supposedlyfun

Suc­cess­ful Men­tor­ing on Par­ent­ing, Ar­ranged Through LessWrong

• supposedlyfun 6 Nov 2021 14:35 UTC

  67 points

  on: Speak­ing of Stag Hunts

  Executive summary: I have no idea what you’re talking about.

  Standards are not really popular. Most people don’t like them. Half the people here, I think, don’t even see the problem that I’m trying to point at. Or they see it, but they don’t see it as a problem.

  I gather that you’re upset about how the Leverage conversation went, and also Cancel Culture, so I assume your chief proposition is that LessWrong is canceling Geoff Anders; but you haven’t actually made that case, just vaguely gestured with words.

  I think that a certain kind of person is becoming less prevalent on LessWrong, and a certain other kind of person is becoming more prevalent, and while I have nothing against the other kind, I really thought LessWrong was for the first group.

  What are the two kinds of persons? Really, I honestly do not know what you are claiming here. Repeat: I don’t have even a foggy guess as to what your two kinds of person are. Am I “a certain other kind of person”? How can I know?

  Distinguish feeling from fact.

  This post has virtually no facts. It has short, punchy sentences with italics for emphasis. It is written like a hortatory sermon. Its primary tool is rhetoric. The first quarter of it is essentially restating parts of the sequences. Then you point to some comments and are upset that they got upvoted. Others, you’re upset they haven’t been upvoted. I have no idea whatsoever why you feel these things, and you don’t elaborate. I am apparently one of the people who “don’t even see the problem that [you’re] trying to point at.”

  This comment was much longer in draft, but I’ve deleted the remainder because I don’t want to seem “impatient” or “sneering”. I’m just confused: You wrote all these words intending to convince people of something, but you don’t specify what it is, and you don’t use the tools we typically use to convince (facts, reliable sources, syllogistic reasoning, math, game theory...). Am I just not part of the intended audience? If so, who are they?

  What links here?

  • hath's comment on Speak­ing of Stag Hunts by [DEACTIVATED] Duncan Sabien (7 Nov 2021 1:17 UTC; 11 points)
  • MondSemmel's comment on Speak­ing of Stag Hunts by [DEACTIVATED] Duncan Sabien (6 Nov 2021 22:39 UTC; 6 points)

• supposedlyfun 18 Sep 2020 2:04 UTC

  50 points

  on: Book Re­view: Work­ing With Contracts

  I’m a lawyer and have programmed very simple things in very simple programming languages, and I endorse both your Contracts 101 description, which is very easy to understand and also accurate, and your parallels with computer programming. Your focus on risk allocation is spot on. I promise to do something for you, you promise to pay me, and the other 50 pages are just risk allocation and rules on how to parse the risk allocation.

  Re patches on top of patches: There is some truth here. For context, there are two reasons that contracts I work on end up looking like this. The first is that the patches are carve-outs for some very particular contingency the client is worried about, and because they’re not lawyers, they don’t understand the non-patchy things that address their concern, so they want something specific addressing their concern. The other side tends to agree because they, too, know that the patchy thing is superfluous. It’s sort of like if you were a programmer who was really bad at math, and you wanted to print “hello world” if x was between 5 and 10 but it was EXTREMELY PERSONALLY IMPORTANT to you that “hello world” be printed where x=7, you would code

  {if(5<x<10), PRINT “hello world”

  if(x=7), PRINT “hello world”}

  The second reason is cost. I could write a bespoke contract for every client’s every need, but to save time==money, there are vast form books/​online repositories for standard transactions, plus we ruthlessly plagiarize from each other—it really is the highest form of flattery. The patches are added to address the specific concerns or unique details of the particular deal. We then run a sanity check applying the patches to the rest of the agreement to make sure nothing weird happens.

  Finally, I would characterize a “reasonableness” requirement as “we’ll just ask a jury” rather than a “do what I mean” button. Because taking a case to trial is so flipping expensive, and putting in a reasonableness standard or “course of business” all but guarantees (due to common law) that you will have to go to trial if there’s an unresolvable dispute, and juries are super unpredictable, you would almost never use “reasonableness” as a substitute for “do what I mean.” You would keep hammering at a verbalization of “what I mean”.

  If the other side were insisting on a “reasonableness” standard for some action which we could define by reference to objective facts (like “200 widgets made out of ASTM A125-96 steel”), my mental model of them would update to “so likely to be planning to cheat my client that we should walk the deal”.

  The other use of “reasonable” you mention is more common—to give the party some freedom but not absolute discretion.

  Thanks again for this excellent post. I feel hopeful when I see non-lawyers understanding law stuff, because it makes me feel hopeless for the future of the Rule of Law (TM) when some part of my job is so complex that no person without specialized training could hope to do it. The law should be for everyone.

  What links here?

  • Rant on Prob­lem Fac­tor­iza­tion for Alignment by johnswentworth (5 Aug 2022 19:23 UTC; 90 points)

• supposedlyfun 4 Nov 2021 5:42 UTC

  47 points

  on: De­po­si­tions and Rationality

  Am lawyer. Have deposed 30+ people, defended 30+ depositions, and was a “potted plant” or active observer in another 20. All the items you mention from the article are good advice for learning how to depose someone.

  I haven’t done any CFAR except insofar as it’s baked into the material here. I’m guessing CFAR assumes that both participants at least believe that they want the same thing—to model reality better, to reach and resolve a crux, something(s) along those lines. Certainly for crux-hunting, you need two people who are fundamentally collaborating.

  Depositions are...really different. Background might help. 100 years ago, relative to today, everybody just showed up at trial with surprise witnesses and documents in what is known as “trial by ambush.” This was like Texas Hold ’Em.

  The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, first published in 1938, aimed to do things dramatically differently by requiring each side to give the other side all of its important documents and witness information, and made depositions a bigger and more useful thing. This is like Texas Hold ’Em except that your hole cards are face up and visible to the other players. The idea was to encourage settlement (and thereby reduce the number of cases on court dockets, and the attendant administrative burden) by forcing everyone to give the other side all the stuff that hurt their case, instead of just the stuff that helped their case, or nothing at all. Every State I know of has since followed suit with similar rules frameworks to govern litigation in State courts. It really works at incentivizing settlement.

  Depositions serve two purposes:

  1. Learn about the facts your side doesn’t already know (adversarial; as you can imagine, lawyers try not to disclose bad facts or documents, but it’s easier to get deponents to tell you that stuff in person for the usual savannah-monkey-brain reasons).

  2. Tie down the witness’s trial testimony (adversarial; if Witness 1 says X at deposition, and Y at trial, you get to beat them up in front of the jury, and it’s really fun).

  Notice that nobody’s incentive here is “expose the truth”—not the courts’, not the parties’. Not until a jury is impaneled is anyone sworn to do anything along those lines.

  At bottom, depositions are a fight. Most witnesses have been prepared by the other side’s lawyer and are not going to make it easy on you. You have to use the techniques above to pin them down, and they fight like cornered animals as you do so. People sweat, get hangry, pit their own executive function against the lawyer’s, play stupid word games they would never play in front of a jury of strangers, answer evasively, interpose leading objections to hint to the witness how to answer the question. There are rules for when you can abort a deposition based on witness or attorney misconduct, because of course we need such a rule.

  Setting apart some time for a witness to actually try recalling further information is almost exactly the same as resolve cycles.

  Most of the time, if I’m doing this to a witness, it’s because I’m trying to get them to say something they don’t want to disclose and I think that me staring at them in silence will trigger savannah-monkey-brain compliance instincts, not because I think they need more time to remember stuff. They probably met with their lawyer for at least an hour in advance. They probably didn’t sleep well the night before because they were thinking about the case.

  “False beliefs feel the same as true ones” means that witnesses are probably too willing to nail down their testimony and end up accidentally perjuring themselves

  This is vanishingly rare in my practice. If the witness’s lawyer did zir job, the witness is maximally unwilling to be nailed down.

  “Boxing in by bracketing” or “calibrated estimation” is missing from the handbook

  I have started incorporating rationalist-adjacent concepts into my deposition strategies, but it’s really only effective against expert witnesses like engineers, surveyors, doctors, lawyers, for attacking the factual and inferential underpinnings of their opinion-for-hire. Most lay witnesses really, truly don’t understand what you’re talking about if you start getting into statistics or even really basic epistemics.

  “Convincing a witness to accept a standard” uses the framework of policy level decisionmaking: making a witness accept that a norm applies to them is easier by having them endorse it first; it then becomes blatantly hypocritical for them to reject it.

  This doesn’t seem like what policy-level decisionmaking is about per the handbook. PLD is more like “it’s hard to decide edge cases consistently with your true values when you’re fatigued, so pre-commit to a decision policy matching your true values when you’re not fatigued”. I can see a connection to the standard-endorsing strategy, but I have to squint pretty hard.

  Edited: to remove ableist language and replace it with the “trial by ambush” phrase.

• supposedlyfun 8 Jan 2021 0:48 UTC

  47 points

  on: Covid 1/​7: The Fire of a Thou­sand Suns

  You deserve to be paid for these covid updates. Are you getting paid? How does one pay you for this? This must’ve taken at least 15 hours.

• supposedlyfun 7 Nov 2021 1:49 UTC

  43 points

  in reply to: [DEACTIVATED] Duncan Sabien’s comment on: Speak­ing of Stag Hunts

  I spent 15 minutes re-reading the thread underneath orthonormal’s comment to try to put myself in your head. I think maybe I succeeded, so here goes, but from a person whose job involves persuading people, it’s Not Optimal For Your Argument that I had to do this to engage with your model here, and it’s potentially wasteful if I’ve failed at modeling you.

  I read both of the comments discussed below, at the time I was following the original post and comments, but did not vote on either.

  ***

  orthonormal P1: Anders seemed like a cult leader/​wannabe based on my first impressions, and I willingly incurred social cost to communicate this to others

  orthonormal P2 [which I inferred using the Principle of Charity]: Most of the time, people who immediately come across as cult leaders are trying to start a cult

  Duncan P1: It’s bad when LW upvotes comments with very thin epistemic rigor

  Duncan P2: This comment has very thin epistemic rigor because it’s based on a few brief conversations

  Gloss: I don’t necessarily agree with your P2. It’s not robust, but nor is it thin; if true, it’s one person’s statement that, based on admittedly limited evidence, they had a high degree of confidence that Anders wanted to be a cult leader. I can review orthonormal’s post history to conclude that ze is a generally sensible person who writes as though ze buys into LW epistemics, and is also probably known by name to various people on the site, meaning if Anders wanted to sue zir for defamation, Anders could (another social and financial cost that orthonormal is incurring). Conditional on Anders not being a cult leader, I would be mildly surprised if orthonormal thought Anders was a cult leader/​wannabe.

  Also, this comment—which meets your epistemic standards, right? If so, did it cause you to update on the “Leverage is being canceled unfairly” idea?

  ***

  Matt P1: I spent hundreds of hours talking to Anders

  Matt P2: If he were a cult leader/​wannabe, I would have noticed

  Duncan P1: It’s bad when LW doesn’t upvote comments with good epistemic rigor

  Duncan P2: This comment has good epistemic rigor because Matt has way more evidence than orthonormal

  Gloss: [Edit: Upon reflection, I have deleted this paragraph. My commentary is not germane to the issue that Duncan and I are debating.]

  ***

  The karma score disparity is currently 48 on 39 votes, to 5 on 26 votes.

  Given my thought process above, which of the comments should I have strongly upvoted, weakly upvoted, done nothing to, weakly downvoted, or strongly downvoted, on your vision of LW?

  Or: which parts of my thought process are inimical to your vision of LW?

  ***

  If it helps you calibrate your response, if any, I spent about 45 minutes researching, conceptualizing, drafting, and editing this comment.

• supposedlyfun 2 Mar 2021 22:53 UTC

  32 points

  on: A whirlwind tour of Ethereum finance

  One of the things I appreciate about this community is posts like this, where a smart person gets the itch to learn all about something interesting, then writes it up in a way that effectively conveys their synthesis.

• supposedlyfun 24 Aug 2021 0:09 UTC

  25 points

  0

  on: The Death of Be­hav­ioral Economics

  Even with Kaj’s highlight comments, which are helpful, I don’t feel educated enough in the economics area (one semester of high school Econ) to tell whether this is
  1) vigorous academic debate or

  2) damning evidence of academic fraud by Kahneman and Tversky.

  Given how K&T are pretty central to parts of the Sequences, and that Judgment Under Uncertainty is at the top of my book pile—can someone with some expertise in this area give their take? I would donate $20 to Givewell for 500+ words that helped me to understand this situation.

• supposedlyfun 28 Apr 2022 6:23 UTC

  24 points

  on: The Game of Masks

  I strongly downvoted this post. This post fits a subgenre I’ve recently noticed at LW in which the author seems to be using writing style to say something about the substance being communicated. I guess I’ve been here too long and have gotten tired of people trying to persuade me with style, which I consider to be, at best, a waste of my time.

  This post also did not explain why I should care that mesaoptimizer systems are kind of like Lacan’s theory. I had to read some Lacan in college, putatively a chunk that was especially influential on the continental philosophers we were studying. Foucault seems like Hemingway by comparison. If Lacan was right about anything, it’s not because he followed anything like the epistemic standards we value here. Or if he did, he did so illegibly, which is as valuable as not doing it at all.

  If you can see the game that someone is playing with themselves, if you can get underneath the lies they tell themselves and access their desires directly, you can play them like an instrument and they will have no idea how you’re doing it.

  This seems important, so I ask you to provide evidence supporting it.

• supposedlyfun 23 Mar 2021 2:54 UTC

  24 points

  on: Thirty-three ran­domly se­lected bioethics papers

  Provisional: a few weeks ago, the LW magic recommendation feed showed me this EY article about bioethics being stupid, from a while back. I was somewhat persuaded by his point. Your random sample seems to strongly confirm his model/​hypothesis:

  A doctor treating a patient should not try to be academically original, to come up with a brilliant new theory of bioethics. As I’ve written before, ethics is not supposed to be counterintuitive, and yet academic ethicists are biased to be just exactly counterintuitive enough that people won’t say, “Hey, I could have thought of that.” The purpose of ethics is to shape a well-lived life, not to be impressively complicated. Professional ethicists, to get paid, must transform ethics into something difficult enough to require professional ethicists.

  Many of these papers seem to be doing exactly that, or to just be arguing with some other bioethicist who is doing that. The pullquotes you put in the body of your post certainly make it look like a diseased discipline. These people are just writing op/​eds at each other, as far as I can tell.

  I only got about halfway through your post because it all seemed aggressively uninteresting to anyone who is not an academic bioethicist. And I like reading philosophy of religion!

  Finally, I think it’s totally nuts that people assert that nudges are, or even can be, per se unethical. But I think maybe I need to do a full-on post about that after reading up on the issue. Upon reflection, I’m withdrawing this claim because a) it’s not germane to the main post or my comment and b) I’m always complaining in my head about people posting contentious claims on LW without any support, so I shouldn’t do that, either.

  [edited to add a link to the Diseased Discipline article.]

  What links here?

  • The Bioethi­cists are (Mostly) Alright by Devin Kalish (EA Forum; 7 Jan 2022 16:02 UTC; 148 points)

• supposedlyfun 6 Dec 2021 1:33 UTC

  23 points

  on: In­ter­pret­ing Yud­kowsky on Deep vs Shal­low Knowledge

  Now that we have a decent grounding of what Yudkowsky thinks deep knowledge is for, the biggest question is how to find it, and how to know you have found good deep knowledge.

  This is basically the thing that bothered me about the debates. Your solution seems to be to analogize, Einstein:relativity::Yudkowsky:alignment is basically hopeless. But in the debates, M. Yudkowsky over and over says, “You can’t understand until you’ve done the homework, and I have, and you haven’t, and I can’t tell you what the homework is.” It’s a wall of text that can be reduced to, “Trust me.”

  He might be right about alignment, but under the epistemic standards he popularized, if I update in the direction of his view, the strength of the update must be limited to “M. Yudkowsky was right about some of these things in the past and seems pretty smart and to have thought a lot about this stuff, but even Einstein was mistaken about spooky action at a distance, or maybe he was right and we haven’t figured it out yet, but, hey, quantum entanglement seems pretty real.” In many ways, science just is publishing the homework so people can poke holes in it.

  If Einstein came to you in 1906 (after general relativity) and stated the conclusion of the special relativity paper, and when you asked him how he knew, he said, “You can’t understand until you’ve done the homework, and I have, and you haven’t,” which is all true from my experience studying the equations, “and I can’t tell you what the homework is,” the strength of your update would be similarly limited.

  You might respond that M. Yudkowsky isn’t trying to really convince anyone, but in that case, why debate? He’s at least trying to get people to publish their AI findings less in order to burn less timeline.

• supposedlyfun 15 Mar 2021 2:43 UTC

  23 points

  on: Dark Matters

  This is fabulous content; thank you. I knew virtually nothing about the evidence for dark matter and now feel like I know a fair amount.

  One hangup: I’m missing one or more inferential steps in interpreting the picture of the Bullet Cluster. I understand that the pink is gas and purple is mass, but I am not getting how that relates to dark matter. Since the rest of the piece is very explicitly “if A then B because x, A is true because y, therefore B” in spelling out the thought-steps, could you really break it down for the poets in the back? Maybe after “Explain this with modified gravity.”

  I’d be interested in an explainer about the theories of what dark matter might be, if there are major schools of thought. (If it’s just people’s pet theories, no need to bother.)

• supposedlyfun 7 Nov 2021 22:28 UTC

  20 points

  in reply to: Ruby’s comment on: Speak­ing of Stag Hunts

  Regarding the three threads you list, I, others involved in managing of LessWrong, and leading community figures who’ve spoken to me are all dissatisfied with how those conversations went and believe it calls for changes in LessWrong.

  I’m deeply surprised by this. If there is a consensus among the LW managers and community figures, could one of them write a post about it laying out what was dissatisfactory and what changes they feel need to be made, or at least the result they want from the changes? I know you’re a highly conscientious person with too much on zir hands already, so please don’t take this upon yourself.

• supposedlyfun 17 Apr 2023 20:03 UTC

  19 points

  12

  on: But why would the AI kill us?

  None of this is particularly new; it feels to me like repeating obvious claims that have regularly been made [. . .] But I’ve been repeating them aloud a bunch recently

  I think it’s Good and Valuable to keep simplicity-iterating on fundamental points, such as this one, which nevertheless seem to be sticking points for people who are potential converts.

  Asking people to Read the Sequences, with the goal of turning them into AI-doesn’t-kill-us-all helpers, is not Winning given the apparent timescales.

• supposedlyfun 7 Nov 2021 23:31 UTC

  19 points

  in reply to: [DEACTIVATED] Duncan Sabien’s comment on: Speak­ing of Stag Hunts

  Understood: the comment-karma-disparity issue is, for you, a glaring example of a larger constellation.

  Also understood: you and I have different preferences for explicitly stating underlying claims. I don’t think your position is unreasonable, just that it will lead to much-longer comments possibly at the cost of clarity and engagement. Striking that balance is Hard.

  I think we’ve drilled as far down as is productive on my concerns with the text of your post. I would like to see your follow-up post on the entire constellation, with the rigor customary here. You could definitely persuade me. I maybe was just not part of the target audience for your post.

• supposedlyfun 4 Oct 2020 15:18 UTC

  19 points

  in reply to: jbash’s comment on: Post­mortem to Petrov Day, 2020

  The Web is full of jokey “red buttons”

  This point is important. LW is the type of website I would expect to do some quirky applet that gives an object lesson in iterated game theory, or something, and as a person still trying to learn on LW’s key concepts, I would be inclined to try to play. Thus, the fact that chris pressed the button last year and entered fake codes is neutral evidence to me. It’s what I would have done if I were playing what I thought was an instructive game.

  By contrast, Petrov believed (I assume correctly or at least justifiably) that all of the “buttons” available to him were real buttons that would cause the Soviets to launch at least one nuke and probably hundreds.

  I don’t have a good solution for the problem of “Convince a relative newcomer to the site, solely via the button, that the button is real and will do what it says it does”. For me, as such a newcomer, this is because HPMOR and SSC (my entrees into the community) have such a screwball sense of humor.

  Thus, the more times you try to say, “For real, clicking this button will actually cause the front page to go down for 24 hours,” or “Lots of people are going to be annoyed by this,” or “Clicking this button will tend to show the community that its xrisk calculations are not unreasonably high,” or even “Petrov would be ashamed of you (epistemic status: confident),” the more it looks like a game, because most of the Internet is so seamless that multiple caveats come off as satire.

  Maybe you could add links to the postmortems for Petrov Day 2019 and 2020 in the button?

• supposedlyfun 19 Sep 2020 20:57 UTC

  19 points

  in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: Book Re­view: Work­ing With Contracts

  In most US jurisdictions, interpretation of a contract is a question of law (read: decided by the judge). However, some subparts of that inquiry are questions of fact (read: decided by the jury). By far the most common is to argue that some key term of the contract is ambiguous—that if we read the document as a whole, that key term has two mutually inconsistent meanings.

  This opens the door to evidence about the parties’ intent, which is a jury question. We lawyers are nothing if not sensitive to language, so we’re very good at coming up with possible ambiguities. A judge confronted with a bona fide ambiguity, or even a borderline one, ought to let the case go to trial for the jury to resolve the intent question. (The “ought” comes from common law about when summary judgment is inappropriate.)

  Another good one is in contracts for specialized goods and services with esoteric terms and requirements. You identify some inadequately defined word no jury is familiar with and hire an expert witness to opine that the word’s meaning in the particular commercial context is x. Your opponent hires an expert to say it’s y. Again, the appellate courts tell the trial courts that in this situation, a jury should resolve the “battle of the experts.” P.S. you can find an expert to say just about anything for $5,000, $10,000 on the high side.

  As you can imagine, it’s much easier to litigate the interpretation of a contract than to draft one that can’t really be litigated. Transactional attorneys tend to give litigators a hard time about this, and litigators give transactional attorneys a hard time about being terrified of court rooms.

• supposedlyfun 2 May 2021 3:27 UTC

  18 points

  in reply to: StyleOfDog’s comment on: Your Dog is Even Smarter Than You Think

  I also mentioned Clever Hans, and you made a good point in response. Rather than sound like I am motte-and-baileying you, I will say that I was using “Clever Hans” irresponsibly imprecisely as a stand-in for more issues than were present in the Clever Hans case.

  I’ve updated in the direction of “I’ll eventually need to reconsider my relationship with my dog” but still expect a lot of these research threads to come apart through a combination of

  • Subconscious cues from trainers—true Clever Hans effects (dogs are super clued in to us thanks to selection pressure, in ways we don’t naturally detect)

  • Experiment design that has obvious holes in it (at first)

  • Experiment design that has subtle holes in it (once the easy problems are dealt with)

  • Alternative explanations, of experimentally established hole-free results, from professional scientists (once the field becomes large enough to attract widespread academic attention). Like, yes, you unambiguously showed experimental result x, which you attributed to p, which would indeed explain x, but q is an equally plausible explanation which your experiment does not differentiate against.

  This is based on a model of lay science that tends to show these patterns, because lay science tends to be a “labor of love” that makes it harder to detect one’s own biases.

  Specifically on the volunteer-based projects, I expect additional issues with:

  • Selection effects in the experimentees (only unusually smart/​perceptive/​responsive/​whatever dogs will make it past the first round of training; the others will have owners who get bored from lack of results and quit)

  • Selection effects in the experimenters (only certain types of people will even be aware of this research; only exceptionally talented dog trainers will stick with the program because training intelligent dogs takes so much f-ing patience, much less training dumber dogs)

  There may be lines of research that conclusively establish some surprising things about dog intelligence, and I look forward to any such surprisal. But I’m going to wait until the dust settles more—and until there are more published papers because I have to work a lot harder to understand technical information conveyed by video—before engaging with the research.

• supposedlyfun 27 Nov 2020 1:28 UTC

  18 points

  in reply to: tinyanon’s comment on: Small Habits Shape Iden­tity: How I be­came some­one who exercises

  Great work on the side project you started! I lack the words to even describe it. You don’t seem at all like the type of person who lies around reading Reddit all the time, and I should know.

  XD

• supposedlyfun 2 Jun 2022 4:00 UTC

  17 points

  on: sup­pos­ed­lyfun’s Shortform

  My brain continues to internalize rationality strategies. One thing I’ve noticed is that any time I hear that the average blah is n, my brain immediately says, <who fucking cares, find me the histogram>.

  That’s good, but does anyone have tips for finding the histogram/​chart/​etc in everyday Internet life? I know “find the article on Pubmed” is good, but often, the data-meat is hidden behind a paywall.