philh

Karma: 6,937

philh 4 Oct 2023 7:40 UTC
3 points
1
in reply to: wilkox’s comment on: EA Vegan Advocacy is not truthseeking, and it’s everyone’s problem
I don’t think this is a great analogy, but basically yeah. This sort of thing is why I included the last paragraph in my previous comment (“I do want there to be space for that kind of thing”).

philh 3 Oct 2023 9:40 UTC
7 points
1
in reply to: wilkox’s comment on: EA Vegan Advocacy is not truthseeking, and it’s everyone’s problem
So I haven’t reread to figure out an opinion on most of this, but wrt this specific point

I found it harder to evaluate whether they were misrepresented in these other ways, because like Stephen Bennett I found it hard to understand Martín’s position in detail.

I kinda want to flag something like “yes, that’s the point”? If Martín’s position is hard to pin down, then… like, it’s better to say “I don’t know what he’s trying to say” than “he’s trying to say [concrete thing he’s not trying to say]”, but both of them seem like they fit for the purposes of this post. (And if Elizabeth had said “I don’t know what he’s trying to say” then I anticipate three different commenters giving four different explanations of what Martín had obviously been saying.)

And, part of the point here is “it is very hard to talk about this kind of thing”. And I think that if the response to this post is a bunch of “gotcha! You said this comment was bad in one particular way, but it’s actually bad in an interestingly different way”, that kinda feels like it proves Elizabeth right?

But also I do want there to be space for that kind of thing, so uh. Idk. I think if I was making a comment like that I’d try to explicitly flag it as “not a crux, feel free to ignore”.

philh 2 Oct 2023 14:09 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: shminux’s comment on: EA Vegan Advocacy is not truthseeking, and it’s everyone’s problem

I agree that I have not stated a proper disclaimer, which was quite warranted, given the thrust of the post.

To clarify: it’s not clear to me whether you think it would have been warranted of you to give a disclaimer, or whether you think not-giving it was warranted?

My only intended point was that, while a lot of people do veganism wrong and some are not suited to it at all, an average person can be vegan without adverse health effects, as long as they eat varied and enriched plant-based diet and periodically check their vitamins/nutrients/minerals levels and make dietary adjustments as necessary.

Your original comments said nothing about periodically checking levels and making adjustments. So if that was part of your intended point, you executed your intent very poorly. (My guess would be that four months later, you misremember your intent at the time. Which isn’t a big deal. Whatever the reason for the omission, the omission seems worth noting.)

(I separately think it’s worth noting that your comment sounds like you’re observing “my partner does X” and concluding “the average person can do X”, which is obviously not good reasoning. Like, maybe you have more evidence than you’re letting on, but the natural-to-me reading of your post is that you’re making a basic error.)

philh 2 Oct 2023 9:34 UTC
4 points
in reply to: gwern’s comment on: philh’s Shortform
Hm, doesn’t feel like the same thing to me; I predict that most other examples of that observation would not have the property that I’m pointing at with the blanket and the password hashing.

philh 1 Oct 2023 16:47 UTC
4 points
on: philh’s Shortform
When you buy an electric blanket, you want it to be cheap to run (i.e. cheap electricity) but also you want to get the one that’s most expensive to run (i.e. highest wattage, since they’re 100% efficient at converting electricity into heat).
(Not entirely true because some of them might generate heat in suboptimal places, and there’s a limit to how much heat you’re interested in them generating, but close enough.)
When you choose a password hash function, you want one that’s slow to run for security, but then you want to choose an implementation of it that runs as fast as you can.
You’re pessimizing/optimizing within an optimized/pessimized domain, or something?
And if you’re writing a program or a blog post, succinctness is generally considered a virtue but if you go too far with that then you’re not just “removing wasted lines/words”, you’re also sacrificing features/speed/examples/clarity/something. This feels like the same kind of thing, just less obviously so?

philh 30 Sep 2023 23:04 UTC
4 points
0
on: “X distracts from Y” as a thinly-disguised fight over group status / politics

I think it’s common sense that concerns about police incompetence do not distract from concerns about police corruption. After all, why would they?

I kinda think they might do, in some circumstances.

I don’t personally pay much attention to concerns about police. I’m aware that people have them, and I could say a handful things on “both sides” of the issue, but I don’t have a strongly held opinion and—importantly—I’m not carefully tracking a lot of evidence that eventually I can examine and integrate in order to come up with a strongly held opinion. I read things and then I mostly forget them.

I don’t think the following is a super accurate characterization of how I form my (weakly held) opinion on the police. But I think it’s more accurate than I’d prefer:

When I see someone talking about concerns with the police, I decide basically on the spot whether those concerns seem to me to be valid or overblown. Then if they seem valid, I move my “concerns with the police” needle towards “valid”; if they seem overblown, I move it towards “overblown”.

and I can imagine that there are people out there, perhaps in large numbers, for whom this actually is pretty accurate.

Notably, this doesn’t have separate buckets for “police misconduct” and “police incompetence”.

And so if I see someone talking about police incompetence in a way that seems overblown to me, that disposes me to take police misconduct less seriously going forwards. I do think that’s just kinda true for me, and my main defense against it is that I’m aware that I’m not tracking evidence in anything like a reasonable way and so I avoid holding or expressing strong opinions.

(Does police misconduct interact with climate change in the same way? For me personally, I don’t think so. But supposing someone’s bucket were instead labeled “woke concerns”… yeah, it wouldn’t surprise me.)

So suppose that someone thinks concerns about police misconduct are valid, but concerns about police incompetence are overblown. (Or perhaps replace valid/overblown with convincing/unconvincing.) If they said that “talking about police incompetence distracts from talking about police misconduct”, that seems to me like it might actually just be true, conditional on them having accurately evaluated those two things.

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philh29 Sep 2023 22:50 UTC

21 points

0 comments3 min readLW link

(reasonableapproximation.net)

philh 19 Sep 2023 19:56 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Gordon Seidoh Worley’s comment on: Deconfusing Regret
Alright, to go meta:
- I disagree that you’ve provided detailed models. I don’t think I have, either; I think it’s mostly been us butting heads over “these two things are different” / “these two things are the same”.
- It’s probably the case that I haven’t been very helpful. If I’m honest, I think a lot of this is because I remember multiple conversations with you where: in the beginning you seemed to me to be saying something confused; and by the end neither of us seemed to have changed our minds. (At least one of these was also a case of you saying that two obviously-to-me different things are actually the same.) I remember zero conversations with you where: in the beginning you seemed to be saying something confused; and by the end either you’d convinced me or I’d convinced you. Which doesn’t mean it’s never happened, but like. The track record of our past conversations does not bode well for our future conversations.
  
  So when you say something that seems to me confused, I’m not sure how to react. I can just downvote/disagree/react and let it go—there’s another LW user who I do that fairly often with—but I think your confusion is often subtle enough to be worth pointing out. (Recall that this thread started when I thought you might be saying one of two things. I thought one was wrong and the other was silly but mostly harmless. It took a few messages to even reach the actual thing we’ve been disagreeing about.) I can try to approach with an open mind and consider that you might have something to teach me just as I think I have something to teach you; but that’s not what I’m actually feeling.
  
  I think my most-common approach in situations like this, and what I went for this time, was roughly “avoid being openly antagonistic, but don’t put lots of effort in; don’t particularly expect to deconfuse you; do try to make it clear to the audience what the disagreement is about, so they can make up their own minds”. (One theoretically good thing about this is that if it does turn out to be me who’s confused, then hopefully it becomes easier for an audience member to step in and explain it to me differently. But so far this hasn’t happened, to my recollection.^[1] Nor do I recall someone stepping in to agree with me and try a different approach of explaining my perspective to you.)
  
  (On “avoid being openly antagonistic”, I’m not currently sure whether “I can’t take it seriously” was toeing the line or over it.)
  
  My current sense is that where the thread really went wrong is when I said “if you want to continue it”. I think I was a bit surprised that you did. And you put in what seemed to me to be some effort, even though history said that you were unlikely to change my mind (it said this to me, dunno if it said it to you); and I would have felt bad if I didn’t put in a bit of effort myself, even though history said I was unlikely to change your mind. My current guess is that I should have just dropped things there.
- Also, you say I haven’t been clear about what I mean by regret, but I have not been talking about regret. The only time I’ve used that word so far has been to say that it’s not what I’m talking about. I dunno if this is a particularly important detail, but it sure seems like a metaphor.
1. ↩︎
  Part of me anticipates you-or-someone-else thinking that my thread with Matt Goldenberg was this. But it seems to me that Matt agrees with me, on the thing that you and I have mostly been disagreeing about.

philh 19 Sep 2023 17:17 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Gordon Seidoh Worley’s comment on: Deconfusing Regret
(This seems obviously wrong to me but I don’t have any hope that continuing will be productive.)

philh 19 Sep 2023 17:06 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Gordon Seidoh Worley’s comment on: Deconfusing Regret
… you claim that I counterfactually could have gone to Alpha Centauri last night? And that there’s no meaningful sense in which this is different from how I counterfactually could have played Baba Is You last night?

Sorry but if that’s what you’re saying I can’t take it seriously, and if it’s not what you’re saying I have no idea what you’re saying instead of that.

philh 19 Sep 2023 16:15 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Matt Goldenberg’s comment on: Deconfusing Regret
But “you didn’t have this thought process/coaching session/emotional state, etc.” isn’t a crux for A, right? I feel like if what you mean is A, then giving that reason is violating a norm of communication, and so it doesn’t particularly feel ambiguous between A and B to me.

But, okay, thanks. I think I see what you’re saying.

This is a tangent, but I’m curious if you agree with me that telling people A feels like lying to make them feel better? (No need to try and justify it or anything if so.)

philh 19 Sep 2023 13:16 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Matt Goldenberg’s comment on: Deconfusing Regret
Um. So do you not see a big difference between
- A: “there was only one thing you could have done, and you did it”
- B: “this specific thing that you might in theory have done, was practically unavailable to you”
?

To me, this conversation feels like… you said you tell people B, and I said that seems very different from A to me, and now you’re saying you tell people A? And I’m not sure if you’re saying that to clarify “oh, no, I don’t tell people B, I tell them A”, or because you don’t see the distinction I’m trying to draw, or what. I’m not really sure where to go from here.

I’ll say that A is the thing that feels to me like lying to people, in that it seems true but only in an irrelevant sense. This comment might help clarify?

philh 19 Sep 2023 12:10 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Matt Goldenberg’s comment on: Deconfusing Regret
Nod. But I note that “you couldn’t have changed this back then, because you didn’t at the time have the tools to do this” seems very different from what I think Gordon is saying?

Like, I see a big difference between “there was only one thing you could have done, and you did it” and “this specific thing that you might in theory have done, was practically unavailable to you”.

Like, “because you didn’t at the time have the tools to do this” admits that we can classify past actions-not-taken into “those we could have taken but didn’t” and “those we couldn’t have taken” (perhaps “those we couldn’t have taken for reason X”, “those we couldn’t have taken for reason Y”, …), whereas Gordon seems to want to classify all past actions as simply “those we could not have taken”.

philh 19 Sep 2023 9:41 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Gordon Seidoh Worley’s comment on: Deconfusing Regret
Yeah, this seems to me to be missing something big. Here are some things we might say I could have done last night:
- Read a book
- Read The Iliad in ancient Greek
- Played ukulele
- Played a ¹⁰⁄₁₀ rendition of We Are the Crystal Gems on ukulele, singing along in tune
- Played theremin
- Gone to the pub
- Gone to Milton Keynes
- Gone to France
- Gone to the moon
- Gone to Alpha Centauri
- Turned into a small cat
- Doodled some math symbols on a piece of paper
- Written a proof of the Riemann Hypothesis
- Drunk a liter of coffee
- … and fallen straight to sleep
- Successfully performed open-heart surgery
- Continued playing Baba Is You
- Finished Baba Is You without looking up any hints or solutions
As it happens I only did one of these. So there’s a sense in which there was only one I could have done, and it’s the one I actually did.

But there’s another, very reasonable and important sense, in which some of these are things that yes, I could have done; and some are things that no, I could not have done. I can read, but I can’t read ancient Greek. I don’t own a theremin, though maybe I could have gotten one delivered if I really wanted? I’m not good at ukulele or singing. I could probably have found a train to Milton Keynes and likely even France; but I don’t think all the money in the world would have gotten me to the moon on that short notice; and Alpha Centauri is simply too far away to go in one night. It’s plausible that there’s a proof of the Riemann hypothesis short enough for me to have written it down in an evening, but it’s not plausible that I would have produced it. And so on.

I claim that when most people talk about whether they did their best, they’re thinking about other things they could have done in this very reasonable and important sense.

Of course, it’s not always obvious whether something is a thing I could have done or not, in this sense. So sometimes it might not be clear whether I did my best or not. That’s fine. It still leaves the phrase much more useful than a phrase that means “as a being of physics, I did the only thing I possibly could have done as dictated by the evolution of the quantum waveform or whatever, which is all that anyone ever does”.
What links here?
- philh's comment on Deconfusing Regret by Alex Hollow (19 Sep 2023 13:16 UTC; 2 points)

philh 19 Sep 2023 0:01 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Matt Goldenberg’s comment on: Deconfusing Regret

I find as a coach that sometimes people really need the view of determinism (often framed as radical acceptance), and they in some sense don’t alieve the thing Gordon is talking about.

I’d be curious to hear examples of this. If I try to come up with them myself, they have a flavor of “lying to people to make them feel better”. (Which I’m not gonna say is categorically bad, but I feel like if you happen to agree that it has that flavor then that seems like a good thing to note on LW. But maybe you just don’t agree it has that flavor.)

Like, I’m imagining here the type of person who’s trying to save the world by working ten hour days seven days a week, and then they have a day where they just lie in bed and play video games and they’re like ”???why didn’t I do my best???”

And I can imagine replying to that with “you did do your best, your best is all you ever do”. But that feels like lying to me. A less-lying answer to me would be something like:

You are probably aware that you are a human, and humans need sleep. Like if you tried to stay awake for a full week, most likely you would simply fail, and if you tried really hard with drugs and stuff then blah blah blah bad idea. It doesn’t obviously violate any physical laws of the universe to stay awake for a week, but it is basically just not an option available to you. It violates some laws of “what it’s like to be a human”, at least for now.

Similarly, humans need rest and relaxation, and if they try to work ten hour days seven days a week they by and large simply fail, and if they push really hard then that often goes badly for them. That, too, violates some laws of “what it’s like to be a human”, at least for now.

You wouldn’t try to push yourself to go a week without sleep. Trying to push yourself to work ten hour days seven days a week is the same basic mistake, but a bit less obvious. You’re beating yourself up for not taking an option that was never really available to you.

To me, this rhymes with the determinism answer, but seems importantly different.

Is this at all close to what you’re thinking?

philh 18 Sep 2023 23:29 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Gordon Seidoh Worley’s comment on: Deconfusing Regret

If you really get that the things couldn’t have been otherwise you’d say something different from “I didn’t do my best”

This just doesn’t seem true to me. Also, neither “next time I want to do better” nor “I have a lot to learn” seems like a suitable replacement, and “I didn’t do my best” doesn’t seem synonymous with “regret” although they overlap in circumstance.

My current sense is that you don’t understand what I consider the normal meaning of the phrase, but also my model of the conversation is that if I try to explain you’ll reply with what I consider to be gotchas that completely miss the point.

(And it’s not super easy to explain because yeah, it involves agency and I’m confused about agency. But I predict that it all adds up to normality, and that our disagreement here does not come from you understanding agency better than I do.)

I’m happy to drop the conversation, but if you want to continue it (it’s fine if you don’t), I’d suggest one way to continue might be for you to try to explain what I think the normal meaning is, and why I think it’s valuable to keep around rather than e.g. trying to replace it with the things you suggest.

Quick edit, as a note: at this point I’m not saying “the way you use the phrase is bad”. Like, that kind of is a thing I think, and my first two comments were indeed criticizing your use of it, but if you were like “yeah it’s kind of weird but I think it’s valuable” then I don’t think I’d have much to say to that. But the conversation shifted to you not simply defending your use, but criticizing other uses (“That someone would say that they did their best is considerable evidence that they are confused about determinism”, “If you really get that the things couldn’t have been otherwise you’d say something different”), and that seems completely wrongheaded to me.

philh 18 Sep 2023 23:16 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: philh’s comment on: Navigating an ecosystem that might or might not be bad for the world
Ah, this seems to work: @plex
(Didn’t work on phone or when editing parent comment on browser, did work when creating a new comment on browser.)

philh 18 Sep 2023 22:27 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Drake Morrison’s comment on: Navigating an ecosystem that might or might not be bad for the world
There is/was such a project. I don’t remember details but @plex probably knows what’s going on.

(That was meant to auto link and give him a notification but I’ve never tried it before and it apparently didn’t work.)

philh 18 Sep 2023 11:42 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Gordon Seidoh Worley’s comment on: Deconfusing Regret
I’m confused. Previously you said

Thinking about the subjective, counterfactual best is sometimes useful as a side effect of how we figure things, but in the context of speaking about how the feeling of regret is optional it makes sense to emphasize the latter sense in which best/worst/etc. has no real meaning.

So it sounded to me like you understand what I would say is the normal meaning of the phrase “I didn’t do my best”, you just think that in this particular case it’s helpful to use some other meaning; where I claim that that other meaning is unhelpful.

But from this reply, it sounds like… you don’t understand what I would say is the normal meaning? Or you think it’s a niche meaning, such that someone who says “I didn’t do my best” is more likely to be confused about determinism than to be using that meaning?

Both of those would be surprising to me.

(I am admittedly confused about agency, and I agree that probably most people are. But it still seems entirely possible to make someone more confused or less confused, so “most people are confused about agency, so I’m unlikely to make them more confused” doesn’t follow.)

philh 17 Sep 2023 21:07 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Gordon Seidoh Worley’s comment on: Deconfusing Regret
Yeah, my reaction is still that this is just a completely unhelpful way of using the term. Like sure, if someone is confused about determinism then it seems good to deconfuse them on that score. But my sense is that
- Most people who say “I didn’t do my best” probably aren’t saying that because they’re confused about determinism.
- Telling them “you did do your best, because there was nothing else you could have done, so you’re always doing your best” is more likely to confuse them about agency than to deconfuse them about determinism.

philh

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