To what extent are people burning themselves out, vs using what they’re doing as an excuse not to perform effortful and sometimes unpleasant mental and physical hygiene? My understanding is this is a crowd prone to depression anyway, and failing to engage in self-care is a pretty common. IE—if these people were working on something else, would we expect them to burn long-term resources anyway?
Laura B
Karma: 528
I notice that as someone without domain specific knowledge of this area, that Paul’s article seems to fill my model of a reality-shaped hole better than Eliezer’s. This may just be an artifact of the specific use of language and detail that Paul provides which Eliezer does not, and Eliezer may have specific things he could say about all of these things and is not choosing to do so. Paul’s response at least makes it clear to me that people, like me, without domain specific knowledge are prone to being pulled psychologically by use of language in various directions and should be very careful about making important life decisions based on concerns of AI safety without first educating themselves much further on the topic, especially since giving attention and funding to the issue at least has the capacity to cause harm.
It was interesting to re-read this article 2 years later. It reminds me that I am generally working with a unique subset of the population, which is not fully representative of human psychology. That being said, I believe this article is misleading in important ways, which should be clarified. The article focused too much on class, and it is hard to see it as anything but classist. While I wrote an addendum at the end, this really should have been incorporated into the entire article and not tacked on, as the conclusions one would reach without it are quite different. I believe I didn’t incorporate it largely because I am not a strong writer and didn’t know how to do this in an elegant way without losing my other points.
This article needed some discussion of internal vs external locus of control. My current clients have a strong sense that they have control over their lives. This leads to attempting more actions to change their situations but also internalizing their failures. The population at the Medicaid clinic feel that they and in fact do have less control over their lives. This is an important thing to point out. I had one older minority client who basically described a lifetime of being buffeted about by various government policy changes and oppressive interference in her life for the last several decades. She suffered many tragedies that were not within her control.
I believe I also over-simplified the psychology of both my current and former patients for clarity. The majority of clients who come to me do want medication. I do see people struggling with past traumas and current situations which are out of their control. I definitely saw people at the Medicaid clinic suffering from identity crises. Money was not absent from the concerns of people on government assistance. I still think the spirit of my comparisons is accurate, but the oversimplifications are dangerous, and I’m not certain that the greater point was worth the confusion.
I still believe the conclusion that struggling to hold onto identity leads to great human suffering. It is not a simple problem to solve, nor necessarily one that should be fully solved. I will leave that to others to debate. I do spend a lot of time working with people on examining their expectations of themselves, where they come from, and whether holding themselves to these standards leads to anything positive in anyone’s life.
“That was when close friends started delicately checking to see if I was “okay.” ”
I would suggest seeing some of your close friends in person and seeing if they think you are ok instead of ‘reassuring’ them that you are fine. Your ‘explanation’ is not at all reassuring on this front. The whole incident seems out of character from what I remember of you, and I’m guessing your friends are right to be concerned. I recommend not writing more in public forums for the time being.
There is a lot of arguing in the comments about what the ‘tradeoffs’ are for individuals in the scientific community and whether making those tradeoffs is reasonable. I think what’s key in the quoted article is that fraudsters are trading so much for so little. They are actively obscuring and destroying scientific progress while contributing to the norm of obscuring and destroying scientific progress. Potentially preventing cures to diseases, time and life-saving technology, etc. This is REALLY BAD. And for what? A few dollars and an ego trip? An 11% instead of a 7% chance at a few dollars and an ego trip? I do not think it is unreasonable to judge this behavior as reprehensible, reguargless if it is the ‘norm’.
Using peers in a field as a proxy for good vs. bad behavior doesn’t make sense if the entire field is corrupt and destroying value. If 100% of scam artists steal people’s money, I don’t forgive a scam artist for stealing less money than the average scam artist. They are not ‘making things better’ by in theory reducing the average amount of money stolen per scam artist. They are still stealing money. DO NOT BECOME A SCAM ARTIST IN THE FIRST PLACE. If academia is all a scam, then that is very sad, but it does not make it ok for people to join in the scam and shrug it off as a norm.
And being fraudulent in science is SO MUCH WORSE than just being an ordinary scam artist who steals money. It’s more like being a scam artist who takes money in exchange for poisoning the water and land with radioactive waste. No, it’s not ok because other people are doing it.
That might be true, but it is very hard for people to make reasoned changes when they are deeply depressed. Depression has real cognitive effects, which people frequently complain about. Depressive reasoning often looks like I SUCK I SUCK I SUCK I SUCK Everything is my fault and I screwed it all up, and I can’t fix it, and I can’t fix it because I SUCK I SUCK I SUCK. Ok—let me focus for a second—If I change this… I SUCK I SUCK … Ok, if I change this thing then… why can’t I think? Oh right I SUCK I SUCK I SUCK… etc, etc. Getting people out of that pattern is very helpful.
Number 1 is the politically correct thing to say, but was not what I actually observed when working with Medicaid patients. People complained far less about poverty than I (who come from a middle-class upbringing) would have anticipated. People adjust to what they are used to. It’s the middle class, with the constant fear of downward mobility, which really suffers from monetary issues. There were some interesting interactions between race and class, which are hard to express without the internet eating me. Being hispanic and poor is very different from being black and poor, which is different still from being white and poor. And I’ll leave it at that.
2 just sounds correct. America has reached the apotheosis of individualism. We can’t all be the star of the show, and it hurts when you find out you are not.
The latter. Most ‘analysts’ today do not consider themselves primarily freudian.
My new practice is only 3 months old, so no one with full on DID yet, though some people have these rando dissociations (which are likely trauma related) I had one patient in my former position with DID. Very interesting case, but hippa lol.
I just read this article from the Atlantic—I wrote the comment first- but I think it eloquently highlights most of these points.
A few thoughts on why people dislike the idea of greatly extending human life:
1) The most obvious reason: people don’t understand the difference between lifespan and healthspan. They see many old, enfeebled, miserable people in old folks homes and conclude, ‘My God, what has science wrought!’ They are at present not wrong.
2) They don’t believe it could work. People as they get older start recognizing and coming to terms with mortality. It suffuses everything about their lives, preparations, the way they talk. The second half of a modern human life is mostly shoring things up for the next generation. Death is horrible. It needs to be made ok one way or another. If you dangle transhumanism in front of them, but they don’t believe it has any possibility of happening, then you are undoing years of mental preparation for the inevitable for no reason. People have mental protections against this kind of thing.
3) On some level people don’t want their parents to live forever. Modernly extended lifespans have already greatly extended the time parents exert influence over their children. Our childhoods essentially never end.
4) On some level people don’t want to live. That might be hard for you to understand, but many people are very miserable, even if they are not explicitly suicidal. The idea of a complete life, when they can say their work is done, can be very appealing. The idea of it never ending can sound like hell.
Sick babies are often too weak to suck much—and this is true even if the baby isn’t sick enough to require a nicu stay. If a baby has to be in the hospital—it can be difficult logistically to breastfeed them, and of course if women aren’t dedicated to it, they won’t maintain milk. My son was required to stay in the nicu for 4 days (for ridiculous reasons—he was fine). I was only allowed to stay in the hospital 2 nights, and I was exhausted and needed to sleep.
I ended up allowing them to feed him formula since my milk was slow to come in—no one strongly encouraged me to stay there and breastfeed in the night. I got a 5 minute tutorial on how to use a pump, which was briefly suggested. It’s great that some hospitals are encouraging breastfeeding and providing donor milk to premature babies. I don’t know how universal this is. I know other women who have complained of similar problems I faced.
Ozy—sibling studies have a major problem—they don’t take into account the reasons why a mother would breast-feed one child but not the other. If you ask moms about this, they always have an answer, and it is usually something like, ‘Josh was very sleepy and just wouldn’t suck. We had to give him a bottle to get him to eat at all.’ My mother basically gives this exact story for why I was breast-fed and my brother was not.
And my brother had developmental problems and I did not. I don’t think this is because he was fed formula.
Remember, weaker/sicker babies are more likely to get formula, and sicker/older/tireder/more depressed mothers are more likely to formula feed. In order to breastfeed, everything has to go right. One thing goes wrong, and it’s on to formula.
It’s a mess. In general poor people are more likely to use formula since they have to go back to work/don’t have the same level of indoctrination- oops education—about the benefits of breast feeding, and breast feeding is a lot of work. Then there’s the issue that sicker babies often have to be formula fed, because they have weaker sucking reflexes and/or require special high-calorie formula. Multiples are more likely to be formula fed, for obvious reasons. Babies of older mothers are more likely to be formula feed, since older moms produce less milk, etc. etc. More obsessive and more highly educated mothers are more likely to breast-feed for obvious reasons. In general, my conclusion from the (noncomprehensive) reading I’ve done about it indicate that breast feeding clearly reduces early respiratory and GI infections as well as reduced colic and GI distress (while breastfeeding), but has unclear impact on long term psychological, physical, and cognitive health. Overall those things look better with breast-fed babies, but attempts to control for other things often negates the effects, leading to yo-yoing articles about the supremacy of breast milk depending on the fashion of the day. However, going back to theory, it would be very strange if breast milk weren’t better given human’s past experience with making food-substitutes. That being said, the healthiest baby is a fed baby, and the impact of formula vs breast feeding is unlikely to outweigh many other factors in a person’s life, such as milk production, needs to earn money to support the family, and mental health of the mother (depression in mothers is very highly correlated with poor long term outcomes).
There is another interpretation, which is that strong property rights *are* moral. I am currently 80% through Atlas Shrugged, which is a very strong thesis for this interpretation. Basically, when you take away property rights, whether the material kind, the action of one’s labor, or the spiritual kind, you give power to those who are best at taking. Ayn Rand presents the results of this kind of thinking, the actions that result, and the society it creates. I strongly recommend you read.
Excellent post with good food for thought. I’m interested to hear more about how people on this blog avoid superstitions.
I agree with Ray—the chapter was too long and spent too many words saying what it was trying to say. I read it in several sittings due to lack of adequate time block nd couldn’t find my place, which lead to me losing time and rereading portions and feeling generally frustrated. think the impact would be improved by reducing by a considerable margin.
I agree that this is an important issue we may have to deal with. I think it will be important to separate doing things for the community from doing things for individual members of the community. For example, encouraging people to bring food to a pot luck or volunteer at solstice is different from setting expectations that you help someone with their webpage for work or help out members of the community who facing financial difficulties. I’ve been surprised by how many times I’ve had to explain that expecting the community to financially support people is terrible on every level and should be actively discouraged as a community activity. This is not an organized enough community with high enough bars to membership to do things like collections. I do worry that people will hear a vague ‘Huffelpuff!’ call to arms and assume this means doing stuff for everyone else whenever you feasilbly can—It shouldn’t. It should be a message for what you do in the context of the public community space. What you choose to do for individuals is your own affair.
Eliezer, Komponisto,
I understand the anxiety issues of, ’Do I have what it takes to accomplish this...”
I don’t understand why the existence of someone else who can would damage Eliezer’s ego. I can observe that many other people’s sense of self is violated if they find out that someone else is better at something they thought they were the best at—the football champion at HS losing their position at college, etc. However, in order for this to occur, the person needs to 1) in fact misjudge their relative superiority to others, and 2) value the superiority for its own sake.
Now, Eliezer might take the discovery of a better rationalist/fAI designer as proof that he misjudged his relative superiority—but unless he thinks his superiority is itself valuable, he should not be bothered by it. His own actual intelligence, afterall, will not have changed, only the state of his knowledge of others’ intelligence relative to his own.
Eliezer must enjoy thinking he is superior for loss of this status to bother his ‘ego’.
Though I suppose one could argue that this is a natural human quality, and Eliezer would need to be superhuman or lying to say otherwise.
We recently gave our 9-year old a ‘kid license’ attached to a tile to take around when he runs errands. He’s had not trouble with anything other than one store refusing to sell him cookies on the basis that they didn’t think his mother would approve. He really loves the independence. I’ve given him a cell-phone in a fanny-pack to take when going someplace new, but he doesn’t want to take the cell phone most of the time. Of course we can’t do this with our 6-year old, both because he is clearly not mature enough, and even if he was, I’m pretty sure strangers would object.