PoignardAzur

Karma: 162

PoignardAzur 11 Mar 2024 16:20 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: ymeskhout’s comment on: My Clients, The Liars
Did you ever get one of your clients to use the “Your honor, I’m very sorry, I’ll never do it again” line?

PoignardAzur 9 Mar 2024 11:33 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Zack_M_Davis’s comment on: My Clients, The Liars

This was not at all obvious from the inside. I can only imagine a lot of criminal defendants have a similar experience. Defense attorneys are frustrated that their clients don’t understand that they’re trying to help—but that “help” is all within the rules set by the justice system. From the perspective of a client who doesn’t think he did anything particularly wrong (whether or not the law agrees), the defense attorney is part of the system.

I mean… you’re sticking to generalities here, and implying that the perspective of the client who thinks he didn’t do anything wrong is as valid as any other perspective.

But if we try to examine some specific common case, eg: “The owner said you robbed his store, the cameras showed you robbing his store, your fingerprints are on the register”, then the client’s fury at the attorney “working with the prosecutor” doesn’t seem very productive?

The problem isn’t that the client is disagreeing with the system about the moral legitimacy of robbing a store. The problem is that the client is looking for a secret trick so the people-who-make-decisions-about-store-robberies will think he didn’t rob the store and that’s not gonna happen.

With that in mind, saying the attorney is “part of the system” is… well, maybe it’s factually true, but it implicitly blames the robber’s predicament on the system and on his attorney in a way that just doesn’t make sense. The robber would be just as screwed if he was represented by eg his super-wealthy uncle with a law degree who loves him dearly.

(I don’t know about your psychiatric incarceration, so I’m not commenting on it. Your situation is probably pretty different to the above.)

PoignardAzur 9 Mar 2024 11:07 UTC
4 points
1
on: My Clients, The Liars
“Well, when we first met, you told me that you never touched the gun,” I reminded him with an encouraging smile. “Obviously you wouldn’t lie to your own lawyer, and so what I can do is get a fingerprint expert to come to the jail, take your prints, then do a comparison on the gun itself. Since you never touched the gun, the prints won’t be a match! This whole case will get dismissed, and we can put all this behind you!”
For the record, I am now imagining you as Bob Odenkirk while you’re delivering that line.

PoignardAzur 11 Feb 2024 0:26 UTC
3 points
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on: Believing In
The point about task completion times feels especially insightful. I think I’ll need to go back to it a few times to process it.

PoignardAzur 10 Feb 2024 0:31 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Conor Moreton’s comment on: Apologizing is a Core Rationalist Skill
I think Duncan’s post touches on something this post misses with its talk of “social API”: apologies only work when they’re a costly signal.

The people you deliver the apology to need to feel it cost you something to make that apology, either pride or effort or something valuable; or at least that you’re offering to give up something costly to earn forgiveness.

PoignardAzur 10 Feb 2024 0:28 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: mruwnik’s comment on: Apologizing is a Core Rationalist Skill
The slightly less machiavellian version is to play Diplomacy with them.

(Or do a group project, or go to an escape game, or any other high-tension low-stakes scenario.)

PoignardAzur 10 Feb 2024 0:26 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: bideup’s comment on: Apologizing is a Core Rationalist Skill
I think “API calls” are the wrong way to word it.

It’s more that an apology is a signal; to make it effective, you must communicate that it’s a real signal reflecting your actual internal processes, and not a result of a surface-level “what words can I say to appear maximally virtuous” process.

So for instance, if you say a sentence equivalent to “I admit that I was wrong to do X and I’m sorry about it, but I think Y is unfair”, then you’re not communicating that you underwent the process of “I realized I was wrong, updated my beliefs based on it, and wondered if I was wrong about other things”.

I’m not entirely sure what the simplest fix is

A simple fix would be “I admit I was wrong to do X, and I’m sorry about it. Let me think about Y for a moment.” And then actually think about Y, because if you did one thing wrong, you probably did other things wrong too.

PoignardAzur 8 Jan 2024 9:53 UTC
1 point
−2
on: A case for AI alignment being difficult
This seems to have generated lots of internal discussions, and that’s cool on its own.

However, I also get the impression this article is intended as external communication, or at least a prototype of something that might become external communication; I’m pretty sure it would be terrible at that. It uses lots of jargon, overly precise language, references to other alignment articles, etc. I’ve tried to read it three times over the week and gave up after the third.

PoignardAzur 29 Dec 2023 10:31 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Valentine’s comment on: The Dark Arts

I think I’m missing something obvious, or I’m missing some information. Why is this clearly ridiculous?

Nuclear triad aside, there’s the fact that the Arctic is more than 1000 miles away from the nearest US land (about 1700 miles away from Montana, 3000 miles away from Texas), that Siberia is already roughly as close.

And of course, the fact the Arctic is made of, well, ice, that melts more and more as the climate warms, and thus not the best place to build a missile base on.

Even without familiarity with nuclear politics, the distance part can be checked in less than 2 minutes on Google Map; if you have access to an internet connection and judges that penalize blatant falsehoods like “they can hit us from the Arctic”, you absolutely wreck your adversary with some quick checking.

Of course, in a lot of debate formats you’re not allowed the two minutes it would take to do a google map check.

PoignardAzur 3 Dec 2023 21:55 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: lc’s comment on: Sharing Information About Nonlinear
Yeah, stumbling on this after the fact, I’m a bit surprised that among the 300+ comments barely anybody is explicitly pointing this out:

I think of myself as playing the role of a wise old mentor who has had lots of experience, telling stories to the young adventurers, trying to toughen them up, somewhat similar to how Prof Quirrell[8] toughens up the students in HPMOR through teaching them Defense Against the Dark Arts, to deal with real monsters in the world.

I mean… that’s a huge, obvious red flag, right? People shouldn’t claim Voldemort as a role model unless they’re a massive edgelord. Quirrell/Voldemort in that story is “toughening up” the students to exploit them; he teaches them to be footsoldiers, not freedom fighters or critical thinkers (Harry is the one who does that) because he’s grooming them to be the army of his future fascist government. This is not subtext, it’s in the text.

HPMOR’s Quirrell might be the EA’s Rick Sanchez.

PoignardAzur 11 Nov 2023 14:37 UTC
7 points
2
on: Peacewagers so Far
I’ve just watched Disney’s Strange Worlds which explicitly features a cohabitive game in its plot called Primal Outpost.

The rules aren’t really shown, we just know that it’s played with terrain tiles, there are monsters, and the goal is ultimately to create a sustainable ecosystem. The concept honestly looked really cool, but the movie underperformed, so I don’t think we’re going to see a tie-in game, unfortunately.

But it shows that the basic idea of a cohabitative game is more appealing that you might think!

(No but seriously, if anyone knows of a Primal Outpost knock-off, I need to know about it.)

PoignardAzur 7 Nov 2023 15:31 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Chris Land’s comment on: Deception Chess: Game #1
I get an “Oops! You don’t have access to this page” error.

PoignardAzur 12 Oct 2023 13:46 UTC
6 points
3
on: Inside Views, Impostor Syndrome, and the Great LARP
This makes a lot of sense to me and helps me articulate things I’ve thought for a while. (Which, you know, is the shit I come to LessWrong for, so big thumbs up!)

One of the first times I had this realization was in one of my first professional experiences. This was the first time in my life where I was in a team that wasn’t just LARPing a set of objectives, but actually trying to achieve them.

They weren’t impressively competent, or especially efficient, or even especially good at their job. The objectives weren’t especially ambitious: it was a long-running project in its final year, and everybody was just trying to ship the best product they could, where the difference between “best they could” and “mediocre” wasn’t huge.

But everyone was taking the thing seriously. People in the team were communicating about their difficulties, and anticipating problems ahead of time. Managers considered trade-offs. Developers tried to consider the UX that end-users would face.

Thinking about it, I’m realizing that knowing what you’re doing isn’t the same as being super good at your job, even if the two are strongly correlated. What struck me about this team wasn’t that they were the most competent people I ever worked with (that would probably be my current job), it’s that they didn’t feel like they were pretending to be trying to achieve their objectives (again, unlike my current job).

PoignardAzur 12 Oct 2023 13:25 UTC
4 points
1
in reply to: aysja’s comment on: Inside Views, Impostor Syndrome, and the Great LARP

And sometimes people will say things to me like “capitalism ruined my twenties” and I have a similarly eerie feeling about, like it’s a gestalt slapped together

Ugh, that one annoys me so much. Capitalism is a word so loaded it has basically lost all meaning.

Like, people will say things like “slavery is inextricably linked to capitalism” and I’m thinking, hey genius, slavery existed in tribal civilizations that didn’t even have the concept of money, what do you think capitalism even is?

(Same thing for patriarchy.)

PoignardAzur 12 Oct 2023 13:19 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Slider’s comment on: Yes Requires the Possibility of No
Anecdotally, I’ve had friends who explicitly asked for an honest answer to these kinds of questions, and if given a positive answer would tell me “but you’d tell me if it was negative, right?”… and still, when given a negative answer, would absolutely take it as a personal attack and get angry.

Obviously those friendships were hard to maintain.

Often when people say they want an honest answer, what they mean is “I want you to say something positive and also mean it”, they’re not asking for something actionable.

PoignardAzur 12 Oct 2023 13:15 UTC
0 points
−2
on: Yes Requires the Possibility of No
And that, kids, is why nobody wants to date or be friends with a rationalist.

PoignardAzur 10 Oct 2023 14:58 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: aphyer’s comment on: Peacewagers so Far
I meant “get players to cooperate within a cooperative-game-with-prisoners-dilemmas”, yes.

PoignardAzur 10 Oct 2023 10:30 UTC
3 points
0
on: Peacewagers so Far
So imagine how much richer expressions of character could be if you had this whole other dimension of gameplay design to work with. That would be cohabitive.

4X games and engine-building games have a lot of that. For instance, in Terraforming Mars, your starting corporations will have different start bonuses that radically shape your strategy throughout the entire game. In a 4X game, you might have a faction with very cheap military production that will focus on zerg-rushing other players; and a faction with research bonuses that will focus more on long-term growth.

Even in a MostPointsWin system, these differences can make different factions with very different “personalities” in both gameplay and lore.

Actually, I feel like a lot of engine-building systems could go from MostPointsWin to cooperation by just adding some objectives. Eg you could make Terraforming Mars cooperative just by adding objectives like “Create at least X space projects”, “Reach oxygen level Y”, “Have at least Z trees on the planet” and having each player pick one. Which is basically what the video game Terraformers did (since it’s a single-player game, MostPointsWin can’t work).

Some other game designs elements:
- One easy way to get players to cooperate is to give them a common loss condition. You mention having a Moloch player, which can be pretty cool (asymetric gameplay is always fun), but it can be environmental. Something like “everyone must donate at least X coals per turn to the communal furnace, else everyone freezes to death”, or the opposite, “every coal burned contributes to global warming, past a certain cap everybody loses”.
- Like you say, binary win/lose conditions can be more compelling than “get as many points as possible”. (I think this is a major reason the MostPointsWin systems are so common.) You can easily get from one to the other by having eg “medals” where you get gold medal for getting 20 points, silver medal for getting 15 points, etc. Or with custom objectives, The Emperor’s gold medal is having 12 tiles, the silver medal is having 8 tiles, etc, while The Druid’s gold medal is preserving at least 8 trees, silver is 6 trees, etc.

PoignardAzur 10 Oct 2023 10:17 UTC
4 points
1
on: Peacewagers so Far
Here’s a cooperation game people haven’t mentioned yet: Galerapagos.

The base idea is: you’re all stuck on a desert island, Robinson Crusoe style. You need to escape before the island’s volcano erupts. The aesthetics are loosely inspired by Koh Lanta, the French equivalent of Survivor.

Each player can do a certain number of actions, namely fish, collect water, help build an escape raft, and scavenge for materials. Each player has an individual inventory.

While it’s possible for everyone to escape alive, there’s some incentives to defect from the group (eg keep your own stash of food while other players starve to death). From what I heard the “tragedy of the commons” elements really start to matter when you have a large (>6) number of players.

PoignardAzur 7 Oct 2023 11:32 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: So8res’s comment on: Related Discussion from Thomas Kwa’s MIRI Research Experience

Perhaps I’m being dense, and some additional kernel of doubt is being asked of me here. If so, I’d appreciate attempts to spell it out like I’m a total idiot.

I don’t know if “dense” is the word I use, but yeah, I think you missed my point.

My ELI5 would be “You’re still assuming the problem was ‘Kurt didn’t know how to use a pump’ and not ‘there was something wrong with your pump’”.

I don’t want to speculate too much beyond that eg about the discretionary budget stuff.

Thanks again! (I have read that book, and made changes on account of it that I also file under partial-successes.)

Happy to hear that!