> _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:
+In an email (Subject: "LessWrong.com is dead to me"), Jessica identified the thread 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.
>
* secret posse member: level of social-justice talk makes me not want to interact with this post in any way
]
-On 4 July, Scott Alexander published ["Some Clarifications on Rationalist Blogging"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/04/some-clarifications-on-rationalist-blogging/), disclaiming any authority as a "rationalist" leader. ("I don't want to claim this blog is doing any kind of special 'rationality' work beyond showing people interesting problems [...] Insofar as [_Slate Star Codex_] makes any pretensions to being 'rationalist', it's a rationalist picnic and not a rationalist monastery.") I assumed this was inspired by Ben's request back in March that Scott "alter the beacon" so as to not confuse people about what the current-year community was. I appreciated it.
+On 4 July 2019, Scott Alexander published ["Some Clarifications on Rationalist Blogging"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/04/some-clarifications-on-rationalist-blogging/), disclaiming any authority as a "rationalist" leader. ("I don't want to claim this blog is doing any kind of special 'rationality' work beyond showing people interesting problems [...] Insofar as [_Slate Star Codex_] makes any pretensions to being 'rationalist', it's a rationalist picnic and not a rationalist monastery.") I assumed this was inspired by Ben's request back in March that Scott "alter the beacon" so as to not confuse people about what the current-year community was. I appreciated it.
-[TODO: "AI Timelines Scam"
- * I still sympathize with the "mainstream" pushback against the scam/fraud/&c. language being used to include Elephant-in-the-Brain-like distortions
- * Ben: "What exactly is a scam, if it's not misinforming people systematically about what you have to offer, in a direction that moves resources towards you? Investigations of financial fraud don't inquire as to the conscious motives of the perp."
- * 11 Jul: I think the law does count _mens rea_ as a thing: we do discriminate between vehicular manslaughter and first-degree murder, because traffic accidents are less disincentivizable than offing one's enemies
- * call with Michael about GiveWell vs. the Pope
-]
+Also in early July 2019, Jessica published ["The AI Timelines Scam"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KnQs55tjxWopCzKsk/the-ai-timelines-scam), arguing that the recent popularity of "short" (_e.g._, 2030) AI timelines was better explained by political factors, rather than any technical arguments: just as in previous decades, people had incentives to bluff and exaggerate about the imminence of AGI in order to attract resources to their own project.
+
+(Remember, this was 2019. After seeing what GPT-3/PaLM/DALL-E/_&c._ could do during the "long May 2020", it's now looking to me like the short-timelines people had better intuitions than Jessica gave them credit for. I won't say, "How could I have known?", but at the time, I didn't, actually, know.)
+
+I still sympathized with the "mainstream" pushback against using "scam"/"fraud"/"lie"/_&c._ language to include motivated [elephant-in-the-brain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elephant_in_the_Brain)-like distortions. I conceded that this was a _boring_ semantic argument, but I feared that until we invented better linguistic technology, the _boring_ semantic argument was going to _continue_ sucking up discussion bandwidth with others when it didn't need to.
+
+"Am I being too tone-policey here?" I asked the coordination group. "Is it better if I explicitly disclaim, 'This is marketing advice; I'm not claiming to be making a substantive argument'?" (Subject: "Re: reception of 'The AI Timelines Scam' is better than expected!")
+
+Ben replied, "What exactly is a scam, if it's not misinforming people systematically about what you have to offer, in a direction that moves resources towards you? Investigations of financial fraud don't inquire as to the conscious motives of the perp."
+
+I replied that the concept of [_mens rea_](https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/mens_rea) did seem necessary for maintaining good incentives, at least in some contexts. The law needs to distinguish between accidentally hitting a pedestrian in one's car ("manslaughter") from premeditated killing ("first-degree murder"), because traffic accidents are significantly less disincentivizable than offing one's enemies. (Anyone who drives at all is probably going to have unlucky analogues in nearby possible worlds who are guilty of vehicular manslaughter.) The manslaughter case was simpler than misinformation-that-moves-resources,[^manslaughter-disanalogy] and it might not be _easy_ for the court to determine "intent", but I didn't see what would reverse the extremely weak principle that intent matters, sometimes.
+
+[^manslaughter-disanalogy]: For one extremely important disanalogy, perps don't _gain_ from committing manslaughter.
+
+Ben replied that what mattered in the determination of manslaughter _vs._ murder was whether there was long-horizon optimization power towards the outcome of someone's death; it wasn't about what sentiments the killer rehearsed in their working memory.
+
+On a phone call, Michael made an analogy between EA and Catholicism. The Pope was fraudulent, because the legitimacy of the Pope's position (and his claims to power and resources) rested on the pretense that he had a direct relationship with God, which wasn't true, and the Pope _knew_ (he _had_ to know, at some level) that it asn't true. (I agreed that this usage of _fraud_ made sense to me.) In Michael's view, Ben's charges against GiveWell were similar: GiveWell's legitimacy rested on the pretense that they were making decisions based on numbers, and they had to know at some level that they weren't doing that.
[TODO: secret thread with Ruby; "uh, guys??" to Steven and Anna; people say "Yes, of course criticism and truthseeking is important; I just think that tact is important, too," only to go on and dismiss any _particular_ criticism as insufficiently tactful.]
In August 2019's ["Schelling Categories, and Simple Membership Tests"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests), I explained a nuance that had only merited a passion mention in "... Boundaries?": sometimes you might want categories for different agents to _coordinate_ on, even at the cost of some statistical "fit." (This was of course generalized from a "pro-trans" argument that had occured to me, [that self-identity is an easy Schelling point when different people disagree about what "gender" they perceive someone as](/2019/Oct/self-identity-is-a-schelling-point/).)
-In September 2019's ["Heads I Win, Tails?—Never Heard of Her; Or, Selective Reporting and the Tragedy of the Green Rationalists"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DoPo4PDjgSySquHX8/heads-i-win-tails-never-heard-of-her-or-selective-reporting), I presented a toy mathematical model of how censorship distorts group beliefs. I was surprised by how well-received it was (high karma, Curated within a few days, later included in the Best-of-2019 collection), especially given that it was explicitly about politics (albeit at a meta level, of course). Ben and Jessica had discouraged me from bothering when I sent them a draft.
+In September 2019's ["Heads I Win, Tails?—Never Heard of Her; Or, Selective Reporting and the Tragedy of the Green Rationalists"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DoPo4PDjgSySquHX8/heads-i-win-tails-never-heard-of-her-or-selective-reporting), I presented a toy mathematical model of how censorship distorts group beliefs. I was surprised by how well-received it was (high karma, Curated within a few days, later included in the Best-of-2019 collection), especially given that it was explicitly about politics (albeit at a meta level, of course). Ben and Jessica had discouraged me from bothering when I sent them a draft. (Jessica said that it was obvious even to 10-year-olds that partisan politics distorts impressions by filtering evidence. "[D]o you think we could get a ten-year-old to explain it to Eliezer Yudkowsky?" I asked.)
In October 2019's ["Algorithms of Deception!"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fmA2GJwZzYtkrAKYJ/algorithms-of-deception), I exhibited some toy Python code modeling different kinds of deception. A function that faithfully passes observations it sees as input to another function, lets the second function constructing a well-calibrated probability distribution. But if the first function outright fabricates evidence, or selectively omits some evidence, or gerrymanders the categories by which it interprets its observations as evidence, the second function comes up with a worse (less accurate) probability distribution.
[TODO: complicity and friendship]
-[TODO: I had a productive winter blogging vacation in December 2019
-pull the trigger on "On the Argumentative Form"; I was worried about leaking info from private conversations, but I'm in the clear "That's your hobbyhorse" is an observation anyone could make from content alone]
+-----
+
+I had a pretty productive blogging spree in late 2019.
+
+[TODO: "The Legend of the Extortion War"]
-[TODO: "Firming Up ..." Dec 2019: combatting Yudkowsky's not-technically-lying shenanigans]
+I polished and pulled the trigger on ["On the Argumentative Form 'Super-Proton Things Tend to Come In Varieties'"](/2019/Dec/on-the-argumentative-form-super-proton-things-tend-to-come-in-varieties/), my reply to Yudkowsky's implicit political concession to me back in March. I had been reluctant to post it based on an intuition of, "My childhood hero was trying to _do me a favor_; it would be a betrayal to reject the gift." The post itself explained why that intuition was crazy, but _that_ just brought up more anxieties about whether the explanation constituted leaking information from private conversations—but I had chosen my words carefully such that it wasn't. ("Even if Yudkowsky doesn't know you exist [...] he's _effectively_ doing your cause a favor" was something I could have plausibly written in the possible world where the antecedent was true.) Jessica said the post seemed good.
+
+I also published ["Firming Up Not-Lying Around Its Edge-Cases Is Less Broadly Useful Than One Might Initially Think"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MN4NRkMw7ggt9587K/firming-up-not-lying-around-its-edge-cases-is-less-broadly), a critique of Yudkowsky's [code of "meta-honesty"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xdwbX9pFEr7Pomaxv/meta-honesty-firming-up-honesty-around-its-edge-cases), on the occasion of the latter's nomination for a Best-of-2018 Review. (The ungainly title of my post was "softened" from an earlier draft, which said "... Surprisingly Useless".)
+
+-----
[TODO: plan to reach out to Rick 14 December
Anna's reply 21 December
On 10 February 2020, Scott Alexander published ["Autogenderphilia Is Common and Not Especially Related to Transgender"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/02/10/autogenderphilia-is-common-and-not-especially-related-to-transgender/), an analysis of the results of the autogynephilia/autoandrophilia questions on the recent _Slate Star Codex_ survey.
-I appreciated the gesture of getting real data, but I was deeply unimpressed with Alexander's analysis for reasons that I found difficult to write up in a timely manner. Three years later, I eventually got around to [polishing my draft and throwing it up as a standalone post](/2023/Feb/reply-to-scott-alexander-on-autogenderphilia/), rather than cluttering the present narrative with my explanation.
+I appreciated the gesture of getting real data, but I was deeply unimpressed with Alexander's analysis for reasons that I found difficult to write up in a timely manner. Three years later, I eventually got around to [polishing my draft and throwing it up as a standalone post](/2023/Mar/reply-to-scott-alexander-on-autogenderphilia/), rather than cluttering the present narrative with my explanation.
Briefly, based on eyballing the survey data, Alexander proposes "if you identify as a gender, and you're attracted to that gender, it's a natural leap to be attracted to yourself being that gender" as a "very boring" theory, but on my worldview, a hypothesis that puts "gay people (cis and trans)" in the antecedent is _not_ boring and actually takes on a big complexity penalty: I just don't think the group of gay men _and_ lesbians _and_ straight males with female gender identities _and_ straight females with male gender identities have much in common with each other, except sociologically (being "queer"), and by being human.
But if you _do_ have the math, a moment of introspection will convince you that the analogy between category "boundaries" and national borders is not a particularly deep or informative one.
-A two-dimensional political map tells you which areas of the Earth's surface are under the jurisdiction of what government.
-
-In contrast, category "boundaries" tell you which regions of very high-dimensional configuration space correspond to a word/concept, which is useful _because_ that structure is useful for making probabilistic inferences: you can use your observastions of some aspects of an entity (some of the coordinates of a point in configuration space) to infer category-membership, and then use category membership to make predictions about aspects that you haven't yet observed.
+A two-dimensional political map tells you which areas of the Earth's surface are under the jurisdiction of what government. In contrast, category "boundaries" tell you which regions of very high-dimensional configuration space correspond to a word/concept, which is useful _because_ that structure is useful for making probabilistic inferences: you can use your observastions of some aspects of an entity (some of the coordinates of a point in configuration space) to infer category-membership, and then use category membership to make predictions about aspects that you haven't yet observed.
But the trick only works to the extent that the category is a regular, non-squiggly region of configuration space: if you know that egg-shaped objects tend to be blue, and you see a black-and-white photo of an egg-shaped object, you can get _close_ to picking out its color on a color wheel. But if egg-shaped objects tend to blue _or_ green _or_ red _or_ gray, you wouldn't know where to point to on the color wheel.
[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."
]
-
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projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff