: Should rationalists be spiritual / Spirituality as overcoming delusion
Ah that’s the one, thanks! Edited the link into the post.

Kaj_Sotala 2 Jun 2024 11:47 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Links for May
At this moment my best guess is that kindness is generally nice, but there is also such thing as too much kindness. I want my friends to be nice to me, but I also want them to be able to defend me and themselves from our potential enemies; and I need some credible signal that they could do that if necessary. (Or, as Jordan Peterson would say, “good” is not the same as “harmless”. A good person is one who could hurt you, but chooses not to.) There is “kindness” that is a choice, and “kindness” that is a strategy to survive by avoiding conflict. I suppose the former is attractive, and the latter is not. But to make it clear that your kindness is a choice, you must sometimes be visibly not-kind.
Yeah this sounds right to me.

Kaj_Sotala 2 Jun 2024 7:30 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: Tapatakt’s comment on: Awakening
The book Altered Traits summarized some of the research on meditators (though if I recall correctly, it also caveated this with saying that most of the research wasn’t very high-quality), e.g.:
Sticking with meditation over the years offers more benefits as meditators reach the long-term range of lifetime hours, around 1,000 to 10,000 hours. This might mean a daily meditation session, and perhaps annual retreats with further instruction lasting a week or so—all sustained over many years. The earlier effects deepen, while others emerge.
For example, in this range we see the emergence of neural and hormonal indicators of lessened stress reactivity. In addition, functional connectivity in the brain in a circuit important for emotion regulation is strengthened, and cortisol, a key hormone secreted by the adrenal gland in response to stress, lessens.
Loving-kindness and compassion practice over the long term enhance neural resonance with another person’s suffering, along with concern and a greater likelihood of actually helping. Attention, too, strengthens in many aspects with long-term practice: selective attention sharpens, the attentional blink diminishes, sustained attention becomes easier, and an alert readiness to respond increases. And long-term practitioners show enhanced ability to down-regulate the mind-wandering and self-obsessed thoughts of the default mode, as well as weakening connectivity within those circuits—signifying less self-preoccupation. These improvements often show up during meditative states, and generally tend to become traits.
Shifts in very basic biological processes, such as a slower breath rate, occur only after several thousand hours of practice. Some of these impacts seem more strongly enhanced by intensive practice on retreat than by daily practice.
lsusr’s review has more quotes.

Kaj_Sotala 1 Jun 2024 21:41 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Links for May
If they successfully get their preferences (a.k.a. “needs”, etc.) acknowledged and accommodated, that is a distinct advantage relative to the base case where they are just a regular person with no special needs! This seems very obvious!
I mean, yes, but having that preference gives them no special advantage relative to not having it.
Suppose that I have a gluten intolerance and need to have gluten-free food available. It’s of course true that getting to have gluten-free food is now a distinct advantage to me, compared to a scenario where I couldn’t get gluten-free food. But the fact that I have a gluten intolerance doesn’t make me better off overall. If I get accommodated, then at best I get to the same neutral level of “can eat food without getting terrible symptoms” that everyone else is at. And more realistically, I won’t even get to that zero level but rather will sometimes accidentally eat food with gluten, will miss out on tasty foods I’d enjoy, etc., so it’d be better for me to not have the intolerance.
Likewise, if someone gets terribly upset about being told “you’re wrong”, then if that’s accommodated, at best they get to the same zero level as everyone who doesn’t get terribly upset about it. And it’s more likely that they won’t get perfectly accommodated, so not only will they gain nothing, but will also need to endure discomfort they wouldn’t need to endure if they didn’t have that sensitivity. So if they don’t already have that pre-existing sensitivity, there’s no incentive for them to develop it.
I do not think that this is the least bit warranted.
Why not? I know plenty of otherwise intelligent, creative etc. people who also have serious mental health problems.

Kaj_Sotala 1 Jun 2024 21:09 UTC
5 points
0
in reply to: romeostevensit’s comment on: Awakening
That’s odd. (Note that while this excerpt was already present in the first edition, it was also retained in the second edition.)

Kaj_Sotala 1 Jun 2024 21:05 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Tapatakt’s comment on: Awakening
I don’t have a complete model of what exactly is going on either. My current guess is that there are something like two different layers of motivation in the brain. One calculates expected utilities in a relatively unbiased manner and meditation doesn’t really affect that one much, but then there’s another layer on top of that which notices particularly high-utility (positive or negative) scenarios and gives them disproportionate weight. That second one tends to mess things up and is the one that meditation seems to weaken.
It looks to me like weakening the second thing tends to make one’s decisions purely better, and more likely for the brain to just do the correct expected utility calculations. I acknowledge that this is very weird and implausible-sounding, because why would the brain develop a second layer of motivation that just messes things up?
My strong suspicion at the moment is that it has to do with social strategies. Calculating expected utilities wrong is normally just bad, but it can be beneficial if other agents are modeling you and making decisions based on their models of you. So if you end up believing that an actually impossible outcome is possible, you may not be able to ever achieve that outcome. But your opponents who see that you are impossible to reason with may still give in, letting you get at least somewhat closer to that outcome than as if you’d been reasonable.
I have some posts with more speculation about these things here and here.

Kaj_Sotala 1 Jun 2024 20:37 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Links for May
o Because you talk quite a bit about what will or will not fix this student’s problem, whether it is easy or hard for this student to “get over it”, how long it would take for this student to fix the problem, what this student’s experience is like, etc., etc. (Likewise the author of the quoted original post.)
These concerns all belong to a corrective view. From a selective view, all of them are irrelevant. What is relevant instead is questions like: supposing that we adopt a policy of granting such requests, what will the student body (likewise: the class, the results of the course, etc.) be like? If we adopt a policy of not granting such requests, what will said things be like? And so on.
So, you say that you thought that selective ways would be a bad way of dealing with the issue. Well, that’s a perfectly coherent view. But it needs to be argued for, not just left as a totally unstated background assumption.
Fair enough, I’ll elaborate then.
You’re thinking about the selective view in a way that focuses on people who have the incentive to make these kinds of requests. Meanwhile I’m more focused on the people who wouldn’t have an incentive to make these kinds of requests, if not for the fact that their trauma makes it excessively costly for them to not have their requests accommodated. It’s not even the case that, as your link to the Vladimir_M comment implies, that they have developed this as an unconscious strategy for getting something that makes them better off. Having this problem just makes them worse off.
If such people make requests that are low-cost for us to grant, while very costly for them if we do not grant them, that has the consequence of making it significantly costlier and harder for them to graduate. And even if they do manage to graduate, it may make it significantly harder for them to overcome their problems later in life. So then one selective effect is that the school as a whole loses people who would otherwise have been good students. But also on a broader level, society as a whole suffers as these people become increasingly worse off and less capable of contributing, when a more accommodating policy could have allowed them to thrive.
(This is a somewhat personal topic for me, as I have a close relative who had to drop out of university due to mental health problems and ultimately ended up on an early disability pension when they would have preferred to be working. And things wouldn’t have needed to go very differently for something similar to happen to me.)
So my view is that it’s bad to take an “ignore/deny” type approach because the selective effects have an overall negative composition on both the student body of that particular school, as well as on the composition of society in general.
Instituting a policy of making, and requiring, such adjustments, selects against the latter sort of individual. (There’s that selective view again!)
Some of my best teachers, instructors, professors, etc. have seemed very much like the latter sort.
That’s true. Though if these people have difficulty making accommodations that would make some of their students significantly better off, then that seems to me like evidence that they’re not among the best teachers, and that it might be good to select against them.
Also this bit sounds like we are now talking about something like… what university-level policies should be like, and while that’s not an unreasonable direction to be going in, I was originally thinking of this just as a discussion of the choices of this particular teacher. It seems to me like one should first get on the same page about whether his specific decision was good or bad, before trying to consider possible policy implications. (Since it can be that a particular choice made individually is good or bad, but trying to create an institution-wide policy that everyone/no-one should make the same choice has unintended effects; but one can’t talk about the policy-level tradeoffs before first knowing what the effects on the individual level are.)
For another thing, some obvious questions we could ask would be: ok, so you’re going to not ever tell this student that she’s wrong. Are you also not going to tell the other students that they’re wrong? What if they ask you “so, am I wrong about this?”, or “so, is this wrong?”? What if they ask you “so, what so-and-so just said—that’s wrong, isn’t it?” You might be tempted to describe various evasions which you could use, but now suppose that another student is (again, to take just one possible example) on the autism spectrum, and has a difficult time understanding euphemisms, indirection, etc.? Suppose that they’re not a native speaker? Suppose that they’re on the spectrum and they’re not a native speaker?
It’s easy to generate lots of “what ifs”, but a long list of them doesn’t mean they’d be hard to answer in practice. Your first two questions in particular seem to me to have obvious answers—automatically extending the policy to all students only makes sense, but if someone explicitly wants to know if they are wrong or not, then they presumably won’t mind being told if they are.
On my Facebook wall where I originally shared this post, various people chimed in with their experiences from either teaching or work, and several mentioned that this wouldn’t really come up for them because they had never had a reason to tell anyone “you’re wrong” anyway. E.g. one person said:
I don’t have much experience of university teaching but I do have some, and I don’t recall ever having to tell a student “you are wrong”, or even words with similar meaning. That’s simply because no student has ever presented a claim that has simple yes or no truth value. The closest I have come to “you are wrong” is something like “it’s partially like you said, but also...” My academic field is history, if that matters.
That said, even if a student made a clearly wrong statement, I would probably state my answer as something like, “an interesting point but it didn’t go quite like that”. I haven’t thought about this in any kind of “woke” scenario, for me it’s just simply a part of good manners that a teacher shouldn’t directly embarass a student.
And another said:
I don’t remember when was the last time at my job I told anyone they are wrong—and I don’t remember when anyone told me I’m wrong. And I work with a lot of people from many walks of life.
There have been plenty of cases where a person (me or someone else) says “here’s how I see it” and the other goes “Ooh, right”. Telling the other person they’re wrong is both useless and counter productive. [...]
Here’s how I see things happening in the places I go to for work. People skip the “that’s not right” or “that’s wrong”, because it does not add anything to the discussion.
Instead depending on the veracity of their own claim, they might say “This is how it is”, “Have you read this piece of research that shows A and B?”. There’s no need to rub the fact that one person was wrong on anybody’s face. It is especially bad form, if one tries to convince the other person to change their mind.
While not everyone agreed, many people seemed to have the position that avoiding “you’re wrong”-type language is just a net improvement and that they’ve never ran into a situation where one would need to use it (and I think at least some of those people do also work in fields with people on the spectrum). This also matches my own experience, and makes me skeptical of how likely it is for any of your scenarios to turn out to be a problem in practice.
If anything, the systematic effects seem positive, in that applying the same policy to all students would likely also make several others feel more comfortable.
Of course, it would be silly to argue that there could never be any costs associated with this. It’s certainly likely that trying to accommodate, if not this particular request, then some other request of vaguely the same type would eventually get us into a challenging scenario. But if that happens, one can figure out the best course of action when it happens, and then possibly re-evaluate the overall approach if it does turn out to be more costly.
In any case, it would seem bad to me if this teacher, in considering whether to grant the request, would conclude that he has to deny it because of some complicated hypothetical scenario that assumed other students reacted in very specific ways. Given that it’s also very plausible that none of that happens and everything goes just fine.
In short, it is very easy to say that making some adjustment would be nearly costless. It is quite another thing to actually consider all the costs.
Fair enough, so I’ll rephrase: there seem to be very small immediate costs for this particular teacher to accommodate the request. It is of course possible that some major unexpected cost comes up, but if that happens, he can consider them and then shift his approach accordingly.
And I haven’t even gotten to the distortionary effect on your own cognition, from not just avoiding such straightforward constructions as “you’re wrong” (and similar), but automatically avoiding them! Perhaps one could make an argument that having your brain automatically flinch away from responding to a clearly wrong statement with “that’s wrong” is not as bad as it sounds… but that certainly wouldn’t be the way I’d bet.
I have a hard time seeing this as particularly problematic, given the previously mentioned view that saying “you’re wrong” just doesn’t seem to be necessary in general. “Having your brain automatically flinch away from” something sounds bad if you phrase it like that, but part of the process of acquiring any skill is to learn to automatically flinch away from performing the skill in a bad way. Similarly, if there’s little reason to ever say “you’re wrong” while there are good reasons to avoid it, then I see this less as distorting cognition and more as optimizing it (or more specifically optimizing the skill of good communication).

Kaj_Sotala 1 Jun 2024 18:28 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Links for May
Yep. (Of course “ignore” can be finessed, but you’ve certainly got the gist of it.)
Okay. In that case I’m not sure why you say that my commentary is dismissing the selective ways of looking at the issue. When I wrote it, the two options I had in mind were “agree to the request” or “deny/ignore the request”. (I mean, I did “dismiss” the selective ways in the sense that I thought they’d be a bad way of dealing with the issue, but I interpret you to have meant “dismiss” in the sense of “not consider at all”.)
I strongly disagree with your evaluation of the cost, and am surprised to see you make such a claim. Surely you must know that “just” using (“slightly”) different language is far from costless?
In the general case it’s not necessarily costless. But in this particular case, at least her teacher seemed to think that it was, if not literally costless, then a very small cost. And if I was in his position, I think it would be a very negligible cost for me to implement. Remembering to use different language would take a little bit of effort at first, but then become automatic very quickly.
(I’m again assuming that the request can be incorporated while still delivering all of the teaching and grading etc. essentially unchanged. If it was the case that she couldn’t easily be corrected on mistakes in assignments or something similar, that would substantially change my position.)
Assume the cost of one accommodation to be “basically zero”. It does not follow from this that the expected total cost of all requested accommodations, conditional on the policy of “grant requested accommodations” being instituted, will be “basically zero”, or even “less than astronomical”. (Indeed, we can observe that such an optimistic prediction turns out to be manifestly false.)
I agree. I did not mean to argue for a blanket policy of granting all requested accommodations, nor did I interpret the original poster to be arguing for that.

Kaj_Sotala 1 Jun 2024 16:55 UTC
5 points
2
in reply to: lsusr’s comment on: Awakening
I think that you [Kaj Sotala] are using the phrase “ordinary human desires” to refer to what I conceptualize of as non-desire “preference-likes”.
Cool. Yeah, that was what I meant.