Norms discouraging "political" speech could aggravate the problem, if the response looked "political" but the original threat didn't. If Kosoy wanted to put in the work to explain why my philosophy of language blogging was causing problems for her, she would face legitimate doubt whether her defensive measures would be "admissible".
-The trainwreck got so bad that the mods manually [moved the comments to their own post](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WwTPSkNwC89g3Afnd/comment-section-from-05-19-2019). Based on the karma scores and what was said, I count it as a "victory" for me.
+The trainwreck got so bad that the mods manually [moved the comments to their own post](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WwTPSkNwC89g3Afnd/comment-section-from-05-19-2019). Based on the karma scores and what was said (Said Achmiz gave [a particularly helpful defense of disregarding community members' feelings](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WwTPSkNwC89g3Afnd/comment-section-from-05-19-2019?commentId=EsSdLMrFcCpSvr3pG)), I count it as a "victory" for me.
On 31 May 2019, a [draft of a new _Less Wrong_ FAQ](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MqrzczdGhQCRePgqN/feedback-requested-draft-of-a-new-about-welcome-page-for) included a link to "... Not Man for the Categories" as one of Scott Alexander's best essays. I argued that it would be better to cite _almost literally_ any other _Slate Star Codex_ post (most of which, I agreed, were exemplary). I claimed that the following disjunction was true: _either_ Alexander's claim that "There's no rule of rationality saying that [one] shouldn't" "accept an unexpected [X] or two deep inside the conceptual boundaries of what would normally be considered [Y] if it'll save someone's life" was a blatant lie, _or_ one had no grounds to criticize me for calling it a blatant lie, because there's no rule of rationality that says I shouldn't draw the category boundaries of "blatant lie" that way. The mod [was persuaded on reflection](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MqrzczdGhQCRePgqN/feedback-requested-draft-of-a-new-about-welcome-page-for?commentId=oBDjhXgY5XtugvtLT), and "... Not Man for the Categories" was not included in the final FAQ. Another "victory."
Math and Wellness Month ended up being mostly a failure: the only math I ended up learning was [a fragment of group theory](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2019/05/group-theory-for-wellness-i/), and [some probability/information theory](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2019/05/the-typical-set/) that [later turned out to super-relevant to understanding sex differences](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#typical-point). So much for taking a break.
-[TODO:
- * I had posted a linkpost to "No, it's not The Incentives—it's You", which generated a lot of discussion, and Jessica (17 June) identified Ray's comments as the last straw.
+In June 2019, I made [a linkpost on _Less Wrong_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5nH5Qtax9ae8CQjZ9/tal-yarkoni-no-it-s-not-the-incentives-it-s-you) to Tal Yarkoni's ["No, It's Not The Incentives—It's you"](https://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2018/10/02/no-its-not-the-incentives-its-you/), about how professional scientists should stop using career incentives as an excuse for doing poor science. It generated a lot of discussion.
+
+Looking over the thread in retrospect, [these words from David Xu seem significant](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5nH5Qtax9ae8CQjZ9/tal-yarkoni-no-it-s-not-the-incentives-it-s-you?commentId=qDPdneAQ4s7HMt3ys):
+
+> _We all know that falsifying data is bad._ But if that's the way the incentives point (and that's a very important if!), then it's _also_ bad to call people out for doing it. If you do that, then you're using moral indignation as a weapon—a way to not only coerce other people into using up their willpower, but to come out of it looking good yourself.
+
+In an email (Subject: "LessWrong.com is dead to me"), Jessica identified the thread (in particular, moderator Ray Arnold's comments) as her last straw:
> LessWrong.com is a place where, if the value of truth conflicts with the value of protecting elites' feelings and covering their asses, the second value will win.
>
-> Trying to get LessWrong.com to adopt high-integrity norms is going to fail, hard, without a _lot_ of conflict. (Enforcing high-integrity norms is like violence; if it doesn't work, you're not doing enough of it).
+> Trying to get LessWrong.com to adopt high-integrity norms is going to fail, hard, without a _lot_ of conflict. (Enforcing high-integrity norms is like violence; if it doesn't work, you're not doing enough of it). People who think being exposed as fraudulent (or having their friends exposed as fraudulent) is a terrible outcome, are going to actively resist high-integrity discussion norms.
+
+Posting on _Less Wrong_ made sense as harm-reduction, but the only way to get people to stick up for truth would be to convert them to _a whole new worldview_, which would require a lot of in-person discussions. She bought up the idea of starting a new forum to replace _Less Wrong_.
- * posting on Less Wrong was harm-reduction; the only way to get people to stick up for truth would be to convert them to _a whole new worldview_; Jessica proposed the idea of a new discussion forum
- * Ben thought that trying to discuss with the other mods would be a good intermediate step, after we clarified to ourselves what was going on; talking to other mods might be "good practice in the same way that the Eliezer initiative was good practice"; Ben is less optimistic about harm reduction; "Drowning Children Are Rare" was barely net-upvoted, and participating was endorsing the karma and curation systems
- * David Xu's comment on "The Incentives" seems important?
- * secret posse member: Ray's attitude on "Is being good costly?"
+Ben said that trying to discuss with the _Less Wrong_ mod team would be a good intermediate step, after we clarified to ourselves what was going on; it might be "good practice in the same way that the Eliezer initiative was good practice." He was less optimistic about harm-reduction; participating on the site was implicitly endorsing it by submitting the rule of the karma and curation systems.
+
+Secret posse member expressed sadness about how the discussion on "The Incentives" demonstrated that the community he loved—including dear friends—was in a very bad way. Michael (in a separate private discussion) had said he was glad to hear about the belief-update. Secret posse member said that Michael saying that also made them sad, because it seemed discordant to be happy about sad news. Michael wrote (in the thread):
+
+> I['m] sorry it made you sad. From my perspective, the question is no[t] "can we still be friends with such people", but "how can we still be friends with such people" and I am pretty certain that understanding their perspective if an important part of the answer. If clarity seems like death to them and like life to us, and we don't know this, IMHO that's an unpromising basis for friendship.
+
+[TODO—
* Jessica: scortched-earth campaign should mostly be in meatspace social reality
* my comment on emotive conjugation (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qaYeQnSYotCHQcPh8/drowning-children-are-rare#GaoyhEbzPJvv6sfZX)
On 3 November 2019, I received an interesting reply on my philosophy-of-categorization thesis from MIRI researcher Abram Demski. Abram asked: ideally, shouldn't all conceptual boundaries be drawn with appeal-to-consequences? Wasn't the problem just with bad (motivated, shortsighted) appeals to consequences? Agents categorize in order to make decisions. The best classifer for an application depends on the costs and benefits. As a classic example, it's very important for evolved prey animals to avoid predators, so it makes sense for their predator-detection classifiers to be configured such that they jump away from every rustling in the bushes, even if it's usually not a predator.
-I had thought of the "false-positives are better than false-negatives when detecting predators" example as being about the limitations of evolution as an AI designer: messy evolved animal brains don't bother to track probability and utility separately the way a cleanly-designed AI could. As I had explained in "... Boundaries?", it made sense for _what_ variables you paid attention to, to be motivated by consequences. But _given_ the subspace that's relevant to your interests, you want to run an epistemically legitimate clustering algorithm on the data you see there, which depends on the data, not your values. The only reason value-dependent gerrymandered category boundaries seem like a good idea if you're not careful about philosophy is because it's _wireheading_. Ideal probabilistic beliefs shouldn't depend on consequences.
+I had thought of the "false-positives are better than false-negatives when detecting predators" example as being about the limitations of evolution as an AI designer: messy evolved animal brains don't bother to track probability and utility separately the way a cleanly-designed AI could. As I had explained in "... Boundaries?", it made sense for _what_ variables you paid attention to, to be motivated by consequences. But _given_ the subspace that's relevant to your interests, you want to run an "epistemically legitimate" clustering algorithm on the data you see there, which depends on the data, not your values. The only reason value-dependent gerrymandered category boundaries seem like a good idea if you're not careful about philosophy is because it's _wireheading_. Ideal probabilistic beliefs shouldn't depend on consequences.
-Abram didn't think the issue was so clear-cut. Where do "probabilities" come from, in the first place? The reason we expect something like Bayesianism to be an attractor among self-improving agents is _because_ probabilistic reasoning is broadly useful: epistemology can be _derived_ from instrumental concerns. He agreed that severe wireheading issues _potentially_ arise if you allow consequentialist concerns to affect your epistemics.
+Abram didn't think the issue was so clear-cut. Where do "probabilities" come from, in the first place? The reason we expect something like Bayesianism to be an attractor among self-improving agents is because probabilistic reasoning is broadly useful: epistemology can be _derived_ from instrumental concerns. He agreed that severe wireheading issues _potentially_ arise if you allow consequentialist concerns to affect your epistemics.
But the alternative view had its own problems. If your AI consists of a consequentialist module that optimizes for utility in the world, and an epistemic module that optimizes for the accuracy of its beliefs, that's _two_ agents, not one: how could that be reflectively coherent? You could, perhaps, bite the bullet here, for fear that consequentialism doesn't tile and that wireheading was inevitable. On this view, Abram explained, "Agency is an illusion which can only be maintained by crippling agents and giving them a split-brain architecture where an instrumental task-monkey does all the important stuff while an epistemic overseer supervises." Whether this view was ultimately tenable or not, this did show that trying to forbid appeals-to-consequences entirely led to strange places.
-I didn't immediately have an answer for Abram, but I was grateful for the engagement. (Abram was clearly addressing the real philosophical issues, and not just trying to mess with me the way almost everyone else in Berkeley was trying to mess with me.)
+I didn't immediately have an answer for Abram, but I was grateful for the engagement. (Abram was clearly addressing the real philosophical issues, and not just trying to mess with me in the sense that almost everyone else in Berkeley was trying to mess with me.)
-Also in November 2019, I wrote to Ben about how I was still stuck on writing the grief-memoir. My _plan_ had been that it should have been possibly to tell the story of the Category War while glomarizing about the content of private conversations, then offer Scott and Eliezer pre-publication right of reply (because it's only fair to give your former-hero-current-[frenemies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frenemy) warning when you're about to publicly call them intellectually dishonest), then share it to _Less Wrong_ and the /r/TheMotte culture war thread, and then I would have the emotional closure to move on with my life (learn math, go to gym, chop wood, carry water) and not be a mentally-dominated cultist.
+------
-The reason it _should_ have been safe to write was because Explaining Things is Good. It should be possible to say, "This is not a social attack; I'm not saying 'rationalists Bad, Yudkowsky Bad'; I'm just trying to carefully _tell the true story_ about why, as a matter of cause-and-effect, I've been upset this year, including addressing counterarguments for why some would argue that I shouldn't be upset, why other people could be said to be behaving 'reasonably' given their incentives, why I nevertheless wish they'd be braver and adhere to principle rather than 'reasonably' following incentives, _&c_."
+Also in November 2019, I wrote to Ben about how I was still stuck on writing the grief-memoir. My _plan_ had been that it should have been possible to tell the story of the Category War while glomarizing about the content of private conversations, then offer Scott and Eliezer pre-publication right of reply (because it's only fair to give your former-hero-current-[frenemies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frenemy) warning when you're about to publicly call them intellectually dishonest), then share it to _Less Wrong_ and the /r/TheMotte culture war thread, and then I would have the emotional closure to move on with my life (learn math, go to gym, chop wood, carry water) and not be a mentally-dominated cultist.
+
+The reason it _should_ have been safe to write was because Explaining Things Is Good. It should be possible to say, "This is not a social attack; I'm not saying 'rationalists Bad, Yudkowsky Bad'; I'm just trying to carefully _tell the true story_ about why, as a matter of cause-and-effect, I've been upset this year, including addressing counterarguments for why some would argue that I shouldn't be upset, why other people could be said to be behaving 'reasonably' given their incentives, why I nevertheless wish they'd be braver and adhere to principle rather than 'reasonably' following incentives, _&c_."
So why couldn't I write? Was it that I didn't know how to make "This is not a social attack" credible? Maybe because ... it wasn't true?? I was afraid that telling a story about our leader being intellectually dishonest was "the nuclear option" in a way that I couldn't credibly cancel with "But I'm just telling a true story about a thing that was important to me that actually happened" disclaimers. If you're slowly-but-surely gaining territory in a conventional war, _suddenly_ escalating to nukes seems pointlessly destructive. This metaphor is horribly non-normative ([arguing is not a punishment!](https://srconstantin.github.io/2018/12/15/argue-politics-with-your-best-friends.html) carefully telling a true story _about_ an argument is not a nuke!), but I didn't know how to make it stably go away.
I said I would bite that bullet: yes! Yes, I was trying to figure out whether I was being fair to my abusers, and it was an important question to get right! "Other people's lack of standards harmed me, therefore I don't need to hold myself to standards in my response because I have [extenuating circumstances](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XYrcTJFJoYKX2DxNL/extenuating-circumstances)" would be a _lame excuse_.
-(This seemed correlated with the recurring stalemated disagreement within our coordination group, where Michael/Ben/Jessica would say, "Fraud, if that word _ever_ meant anything", and while I agreed that they were pointing to an important way in which things were messed up, I was still sympathetic to the Caliphate-defender's reply that the Vassarite usage of "fraud" was motte-and-baileying between vastly different senses of _fraud_; I wanted to do _more work_ to formulate a _more precise theory_ of the psychology of deception to describe exactly how things are messed up a way that wouldn't be susceptible to the motte-and-bailey charge.)
+(This seemed correlated with the recurring stalemated disagreement within our coordination group, where Michael/Ben/Jessica would say, "Fraud, if that word _ever_ meant anything", and while I agreed that they were pointing to an important way in which things were messed up, I was still sympathetic to the Caliphate-defender's reply that this usage of "fraud" was motte-and-baileying between vastly different senses of _fraud_; I wanted to do _more work_ to formulate a _more precise theory_ of the psychology of deception to describe exactly how things are messed up a way that wouldn't be susceptible to the motte-and-bailey charge.)
[TODO: Ziz's protest;
_ex cathedra_ statement that gender categories are not an exception to the rule, only 1 year and 8 months after asking for it
]
-And really, that _should_ have been the end of the story. At the trifling cost of two years of my life, we finally got a clarification from Yudkowsky that you can't define the word _woman_ any way you like. I didn't think I was entitled to anything more than that. I was satisfied. I still published "Unnatural Categories Are Optimized for Deception" in January 2021, but if I hadn't been further provoked, I wouldn't have occasion to continue waging the robot-cult religious civil war.
+And really, that _should_ have been the end of the story. At the trifling cost of two years of my life, we finally got a clarification from Yudkowsky that you can't define the word _woman_ any way you like. I didn't think I was entitled to anything more than that. I was satisfied. If I hadn't been further provoked, I wouldn't have occasion to continue waging the robot-cult religious civil war.
-[TODO: psychiatric disaster, breakup with Vassar group, this was really bad for me
-[As it is written](https://www.alessonislearned.com/), "A lesson is learned but the damage is irreversible."
-]
+I still published ["Unnatural Categories Are Optimized for Deception"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/onwgTH6n8wxRSo2BJ/unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception) in January 2021.
-[TODO: "Unnatural Categories Are Optimized for Deception"
+I wrote back to Abram Demski regarding his comments from fourteen months before: on further thought, he was right. Even granting my point that evolution didn't figure out how to track probability and utility separately, as Abram had pointed out, the _fact_ that it didn't meant that not tracking it could be an effective AI design. Just because evolution takes shortcuts that human engineers wouldn't didn't mean shortcuts are "wrong". (Rather, there are laws governing which kinds of shortcuts _work_.)
-Abram was right
+Abram was also right that it would be weird if reflective coherence was somehow impossible: the AI shouldn't have to fundamentally reason differently about "rewriting code in some 'external' program" and "rewriting 'its own' code." In that light, it made sense to regard "have accurate beliefs" as _merely_ a convergent instrumental subgoal, rather than what rationality is about—as sacrilegious as that felt to type.
-the fact that it didn't means that not tracking it can be an effective AI design! Just because evolution takes shortcuts that human engineers wouldn't doesn't mean shortcuts are "wrong" (instead, there are laws governing which kinds of shortcuts work).
+And yet, somehow, "have accurate beliefs" seemed _more fundamental_ than other convergent instrumental subgoals like "seek power and resources". Could this be made precise? As a stab in the dark, was it possible that the [theorems on the ubiquity of power-seeking](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6DuJxY8X45Sco4bS2/seeking-power-is-often-robustly-instrumental-in-mdps) might generalize to a similar conclusion about "accuracy-seeking"? If it _didn't_, the reason why it didn't might explain why accuracy seems more fundamental.
-Embedded agency means that the AI shouldn't have to fundamentally reason differently about "rewriting code in some 'external' program" and "rewriting 'my own' code." In that light, it makes sense to regard "have accurate beliefs" as merely a convergent instrumental subgoal, rather than what rationality is about
-somehow accuracy seems more fundamental than power or resources ... could that be formalized?
+[TODO: psychiatric disaster, breakup with Vassar group, this was really bad for me
+[As it is written](https://www.alessonislearned.com/), "A lesson is learned but the damage is irreversible."
]
+
+
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff