Sarunas

Karma: 955

Sarunas 22 Jul 2014 15:30 UTC
3 points
on: Politics is hard mode
It seems to me that the issue could be made clearer by making a distinction between three different levels/types of politics.
1. The territory itself. Not the whole territory is relevant here. Let’s call relevant part preimage of politics . More about this later.
2. Methods of thought and style of thinking commonly used in politics. It seems to me that there are some issues that are understood as “archetypically” political (e.g.elections, election campaigns) and other things are deemed political (or not) by whether they are thought about in a manner similar to aforementioned archetypical examples. Thus it seems to me that the extension of what is thought about as politics happens at this level. Territory that is “covered” by this could be called preimage of politics(by analogy with mathematics), or “topics that are usually thought of as relating to politics”. One should note that in different contexts preimage of politics could be different. E.g. for a member of parliament, a journalist, an economist and an average layperson the sets of topics that they approach using “methods that are used in politics” might be different.
3.Political science, which studies the level 2.

It seems to me that when people caution against politicizing the issue, they usually mean not that the issue itself (level 1) should not be thought about, but rather that the issue shouldn’t be in the preimage of politics, i.e. methods of politics, style of thinking that is usually used in politics are probably not the right way to approach it (level 2) and other styles of thinking (e.g. economics, game theory) should be used instead. An adage “politics is a mindkiller” similarly cautions against the fact that a habit to extend the area covered by methods of politics seems to be self-catalyzing, i.e. once you politicize one topic/issue A you might be psychologically more inclined to politicize issues B and C. And after you “find the correct way of reasoning” about the topic using the methods of politics, you might be less inclined to try other approaches which are likely to be more productive. Once you politicize most topics it might be difficult to think about stuff in any other way, i.e. your mind might become metaphorically killed.

It seems to me that “politics is hard mode” is mostly about level 1, it captures the intuition that many issues that tend to be politicized (happens to be in a preimage of politics) are non-trivial. However “politics is the mind-killer” seems to be more about dangers at level 2, what kinds of approaches are used to a specific problem.

(English is not my first language, therefore I apologize in advance for all mistakes. Feel free to correct them)

Sarunas 23 Jul 2014 16:16 UTC
0 points
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Politics is hard mode
I’ll comment on your first sentence only, because I am not sure I understand the second one correctly. Could you clarify what do you mean? Indeed, the distinction might be blurry. I might have overly narrow view of politics, but it seems to me that while boundaries between them are not clear, the “central examples” seem to be different. I’ll try to present an example of what seems to me an archetypical example of politics. I do not claim that it describes all political discussions everywhere.

Imagine a parliament or some other group of people each of whom is of some political ideology. Suppose they have an issue in an agenda. If the issue is uncontroversial, everybody just uses their common sense and moves on to the next issue. However, if an issue at hand is controversial and complicated (where there is no clear and easy solution), then self-identified blues often default to doing what blues are supposed to do and self-identified greens default to doing what greens are supposed to do. Therefore some people would probably say that politics are best described as a clash(es) of ideas or a clash(es) of ideologies (e.g. there are many books with similar titles, also compare this to the clashes between candidates before the elections). Debates between people supporting different sides of these clashes are possibly the most central part of democratic politics. How exactly these debates are won or lost is of secondary importance (a good politician is one who can win such debates).

Game theory can be useful here e.g. to determine what concessions should a group of people make to strike a deal (possibly metaphorically) with another group of people to obtain a stronger position in a debate (by e.g. obtaining a winning majority). However, it seems to me that in this case game theory is used solely to reason about the level 2, and not about the level 1, i.e. it is used to determine how political actors would behave in such and such situation. However game theory seems to be rarely used for reasoning about the object level (level 1) (of course, the situation is probably entirely different in the field of foreign affairs). Take any polarizing issue that everyone has opinion about (what issues are considered polarizing might depend on the country). For the sake of concreteness take some issues that are controversial in the United States—abortions, gun policy, etc. These topics are definitely considered political, but it seems to me that they are rarely (if ever) thought about in terms of game theory. Of course, game theory might not be very applicable here. Or it might be. There might be even some game theorist somewhere analyzing these issues themselves, which seems to me to be distinct from analyzing related political clashes concerning these issues.

Of course, in reality it might turn out that level 1 and level 2 are too closely related to be analyzed separately. In that case the aforementioned distinction between using game theory at different levels might be unproductive. Also, I am definitely not an insider of politics—maybe politicians and experts who advise them use a lot of game theory for object level reasoning (i.e not about other political actors). However it doesn’t seem that way from outside.

I must also admit that I made a distinction between politics and game theory before I had a clearer idea why they seemed different to me. Therefore in this comment I mostly tried to find reasons why it might be so. I didn’t search for similarities and reasons why these two areas should be thought of as closely related. Due to this asymmetry my post might not describe a complete picture.

edit: I didn’t downvote you. I don’t know why somebody else did.

Sarunas 25 Jul 2014 12:27 UTC
0 points
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Politics is hard mode
I feel that I should read more about the influence of game theory on politics to say anything productive about the topic. I might have underestimated how much of an influence game theory has on policymaking. It seems plausible that some people, who had success of using it in one situation, might be inclined to use it more, potentially even in situations where it cannot (or is not enough to) capture some relevant and important features of reality (of course, in some situations the opposite might be true and game theory might be underutilized, it is probably difficult to tell these cases apart a priori). However, things like these might depend on a country in question, I might have generalized from one country and most visible parts of politics in other ones (e.g. I do not remember seeing a single instance of any politician (or any other public figure) publicly using game theory based arguments for any political issue in my country (of course, it’s possible that I do not follow politics close enough. It is also possible that they simplify their arguments when speaking to the media)). Public choice theory is related but seems to be somewhat distinct. I might have to ask an actual political scientist about this before saying anything else. Sadly, I do not speak German (although it is one of the languages I would like to learn some day).

Anyway, I would like to withdraw from this discussion about influence of game theory on politics because I feel that I lack necessary knowledge to say anything substantial. In my original comment I mentioned game theory only as one possible example.

P.S. On a totally unrelated note, thank you for replying to my first ever Lesswrong comment!

Sarunas 25 Jul 2014 13:30 UTC
4 points
in reply to: Viliam_Bur’s comment on: [LINK] Another “LessWrongers are crazy” article—this time on Slate
It seems to me that what XiXiDu wants are not just any high quality posts and the classification of Lesswrong posts into high and low quality buckets fails to capture what he/she tried to convey. It seems to me that XiXiDu talked about the lack of problem solving posts, the typical titles of which could be something like “Problem 123: Let’s brainstorm for possible angles how to attack it” or “Problem 456: Let’s try an unexpected approach 789 and see if it leads somewhere” (not unlike the aforementioned Polymath Project or maybe even Mathoverflow). Currently neither “Main” (which is mostly about presenting arguments that are already polished), nor “Discussion” (which is a mish mash of mostly links, open threads and posts, that are considered too short to be posted in Main) contains many posts of such type.

Sarunas 12 Aug 2014 11:09 UTC
1 point
on: From Natural (or Naturalized) to Social Epistemology
It is an intriguing topic, thank you for posting about it. I haven’t read papers by Goldman yet, but I’ll try to take a look at them. Some Lesswrong posts that might be somewhat related: Some Heuristics for Evaluating the Soundness of the Academic Mainstream in Unfamiliar Fields , Scholarship: how to tell good advice from bad advice? , maybe tangentially even some posts like this. In addition, potentially some posts on Overcomingbias might be relevant, as well as some posts on Slatestarcodex, e.g. Searching For One-Sided Tradeoffs. However, as you can see, all these posts are scattered here and there and do not seem to form any coherent body of ideas (well, there are some recurring themes on Overcomingbias).

It seems to be such a broad topic, it would require dozens (if not hundreds) Lesswrong posts to do some justice to it. E.g. one could probably expect different answers when analyzing what would be the best strategies for a given individual to follow versus what strategies would lead to “average wrongness in a society” being as small as possible? (well, I’ll have to think about it, at this moment this is just a guess). It seems to me that natural epistemology is less likely to contain such tensions (again, a much deeper analysis is required to say whether this is actually true).

Moreover, it seems to me that it is much less likely that a single unifying framework (similar, to e.g. Bayesian inference, that was a recurring theme on Lesswrong) even exists. Again, I should probably read Goldman’s papers before saying anything more.

[LINK] 2014 Fields Medals and Nevanlinna Prize anounced

Sarunas13 Aug 2014 10:58 UTC

3 points

17 comments2 min readLW link

Sarunas 20 Aug 2014 22:36 UTC
6 points
in reply to: satt’s comment on: Rationality Quotes August 2014
This is known as Cunningham’s Law. Another example.The explanation (non-competitive vs. competitive mindsets, the latter of which is more motivating to act) seems quite convincing. In addition, could there also be an analogy to loss aversion (a tendency to prefer avoiding losses to acquiring gains)? Would people feel more urgency to correct what they see as wrong (and thus challenging what they see as correct) rather than explain what is right (“less wrong” vs. “more right”, if we are not trying to avoid puns)?

Sarunas 22 Aug 2014 21:00 UTC
4 points
in reply to: DefectiveAlgorithm’s comment on: Fighting Biases and Bad Habits like Boggarts
Maybe someone got shadowbanned? Reddit does that to fight spam and (if I understand correctly) Lesswrong is based on the Reddit source code.

Sarunas 24 Aug 2014 8:54 UTC
2 points
on: [Link] Feynman lectures on physics
A related website http://www.feynmanlectures.info/ seems to be maintained by the same people. In addition to the books themselves, one can find an errata, some exercises, etc..

Sarunas 29 Aug 2014 22:11 UTC
19 points
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Calibrating your probability estimates of world events: Russia vs Ukraine, 6 months later.

I would also expect that Latvia gives it’s minorities certain rights because it’s legally obliged to do so under EU law that Ukraine didn’t.

This isn’t directly relevant to the discussion, but if Russia were ever to attack Latvia, their excuse would probably precisely be the treatment of ethnic Russians. It is, in fact, a recurring theme in Russian media.

The reason for this is that in order to be eligible for a full citizenship one is required to pass Latvian language competency and Latvian history exams. What is more, Latvia allows dual citizenship, but only if the other citizenship is of a country that belongs to the list that is specified by a law. Russia is not on the list.

Citizens of the former USSR who possess neither Latvian nor other citizenship who live in Latvia are eligible for a non-citizen passport. They are allowed to naturalize provided they pass the aforementioned exams. However, for various reasons many are unwilling (few are unable) to do so. For example, traveling to Russia is easier for a non-citizen than a citizen of Latvia. However, it is easier to work and travel in the Schengen Area if one is a non-citizen of Latvia than a citizen of Russia. Thus some people might find it disadvantageous to choose one citizenship (in their day-to-day lives traveling is more important than having the right to vote).

How such an unusual situation came into existence? If I understand correctly, in early 1990s Latvia desperately tried to avoid breakaway regions, because in 1989 only 49% of the non-Latvian population supported the idea of the independence of Latvia (the number of Latvians supporting the idea made up 93%). It should be noted that, according to wikipedia, such situation is not without a precedent:

Peter Van Elsuwege, a scholar in European law at Ghent University, states that the Latvian law is grounded upon the established legal principle that persons who settle under the rule of an occupying power gain no automatic right to nationality. A number of historic precedents support this, according to Van Elsuwege, most notably the case of Alsace-Lorraine when the French on recovering the territory in 1918 did not grant citizenship to German settlers despite Germany having annexed the territory 47 years earlier in 1871.

However, as you can imagine, the fact that these non-citizens (mostly Russians) do not have voting rights is a target of outrage in Russian media. Furthermore, many ethnic Russians in Latvia watch a lot of it and this results in them having different opinions (about e.g. situation in Ukraine) than ethnic Latvians. However, it is not clear whether they would actually support Russia in the case of armed conflict.

Please note that I’m neither Latvian, nor an expert on Latvian law, therefore the story above may contain some inaccuracies. Still, LW readers might find it helpful for their probability estimates of potential wars and/or other events.

Sarunas 31 Aug 2014 20:06 UTC
14 points
in reply to: NancyLebovitz’s comment on: Calibrating your probability estimates of world events: Russia vs Ukraine, 6 months later.
It seems unlikely. In a poll held by Kyiv International Institute of Sociology in May 2009 in Ukraine, 96% of respondents were positive about Russians as an ethnic group, 93% respected the Russian Federation and 76% respected the Russian establishment..

In the 2001 Ukrainian census 17.3% of the population of Ukraine identied as ethnic Russians (58.3% in Crimea) while 77.8% as Ukrainians. However, in 2012, only 50% of respondents consider Ukrainian their native language, 29% - Russian. Moreover, 20% consider both Ukrainian and Russian their mother tongue and 45% usually speak Ukrainian at home, 39% - Russian and 15% - both Ukrainian and Russian (equally).

Russian language seems to have high informal status, since, according to wikipedia

A 2012 study showed that: on the radio, 3.4% of songs are in Ukrainian while 60% are in Russian over 60% of newspapers, 83% of journals and 87% of books are in Russian 28% of TV programs are in Ukrainian, even on state-owned channels.

and business affairs are still mainly dealt with in Russian. Some people even claim that

“There is an established Russian-speaking environment in big cities and it exerts pressure on people,” she claims. “They think that they will not belong to it if they speak Ukrainian.”

and, according to the same article

Sociological surveys show a huge gap between the number of those who speak Ukrainian at home and those who also use it at work and in public. For Kyiv, this is about 50% and 20% accordingly.

At the same time, according to the Constitution, the state language of Ukraine is the Ukrainian language. However, in 2012 the new law gave Russian status of regional language and approved its use in courts and other government institutions in areas where the percentage of Russians exceeds 10%.

As you can see, we can observe the gap between formal status and informal status of Russian in Ukraine. Thus for any language related event there are at least two different interpretations. For example, on February 2014, the new Ukrainian government tried to repeal 2012 language law. While many Ukrainian-speaking Ukrainians saw it as an attempt to finally curtail Russification (in the informal sphere), many Russian speakers “saw the move as more evidence that the antigovernment protests in Kiev that toppled Yanukovich’s government were intent on pressing for a nationalistic agenda.” Obviously, back in 2012 it was Ukrainian speakers who saw the new law as unfairly “narrowing the sphere of use of Ukrainian language” and on February 2014 they thought that it was their chance to reverse it. However, they were far too much in haste, and, even though the acting president vetoed the bill, a backlash among Russian speakers probably made Russia’s military takeover of Crimea much easier.

Although the language isn’t everything, but, according to an opinion poll

among respondents who support Ukraine’s entry into the Customs Union, the vast majority (72%) speak in favor of granting Russian the status of the state language. However, among respondents who support the signing of the free trade zone agreement with the EU, the vast majority (72%) are against bilingualism

Another point made by the same poll shows that it is, at least partially, a matter of personal identity beyond language:

Despite the fact that Ukrainian is mostly spoken by elderly people, young people oppose bilingualism more.

(indeed, it seems that for many Ukrainians this whole EU vs.Customs Union dilemma is more about identity than economics).

But I digress. In short, it seems to me that if Russians were actually being mistreated, their language would not have such a high informal status in Ukraine, which is disproportionate to the share of actual ethnic Russians in Ukrainian population. However, due to the differences between formal, informal public and informal private spheres certain actions (e.g. by the government) can be perceived as unfair by a certain segment of population.

(Disclaimer: I am not a Ukrainian; the story above may contain some inaccuracies. In addition, an actual Ukrainian would be able to tell what exactly are prevailing sentiments now)

Sarunas 31 Aug 2014 21:28 UTC
4 points
on: Robin Hanson’s “Overcoming Bias” posts as an e-book.
Thank you very much!

At the same time, it would have been even better if you had included comments (instead of just linking to them) into an e-book. It was my impression that sometimes Robin Hanson deliberately tried to post thought provoking problems and challenges in order to make his readers grapple with them and brainstorm for possible solutions, this way harnessing “the collective mind” of the Overcomingbias commenters. Thus having comments in the e-book might be great for an offline reading. At the same time, let’s not make the perfect the enemy of the good!

On the second thought, it is not even clear if it indeed would be perfect, since it would require the reader to wade through pages of comments of uneven quality, thus reducing the pleasure of reading.

Sarunas 11 Sep 2014 12:29 UTC
1 point
in reply to: buybuydandavis’s comment on: [Link] How to see into the future (Financial Times)

This was quite an eye opener to me when I first saw it. We take empirical testing and verification for granted, but if you were just unaware of it, what else go by to determine the “truth” of something? Scientific method is obviously not in the genes, but I bet you that obedience to authority is, even in “truth”.

Experts still generally thrive on authority, not empirically demonstrated competence.

I am not a historian of science and it might be “just-so story”, but it was my understanding that one of the reasons Galileo’s telescope was so important in the history of science was that it (and other scientific instruments) made it possible to challenge a theory without necessarily having to challenge the authority of the creator of that theory. If people share the same senses which are of approximately the same quality (except, obviously, people who are blind, deaf, etc.), then the defining reason why some people come up with good theories and other don’t is their intellect (and thus, authority, since, by halo effect, people who have more authority are generally thought to be more intelligent) and maybe having access to some esoteric knowledge, revelations (the concept of cumulative progress (“standing on the shoulders of giants”) is not necessarily helpful for challenging the established theory) which are rare.

So when one tries e.g. to challenge an idea by Aristotle, unless the falsehood of this idea is demonstrated easily and cheaply, all the listeners (who are forced to take an outside view) can do is compare who of you two was more likely to make a faulty reasoning or faulty observation, i.e. comparing intellect and qualifications (and therefore, authority), and the the followers of Aristotle can point to his large and impressive body of work as well as him being highly respected by all other authority figures. On the other hand if one has a telescope (or any other scientific instrument that enables one to extend one’s senses) the assumption of everyone having equal senses is broken and it is no longer necessary to engage in “who is more intelligent and wise” fight, one can simply point out that you have a telescope and this is the reason why your discovery (that contradicts a respected position) might nevertheless be correct. One could even make a polite deference to the authority (“X was an extraordinary genius, just imagine what he could have done if he hadall the equipment we have today—possibly much more exciting things than we are currently able to”) and still claim to be more correct than them.

When more and more arguments are won by pointing out to these “extended senses”, we gradually see the shift of authority in the observations from the eminence of theory creators to the quality of lab equipment.

It is important to note that innovations in methodology (e.g. calculating probabilities) seem more similar to “tools/algorithms” rather than “intellect”, since the whole point of having and following a certain methodology at all is to avoid necessarily having to be genius to make a discovery.

However, at any given moment in time, in any given area, most reseachers still use basically the same equipment, thereby restoring the approximate equality of everyone’s senses. Therefore even today, when scientists obtain different result using similar (or at least comparable in quality) equipment, people start making claims about who has (and who has not) relevant qualifications. At the same time, we see a lot of theories in astronomy and astrophysics being overturned whenever a new, larger and better telescope becomes available.

I admit, this was mostly about people who take an outside view, and the experts in sciences and/or those who are actually interested in making correct predictions about the world. Many people who are often said to be experts aren’t actually trying and have some different goals instead.

Sarunas 12 Sep 2014 18:14 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: [Link] How to see into the future (Financial Times)
I was mostly trying to talk about an “outside view”, i.e. whom should a layman (who is not necessarily able to immediately replicate an experiment himself/herself) believe?

Suppose an acclaimed professor (in earlier times—a famous natural philosopher) and a grad student (or an equivalent in earlier times) are are trying to figure out something and their respective experiments produce differing results. Suppose their equipment was of the same quality. Whom being correct should a layperson bet on before further research becomes available? Would even the grad student himself/herself be confident in his/her result? Now suppose the grad student had access to a significantly better and more modern tools (such as a telescope in the early 1600s or an MRI scanner in 1970s, etc.). The situation changes completely. If the difference between the quality of lab equipment would be sufficiently large (e.g. CERN vs an average high school lab) nobody would even bother to do a replication. (by the way, given equipment of the same quality (e.g. only senses), if the difference in authority is sufficiently large, would the situation be analogous? I’m not sure I can answer this question).

A more mundane situation. Suppose a child claims there is some weird object in the sky that they saw with their naked eye. Then others would ask, why hadn’t others (whose eyes are even better) seen it before? Why hadn’t others (who are potentially more intelligent) identified it? Now suppose the said child has a telescope. Even if others would not bother to look at the sky themselves, they would be much more likely to believe that he/she could have actually seen something that was real.

In no way am I trying to downplay the importance of replications and, especially, cheap replications, such as allowing everybody to look through your telescope. (which, in addition to being a good replication of that particular observation, also serves a somewhat more general purpose—people have to believe that you really do possess “extended sense” instead of just making it up (like many self-proclaimed psychics do)). The ability to replicate cheap experiments is crucial. As well as the fact that (in the ideal world, if not necessarily the real one) there are people in the world who have the means necessary to replicate difficult and expensive ones, and the willingness (and/or incentives) to actually do so and honestly point out whatever discrepancies they may find.

It seems necessary to point out that this is probably just a “just-so story”, an actual historian of science probably could make a much more informed comment whether the process I described was of any importance at all.

Anyway, this conversation seems to have strayed a bit off topic and now barely touches the Financial Times article.

Sarunas 16 Sep 2014 11:54 UTC
7 points
in reply to: Jiro’s comment on: What are your contrarian views?

“Rationality” leads people to believe such absurd ideas

Are you sure you have pinpointed the right culprit? Why exactly “rationality”? “Zooming in” and “zooming out” would lead to potentially different conclusions. E.g. G.K.Chesterton would probably blame atheism[1]. Zooming out even more, for example, someone immersed in Eastern thought might even blame Western thought in general. Despite receiving vastly disproportionate share of media attention it was such a small part of LessWrong history and thought (by the way, is anything that any LWer ever came up with a part of LW thought?) that it seems to wrong to put the blame on LessWrong or rationality in general.

Furthermore, which would you say is better, an ability to formulate an absurd idea and then find its flaws (or, for e.g. mathematical ideas, exactly under what strange conditions they hold) or inability to formulate absurd ideas at all? Ability to come up with various absurd ideas is an unavoidable side effect of having an imagination. What is important is not to start believing it immediately, because in the history of any really new and outlandish idea at the very beginning there is an important asymmetry (which arises due to the fact that coming up with any complicated idea takes time) - an idea itself has already been invented but the good counterarguments do not yet exist (this is similar to the situation where a new species is introduced to an island where it does not have natural predators, which are introduced only later). This also applies to the moment when a new outlandish idea is introduced to your mind and you haven’t heard any counterarguments by that moment, one must nevertheless exercise caution. Especially if that new idea is elegant and thought provoking whereas all counterarguments are comparatively ugly and complicated and thus might feel unsatisfactory even after you have heard them.

the presence of a significant number of people psychologically affected

Was there really a significant number of people or is this just, well, an urban legend? The fact that some people are affected is not particularly surprising—it seems to be consistent with the existence of e.g. OCD. Again, one must remember that not everyone thinks the same way and the common thing between people affected might have been something other than acquaintance with LW and rationality which you seem to imply (correct me if my impression was wrong).

the fact that Eliezer accepts that basilisk-like ideas can be dangerous

I think it is better to give Eliezer a chance to explain himself why he did what he did. My understanding is that whenever someone introduces a person to new variant of this concept without explaining proper counterarguments it takes time for that person to acquaint themselves with them. In very specific instances that might lead to unnecessary worrying about it and potentially even some actions (most people would regard this idea as too outlandish and too weird whether or not it was correct and compartmentalize everything even if it was). A clever devil’s advocate could potentially come up with more and more elaborate versions of this idea which take more and more time to take down. As you can see, it is not necessary for any form of this idea to be correct for this gap to expand.

Personally I understand (and share) the appeal of various interesting speculative ideas and and the frustration that someone thinks that this is supposedly bad for some people, which seems against my instincts and the highly valuable norm of free marketplace of ideas.

At this point in time, however, the basilisk seems to be more often brought up in order to dismiss all LW, rather than only this specific idea, thus it is no wonder that many people get defensive even if they do not believe it.

All of this does not touch the question whether the whole situation was handled the way it should have been handled.

[1] Although the source says that famous quote is misattributed. Huh. I remember reading a similar idea in one of “Father Brown” short stories. I’ll have to check it.

(excuse my english, feel free to correct mistakes)

Sarunas 17 Sep 2014 13:05 UTC
2 points
in reply to: lmm’s comment on: What are your contrarian views?

It’s whatever makes LW different from the wider population, even the wider nerdy-western-liberal-college-educated cluster. The general population of atheists does not have problems with basilisks, and laughs them off when you describe them to them.

What ideas does the general population of atheists have in common besides the lack of belief in God? And what interesting ideas can you derive from that? F.Dostoevsky (who wasn’t even an atheist) seems to have thought that from this one could derive that everything is morally permitted. Maybe some atheistic ideas seemed new, interesting and outlandish in the past when there were few atheists (e.g. separation of church and state), but nowadays they are part of common sense.

No, the claim of this hypothetical Chesterton would not be that atheism creates new weird ideas. It would be that by rejecting god you lose the defense against various weird ideas (“It’s the first effect of not believing in God that you lose your common sense.”—G.K.Chesterton). It is not general atheism, it is specific atheist groups. And in the history of the world, there were a lot of atheists who believed in strange things. E.g. some atheists believe in reincarnation or spiritism. Some believe that the Earth is a zoo kept by aliens. In previous times, some revolutionaries (led not by their atheism, but by other ideologies) believed that just because the social order is not god given it could be easily changed into basically anything. The hypothetical Chesterton would probably claim that had all these people closely followed church’s teachings they would not have believed in these follies since the common sense provided by the traditional christianity would have prevented them. And he would probably be right. The hypthetical Chesterton would probably think that the basilisk is yet another thing in the long list of things some atheists stupidly believe.

Yes, on LessWrong the weirdness heuristic is used less than in more general atheist/skeptic community (in my previous post I have already mentioned why I think it is often useful), and it is considered bad to dismiss the idea if the only counterargument to it is that is weird. Difference in acceptance of weirdness heuristic probably comes from different mentalities: trying to become more rational vs. a more conservative strategy of trying to avoid being wrong (e.g. accepting epistemic learned helplessness when faced with weird and complicated arguments and defaulting to the mainstream position). This difference may reduce a person’s defenses against various new and strange ideas. But even then, one of the most upvoted LW posts of all times already talks about this danger.

Nevertheless, while you claim that general population of atheists “laughs them off when you describe them to them.”, it is my impression that the same is true here, on LessWrong, as absolute majority of LWers do not consider it as a serious thing (sadly, I do not recall any survey asking about that). It is just a small proportion of LWers that believe in this idea. Thus it cannot be “whatever makes LW different from the wider population”, it must be whatever makes that small group different from the wider LW population, because even after rejecting following tradition (which would be the hypothetical Chesterton’s explanation) and diminished usage of weirdness heuristic (which would be average skeptic’s explanation) majority of LWers still do not believe it. And the reasons why some LWers become defensive when someone brings it up are probably very similar to those described in a blog post “Weak Men Are Superweapons” by Yvain.

One could argue that LessWrong thought made it possible to formulate such an idea. Which I had already addressed in my previous post. Once you have a wide vocabulary of ideas you can come up with many things. It is important to be able to find out if the thing you came up with is true.

If these ideas are dangerous to us then we are doing something wrong. If you’re saying that danger is an unavoidable cost of being able to generate interesting ideas, then the large number of other groups who seem to come up with interesting ideas without ideas that present a danger to them seems like a counterexample.

I do not think that thinking about basilisk is dangerous to us. Maybe it is to some people with OCD or something similar, I do not know. I talked about absurdity, not danger. It seems to me that instead of restricting our imagination (so as to avoid coming up with absurd things), we should let it run free and try improve our ability to recognize which of these imagined ideas are actually true.

It also received a disproportionate amount of ex cathedra moderator action. Which things are so important to EY that he feels it necessary to intervene directly and in a massively controversial way? By their actions we can conclude that the Basilisk is much more important to the LW leadership than e.g. the illegitimate downvoting that drove danerys away.

I do not know what exactly did Eliezer think when he decided. I am not him. In fact, I wasn’t even there when it happened. I have no way of knowing whether he had actually had a clear reason at the time or simply freaked out and made an impulsive decision, or actually believed it at that moment (at least to the extent of being unable to immediately rule it out completely, which might have led to censor that post in order to postpone the argument). However, I have an idea which I find at least somewhat plausible. This is a guess.

Suppose even a very small number of people (let’s say 2-4 people) were affected (again, let’s remember that they would be very atypical, I doubt that having, e.g. OCD would be enough) in a way that instead of only worrying about this idea, they would actually take action and e.g. sell the large part of their possessions and donate it to (what was then known as) SIAI, leave their jobs to work on FAI or start donating all their income (neglecting their families) out of fear of this hypothetical torture. Now that would be a PR disaster many orders of magnitude larger than anything basilisk related we have now. Now, when people use the word “cult”, they seem to seem to use it figuratively, as a hyperbole (e.g.), in that case people and organizations who monitor real cults would actually label SIAI as a literal one (whether SIAI likes it or not). Now that would be a disaster both for SIAI and the whole friendly AI project, possibly burying it forever. Considering that Eliezer worried about such things even before this whole debacle, it must have crossed his mind and this possibility must have looked very scary leading to the impulsive decision and what we can now see as improper handling of the situation.

Then why not claim that you do this for PR reasons instead of caring about psychological harm of those people? Firstly, one may actually care about those people, especially if one knows one of them personally (which seems to be the case from the screenshot provided by XiXiDu and linked by Jiro). And even in more general case, talking about caring usually looks better than talking about PR. Secondly, “stop it, it is for your own safety” probably stops more people from looking than “stop it, it might give us a bad PR” (as we can see from the recent media attention, the second reason stops basically nobody). Thirdly, even if Eliezer personally met all those people (once again, remember that they would be very atypical) affected and explicitly asked not to do anything, they would understand that he has SIAI PR at stake and thus an incentive to lie to them about what they should do, and they wouldn’t want to listen to him (as even remote possibility of torture might seem scary) and, e.g. donate via another person. Or find their own ways of trying to create fAI. Or whatever they can come up with. Or find their ways to fight the possible creation of AI. Or maybe even something like this. I don’t know, this idea did not cause me nightmares therefore I do not claim to understand the mindset of those people. Here I must note that in no way I am claiming that because a person has an OCD they would actually do that.

Nowadays, however, what most people seem to want to talk about is not the idea of a basilisk itself, but rather the drama surrounding it. As it is sometimes used to dismiss all LW (again, for reasons similar to this), many people get very defensive and pattern match those who bring this topic up with an intent of potentially discussing it (and related events) to trolls who do it just for the sake of trolling. Therefore this situation might feel worse for some people, especially those who are not targeted by the mass downvoting or have so much karma they can’t realistically be significantly affected by it.

I feel like I am putting a lot of effort to steelman everything. I guess I, too, got very defensive, potentially for the reasons mentioned in that SlateStarCodex post. Well, maybe everything was just a combination of many stupid decisions, impulsive behaviour and after-the-fact rationalizations, which, after all, might be the simplest explanation. I don’t know. Well, as I wasn’t even there, there must people who would be better informed about the events and better suited to argue.
What links here?
- Sarunas's comment on What are your contrarian views? by Metus (17 Sep 2014 13:06 UTC; 1 point)

Sarunas 17 Sep 2014 13:06 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Jiro’s comment on: What are your contrarian views?

Censoring substantial references to the basilisk was partly done in the name of protecting the people affected. This requires that there be a significant number of people, not just that there be the normal number of people who can be affected by any unusual idea.

Curiously, it is not necessary. For example, it would suffice that people who do the censoring overestimate the number of people that might need protection. Or consider PR explanation that I gave in another comment which similarly does not require a large number of people affected. Some other parts of your comment are also addressed there.

Sarunas 17 Sep 2014 20:21 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Jiro’s comment on: What are your contrarian views?
Well, in that post by Xixidu, there is a quote by Mitchell Porter (that is approved by Eliezer) that, combined with the [reddit post] I have linked earlier, seems he was not able to provide a proof that no variation of basilisk would ever work given that there are more than one possible decision theory, including some exotic and obscure ones that are not yet invented (but who knows what will be invented in the future). Eliezer seems to think that humans minds are unable to actually rigorously follow such a decision theory strictly enough that would be required for such a concept to work. But the human ability is such a vague concept, it is not clear how one can give a formal proof.

However, it seems to me that an inability to provide a formal proof seems to be an unlikely reason to freak out. What (I guess) has happened was that this inability to provide a proof, combined with that unnamed SIAI person’s nightmares (I would guess that Eliezer knows all SIAI people personally) and the fear of the aforementioned potential PR disaster might have resulted into the feeling of losing control of a situation and made him panic, thus resulting into that nervous and angry post, emphasizing the danger and need to protect some people (and leaving out cult PR reasons). This is my personal guess, I do not guarantee that it is correct.

Is an inability to actually deny a thing equivalent to a belief that negation of that belief has a positive probability? Well, logically they are somewhat similar, but these two ways to express similar ideas certainly have different connotations and leave very different impressions in the listener’s mind what was the person’s actual degree of belief.

(I must add that I personally do not like speculating about another person’s motivations why he did what he did when I actually have no way of knowing them)

Sarunas 17 Sep 2014 20:24 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Jiro’s comment on: What are your contrarian views?
I would guess that the dislike of censorship is not an unpopular position, whatever its motivations.

Sarunas 18 Sep 2014 14:15 UTC
1 point
in reply to: lmm’s comment on: What are your contrarian views?
Well, nobody in LW community is without flaws. People often fail (or sometimes not even try) to live up to the high standards of being a good rationalist. The problem is that in some internet forums “judging the community” somehow becomes something like “this is what LW makes you to believe, and even if they deny it, they do it only because not doing it would give them a bad image” or “they are a cult that wants you to believe in their robot god” which are such gross misrepresentations of LW (or even thedrama surrounding the basilisk stuff) that even after considering Hanlon’s razor one is left wondering whether that level of misinterpretation is possible without at least some amount of intentional hostility. I would guess that nowadays a large part of annoyance at somebody even bringing this topic up is a reaction to this perceived hostility.

If EY is incapable of doing that then that says very bad things about everything we do here.

No, neither it says very bad things about everything we do here, nor about everything we do here. Whenever EY makes a mistake and fails to recognize and admit it, it is his personal failing to live up to the standards he wrote about so much. You may object that not enough people called him out on that on LW itself, but it was my impression that many of those that do e.g. on reddit seem to be LW users (as currently there are few related discussions here on LW, there is no context to do that here, besides, EY rarely comments here anymore). In addition to that on this thread there seems to be several LW users who agree with you, thus definitely you are not a lone voice, among LWers there seem to be many different opinions. Besides, on that reddit thread he seems to basically admit that, in fact, he did make a lot of mistakes in handling this situation.

It has just dawned to me that while we are talking about censorship, at the same time we are having this discussion. And frankly, I do not remember when was the last time a comment was deleted solely for bringing this topic up. Maybe the ban has been silently lifted or at least is no longer ever enforced (even though there were no public announcement about this), leaving everything to the local social norm? However, I would guess that due to the said social norm one could predict that if one posted about this topic, unless one made really clear that one is bringing this topic up due to the genuine curiosity (and having a genuinely interesting question) and not for the sake of trolling or “let’s see what will happen”, o trying to make fun of people and their identity, one would receive a lot of downvotes (due to being pattern matched, which sustains the social norm of not touching this topic). I feel that I should add, that I wouldn’t advice you to test this hypothesis, because that would probably be considered as bringing the topic up for the sake of bringing it up. I’m not claiming the situation is perfect, and I would agree that in the ideal case, the free marketplace of ideas should prevail and this discrepancy between the current situation and the ideal case should be solved somehow.

Sarunas

[LINK] 2014 Fields Medals and Ne­van­linna Prize anounced

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