yes, i suppose this is one thing you can say for kink party drama, people are incentivized to keep it fairly insular to avoid being fired or having their funding pulled.
Trinley Goldenberg
Karma: 5,968
yes, i guess i should have been clear—i wasn’t saying that these two cases in particular caused drama
just that the increased need/perceived need for banning people is the primary cause of drama in this scene, and it’s why there’s more drama than in other common scenes, and i’ve seen it definitely in the rat sphere, though i’ve never been to an rmn party
maybe you’ve done a good job and created a version that doesn’t create drama, i dunno
ETA:
also, basically exactly the sex-process drama process played out with slutcon publically on twitter, as an example what i’m talking about (this has nothing to do the organizers being bad or making bad decisions afaict, just asomeone perceived their consent to be violated (at a non-sex party, but sexually charged event)
one of the parties involved get upset that the organizers handled it badly, and so felt the need to let the community know
people in the community felt the need to pontificate about who was right, and why the would/wouldn’t trust the organizers, creating minor drama and sides
it didn’t escalate to what sometimes happen, which is a full blown schism where there’s two parallel events/communities/party scenes happening, but afaict it’s pretty hard to control how far it goes even with skillful adjudication
it may be the case that you’ve run rmn in a great way that prevents this, but i would be pretty unsurprised if it regresses to the mean that we see with slutcon.
This is almost always why banning happens, although general creepiness is another reaaon
Yes, this is the primary drama from sex parties
Someone thinks their consent was violated, and it becomes a whole thing/splits the community
Much more rare at non-sex parties
ok, but it seems like normally that would be the case? if the drama is escaping containment to random people who have no interest in ever attending, it’s nuclear level drama. Most of it would be among the people who were at a particular party or would want to attend a future one.
I’m pretty surprised about this perception. In my perception it seems like sex parties reliably produce more drama than regular parties, and IME the rationalist community is not exempt from this.
it seems pretty clear to me that having integrity is a good sign all around.
however, being scrupulous about the perception of integrity pretty clearly can go both ways, depending on the type of impact you’re trying to have. a common signal for a good startup founder is often a type of iconclasm that would do something that others see as morally dubious or cringe, if they think it’s right. meanwhile, when hiring a ceo for a large, established company, you want a scrupulous person above reproach.
startupy type impact—high risk, uncertain, requires novel thinking and going against the grain—may select for one. while big company type impact—logistical mind, detail oriented, good at bringing established playbooks to new environements—may select for the other.
Game as benchmark: as is always the case in evaluations, it remains difficult to know whether these results reflect how models would actually behave in the real world. We think that this eval arguably underestimates the hit rate of agents in a real world context, where all animals in the path of farm machinery are unlikely to be visible.
This non-sequitur seems cheap to me. The question isn’t whether the benchmark underestimates accidental killings but whether it underestimates moral behavior since the agent isn’t actually killing any animals. and my guess would be “yes it very much does underestimate moral behavior since it’s a game”
Steganography seems like a strange way to think about this behavior, vs. e.g. Anna Salamon’s framing that it’s simply the LMs writing about what they know/what it’s like to be them.
(I suppose this is also a good time to mention that I believe Anna’s observation predates the Unslop contest and therefore is prior art that you mentioned you weren’t aware of on that page)
Thanks for continuing to share this analysis, I continually find your thinking on this the most useful take on timelines as they relate to pure scaling
My model of addictions is that they usually go like this:
You create an avoidance/anesthetic behavior that serves a certain purpose.
The behavior becomes an addiction—there’s some sort of dopamine hit from the addiction itself, such that simply NOT doing the behavior is unpleasant, regardless of the original thing you were trying to avoid.
You then further justify this behavior rationally, coming up with all sorts of other purposes that weren’t the original anesthetic.
When I work with clients who have addictive behaviors, we try to address both #1 and #2 simultaneously. There’s both the aspect of unlearning the addictive behavior as a solution and replacing it with more functional behaviors, and SIMULTANEOUSLY there’s just a chemical loop that has arisen, similar to an itch that needs to be scratched, that must be addressed on it’s own terms. The addiction has created a self-sustaining loop where simply not doing the behavior creates it’s own suffering, so the playbook described in the post is necessary but not sufficient.
But these are all standard for the status quo
Whereas my answer is: If I’m being sufficiently evil then I sure hope it tells me no.
There’s of course, a “problem” if AIs in general do this. It tells you you’re being evil when you eat the standard american diet, built on the back of factory farmed animals.
Same when you order a package from Amazon, or do many other normal things people do to maintain a slightly better standard of living, but which put slight human momentary comfort ahead of the suffering and death of other beings (including of course, future humans and humanity itself)
Most people aren’t prepared to face the amount of evil they do simply by participating in the modern economy. And, in the absence of facing it, will simply complain about moralizing and put their money into the more evil alternative.
but consider that they’ve thought about it for MUCH more than five minutes?
i suspect the distance between you and ea grantmakers is not ‘you’ve spent more time thinking about grantmaking than them’, but more fundamental model mismatches
my answer in the op was just trying to point at one
Ehh, I just think grantmaking is hard and there are legitimate disagreements. Are they being too conservative or not conservative enough for example.
EA funding orgs have always been conservative.
But imagine YOU were part of the grantmaking ecosystem that gave $30mil to the OpenAI non-profit thinking you were helping AI x-risk
You’d probably realize it’s easy to throw money at the problem and end up making things worse
This seems to be taking steelmaning to a laughable degree
“Yes, the journalists are mocking people as a demand-driven desire from their readers to know who’s harmless”
kegan (and those of that tradition, like wilbur) look at society’s ills and see a problem of insufficient abstraction
mcgilchrist (and those of that tradition) look at society’s ills and see a problem of over-abstraction
my biggest intellectual shift over the past five years is coming to believe that mcgilchrist is right and kegan is wrong
the type of wisdom that kegan’s developmental levels are trying to grasp at is FULLY AND AUTOMATICALLY realized by the shift of instead of that grasping, surrendering the abstraction to the right hemisphere (and subsequent levels of surrender that surrender ever deeper levels of that grasping)
this means that in order to recognize true wisdom as a collective , instead of imperfectly approximate it in ways that are bound to fail, as we have been doing, we need to take society in basically the opposite direction that it has been going
of course, snark is seen as virtuous, it’s important to let people know who’s good and who’s bad, goes the thinking
i’m not really sure about your question, i think it’s actually quite a hard one and depends a bunch on specific tactical questions about your message and how to spread it
but, regardless, you should KNOW that snark is being employed, not think that they’re giving a neutral account, not sharing a snarky account naively as a positive or neutral story, etc
I think this is just a common pattern with sex events (not because they’re bad or lax with security or don’t care about consent), although rarely as public with unrelated internet personas weighing in. as I said I’ve seen this occur a bunch, often with newbies or outsiders sure but often with people deeply embedded in a sex positive commuity.