Sometimes the solution is just not to talk about certain topics. (But this requires cooperation from the other side.) For example, I don’t discuss politics with my mother, because that would be predictably frustrating for both sides.
Maybe there is a good boundary for you, for example don’t discuss your job? (Or stick to technicalities, such as salary.)
Before we had LLMs, “sycophancy” was called “how to win friends and influence people”.
I think this is very common.
It’s one of the patterns mentioned in “Games People Play”. For example, a socially shy woman could marry a controlling man who will keep her at home. Then it becomes “I don’t have a problem with social situations, actually I would love to have a party, but… you know my husband”.
my dad doesn’t believe in me, or really know anything about me.
he thinks i’m a failure, chutiah, etc.
If he doesn’t know anything about you, why would it matter what he thinks about you?
A part of becoming adult is realizing that your parents are just random people with no magical powers. Their opinions are just… their opinions. Could be right, could be wrong, could be anything. If someone who isn’t your parent said the same thing, would you care?
Out of curiosity I once joined an OVB training for financial advisors, but I concluded that there was no way to do this ethically (and make nonzero money). Long story short, your reward depends on the recommendations you give to your clients. The worse the advice, the greater the commission.
Of course no one tells you explicitly to give bad advice, but they discourage you from asking too many questions (the excuse is something like: if you keep doing this, one day you will understand), I think they won’t give you the exact formula for calculating your reward, but they give you enough hints that selling life insurance is where most of the reward comes from. (The reward for everything else is a rounding error; a service you do only so that you can plausibly say that you are not an insurance salesman.) Like, it’s okay to help people get mortgage, or even invest money in funds (note: their recommended funds always lose money, no matter which direction the economy goes)… but, you know, the really important thing is to “create a financial plan” for your client, which always includes pressing them to spend about 1⁄3 on their salary on life insurance, regardless of their circumstances. Because that is where your commission comes from.
A honest financial advisor, for starters, couldn’t be paid by commission; that’s already the opposite of alignment, because the worst products have highest commissions (basically they are paying you to help them scam people, by sharing a part of the profit), and the small commissions would result in very low hourly income for you (considering how much time would you spend talking to the client, how many clients would refuse your advice, etc.). A more honest model is to ignore the commission and just get paid by hour of consultation. There, at least you don’t have an incentive to actively give bad advice. (You still don’t have much of an incentive to give good advice, though.)
I would never have thought to make a LW post out of an experience like that.
Now my excuses for not blogging more frequently look even more pathetic.
Congratulations on surviving!
I was recently thinking about written text in general. In the past, when literacy wasn’t a norm, only the smartest people were able to write a complete book. It doesn’t necessarily mean that all the books were smart or good for humanity (e.g. Malleus Maleficarum), but at least they were biased in the direction of literate and educated people.
With social networks, it seems to be the other way round. Various kinds of crazy people produce the overwhelming majority of the text, simply because they can dedicate 16 hours a day to doing that, and they don’t need to spend time thinking or researching, so even their output per minute is astronomical.
And I already worry about the impact on humans. I think the average human doesn’t think too much, but rather emulates the perceived consensus of the environment. In the past, it mostly meant trying to emulate the smart people, even if unsuccessfully. Today, it means waves of contagious idiocy (which can be further weaponized by political actors who can employ an army of trolls… or, more recently, LLMs).
I actually have somewhat higher hopes for LLMs than humans. LLMs seem better at noticing patterns and correlations. They may figure out that one psychosis is related to another psychosis… so once you teach them “not that”, the lesson may generalize. Better than for an average human, for which every new craziness seems to be a separate case. -- But this needs to be empirically verified.
Actually it would be cool if the LLMs could figure out the general factor of “rationality” as a pattern, and sort out the texts accordingly. (Unfortunately, five minutes later someone would ask the LLMs to generate some bullshit using the rationality pattern...)
I wouldn’t recommend literally life-threatening things, but I think it is good to regularly volunteer for some kind of discomfort. The normal life then feels great. On the other hand, people who keep doing the same things over and over again, seem to get very sensitive about details.
I 100% agree about financial advisors, but I am less sure about the doctors. (Not enough experience with the lawyers.) These are the differences between the professions that I think could be responsible:
Idealism: Some kids dream about becoming doctors because “helping other people heal” is intuitive. Even if they later get somewhat corrupt, at least they started from a good position. On the other hand, people doing finance are usually there specifically for the money. (Doing it for idealistic reasons is possible in theory, but requires an effective altruism kind of mindset, which is rare in the population.)
Temptation: How much money does a corrupt doctor make compared to a honest one? Twice as much, maybe. A honest financial advisor? Probably can’t even find client. So possibly a few orders of magnitude difference.
Regulation: Depends on the country, but there are some checks on doctors, however dysfunctional those may be. For financial advisors, giving bad advice is the state of art; almost no one gives good advice.
Also, not sure why, but in my experience there seems to be a generational difference: older plumbers etc. are more likely to do a good job and ask for less money.
Czechoslovakia had no common border with the Soviet Union in 1938.
Oh, I did not realize this!
Do you have any statistics, how many % died during the deportation? If I understand correctly, you say less than 50%.
In fact, this was not the only ethnic group to suffer this fate
Yes, that was kinda my point.
Maybe yet another option would be not to make a deal with Hitler about dividing Poland? That would slow him down.
(Even more strategic: offer Czechoslovakia military help against Hitler.)
I guess that the dynamics of the game would depend on how relatively expensive is it to build a doom device—something that reliably kills everyone, including you. (Can I borrow zillion dollars from Satan, build zillion robots and kill everyone, and the next turn Satan takes me because I am unable to pay back? Or is my capacity to make such deal limited by my current resources, so if I get poor, even my capacity to make deals with Satan is limited enough to make me harmless.)
There is no intrinsic incentive to use the doom device, but there is also no intrinsic incentive to not use it when your loss is guaranteed. So it would be used for blackmail: “don’t create a situation where my loss is guaranteed, or I will use the doom device”. Given that only one player can win, if two of them build such device, they are stuck. (They could possibly negotiate to destroy both their devices.)
This again depends on how predictable the situation is. Whether it is something like “you have 10x more resources than me, you are virtually guaranteed to win” (so I know when to use the doom device) or like “you can win by a surprise, such as using a resource I don’t know that you have, or by a random outcome, such as having a spell that wins the game depending on a coin flip” (so I am never sure whether this is the moment to use the doom device until it is too late).
tl;dr—I think the dynamics would depend a lot on implementation details
This will make sense when mathematicians stop using pen and paper. Or maybe only for presenting the final equation. Otherwise solving an equation would take ten pages full of prose—and the terse notation was historically invented to prevent exactly this.
If I am playing against a stronger player, do I have an incentive to be or not to be omnicidal? Is “everyone loses” preferable to “I win with probability 10% and lose with probability 90%”?
I think your idea is that “everyone dies” is an outcome that is possible but everyone wants to avoid, but is it true?
we might come up with a formal definition to what an “aligned agent” means
I believe this is the difficult part. More precisely, to describe what is the agent aligned with. We can start with treating human CEV as a black box, and specify mathematically what does it mean to be aligned with some abstract f(x). But then the problem will be to specify f(x).
Wait, do I understand it correctly that when people say “science has proved that even small amounts of alcohol are harmful”, the actual scientific definition of “small amounts” is “one drink every day”?
To me that sounds a surprisingly lot for a “small amount”, and I am in Eastern Europe. The idea that the recommended amount is two drinks a day is something I would expect in Russia, not in USA.
a friend suggested I research “Roko’s”. [...] Would be happy to discuss.
Contrary to what Wikipedia suggests, the people who enjoy discussing this topic on Less Wrong are mostly the newcomers who arrived here after reading Wikipedia. But we have a wiki page on the topic.
We are all predisposed to think in Binary terms; either/or, black & white, good or bad, etc. [...] Almost everything is on a gradient.
Another danger is that people who want to go behind the binary, often fall into one of the following traps:
Unary—“everything is unknowable”, “everything is relative”, etc.
Ternary—there are three values: “yes”, “no”, and “maybe”, but all the “maybe” values are the same
I am also quite comfortable discussing political or U.S constitutional issues.
That is not a frequent topic here, for reasons. Maybe ACX is a better place for that.
would you set up the causal chain of events to one day reveal to humans that they do not have free will?
You would need to make sure that there is no misunderstanding. Otherwise you would be communicating something else than you intended.
So, considering that the debate on this topic is typically full of confusion, the answer is probably: no.
Oh, this wasn’t even a part of my mental model! (I wonder what other things am I missing that are so obvious for the local people that no one even mentions them explicitly.)
My first reaction is a shocked disbelief, how can there be such a thing as “unemployed… rationalist… living in Bay Area”, and even “houses full of them”...
This goes against my several assumptions such as “Bay Area is expensive”, “most rationalists are software developers”, “there is a shortage of software developers on the market”, “there is a ton of software companies in Bay Area”, and maybe even “rationalists are smart and help each other”.
Here (around the Vienna community) I think everyone is either a student or employed. And if someone has a bad job, the group can brainstorm how to help them. (We had one guy who was a nurse, everyone told him that he should learn to code, he attended a 6-month online bootcamp and then got a well-paying software development job.) I am literally right now asking our group on Telegram to confirm or disconfirm this.
Thank you; to put it bluntly, I am no longer surprised that some of the people who can’t hold a job would be deeply dysfunctional in other ways, too. The surprising part is that you consider them a part of the rationalist community. What did they do to deserve this honor? Memorized a few keywords? Impressed other people with skills unrelated to being able to keep a job? What the fuck is wrong with everyone? Is this a rationalist community or a psychotic homeless community or what?
...taking a few deep breaths...
I wonder which direction the causality goes. Is it “people who are stabilized in ways such as keeping a job, will remain sane” or rather “people who are sane, find it easier to get a job”. The second option feels more intuitive to me. But of course I can imagine it being a spiral.
Yes, but another option is to invite people whose way of life implies some common ground. Such as “the kind of people who could get a job if they wanted one”.