Said Achmiz

The Real Rules Have No Exceptions

Selec­tive, Cor­rec­tive, Struc­tural: Three Ways of Mak­ing So­cial Sys­tems Work

His­tory of LessWrong: Some Data Graphics

• Said Achmiz 7 Dec 2018 7:31 UTC

  64 points

  in reply to: Qiaochu_Yuan’s comment on: Tran­shu­man­ism as Sim­plified Humanism

  Consider: “having food is good. Having more and tastier food is better. This is common sense. Transfoodism is the philosophy that we should take this common sense seriously, and have as much food as possible, as tasty as we can make it, even if doing so involves strange new technology.” But we tried that, and what happened was obesity, addiction, terrible things happening to our gut flora, etc. It is just blatantly false in general that having more of a good thing is better.

  Conclusion does not follow from example.

  You are making exactly the mistake which I described in detail (and again in the comments to this post). You’re conflating desirability with prudence.

  It is desirable to have as much food as possible, as tasty as we can make it. It may, however, not be prudent, because the costs make it a net loss. But if we could solve the problems you list—if we could cure and prevent obesity and addiction, if we could reverse and prevent damage to our gut flora—then of course having lots of tasty food would be great! (Or would it? Would other problems crop up? Perhaps they might! And what we would want to do then, is to solve those problems—because having lots of tasty food is still desirable.)

  So, in fact, your example shows nothing like what you say it shows. Your example is precisely a case where more of a good thing is better… though the costs, given current technology and scientific understanding, are too high to make it prudent to have as much of that good thing as we’d like.

  As for “common sense”: in many human societies it was “common sense” to own slaves, to beat your children, again etc. Today it’s “common sense” to circumcise male babies, to eat meat, to send people who commit petty crimes to jail, etc., to pick some examples of things that might be considered morally repugnant by future human societies. Common sense is mostly moral fashion, or if you prefer it’s mostly the memes that were most virulent when you were growing up, and it’s clearly unreliable as a guide to moral behavior in general.

  Now this does prove too much. Ok, so “common sense” can’t be trusted. Now what? Do we just discard everything it tells us? Reject all our moral intuitions?

  Yes, by all means let’s examine our intuitions, let us interrogate the output of our common sense. This is good!

  But sometimes, when we examine our intuitions and interrogate our common sense, we come up with the same answer that we got at first. We examine our intuitions, and find that actually, yeah, they’re exactly correct. We interrogate our common sense, and find that it passes muster.

  And that’s fine. Answers don’t have to be complex, surprising, or unintuitive. Sometimes, the obvious answer is the right one.

  That is Eliezer’s point.

• Said Achmiz 28 Oct 2021 4:33 UTC

  63 points

  on: They don’t make ’em like they used to

  Stoves may be a bad example, but there are plenty of things that they don’t make like they used to. Without even leaving the kitchen, we can give many examples:

  • Pyrex measuring cups. Formerly made from heat-resistant borosilicate, they are now made of lime glass—and therefore have a far greater chance of explosively shattering (and potentially inflicting serious injury on anyone nearby) when used with very hot liquids (especially ones with a high specific heat, like sugar syrups).

  • Cast-iron fry pans. Very old (70+ years) cast-iron cookware is prized on the secondary market, because it was sanded smooth (and thus could be more effectively seasoned, for a long-lasting non-stick surface); modern cast-iron cookware manufacturing skips this step, resulting in a (much less effective) pebbly surface. (And no, this is not explained by retail price reductions; the [inflation-adjusted] price of a cast-iron pan has not changed by more than ~2x since at least the 1940s.)

  • Heavy-duty aluminum cookware. Guardian Service brand cookware is also prized on the secondary market; nothing remotely like it is made anymore (for example, I once looked into purchasing a modern analogue of a ~1.5-qt. G.S. saucepan, to find that the currently available models have walls literally more than an order of magnitude thinner than the G.S. one; this makes them vastly inferior).

  • Food processors—specifically, the design of food processor feed tubes. Until ~15 years ago, the gold-standard consumer-grade food processor (the Cuisinart) used an extremely simple design of lid /​ feed tube /​ pusher assembly, which was very sturdy, very simple to operate, and very easy to clean. Then they (and every other manufacturer along with them) switched (due to, I believe, liability issues for certain quite implausible injury scenarios) to a new design that was dramatically inferior on practical every axis: much flimsier and more prone to breaking, much harder to clean, much more difficult to use.

  • Springform pans. Calphalon used to make a flawlessly designed, and very well-built, springform pan, which was manifestly superior in design to every other product in this category. Today, they still make that pan—but they have changed their manufacturing /​ QA process such that their new pans regularly rust and fall apart within months or weeks of use (the old version could easily last for decades). No other manufacturer makes a comparable product.

  • Potato mashers. Good luck getting a potato masher like this one today. Currently available models use an inferior design that is far less effective at its task.

  • Manual (rotary) can openers. (See also.)

  It is certainly true that “usually, we moved on for a reason.” The problem is that “we” often means “manufacturers of consumer products, whose goal is to maximize their profits, and who serve to fulfill the values of consumers only to the extent that it maximizes their profits”, and the reason often is “because the new, considerably worse, product is cheaper to manufacture and will sell just as well to uninformed (and deliberately misled) consumers, thus increasing profits”.

  The ideal is not a static state where everything lasts forever and nothing ever changes. Such a world is impossible and undesirable—even if we could create it, it would be stagnant. The ideal is a dynamic world of progress, of continual upgrading and renewal.

  Your ideal is not everyone’s.

  What links here?

  • Said Achmiz's comment on Re­cur­sive Mid­dle Man­ager Hell by Raemon (22 Jan 2024 3:30 UTC; 9 points)

• Said Achmiz 7 Jul 2019 9:22 UTC

  62 points

  0

  on: Steel­man­ning Divination

  This comment is going to seem unrelated or only tangentially related to the post, at first. I promise that it’s quite relevant, but explaining the relevance up-front would make the comment longer and more awkward.

  Open up an old-school Dungeons & Dragons rule book (like this this one), and one thing you’ll find a whole lot of is random tables.

  The idea was simple: your characters would encounter some situation; the Dungeon Master (DM) would roll some dice; then he’d consult a table, which would tell him what the outcome of the situation was, given the result of the die rolls.

  Here’s a table for diseases (or disorders)^[1]:

  

  If a player character contracted a disease, or developed a disorder (which, itself, would’ve been determined by some other die rolls), the DM would roll three dice: one (a d100) to determine the afflicted part of the body; one (a d8) for whether the affliction was acute or chronic; and a third (another d8) to determine severity. The table above indicated which values on each die corresponded to which outcome.

  Here’s a table for determining whether a previously undiscovered fortress or castle is inhabited, and by whom (or by what!)^[2]:

  

  Finally, here’s a table for determining what happens when two magical potions are mixed (or, when a character drinks them both)^[3]:

  

  Random tables fell out of favor, for a time.^[4] But they’ve been making somewhat of a comeback (along with many other features of “old-school” D&D—the so-called “Old-School Renaissance”). One sees discussions of random tables, now and then, on blogs and web forums dedicated to tabletop role-playing games. Often, people put together their own random tables.

  And—as with everything else—one sees arguments about them.

  Arguments for: These usually involve the word ‘fun’. Randomness is fun, we are told, and surprises are fun; and a random table can inspire a Dungeon Master, and suggest possibilities.

  Arguments against: Randomness, the critics say, does not make sense; and surprises are not fun. (Because—it is implied—they might be bad; or they are often bad; or they are usually bad.)

  Both sides miss the point entirely. Very few people—even among those who love a good random table—understand the tables’ nature, and their purpose. Without understanding, when people today try to construct random tables for use in their D&D games, they often find that something is missing—some ineffable quality that makes these modern imitations of the work of Gygax fail to have quite the same satisfying and enriching effect on the game as did the random tables in the D&D rule books of old.

  And that ‘something’ is that random tables are not about the mere fact of randomness.

  Here is what random tables really are: they are representations of a probability distribution across a set of outcomes. As such, they encode two critical things: first, what outcomes are possible; second, those outcomes’ relative frequency.

  And in consequence, here is something else that random tables are: they are models of the game world.

  Look again at that first table I presented (with the diseases and disorders). A character is exposed to disease; the DM rolls d100^[5]. On a roll of 1, 2, or 3, the character contracts an affliction of the blood; on a roll of 4, an illness of the bones; a roll of 5 signifies a nervous system disorder.

  But another way to look at this, is that blood-related disorders are 3 times more likely—and thus 3 times more common—than bone-related disorders (at least, among adventurers!).

  And the table has no entry for a disease of the lymphatic system. As a consequence, in this fictional world, no such illnesses exist (or, perhaps, they do not occur among the sorts of people that the player characters are).

  Similarly, the second table (with the castles) tells us that among small-sized strongholds found in wilderness regions, 45% are deserted entirely, 15% are infested with monsters, and the remaining 40% are occupied by civilized folk.

  When constructing, or choosing to use, a random table of outcomes, what you are doing is modeling the fictional world of the game. The relative frequency of the possible outcomes of the category of situation which is to be resolved by rolling on the table—and, no less importantly, which outcomes are present in the distribution at all, and which are not—are facts about that world.

  Now consider two random tables, for the same situation—let us say, two versions of the disease & disorder table given above. The first is as presented, while the second has all the same rows, but the distribution is altered: on this latter table, only a single number each (out of 100, on the d100) will yield any result but ‘skin’—to which the remaining 85 out of 100 numbers are now allocated.

  What are the consequences for using this latter table? Well, in a D&D game where the DM chooses to use it (in place of the original table), it is rare indeed for any character to fall ill with a disease of the respiratory system—but afflictions of the skin are terrifyingly commonplace. One hopes that the DM has a good explanation for this skew (perhaps the fictional world on which the action takes place lacks an ozone layer, resulting in a permanent epidemic of skin cancers); if not, the modeled world will fail to make much sense (one can only suspend disbelief so far, after all, and perhaps—even after we’ve accepted the existence of dragons and elves—being told that skin conditions are 85 times more common than the cold, the flu, bronchitis, and every other respiratory condition combined, is a bridge too far).

  And, similarly, we may imagine yet another version of this same table—an expanded one, with many more rows than merely the 16 we see above (with the die roll result ranges—i.e., the probability mass—of the existing entries being compressed, to make room); and these additional rows are all mental or psychological disorders. In this setting, characters are just as much in danger of developing a debilitating phobia, or lapsing into psychosis, as developing a skin condition. This, too, will result in a very different game world—and a very different game—than the original table.

  The point, in other words, is not simply the fact of using a random table. The point, rather, is: just what exactly is on that random table, and what is not on it; and what is the distribution of the listed things. Not all random tables are created equal; not all are equally ‘fun’. The details are everything.

  ---

  And now consider the application of the same caveat—to random tables, not of outcomes in a game, but of outcomes of a method of divination.

  Suppose that we accept the basic idea, that we wish to be prompted to take some perspective, or think along certain lines, chosen at random out of a pool of such. The question, however, is: what, specifically, is the set of perspectives or prompts from which we are selecting? What perspectives are on there? What will be the relative frequency of certain perspectives or prompts, if you draw from this distribution repeatedly? And what is not in there?

  We may imagine, for instance, two versions of the same divinatory device. In both versions, you draw a card from a shuffled 52-card deck, then consult a booklet of prompts, where each card corresponds to one entry. But the booklets are different; they were written (and the sets of prompts compiled) by people with very different philosophies (a Buddhist and a Randian, perhaps; or a Christian and a Communist).

  Would not your choice of which version of this device to use for your divinations, affect the long-term outcome of using it? Might not your actions be nudged in one direction, or another—systematically? Might there not be some prominent gaps, in one or both of the distributions—perspectives which are simply absent from the set of possible prompts? What would be the consequence of such a lack?

  Generators of random outcomes can be extremely efficient ways to model complex systems, by abstracting away the details of causal interactions. But be careful that the outcome distribution of the generator is one which you actually endorse.

  ---

  1. ↩︎

     Dungeon Master’s Guide for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, 1st edition; p. 14.

  2. ↩︎

     Dungeon Master’s Guide for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, 1st edition; p. 182.

  3. ↩︎

     Dungeon Master’s Guide for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, 1st edition; p. 119.

  4. ↩︎

     The popular sentiment, you see, was that things should happen for a reason, because the DM decided they should happen, rather than being quite so… random. Or, of course, perhaps the game’s publishers merely wanted to economize by reducing the rule books’ page count.

  5. ↩︎

     That is, the DM generates an integer between 1 and 100 (inclusive), with the distribution across the possible values being uniform.

• Said Achmiz 22 Nov 2013 3:55 UTC

  62 points

  on: 2013 Less Wrong Cen­sus/​Survey

  I took the survey.

  However, this question confused me:

  Time in Community How long, in years, have you been in the Overcoming Bias/​Less Wrong community? Enter periods less than 1 year in decimal, eg “0.5″ for six months (hint: if you’ve been here since the start of the community in November 2007, put 6 years)”

  (emphasis mine)

  The wording confused me; I almost put “6 years” instead of “6″ because of it.

  Also, I was sorely tempted to respond that I do not read instructions and am going to ruin everything, and then answer the rest of that section, including the test question, correctly. I successfully resisted that temptation, of which fact I am proud.

• Said Achmiz 15 May 2019 22:46 UTC

  58 points

  on: Why I’ve started us­ing NoScript

  Speaking as someone who both builds websites, and also has very strong objections to ads, tracking, website bloat, and all the other maladies and afflictions of the modern web, I have to say that… using NoScript is not a good suggestion.

  There are several reasons; some are entirely selfish, and some have to do with how your actions affect wider trends. I’ll list what I think are the major reasons.

  First, though, let me say that I entirely agree with you when you say “I don’t think arbitrary third party trackers ought to be trusted to run in your browser”. I’ll go further, and say that I have no obligation to view ads, to be tracked, to view messages about how ads are necessary for a website’s revenue and continued survival, to view messages about cookies or other GDPR-related nonsense, to click on popups about those messages, to view or click on popups asking me to register an account with a website, etc., etc., etc. It’s my computer, and I have the absolute right (assuming I am breaking no laws) to view content thereon in whatever way I wish.

  And I still don’t think NoScript is a good call. Here’s why.

  It breaks websites in ways that may not be obvious.

  It is, in some sense, the less bad scenario if you visit a site and it’s just obviously horribly broken; you click that NoScript icon, whitelist the site, and voilà—you’re good to go. But what if a site seems to be fine? It might not occur to you to enable NoScript… but you’ll be missing potentially quite important site features. If you get used to browsing with NoScript, you might not even think to turn off the extension for a website… and be deprived of work the site designer has put in to make the website usable and useful.

  The perverse irony of this is that it means that using NoScript will most reliably damage your user experience of precisely those websites that use JavaScript responsibly. For a simple example, take the website which I am, right now, using to type this comment: GreaterWrong. If you turn off JavaScript, you can still view posts and comments, and in fact the site will at first glance look just fine (this is by design; we want to support those users who, due to limitations of hardware and software, cannot run the JS we use). But you will not have any of the usability enhancements GreaterWrong offers—changing the text size, adjusting the appearance (themes & theme tweaker) and the content width, keyboard-based navigation features, etc.

  This is, of course, directly a problem for you, as an individual, but it gets worse due to general user-population trends. Widespread use of NoScript among those who care about issues related to web bloat (and related issues) would (and, I strongly suspect, already is) weaken or even largely remove the pressure on web designers to minimize at least the most egregious of such anti-patterns. If I know that weighing down my site with a bunch of JavaScript means that many users will simply leave the site and never come back, I will put effort into optimization. But if I know that anyone who cares about performance will in any case have NoScript installed, then why not add framework after framework and tracker after tracker?

  Note that I am not saying “and therefore you must suffer the burden of websites filled with malicious and bloated JavaScript… For The Common Good™”! Rather, I am saying that the right way to fight these undesirable trends is not NoScript, but rather something else (see below).

  It is a blunt instrument, and that leads to security lapses.

  If you find that a website doesn’t work with NoScript enabled, you can, indeed, laboriously whitelist one domain at a time, after manually checking the provenance of each one, until the site begins to work. But, for one thing, most people will not do this; they will be less careful, and will whitelist whatever it takes to make a site work. And even if you do carefully and manually whitelist every script domain one by one, you will inevitably let in some “naughty” scripts by mistake. Either way, security lapses will result.

  There’s a better way.

  You want to block ads. Good; block ads, not JavaScript.

  You want to block trackers. Good; block trackers, not JavaScript.

  You want to avoid third-party assets. Good; avoid third-party assets, not JavaScript.

  In short, fix the specific problems you have, rather than simply disabling a big chunk of your browser.

  Here’s how.

  • uBlock Origin (blocks ads)

  • Decentraleyes (protects against tracking via centralized asset distribution)

  • Facebook Container and Google Container (isolate your activity on said sites from the rest of your browsing) (Firefox only)

  • Nano Defender (enhancement for uBlock Origin; fights ad-blocker-blockers)

  • Privacy Badger (blocks trackers of various sorts)

  • AlwaysKillSticky (gets rid of sticky page elements) [disclosure: I’m the author of this one]

  • Anti-Paywall (exactly what it sounds like)

  Advantages of this approach:

  1. Automatic instead of manual (no “spend 3 minutes manually whitelisting each of 50 domains, hoping you didn’t accidentally enable a bad one”)

  2. No breaking of website functionality

  3. Much more comprehensive protection than NoScript (together, these add-ons will also block tracking pixels, cookies, centrally distributed CSS or images or other assets that could track you, etc.)

• Said Achmiz 23 Jul 2019 5:18 UTC

  57 points

  on: The Real Rules Have No Exceptions

  Playing the devil’s advocate:

  Consider this tumblr post by nostalgebraist, the contents of which I entirely concur with and endorse. It would seem to contradict, or at least undermine the applicability of, the approach I describe in this post.

  More generally, the contradiction arises because, while this is entirely true—

  the rule as stated, together with the criteria for deciding whether something is a “legitimate” exception, is the actual rule.

  —the difficulty is that in some cases, the stated rule may be straightforward and legible, but the criteria for evaluating the legitimacy of exceptions is complex and illegible (and, in many or even most such cases, attempting to make the criteria legible will inevitably result in discarding important information).

  Thus, e.g., in the sort of scenario described by nostalgebraist, the “actual rule” is “these are the explicit rules, but I also reserve the right to apply my own, fundamentally irreducible^[1] judgment to make exceptions, and I admit of no formal/​explicit rule which stands above that right”. In this case, spelling out the “actual rule” seems to have gained us very little.

  Yet I think that the approach I describe withstands this challenge—because it remains the best approach, despite not being perfect; all the other solutions to the question (of what to do about apparently-compelling exceptions to apparently-reasonable rules) do no better, in such cases.

  And while we gain little by spelling out the “actual rule” in these “complex and/​or illegible exception-judging criteria” situations, nevertheless we do gain something—namely, making explicit (and therefore salient) the fact that unexpected exceptions (driven by irreducible judgment) are a possibility. What is explicit, can be better prepared for, and can be discussed, and problems addressed; so this is a benefit, if not a very great one.

  ---

  1. ↩︎

     Why do I say “fundamentally irreducible”? Suppose that you offer some operationalization of my judgment criteria—one which appears to account for all of the judgments I’ve made, to instantiate any principles that seem to stand behind my judgment criteria, not to to leave unaddressed any cases I can imagine, etc. You may be tempted to call this a successful reduction—to identify my judgment with your reduction of it. Yet recall that, by construction, I have retained the right to “call bullshit” on any application of an explicit rule which I feel goes against the rule’s spirit; which means that I remain free to, e.g., reject the output of your operationalization of my judgment criteria, in any future case, no matter how closely that output has matched my judgment thus far. Since this applies to any operationalization you can construct—which must, by definition, be explicit—the “personal judgment” rule is a meta-rule of a higher order than any explicit rule, and operationalizing it is impossible.

  What links here?

  • Said Achmiz's comment on The Real Rules Have No Exceptions by Said Achmiz (25 Jan 2021 19:52 UTC; 5 points)
  • Said Achmiz's comment on The Real Rules Have No Exceptions by Said Achmiz (24 Jul 2019 19:25 UTC; 5 points)
  • Said Achmiz's comment on The Real Rules Have No Exceptions by Said Achmiz (23 Jul 2019 5:20 UTC; 2 points)

Archiv­ing link posts?

• Said Achmiz 2 Jul 2013 13:11 UTC

  53 points

  in reply to: dspeyer’s comment on: Ra­tion­al­ity Quotes July 2013

  Here’s the thing about air-travel-related complaints.

  Air travel is really unpleasant. Oh sure, it’s technologically impressive, but the actual experience is terrible: sitting in a cramped space for hours on end, being in close proximity to so many other people; the pressure changes and the noise; the long, tiring process of arriving for your flight, which often takes longer than the actual flight and is quite stressful; the humiliating and absurd security procedures, which these days look more and more like ways for the government to gratuitously exercise its power...

  So we’ve got this really impressive means of travel, which our society seems to have conspired to make as unpleasant as humanly possible. Ok, maybe it’s all excusable and inevitable, just for the sheer amazingness of “ooh, we’re FLYING through the AIR and so FAST!” etc. But then, after we pay the airline such impressive amounts of money for this amazing-but-unpleasant convenience, they don’t deign to even serve us good drinks?

  And what do the drinks have to do with how technologically impressive flight is, anyway? Are the people responsible for the drinks also the people who build, maintain, and fly the planes? What, are the drinks the pilot’s responsibility, and he just can’t be bothered, what with all that keeping the plane upright that he has to do? Did the Boeing engineer have “serve good drinks” on his to-do list, but just plain didn’t get to it, tired as he was from all that “making sure the wings don’t fall off” he had to do? No! The people responsible for the drinks had one damn job! And they’re doing it badly! And then when people complain, they have the gall to evade responsibility by attempting to take credit for all that amazing science and engineering?!

  In short, the quote is analogous to:

  “I mean, when you think about it, our society is pretty freaking remarkable. We have computers, and indoor plumbing, and hundreds of channels on cable. Hundreds of millions of man-hours of work and struggle and research, blood, sweat, tears, and lives have gone into the history of all of our modern conveniences, and it has totally revolutionized the face of our planet and societies.

  But look anywhere in the world, and I absolutely promise you that you will find someone who, in the face of all that incredible achievement, will be willing to complain about being mugged.

  Being mugged, people.”

  Yeah, “everything is amazing so why are you complaining about this unrelated bad thing” is a fallacy. At this rate, all complaints about everything, ever, are apparently unwarranted.

• Said Achmiz 23 Oct 2021 6:58 UTC

  51 points

  in reply to: mathenjoyer’s comment on: My ex­pe­rience at and around MIRI and CFAR (in­spired by Zoe Curzi’s writeup of ex­pe­riences at Lev­er­age)

  The highly scrupulous people here can undergo genuine psychological collapse if they learn their actions aren’t as positive utility as they thought.

  “That which can be destroyed by the truth should be”—I seem to recall reading that somewhere.

  And: “If my actions aren’t as positive utility as I think, then I desire to believe that my actions aren’t as positive utility as I think”.

  If one has such a mental makeup that finding out that one’s actions have worse effects than one imagined causes genuine psychological collapse, then perhaps the first order of business is to do everything in one’s power to fix that (really quite severe and glaring) bug in one’s psyche—and only then to attempt any substantive projects in the service of world-saving, people-helping, or otherwise doing anything really consequential.

• Said Achmiz 6 Dec 2018 18:00 UTC

  51 points

  in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: Tran­shu­man­ism as Sim­plified Humanism

  Any moral framework that doesn’t acknowledge tradeoffs is broken. The interesting questions aren’t “should we save this person if it doesn’t cost anything?”—truly, that’s trivial as you say. The interesting ones, which authors and ethicists try to address even if they’re not all that clear are, “who should suffer and by how much in order to let this person live better/​longer?“.

  The problem comes in when people start inventing imaginary tradeoffs, purely out of a sense that there must be tradeoffs—and, critically, then use the existence of those (alleged) tradeoffs as a reason to simply reject the proposal.

  And then you have the flaw in reasoning that I described in this old comment:

  I think that this post conflates two issues, and is an example of a flaw of reasoning that goes like this:

  Alice: It would be good if we could change [thing X].
  Bob: Ah, but if we changed X, then problems A, B, and C would ensue! Therefore, it would not be good if we could change X.

  Bob is confusing the desirability of the change with the prudence of the change. Alice isn’t necessarily saying that we should make the change she’s proposing. She’s saying it would be good if we could do so. But Bob immediately jumps to examining what problems would ensue if we changed X, decides that changing X would be imprudent, and concludes from this that it would also be undesirable.

  […]

  I think that Bob’s mistake is rooted in the fact that he is treating Alice’s proposal as, essentially, a wish made to a genie. “Oh great genie,” says Alice, “please make it so that death is no more!” Bob, horrified, stops Alice before she can finish speaking, and shouts “No! Think of all the ways the words of your wish can be twisted! Think of the unintended consequences! You haven’t considered the implications! No, Alice, you must not make such grand wishes of a genie, for they will inevitably go awry.”

• Said Achmiz 7 Mar 2020 22:38 UTC

  49 points

  in reply to: sirjackholland’s comment on: Cred­i­bil­ity of the CDC on SARS-CoV-2

  obvious info hazard

  I wish people would stop throwing this term around willy-nilly.

  Not only is it not obvious to me that this post is an “info hazard”, but I don’t really know what you even mean by it. Is it the definition used in this recent Less Wrong post^[1], or perhaps the one quoted in this Less Wrong Wiki entry^[2]?

  In any case, the OP seems to be presenting true (as far as I can tell) and useful (potentially life-saving, in fact!) information. If you’re going to casually drop labels like “infohazard” in reference to it, you ought to do a lot better than a justification-free “this is bad”. Civil or not, I’d like to see that critique.

  If you think the OP is harmful, by all means do not let civility stop you from posting a comment that may mitigate that harm! If you really believe what you’re saying, that comment may save lives. So let’s have it!

  EDIT: Like Zack, I will strong-upvote this extended critique if you post.

  ---

  1. ↩︎

     TL;DR: “Infohazard” means any kind of information that could be harmful in some fashion. Let’s use “cognitohazard” to describe information that could specifically harm the person who knows it.

  2. ↩︎

     An information hazard is a concept coined by Nick Bostrom in a 2011 paper[1] for Review of Contemporary Philosophy. He defines it as follows; “Information hazard: A risk that arises from the dissemination or the potential dissemination of (true) information that may cause harm or enable some agent to cause harm.”

New GreaterWrong fea­ture: anti-kib­itzer (hides post/​com­ment au­thor names and karma val­ues)

• Said Achmiz 22 Oct 2021 10:52 UTC

  47 points

  in reply to: Unreal’s comment on: My ex­pe­rience at and around MIRI and CFAR (in­spired by Zoe Curzi’s writeup of ex­pe­riences at Lev­er­age)

  I think that treating Michael Vassar as an unchangeable force of nature is the right way to go—for the purposes of discussions precisely like this one. Why? Because even if Michael himself can (and chooses to) alter his behavior in some way (regardless of whether this is good or bad or indifferent), nevertheless there will be other Michael Vassars out there—and the question remains, of how one is to deal with arbitrary Michael Vassars one encounters in life.

  In other words, what we’ve got here is a vulnerability (in the security sense of the word). One day you find that you’re being exploited by a clever hacker (we decline to specify whether he is a black hat or white hat or what). The one comes to you and recommends a patch. But you say—why should we treat this specific attack as some sort of unchangeable force of nature? Rather we should contact this hacker and persuade him to cease and desist. But the vulnerability is still there…

• Said Achmiz 21 Apr 2019 22:39 UTC

  47 points

  on: Where to Draw the Boundaries?

  This is an excellent post. It has that rare quality, like much of the Sequences, of the ideas it describes being utterly obvious—in retrospect. (I also appreciate the similarly Sequence-like density of hyperlinks, exploiting the not-nearly-exploited-enough-these-days power of hypertext to increase density of ideas without a concomitant increase in abstruseness.)

  … which is why I find it so puzzling to see all these disagreeing comments, which seem to me to contain an unusual, and puzzling, level of reflexive contrarianness and pedanticism.

  What links here?

  • Said Achmiz's comment on Where to Draw the Boundaries? by Zack_M_Davis (7 Dec 2020 1:23 UTC; 12 points)
  • abramdemski's comment on Where to Draw the Boundaries? by Zack_M_Davis (12 Dec 2020 19:21 UTC; 8 points)
  • Zack_M_Davis's comment on Maybe Ly­ing Doesn’t Exist by Zack_M_Davis (25 Dec 2019 5:41 UTC; 2 points)

• Said Achmiz 4 Nov 2012 1:40 UTC

  47 points

  on: 2012 Less Wrong Cen­sus/​Survey

  I took the survey.

  I am curious to know whether CFAR questions #2 and #4 are supposed to have a “right” answer.

• Said Achmiz 28 Dec 2023 23:19 UTC

  44 points

  22

  in reply to: Ben Pace’s comment on: Crit­i­cal re­view of Chris­ti­ano’s dis­agree­ments with Yudkowsky

  Is there actually anyone who has read all those words and thus understands how Eliezer would tackle the problem? (Do you, for example?)

  This is not a rhetorical question, nor a trivial one; for example, I notice that @Vanessa Kosoy apparently misunderstood some major part of it (as evidenced by this comment thread), and she’s been a MIRI researcher for 8 years (right? or so LinkedIn says, anyhow). So… who does get it?

• Said Achmiz 2 Aug 2013 0:38 UTC

  44 points

  in reply to: MalcolmOcean’s comment on: Ra­tion­al­ity Quotes Au­gust 2013

  “If it July, I desire to believe it is July. If it is August, I desire to believe it is August...”