quanticle

Trust Me I’m Ly­ing: A Sum­mary and Review

Slack Club

• quanticle 27 Sep 2019 3:22 UTC

  49 points

  on: Honor­ing Petrov Day on LessWrong, in 2019

  In a world where dangerous technology is widely available, the greatest risk is unilateralist action.

  What Stanislav Petrov did was just as unilateralist as any of the examples linked in the OP. We must remember that when he chose to disregard the missile alert (based off his own intuition regarding the geopolitics of the world), he was violating direct orders. Yes, in this case everything turned out great, but let’s think about the counterfactual scenario where the missile attack had been real. Stanislav Petrov would potentially have been on the hook for more deaths than Hitler and the utter destruction of his nation.

  A unilateral choice not to act is as much of a unilateral choice as a unilateral choice to act.

  What links here?

  • Ruby's comment on Honor­ing Petrov Day on LessWrong, in 2019 by Ben Pace (27 Sep 2019 17:04 UTC; 23 points)

• quanticle 1 Jan 2020 6:18 UTC

  39 points

  in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Meta-dis­cus­sion from “Cir­cling as Cousin to Ra­tion­al­ity”

  One of the things I try to be careful of, as a rationalist, is to note when the “standard definitions” are importing connotations that go beyond the textual meaning of the word. In this case, like Said Achmiz, I’ve noticed that “authentic” and “authenticity” are often used as applause lights, serving to engender vaguely positive feelings in the mind of the person reading the text, without actually adding any data or predictions.

  Specifically, I’m pointing at the following paragraph:

  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.

  What are “authentic” and “authenticity” doing here? It seems to me that they could easily be replaced by “healthy” and “health”. And if they were, I think it would be entirely justified for someone less familiar with the context to ask what that word means to the person writing here.

  So let me put it plainly: what is an “authentic” relationship? How does one distinguish an authentic relationship from an inauthentic one? The text clearly states that an authentic relationship can still include “distance and walls and politeness and flexible preferences”. So given that inauthentic relationships can also be characterized as including those very same elements, what sorts of distances, walls, politeness and flexible preferences distinguish an authentic relationship from an inauthentic one?

• quanticle 14 Nov 2019 2:21 UTC

  34 points

  on: In­stant stone (just add wa­ter!)

  Rebar has one fatal flaw: rust. As water permeates into the concrete, the rebar inside rusts. The iron expands as it rusts, which tends to burst the concrete open from the inside, a phenomenon known as concrete cancer. However, recently researchers have built a pair of bridges using glass and carbon-fiber rebar, in an attempt to make a building material that has the strength of reinforced concrete with the durability of plain concrete.

• quanticle 23 Jul 2019 14:18 UTC

  34 points

  in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: The Real Rules Have No Exceptions

  Paul Scharre, in his excellent book about the application of AI to military technology, Army of None, has an anecdote which I think is relevant. In the book, he talks about leading a patrol up an Afghan hillside. As he and the troops under his command ascend the hillside, they’re spotted by a farmer. Realizing that they’ve been spotted, the patrol hunkers down and awaits the inevitable attack by Afghan insurgent forces. However, before the attackers arrive, something unexpected happens. A little girl, about 5 or 6 years of age, comes up to the position, with some goats and a radio. She reports the details of the Americans’ deployment to the attacking insurgents and departs. Shortly thereafter, the insurgent attack begins in earnest, and results in the Americans being driven off the hillside.

  After the failed patrol, Scharre’s troop held an after-action briefing where they discussed what they might have done differently. Among the things they discussed was potentially detaining the little girl, or at least relieving her of her radio so as to limit the information being passed back to the attackers. However, at no point, did anyone suggest the alternative of shooting the girl, even though they would have been perfectly justified, under the laws of war and rules of engagement, in doing so. Under the laws of war, anyone who acts like a soldier is a soldier, and this includes 5-year-old-girls conducting reconnaissance for insurgents. However, everyone understood, on a visceral level, that there was a difference between permissible and correct and that the choice of shooting the girl, while permissible, was morally abhorrent to the point where it was discarded at an unconscious level.

  That said, no one in the troop also said, “Okay, well, we need to amend our rules of engagement to say, ‘Shooting at people conducting reconnaissance is permissible… except when the person is a cute little 5-year-old-girl.’” Everyone recognized, again, at an unconscious level, that there was value to having a legible rule “Shooting at people behaving in a soldierly manner is acceptable,” with illegible exceptions (“Except when that person is a 5-year-old girl leading goats”). The drafters of rules cannot anticipate every circumstance in which the rule might be applied, and thus having some leeway about the specific obligations (while making the intent of the rule clear) is valuable insofar as it allows people to take actions without being paralyzed by doubt. This applies as much to rules governing as an organization as it does to rules that you make for yourself.

  The application to AI is, I hope, obvious. (Unfriendly) AIs don’t make a distinction between permissible and correct. Anything that is permissible is an option that can be taken, if it furthers the AI’s objective. Given that, I would summarize your point about having illegible exceptions as, “You are not an unfriendly AI. Don’t act like one.”

• quanticle 28 Sep 2019 7:24 UTC

  33 points

  in reply to: Aiyen’s comment on: Honor­ing Petrov Day on LessWrong, in 2019

  If you will not honor literally saving the world, what will you honor?

  I find it extremely troubling that we’re honoring someone defecting against their side in a matter as serious as global nuclear war, merely because in this case, the outcome happened to be good.

  (but deterrence would have helped no one if he had launched)

  That is exactly the crux of my disagreement. We act as if there were a direct lever between Petrov and the keys and buttons that launch a retaliatory counterstrike. But there wasn’t. There were other people in the chain of command. There were other sensors. Do we really find it that difficult to believe that the Soviets would not have attempted to verify Petrov’s claim before retaliating? That there would not have been practiced procedures to carry out this verification? From what I’ve read of the Soviet Union, their systems of positive control were far ahead of the United States’ as a result of the much lower level of trust the Soviet Politburo had in their military. I find it exceedingly unlikely that the Soviets would have launched without conducting at least some kind of verification with a secondary system. They knew the consequences of nuclear attack just as well as we did.

  In that context, Petrov’s actions are far less justifiable. He threw away all of the procedures and training that he had… for a hunch. While everything did turn out okay in this instance, it’s certainly not a mode of behavior I’d want to see established as a precedent. As I said above: Petrov’s actions were just as unilateralist as the people releasing the GPT-2 models, and I find it discomfiting that a holiday opposing that sort of unilateral action is named after someone who, arguably, was maximally unilateralist in his thinking.

• quanticle 8 Mar 2020 5:20 UTC

  32 points

  on: Win­ning vs Truth – In­fo­haz­ard Trade-Offs

  I think the notion of “winning” and “truth” being opposed has been addressed by Doublethink (Choosing To Be Biased). As Eliezer puts it so well:

  There is no second-order rationality. There is only a blind leap into what may or may not be a flaming lava pit. Once you know, it will be too late for blindness.

The Na­tional Se­cu­rity Com­mis­sion on Ar­tifi­cial In­tel­li­gence Wants You (to sub­mit es­says and ar­ti­cles on the fu­ture of gov­ern­ment AI policy)

• quanticle 8 Apr 2023 3:05 UTC

  30 points

  21

  on: Con­sider The Hand Axe

  I’m the idiot holding the hand axe. I’m the imbecile mangling my shins with rock debris. Why bother?

  Because no matter how obsolete hand axes or hand-forged iron spoons, or hand-built CPUs are, it’s still cool to make one yourself.

• quanticle 20 Aug 2018 3:14 UTC

  30 points

  on: A fu­ture for neuroscience

  I agree that connectome-specific harmonic wave theory is elegant. I think that it has the potential to unlock some interesting insights about how brains work. I think it definitely deserves more study and research from neuroscientists. But to suggest that all psychologists and psychiatrists should stop what they’re doing and focus on CSHW is incorrect, even if CSHW is actually true. It would be like suggesting that all programmers stop what they’re doing and pay attention every time physicists figure out a new transistor theory. Yes, this new theory may revolutionize how neuroscientists see how the brain conducts certain operations, but psychologists and psychiatrists operate at a much higher level of abstraction than that.

  While you have given some instances of how this understanding might affect our higher-level-of-abstraction models of the brain, it’s important to note that all of these are pure speculation. Harmonics might indicate the level of pleasantness of an experience or sensation, or they might not. Adjusting one’s connectome harmonics to be different might eliminate mental illness or it might not. The history of psychological research and mental illness treatment is rife with new paradigms which have either turned out to be completely useless in modeling disease or of significantly more limited utility than what they were initially advertised to be. At this stage, therefore, it’s not worth getting excited over CSHW, because it might be yet another thing that looks good on a conference poster, but then doesn’t work in clinical trials. Or, worse yet, it might be a thing that looks good on research posters, leads to limited success in clinical trials, and then is found to be of little or no effect when the replication study is done.

  My advice for psychologists and psychiatrists would be to ignore this. Ignore it completely. When a form of treatment based upon CSHW is developed or proposed, investigate it. Then replicate the investigation. Then, take the treatment into clinical practice. But CSHW itself? You need to know about it about as much as a programmer needs to know transistor physics.

• quanticle 12 Feb 2018 9:33 UTC

  29 points

  on: “Just Suffer Un­til It Passes”

  In the spirit of reversing any advice you hear I would also suggest that sometimes, just waiting and suffering out the problem is a really counterproductive strategy. For example, recently, I had a pretty severe cold, with a fever and a hacking cough that would leave me debilitated for minutes. Now, I could have just laid in bed and suffered through it. And indeed, I did, for a day or so. But when the cold didn’t pass on its own, I found that it was way more productive for me to address the symptoms with cough drops, tea, hot soup, and acetaminophen than it was for me to simply wait and try to wait for the problem to go away on its own.

  In the same fashion, I find that when I’m in a really bad place, in terms of mental health, trying to suffer through it is often the worst strategy. I use up a ton of willpower forcing myself to not get distracted, which then leaves me feeling drained and unproductive the next day, starting the cycle all over again. I’ve found that sometimes it’s acceptable to have a low productivity day, if you acknowledge to yourself that today will be a low productivity day (or heck, even an entire low-productivity weekend), and then you “reset” and get back into your normal groove the next day.

  So what’s my advice? I’m not entirely sure. I think I would say that the most helpful thing for me to do has been to set time limits. Try to tough it out for X hours, but after that, rather than grinding one’s willpower into a nub trying to brute-force past a problem, accept that the problem will not be solved today. Sometimes, the root cause is insoluble (as was the case with my cold) and the best strategy is to address the symptoms as best as you’re able until the root cause resolves itself.

• quanticle 16 Apr 2023 5:47 UTC

  28 points

  30

  in reply to: RobertM’s comment on: Moder­a­tion notes re: re­cent Said/​Dun­can threads

  For what it’s worth, I had a very similar reaction to yours. Insects and arthropods are a common source of disgust and revulsion, and so comparing anyone to an insect or an arthropod, to me, shows that you’re trying to indicate that this person is either disgusting or repulsive.

• quanticle 3 Mar 2023 6:45 UTC

  28 points

  −26

  on: The Parable of the King and the Ran­dom Process

  This is similar to a scenario described by Michael Lewis, in The Big Short. In Lewis’ telling, Michael Burry noticed that there was a company (Liberty Interactive, if I remember correctly), that was in legal trouble. This legal trouble was fairly serious—it might have resulted in the liquidation of the company. However, if the company came through the legal trouble, it had good cash flow and was a decent investment.

  Burry noticed that the company was trading at a steep discount to what cash flow analysis would predict its share price to be. He realized that what was occurring was that there was one group of investors who were betting that the company would survive its legal troubles, and trade at a “high” price, and there was another group of investors who thought that the stock was going to go to zero because of the legal trouble the company found itself in. Burry read the legal filings himself, came to the conclusion that it was probable that the company would survive its brush with the law, and invested heavily in it. As it turn out, his prediction was proven correct, and he made a nice return.

  Burry’s position was a likely outcome. The short-sellers who thought that the stock would go to zero bet on another likely outcome. The only truly unlikely outcome is the one that the market, as a whole, was predicting when Burry made his investment. The price of the stock was an average of two viewpoints that, in a fundamental sense, could not be averaged. Either the company loses its court case, and the stock goes to zero. Or the company survives its court case (perhaps paying a fine in the process), and proceeds with business as usual. As a result, the current market price of the company is not a good guide to its long-term value, and it was possible, as Burry did, to beat the market.

• quanticle 1 Mar 2020 6:58 UTC

  28 points

  on: Cortés, Pizarro, and Afonso as Prece­dents for Takeover

  Another example in this vein is Robert Clive’s takeover of the Bengal Sultanate. As Nick Robins documents in The Corporation that Changed the World, Robert Clive was sent to Bengal by the British East India Company with the instruction to set up a modest trading outpost and specifically not engage in local politics or intrigue. So, of course, he intrigues with Mir Jafar, the commander in chief of the Nawab’s army and gets him to change sides (along with a large portion of the Nawab’s army) during the Battle of Plassey.

  The East India Company’s victory at the battle of Plassey resulted in immediate financial gain of £2,500,000 (now valued at over £250,000,000) for the Company, plus another £234,000 (now valued at £23,000,000) for Clive himself. Even more importantly, the EIC gained the right of diwani—the right to collect taxes on behalf of the Mughals in Bengal. This allowed them to establish themselves as a commercial monopoly over the Bengal textile industry (considered the best in the world at that time) and further entrench themselves as a commercial and military power in India. For good reason, the Battle of Plassey is seen as a key moment in the consolidation of the British Empire in India, even though it was fought by a private individual on behalf of a private corporation.

• quanticle 27 Dec 2019 9:03 UTC

  27 points

  on: Firm­ing Up Not-Ly­ing Around Its Edge-Cases Is Less Broadly Use­ful Than One Might Ini­tially Think

  Maybe I’m unusually honest—or possibly unusually bad at remembering when I’ve lied!?—but I’m not sure I even remember the last time I told an outright unambiguous lie. The kind of situation where I would need to do that just doesn’t come up that often.

  I would say that you should consider yourself fortunate then, that you are living in a situation where most of the people surrounding you have your best interests in mind (or, at worst, are neutral towards your interests). For others in more adversarial situations, telling lies (or at least shading the truth to the extent that would be considered lying by the standards of this post) is a necessary survival skill.

• quanticle 27 Sep 2019 5:16 UTC

  27 points

  in reply to: Matthew Barnett’s comment on: Honor­ing Petrov Day on LessWrong, in 2019

  Petrov’s choice was obviously the correct one in hindsight. What I’m questioning is whether Petrov’s choice was obviously correct in foresight. The rationality community takes as a given Petrov’s assertion that it was obviously silly for the United States to attack the Soviet Union with a single ICBM. Was that actually as silly as Petrov suggested? There were scenarios where small numbers of ICBMs were launched in a surprise attack against an unsuspecting adversary in order to kill leadership, and disrupt command and control systems. How confident was Petrov that this was not one of those scenarios?

  Another assumption that the community makes is that Petrov choosing to report the detection would have immediately resulted in a nuclear “counterattack” by the Soviet Union. But Petrov was not a launch authority. The decision to launch or not was not up to him, it was up to the Politburo of the Soviet Union. We have to remember that when he chose to lie about the detection, by calling it a computer glitch when he didn’t know for certain that it was one, Petrov was defecting against the system. He was deliberately feeding false data to his superiors, betting that his model of the world was more accurate than his commanders’. Is that the sort of behavior we really want to lionize?

• quanticle 21 Aug 2018 21:30 UTC

  27 points

  on: [Fea­ture Idea] Epistemic Status

  I would support this initiative on the condition that list of epistemic statuses is not freeform text. A list of confidence levels, plus options like “log” or “review” for opinion pieces would serve the original purpose of epistemic status—allowing an author to write confidently and forthrightly about conclusions while still indicating that they’re not 100% sure about those conclusions.

  Allowing freeform text, however, would lead to epistemic statuses like:

  • “Casual”

  • “political, opinionated, personal, all the typical caveats for controversial posts”

  • Whatever on earth this is

  We must remember that the original purpose of epistemic status was to increase the legibility of posts. The hope was that by introducing a standard set of words indicating confidence, one could quickly and easily share and compare the confidence that one had in their conclusions, facilitating the process of reaching agreement. Epistemic statuses, as they’re actually used in the community, are the opposite of that. Most of the time, I ignore them, because they don’t add to the content of the post, and just serve as a bonus field for the author to signal how witty and subversive they are.

  The introduction of an epistemic standard field for LessWrong posts represents a chance to reclaim the concept and reimplement it in the manner that it was originally meant to be. We should not squander this opportunity.

  Edit (2018-08-22): it turns out that one of my friends has an entire tumblr of non-epistemic epistemic statuses.

  What links here?

  • Raemon's comment on Ad­di­tional ar­gu­ments for NIMBY by Zvi (12 Oct 2018 20:47 UTC; 2 points)

An­nounc­ing Data Se­crets Lox: An Alter­na­tive to Slate Star Codex Open Threads

• quanticle 26 Sep 2022 5:27 UTC

  26 points

  0

  on: UI/​UX From the Dark Ages

  No, no, a thousand times no. This is a huge step backwards for UI. This is taking us back to the UI of old-school text adventure games, where I have to guess what specific words the inscrutable interpreter is looking for in order to do what I want it to do.

  I do not want the system to “do what I mean”, I want the system to do exactly what I tell it to do. In practice, every system that attempts to “do what the user means” ends up becoming an extremely janky command-line system with syntax that makes tcsh look sane.

  Instead of constantly chasing new interaction paradigms like novelty-addicted squirrels, I would much rather UI designers and developers spend time improving the performance and organization of existing systems.