lalaithion

Karma: 568

lalaithion 5 May 2023 15:41 UTC
1 point
−1
in reply to: matto’s comment on: How to get good at programming
General principles of OSes and Networks is invaluable to basically everyone.

How programming languages, compilers, and interpreters work will help you master specific programming languages.

lalaithion 4 May 2023 2:54 UTC
5 points
1
in reply to: ymeskhout’s comment on: What Boston Can Teach Us About What a Woman Is
Hmm, no, I don’t believe I use sex and gender interchangeably. Let’s taboo those two terms.

I think that most people don’t care about a person’s chromosomes. When I inspect the way I use the words “sex” and “gender”, I don’t feel like either of them is a disguised query for that person’s chromosomes.

I think that many people care about hormone balances. Testosterone and Estrogen change the way your body behaves, and the type of hormone a person’s body naturally produces and whether they’re suppressing that and/or augmenting with a different hormone is definitely relevant for sports and medicine.

I think that many people care about appearance. Most people’s sexual attraction is keyed to whether a person looks a certain way. Examples include: Straight men being attracted to gay men in feminine clothing, masc lesbians and gay twinks accidentally hitting on each other or even making out without realizing they’re not “technically” attracted to their gender, straight women being attracted to butch lesbians.

I think that many people care about “intent-to-fit-into-and-interact-with-the-world-as-a-specific-social-role”, which is pretty hard for me to point at without the word gender. But our society does have two primary social roles, and committing to living in one social role is important to people. I think lots of people track who is in which social role and interact with those people in different ways.

It sounds like our disagreement is that you doubt that anyone cares about the “intent to fit into and interact with the world as a specific role”, whereas in my experience lots of people care a lot about this.

I’m not really sure the Harvard thing is a good analogy? Consider the following phrases:
- I identify as a woman
- I identify as a person with XX chromosomes
- I identify as a Harvard Graduate
- I identify as a Bostonian
- I identify as an academic
- I identify as a Christian
- I identify as a lesbian Which of those identify phrases mean things? It’s the ones which are about primarily social roles and not about physical fact. I think all of these are meaningful except the second and third.
Now, some of these could be lies, (I could say I’m an academic but not actually care about academics!) but they’re not nonsensical.

Now, obviously, you’ll tell me that the social role is the good-enough sorting mechanism and so we should discard it for better sorting mechanisms involving physical characteristics. That’s pretty close to gender abolitionism, to be honest, and I don’t really understand where you get off the following train:

Let me analyze an example you gave while my terms are tabooed: changing rooms. Our goal is to “avoid the discomfort that might come with attracting sexualized attention from strangers”. Obviously, if we look at all four categories I proposed above, (XX/XY, testosterone/estrogen, masculine appearance/feminine appearance, male-social-role/female-social-role), all four of them have approximately the same distribution of attraction to the opposite category. However, only one of them is directly visible to strangers in the dressing room—masculine appearance/feminine appearance. (We could introduce a new category, penis vs. vagina, but then you’ll have very masculine vagina havers in the vagina room and very feminine penis havers in the penis room.)

I would guess that you don’t agree that segregating changing rooms by masculine appearance/feminine appearance is correct? If I’m right about that, what part of the above analysis do you object to?

lalaithion 3 May 2023 17:54 UTC
10 points
1
in reply to: ymeskhout’s comment on: What Boston Can Teach Us About What a Woman Is
I think that one thing you’re missing is that lots of people… use gender as a very strong feature of navigating the world. They treat “male” and “female” as natural categories, and make lots of judgements based on whether someone “is” male or female.

You don’t seem to do that, which puts you pretty far along the spectrum towards gender abolition, and you’re right, from a gender abolition perspective there’s no reason to be trans (or to be worried about people using the restroom they prefer or wearing the clothes they prefer or taking hormones to alter their body in ways they prefer).

But I think you’re expecting that most people act this way, and they don’t! For example, there are lots of people who would be uncomfortable doing X with/to/around a feminine gay man, but wouldn’t be uncomfortable doing X with/to/around a trans woman, even if the two hypothetical people look very similar.

Some examples of X that I have seen include:
- Women sleeping in the same room or tent as this person
- Muslim women not wearing a headscarf in their presence
- Women going to a bathroom or changing room together
- Straight men or lesbian women being attracted to this person
I don’t really know how to explain this any more than I already have. To lay it out simply:
1. Here is this thing, gender.
2. Lots of people care about gender a lot
3. It’s a valid position to say “I don’t care about this thing and don’t understand why anyone else does”
4. Nevertheless, understanding that people do care will help you better understand why a lot of stuff around gender happens.
Note: I am not trying to convince you to care about gender! I am merely trying to explain some of the ways other people, both trans and cis, care about gender.

lalaithion 1 May 2023 22:31 UTC
4 points
1
in reply to: ymeskhout’s comment on: What Boston Can Teach Us About What a Woman Is
I’ve met many self-identified women (trans and otherwise) that did not prefer female-gendered terms, prompting plenty of inadvertent social gaffes on my end.

I think that if someone self identifies as a woman to you, and you use a gendered term to describe them (she, policewoman, actress) that is not a social gaffe on your part. I think that it is fine for someone to identify as a woman, but advocate for the use of gender neutral language in all cases even applied to them, but they should not put pressure on those who do so differently.

and the most reliable heuristic I could think of was “in conversation, don’t bring up video games or guns when talking to women.”

I would not make this assumption about cis women, and so I also wouldn’t make it about trans women. If you’re living in two subcultures, one with few trans women but many cis women who this assumption applies to and one with few cis women but many trans women who this assumption applies to, I could see how you would arrive at this and find it doesn’t work very well.

I remain rudderless and find gender categories way too broad and opaque to discern any meaningful guidance

It is possible you don’t interact with people’s gender that frequently, which is fine, but this isn’t true of most people I interact with. Some examples of places where knowing someone identifies as a woman vs. as a man vs. as nonbinary would affect your view of their behavior:
- Which bathroom they use, and whether you can go to the same changing room in a pool/gym.
- Which clothing they will wear, which clothing they will shop for, and how you should react to them wearing said clothing. (Is your friend being silly by wearing a skirt? probably if he’s a man, but unlikely if she’s a woman.)
- With whom they are okay with casual friendly touches (for example, many people are more open to hugs from the same gender)
Obviously, you should ask about these things if you need to know, and I agree that in many cases being specific is important. However, many humans spend a lot of time policing other’s gender presentations. If I saw a male friend walking into a women’s restroom, I would warn them that they’re going in the wrong one. I would do this to my trans male friends but not my trans female friends. Maybe they would correct me and explain the situation. Maybe they would be hostile, in which case they would be rude. And if you need to know, or they need to tell you, they can.

If you’re not the type of person to be aware in the differences I’ve mentioned above, then maybe it is useless to you, but it’s not useless to all people, and the person telling you won’t necessarily know that.

On top of all of this, many trans people are gender abolitionists ideologically, but if they have to choose between being seen by society as a man vs. a woman, they are still going to make that choice even if they wish that society didn’t make the disctinction.

lalaithion 1 May 2023 18:29 UTC
37 points
30
on: What Boston Can Teach Us About What a Woman Is
The common justification trotted out (that it’s necessary to include the theoretically-possible transman who somehow can get pregnant and apparently suffers no dysphoria from carrying a fetus to term) is completely daft.

This is as far as I can tell completely false. Plenty of trans men carry fetuses to term. Plenty of trans men carried fetuses to term before they came out as trans men. Plenty of trans men decide to carry fetuses to term after they come out as trans men. A couple of facts I believe about the world that may help you make sense of this:
- Not everyone experiences dysphoria the same way and in the same amount. Someone may experience pregnancy as an extreme negative, but have no feelings around facial hair. Someone may desire facial hair very strongly, but have no strong opinions on pregnancy at all.
- Some people want to have their own children very strongly, and are willing to suffer considerably to achieve that, even if it means feeling dysphoric for 9 months.
This is the general feeling I get from a lot of this post: it represents a good understanding of the anti-trans side of the debate, and a good understanding of the rationalist interpretation of semantics applied to the trans debate, but it lacks understanding of the experiences of trans people, and it also lacks awareness that it is missing that understanding.

If anyone identifies to me as a woman, the same question and more: What am I supposed to do with this information? What new information has this communicated? Why should I care? Why does it matter?

The most basic piece of information that is being communicated here is that, assuming you speak English, the person would like you to use female-gendered terms (she/her/hers, actress instead of actor, etc.) for her. You touch on the rest with

Perhaps the theory here is there is an expectation that the word woman will (intentionally or not) dredge up in people’s minds everything else tangentially associated with the concept.

and I’m not sure why you discard this as worthless or deceptive. Maybe a better way of framing this is to translate “I identify as a women” to “I believe you will do a better job of modeling my personality, desires, actions, and other ways of interacting with you if you use predictions from the ‘woman’ category you have in your mind instead of the ‘man’ category in your mind.”

Maybe you disagree that anyone in the world could be better modeled as a gender that was not their assigned gender at birth.

Likewise for nonbinary people. If someone tells you that they are nonbinary, they are telling you, “I would prefer for you to use gender-neutral terms to refer to me. If you associate me with your internal ‘man’ category or your internal ‘woman’ category, I believe you will make worse predictions of my actions than if you attempt to associate me with both or neither categories.”

This isn’t nearly as useless as telling someone your favorite shampoo brand. In case you were wondering, I prefer the most basic Pantene shampoo. Now you are able to predict things about how I buy shampoo better.

I am also nonbinary. Now you are able to predict things about how I interact with gender better.

lalaithion 3 Apr 2023 17:04 UTC
13 points
8
on: Orthogonality is expensive

Orthogonality in design states that we can construct an AGI which optimizes for any goal. Orthogonality at runtime would be an AGI design that would consist of an AGI which can switch between arbitrary goals while operating. Here, we are only really talking about the latter orthogonality

This should not be relegated to a footnote. I’ve always thought that design-time orthogonality is the core of the orthogonality thesis, and I was very confused by this post until I read the footnote.

lalaithion 3 Feb 2023 20:30 UTC
8 points
2
on: Aiming for Convergence Is Like Discouraging Betting
There are tactics I have available to me which are not oriented towards truthseeking, but instead oriented towards “raising my status at the expense of yours”. I would like to not use those tactics, because I think that they destroy the commons. I view “collaborative truth seeking” as a commitment between interlocutors to avoid those tactics which are good at status games or preaching to the choir, and focus on tactics which are good at convincing.
Additionally,
I can can just … listen to the counterarguments and judge them on their merits, without getting distracted by the irrelevancy of whether the person seems “collaborative” with me
I do not have this skill. When I perceive my partner in discourse as non-collaborative, I have a harder time honestly judging their counterarguments, and I have a harder time generating good counterarguments. This means discourse with someone who is not being collaborative takes more effort, and I am less inclined to do it. When I say “this should be a norm in this space”, I am partially saying “it will be easier for you to convince me if you adopt this norm”.

lalaithion 27 Jan 2023 20:29 UTC
5 points
4
in reply to: davidad’s comment on: Assigning Praise and Blame: Decoupling Epistemology and Decision Theory
I walked through some examples of Shapley Value here, and I’m not so sure it satisfies exactly what we want on an object level. I don’t have a great realistic example here, but Shapley Value assigns counterfactual value to individuals who did in fact not contribute at all, if they would have contributed were your higher-performers not present. So you can easily have “dead weight” on a team which has a high Shapley Value, as long as they could provide value if their better teammates were gone.

lalaithion 25 Jan 2023 20:17 UTC
3 points
2
on: Some questions about free will compatibilism
my friend responds, “Your beliefs/desires, and ultimately your choice to study English, was determined by the state of your brain, which was determined by the laws of physics. So don’t feel bad! You were forced to study English by the laws of physics.”
The joke I always told was
“I choose to believe in free will, because if free will does exist, then I’ve chosen correctly, and if free will doesn’t exist, then I was determined to choose this way since the beginning of the universe, and it’s not my fault that I’m wrong!”

lalaithion 25 Jan 2023 20:14 UTC
1 point
0
on: Some questions about free will compatibilism
Reductionism means that “Jones” and “Smith” are not platonic concepts. They’re made out of parts, and you can look at the parts and ask how they contribute to moral responsibility.
When you say “Smith has a brain tumor that made him do it”, you are conceiving of Smith and the brain tumor as different parts, and concluding that the non-tumor part isn’t responsible. If you ask “Is the Smith-and-brain-tumor system responsible for the murder”, the answer is yes. If you break the mind of Jones into parts, you could similarly ask “Is the visual cortex of Jones responsible for the murder”, and the answer would be no.
So, why do we conceive of “Smith” and “the brain tumor” as more naturally separable? Because we have an understanding that the person Smith was before the brain tumor has continuity with the current Smith+brain tumor system, that the brain tumor is separable using surgery, that the post-surgery Smith would have continuity with the current Smith+brain tumor system, that the post-surgery Smith would approve of the removal of the brain tumor, and the pre-tumor Smith would approve of the removal of the brain tumor.
Whereas we don’t have an understanding of Jones in that way. If we did, maybe if we were visited by aliens which had much more advanced neuroscience, and they pointed out that lead exposure had changed a neural circuit so that it operated at 85% efficiency instead of the normal 100%, and they could easily change that, and the post-change Jones didn’t want to commit any murders, we might not consider the new Jones morally responsible. But the old Jones-minus-efficiency was responsible.

lalaithion 10 Nov 2022 17:17 UTC
1 point
0
on: Desiderata for an Adversarial Prior
One adversarial prior would be “my prior for bets of expected value X is O(1/X)”.

lalaithion 6 Nov 2022 17:21 UTC
9 points
2
on: Has anyone increased their AGI timelines?
No public estimates, but the difficulty of self driving cars definitely pushed my AGI timelines back. In 2018 I predicted full self driving by 2023; now that’s looking unlikely. Yes, the advance in text and image understanding and generation has improved a lot since 2018, but instead of shortening my estimates that’s merely rotated which capabilities will come online earlier and which will wait until AGI.

However, I expect some crazy TAI in the next few years. I fully expect “solve all the millennium problems” to be doable without AGI, as well as much of coding/design/engineering work. I also think it’s likely that text models will be able to do the work of a paralegal/research assistant/copywriter without AGI.

lalaithion 27 Oct 2022 20:38 UTC
3 points
3
in reply to: gbear605’s comment on: Is the Orthogonality Thesis true for humans?
Additionally, if you have a problem which can be solved by either (a) crime or (b) doing something complicated to fix it, your ability to do (b) is higher the smarter you are.

lalaithion 10 Oct 2022 17:12 UTC
3 points
0
on: Six (and a half) intuitions for KL divergence
It would be nice to have a couple examples comparing concrete distributions Q and P and examining their KL-divergence, why it’s large or small, and why it’s not symmetric.

lalaithion 7 Oct 2022 16:48 UTC
5 points
0
in reply to: niplav’s comment on: Open & Welcome Thread—Oct 2022
If I were making one up, I might say “g distributes over composition of f”.

lalaithion 26 Sep 2022 20:53 UTC
9 points
4
in reply to: Amelia Bedelia’s comment on: LW Petrov Day 2022 (Monday, 9/26)
It would be better if it was merely an organization that merely had contradictory goals (maybe a degrowth anarcho-socialist group? A hardcore anti-science christian organization?) but wasn’t organized around the dislike of our group specifically.

lalaithion 12 Sep 2022 17:10 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: nem’s comment on: All AGI safety questions welcome (especially basic ones) [~monthly thread]
More likely, the AI just finds a website with a non-compliant GET request, or a GET request with a SQL injection vulnerability.

lalaithion 28 Aug 2022 23:20 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Archimedes’s comment on: What’s the Most Impressive Thing That GPT-4 Could Plausibly Do?
I agree that before that point, an AI will be transformative, but not to the point of “AGI is the world superpower”.

lalaithion 28 Aug 2022 22:50 UTC
4 points
2
in reply to: Archimedes’s comment on: What’s the Most Impressive Thing That GPT-4 Could Plausibly Do?
That’s what people used to say about chess and go. Yes, mathematics requires intuition, but so does chess; the game tree’s too big to be explored fully.

Mathematics requires greater intuition and has a much broader and deeper “game” tree, but once we figure out the analogue to self-play, I think it will quickly surpass human mathematicians.

lalaithion 26 Aug 2022 21:11 UTC
7 points
0
on: What’s the Most Impressive Thing That GPT-4 Could Plausibly Do?
GPT-4 (Edited because I actually realize I put way more than 5% weight on the original phrasing): SOTA on language translation for every language (not just English/French and whatever else GPT-3 has), without fine-tuning.
Not GPT-4 specifically, assuming they keep the focus on next-token prediction of all human text, but “around the time of GPT-4”: Superhuman theorem proving. I expect one of the millennium problems to be solved by an AI sometime in the next 5 years.