From 0c0916ea6c4ae88efcd6a285041bea1db123c214 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: "M. Taylor Saotome-Westlake" Date: Fri, 30 Sep 2022 18:21:00 -0700 Subject: [PATCH] memoir: building up to my private Document --- .../a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md | 11 ++++++----- 1 file changed, 6 insertions(+), 5 deletions(-) diff --git a/content/drafts/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md b/content/drafts/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md index b867a12..bf5a444 100644 --- a/content/drafts/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md +++ b/content/drafts/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md @@ -638,16 +638,17 @@ motivation deflates after Christmas victory There's another extremely important part of the story that _would_ fit around here chronologically, but I again find myself constrained by privacy norms: everyone's common sense of decency (this time, even including my own) screams that it's not my story to tell. -Here I again need to make a digression about privacy norms. Adherence to norms is fundamentally fraught for the same reason as AI alignment is. That is, in [rich domains](https://arbital.com/p/rich_domain/), explicit constraints on behavior face a lot of adversarial pressure from optimizers bumping up against the constraint. The intent of privacy norms restricting what things you're allowed to say, is to conceal information. But _information_ in Shannon's sense is about what states of the world can be inferred given the states of communication signals; it's much more expansive than the denotative meaning of a text, what we would colloquially think of as the explicit "content" of a message. - -If norms can only regulate the denotative meaning of a text (because trying to regulate subtext is too subjective for a norm-enforcing coalition to coordinate on), - - +Here I again need to make a digression about privacy norms. Adherence to norms is fundamentally fraught for the same reason as AI alignment is. That is, in [rich domains](https://arbital.com/p/rich_domain/), attempts to regulate behavior with explicit constraints face a lot of adversarial pressure from optimizers bumping up against the constraint, and finding the [nearest unblocked strategies](https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/nearest_unblocked) that circumvent the constraint. The intent of privacy norms restricting what things you're allowed to say, is to conceal information. But _information_ in Shannon's sense is about what states of the world can be inferred given the states of communication signals; it's much more expansive than the denotative meaning of a text, what we would colloquially think of as the explicit "content" of a message. +If norms can only regulate the denotative meaning of a text (because trying to regulate subtext is too subjective for a norm-enforcing coalition to coordinate on), someone who would prefer to reveal private information, but also wants to comply with privacy norms, has an incentive to leak everything they possibly can as subtext—to imply it, and hope to escape punishment on grounds of not having "really said it." And if there's some sufficiently egregious letter-complying-but-spirit-violating evasion of the norm, that a coalition _can_ coordinate on enforcing, the info-revealer has an incentive to stay _just_ shy of being that egregious. +Thus, it's unclear how much mere adherence to norms helps, when people's wills are actually misaligned. If I'm furious at Yudkowsky for prevaricating about my Something to Protect, and am in fact _more_ furious rather than less that he managed to do it without technically "lying", I should not debase myself by thinking myself innocent for not having "really said it." +Having considered all this, here's what I think I can say: I spent a number of hours in the first half of 2020 working on a private Document about a hypothesis that had occured to me. +Previously, I had already thought it was nuts that the culture of trans ideology was exerting influence the rearing of gender-non-conforming children. +claims that children who are far outside the typical norm of _behavior_ (_e.g._, social play styles) for their sex—very tomboyish girls and very feminine boys [TODO: pandemic starts] -- 2.17.1