[I think there’s a thing Eliezer does a lot, which I have mixed feelings about, which is matching people’s statements to patterns and then responding to the generator of the pattern in Eliezer’s head, which only sometimes corresponds to the generator in the other person’s head.]
I want to add an additional meta-pattern – there was a once a person who thought I had a particular bias. They’d go around telling me “Ray, you’re exhibiting that bias right now. Whatever rationalization you’re coming up with right now, it’s not the real reason you’re arguing X.” And I was like “c’mon man. I have a ton of introspective access to myself and I can tell that this ‘rationalization’ is actually a pretty good reason to believe X and I trust that my reasoning process is real.”
But… eventually I realized I just actually had two motivations going on. When I introspected, I was running a check for a positive result on “is Ray displaying rational thought?”. When they extrospected me (i.e. reading my facial expressions), they were checking for a positive result on “does Ray seem biased in this particular way?”.
And both checks totally returned ‘true’, and that was an accurate assessment.
The particular moment where I noticed this metapattern, I’d say my cognition was, say, 65% “good argumentation”, 15% “one particular bias”, “20% other random stuff.” On a different day, it might have been that I was 65% exhibiting the bias and 15%.
None of this is making much claim of what’s likely to be going on in Rohin’s head or Eliezer’s head or whether Eliezer’s conversational pattern is useful, but wanted to flag it as a way people could be talking past each other.
I want to add an additional meta-pattern – there was a once a person who thought I had a particular bias. They’d go around telling me “Ray, you’re exhibiting that bias right now. Whatever rationalization you’re coming up with right now, it’s not the real reason you’re arguing X.” And I was like “c’mon man. I have a ton of introspective access to myself and I can tell that this ‘rationalization’ is actually a pretty good reason to believe X and I trust that my reasoning process is real.”
But… eventually I realized I just actually had two motivations going on. When I introspected, I was running a check for a positive result on “is Ray displaying rational thought?”. When they extrospected me (i.e. reading my facial expressions), they were checking for a positive result on “does Ray seem biased in this particular way?”.
And both checks totally returned ‘true’, and that was an accurate assessment.
The particular moment where I noticed this metapattern, I’d say my cognition was, say, 65% “good argumentation”, 15% “one particular bias”, “20% other random stuff.” On a different day, it might have been that I was 65% exhibiting the bias and 15%.
None of this is making much claim of what’s likely to be going on in Rohin’s head or Eliezer’s head or whether Eliezer’s conversational pattern is useful, but wanted to flag it as a way people could be talking past each other.