Zack_M_Davis(Zack M. Davis)

• Zack_M_Davis 19 Sep 2023 4:43 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Algon’s comment on: Ac­tu­ally, “per­sonal at­tacks af­ter ob­ject-level ar­gu­ments” is a pretty good rule of epistemic conduct

  I’m glad you’re out of your funk!

• Zack_M_Davis 18 Sep 2023 6:11 UTC

  10 points

  7

  in reply to: omnizoid’s comment on: Con­tra Heighn Con­tra Me Con­tra Heighn Con­tra Me Con­tra Func­tional De­ci­sion The­ory

  But part of the whole dispute is that people don’t agree on what “rational” means, right? In these cases, it’s useful to try to avoid the disputed term—on both sides—and describe what’s going on at a lower level. Suppose I’m a foreigner from a far-off land. I’m not a native English speaker, and I don’t respect your Society’s academics any more than you respect my culture’s magicians. I’ve never heard this word rational before. (How do you even pronounce that? Ra-tee-oh-nal?) How would you explain the debate to me?

  It seems like both sides agree that FDT agents get more money in Newcomb’s problem, and that CDT agents do better than FDT agents given the fact of having been blackmailed, but that FDT agents get blackmailed less often in the first place. So … what’s the disagreement about? How are you so sure one side is crazy? Can you explain it without appealing to this “ra-tee-oh-nal” thing, or the consensus of your Society’s credentialed experts?

• Zack_M_Davis 18 Sep 2023 5:55 UTC

  2 points

  2

  in reply to: Algon’s comment on: Ac­tu­ally, “per­sonal at­tacks af­ter ob­ject-level ar­gu­ments” is a pretty good rule of epistemic conduct

  I think I have more faith in Less Wrong readers than you do? I trust readers of this website to be able to interpret words like “extreme” acccording to their literal meanings, rather than being dominated by connotational halo effects.

• Zack_M_Davis 17 Sep 2023 23:40 UTC

  5 points

  3

  on: Con­tra Heighn Con­tra Me Con­tra Heighn Con­tra Me Con­tra Func­tional De­ci­sion The­ory

  What two-boxers claim is that the situation is artificially rigged against them, such that they lose by being rational. [...] if there’s a demon who pays a billion dollars to everyone who follows CDT or EDT then FDTists will lose out

  But the original timeless decision theory paper addresses this class of argument: see §4 on “Maximizing Decision-Determined Problems” and §5 on “Is Decision-Dependency Fair”. Briefly, the relevant difference between Newcomb’s problem and “reward agents that use a particular decision theory” scenarios is that Newcomb’s problem only depends on the agent’s choice of boxes, not the agent’s internal decision theory.

• Zack_M_Davis 17 Sep 2023 23:15 UTC

  0 points

  0

  in reply to: green_leaf’s comment on: A Hill of Val­idity in Defense of Meaning

  Sorry, you’re going to need to be more specific. What particular claim X have I asserted is true without bringing arguments for it? Reply!

  I agree that I’m combining emotional autobiography with topic exposition, but the reason I’m talking about my autobiography at all is because I tried object-level topic exposition for years—in such posts as “The Categories Were Made for Man to Make Predictions” (2018), “Where to Draw the Boundaries?” (2019), “Unnatural Categories Are Optimized for Deception” (2021), and “Challenges to Yudkowsky’s Pronoun Reform Proposal” (2022)—and it wasn’t working. From my perspective, the only thing left to do was jump up a metal level and talk about why it wasn’t working. If your contention is that I don’t have the substance to back up my claims, I think you should be able to explain what I got wrong in those posts. Reply!

  Reply!

• Zack_M_Davis 17 Sep 2023 22:47 UTC

  6 points

  0

  in reply to: Algon’s comment on: Ac­tu­ally, “per­sonal at­tacks af­ter ob­ject-level ar­gu­ments” is a pretty good rule of epistemic conduct

  I don’t have a problem with “extreme”. I read it in Wiktionary sense 3: “Excessive, or far beyond the norm.” I can see how that’s value-laden in the sense that what’s excessive or far beyond the norm depends on what length you think would be adequate or within the norm. Clearly, I don’t think it was excessive, or I wouldn’t have written that way. But if Max H. thinks it was excessive (relative to his own perception of adequacy or norms), I think it’s fine for him to indicate as much with the word “extreme”. Who is being misled by this, exactly?

• Zack_M_Davis 17 Sep 2023 22:47 UTC

  15 points

  13

  on: Ac­tu­ally, “per­sonal at­tacks af­ter ob­ject-level ar­gu­ments” is a pretty good rule of epistemic conduct

  Thanks for writing!

  I am interested in hearing thoughts and responses from the readers and upvoters of that post, moreso than from its author

  Cold! (But given that you feel that way, it’s fine for you to say so.)

  Things like “readers often don’t read to the end of the article”, and “readers are unconsciously influenced by what they read”, and “writers are unconsciously influenced by the structure of their own writing” are empirical claims about how the human brain works [...] perhaps this rule in particular [...] will not apply to some hypothetical ideal agent [...] For now though, it seems perfectly reasonable under the ordinary meaning of the words to call any [such] rule [...] a rule of “epistemic conduct”.

  This seems like a key crux. In the post, I agreed that a defer-personal-attacks rule is “good writing advice, which I generally endeavor to follow.” But I balk at the word “epistemic” being applied in cases where the guidance in question seems to be catering to cognitive biases rather than working to overcome them.

  Consider the “Readers often don’t read to the end of the article” point. I agree that, indeed, readers often don’t read to the end of the article. I don’t think this imposes an “epistemic conduct” obligation on authors to only write things that can be understood by such readers. Sometimes an author is trying to say something nuanced that requires a whole article to say! If readers who can’t be bothered to read the whole thing won’t get it, I want to say that that’s “their fault.”

  it matters who is being attacked in front of what audience, and how likely anyone is to feel personally affronted by the negative character assessments

  I would say that if it matters who is being attacked, that would seem to be an indictment of that audience’s epistemic conduct, rather than the author’s.

  I’m not sure I understand the contrary position? Pragmatically, I get that if I’m trying to persaude an audience of neo-Nazis of something, I would be more successful in my goal of persuasion if I avoid saying anything negative about Hitler. But I don’t think of that as good “epistemic conduct” on my part; I see that as catering to my audience’s prejudices.

• Zack_M_Davis 15 Sep 2023 21:51 UTC

  1 point

  4

  in reply to: trevor’s comment on: Con­tra Yud­kowsky on Epistemic Con­duct for Author Criticism

  This is an amazingly clarifying comment!! Thanks for writing it!

  I also was confused by Yud calling it a “basic rule of epistemic conduct”, but if that seemed like a good way to mitigate the harm while it was ongoing, then that was his call. [...] when Yud’s reputation is bad, it’s basically impossible to convince important and valuable people to read The Sequences and HPMOR and inoculate themselves against a changing world of cognitive attacks, whereas it’s a downhill battle to convince them to read those texts when Yud’s reputation is good

  I want people to read the Sequences because they teach what kinds of thinking systematically lead to beliefs that reflect reality. I’m opposed to people making misleading claims about what kinds of thinking systematically lead to beliefs that reflect reality (in this case, positing a “basic rule of epistemic conduct” that isn’t one) just because it seems like a good way to mitigate ongoing harm to their reputation. That’s not what the Sequences say to do!

  Omnizoid’s bad faith attacks

  What do you mean by “bad faith” in this context? Following Wikipedia, I understand bad faith to mean “a sustained form of deception which consists of entertaining or pretending to entertain one set of feelings while acting as if influenced by another”—basically, when the stated reasons aren’t the real reasons. (I recently wrote a post about why I don’t find the term that useful, because I think it’s common for the stated reasons to not be the real reasons, rather than a rare deviation.)

  I agree that Omnizoid’s post was bad. (At a minimum, the author failed to understand what problems timeless decision theory is trying to solve.) But I don’t want to call it “bad faith” without simultaneously positing that the author has some particular motive or hidden agenda that they’re not being forthcoming about.

  What motive would that be, specifically? I think the introduction was pretty forthcoming about why Omnizoid wanted to damage Yudkowsky’s reputation (“Part of this is caused by personal irritation”, “But a lot of it is that Yudkowsky has the ear of many influential people”, “Eliezer’s influence is responsible for a narrow, insular way of speaking among effective altruists”, “Eliezer’s views have undermined widespread trust in experts”). I don’t see any particular reason to doubt that story.

Con­tra Yud­kowsky on Epistemic Con­duct for Author Criticism

• Zack_M_Davis 7 Sep 2023 20:18 UTC

  8 points

  7

  in reply to: orthonormal’s comment on: Shar­ing In­for­ma­tion About Nonlinear

  Kat/​Emerson/​Drew would immediately tell anyone in their orbit to come and post positive testimonials of them under promises of reward or threat of retaliation

  A loyal friend would also post positive testimonials, without promises or threats. (But I agree that this is weak evidence about allegations regarding behavior towards other people.)

• Zack_M_Davis 1 Sep 2023 19:22 UTC

  2 points

  2

  in reply to: unmotivated’s comment on: I think Michael Bailey’s dis­mis­sal of my au­to­g­y­nephilia ques­tions for Scott Alexan­der and Aella makes very lit­tle sense

  I’m now downvoted to oblivion

  But all of your comments currently have positive karma? (The left number is karma; the right number is agree/​disagree voting, which exists precisely to express disagreement without it being a rebuke.)

• Zack_M_Davis 31 Aug 2023 19:05 UTC

  5 points

  6

  in reply to: NeroWolfe’s comment on: New User’s Guide to LessWrong

  I love getting comments on old posts! (There would be less reason to write if all writing were doomed to be ephemera; the reverse-chronological format of blogs shouldn’t be a straitjacket or death sentence for ideas.)

• Zack_M_Davis 29 Aug 2023 6:11 UTC

  6 points

  −2

  in reply to: Steven Byrnes’s comment on: As­sume Bad Faith

  I find the terms “good faith” /​ “bad faith” to be incredibly useful in everyday life, and I’m not sure how you would explain that fact. Do you think I’m insufficiently cynical or something?

  I think this and some previous posts have been part of a multi-year attempt to articulate a worldview that our culture doesn’t already have standard language for; cynical is close, but not quite right.

  Do you ever get accused of bad faith? How do you respond? I always want to point at the Wikipedia definition and say, “Can you be more specific? What motivation do you think I have here I haven’t been explicit about? I’m happy to clarify!”

  Crucially, it’s not the case that there’s never going to be anything to clarify. Sometimes when I’m in a discussion on Twitter with someone who’s more of an ideologue than I am, I end up choosing my words carefully to make it sound like I’m “on their side” to a greater extent than I really am, because I’m afraid that they’d slam the door on me if they knew what I was really thinking, but they might listen to the intellectually substantive point I’m trying to make if I talk like a fellow traveler. (This is also point #7 of Scott Alexander’s nonfiction writing advice.)

  Is that bad faith, or just effective rhetoric? I think it’s both! And I think human life is full of these little details where the way people naturally talk and behave needs to be explained in terms of social and political maneuvering, and you can’t just “not do that” because it’s not clear what exactly that would entail. (Refusing to signal is like refusing to allow time to pass.) The closest I can get to “not doing that” is by going meta on it—writing about it in posts like this, lampshading it when I can afford to.

• Zack_M_Davis 26 Aug 2023 6:08 UTC

  3 points

  −2

  in reply to: M. Y. Zuo’s comment on: As­sume Bad Faith

  Sorry if the title was confusing. (It was too punchy to resist.) I think if you read the full text of the post and pretend it was titled something else, it will make more sense: I’m appealing to the definition of “bad faith” as being about non-overt motives, and explicitly denying that this precludes value in reading or engaging, precisely because non-overt motives are pretty ordinary.

As­sume Bad Faith

• Zack_M_Davis 24 Aug 2023 17:24 UTC

  4 points

  0

  in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: The God of Hu­man­ity, and the God of the Robot Utilitarians

  It took Robutil longer still to consider that perhaps humans not only need to prioritize their own wellbeing and friendships, but to prioritize them for their own sake?

• Zack_M_Davis 24 Aug 2023 17:11 UTC

  10 points

  5

  on: The God of Hu­man­ity, and the God of the Robot Utilitarians

  It took Robutil longer still to consider that perhaps [...] it can be valuable to prioritize [your own wellbeing and friendships] for their own sake, not just as part of a utilitarian calculus, because trying to justify them in utilitarian terms may be a subtly wrong step in the dance that leaves them hollow.

  Why would Robutil consider that? It seems contrary to His Nature as a God. You can’t get more utilons that way!

  That is, the point of imagining metaphorical Gods as the embodiments of abstract ideals is to explore the ramifications of those ideals being taken seriously. If you flinch from the logical consequences because the results are “unreasonable” from a human perspective, you’re disrespecting the Gods (except Humo).

  Humo and Robutil should definitely compromise and coordinate with each other. (Polytheistic Gods are not omnipotent. Given that Robutil isn’t powerful enough to overtake Humo, kill all humans, and tile the lightcone with utilitronium, then he has no better option but to work with him: humans do generate utilons, even they’re not maximally efficient.) But to depict Robutil as being persuaded that something has value “not just as part of a utilitarian calculus” is silly and shatters the reader’s suspension of disbelief.

• Zack_M_Davis 22 Aug 2023 3:57 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: JohnWittle’s comment on: Blan­chard’s Danger­ous Idea and the Plight of the Lu­cid Crossdreamer

  I appreciate the support, but given that I’m questioning other people’s life stories, it seems only fair that they be allowed to question mine? I can take it!

• Zack_M_Davis 13 Aug 2023 23:09 UTC

  11 points

  2

  in reply to: philh’s comment on: Lack of So­cial Grace Is an Epistemic Virtue

  The thesis of the post is that people who are trying to maximize the accuracy of shared maps are going to end up being socially ungraceful sometimes, because sometimes social grace calls for obfuscating shared maps.

  Criticism of unjustified confidence for being unjustified increases the accuracy of shared maps. Criticism of unjustified confidence for reasons of social status regulation is predictably not going to be limited to cases where the confidence is unjustified, even if it happens to be unjustified in a particular case.

  Accuracy of shared maps is quantitative. A culture that’s optimized for social grace isn’t going to make people wrong about everything, and could make people less wrong about many things relative to many less graceful alternative cultures. (At minimum, if you’re not allowed be confident, you can’t be overconfident; if you’re not allowed to talk about what’s inside someone’s head, you can’t be wrong about what’s inside someone’s head.)

• Zack_M_Davis 13 Aug 2023 23:07 UTC

  15 points

  7

  in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: A Hill of Val­idity in Defense of Meaning

  Thanks for your patience. For the most part, I try to be reluctant to issue proclamations about what other people “should” do, as I explain in “I Don’t Do Policy”. (“Should” claims can be decomposed into conditional predictions about consequences given actions, and preferences over consequences. The conditional predictions can be evaluated on their merits, and I don’t control other people’s preferences.) In particular, I don’t think there’s One True social gender convention.

  The “court ruling” thing was an unusual case where, you know, I had been under the impression that this subculture with Eliezer Yudkowsky as its acknowledged leader was serious about being “spec’d into prioritizing truth/​mapmaking”. It really seemed like the kind of thing that shouldn’t be hard to clear up—that he would perceive an interest in clearing up, after the problem had been explained.

  My position at the time was, “Scott should retract it and we should all agree he should retract it”. Since that didn’t happen despite absurd efforts, my conclusion is more that there is no “we”. It would be nice if there were a subculture that had spec’d into prioritzing truth/​mapmaking, but our little cult/​patronage-network doesn’t deserve credit for that: on the margin, I’m now more interested in efforts to break people of the delusion that the ingroup has a monopoly on Truth and Goodness, than I am in efforts to get the ingroup to live up to its marketing material about being the place in the world for people who are interested in Truth and Goodness.

  Obviously, this doesn’t entail giving up on Truth and Goodness! (“Thinking” and “writing” and “helping people” were not invented here.) It doesn’t even entail cutting ties with “the community.” (I am, actually, still using this website, at least for now.) It does involve propagating the implication from “‘rationalist’ is a made up label” (as you say) to applying the same standards of moral reasoning to the ingroup’s cult/​patronage-network and broader Society (and not confusing the former thing for “rationalist Society”).

  Because you know, maybe the “community” model was just never a good idea to begin with? I’m worried that if I were to accept your support in enforcing norms about the category-boundary thing, then the elephant in my brain might think I therefore owed you a favor and should stop giving you such a hard time about the free-speech-for-disagreeable-people thing. As the post notes, that’s not how it works. Or maybe it is how human communities work, but it’s not how the ideal justice of systematically correct reasoning works.