query

Karma: 288

query 14 Mar 2018 0:15 UTC
39 points
on: Caring less
If you choose to “care more” about something, and as a result other things get less of your energy, you are socially less liable for the outcome than if you intentionally choose to “care less” about a thing directly. For instance, “I’ve been really busy” is a common and somewhat socially acceptable excuse for not spending time with someone; “I chose to care less about you” is not. So even if your one and only goal was to spend less time on X, it may be more socially acceptable to do that by adding Y as cover.
Social excusability is often reused as internal excusability.

query 19 Nov 2015 20:14 UTC
28 points
on: Marketing Rationality
I have not a clue whether this sort of marketing is a good idea. Let me be clear what I mean: I think there’s maybe a 30-40% chance that Gleb is having a net positive impact through these outreach efforts. I also think there’s maybe a 10-20% chance that he’s having a horrific long-term negative impact through these outreach efforts. Thus the whole thing makes me uncomfortable.

So here’s some of the concerns I see; I’ve gone to some effort to be fair to Gleb, and not assume anything about his thoughts or motivations:
- By presenting these ideas in weakened forms (either by giving short or invalid argumentation, or putting it in venues or contexts with negative associations), he may be memetically immunizing people against the stronger forms of the ideas.
- By teaching people using arguments from authority, he may be worsening the primary “sanity waterline” issues rather than improving them. The articles, materials, and comments I’ve seen make heavy use of language like “science-based”, “research-based” and “expert”. The people reading these articles in general have little or no skill at evaluating such claims, so that they effectively become arguments from authority. By rhetorically convincing them to adopt the techniques or thoughts, he’s spreading quite possibly helpful ideas, but reinforcing bad habits around accepting ideas.
- Gleb’s writing style strikes me as very unauthentic feeling. Let me be clear I don’t mean to accuse him of anything negative; but I intuitively feel a very negative reaction to his writing. It triggers emotional signals in me of attempted deception and rhetorical tricks (whether or not this is his intent!) His writing risks associating “rationality” with such signals (should other people share my reactions) and again causing immunization, or even catalyzing opposition.
An illustration of the nightmare scenario from such an outreach effort would be that, 3 years from now when I attempt to talk to someone about biases, they respond by saying “Oh god don’t give me that ‘6 weird tips’ bullshit about ‘rational thinking’, and spare me your godawful rhetoric, gtfo.”

Like I said at the start, I don’t know which way it swings, but those are my thoughts and concerns. I imagine they’re not new concerns to Gleb. I still have these concerns after reading all of the mitigating argumentation he has offered so far, and I’m not sure of a good way to collect evidence about this besides running absurdly large long-term “consumer” studies.

I do imagine he plans to continue his efforts, and thus we’ll find out eventually how this turns out.
What links here?

query 18 Jan 2018 4:33 UTC
26 points
on: An Apology is a Surrender
On equal and opposite advice: many more people want you to surrender to them than it is good for you to surrender to, and the world is full of people who will demand your apology (and make it seem socially mandatory) for things you do not or should not regret. Tread carefully with practicing surrender around people who will take advantage of it. Sometimes the apparent social need to apologize is due to a value/culture mismatch with your social group, and practicing minimal or non-internalized apologies is actually a good survival mechanic.
If you are high power, high status, low agreeableness, or inescapable to a certain set of people, and you often find yourself issuing non-apologies, then this may indicate blindspots (you’re doing things you don’t want to do without realizing) or that your exercise of power/disregard of social reality is hurting others.
If you are already highly agreeable, you currently have low mana (https://www.lesserwrong.com/posts/39aKPedxHYEfusDWo/mana/), or you feel like you can’t escape a certain set of people who you need to apologize to, then internalizing apologies may be pushing in the wrong direction and overwriting your values with theirs.

query 19 Feb 2018 21:40 UTC
19 points
on: Circling
Upfront note: I’ve enjoyed the circling I’ve done.
One reason to be cautious of circling: dropping group punishment norms for certain types of manipulation is extremely harmful. From my experience of circling (which is limited to a CFAR workshop), it provides plausible cover for very powerful status grabs under the aegis of “(just) expressing feelings and experiences”; I think the strongest usual defense against this is actually group disapproval. If someone is able to express such a status grab without receiving overt disapproval, they have essentially succeeded unless everyone in the group truly is superhuman at later correcting for this. If mounting the obvious self-defense against the status grab is taken off the table, then you may just lose painfully unless you can out-do them.
Normalizing circling (or NVC) too much could lead to externalities, where this happens outside of an actual circling context. This could lead to people losing face who normally wouldn’t, along with arms races that turn an X community into a circling-skill community.
If people are allowed to fish sell you (https://www.lesserwrong.com/posts/aFyWFwGWBsP5DZbHF/circling#E9dqjhm8Ca3HkFRMZ), and walking away loses you social status, and other people look on expectantly for your answer as you are fish sold instead of saying “Stop, they don’t want to buy your fish”, then depending on the type of fish and what escape routes to other social circles you have available, you may be in a hellishly difficult situation.
Note that I think this is bad regardless of your personal skill at resisting social pressure. The social incentive landscape changing leads to worse outcomes for everyone, even if you can individually get better outcomes for yourself by better learning to resist social pressure. That better outcome may be moving to a different community instead of being continually downgraded in status, which is a worse outcome than the community never having that bad incentive landscape to begin with.

query 11 May 2018 1:34 UTC
15 points
on: Affordance Widths
Definitely makes sense. A commonly cited example is women in an office workplace; what would be average assertiveness for a male is considered “bitchy”, but they still suffer roughly the same “weak” penalties for non-assertiveness.
With the advice-giving aspect, some situations are likely coming from people not knowing what levers they’re actually pulling. Adam tells David to move his “assertiveness” lever, but there’s no affordance gap available for David by moving that lever—he would actually have to move an “assertiveness + social skill W” lever which he doesn’t have, but which feels like a single lever for Adam called “assertiveness”. Not all situations are such; there’s no “don’t be a woman” or “don’t be autistic lever”. Sometimes there’s some other solution by moving along a different dimension and sometimes there’s not.

query 12 Oct 2015 18:19 UTC
12 points
in reply to: Thomas’s comment on: Open thread, Oct. 12 - Oct. 18, 2015
Your question of “after finishing the supertask, what is the probability that 0 stays in place” doesn’t yet parse as a question in ZFC, because you haven’t specified what is meant by “after finishing the supertask”. You need to formalize this notion before we can say anything about it.

If you’re saying that there is no formalization you know of that makes sense in ZFC, then that’s fine, but that’s not necessarily a strike against ZFC unless you have a competitive alternative you’re offering. The problem could just be that it’s an ill-defined concept to begin with, or you just haven’t found a good formalization. Just because your brain says “that sounds like it make sense”, doesn’t mean it actually makes sense.

To show that ZFC is inconsistent, you would need to display a formal contradiction deduced from the ZFC axioms. “I can’t write down a formalization of this natural sounding concept” isn’t a formal contradiction; the failure is at the modeling step, not inside the logical calculus.

query 30 Mar 2018 18:30 UTC
9 points
0
on: Hufflepuff Cynicism on Hypocrisy
As you say, there are certainly negative things that hypocrisy can be a signal of, but you recommend that we should just consider those things independently. I think trying to do this sounds really really hard. If we were perfect reasoners this wouldn’t be a problem; the anti-hypocrisy norm should indeed just be the sum of those hidden signals. However, we’re not; if you practice shutting down your automatic anti-hypocrisy norm, and replace it with a self-constructed non-automatic consideration of alternatives, then I think you’ll do worse sometimes.
This has sort of a “valley of bad rationality” feel to me; I imagine trying to have legible, coherent thoughts about alternative considerations while ignoring my gut anti-hypocrisy instinct, and that reliably failing me in social situations where I should’ve just gone with my instinct.
I notice the argument I’m making applies generally to all “override social instinct” suggestions, and I think that you should sometimes try to override your social instincts—but I do think that there’s huge valleys of bad rationality near to this, so I’d take extreme care about it. My guess is I think you should override them much less than you do—or I have a different sense of what “overriding” is.
What links here?
- Hufflepuff Cynicism on Hypocrisy by abramdemski (29 Mar 2018 21:01 UTC; 21 points)

query 28 Feb 2018 17:31 UTC
8 points
in reply to: FireItself’s comment on: Circling
I think it’s a memetic adaptation type thing. I would claim that attempting to open up the group usage of NVC will also (in a large enough group) open up the usage of “language-that-appears-NVCish-even-if-against-the-stated-philosophy”. I think that this type of language provides cover for power plays (re: the broken link to the fish selling scenario), and that using the language in a way that maintains boundaries requires the group to adapt and be skillful enough at detecting these violations. It is not enough if you do so as an individual if your group does not lend support; it may be enough if as an individual you are highly skilled at defending yourself in a way that does not lose face (and practicing NVC might raise that skill level), but it’s harder than in the alternative scenario.
I’m definitely not trying to object to NVC in general, but I’m worried about it as a large social group style. I think the failures of it as a large group style would mostly appear as relatively silent status transfers to the less virtuous.
Also, these arguments are not super specific to NVC and Circling, so should probably be abstracted. I think any large scale group communication change has similar bad potential, and it’s an object level question whether that actually happens. With NVC, I’ve seen some such dynamics in churches that remind me of it, hence why I raise the worry. I think I would feel queasy and like I was being attacked if someone started using NVC language at me in a public setting in front of others; I definitely feel like I’ve been “fish-sold” before.
It’s entirely possible that there exist large groups with a high enough skill level or different values so that this is not a problem at all, and my experience is just too limited.

query 15 Feb 2018 6:33 UTC
8 points
in reply to: cousin_it’s comment on: Hufflepuff Cynicism on Crocker’s Rule
“Complaining about your trade partners” at the level of making trade decisions is clearly absurd (a type error). “Complaining about your trade partners” at the level of calling them out, suggesting in an annoyed voice they behave differently, looking miffed, and otherwise attempting to impose costs on them (as object level actions inside of an ongoing trade/interaction which you both are agreeing to) is not. These are sometimes the mechanism via which things of value are traded or negotiations are made, and may be preferred by both parties to ceasing the interaction.

query 18 Jul 2015 22:33 UTC
8 points
on: List of Fully General Counterarguments
I think it would be good to separate the analysis into FGCA’s which are always fallacious, versus those that are only warning signs/rude. For instance, the fallacy of grey is indeed a fallacy, so using it as a counter-argument is a wrong move regardless of its generality.

However, it may in fact be that your opponent is a very clever arguer or that the evidence they present you has been highly filtered. Conversationally, using these as a counter-argument is considered rude (and rightly so), and the temptation to use them is often a good internal warning sign; however you don’t want to drop consideration of them from your mental calculus. For instance, perhaps you should be motivated after the conversation to investigate alternative evidence if you’re suspicious that the evidence presented to you was highly filtered.

query 22 May 2015 15:40 UTC
8 points
0
in reply to: Mark_Friedenbach’s comment on: Leaving LessWrong for a more rational life
What type of evidence would make you think it’s more likely that a self-modifying AGI could “break out of the box”?

I want to understand your resistance to thought-experiments. Are all thought-experiments detached from reality in your book? Are all analogies detached from reality? Would you ever feel like you understood something better and thus change your views because of an analogy or story? How could something like http://lesswrong.com/lw/qk/that_alien_message/ be different in a way that you would theoretically find persuasive?

Perhaps you’re saying that people’s confidence is too strong just based on analogy?

I was going to try and address your comment directly, but thought it’d be a good idea to sort that out first, because of course there are no studies of how AGI behave.

query 19 May 2015 16:42 UTC
8 points
in reply to: Gunnar_Zarncke’s comment on: We Should Introduce Ourselves Differently
Several people I’ve tried to introduce the site to have been turned off at the title: they interpreted “Less Wrong” to mean something akin to “We are a community of arrogant internet atheists who are Less Wrong than all of those stupid people”.

I believe the potshots at religion in major articles also fed into this view for at least one person; he was interested in some of the articles, but used those potshots and selected comments to argue that the community was terrible. He now is interested in many of the ideas, but is semi-actively opposed to the community (e.g. he’ll say derogatory things about it if it’s brought up.)

In it’s current form, I think the site is dangerous to share with anyone who is (a) religious or sensitive to poking fun at religion, or (b) cynical with regard to “atheist communities” which is what LessWrong is at risk of pattern matching as. I’d love to have a good resource for sharing rationality with those friends, although for some of them the well of “rationality” is poisoned by their negative associations with Less Wrong.

query 27 Feb 2018 20:10 UTC
7 points
in reply to: Dr. Jamchie’s comment on: Mythic Mode
This is incorrect and I think only sounds like an argument because of the language you’re choosing; there’s nothing incoherent about 1. preferring evolutionary pressures that look like Moloch to exist so that you end up existing rather than not existing, and 2. wanting to solve Moloch-like problems now that you exist.
Also, there’s nothing incoherent about wanting to solve Moloch-like problems now that you exist regardless of Moloch-like things causing you to come into existence. Our values are not evolution’s values, if that even makes sense.

query 13 Nov 2015 15:28 UTC
7 points
on: Reflexive self-processing is literally infinitely simpler than a many world interpretation
I disagree with your conclusion. Specifically, I disagree that

This is, literally, infinitely more parsimonious than the many worlds theory

You’re reasoning isn’t tight enough to have confidence answering questions like these. Specifically,
- What do you mean by “simpler”?
- Specifically how does physics “take into account the entire state of the universe”?
In order to actually say anything like the second that’s consistent with observations, I expect your physical laws become much less simple (re: Bell’s theorem implying non-locality, maybe, see Scott Aaronson’s blog.)

A basic error you’re making is equating simplicity of physical laws with small ontology. For instance, Google just told me there’s ~10^80 atoms in the observable universe (+- a few orders of magnitude), but this is no blow against the atomic theory of matter. You can formalize this interplay via “minimum message length” for a finite, fully described system; check Wikipedia for details.

Even though MWI implies a large ontology, it’s just a certain naive interpretation of our current local description of quantum mechanics. It’s hard to see how there could be a global description that is simpler, though I’d be interested to see one. (Here local/global mean “dependent on things nearby” vs “dependent on things far away”, which of course is assuming that ontology.)

With all kindness, the strength of your conclusion is far out of scope with the argument you’ve made. The linked paper looks like nonsense to me. I would recommend studying some basic textbook math and physics if you’re truly interested in this subject, although be prepared for a long and humbling journey.

query 30 Apr 2018 5:26 UTC
6 points
on: Does Thinking Hard Hurt Your Brain?
I perceive several different ways something like this happens to me:
1. If I do something that strains my working memory, I’ll have an experience of having a “cache miss”. I’ll reach for something, and it won’t be there; I’ll then attempt to pull it into memory again, but usually this is while trying to “juggle too many balls”, and something else will often slip out. This feels like it requires effort/energy to keep going, and I have a desire to stop and relax and let my brain “fuzz over”. Eventually I’ll get a handle on an abstraction, verbal loop, or image that lets me hold it all at once.
2. If I am attempting to force something creative, I might feel like I’m paying close attention to “where the creative thing should pop up”. This is often accompanied with frustration and anxiety, and I’ll feel like my mind is otherwise more blank than normal as I keep an anxious eye out for the creative idea that should pop up. This is a “nothing is getting past the filter” problem; too much prune and not enough babble for the assigned task. (Not to say that always means you should babble more; maybe you shouldn’t try this task, or shouldn’t do it in the social context that’s causing you to rightfully prune.)
3. Things can just feel generally aversive or boring. I can push through this by rehearsing convincing evidence that I should do the thing—this can temporarily lighten the aversion.
All 3 of these can eventually lead to head pain/fogginess for me.
I think this “difficulty thinking” feeling is a mix of cognitive ability, subject domain, emotional orientation, and probably other stuff. Mechanically having less short-term memory makes #1 more salient whatever you’re doing. Some people probably have more mechanical”spark” or creative intelligence in certain ways, affecting #2. Having less domain expertise makes #1 and maybe #2 more salient since you have less abstractions and raw material to work with. Lottery of interests, social climate, and any pre-made aversions like having a bad teacher for a subject will factor into #3. Sleep deprivation worsens #1 and #2, but improves #3 for me (since other distractions are less salient).
I think this phenomenon is INSANELY IMPORTANT; when you see people who are a factor of 10x or 100x more productive in an area, I think it’s almost certainly because they’ve gotten past all of the necessary thresholds to not have any fog or mechanical impediment to thinking in that area. There is a large genetic component here, but to focus on things that might be changeable to improve these areas:
- Using paper or software when it can be helpful.
- Working in areas you find natively interesting or fun. Alternatively, framing an area so that it feels more natively interesting or fun (although that seems really really hard). Finding subareas that are more natively fun to start with and expand from; for instance, when learning about programming, trying out some different languages to see which you enjoy most. It’ll be easier to learn necessary things about one you dislike after you’ve learned a lot in the framework of one you like.
- Getting into a social context that gives you consistent recognition for doing your work. This can be a chicken and egg problem in competitive areas.
- Eliminating unrelated stressors, setting up a life that makes you happier and more fulfilled; I had worse brain fog about math when in bad relationships.
- Eating different food. There’s too many potential dietary interventions to list (many contradictory); I had a huge improvement from avoiding anything remotely in the “junk food” category and trying to eat things that are in the “whole food” category.
- Exercise
- Stimulant drugs for some people; if you have undiagnosed ADHD, try to get diagnosed and medicated.
I really wish I had spent more time in the past working on these meta problems, instead of beating my head against a wall of brain fog.

query 9 Apr 2018 23:13 UTC
6 points
in reply to: ryan_b’s comment on: Is Rhetoric Worth Learning?
I think you’re looking for Thurston’s “On proof and progress in mathematics”: https://arxiv.org/abs/math/9404236

query 24 Feb 2018 21:52 UTC
6 points
in reply to: MalcolmOcean’s comment on: Mythic Mode
I’m not an expert, but I think MD5 isn’t the best for this purpose due to collision attacks. If it’s a very small plain-english ASCII message, then collision attacks are probably not a worry (I think?), but it’s probably better to use something like SHA-2 or SHA-3 anyways.

query 7 Feb 2018 19:54 UTC
6 points
on: Two Coordination Styles
A potential explanation I think is implicit in Ziz’s writing: the software for doing coordination within ourselves and externally is reused. External pressures can shape your software to be of a certain form; for instance, culture can write itself into people so that they find some ideas/patterns basically unthinkable.
So, one possibility is that fusion is indeed superior for self-coordination, but requires a software change that is difficult to make and can have significant costs to your ability to engage in treaties externally. Increased Mana allows you to offset some of the costs, but not all; some interactions are just pretty direct attempts to check that you’ve installed the appropriate mental malware.

query 6 Jan 2018 19:24 UTC
6 points
on: Rationality: Abridged
This is completely awesome, thanks for doing this. This is something I can imagine actually sending to semi-interested friends.
Direct messaging seems to be wonky at the moment, so I’ll put a suggested correction here: for 2.4, Aumann’s Agreement Theorem does not show that if two people disagree, at least one of them is doing something wrong. From wikipedia: ” if two people are genuine Bayesian rationalists with common priors, and if they each have common knowledge of their individual posterior probabilities, then their posteriors must be equal. ” This could fail at multiple steps, off the top of my head:
1. The humans might not be (mathematically pure) Bayesian rationalists (and in fact they’re not.)
2. The humans might not have common priors (even if they satisfied 1.)
3. The humans might not have common knowledge of their posterior probabilities; a human saying words is a signal, not direct knowledge, so them telling you their posterior probabilities may not do the trick (and they might not know them.)
You could say failing to satisfy 1-3 means that at least one of them is “doing something wrong”, but I think it’s a misleading stretch—failing to be normatively matched up to an arbitrary unobtainable mathematical structure is not what we usually call wrong. It stuck out to me as something that would put off readers with a bullshit detector, so I think it’d be worth fixing.

query 21 Dec 2017 2:36 UTC
6 points
on: Mana
I found this extremely helpful; it motivated me to go read your entire blog history. I hope you write more; I think the “dark side” is a concept I had only the rough edges of, but one that I unknowingly desired to understand better (and had seen the hints of in other’s writing around the community.) I feel like the similarly named “dark arts” may have been an occluding red herring.
The more you shine the light of legibility, required defensibility and justification, public scrutiny of beliefs, social reality that people’s judgement might be flawed and they need to distrust themselves and have the virtue of changing their minds, the more those with low mana get their souls written into by social reality.
This is something I liked seeing written. This is a trade-off I don’t often see recognized by people around me; without recognizing this, communal pursuits can destroy and subsume the weaker people within them. As one who has had their soul partly killed in the past by the legibility requirements of people who were alien to me, I value this lesson and anything that helps people develop protective immunity.