... hm, acutally, when I try to formalize this with the simplest possible toy model, it doesn't work (the "may as well be hung ..." effect doesn't happen given the modeling assumptions I just made up). I was going to say: our team chooses a self-censorship parameter c from 0 to 10, and faces a bullying level b from 0 to 10. b is actually b(c, p), a function of self-censorship and publicity p (also from 0 to 10). The team leaders' utility function is U(c, b) := -(c + b) (bullying and self-censorship are both bad). Suppose the bullying level is b := 10 - c + p (self-censorship decreases bullying, and publicity increases it).
My thought was: a disgruntled team-member might want to increase p in order to induce the leaders to choose a smaller value of c. But when I do the algebra, -(c + b) = -(c + (10 - c + p)) = -c - 10 + c - p = -10 - p. (Which doesn't depend on c, seemingly implying that more publicity is just bad for the leaders without changing their choice of c? But I should really be doing my dayjob now instead of figuring out if I made a mistake in this Facebook comment.)
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> Eliezer is not a private person - he's a public figure. He set in motion a machine that continues to raise funds and demand work from people for below-market rates based on moral authority claims centered around his ability to be almost uniquely sane and therefore benevolent. (In some cases indirectly through his ability to cause others to be the same.) "Work for me or the world ends badly," basically.
> If this is TRUE (and also not a threat to destroy the world), then it's important to say, and to actually extract that work. But if not, then it's abuse! (Even if we want to be cautious about using emotionally loaded terms like that in public.)
> The machine he built to extract money, attention, and labor is still working, though, and claiming to be sane in part based on his prior advertisements, which it continues to promote. If Eliezer can't be bothered to withdraw his validation, then we get to talk about what we think is going on, clearly, in ways that aren't considerate of his feelings. He doesn't get to draw a boundary that prevents us from telling other people things about MIRI and him that we rationally and sincerely believe to be true.
> The fact that we magnanimously offered to settle this via private discussions with Eliezer doesn't give him an extra right to draw boundaries afterwards. We didn't agree to that. Attempting to settle doesn't forfeit the right to sue. Attempting to work out your differences with someone 1:1 doesn't forfeit your right to complain later if you were unable to arrive at a satisfactory deal (so long as you didn't pretend to do so).
+
+--------
+
+7 May—
+> I'm still pretty frustrated with the way you seem to dismiss my desire for a community that can get the basics right as delusional! Yes, I remember how you said in 2009 that you're not going to say the Things You Can't Say, and you keep repeating that you tried to tell me that public reason doesn't work, but that seems really fundamentally unresponsive to how I keep repeating that I only expect consensus on the basic philosophy stuff (not my object-level special interest). Why is it so unrealistic to imagine that the actually-smart people could enforce standards in our own tiny little bubble of the world? (Read the "worthless cowards" political/rhetorical move as an attempt to enforce the standard that the actually-smart people should enforce standards.)
+
+> I'm also still pretty angry about how your response to my "I believed our own propaganda" complaint is (my possibly-unfair paraphrase) "what you call 'propaganda' was all in your head; we were never actually going to do the unrestricted truthseeking thing when it was politically inconvenient." But ... no! I didn't just make up the propaganda! The hyperlinks still work! I didn't imagine them! They were real! You can still click on them: ["A Sense That More Is Possible"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Nu3wa6npK4Ry66vFp/a-sense-that-more-is-possible), ["Raising the Sanity Waterline"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XqmjdBKa4ZaXJtNmf/raising-the-sanity-waterline)
+
+> Can you please acknowledge that I didn't just make this up? Happy to pay you $200 for a reply to this email within the next 72 hours
+
+Or see ["A Fable of Science and Politics"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6hfGNLf4Hg5DXqJCF/a-fable-of-science-and-politics), where the editorial tone is pretty clear that we're supposed to be like Daria or Ferris, not Charles.
+
+> But, it's kind of bad that I'm thirty-one years old and haven't figured out how to be less emotionally needy/demanding; feeling a little bit less frame-locked now; let's talk in a few months (but offer in email-before-last is still open because rescinding it would be dishonorable)
+
+
+> I liked the conversation and like being on good terms and do not wish to be negative in what I am about to say. That said, if it's okay with you, I in general don't want to receive offers of money anymore (nor actual money either); I think I used to regard them as good-faith proposals for mutual benefit between consenting adults a la libertarianism, and at the moment I am afraid that if I ever accept money (or you ever give me money for an email or something) it'll appear in some Ben Hoffman essay as "using you" or some similar such thing, and receiving such offers (or taking them), given that I am not in fact in much need of money at the present margin, looks to me like not a good way to further my own goals as a consenting adult. (I appreciate the email you then sent afterward; I'd planned to write this before you sent that email, and it still seemed worth saying, but I appreciate also your own efforts to create a low-drama context.)
+
+> Re delusions, perhaps "ideals, which are useful but also partly intentionally simplified/inaccurate so as to be easier to unite around, and which for simplicity one coordinates as though others share" might be a better way to describe them, since sometimes simplified models have uses. Also, of course, the desire part can't be delusional; desires don't have truth-values; only predictions can be false-and-protecting-themselves-from-evidence. You can desire whatever you want, and can work toward it!
+
+> Regarding whether those ideals were ever the thing that a sensible but unbiased seeker-for-uniting-ideals, observing the 2008-2010 community, would've extrapolated from our community's speech and writing:
+
+> I agree such a person might've gotten your ideal from "a sense that more is possible", "raising the sanity waterline", and for that matter the facebook post about local validity semantics. Also from Michael Vassar's speech at the time about how he just went ahead and discussed e.g. race and gender and IQ and didn't seem to get ill effects from this and thought other people should do so too. too.
+> I think there are also pieces of speech one can point to from 2008-2010 that point toward it being unsurprising if people avoid controversial issues, e.g. "politics is the mind-killer" and its reception/quotation"; my own discussion of the essay "things you can't say" and my getting of Benton House to read this essay; various other things that others in good regard (not Eliezer) said to me privately at the time.
+> My own extrapolated ideal from all of this at the time was something like: "Ah, our ideal is 'let's try to figure out how to actually think, and practice it in concrete cases, while meanwhile dodging examples in public that risk getting us into trouble; practicing on less politics-inducing examples should work fine while developing the art, and is a net better idea than heading toward places where our nascent community may get torn apart by politics'".
+
+> (Looking at that last bullet point myself today, that claim seems far from obviously true, though also far from obviously false. It is therefore not a sentence I would say today (to avoid saying things that aren't likely enough to be true). It also seems to me today that we have done less to develop the core art of epistemic rationality than Eliezer hoped for in those posts, partly for lack of diligence and partly because the project itself proved harder and more likely to stir up hard-to-avoid psychological and social cans of instability than I initially expected. I guess my current guess is something like: "politics: can't rationality with it, can't rationality without it", although "it's hard to figure out how to" is maybe more accurate than simply "can't".)
+
+
+
+> When forming the original let's-be-apolitical vision in 2008, we did not anticipate that whether or not I should cut my dick off would become a political issue. That's new evidence about whether the original vision was wise! I'm not trying to do politics with my idiosyncratic special interest; I'm trying to think seriously about the most important thing in my life and only do the minimum amount of politics necessary to protect my ability to think. If 2019-era "rationalists" are going to commit a trivial epistemology mistake that interferes with my ability to think seriously about the most important thing in my life, but can't correct the mistake (because that would be politically inconvenient), then the 2019-era "rationalists" are worse than useless to me personally. This probably doesn't matter causally (I'm not an AI researcher, therefore I don't matter), but it might matter timelessly (if I'm part of a reference class that includes AI researchers).
+
+> Fundamentally, I just don't think you can do consisently high-grade reasoning as a group without committing heresy, because of the "Entangled Truths, Contagious Lies"/"Dark Side Epistemology" mechanism. You, Anna, in particular, are unusually good at thinking things without saying them; I think most people facing similar speech restrictions just get worse at thinking (plausibly including Eliezer), and the problem gets worse as the group effort scales. (It's easier to recommend "What You Can't Say" to your housemates than to put it on a canonical reading list, for obvious reasons.) You can't optimize your group's culture for not-talking-about-atheism without also optimizing against understanding Occam's razor; you can't optimize for not questioning gender self-identity without also optimizing against understanding "A Human's Guide to Words."
+
+-----
+
+
+there's this thing where some people are way more productive than others and everyone knows it, but no one wants to make it common knowledge which is really awkward for the people who are simultaneously (a) known but not commonly-known to be underperforming (such that the culture of common-knowledge-prevention is to my self-interest because I get to collect the status and money rents of being a $150K/yr software engineer without actually performing at that level, and my coworkers and even managers don't want to call attention to it because that would be mean—and it helps that they know that I already feel guilty about it) but also (b) tempermentally unsuited and ideologically opposed to subsisting on unjustly-acquired rents rather than value creation
+
+(where I'm fond of the Ayn Rand æsthetic of "I earn my keep, and if the market were to decide that I don't deserve to live anymore, I guess it would be right and I should accept my fate with dignity" and I think the æsthetic is serving a useful function in my psychology even though it's also important to model how I would change my tune if the market actually decided that I don't deserve to live)
+
+> but the "Everyone knows that Zack feels guilty about underperforming, so they don't punish him, because he's already doing enough internalized-domination to punish himself" dynamic is unsustainable if it evolves (evolves is definitely the right word here) into a loop of "feeling gulit in exchange for not doing work" rather than the intended function of "feeling guilt in order to successfully incentivize work"
+
+You've got to be strong to survive in the [O-ring sector](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O-ring_theory_of_economic_development)
+
+(I can actually see the multiplicative "tasks are intertwined and have to all happen at high reliability in order to create value" thing playing out in the form of "if I had fixed this bug earlier, then I would have less manual cleanup work", in contrast to the "making a bad latte with not enough foam, that doesn't ruin any of the other customer's lattes" from my Safeway-Starbucks-kiosk days)
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff