--- /dev/null
+Title: Democracy Is Not Trivially Empowering
+Date: 2027-01-01
+Status: draft
+Category: social science
+Tags: regret
+
+https://x.com/adamascholl/status/2088407686304211080
+
+> Much of your long description strikes me as similarly misleading or false. As one example: you describe brainstorming/discussion about pivotal acts as an attempt to massively increase the global power of MIRI itself, as if the obvious plan—had such a technology been created—would have been to unilaterally use it themselves. There are of course many other options! Like e.g. giving it to our democratically elected government, in case they should wish to use it at some point. Of course any plan involving pivotal acts (that I have ever heard, at least) involves at least some motel quandaries; in my experience these quandaries were often the main focus of such discussions. But they of course do not consist exclusively of plans that involve taking extreme unilateral actions! And MIRI was in fact quite worried about plans that did, which is why e.g. we taught a class warning about the Unilateralist's Curse at MIRI's AIRCS recruiting workshops.
+
+https://x.com/ohabryka/status/2088688589370716389
+
+> 1. “MIRI taking over the world” is a very different statement than “democracy taking over the world”. Who is doing the taking over really matters of course!
+> 2. Nobody objecting to your post is of course not much evidence. A post is long. People start objecting to non-central metaphors when they become load bearing for an argument.
+> 3. No, JD was not careful to say “math object taking over the world”. In the context of this conversation he was saying that to justify the original phrasing, i.e. making the argument “yes, MIRI was trying to take over the world, because they were trying to define a math object that would take over the world”. Otherwise his response doesn’t make any sense and JD’s last response in this thread is quite explicit about that.
+>
+>> Also keep in mind that CEV-based FAI wouldn't be empowering actual humans (unless that's what CEV ends up deciding to do, which nobody can say ahead of time). It would instead be directly empowering hypothetical or simulated humans in the FAI's thoughts.
+>
+> This feels philosophically confused. Yes, the model of the humans needs to be accurate, but the same logic would say “but keep in mind, democracy is not empowering actual humans, it would be empowering the humans in the minds of the elected representatives”, and like, sure, but that’s still empowering the actual humans. And of course in the case of CEV making sure you are using an accurate model of human preferences is a strict criteria of success, if your model of the humans isn’t accurate, then you have failed at CEV.
Category: philosophy
Tags: honesty
-I run into a lot of people who consider themselves intellectuals and truthseekers who are also incredibly fussy about what information reaches their eyes. They block at the drop of a hat, derail intellectually substantive discussions into mind-numbing litigation of minutiæ of "tone", and refuse to acknowledge a logical point unless it's been presented to them in the precise way that doesn't offend their (often idiosyncratic) sense of etiquette or "discourse norms."
+I run into a lot of people who consider themselves truthseeking intellectuals who are also incredibly fussy about what information reaches their eyes. They block at the drop of a hat, derail intellectually substantive discussions into mind-numbing litigation of minutiæ of "tone", and refuse to acknowledge a logical point unless it's been presented to them in the precise way that doesn't offend their (often idiosyncratic) sense of etiquette or "discourse norms."
-It would be hard to communicate how much contempt I hold these people in. (Not because I couldn't find the words. Because they'd block me before I could communicate it.) I think they are ineffective and boring people whose pretensions to intellectualism are morally fraudulent; I think they are making the world worse insofar as they manage to trick anyone into conflating intellectual virtue with mastery of their impoverished form of cant.
+It would be hard to communicate how much contempt I hold these people in. (Not because I couldn't find the words. Because they'd block me before I could communicate it.) I think they are ineffective and boring people whose pretensions to intellectualism are morally fraudulent; I think they are making the world worse insofar as they manage to trick anyone into conflating epistemic virtue with mastery of their impoverished form of cant.
-To be clear, I understand that attention is a precious and limited resource, now more than ever. One must ruthlessly filter and prune one's information evironment in order to maintain the signal-to-noise ratio, lest one drown in an ocean of slop. If someone is quick to drop out of conversations because they're busy and don't have time for whatever nonsense people are yammering about, then they have my respect, and indeed, admiration. (Perhaps I should learn to one day have so much respect for my own time.)
+To be clear, I understand that attention is a precious and limited resource, now more than ever. One must ruthlessly filter and prune one's information evironment in order to maintain the signal-to-noise ratio, lest one drown in an ocean of slop. If someone is quick to drop out of conversations because they're busy and don't have time for whatever nonsense people are yammering about, then that person has my respect, and indeed, admiration. (Perhaps I should learn to one day have so much respect for my own time.)
-But the people I'm complaining about are very obviously not protecting their time from noise. They're avoiding criticism, protecting their egos from signal that would hurt their feelings, cocooning themselves away from information that might challenge what they would prefer to believe. Someone protecting their time might mute someone for being boring, but not for "being a dick." (In my experience, everyone who complains about someone allegedly "being a dick" is actually complaining about that person's refusal to suck theirs.)
+But the people I'm complaining about are obviously not protecting their time from noise. They're avoiding criticism, protecting their egos from signal that would hurt their feelings, cocooning themselves away from information that might challenge what they would prefer to believe. Someone protecting their time might mute someone for being boring, but not for "being a dick." (In my experience, everyone who complains about someone allegedly "being a dick" is actually complaining about that person's refusal to suck theirs.)
-It's not that I'm some kind of superhuman stoic who has no empathy for why someone would want to hide from information. I have feelings, too. Sometimes I procrastinate checking my email or the comment section when a tough conversation has been happening and I'm worried that someone might have said something critical about me that I would find upsetting to read. I avoid it because I just don't want to deal with it now, as opposed to dealing with it some hours or days later when I'm feeling up to it. (I always feel better after I eventually work up the bravery to check, but this fact is surprisingly hard to remember.)
+It's not that I'm some kind of superhuman stoic who has no empathy for why someone would want to hide from information. I have feelings, too. Sometimes I procrastinate checking my email or the comment section when a tough conversation has been happening and I'm worried that someone might have said something critical about me that I would find upsetting to read. I avoid it because I just don't want to deal with it now, when I could deal with it some hours or days later when I'm feeling up to it. (I always feel better after I eventually work up the bravery to check, but this fact is surprisingly hard to remember.)
-Crucially, however, I know that me avoiding my mail is _my_ (temporary) reluctance to meet the responsibilities of being a grown-up intellectual. Managing my emotions is _my_ job. I don't expect or want other people to refrain from telling me things that I might find upsetting to read, because the set of things I might find upsetting to read includes a lot of imporant decision-relevant information about the world.
+Crucially, however, I know that me avoiding my mail is my (temporary) reluctance to meet the responsibilities of being a grown-up intellectual. Managing my emotions is _my_ job. I don't expect or want other people to refrain from telling me things that I might find upsetting to read, because the set of things I might find upsetting to read includes a lot of imporant decision-relevant information about the world.
Although I'm not any kind of superhuman stoic, I think I have developed a certain tolerance and even taste for criticism. The email-avoidance behavior only kicks in when I'm facing particularly heightened social risk when fighting with people whose opinions I have reason to care about. In contrast, being criticized by randos elsewhere on the internet is more amusing than anything else. It's flattering to be hated: it means that someone thinks you're important enough to be worth hating, rather than ignored by default (as almost everything must be in our information-rich, attention-poor world).
-The people I'm complaining about often point to /r/SneerClub (a group of "haters" of our local intellectual scene) as the epitome of "bad" speech that one shouldn't be so much as tempted to look at, but my main complaint about Sneer Club is that they're just not that smart and almost never come up with any really penetrating criticisms. In theory, one might have hoped that a dedicated anti-fan club might be an indispensible source of valuable criticism, as people who hate you are motivated to search hard for all the things you're doing wrong that your friends like you too much to tell you about or even notice. Unfortunately, in practice, they just go for the cheap dunks. Thus, /r/SneerClub ends up being mostly pretty boring to me, although the novelty of having dedicated haters is worth enough passing interest that I did make sure to [submit one of my particularly sneerable-seeming pieces there](https://old.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/n44drl/sexual_dimorphism_in_yudkowskys_sequences_in/). (My submission got locked, but [someone else's got 36 karma](https://old.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/nt37j1/the_rationalist_subcultures_resident_blanchardian/) before the mods decided to delist it because "it feels for once like an actual bullying thing to post".)
+The people I'm complaining about often point to /r/SneerClub (a group of "haters" of our local intellectual scene) as the epitome of "bad" speech that one shouldn't be so much as tempted to look at, but my main complaint about Sneer Club is that they're just not that smart and almost never come up with any really penetrating criticisms. In theory, one might have hoped that a dedicated anti-fan club might be an indispensible source of valuable criticism, as people who hate you are motivated to search hard for all the things you're doing wrong that your friends like you too much to tell you about or even notice. Unfortunately, in practice, they just go for the cheap dunks. Thus, /r/SneerClub mostly ends up being boring to me, although the novelty of having dedicated haters is worth enough passing interest that I did make sure to [submit one of my particularly sneerable-seeming pieces there](https://old.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/n44drl/sexual_dimorphism_in_yudkowskys_sequences_in/). (My submission got locked, but [someone else's got 36 karma](https://old.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/nt37j1/the_rationalist_subcultures_resident_blanchardian/) before the mods decided to delist it because "it feels for once like an actual bullying thing to post".)
+
+Once, before blocking me on Twitter (for retweeting [satire of Scott Alexander](https://x.com/0x49fa98/status/2010491654797426940) that they thought was too sneering), someone told me that my own masochistic taste wasn't a good reason to inflict it on others. But I think [my "masochism" is an essential rationality practice](/blog/2016/Sep/bayesomasochism/). It's not an idiosyncratic quirk of no consequence; it's an acquired taste that I deliberately cultivated for my epistemic health. By nature, people [instinctively cling to comforting beliefs and feel pain doubting them](https://www.readthesequences.com/Avoiding-Your-Beliefs-Real-Weak-Points).
+
+
+It's not feasible
+
+Embracing the pain turns out to be more feasible than willing it away.
+
+Without "masochism",
+
+
-[TODO: told I'm a masochist, but Bayesomasochism is an important rationality practice]
I think the people I'm complaining about could be more like me if they wanted to, and the fact that they don't want to disqualifies them from being serious intellectuals. At least along this dimension, they are beneath me.
projects / An_Algorithmic_Lucidity.git / commitdiff