nshepperd

Karma: 2,421

nshepperd 18 Oct 2021 2:42 UTC
−4 points
in reply to: jessicata’s comment on: My experience at and around MIRI and CFAR (inspired by Zoe Curzi’s writeup of experiences at Leverage)

None of us are calling for blame, ostracism, or cancelling of Michael.

What I’m saying is that the Berkeley community should be.

Ziz’s sentence you quoted doesn’t implicate Michael in any crimes.

Supplying illicit drugs is a crime (but perhaps the drugs were BYO?). IDK if doing so and negligently causing permanent psychological injury is a worse crime, but it should be.

nshepperd 18 Oct 2021 2:22 UTC
47 points
in reply to: Scott Alexander’s comment on: My experience at and around MIRI and CFAR (inspired by Zoe Curzi’s writeup of experiences at Leverage)

I don’t think we need to blame/ostracize/cancel him and his group, except maybe from especially sensitive situations full of especially vulnerable people.

Based on the things I am reading about what has happened, blame, ostracism, and cancelling seem like the bare minimum of what we should do.

Vassar has had, I think about 6, transfems gravitate to him, join his projects, go on his quests, that I’ve heard. Including Olivia, and Jessica, and I think Devi. Devi had a mental breakdown and detransitioned IIHC. Jessica had a mental breakdown and didn’t detransition. Olivia became an agent of mental breakdown, compulsively breaking others via drug trips because they went through gates they shouldn’t’ve.

This is really, really serious. If this happened to someone closer to me I’d be out for blood, and probably legal prosecution.

Let’s not minimize how fucked up this is.

nshepperd 5 Apr 2021 7:07 UTC
25 points
on: Ranked Choice Voting is Arbitrarily Bad

Each cohort knows that Carol is not a realistic threat to their preferred candidate, and will thus rank her second, while ranking their true second choice last.

Huh? This doesn’t make sense. In which voting system would that help? In most systems that would make no difference to the relative probability of your first and second choices winning.

nshepperd 3 Jan 2021 8:26 UTC
2 points
in reply to: sh4dow’s comment on: How sure are you that brain emulations would be conscious?
That’s possible, although then the consciousness-related utterances would be of the form “oh my, I seem to have suddenly stopped being conscious” or the like (if you believe that consciousness plays a causal role in human utterances such as “yep, i introspected on my consciousness and it’s still there”), implying that such a simulation would not have been a faithful synaptic-level WBE, having clearly differing macro-level behaviour.

nshepperd 18 May 2020 3:57 UTC
22 points
in reply to: maximkazhenkov’s comment on: What are your greatest one-shot life improvements?
As a more powerful version of this, you can install uBlock Origin and configure these custom filters to remove everything on youtube except for the video and the search box. As a user, I don’t miss the comments, social stuff, ‘recommendations’, or any other stuff at all.

nshepperd 11 Apr 2020 7:05 UTC
2 points
in reply to: G Gordon Worley III’s comment on: What is the subjective experience of free will for agents?
I must admit I can’t make any sense of your objections. There aren’t any deep philosophical issues with understanding decision algorithms from an outside perspective. That’s the normal case! For instance, A*

nshepperd 2 Apr 2020 19:54 UTC
10 points
on: What is the subjective experience of free will for agents?
Possibility and Could-ness

nshepperd 4 Jan 2020 0:52 UTC
31 points
on: Circling as Cousin to Rationality
This isn’t a criticism of this post or of Vaniver, but more a comment on Circling in general prompted by it. This example struck me in particular:

Orient towards your impressions and emotions and stories as being yours, instead of about the external world. “I feel alone” instead of “you betrayed me.”

It strikes me as very disturbing that this should be the example that comes to mind. It seems clear to me that one should not, under any circumstances engage in a group therapy exercise designed to lower your emotional barriers and create vulnerability in the presence of anyone you trust less than 100%, let alone someone you think has ‘betrayed’ you. This seems like a great way to get manipulated, taken advantage of by sexual abusers, gaslighted etc, which is a particular concern given the multiple allegations of abuse and sexual misconduct in the EA/Circling communities (1, 2, ChristianKl’s comment). Reframing these behaviours as personal emotions and stories seems like it would further contribute to the potential for such abuse.

nshepperd 3 Jan 2020 15:51 UTC
15 points
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Meta-discussion from “Circling as Cousin to Rationality”

Where does that obligation come from?

This may not be Said’s view, but it seems to me that this obligation comes from the sheer brute fact that if no satisfactory response is provided, readers will (as seems epistemically and instrumentally correct) conclude that there is no satisfactory response and judge the post accordingly. (Edit: And also, entirely separately, the fact that if these questions aren’t answered the post author will have failed to communicate, rather defeating the point of making a public post.)

Obviously readers will conclude this more strongly if there’s a back-and-forth in which the question is not directly answered, and less strongly if the author doesn’t respond to any comments at all (which suggests they’re just busy). (And readers will not conclude this at all if the question seems irrelevant or otherwise not to need a response.)

That is to say, the respect of readers on this site is not automatically deserved, and cannot be taken by force. Replying to pertinent questions asking for clarification with a satisfactory response that fills a hole in the post’s logic is part of how one earns such respect; it is instrumentally obligatory.

On this view, preventing people from asking questions can do nothing but mislead readers by preventing them from noticing whatever unclearness / ambiguity etc the question would have asked about. It doesn’t release authors from this obligation, but just means we have to downgrade our trust in all posts on the site since this obligation cannot be met.

nshepperd 3 Jan 2020 0:57 UTC
11 points
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Meta-discussion from “Circling as Cousin to Rationality”
T3t’s explanations seem quite useless to me. The procedure they describe seems highly unlikely to reach anything like a correct interpretation of anything, being basically a random walk in concept space.

It’s hard to see what “I don’t understand what you meant by X, also here’s a set of completely wrong definitions I arrived at by free association starting at X” could possibly add over “I don’t understand what you meant by X”, apart from wasting everyone’s time redirecting attention onto a priori wrong interpretations.

I’m also somewhat alarmed to see people on this site advocating the sort of reasoning by superficial analogy we see here:

“Conforming to or based on fact” feels very similar to “the map corresponds to the territory”.

Performing the substitution: “An expression that is worthy of acceptance or belief, as the expression (map) corresponds to the internal state of the agent that generated it (territory).”

So, overall, I’m not very impressed, no.

nshepperd 2 Jan 2020 9:11 UTC
12 points
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Meta-discussion from “Circling as Cousin to Rationality”

But my sense is that if the goal of these comments is to reveal ignorance, it just seems better to me to argue for an explicit hypothesis of ignorance, or a mistake in the post.

My sense is the exact opposite. It seems better to act so as to provide concrete evidence of a problem with a post, which stands on its own, than to provide an argument for a problem existing, which can be easily dismissed (ie. show, don’t tell). Especially when your epistemic state is that a problem may not exist, as is the case when you ask a clarifying question and are yet to receive the answer!

nshepperd 1 Jan 2020 22:14 UTC
12 points
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Meta-discussion from “Circling as Cousin to Rationality”

To be clear, I think your comment was still net-negative for the thread, and provided little value (in particular in the presence of other commenters who asked the relevant questions in a, from my perspective, much more productive way)

I just want to note that my comment wouldn’t have come about were it not for Said’s.

Again, this is a problem that would easily be resolved by tone-of-voice in the real world, but since we are dealing with text-based communication here, these kinds of confusions can happen again and again.

To be frank, I find your attitude here rather baffling. The only person in this thread who interpreted Said’s original comment as an attack seems to have been you. Vaniver had no trouble posting a response, and agreed that an explanation was necessary but missing.

nshepperd 1 Jan 2020 21:20 UTC
4 points
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Meta-discussion from “Circling as Cousin to Rationality”
FWIW, that wasn’t my interpretation of quanticle’s comment at all. My reading is that “healthy” was not meant as a proposed interpretation of “authentic” but as an illustrative substitution demonstrating the content-freeness of this use of the word—because the post doesn’t get any more or less convincing when you replace “authentic” with different words.

This is similar to what EY does in Applause Lights itself, where he replaces words with their opposites to demonstrate that sentences are uninformative.

(As an interpretation, it would also be rather barren, and not particularly ‘concrete’ either: obviously “‘authentic’ means ‘healthy’” just raises the question of what ‘healthy’ means in this context!)

nshepperd 1 Jan 2020 7:53 UTC
45 points
on: Circling as Cousin to Rationality
Why should “that which can be destroyed by the truth” be destroyed? Because the truth is fundamentally more real and valuable than what it replaces, which must be implemented on a deeper level than “what my current beliefs think.” Similarly, why should “that which can be destroyed by authenticity” be destroyed? Because authenticity is fundamentally more real and valuable than what it replaces, which must be implemented on a deeper level than “what my current beliefs think.” I don’t mean to pitch ‘radical honesty’ here, or other sorts of excessive openness; authentic relationships include distance and walls and politeness and flexible preferences.

To expand on Said and quanticle’s comments here, I find this argument deeply unconvincing, and here’s why. I see three things missing here:
1. A definition of ‘authentic’ in concrete terms—what kind of behaviour does it entail, with what kind of consequences? This can be a dictionary definition, in exchange for shifting a lot of burden to the following two steps.
2. An argument that ‘authenticity’ so defined is “real and valuable” enough to be more valuable than anything that might be lost in the course of such behaviour—this is not as simple as a superficial argument by analogy to truth might make it appear, since the argument for believing true things is more complex than that in the first place (for instance, relying on the particular role of true beliefs in decision theory).
3. An argument that Circling is ‘authentic’ in the manner so defined (presumably, since a defense of Circling seems to be the point of the post).
Currently all three holes here seem to be plugged by the simple use of ‘authentic’ as an applause light.
What links here?

nshepperd 16 Oct 2019 7:31 UTC
4 points
in reply to: TAG’s comment on: Can we make peace with moral indeterminacy?
If what you want is to do the right thing, there’s no conflict here.

Conversely, if you don’t want to do the right thing, maybe it would be prudent to reconsider doing it...?

nshepperd 21 Jun 2019 3:35 UTC
10 points
in reply to: G Gordon Worley III’s comment on: Let Values Drift
I don’t see the usual commonsense understanding of “values” (or the understanding used in economics or ethics) as relying on values being ontologically fundamental in any way, though. But you’ve the fact that they’re not to make a seemingly unjustified rhetorical leap to “values are just habituations or patterns of action”, which just doesn’t seem to be true.

Most importantly, because the “values” that people are concerned with then they talk about “value drift” are idealized values (ala. extrapolated volition), not instantaneous values or opinions or habituations.

For instance, philosophers such as EY consider that changing one’s mind in response to a new moral argument is not value drift because it preserves one’s idealized values, and that it is generally instrumentally positive because (if it brings one’s instantaneous opinions closer to their idealized values) it makes one better at accomplishing their idealized values. So indeed, we should let the EAs “drift” in that sense.

On the other hand, getting hit with a cosmic ray which alters your brain, or getting hacked by a remote code execution exploit is value drift because it does not preserve one’s idealized values (and is therefore bad, according to the usual decision theoretic argument, because it makes you worse at accomplishing them). And those are the kind of problems we worry about with AI.

nshepperd 21 Jun 2019 1:37 UTC
12 points
on: Let Values Drift
When we talk of values as nouns, we are talking about the values that people have, express, find, embrace, and so on. For example, a person might say that altruism is one of their values. But what would it mean to “have” altruism as a value or for it to be one of one’s values? What is the thing possessed or of one in this case? Can you grab altruism and hold onto it, or find it in the mind cleanly separated from other thoughts?

Since this appears to be a crux of your whole (fallacious, in my opinion) argument, I’m going to start by just criticizing this point. This argument proves far too much. It proves that:
- People don’t have beliefs, memories or skills
- Books don’t have concepts
- Objects don’t have colors
- Shapes don’t have total internal angles
It seems as if you’ve rhetorically denied the existence of any abstract properties whatsoever, for the purpose of minimizing values as being “merely” habituations or patterns of action. But I don’t see why anyone should actually accept that claim.

nshepperd 10 May 2019 5:10 UTC
4 points
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Interpretations of “probability”
Doesn’t it mean the same thing in either case? Either way, I don’t know which way the coin will land or has landed, and I have some odds at which I’ll be willing to make a bet. I don’t see the problem.

(Though my willingness to bet at all will generally go down over time in the “already flipped” case, due to the increasing possibility that whoever is offering the bet somehow looked at the coin in the intervening time.)

nshepperd 10 May 2019 4:47 UTC
19 points
on: Interpretations of “probability”
The idea that “probability” is some preexisting thing that needs to be “interpreted” as something always seemed a little bit backwards to me. Isn’t it more straightforward to say:
1. Beliefs exist, and obey the Kolmogorov axioms (at least, “correct” beliefs do, as formalized by generalizations of logic (Cox’s theorem), or by possible-world-counting). This is what we refer to as “bayesian probabilities”, and code into AIs when we want to them to represent beliefs.
2. Measures over imaginary event classes / ensembles also obey the Kolmogorov axioms. “Frequentist probabilities” fall into this category.
Personally I mostly think about #1 because I’m interested in figuring out what I should believe, not about frequencies in arbitrary ensembles. But the fact is that both of these obey the same “probability” axioms, the Kolmogorov axioms. Denying one or the other because “probability” must be “interpreted” as exclusively either #1 or #2 is simply wrong (but that’s what frequentists effectively do when they loudly shout that you “can’t” apply probability to beliefs).

Now, sometimes you do need to interpret “probability” as something—in the specific case where someone else makes an utterance containing the word “probability” and you want to figure out what they meant. But the answer there is probably that in many cases people don’t even distinguish between #1 and #2, because they’ll only commit to a specific number when there’s a convenient instance of #2 that make #1 easy to calculate. For instance, saying ¹⁄₆ for a roll of a “fair” die.

People often act as though their utterances about probability refer to #1 though. For instance when they misinterpret p-values as the post-data probability of the null hypothesis and go around believing that the effect is real...

nshepperd 3 May 2019 6:07 UTC
9 points
in reply to: Geropy’s comment on: Functional Decision Theory vs Causal Decision Theory: Expanding on Newcomb’s Problem
No, that doesn’t work. It seems to me you’ve confused yourself by constructing a fake symmetry between these problems. It wouldn’t make any sense for Omega to “predict” whether you choose both boxes in Newcomb’s if Newcomb’s were equivalent to something that doesn’t involve choosing boxes.

More explicitly:

Newcomb’s Problem is “You sit in front of a pair of boxes, which are either- both filled with money if Omega predicted you would take one box in this case, otherwise only one is filled”. Note: describing the problem does not require mentioning “Newcomb’s Problem”; it can be expressed as a simple game tree (see here for some explanation of the tree format):

.

In comparison, your “Inverse Newcomb” is “Omega gives you some money iff it predicts that you take both boxes in Newcomb’s Problem, an entirely different scenario (ie. not this case).”

The latter is more of the form “Omega arbitrarily rewards agents for taking certain hypothetical actions in a different problem” (of which a nearly limitless variety can be invented to justify any chosen decision theory¹), rather than being an actual self-contained problem which can be “solved”.

The latter also can’t be expressed as any kind of game tree without “cheating” and naming “Newcomb’s Problem” verbally—or rather, you can express a similar thing by embedding the Newcomb game tree and referring to the embedded tree, but that converts it into a legitimate decision problem, which FDT of course gives the correct answer to (TODO: draw an example ;).

(¹): Consider Inverse^2 Newcomb, which I consider the proper symmetric inverse of “Inverse Newcomb”: Omega puts you in front of two boxes and says “this is not Newcomb’s Problem, but I have filled both boxes with money iff I predicted that you take one box in standard Newcomb”. Obviously here FDT takes both boxes and a tidy $1,000,1000 profit (plus the $1,000,000 from Standard Newcomb). Whereas CDT gets… $1000 (plus $1000 from Standard Newcomb).