FeepingCreature
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User ID: 311
This logic seems mad though, taken to it's extreme the most altruistic move would be to help someone that shares none of your values, and since altruism is a core value you should be exclusively helping the least altruistic of people as that is the most selfless thing you could do. Of course this is obviously ridiculous and self defeating (like the lgbt groups supporting hamas)
That's a misunderstanding. You're implicitly applying a virtue/signaling framing to a consequentialist policy. You should be supporting the least altruistic people iff you want to signal the depth of your commitment to altruism to your peergroup. EA isn't trying to "maximize the depth of the virtue of altruism", it's trying to "maximize the rating produced by the altruism principle." Adherence is "capped" at one - when you already do the maximum good for the greatest number, you cannot adhere even harder by diverging from this concept to avoid also benefitting non-altruist principles. That is, EA does not at all penalize you for your actions also having auxiliary benefits to yourself or your peergroup, if that happens to be the optimal path. Also, utilitarianism is in fact allowed to recognize second-order consequences. That's why "earning to give" and 80,000 Hours exist - help some already pretty privileged people today, and they can probably help a lot of others tomorrow.
What makes EA EA as opposed to traditional A is exactly that it's supposed to care more about outcome rating than virtuous appearance!
FeepingCreature
10mo ago
We're just using different terms. You say "blackmail", I say "punishment"- they're the same concept. "Obey the law or we put you in jail" is structurally indistinguishable from blackmail, also taxation is theft. These are disagreements of emotional valence, not fact.
Game theory doesn't have an opinion about who should win, just about how to win the most effectively. (Though if it comes to it, I would like it to be known that I'm with the underclass.)
The thing I don't understand is how you can possibly train for uncertainty.
The model needs to "learn the feeling of not being sure". But whether it's sure or not always depends on its state of knowledge at the time, and that state of knowledge will never be represented in its training set. Additionally and relatedly, you cannot train a LLM to "notice when it's saying something wrong" without indirectly training it to say something wrong, then say it notices.
You would have to inspect the network and somehow determine when it is objectively uncertain, and to what degree, and then synthesize a training task based on that actual uncertainty. That level of interpretability is pretty beyond us at the moment.
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
Sure, but QM actually made testable predictions that explained reality better than the prevailing theories. Where is qualia's Michelson-Morley? Where is consciousness's precession of Mercury?
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
Do you apply this same logic to any other system we don't totally understand? Also, can you give an example for a law that makes qualia easier to explain?
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
for that matter atheists don't become Catholic when you show them the data that prayer and church attendance does have a positive impact on your psychological health
One of these things is not like the others: atheists don't necessarily disagree with the data. If you show a non-HBDer twin studies, presumably they'll try to disagree with them because they agree that to believe in the worldview modelled by the studies would "compel" them to become a HBDer, which they don't want for social censure. Ie. there are preferences attached to their beliefs. But if an atheist believes that Christians are more mentally healthy, this does not compel him to believe in God. Why would it? I mean, it's absolutely a value difference, but it's a value difference that isn't hooked to that part of the world model.
I think it makes those kinds of slips, which to me just means it has imperfect understanding and tends to bullshit. But it doesn't universally make those kinds of slips; it gets chair-person type relations right at a level above chance. Otherwise, generating any continuous run of coherent text would be near impossible.
It would be exceedingly strange for it to generate "the chair sits on the person" at the same rate as its converse, considering that "the <thing> <interacts> the <person>" is vanishingly rarer in its training corpus than "the <person> <interacts> the <thing>". But that sort of generalization requires some abstract model of "thing", "person" and "interact". For it to not pick up that pattern would be odd - why would that be the pattern that stumps it, when it can pick up the categories just fine?
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
Seems like a link to Neutral vs Conservative is in order.
If even the right reads left-aligned MSM, how is a right-wing equivalent of the MSM ever supposed to get off the ground? It'd be disadvantaged on every axis. Right-wing media is the way it is because it has to compete and win on ideological adherence to get any marketshare at all.
To me, this is a strong argument in favor of burning down institutions in general: sometimes, probably often, you can't build better ones while the old ones still exist. Not because they'd actively prevent you, but because they're already occupying the neutral space.
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
Observe the nuclear power plant operator long enough and you can plausibly gain enough understanding to run the power plant while never figuring out what fission is.
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
you chose to paraphrase similar statements as different in order to justify your one-sided demand for "evidence"
The two statements are:
Lockdowns made... some kind of sense in 2019/early 2020 when we had few other tools and the pandemic could have still turned out to be deadlier based on the reports coming out of China.
And
lockdowns never made sense at any point w/re to covid; there was zero scientific evidence to support them, lots of historical evidence against them
The second of those marshals "evidence" to support itself; the first does not. Claiming evidence and not providing any is worse than not claiming any to begin with.
Looking forward to your post!
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
However, it seems difficult to explain lack of girls' participation in an all-girl coding camp by any form of male behavior. In that sense, code camp intervention has not been tested, but has been attempted, which is itself a test. Of course, motte = "patriarchy is fully general and can be hosted on female brains", bailey = "men are sexist and that's why women don't code".
If we take this entirely seriously, dismantling patriarchy here would require forcing girls to go to code camp.
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
It's very challenging to take care of yourself without regularly being within six feet of many other humans.
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
If I say that Some Guy is actually braindead and is being piloted around by gnomes that live inside their brain, that doesn't reflect negatively on Guy (how could it? They're almost not a person!), and it doesn't really reflect badly on the gnomes either, so why does it seem like an attack?
I think because while it doesn't reflect badly in the world where it's right, it does reflect badly on Guy in the world where it's wrong. It's a paradoxical attack, that lands only if it misses.
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
No I don't, there's nothing wrong with price-haggling. You'll just use different arguments for it.
I think the kid with PTSD and the decaying immobile nonagenarian amputee are comparable. You think they're qualitatively different. Fine, make your case, or at least describe it with more detail than "beyond absurd". At least specify some sort of metric.You can't just construct reference classes by appeal to absurdity.
Then I'll just argue that suicide should not be forbidden. You can't stop me, mwahaha.
I'm not saying a line cannot be drawn, I'm saying there's two different arguments here. And for that matter, this argument still implies the line - presumably you would not say something like "people wil use any exception to argue for allowing decrepit Alzheimers patients to kill themselves." So your line is still there; you cannot construct a principled argument by saying "otherwise, the unprincipled line would be violated."
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
Is that insufficiently or invalidly bad?
Imagine, to pose an unreasonable extreme, everything beautiful in the world becoming ugly and disfigured. That would be a mere aesthetic change, but it would also drive near anyone to suicide. If we are agreed that this should ought to be prevented, we can then begin negotiating degrees.
FeepingCreature
2mo ago
Trust..? I just ask it code questions, lol. They can sniff my 40k token Vulkan demo if they like.
FeepingCreature
9mo ago
But being a big-breasted female-presenting tiefling with a futa cock and dude voice? Feels like a strange midpoint. If you live in a world of magic and this can be done easily with a finger snap or a procured service, why wouldn't you go all in one way or the other? I'll admit to a possible failure of imagination on my end, but it just comes off as kink and fetishism.
If you live in a world of magic and this can be done easily with a finger snap, why wouldn't you go for kink and fetishism?
FeepingCreature
9mo ago
On one hand I want to say that surely, being able to recognize and admit misconduct is private is better than not being able to do so, so this leak is bad. On the other hand, this is a pretty impressive level of self-delusion even so, and we do want to push back on misconduct when we become aware of it.
But I guess my synthesis would be: if the only way we have of noticing misconduct in a topic as impactful as a world-wide pandemic is a leak of private messages where the scientists involved literally admit to it, then science has much, much bigger problems than these people's misconduct.
I mean, I agree, but you could imagine a society that was all work, zero play, 16 hours a day until you die. Any money you are paid for your labor is only reinvested to make you a more effective employee. Children are still raised (16 hours of schooling and training per day, enter the labor force at 12), but they refund their parents the cost of raising them and thus are merely another labor-raising device. All fun that one has is optimized for perfect recovery to maximize socially useful labor. I think if we look at why such a society was bad, we find what the proper role of fun is: this society doesn't seem to be for anything aside from itself. Is society for man or is man for society? Whereas from the "fun" perspective, or rather the "human values" perspective, we find that we don't need to justify labor: a life with a balance of meaningful challenges, self-actualization and silly fun seems more preferred, even on its own merits, than a life of only one of them. So there are two arguments for labor: first, a society with only fun quickly runs out of fun overhead. This is an argument that even fun-maximalists will embrace, but it doesn't give you meaning in a post-singularity setting where the amount of labor strictly required for fun maximization is zero. The other is that meaningful labor is fun. (At least, if we stretch the meaning of fun somewhat, to mean "fulfilling".) This offers a blueprint for a post-singularity world of voluntarist labor. And in that model, we may imagine that some people genuinely are most satisfied by a life filled entirely with vapid fun, and so what? Their fun does not diminish mine.
FeepingCreature
11mo ago
If the president calls some other country and tells them something that's classified, and he doesn't know it's classified, I think it still becomes declassified in doing so. At least, that seems to be the argument. So in effect, by taking them home and keeping them past the end of his presidency, Trump declassified the materials without realizing he did so.
I mostly just find that argument amazing and I hope it wins for its own sake as an argument.
FeepingCreature
11mo ago
I mean, it would lead to endless tit-for-tat only as long as supplies of crimes last. I mean, you could make it last a long time by changing laws, but you'd have to put a bunch of additional work in. Absent a new wave of ex-post-facto laws or blatant procedure prosecutions, honestly my first reaction is "yes, good." Let justice reign, etc.
FeepingCreature
11mo ago
If I had two sons, and one son got drunk and punched someone at a bar while another got drunk and was punched by someone at a bar. I would not want to live in a world where the former was killed and the latter killed their assaulter. I'd much rather live in the alternative world where no one died. Which would you rather live in?
I think this is an instance of causal decision theory in the wild, in that you're holding the punch stable when there's no reason to expect that to be the case. What if it being "the sort of world where people who throw punches are killed" means that instead you get to pick between the world where your sons punch and are punched, and the world where nobody is even punched? Then the question would be to what extent punch-kill actually allows acausal flow, right? Ie. we may imagine a world where some people just, out of the blue, are struck by the urge to punch and otherwise-agentically seek out a target to punch. In that case, the kill-branch obviously would only worsen the situation. So the question comes down to if the punch urge is such that the kill branch can successfully shift the incentives enough to suppress the punch branch enough to make up for the QALY loss.
Because at the end of the day, we'd at least somewhat prefer that the least people die. Right?
If non vaccinated, or positives covid tested individuals and families had been shipped off to camps (outside china), and had been killed would that really have been incongruent with the rhetoric and propoganda deployed?
I obviously cannot prove this, but my immediate reaction is "yes, of course, massively incongruent."
We'd need more samples. I was right this time, but obviously n=1.
I think even in China, you could predict fairly reliably if a given camp or campaign was going to engage in mass murder or not, ie. whether the Uighur rhetoric is like the Nazi rhetoric in ways that the Covid rhetoric is not. To be clear, I don't have an opinion on this; I haven't done any research on genocide in China, but I'd expect if there was genocide we should see commonalities in the rhetoric.
edit: Ie. say, nobody was calling Covid victims dangerous parasites.... Okay, I'm not willing to say that. Maybe it's just that the US CW is so hot that the rhetoric on the street was genuinely indistinguishable from Mein Kampf? If so, Scott may be apropos: "Stop telling people they’re going to be killed. ... Stop trying to convince Americans that all the other Americans hate them."
If you told me, there were two societies, one values strength over weakness, and the other weakness over strength, and asked me to choose, I would conclude two things:
I mean, come on! Who talks like that? Do you think that first society is going to have solid investment in research, developed logistics, good infrastructure? Or a dictator and a big army? You couldn't set up a better stereotype if you tried.
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