I’m a very confused person trying to become less confused. My history as a New Age mystic still colors everything I think even though I’m striving for rationality nowadays. Here’s my backstory if you’re interested.
MSRayne
Karma: 1,188
I’ve long suspected that things like this are almost entirely made traumatic by society’s socially constructed ideas about them, but it’s very taboo to talk about—it’s a very dangerous opinion to have—and I’ve almost never told people I think this. Thanks for saying it for me.
I had sexual trauma as a child that didn’t even involve any actual sexual event. Rather, I had and wrote down a quasi-sexual fantasy about a playmate from the playground (I was 8) and my mom found it and confronted me about it, thinking that I had been molested or something because why else would “a child!!” be thinking of such things. I felt disgusting afterward, for years, like I must be evil for thinking this way about another kid, and throughout my teenage years I would occasionally have almost panic attack like ptsd feelings when I would think about sexuality in certain contexts that reminded me of that experience.
So it seems to me that the trauma comes from believing that you have been violated, because authority figures or parents or society tell you that you have—not from being violated, itself. And what constitutes a violation is to some extent socially constructed. Sometimes, because of this, as in my case, you can feel violated when nothing has even happened to you.
Parents really need to realize—or be taught—that they are exocortices for their children, one of whose primary roles is to process things that the child cannot and be a sink for big emotions, NOT a source of them. When parents push their own emotions onto a child, that invariably is traumatizing—as in the case of parentification or “emotional incest”, or narcissistic abuse, etc. This is another example of that. Arguably, telling a child they ought to feel worse about something that has happened to them is itself a form of abuse.
Who is this MSRayne person anyway?
Nature abhors an immutable replicator… usually
The most amusing thing about this is that you don’t find out whether the entity was “evil” until after you’ve already stabbed it. “Oh, sorry, apparently you’re a good guy but now you’re dead, oops.”
Haven’t finished the post yet, just reading the list of boundary violations that are benign to you, but I just have to say right now, holy excrement, absolutely none of those seem like they would be benign to me under any circumstances no matter how well I know someone! Like, just reading the list made me feel intensely uncomfortable.
I suspect that for me the concept of “benign boundary violations” essentially doesn’t exist; my boundaries are super-strict. That said, in some areas I do have boundaries that are far less restrictive than societal norms, but they’re mainly on the mental plane, rather than regarding physical behaviors. I have lots of other stuff to say about boundaries but I’ll edit and continue this comment after I’ve read the whole post.
Okay so… wow. Reading this post—just a bunch of text! - made me feel physically uncomfortable in much the same way I feel if someone tries to touch me. That never happens. To me it seems like all interactions with another person are opt-in, and the baseline should be “leave me completely alone, don’t touch me, don’t speak to me, don’t even acknowledge my presence.” I find basically all human interaction overwhelming and more or less boundary violating, and I didn’t realize until reading this post that my experience of life could be described that way. I mean, I knew I was unusually introverted, but I never thought to describe it in terms of boundaries.
On the topic of touch in particular: I was raised by emotionally abusive and neglectful parents, and I never experienced any kind of affection growing up. I was also (and still am) extremely isolated from other people. So I never learned to feel comfortable with touch or most other kinds of “informal” interaction. The only times I can remember my parents touching me were all unpleasant or even subtly violating. To others I probably seem somewhat stiff and overly formal, because I don’t know the social protocols (other people’s boundaries, I guess) and I wouldn’t feel good about doing things that seem normal to others but seem like boundary violations to me. So: to me, the idea that there exist benign boundary violations is… so overwhelmingly unintuitive, that I would never have thought of it. (Or, more accurately, I’ve thought of them many times, but only as something intrinsically sexual and kinky. Yes, even stuff like the ones you listed. And that’s a whole ’nother bucket of worms.)
I’ve been thinking for a long time about ethics and how people ought to treat one another etc, and I usually do it in terms of something like what you’re calling boundaries, only I assume they all would in an ideal world be explicitly negotiated: people say when they meet what all their boundaries are in all the relevant domains of life (which I’d like to enumerate), or even like trade sheets of paper on which all those things are written, and agree to respect one another’s boundaries. And of course if something comes up that wasn’t in the relationship contract, it is negotiated right then and there by asking, NEVER guessing.
That way all that frightening, confusing, complicated, implicit human emotion and relationship stuff that I don’t understand could be made explicit and easy for me to navigate with no uncertainty (and I am extremely, indeed probably pathologically, risk-averse, which may be related): just follow written rules! Even then, though, I probably wouldn’t do many things (like what’s in your list) that people accept. And benign boundary violations would not exist and be totally alien and unheard of in that ideal world of mine, since they rely on guessing which I Do Not Do, Ever, and it’s hard for me to intuitively imagine being someone who does do that.
When you said that the loss of these benign boundary violations is a loss of human intimacy… well, I’ve never in my life had human intimacy of any kind, don’t understand it, and am honestly frightened enough by it, apparently, that just reading this made my skin crawl a little bit. I guess I’m in a really high upper percentile of sensitivity… I don’t know what to do about this, but it’s probably important and it’s almost certainly damaging my life in some way. Thanks for inducing me to notice this in this way.
To be honest, I look forward to AI partners. I have a hard time seeing the point of striving to have a “real” relationship with another person, given that no two people are really perfectly compatible, no one can give enough of their time and attention to really satisfy a neverending desire for connection, etc. I expect AIs to soon enough be better romantic companions—better companions in all ways—than humans are. Why shouldn’t I prefer them?
No, it’s called “lying”. The text that he produces as a result of these social pressures does not reflect his actual thought processes. You can’t judge a belief on the basis of a bunch of ex post facto arguments people make up to rationalize it—the method by which they came to hold the belief is much more informative, and for those of us with very roundabout styles of thinking (such as myself) being forced into this self-censorship and modification of our thought patterns into something “coherent” and easy to read actually destroys all the evidence of how we actually came to the idea, and thus destroys much of your ability to effectively examine its validity!
The principles from the post can still be applied. Some humans do end up aligned to animals—particularly vegans (such as myself!). How does that happen? There empirically are examples of general intelligences with at least some tendency to terminally value entities massively less powerful than themselves; we should be analyzing how this occurs.
Also, remember that the problem is not to align an entire civilization of naturally evolved organisms to weaker entities. The problem is to align exactly one entirely artificial organism to weaker entities. This is much simpler, and as mentioned entirely possible by just figuring out how already existing people of that sort end up that way—but your use of “we” here seems to imply that you think the entirety of human civilization is the thing we ought to be using as inspiration for the AGI, which is not the case.
By the way: at least part of the explanation for why I personally am aligned to animals is that I have a strong tendency to be moved by the Care/Harm moral foundation—see this summary of The Righteous Mind for more details. It is unclear exactly how it is implemented in the brain, but it is suspected to be a generalization of the very old instincts that cause mothers to care about the safety and health of their children. I have literally, regularly told people that I perceive animals as identical in moral relevance to human children, implying that some kind of parental instincts are at work in the intuitions that make me care about their welfare. Even carnists feel this way about their pets, hence calling themselves e.g. “cat moms”. So, the main question here for alignment is: how can we reverse engineer parental instincts?
I want to see more posts like this. There’s lots of reason to be stressed and we see posts about that occasionally—but there’s also reasons to be excited and motivated to move forward. I’ll post about my vision of the future at some point. Mine is a lot weirder and more explicitly transhumanist than yours though lol! (But of course everything you say I totally agree with.)
I’m one of those people who’s never in my life been agentic. I still live in my parents’ house (I’m 25) and spend most of my time in my bedroom, because they burnt out all my capacity for agency when I was a child—it didn’t even take until teenage years. I can’t even go outside without telling someone!
Homeschooled till 16, never went to college because it seemed like a waste of money and anyway I was afraid of leaving the house, never had a job because I can’t stand the idea of yet another person telling me what to do and I don’t need anything that money could buy anyway, as long as I live here...
Endless free time, but no freedom, and no idea what I would do if I had freedom. It’s somehow hellish, comfortingly familiar, and completely emotionally neutral at the same time. Honestly, I feel totally trapped.
Sorry to complain lol. Point is, you’re right, this is a thing.
It might be good to explicitly state in the hover text over the upvote and downvote buttons that they mean “would like to see more of this” and “would like to see less of this”, rather than the mysterious and vague “like” and “dislike”.
More radically, instead of vague “agree” and “disagree”, one could imagine placing a small probability distribution in each comment and votes consist of marking how much credence you have in whatever that comment is saying. This is more confusing if the comment makes multiple claims, though, but that’s a failure mode of the agree and disagree also.
Perhaps it should be possible to highlight sections of a comment and mark them with probability distributions that pop up when you hover over them and which also subtly color the highlight (divide probabilities into three ranges: red=0-33%, green=33-67%, blue=67-100%, then weight the RGB values by the number of votes in each range), as well as putting a small unobtrusive icon shaped like the probability distribution (perhaps in the margin?) when not hovering...
I just made a bunch of claims all at once… that is indeed a failure mode of this system which is going to regularly occur.
This makes me wonder if some proportion of “masculine” gay men are actually transwomen (of the early onset type) with autoandrophilia. I may even fit into that category myself. I didn’t care about masculinity and in fact found it somewhat abhorrent and not-me-ish until I started getting off to more masculine looking guys in porn. (When I first saw porn when I was 12 I mainly focused on twinks and wanted to look like them, and there’s still a part of me that feels that way, which wars with the part that wants to bulk up because masc dudes are also hot—and usually wins, because bulking is hard and I would rather read books.)
Of course, my natural femininity is not tremendous (I wasn’t flamboyant as a child and as far as I know never have been—I’ve always thought feminine-acting men were creepy—but I did flirt with identifying as nonbinary during my late teens, and used to have multiple female alters during the period where I thought I had multiple personalities), and most of my femininity is the result of misandry taught by the media and my mother (I believed for most of my childhood and early teens that masculinity is disgusting and bestial, and that only women can be powerful / noble, but later realized that like all other disgusting and bestial things, masculinity is sexy as fuck, which helped me get out of my misandry phase.)
Nowadays I think my gender identity is probably something like “true hermaphrodite / omega (as in the omegaverse fanfiction trope) male”, which unfortunately is not something that one can currently medically transition to, and I experience no dysphoria (and to be honest, the only reason I think it would be cool to have both male and female genitals is because it seems too asymmetric and unbalanced not to, and I’m very Libra [yes I know astrology isn’t real, but it’s still a helpful and / or fun language to describe personalities with]).
Well—actually, it’s possible I do experience dysphoria, but in which direction changes with my mood (I sometimes don’t feel masculine enough), and there’s an element of The Paraphilia Which Must Not Be Named [note: if you ask me, I will not name it, and I will neither confirm nor deny guesses, but you can probably figure it out based on what I’m not saying] which also interacts in weird ways with the whole thing, and overall I just find gender and sexuality stuff tiresome and confusing and sort of wish I didn’t have to deal with it.
Thanks for coming to my rambly asf TED talk.
For me, as someone who’s lurked off and on for a few years and only started regularly commenting recently, I find this whole place terribly intimidating. Everyone else is far smarter than me and I am used to being the smartest person in every room, and it’s quite painful and makes it hard to interact. It’s some of the best writing I’ve ever read on the internet… but that may be a bad thing, as it’s an impossible threshold to climb over as a newbie.
I feel like consequentialists are more likely to go crazy due to not being grounded in deontological or virtue-ethical norms of proper behavior. It’s easy to think that if you’re on track to saving the world, you should be able to do whatever is necessary, however heinous, to achieve that goal. I didn’t learn to stop seeing people as objects until I leaned away from consequentialism and toward the anarchist principle of unity of means and ends (which is probably related to the categorical imperative). E.g. I want to live in a world where people are respected as individuals, so I have to respect them as individuals—whereas maximizing individual-respect might lead me to do all sorts of weird things to people now in return for some vague notion of helping lots more future people.
What I’m expecting, if LLMs remain in the lead, is that we end up in a magical, spirit-haunted world where narrative causality starts to actually work, and trope-aware people essentially become magicians who can trick the world-sovereign AIs into treating them like protagonists and bending reality to suit them. Which would be cool as fuck, but also very chaotic. That may actually be the best-case alignment scenario right now, and I think there’s a case for alignment-interested people who can’t do research themselves but who have writing talent to write a LOT of fictional stories about AGIs that end up kind and benevolent, empower people in exactly this way, etc., to help stack the narrative-logic deck.
This is adorable but unlikely. I think it’s best to examine worst-case scenarios and how to solve them, rather than daydreaming about best-case scenarios we cannot reasonably expect.
I love the spelling “icstchanj” for exchange. Children really do spell better than adults do, don’t they?
Does this imply that AGI is not as likely to emerge from language models as might have been thought? To me it looks like it’s saying that the only way to get enough data would be to have the AI actively interacting in the world—getting data itself.