I’m surprised to hear that this is your take. Do you only feel this way about politicians who explicitly state that they are acting on their constituents’ values rather than their own, and are willing to also talk candidly about their own values which they are choosing to set aside? Or do you feel similarly about politicians who consistently speak from the values that they have chosen to act on, and do not clarify that those are values that they have taken up on behalf of their constituents while their own personal values differ in some respects?
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Karma: 8,160
This is part of the trickiness of writing the post without examples, which would better pin down where in Alice-Alex-space we’re looking. But, as you got into in another comment thread, there’s other trickiness in writing the post with examples.
I don’t really buy the Alice-Alex dichotomy. “Allie kinda has a good point here” often coexists with “Allie’s thinking about this is pretty distorted and not an accurate description of reality”. Often Allie has blind spots or tunnel vision around this topic, or their understanding of the principle at stake is idiosyncratic and not a good guide for others to be consistently following, or their application of the principle is pretty selective relative to its explicit meaning (e.g. they mainly apply it against people who they already oppose for other reasons), or there’s something funny about how they came to have this hobbyhorse. Maybe an Alice-Alex spectrum is a good enough model? Or maybe it’s better to split it into two dimensions, the extent to which they’ve locked onto something true and important and the extent to which their own thinking about it is screwy.
I’m also unsure about the emphasis on “principled”. Sometimes it seems more like: there are certain patterns of things that deeply annoy/frustrate/offend someone. When one of those things happens around them, they point at it and complain. But the sorts of things that trigger someone’s complaints are a different category than the things a person says about the things they complain about. If a person complains about a thing by saying that it violates such-and-such principle and presents themself as a champion of that principle, that doesn’t necessarily mean that this person in fact is unusually rule-based in abiding by that principle and trying to apply it consistently with high standards. (Though there is typically some relationship between their complaints and that principle.) “Annoyingly loud about principle X” is not equal to “loudly & annoyingly principled about X”.
Sometimes the main potential contribution of an Alice-like person is directing attention to things that don’t fit smoothly in the conversation, and which otherwise might not be talked about much or even (by many people) thought about much. In those cases, what Alice has to say about those things doesn’t add much value. It may seem like Alice has some special insights, but those are just low-hanging fruit that you could get just by paying attention and doing some thinking about the topic. And Alice’s version of those insights might come with some distortions, attitudes, animosity, etc. that aren’t necessary or fitting, such that if you’re relying on Alice then you need to do a lot of work sorting out the actual patterns in reality that she’s been tracking from all the other stuff. Once Alice has directed your attention there, the main thing to do is to look at that part of the world and think about it and use your standard epistemic processes for making sense of the world. (As in my first paragraph, there are two dimensions here where different Allies can have more or less hard-to-independently attain insights, and different allies can also have more or less distortions & nonsense.)
You’re writing as if you or Benquo had put forward a clear claim about the world and I’d said that it’s false, and now there are “sides” in that factual dispute.
What I said is that “blatant lies are the best kind” does not make a clear claim about the world; my criticism that it’s terrible is closer to saying that it’s “not even wrong”.
Does the phrase “blatant lies are the best kind” clearly map on to some specific claim about the world which could resolve as “true” or “false”? Does the phrase help people be more epistemically grounded when engaging with the topic, better at tracking what’s actually happening in the world around them and having traction in thinking about it? I say no.
To dig into that particular phrase some more: there is something funny about how it is doing comparisons (or what it’s conditioning on), like there’s some implicit ceteris paribus clause that’s doing a lot of work, or it’s setting up a hypothetical choice and the details in how you define what the options are is doing a lot of work. There’s something interesting going on with the word “blatant”. It’s setting out a very absolutist claim—does it actually mean it? Is there one clear standard of good that “best” is referring to?
It’s definitely memorable and punchy rhetoric. It was built for that rhetorical oomph; how did it get it? It doesn’t look like the rhetorical oomph that comes as the exclamation mark when you’ve nailed it with a scarily precise description of the world. It doesn’t feel like you’ve just put on glasses and are now seeing the world more clearly than you’ve been able to before. It feels more like a cat coupling. There’s a contrarian allure to the way it flips things on their head which is somewhat discombobulating and helps give it a feel of deep wisdom. And the confusions and difficulty of parsing it as a clear claim about the world may be a feature rather than a bug because they help prevent it from turning into something mundane which doesn’t have that feeling of insight.
Is this your attempt to state the core claim: “Sometimes you do really gotta have more norms and put more effort and stigma in the instances of a crime that tried harder not to be caught”? On first glance it seems true, though I’d want to poke at it more to be sure about what exactly it’s claiming. The “Sometimes” alone makes it very different from the post’s titular claim, and also perhaps close to trivial; I suspect that the more interesting & substantive version of the claim would have to get more specific here and that’s where disagreements could emerge.
I can make my own attempt to come at it from what you’re calling the other side: (Generally) Knowledge is good. Knowing about bad things that are happening to you is good. That makes stealthiness (a tendency to go undetected) a pernicious feature for bad things to have. This applies to people trying to deceive you—it’s better if you notice their attempted deception, which means that it’s pernicious if their attempted deception is hard for you to detect. It also applies to lots of other things, e.g. if you have cancer it’s bad for it to be a “stealthy” form of cancer that tends to result in tests that are false negatives.
Maybe if there had been a clear argument it would’ve gotten better counter-arguments. I’m not even sure what specific claim you’re identifying as the hypothesis, such that it could be true or false.
To sketch a basic “boo blatant lies” argument: It’s challenging for a group of people to have epistemic standards because of ambiguity, fallibility (which makes it exceedingly rare for anyone to be perfectly honest), and the challenges of people at some distance from a situation correctly identifying what happened in that situation (especially when they may start off more inclined to trust some people than others, or fallible themselves). Blatant lies—the ones that are easily identifiable as intentional lies even from a distance—are ones that the group can most straightforwardly coordinate on recognizing and responding to. Which is a starting point to build from. (And even in a group that only catches the blatant lies, many repeat epistemic offenders will slip up eventually and commit a blatant lie that can be caught, and many of the ones who are careful not to slip up will at least be constrained to meaningful degree by the loose-but-still-present epistemic standards.)
So, why get so indignant about blatant lies? To coordinating against a subset of bad epistemic practices that it’s feasible for us to coordinate against.
And the slogan “blatant lies are the best kind!” seems to be poking against that coordination for epistemic standards. It’s like saying “the best kinds of thieves are the ones who get caught and punished” to interrupt someone in the process of apprehending a thief and ask them why they’re so worked up about it.
Here’s another angle: Donald Trump. He sure does tell a lot of blatant lies. Has that been better for the epistemic environment of US politics than the less direct epistemic shenanigans that other Presidents have pulled? Has it been better for the practice of US politics?
Ben Hoffman’s “Blatant Lies are the Best Kind!” is maybe the best post title followed by the least clarifying post I have ever encountered. The title is honestly amazing
Strong disagree. This is one of the worst post titles and a terrible slogan.
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Looking at the bonus objective, the Hero and path that looks most promising is
Warrior: Gremlin, Jaw Worm, Adamant Armor, Enchanted Shield, Sentries, Campfire, Vanishing Powder, The Champion
Reasoning
This run looks promising at first glance because it gets the two Warrior-specific treasures, and faces as few enemies as possible subject to that constraint (as the Warrior seems to fare better against bosses when he has faced fewer enemies).
The big concern with it is the boss battle. The Warrior did ever lose to the Sentries, but only about 2% of the time, and never when he had both Warrior treasures. And he never lost to Gremlin or Jaw Worm.
The Warrior had only an 87% win rate against The Champion when he had both Warrior treasures, including an 86% win rate when his other floors involved 3 enemies, 1 campfire, and 1 other-hero treasure (as this plan does—Vanishing Powder is a Rogue treasure). And one of the failed runs (23970) looks very similar to this plan: Staff of the Magi, Enchanted Shield, Slaver, Jaw Worm, Adamant Armor, Sentries, Campfire, The Champion. So this doesn’t seem like a guaranteed win.
But I don’t see anything better at this point. A Rogue run which gets the Cloak of Protection and the Vanishing Powder looks like an obvious alternative, but looking at similar runs that seems worse.
And when I look at win rate against The Champion in runs that made it to the final floor, by Hero & pairs of floors previously encountered, the top 3 highest win rates all involve the Warrior with Adamant Armor and another useful treasure (Boots of Swiftness, Enchanted Shield, or Cloak of Protection), each with a win rate of ~87%. So that includes my planned run (Hero with Armor & Shield) basically tied for first. None of the other floor pairs with a win rate over 65% look possible in this tower; Rogue with Cloak of Protection and Vanishing Powder is down at 55%.
My current choice for Torreador and path on the main problem:
The Warrior on the easy path, with the shield and all the campfires:
Enchanted Shield, Campfire, Jaw Worm, Campfire, Campfire, Campfire, Campfire, The Collector
Reasoning
I tried to find scenarios where a Hero had a 100% win rate against The Collector (given that they made it to the boss battle) and found one: when the Warrior had at least one of the two Warrior-specific treasures (Shield, Armor) and only faced 1 enemy along the way he had 228⁄228 wins. That included 31⁄31 wins when it was his only useful treasure (out of the 6: Shield, Armor, Boots, Cloak, Potion, Ring).
And would he survive that path to The Collector? The Warrior never lost to the Jaw Worm, and never lost to the first Enemy he faced. And only lost on floors with a Boss or Enemy. So making it to The Collector seems safe.
The median researcher hypothesis seems false. Something like an 80⁄20 distribution seems much more plausible, and is presumably more like what you’d find for measurable proxies of ‘influence on a field’ like number of publications in “top tier” journals, or number of researchers in the field who were your grad student. Voting “no”.
Mediocre criticism can get plenty of upvotes as long as it’s a culture fit.
If the author does a good job of pitching it to Less Wrongers, then the critical post can activate readers’ it’s virtuous to be open-minded mindset and turn their critical faculties towards the thing that the post is criticizing and away from the post itself. So instead of evaluating the post according to their ordinary standards of epistemics and quality, they instead try to find anything in it that seems good / insightful / overly neglected / provoking of new useful thoughts / on a promising track.
Seems like you’re mushing together several loosely related things, including what we might call model-based motivation, explicit long-term planning, unified purpose, and precisely targeted goals.
Model-based motivation: being motivated to do something in a way that relies on your internal models of the world, not just on direct sensory rewards.
Explicit long-term planning: being aware of your goal, explicitly planning ways to achieve it, following those plans including over periods of months or years.
Unified purpose: a person’s motivations and actions in a domain fitting together coherently to work towards a single purpose, even across contexts.
Precisely targeted goals: having the goal precisely match something that can be specified on other grounds besides what we can empirically observe that people aim for (like “inclusive genetic fitness” which is picked out by theory).
The godshatter post is mainly about the last two—people have a collection of fragmented motivations which helped towards the selected-for purpose in the contexts where we evolved. Your argument here is mainly about the first two.
I think that the first two are pretty common, and are found in human romantic/reproductive goals, e.g. long-term planning around having kids, or motivations to improve ones appearance in ways that you expect potential partners to find attractive. I think that the last two are pretty rare, including for status—most people have a collection of somewhat-status-related motivations (though perhaps a small fraction of people (sociopaths?) have status as a more unified goal), and I haven’t seen anyone specify the “status” target well enough to even check if people’s motivations aim at that precise target.
You seem to think that this post poses a single clear puzzle, of the sort that could have a single answer.
I disagree. I think the post has clarity problems (especially in its definition of poverty in terms of “desperate scrabbling”, which conflates a lack of at least one essential material resource with anything at all that a person might desperately care about) and kind of gestures at various questions related to poverty.
I haven’t given that article a close read, but on a quick look through it I find it basically not at all compelling.
It looks like it’s the genre of ‘this part of reality is surprisingly detailed, therefore be paranoid/nihilistic/cynical about it’.
This genre of article is saying: there’s this concept that you’ve been using, which you’ve been treating as a clean abstraction without really thinking much about where it can from, but if you look at where it comes from, there is a bunch of messy detail & judgments calls.
And that much, often, is true. But it’s written with an air of suspicion, or with explicit claims that therefore it’s all just a bunch of made-up nonsense. Which does not follow.
Numbers that involve judgment calls aren’t in general fake/nonsense/bullshit. I regularly use subjective probabilities, Fermi estimates, etc., and I imagine that you do too.
If you want, you can have the takeaway from this sort of article: “that’s right, I’ve been using this concept without really understanding the messy detail behind it. Do I care enough about this to want to understand where it comes from?”
If so, then you can go try to learn about it, using the processes that you usually use to learn about things. Try to find writing by economists explaining where inflation numbers and “real GDP” numbers come from, or some narrower question that you could dig into enough so that you have a . Have a conversation with Claude about it. Make a google doc where you think through what you would do if it was up to you to come up with number for “real GDP”, or to do whatever tasks people do when they rely on “real GDP” numbers. Etc.
This post of yours looks like it’s kinda trying to do some of that, although the things that you’d want to learn about might not fit into a lesswrong comment, and I don’t know if you’ll find anyone who is sufficiently well-informed about real GDP calculations and willing to spend the time to leave a detailed comment for you to get a good object-level answer here. And it reads like you’ve already maybe 70% bought in to the mood & the narratives of the post you’ve linked, which is not something that I’d recommend with this genre of post before you’ve tried to learn about it elsewhere. Maybe you can come back to this post afterwards and consider its reasoning after you have more grounding in the topic, but relying on this person’s judgment & narratives about some topic just because he’s the one who pointed out to you that it is surprisingly detailed seems like bad process.
To get a little more object-level: One thing that’s missing from the article (and your takeaways from it) is that most of the judgment calls that the economists who come up with “real GDP” numbers make are at the process level, of what procedures to use to assign a number to real GDP for a country for a particular year, given the various complications. When trying to answer a question like “what was US GDP in 1946“ they have limited degrees of freedom because they’re mostly just relying on the processes that they’ve decided to apply to answering that sort of question for all countries & years. Which is pretty different from “BEA economists eye-balling a bunch of factors and coming up with a number that “seems right””, even if both involve judgment calls.
Did you have a different vision for how to get really good AI X-risk legislation passed?
I’d interpreted your post has already implicitly sharing something like orthonomal’s view, since I took you to be arguing that we should prioritize getting a small number of legislators who really Get It.
It sounds like your view is that (say) a House with 5 legislators who are amazing on AI X-risk, 15 who seem like they’re kinda pretty good, and 415 others is actively worse than one with 5 amazing legislators and 430 others?
I’m not sure why you think this. I’d think that most of the ways in which the pretty good legislators could be disappointing would make them more similar to the 415 others, or less influential, rather than actively worse. And often it would still be somewhat helpful to have them in Congress, e.g. they’d generally be more likely than random legislators to vote for a good AI bill that has a chance at becoming law.
One big way it could backfire to have a pretty-good-seeming legislator in the house is if they become a leading voice on AI while having misguided views on AI. But the concern about candidates who have a combination of prioritizing AI, being very competent, and having misguided views on AI feels different than just having extremely high standards for amazingness on AI X-risk.
The first is simple, unemployment. It’s calculated in a way that is very favorable to the government[1], because the government decides how it’s calculated and generally wants to look like things are going well. Labor force participation, a statistic that more accurately captures the share of the productive population that is being squandered, has fallen precipitously from 2005 to around 2015, enjoyed a slight increase from 2015 to 2019, and then taken a nosedive afterwards, never recovering to its 2019 high. Since 2005, a full four percent of the population—one out of 25 people—have dropped out of the labor force. This is the sort of thing that affects everything, from the national psyche to the social fabric to, of course, our ability to use the country’s human resources efficiently.
Prime age employment to population ratio is a better measure, and it does not show a decline since 2005.
The measure that you picked goes down if the population gets older and includes a larger share of retired people (which it has) or if more people age 16-24 are in school rather than working (which has also been happening).
I guess we didn’t manage to communicate.
In both cases I’m talking about a politician who chooses what values to act on based on a mix of considerations, including what their constituents value and their own personal values.
In the first case, the politician is willing to go into detail on where those values-that-they-act-on came from, including where they’re setting aside their personal views in order to act on their constituents’ values. In the second case, the politician just talks from the set of values that they’ve chosen to act on, without those sorts of clarifications.
I had pegged you as someone who prioritized candor in a way that would make you see the second kind of politician as unacceptably low-integrity.