If OP was geniunely curious, she could’ve looked for evidence beyond her personal feelings (e.g. ran an internet survey) and / or asked Kat privately. What OP did here is called “concern trolling”.
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Karma: 245
I personally found the memes funny. To address your objection:
Overall, the content she posts feels like engagement bait. It feels like it is trying to convince me of something rather than make me smarter about something. It feels like it is trying to convey feelings at me rather than facts. It feels like it is making me stupider.
To give an analogy, it feels like PETA content. When I initially went vegan, it wasn’t PETA content that convinced me. It was Brian Tomasik content and videos of grinding male chicks. While it’s true that I am “out of distribution” so to speak, popular consensus is that PETA’s attempts at memetic content are mostly cringe. Kat Woods, why would you want to make content like that?
The goal of rationalist community is to make people smarter and more rational. Thus we have a norm: we should aim to explain and not persuade. This isn’t a norm in a wider world; persuading other people to your point of view is a socially acceptable way to achieve your goals. It seems to me you are trying to enforce lesswrong norms outside of lesswrong; why?
The goal of AI safety isn’t to make people smarter, it is to prevent unsafe AI from being deployed. Conveying feelings isn’t inherently bad. I would agree that manipulating people’s feelings to change their beliefs contrary to facts is bad. But that is not the only possible purpose of conveying feelings. People can be moved to act by feelings, we often feel better when we know that others share our feelings, and we can get along better if we understand each other’s feelings and don’t hurt them, and humor is valuable in its own right. I also wouldn’t say that these posts you sited are all feelings based, many of them are debunking faulty arguments that many people make. That’s just valid discourse.The goal of PETA isn’t to be popular, it is to protect animals. Here are their accomplishments as listed on their website (I trust they’re not lying):
PETA persuaded more than a dozen companies, including Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson, to make the abusive and pointless forced swim test a thing of the past. Laboratories conduct these experiments by dosing mice, rats, guinea pigs, gerbils, or hamsters with a test substance, dropping them into inescapable containers of water, and watching as the petrified animals frantically look for an escape. See other victories for animals who are used in experiments.
In 1995 after two years of negotiations with—and more than 400 demonstrations against—the company worldwide, McDonald’s became the first fast-food chain to agree to make basic welfare improvements for farmed animals. Now, thanks largely to PETA’s outreach and persistence, you can’t visit a fast-food restaurant without seeing a vegan option, whether it’s Burger King’s or Carl’s Jr.’s animal-free burgers, Del Taco’s vegan beef burritos, or WaBa Grill’s plant-based steak bowls. The vegan revolution is here.
Undercover investigations of pig-breeding factory farms in North Carolina and Oklahoma revealed horrific conditions and daily abuse of pigs, including the fact that one pig was skinned alive, leading to the first-ever felony indictments of farm workers. See other victories for animals who are used for food.
After persistent campaigning by PETA U.S., other PETA entities, and our supporters around the world, Canada Goose joined the ever-growing list of top fashion brands that have sworn off fur, including Prada, Coach, Versace, Michael Kors, Balmain, Gucci, Calvin Klein, and Burberry. And we’re toppling other industries, too. After we released the results of PETA Asia’s investigation into the angora rabbit fur industry, more than 100 major brands suspended their use of the material, including Gap, H&M, Ralph Lauren, Topshop, UNIQLO, and Zara. And following the release of the first-of-its-kind undercover PETA investigation into one of the world’s largest alpaca-fleece producers, we persuaded more than 65 companies to make the compassionate decision to ban the material. See other victories for animals exploited for fashion.
After 36 years of protests from PETA members and supporters against Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, it stopped using animals in its shows. Ringling is planning its return to the big top, without animals—sending a powerful message to the entire industry and echoing what we’ve been saying for decades: Animals don’t belong in the circus or in any other form of entertainment. In a landmark case, our Endangered Species Act (ESA) lawsuit against Tiger King villain Tim Stark and Indiana roadside zoo Wildlife in Need succeeded—setting a precedent that premature separation of lion, tiger, and lion/tiger hybrid cubs and mothers; declawing; and cub-petting violate federal law. We also played an integral role in a major victory when the U.S. Department of Justice seized 69 protected big cats from Lauren and Jeff Lowe, operators of Tiger King Park in Oklahoma, and won its own ESA lawsuit against the Lowes. See other victories for animals used for entertainment.
PETA persuaded Mobil, Texaco, Pennzoil, Shell, and other oil companies to cover their exhaust stacks after showing how millions of birds and bats had become trapped in the shafts and been burned to death. See other victories for wildlife.
Thanks to PETA’s lengthy campaign to push PETCO to take more responsibility for the animals in its stores, the company agreed to stop selling large birds and to make provisions for the millions of rats and mice in its care. See other victories for abused companion animals.
It seems what PETA does works.
But honestly, is this content for the greater good? Are the clickbait titles causing people to earnestly engage? Are peoples’ minds being changed? Are people thinking thoughtfully about the facts and ideas being presented?
If this looks a lot like brand memeing or PETA advocacy, I’d expect it to work about as well. Meaning at least somewhat well. What makes you think it doesn’t work, apart from your own feelings? I’m not a subscriber to the subreddits and I don’t know what their vibe or level of seriousness is, so the memes may indeed be out of place on some of these subreddits. I have no opinion on that. I agree it would be good if someone collected data and learned which advocacy methods are most effective.
What would I do instead
Maybe you should do it.
I like the dress code you propose, it looks so pretty! I was on the fence about going and this post helped me make up my mind. You made it sound more like a real party.
Hi! I wrote two extensions you suggested:
- “Emotion highlighter” detecting and highlighting paragraphs with 6 basic emotions
It’s very basic API call right now, I’ll think about improving it once I see if anyone uses it at all and what improvements they want (more emotions / more precise highlighting / better classification?).
- “Simple English translator” converting all text on a webpage into plain English.
They use your OpenAI API key to analyze all text on a webpage once you click the extension, and OpenAI charges $5.00 / 1M input tokens as of the time of writing this comment.
>> High decouplers will notice that, holding preferences constant, offering people an additional choice cannot make them worse off. People will only take the choice if its better than any of their current options.
This is demonstrably untrue in cases of suicide. 70% of people who survive a suicide attempt do not attempt it again, so their decision to try is probably a bout of temporary madness / irrationality, and not an expression of stable well-considered preference for death over life.
Long Live the Queen takes about 4 hours. It would take some luck to beat it on the first try, but generally you win by using common sense and training useful skills.
What were the most impressive results that were supposedly accomplished? Maybe we should run some experiments to see if they can be reproduced?
Interesting post and self-improvement advice!
I want to add to that when you’re learning a behavior that is new to you, you want to start out in a low-risk setting. You are probably going to make mistakes. For example, when you first try to act high-status and assertive, you may overdo it and come off as aggressive and rude. So you want to start practicing in a safe setting where mistakes won’t cost you a job, e.g. anonymously on the internet or with friends. Or if you do write to your boss, have a friend look over the letter. Then move on to more high stakes situations.
Another caveat is that if you adopted a dysfunctional behavior, it was probably for a reason. There was probably someone in your environment around whom the dysfunctional behavior made complete sense and was the only way to get along with them. They may still be around you. Expect them to blow up. But don’t be discouraged, remember most people are not like them.
I appreciate you writing this post! I was curious about the evidence for lab leak, but was too lazy to investigate on my won.
You point out COVID-19 is the only sarbecovirus with furin cleavage site. But couldn’t it have evolved by switching host from some other species? According to Nature, “viruses more often evolve by jumping from one host species to another than by remaining within a particular species.”
So the general prevalence of furin cleavage sites seems relevant too. Did anyone look into what that is?
Didn’t they demonstrate that transformers could be mesaoptimizers? (I never properly understood the paper, so it’s a genuine question.) Uncovering Mesaoptimization Algorithms in Transformers
Not to mention that the default result of rebellion is failure. (Figure from https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/the-future-of-nonviolent-resistance-2/)
OP doesn’t claim that dictators are unchecked in their power, he jokingly claims that dictators and monarchs inevitably end up overthrown. Which is, of course, false: there were ~55 authoritarian leaders in the world in 2015, and 11 of them were 69 years old or older, on their way to die of old age. Dictator’s handbook has quite a few examples of dictators ruling until their natural death, too.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/09/10/when-dictators-die/
I agree that it’s his main point; however, he’s also making an observation that most terrorists are incompetent, impulsive, have poor preparation and planning, and choose difficult forms of attacks when better options are available. The post has several anecdotes illustrating that.
He believes the incompetence is caused by terrorist acting on social incentives instead of optimizing for their stated goals. However, what if some terrorist group has one earnest terrorist, or what if the chatbot provides the social encouragement need to spur a terrorist to action while simultaneously suggesting a more effective stategy? There also lone wolf terrorist who, while more practical, are limited to their own ideas, so probably less competent than a whole team of researchers.
Ok, so LLMs don’t give an advantage in bioterrorism planning to a team of RAND researchers. Does it mean they don’t give an advantage to actual terrorists, who are notoriously incompetent? https://gwern.net/terrorism-is-not-effective#sn17
I think you’re zeroing in on the hypothesis that your list had a problem too early. There are many possible reasons to fail college, like having a mental health issue or not being very motivated to succeed in the first place. Do you know that he actually read your list?
In my experience the biggest predictor of teaching success is whether the person asked to be taught)
If you are leaving relatives or friends behind, consider developing some kind of code language, because people in Russia might be afraid to tell you their real opinions over the phone in plain speech.
I believe there is nothing wrong or irrational about taking collective action or calling to it. On the contrary, a culture that prohibited collective action has failed at instrumental rationality and is about to be conquered by a culture that didn’t. So I am strongly opposed to your first suggested rule.
Yes, I believe we shouldn’t get involved in politics if it endangers alignment research efforts or otherwise hurts the community for little gain. But we should take collective actions which carry negligible risks and huge expected benefits. Rationality is about winning. Being divided makes us weak and less likely to win. Let’s not do this.
Will MIRI want to hire programmers once the pandemic is over? What kind of programmers? What other kinds of people do you seek to hire?
There are at least 4 levels to the skill of empathy:
1. Imagine yourself in the other person’s shoes
2. Imagine yourself in the other person’s shoes and having their beliefs
3. Imagine yourself in the other person’s shoes and having their beliefs and values
4. Imagine yourself in the other person’s shoes and having their beliefs, values, thought process and intelligence
For the nail video, you are deploying the first level of empathy. If you believed that there is a nail in your head that causes all your problems, you would want to remove it and feel disgusted at yourself if you didn’t. However, the woman does not see things that way! The whole video is a metaphor for how the man perceives the situation. From the woman’s perspective the conversation could be something like:
- Man, job search is so hard! Just yesterday...
- Well, have you tried creating a Linkedin account?
Woman: of course I have a Linkedin account, I wasn’t born yesterday… I just wanted to rant about this interviewer who was rude to me. I don’t need my husband to fix the problem of some people being rude, I just wanted support. Instead I learned that he sees me as an idiot. Grand.
Failing to account for a different intelligence level is, I believe, a mistake that highly intelligent people make a lot. If the median student at your college has a perfect SAT score, that tells me that SAT is not very hard, and two people with perfect SAT scores can have a big difference in intelligence.
During the first part of my MATS stream, our supervisor assigned an obligatory reading list of math textbooks that, when you divided the total page count by the number of days, amounted to 100 pages of math textbook per day. Also, optionally, you could think ahead about the research direction to choose in the stream and ask questions about that. The other people in the stream were keeping up with both. I was at first confused how, but then I learned two out of four people in our stream were IMO winners. Of course they could study 100 pages of math textbook per day and have time left over. Or maybe they already knew half of it—I’d studied many of the topics myself in college, but it was years ago and I needed a revision. Also, my thought process said the obligatory task must be completed before the optional one, but that perhaps was a mistake. So, I studied 100 pages of math textbook per day as best I could, but didn’t have time left over for anything else. At the end of the stream the supervisor approached me to say I seemed lazy and disengaged and that the results of my week of research were probably completed in the last two days (they were not).
I wasn’t lazy, I worked as hard as I possibly could. I just don’t have the brainpower of IMO winners. I myself am a national olympiad winner and I was an IMO candidate. For years on end I dedicated virtually every free moment of my time to preparing for IMO, but my teachers were disappointed and one approached me in 11th grade to lecture me about the harm of computer games. I hadn’t played computer games since 9th grade.
So, if you don’t account for people having different levels of intelligence, you may be too quick to assume that other people are not putting in effort. Did the other students in your project really not study any ML before the start of the semester, or maybe they did and it didn’t benefit them as much as it would you? What did they do before the semester then, just relax all day? Learn other things they’d need in college, like math or general programming skills? Work a job to support their family? I’m not trying to defend these particular students—I haven’t met them, maybe you are 100% right and they were just lazy—just saying these alternative explanations to laziness are generally worth considering. You planned to study machine learning years in advance, other people could’ve planned for different careers, and then their plans failed, and doing ML is their plan C which they made up on the fly.
Of course, even the highest levels of empathy will not necessarily prevent you from feeling disappointed or disgusted by people. I believe some thought processes are inherently immoral and disgusting, so you could accurately model them and still feel disgust. Motivated reasoning, sadism, narcissism, bigotry—there are many things you could simulate in your head and still remain unsympathetic towards.
Still… you appear to be operating at the lowest level of the empathy skill, and can probably do better and feel more sympathetic to people as a result.