I note that almost all of these updates are (weakly or strongly) predicted by thinking of you as someone who is trying to harmonize better with a nice social group built around working together to do “something related to AI risk”.
TekhneMakre
Karma: 3,232
How are you telling the difference between “evolution aligned humans to this thing that generalized really well across the distributional shift of technological civilization” vs. “evolution aligned humans to this thing, which then was distorted / replaced / cut down / added to by the distributional shift of technological civilization”?
Isn’t a major point of purifiers to get rid of pollutants, including tiny particles, that gradually but cumulatively damage respiration over long-term exposure?
From Owen’s post: “I’d suggested her as a candidate earlier in the application process, but was not part of their decision-making process”. “Unrelated job offer” is a bad description of that. I don’t see the claim about hosting in the post, but that would a little soften things if true.
Anyway, it’s not a random blog post! If it was a post about how many species of flowers there are or whatever, then my comment wouldn’t make sense. But it’s not random! It’s literally about acting wholesomely! His very unwholesome behavior is very relevant to a post he’s making to the forum of record about what wholesome behavior is!
It makes sense, but I think it’s missing that adults who try to want in the current social world get triggered and/or traumatized as fuck because everyone else is behaving the way you describe.
Really...? You think it’s not indicative of a nontrivial amount of poison, to be in a position of brokering statusful positions to young people, fly one out, suprise her with an expectation that she’ll stay in his house, and greet her with “hold on, I’m gonna masturbate”? This is… a pretty big disconnect between your mindset and mine.
I agree, but he should be more forthcoming!
@Zach Stein-Perlman @habryka Since I guess you don’t understand what I’m saying: If someone’s going to read an essay about a topic that’s entwined with soulcrafting, and that essay is written by someone who has some amount of poison in them, then the reader should be aware of this. Care to say what you disagree with about that?
When it comes to soul-related stuff like this, I’d rather want to keep in mind who the author is… https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/QMee23Evryqzthcvn/a-statement-and-an-apology
climate?
My guess is that a good way to start is to write a short or medium length post that talks about one thing that seems really interesting to you, that LessWrong readers probably haven’t heard about / thought about.
The standard that you seem to be suggesting is Kafkaesque. Someone accuses you of something, you prove them false, but that doesn’t count because of strategic meanings of words. What?
But imagine this from the other side of a conflict. There’s a social norm:
Don’t isolate people (e.g. because it makes them vulnerable, e.g. to abuse).
Now a hypothetical (cartoonishly explicit) bad actor comes along and says “Aha, I know what to do, I will use my soft power to isolate my employee, but only from some people, and that way I’m not “isolating” them, but I can still control their social context of influences, support, and ideology”. (To be extra clear: I’m not following the story in detail and I’m genuinely not claiming that Nonlinear is like this; there’s some possible relevance, in that their genuinely well-intended actions might possibly have had a similarly bad effect as this hypothetical cartoonish bad actor would hypothetically have had.)
So this bad actor does this. Now, did they isolate the person? Did they violate the norm? Can you accuse them of isolating their employee? Do you have to exactly specify what shape of isolation, on pain of making an infinitely malleable accusation? If you later specify the shape / form of the isolation, are you changing the accusation?
Any of them. My point is that “climb!” is kind of like a message about the territory, in that you can infer things from someone saying it, and in that it can be intended to communicate something about the territory, and can be part of a convention where “Climb!” means “There’s a bear!” or whatever; but still, “Climb!” is, besides being an imperative, a word that’s being used to bundle actions together. Actions are kinda part of the territory, but as actions they’re also sort of internal to the speaker (in the same way that a map is also part of the territory, but it’s also internal to the speaker) and so has some special status. Part of that special status is that your actions, and how you bundle your actions, is up to your choice, in a way that it’s not up to your choice whether there’s a biological male/female approximate-cluster-approximate-dichotomy, or whether 2+4=6 etc.
If someone wants to be classified as ”… has XY chromosomes, is taller-on-average, has a penis...” and they aren’t that, then it’s a pathological preference, yeah. But categories aren’t just for describing territory, they’re also for coding actions. If a human says “Climb!” to another human, is that a claim about the territory? You can try to infer a claim about reality, like “There’s something in reality that makes it really valuable for you to climb right now, assuming you have the goals that I assume you have”.
If someone says “call me ‘he’ ”, it could be a pathological preference. Or it could be a preference to be treated by others with the male-role bundle of actions. That preference could be in conflict with others’ preferences, because others might only want to treat a person with the male-role bundle if that person ”… has XY chromosomes, is taller-on-average, has a penis...” . Probably it’s both, and they haven’t properly separated out their preferences / society hasn’t made it convenient for them to separate out their preferences / there’s a conflict about treatment that is preventing anyone from sorting out their preferences.
“Okay, let’s redefine the word ‘pretty’ such that it includes you” actually makes some sense. Specifically, it’s an appeal to anti-lookism. It’s of course confused, because ugliness is also an objective thing. And it’s a conflict, because most people want to treat ugly people differently than they treat pretty people, so the request to be treated like a pretty person is being refused.
On reflection, this post seems subtly but deeply deranged, assuming this is true:
People living 50, or 100, or 200 years ago didn’t have nearly this much trouble dating.
If that’s true, then all this stuff is besides the point, and the question is what changed.
categories are useful insofar as they compress information by “carving reality at the joints”;
I think from context you’re saying ”...are only useful insofar...”. Is that what you’re saying? If so, I disagree with the claim. Compressing information is a key way in which categories are useful. Another key way in which categories are useful is compressing actions, so that you can in a convenient way decide and communicate about e.g. “I’m gonna climb that hill now”. More to the point, calling someone “he” is mixing these two things together: you’re both kinda-sorta claiming the person has XY chromosomes, is taller-on-average, has a penis, etc.; and also kinda-sorta saying “Let’s treat this person in ways that people tend to treat men”. “He” compresses the cluster, and also is a button you can push to treat people in that way. These two things are obviously connected, but they aren’t perfectly identical. Whether or not the actions you take make someone happy or sad is relevant.
You can’t just use redefinitions to turn trans women similar to cis women.
What does this mean? It seems like if the original issue is something about whether to call an XY-er “she” if the XY-er asks for that, then, that’s sort of like a redefinition and sort of not like a redefinition… Is the claim something like:
Eliezer wants to redefine “woman” to mean “anyone who asks to be called ‘she’ ”. But there’s an objective cluster, and just reshuffling pronouns doesn’t make someone jump from being typical of one cluster to typical of the other.
Trans women start out much more similar to cis men than to cis women, and transitioning doesn’t do very much.
This one is a set of empirical, objective claims.… but elsewhere you said:
Focusing on brains seems like the wrong question to me. Brains matter due to their effect on psychology, and psychology is easier to observe than neurology.
Even if psychology is similar in some ways, it may not be similar in the ways that matter though, and in fact the ways that matter need not be restricted to psychology. Even if trans women are psychologically the same as cis women, trans women in women’s sports is still a contentious issue.
So I guess that was representing your viewpoint, not Zack’s?
Are you claiming that Zack is claiming that there’s no such thing as gender? Or that there’s no objective thing? Or that there’s nothing that would show up in brain scans? I continue to not know what the basic original object-level disagreement is!
I’m not saying that it looks like you’re copying your views, I’m saying that the updates look like movements towards believing in a certain sort of world: the sort of world where it’s natural to be optimistically working together with other people on project that are fulfilling because you believe they’ll work. (This is a super empathizable-with movement, and a very common movement to make. Also, of course this is just one hypothesis.) For example, moving away from theory and “big ideas”, as well as moving towards incremental / broadly-good-seeming progress, as well as believing more in a likely continuum of value of outcomes, all fit with trying to live in a world where it’s more immediately motivating to do stuff together. Instead of witholding motivation until something that might really work is found, the view here says: no, let’s work together on whatever, and maybe it’ll help a little, and that’s worthwhile because every little bit helps, and the witholding motivation thing wasn’t working anyway.
(There could be correct reasons to move toward believing and/or believing in such worlds; I just want to point out the pattern.)