Zack_M_Davis(Zack M. Davis)

• Zack_M_Davis 27 Jan 2020 6:50 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Wei_Dai's comment on: Book Re­view—The Ori­gins of Un­fair­ness: So­cial Cat­e­gories and Cul­tural Evolution

  no way to ob­tain a fair equil­ibrium or no way to ob­tain an equil­ibrium that is both fair and effi­cient. (How would you do that in my ex­am­ple, with­out go­ing out­side the game entirely

  Taller per­son steps aside on even-num­bered days, shorter per­son steps aside on odd-num­bered days?? (If the “cal­en­dar cost” of re­mem­ber­ing what day it is, is suffi­ciently small. But it might not be small if step­ping-aside is mostly gov­erned by in­grained habit.)

• Zack_M_Davis 27 Jan 2020 5:24 UTC

  9 points

  in reply to: Stuart Anderson's comment on: What are be­liefs you wouldn’t want (or would feel ap­pre­hen­sive about be­ing) pub­lic if you had (or have) them?

  (I feel bad for how lit­tle in­tel­lec­tu­ally-hon­est en­gage­ment you must get, so I guess I’ll chip in with some feed­back.)

  We over­whelm­ingly give cus­tody of chil­dren to the statis­ti­cally worse parent

  Is the im­plied policy sug­ges­tion here to de­crease the num­ber of chil­dren be­ing raised with­out mar­ried par­ents (e.g., by mak­ing di­vorce harder, dis­cour­ag­ing pre­mar­i­tal sex, en­courag­ing abor­tion if the par­ents aren’t mar­ried, &c.), or are you propos­ing award­ing cus­tody dis­putes to the father more of­ten? Your phras­ing (“the statis­ti­cally worse par­ent”) seems to sug­gest the lat­ter, but the dis­tri­bu­tion of sin­gle fathers to­day is ob­vi­ously not go­ing to be the same as the dis­tri­bu­tion af­ter a change in cus­tody rules!

  (Child care is cross-cul­turally as­sumed to be pre­dom­i­nantly “women’s work” for both evolu­tion­ary and cul­tural-evolu­tion­ary rea­sons: against that back­ground, there’s go­ing to be a se­lec­tion effect whereby men who vol­un­teer to be pri­mary care­tak­ers are go­ing to be dis­pro­por­tionately un­usu­ally well-suited to it.)

  When your perfor­mance in a task is di­rectly cor­re­lated to the pres­ence or ab­sence of an­other, what does that say about your value in that task?

  If the pres­ence or ab­sence of the other also con­tributes to the task perfor­mance, then hon­estly, not much? If kids are bet­ter off in two-par­ent house­holds, that’s an ar­gu­ment in fa­vor of two-par­ent house­holds: if you have a the­sis about women and moth­ers speci­fi­cally, you need ad­di­tional ar­gu­ments for that.

• Zack_M_Davis 26 Jan 2020 23:26 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Viliam's comment on: Matt Gold­en­berg’s Short Term Feed

  Hope­fully, it will be eas­ier in the Bay Area than it would be oth­er­wise.

  Speak­ing as a Bay Area na­tive,^[1] I would not use the word “hope­fully” here!

  (One would hope to find or cre­ate a sub­group, but it would be nicer if it were pos­si­ble to do this some­where with less-in­sane hous­ing prices and am­bi­ent cul­ture. Hop­ing that it needs to be done here on ac­count of just hav­ing moved here would be the sunk cost fal­lacy.)

  ---

  1. Raised in Walnut Creek, presently in Berkeley. ↩︎

• Zack_M_Davis 26 Jan 2020 4:53 UTC

  14 points

  in reply to: Scott Alexander's comment on: Firm­ing Up Not-Ly­ing Around Its Edge-Cases Is Less Broadly Use­ful Than One Might Ini­tially Think

  (Thanks for your pa­tience.)

  This is part of what you mean when you say the re­port-draft­ing sci­en­tist is “not a bad per­son”—they’ve fol­lowed the let­ter of the moral law as best they can [...] your judg­ment (“I guess they’re not a bad per­son”) is the judg­ment that moral­ity en­courages you to give

  So, from my per­spec­tive as an au­thor (which, you know, could be wrong), that line was mostly a strate­gic poli­ti­cal con­ces­sion: there’s this per­sis­tent prob­lem where when you try to talk about harms from peo­ple be­ing com­plicit with sys­tems of de­cep­tion (not even to do any­thing about it, but just to talk about the prob­lem), the dis­cus­sion im­me­di­ately gets de­railed on, “What?! Are you say­ing I’m a bad per­son!? How dare you!” … which is a much less in­ter­est­ing topic.

  The first line of defense against this kind of de­railing is to be very clear about what is be­ing claimed (which is just good in­tel­lec­tual prac­tice that you should be do­ing any­way): “By sys­tems of de­cep­tion, I mean pro­cesses that sys­tem­at­i­cally re­sult in less ac­cu­rate be­liefs—the English word ‘de­cep­tion’ is of­ten used with mor­al­iz­ing con­no­ta­tions, but I’m talk­ing about a tech­ni­cal con­cept that I can im­ple­ment as literal ex­e­cutable Python pro­grams. Similarly, while I don’t yet have an el­e­gant re­duc­tion of the un­der­ly­ing game the­ory cor­re­spond­ing to the word ‘com­plic­ity’ …”

  The sec­ond line of defense is to throw the po­ten­tial-de­railer a bone in the form of an ex­cul­pa­tory dis­claimer: “I’m not try­ing to blame any­one, I’m just say­ing that …” Even if (all other things be­ing equal) you would pre­fer to so­cially pun­ish com­plic­ity with sys­tems of de­cep­tion, by pre­comit­ting to re­lin­quish the op­tion to pun­ish, you can buy a bet­ter chance of ac­tu­ally hav­ing a real dis­cus­sion about the prob­lem. (Mak­ing the pre­com­mit­ment cred­ible is tough, though.)

  Iron­i­cally, this is an in­stance of the same prob­lem it’s try­ing to com­bat (“dis­tort­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tion to ap­pease au­thor­ity” and “dis­tort­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tion in or­der to ap­pease peo­ple who are afraid you’re try­ing to scape­goat them on the pre­text of them dis­tort­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tion to ap­pease au­thor­ity” are both in­stances of “dis­tort­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tion be­cause The In­cen­tives”), but hope­fully a less se­vere one, whose sever­ity is fur­ther re­duced by ex­plain­ing that I’m do­ing it in the com­ments.

  You can also think of the “I’m not blam­ing you, but se­ri­ously, this is harm­ful” ma­neu­ver as an in­ter­ac­tion be­tween lev­els: an ax­iolog­i­cal at­tempt to push for a higher moral stan­dard in given com­mu­nity, while ac­knowl­edg­ing that the com­mu­nity does not yet up­hold the higher stan­dard (analo­gous to moral at­tempt to in­sti­tute tougher laws, while ac­knowl­edg­ing that the sin in ques­tion is not a crime un­der cur­rent law).

  notic­ing small lies com­mit­ted by ac­ci­dent or un­der stress.

  Lies com­mit­ted “by ac­ci­dent”? What, like un­con­sciously? (Maybe the part of your brain that gen­er­ated this sen­tence doesn’t dis­agree with Jes­sica about the mean­ing of the word lie as much as the part of your brain that ar­gues about in­ten­sional defi­ni­tions??)

• Zack_M_Davis 24 Jan 2020 22:26 UTC

  8 points

  in reply to: Tenoke's comment on: 2018 Re­view: Vot­ing Re­sults!

  I’d rather get an an­swer to my ini­tial com­ment—why it makes sense to you/​them

  Sure. I ex­plained my per­sonal en­thu­si­asm for the Re­view in a Novem­ber com­ment.

• Zack_M_Davis 24 Jan 2020 21:14 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: Tenoke's comment on: 2018 Re­view: Vot­ing Re­sults!

  What, in your view, is the main is­sue? Other than print­ing/​dis­tri­bu­tion costs, the only other prob­lem that springs to mind is the op­por­tu­nity cost of the la­bor of who­ever does the de­sign/​type­set­ting, but I don’t think ei­ther of us is in a good po­si­tion to as­sess that. What bad thing hap­pens if the peo­ple who run a web­site also want to print a few pa­per books?

• Zack_M_Davis 24 Jan 2020 18:30 UTC

  16 points

  in reply to: Tenoke's comment on: 2018 Re­view: Vot­ing Re­sults!

  Print-on-de­mand books aren’t nec­es­sar­ily very ex­pen­sive: I’ve made board books for my friend’s son in print runs of one or two for like thirty bucks per copy. If the team has some spare cash and some­one wants to do the type­set­ting, a tiny print run of 100 copies could make sense as “cool in-group sou­venir”, even if it wouldn’t make sense as com­mer­cial pub­lish­ing.

• Zack_M_Davis 23 Jan 2020 7:29 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: philh's comment on: Book Re­view—The Ori­gins of Un­fair­ness: So­cial Cat­e­gories and Cul­tural Evolution

  Apolo­gies—my blog dis­til­la­tion of “what I learned” is gloss­ing over a lot of stuff that the ac­tual book cov­ers prop­erly: the differ­ence be­tween mod­els where agents only meet the other type vs. also their own type is dis­cussed in §3.3.2–3, and “taller per­son leads, shorter per­son fol­lows” is an ex­am­ple of what O’Con­nor calls “gra­di­ent mark­ers” in §2.3.2.

  As far as danc­ing goes, I think it’s kind of like how we give cute mnemonic names like “Hawk–Dove” to pay­off ma­tri­ces of a par­tic­u­lar form that don’t quite make sense as a literal story about literal hawks and literal doves, but evolu­tion­ary game the­ory in gen­eral re­ally is use­ful for un­der­stand­ing the be­hav­ior of an­i­mals (in­clud­ing birds).

• Zack_M_Davis 22 Jan 2020 4:17 UTC

  9 points

  in reply to: Wei_Dai's comment on: How Doomed are Large Or­ga­ni­za­tions?

  #2 could be a “bap­tists and bootleg­gers” effect: ide­olog­i­cal ac­tivists (the “bap­tists”) want to change So­ciety; mazey or­ga­ni­za­tions (the “bootleg­gers”) can offer the ac­tivists “shal­low” con­ces­sions that (you can tell if you scru­ti­nize closely enough, but al­most no one does) don’t ac­tu­ally end up chang­ing So­ciety much, but do shut out less-mazey com­peti­tors who can’t af­ford to make the con­ces­sions.

Book Re­view—The Ori­gins of Un­fair­ness: So­cial Cat­e­gories and Cul­tural Evolution

• Zack_M_Davis 13 Jan 2020 3:12 UTC

  14 points

  in reply to: Zvi's comment on: Pre­limi­nary thoughts on moral weight

  This kind of think­ing ac­tively drives me and many oth­ers I know away from LW/​EA/​Rationality

  And that kind of think­ing (ap­peal to the con­se­quence of re­pel­ling this-and-such kind of per­son away from some alleged “com­mu­nity”) has been ac­tively driv­ing me away. I won­der if there’s some way to get peo­ple to stop on­tol­o­giz­ing “the com­mu­nity” and thereby re­duce the per­ceived need to fight for con­trol of the “LW”/​”EA”/​”ra­tio­nal­ist” brand names? (I need to figure out how to stop on­tol­o­giz­ing, be­cause I’m ex­hausted from fight­ing.) In­so­far as “ra­tio­nal­ity” is a thing, it’s some­thing that Luke-like op­ti­miza­tion pro­cesses and Zvi-like op­ti­miza­tion pro­cesses are try­ing to ap­prox­i­mate, not some­thing they’re try­ing to fight over.

• Zack_M_Davis 12 Jan 2020 19:31 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: rohinmshah's comment on: Real­ism about rationality

  I strug­gle to name a way that evolu­tion af­fects an ev­ery­day per­son (ig­nor­ing ir­rele­vant things like athe­ism-re­li­gion de­bates).

  Evolu­tion­ary psy­chol­ogy?

• Zack_M_Davis 6 Jan 2020 8:19 UTC

  29 points

  in reply to: Scott Alexander's comment on: Free Speech and Triskaideka­pho­bic Calcu­la­tors: A Re­ply to Hub­inger on the Rele­vance of Public On­line Dis­cus­sion to Ex­is­ten­tial Risk

  when you talk to them in pri­vate they get ev­ery­thing 100% right.

  I’m happy for them, but I thought the point of hav­ing tax­payer-funded aca­demic de­part­ments was so that peo­ple who aren’t in­sider ex­perts can have ac­cu­rate in­for­ma­tion with which to in­form de­ci­sions? Get­ting the right an­swer in pri­vate can only help those you talk to in pri­vate.

  I also don’t think we live in the world where ev­ery­one has in­finite amounts of slack to burn en­dors­ing taboo ideas and noth­ing can pos­si­bly go wrong.

  Can you think of any ways some­thing could pos­si­bly go wrong if our col­lec­tive map of how hu­mans work fails to re­flect the ter­ri­tory?

  (I drafted a vi­cious and hilar­i­ous com­ment about one thing that could go wrong, but I fear that site cul­ture de­mands that I with­hold it.)

• Zack_M_Davis 6 Jan 2020 6:41 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Scott Alexander's comment on: Less Wrong Poetry Corner: Walter Raleigh’s “The Lie”

  Oh, sorry, I wasn’t try­ing to offer a le­gal opinion; I was just try­ing to con­vey wor­ld­view-ma­te­rial while riffing off your char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of “defraud­ing ev­ery­one about the El Do­rado thing.”

• Zack_M_Davis 6 Jan 2020 2:32 UTC

  21 points

  in reply to: steven0461's comment on: Less Wrong Poetry Corner: Walter Raleigh’s “The Lie”

  Would your views on speak­ing truth to power change if the truth were 2x as offen­sive as you cur­rently think it is? 10x? 100x?

  For some mul­ti­plier, yes. (I don’t know what the mul­ti­plier is.) If po­ten­tates would mur­der me on the spot un­less I deny that that they live act­ing by oth­ers’ ac­tion, and af­firm that they are loved even if they don’t give and are strong in­de­pen­dently of a fac­tion, then I will say those things in or­der to not be mur­dered on the spot.

  I guess I need to clar­ify some­thing: I tend to talk about this stuff in the lan­guage of virtues and prin­ci­ples rather than the lan­guage of con­se­quen­tial­ism, not be­cause I think the lan­guage of virtues and prin­ci­ples is liter­ally true as AI the­ory, but be­cause hu­mans can’t use con­se­quen­tial­ism for this kind of thing. Some part of your brain is perform­ing some com­pu­ta­tion that, if it works, to the ex­tent that it works, is mir­ror­ing Bayesian de­ci­sion the­ory. But that doesn’t help the part of you can that talk, that can be reached by the part of me that can talk.

  “Speak the truth, even if your voice trem­bles” isn’t a literal ex­e­cutable de­ci­sion pro­ce­dure—if you pro­grammed your AI that way, it might get stabbed. But a cul­ture that has “Speak the truth, even if your voice trem­bles” as a slo­gan might—just might be able to do sci­ence or bet­ter—to get the god­damned right an­swer even when the lo­cal analogue of the Pope doesn’t like it. I falsifi­ably pre­dict that a cul­ture that has “Use Bayesian de­ci­sion the­ory to de­cide whether or not to speak the truth” as its slo­gan won’t be able to do sci­ence—Pla­ton­i­cally, the math has to ex­ist, but let­ting hu­mans ap­peal to Pla­tonic math when­ever they want is just too con­ve­nient of an ex­cuse.

  Would your views on speak­ing truth to power change if the truth were 2x less ex­pen­sive as you cur­rently think it is? 10x? 100x? I falsifi­ably pre­dict that your an­swer is “Yes.” Fol­lowup ques­tion: have you con­sid­ered perform­ing an ex­per­i­ment to test whether the con­se­quences of speech are as dire as you cur­rently think? I think I have more data than you! (We prob­a­bly mostly read the same blogs, but I’ve done field work.)

  (If so, are you sure that’s not why you don’t think the truth is more offen­sive than you cur­rently think it is?)

  Great ques­tion! No, I’m not sure. But if my cur­rent view is less wrong than the main­stream, I ex­pect to do good by talk­ing about it, even if there ex­ists an even bet­ter the­ory that I wouldn’t be brave enough to talk about.

  Im­ma­te­rial souls are stabbed all the time in the sense that their opinions are dis­cred­ited.

  Can you be a lit­tle more spe­cific? “Dis­cred­ited” is a two-place func­tion (dis­cred­ited to whom).

• Zack_M_Davis 5 Jan 2020 3:15 UTC

  37 points

  in reply to: Scott Alexander's comment on: Less Wrong Poetry Corner: Walter Raleigh’s “The Lie”

  I think the Vas­sar­ian–Tay­lorist con­flict–mis­take syn­the­sis moral is that in or­der to perform its func­tion, the English court sys­tem needs to be able to pun­ish Raleigh for “fraud” on the ba­sis of his ac­tions rel­a­tive what he knew or could have rea­son­ably been ex­pected to know, even while Raleigh is sub­jec­tively the hero of his own story and a sym­pa­thetic psy­chol­o­gist could elo­quently and truth­fully ex­plain how easy it was for him to talk him­self into a bi­ased nar­ra­tive.

  Where mis­take the­o­rists treat poli­tics as “sci­ence, en­g­ineer­ing, or medicine” and con­flict the­o­rists treat poli­tics as war, this view treats poli­tics as evolu­tion­ary game the­ory: the un­fold­ing over time of a pop­u­la­tion of many dumb, small agents ex­e­cut­ing strate­gies, form­ing coal­i­tions, oc­ca­sion­ally switch­ing strate­gies to imi­tate those that are more suc­cess­ful in the lo­cal en­vi­ron­ment, &c. The syn­the­sis view is mis­take-the­o­retic in­so­far as the lit­tle agents are un­der­stood to be play­ing far from op­ti­mally and could do much bet­ter if they were smarter, but con­flict-the­o­retic in­so­far as the games be­ing played have large zero-sum com­po­nents and you mostly can’t take the things the lit­tle agents say liter­ally. The “mis­takes” aren’t ran­dom and not eas­ily fix­able with more in­for­ma­tion (in con­trast to how if I said 57 was prime and you said “But 3 × 19”, I would im­me­di­ately say “Oops”), but rather arise from the strate­gies be­ing ex­e­cuted: it’s not a co­in­ci­dence that Raleigh talked him­self into a nar­ra­tive where he was lone an­gel who would dis­cover limitless gold.

  Agents se­lect be­liefs on the ba­sis of ei­ther their be­ing true (and there­fore use­ful for nav­i­gat­ing the world) or be­cause they suc­cess­fully de­ceive other agents into mis-nav­i­gat­ing the world in a way that benefits the be­lief-holder. “Be more char­i­ta­ble to other peo­ple” isn’t nec­es­sar­ily great ad­vice in gen­eral, be­cause while some­times other agents have use­ful true in­for­ma­tion to offer (Raleigh’s The Dis­cov­ery of Guiana “in­cludes some ma­te­rial of a fac­tual na­ture”), it’s hard to dis­t­in­guish from mis­in­for­ma­tion that was op­ti­mized to benefit the agents who pro­pogate it (Dis­cov­ery of Guiana also says you should in­vest in Raleigh’s sec­ond ex­pe­di­tion).

  Mis­take the­o­rists think con­flict the­o­rists are mak­ing a mis­take; con­flict the­o­rists think mis­take the­o­rists are the en­emy. Evolu­tion­ary game the­o­rists think that con­flict the­o­rists are ex­e­cut­ing strate­gies adapted to an en­vi­ron­ment pre­dom­i­nated by zero-sum games, and that mis­take the­o­rists are ex­e­cut­ing strate­gies adapted to an en­vi­ron­ment con­tain­ing co­op­er­a­tive games (where the ex­is­tence of a mechanism for ex­ter­nally en­forc­ing agree­ments, like a court sys­tem, al­igns in­cen­tives and thereby makes it eas­ier to pro­pogate true in­fro­ma­tion).

Less Wrong Poetry Corner: Walter Raleigh’s “The Lie”

• Zack_M_Davis 4 Jan 2020 21:05 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: ESRogs's comment on: Meta-dis­cus­sion from “Cir­cling as Cousin to Ra­tion­al­ity”

  When de­sign­ing norms, we should take into ac­count an asym­me­try be­tween read­ing and writ­ing: each com­ment is only writ­ten once, but read many times. Each norm im­posed on writ­ers to not be un­duly an­noy­ing con­strains the in­for­ma­tion flow of the fo­rum much more than each norm im­posed on read­ers to not be un­duly an­noyed.

• Zack_M_Davis 4 Jan 2020 17:05 UTC

  16 points

  in reply to: ESRogs's comment on: Meta-dis­cus­sion from “Cir­cling as Cousin to Ra­tion­al­ity”

  Why should Said be the one to change, though? Maybe rel­a­tively sub­tle tweaks to your read­ing style could make a big differ­ence.

  A “sur­prised baf­fle­ment” tone is of­ten seen as a so­cial at­tack be­cause it’s per­ceived as im­ply­ing, “You should know this already, there­fore I’m sur­prised that you don’t, there­fore I should have higher sta­tus than you.” But that’s not the only pos­si­ble nar­ra­tive. What hap­pens if you re­frame your re­ac­tion as, “He’s sur­prised, but sur­prise is the mea­sure of a poor hy­poth­e­sis—the fact that he’s so clue­lessly self-cen­tered as to not be able to pre­dict what other peo­ple know means that I should have higher sta­tus”?

• Zack_M_Davis 4 Jan 2020 2:48 UTC

  33 points

  in reply to: Duncan_Sabien's comment on: Meta-dis­cus­sion from “Cir­cling as Cousin to Ra­tion­al­ity”

  What I meant by the word “our” was “the broader con­text cul­ture-at-large,” not Less Wrong or my own per­sonal home cul­ture or any­thing like that. Apolo­gies, that could’ve been clearer.

  No, I got that, I was just us­ing the op­por­tu­nity to riff off your “In My Cul­ture” piece^[1] while defend­ing Said, who is a su­per valuable com­menter who I think is be­ing treated pretty un­fairly in this 133-com­ment-and-count­ing meta train­wreck!

  Sure, some­times he’s in­sis­tent on press­ing for rigor in a way could seem “nit­picky” or “dense” to read­ers who, like me, are more likely to just shrug and say, “Meh, I think I mostly get the gist of what the au­thor is try­ing to say” rather than hon­ing in on a par­tic­u­lar word or phrase and writ­ing a com­ment ask­ing for clar­ifi­ca­tion.

  But that’s valuable. I am glad that a web­site nom­i­nally de­voted to mas­ter­ing the hid­den Bayesian struc­ture of cog­ni­tion to the de­gree of pre­ci­sion re­quired to write a re­cur­sively self-im­prov­ing su­per­in­tel­li­gence to rule over our en­tire fu­ture light­cone has peo­ple whose in­nate need for rigor is more de­mand­ing than my sense of “Meh, I think I mostly get the gist”!

  ---

  1. This is ac­tu­ally the sec­ond time in four months. Sorry, it writes it­self! ↩︎