As part of some recent experiments with debates, today I debated Ronny Fernandez on the topic of whether privacy is good or bad, and I was randomly assigned the “privacy is good” side. I’ve cut a few excerpts together that I think work as a standalone post, and put them below.
At the start I was defending privacy in general, and then we found that our main disagreement was about whether it was helpful for thinking for yourself, so I focus even more on that after the opening statement.
This is an experiment. I’m down for feedback on whether to do more of this sort of thing (it only takes me ~2 hours), how I could make it better for the reader, whether to make it a top-level post, etc.
Epistemic status: soldier mindset. I will here be exaggerating the degree to which I believe my conclusions.
Opening Statement
My core argument is that, in general, the pressures for conformity amongst humans are crazy.
This is true of your immediate circle, your local community, and globally. Each one of these has sufficiently strong pressures that I think it is a good heuristic to actively keep secrets and things you think about and facts about your life separate from each of them. Secret lives and secret thoughts are healthy for a species with such terrible pressures for conformity.
On an individual level, I see the people around me copying word choice, clothing, beliefs, attitudes toward others, based on the slightest of cues. In myself I notice very base emotions guiding the track of my thoughts — who or what am I attracted to, who or what do I fear, etc, changes whose thoughts I consider when making decisions. cf. Duncan Sabien’s shoulder advisors — I have had people sit on my shoulder and tell me what they think simply because the person has power over me in some fashion, in a way that I do not endorse. As such, I think it’s really healthy to have parts of your life cut off from them, that they will never know about. It helps me to have a therapist where what we discuss is private and she will never enter other parts of my life — I can say things to her that would have complicated and likely negative social repercussions for me if I said to anyone else, or that would do so via causing me fear of imagining their repercussions. Separation is healthy.
This is also true on a much larger scale. I think that there’s an equilibrium of being a fully open person, and I think this is anti-correlated with being able to be in positions of great power where you will have a very high attack surface. If you attempt to get a prestigious role in this world, many people may come and attack you with personal information, about your sexuality, about your past bad behavior (even if it’s common and you’re the only one to admit it).
Recall the excellent Tim Ferriss article 11 Reasons Not to Become Famous. Stalkers, death threats, harassment of family members and loved ones, dating woes, extortion attempts, desperation messages and pleas for help, kidnapping, impersonation & identity theft, attack & clickbait media, “friends” with ulterior motives, and invasions of privacy. I’m not arguing that this is the default, I’m arguing that as you move closer to power and prestige, the adversarial forces on you will increase dramatically, and at this point you will probably breakdown if you expose all your private information. I think that there is an equilibrium for perfectly open people who provide value by showing you what people are really like, and I think that sometimes this is itself a form of great power, but I don’t think that this is true for all people close to prestige and power in general, and often it’s reasonable for them to have many parts of their lives not be up for consideration when attacking their power.
If I were Robin Hanson I would be here arguing that the modern world has much heightened pressures to conform due to improved transport and communication channels, where it’s trivial to find people in the world different to you and socially shame / embarrass them, or cause conformity by whatever other crazy mechanisms in our brain cause conformity. The developed world praises multiculturalism in terms of styles of cuisine and fashions and so on, but never has such a high fraction of the world spoken a single language (English), traded in the same financial markets, been part of the same supply chains, had the same famous people, etc. Twitter allows mob justice to roam the entire English-speaking world. To protect yourself from this, it’s good to have parts of your life that are taboo or different not be an open attack surface.
I also think that another good argument here is that rule-breaking behavior is often good and important. Incompetent fools with power can cause a lot of damage and you should ignore some of their especially damaging rules. Zero privacy would mean that you’d never be able to go against those who wield power badly.
Personally I am very sympathetic to “you can have way lower boundaries for privacy than most people are willing to admit to themselves” and “morally you should be way more open than many people think” and would be willing to defend a lot of ways you can do better than 99% of people on these axes, but I am here going to defend that the answer isn’t “literally zero privacy” and that there are some strong reasons to maintain it, including avoiding conformity, reducing attack surface when near power, decreasing cultural conformity, and allowing for rule-breaking behavior.
Brief Aside
My attitude toward conformity is more like “Hit it seventeen different ways” rather than “Solve it with one weird trick”. I think having some parts of your thoughts and life be fully separate from any given person or community is a good trick for separating your thoughts from theirs.
Rebuttal
I am going to focus on what has come up as the core of the disagreement between us.
It seems to me that privacy is a really powerful way of thinking for yourself.
Here are some reasons why it looks like this to me.
I think that one of the big attack vectors in my social community has been totalization, where a single axis of value is all that exists (the end of the world is all that matters). Anything that is not useful for saving the world, or is weakly counterproductive, is considered bad and dismissed. (See the great Jacob Geller video on Art in the Pre-Apocalypse.) It is also the case that I find that simulating very different shoulder advisors with different perspectives, from a different status hierarchy, is very good. But I find that when I try to bring them up in my local status hierarchy, their perspectives are dismissed and they’re denigrated as not having the kinds of attributes that are worth of respect. As such, in order to be successful at this, I have kept my other social hierarchies a secret such that my world-saving one doesn’t start beating down on the other one. I currently think this has been quite useful and suspect that, at the end of my life, I may look back and view this as a superpower.
There are parts of my life that are very difficult and confusing and painful to think about, and also where I have found the local culture’s advice / received wisdom has been negative and painful for me. As such I’ve chosen to think about those things alone and separately and avoid trying to connect them to my local community, which I think would otherwise hurt me. There’s a trust issue here.
Over the years I’ve found that relying on others to treat my private thoughts well has been harmful, and I have nobody to rely on to think my thoughts and respect them other than myself. I do an immense amount of private journaling, in the last 2 years I’ve written an average of 500 words every day. It’s a key aspect of my journaling that this is not shared with anyone else, that I can say thoughts that would have very wild social repercussions — not punishment directly, but just enough social effects that I need to do a bunch of social modeling to manage them. (This is related to how one of the worst parts of my living in a group house was the fact that I had to pass through a common space to go to the bathroom — I had to boot up potential social modeling regularly throughout the day and night.) This has allowed my thoughts to take long-chain thoughts in directions that otherwise would have a lot of friction, and reach conclusions and ideas that I can reach without having to fight a constant uphill battle.
It seems to me that Ronny’s position is that in order to think for yourself and avoid the pressures of conformity, you should also make it a goal to not need privacy. I think this is maybe a useful heuristic (to explore why you are having privacy and whether you can safely drop it) but I don’t think it is at all a requirement. I think the goal should be to think for yourself and figure out what’s true and how to take right action, and if privacy is a useful tool for that, then we should not be prejudiced against it. I think that Ronny has got many good ways of fighting through the frictions people put upon you for thinking openly in public and being open about yourself / your mind / your life, but I think he is missing the value of also simply sidestepping all of those frictions and thinking long-chain thoughts out of sight of the other superintelligent chimps.
Final Counterarguments
Ronny argues that my strategy will make me lonely and isn’t good for avoiding conformity.
I think my overall take is that the weakest parts of Ben’s position are:
It leads to having kind of a sad relationship with people you are closest with or something, and being kinda lonely
Being private helps people to deal with conformity
I’ll say some things about both.
Loneliness
Here are two quick quotes from the best book on founding a company I’ve read, “The Hard Thing About Hard Things” by Ben Horowitz.
This is the last step of the section on hiring
STEP 3: MAKE A LONELY DECISION
Despite many people being involved in the process, the ultimate decision should be made solo. Only the CEO has comprehensive knowledge of the criteria, the rationale for the criteria, all of the feedback from interviewers and references, and the relative importance of the various stakeholders. Consensus decisions about executives almost always sway the process away from strength and toward lack of weakness. It’s a lonely job, but somebody has to do it.
And here’s a section “The Most Difficult CEO Skill”. He talks about difficult decisions
IT’S A LONELY JOB
In your darkest moments as CEO, discussing fundamental questions about the viability of your company with your employees can have obvious negative consequences. On the other hand, talking to your board and outside advisers can be fruitless. The knowledge gap between you and them is so vast that you cannot actually bring them fully up to speed in a manner that’s useful in making the decision. You are all alone.
[...]
My friend Jason Rosenthal took over as CEO of Ning in 2010. As soon as he became CEO, he faced a cash crisis and had to choose among three difficult choices: (1) radically reduce the size of the company, (2) sell the company, or (3) raise money in a highly dilutive way. Think about those choices:
Lay off a large set of talented employees whom he worked very hard to recruit and, as a result, likely severely damage the morale of the remaining people.
Sell out all of the employees whom he had been working side by side with for the past several years (Jason was promoted into the position) by selling the company without giving them a chance to perform or fulfill their mission.
Drastically reduce the ownership position of the employees and make their hard work economically meaningless. Choices like these cause migraine headaches. Tip to aspiring entrepreneurs: If you don’t like choosing between horrible and cataclysmic, don’t become CEO.
[...]
Great CEOs face the pain. They deal with the sleepless nights, the cold sweats, and what my friend the great Alfred Chuang (legendary cofounder and CEO of BEA Systems) calls “the torture.” Whenever I meet a successful CEO, I ask them how they did it. Mediocre CEOs point to their brilliant strategic moves or their intuitive business sense or a variety of other self-congratulatory explanations. The great CEOs tend to be remarkably consistent in their answers. They all say, “I didn’t quit.”
I recommend the book, I learned a lot from it.
I would also talk about great mathematicians like Grothendieck and Andrew Wiles who did so much great work alone and avoiding people. I think there’s a lot of pointers here to a tactic of “your thinking has to be yours and separate from other people.” If you’ve read HPMOR you know that Godric Gryffindor was lonely and Eliezer is lonely. I am lonely and I know other people I highly respect who are too. Sorry. I don’t see this as something that one can simply overcome.
Conformity
Ronny wrote this toward the end of the debate.
Something I wish I had mentioned earlier is that it’s not just practice. Like, eventually people will stop trying to control you by pointing and laughing or other means that you don’t approve of because they will just see that it doesn’t work. This is sort of like the point that weirdness points aren’t quite real, they’re more like an affordance that you can invest in.
Like, yeah, if you’re Mr Smith the bank manager who wears a suit and tie everyday and never makes an off color remark and who always makes sure that his socks match his underwear or whatever, then if you go to the opera wearing assless chaps one day, your friends will make fun of you and possibly even worry about your mental health.
But if you’re Crazy Eye Travis, who rides his unicycle to the taxidermy place everyday and always wears a clown suit and is always shit posting on twitter, then if you go to the opera wearing assless chaps one day, most of your friends won’t even notice. At some point they might even make a point not to notice since they are beginning to suspect that you just like the attention.
You write “it’s not just practice… eventually people will stop trying to control you”. Yes, sometimes certain social scenes change their expectations of you. But the basics of being a human with social psychology do not change. Part of picking who you’re accountable to is part of recognizing this. It seems to me that a big difference between Mr Smith and Crazy Eye Travis is probably who his friends actually are (I am skeptical that they’re the same people).
“Nonconformity-maxing” is not the goal. “Having true beliefs and taking right action” is the goal, and then you have to fight the pressures of conformity. If you try to take a life where it is legible that you were a non-conformist, this does not make you right, and may impair you.
My guess is that sometimes you need to be able to conform, and you still need to be able to think for yourself. I think it’s really hard to do Crazy Eye Travis and actually have rigorous thought and interface with somewhat-corrupt-somewhat-competent hierarchies like academia and industry and so on (‘interface’, a word which here also includes ‘reading all their papers and modeling their incentives and talking to them and figuring out what’s true’, as well as potentially working with them in high-stakes situations).
Do you think the government wants to work with Crazy Eye Travis on something high stakes? I think they’ll ouster him early. You need to be able to think as well as conforming, to not only play non-conformism. It still seems to me like having secret lives and secret thoughts is a fine addition to Crazy Eye Travis and not losing much and potentially gaining a lot.
I’m surprised that the frame around Crazy Eye Travis is framed around whether his friends will pressure him or his own psychology, instead of the environmental consequences. Most opera houses are not going to let you in if your ass is hanging out. Nor will banks or bigtech jobs. Failure to conform with institutions typically results in losing access to those institutions.
I’m down for feedback on whether to do more of this sort of thing (it only takes me ~2 hours), how I could make it better for the reader, whether to make it a top-level post, etc.
I agree with your perspective almost entirely (for reasons basically building on top of what Zvi has written about at length before), so I would be a lot more curious to see what Ronny’s argument was during the debate (if he is okay with sharing it, of course).
I know you have referenced and quoted part of his reasoning, but it’s a bit weird to read a rebuttal to someone’s argument without first reading the argument itself, in their own words.
Thanks for writing this up—at least for myself, I think I agree with the majority of this, and it articulates some important parts of how I live my life in ways that I hadn’t previously made explicit for myself.
Privacy: a tool for thinking for yourself
As part of some recent experiments with debates, today I debated Ronny Fernandez on the topic of whether privacy is good or bad, and I was randomly assigned the “privacy is good” side. I’ve cut a few excerpts together that I think work as a standalone post, and put them below.
At the start I was defending privacy in general, and then we found that our main disagreement was about whether it was helpful for thinking for yourself, so I focus even more on that after the opening statement.
This is an experiment. I’m down for feedback on whether to do more of this sort of thing (it only takes me ~2 hours), how I could make it better for the reader, whether to make it a top-level post, etc.
Epistemic status: soldier mindset. I will here be exaggerating the degree to which I believe my conclusions.
Opening Statement
My core argument is that, in general, the pressures for conformity amongst humans are crazy.
This is true of your immediate circle, your local community, and globally. Each one of these has sufficiently strong pressures that I think it is a good heuristic to actively keep secrets and things you think about and facts about your life separate from each of them. Secret lives and secret thoughts are healthy for a species with such terrible pressures for conformity.
On an individual level, I see the people around me copying word choice, clothing, beliefs, attitudes toward others, based on the slightest of cues. In myself I notice very base emotions guiding the track of my thoughts — who or what am I attracted to, who or what do I fear, etc, changes whose thoughts I consider when making decisions. cf. Duncan Sabien’s shoulder advisors — I have had people sit on my shoulder and tell me what they think simply because the person has power over me in some fashion, in a way that I do not endorse. As such, I think it’s really healthy to have parts of your life cut off from them, that they will never know about. It helps me to have a therapist where what we discuss is private and she will never enter other parts of my life — I can say things to her that would have complicated and likely negative social repercussions for me if I said to anyone else, or that would do so via causing me fear of imagining their repercussions. Separation is healthy.
This is also true on a much larger scale. I think that there’s an equilibrium of being a fully open person, and I think this is anti-correlated with being able to be in positions of great power where you will have a very high attack surface. If you attempt to get a prestigious role in this world, many people may come and attack you with personal information, about your sexuality, about your past bad behavior (even if it’s common and you’re the only one to admit it).
Recall the excellent Tim Ferriss article 11 Reasons Not to Become Famous. Stalkers, death threats, harassment of family members and loved ones, dating woes, extortion attempts, desperation messages and pleas for help, kidnapping, impersonation & identity theft, attack & clickbait media, “friends” with ulterior motives, and invasions of privacy. I’m not arguing that this is the default, I’m arguing that as you move closer to power and prestige, the adversarial forces on you will increase dramatically, and at this point you will probably breakdown if you expose all your private information. I think that there is an equilibrium for perfectly open people who provide value by showing you what people are really like, and I think that sometimes this is itself a form of great power, but I don’t think that this is true for all people close to prestige and power in general, and often it’s reasonable for them to have many parts of their lives not be up for consideration when attacking their power.
If I were Robin Hanson I would be here arguing that the modern world has much heightened pressures to conform due to improved transport and communication channels, where it’s trivial to find people in the world different to you and socially shame / embarrass them, or cause conformity by whatever other crazy mechanisms in our brain cause conformity. The developed world praises multiculturalism in terms of styles of cuisine and fashions and so on, but never has such a high fraction of the world spoken a single language (English), traded in the same financial markets, been part of the same supply chains, had the same famous people, etc. Twitter allows mob justice to roam the entire English-speaking world. To protect yourself from this, it’s good to have parts of your life that are taboo or different not be an open attack surface.
I also think that another good argument here is that rule-breaking behavior is often good and important. Incompetent fools with power can cause a lot of damage and you should ignore some of their especially damaging rules. Zero privacy would mean that you’d never be able to go against those who wield power badly.
Personally I am very sympathetic to “you can have way lower boundaries for privacy than most people are willing to admit to themselves” and “morally you should be way more open than many people think” and would be willing to defend a lot of ways you can do better than 99% of people on these axes, but I am here going to defend that the answer isn’t “literally zero privacy” and that there are some strong reasons to maintain it, including avoiding conformity, reducing attack surface when near power, decreasing cultural conformity, and allowing for rule-breaking behavior.
Brief Aside
My attitude toward conformity is more like “Hit it seventeen different ways” rather than “Solve it with one weird trick”. I think having some parts of your thoughts and life be fully separate from any given person or community is a good trick for separating your thoughts from theirs.
Rebuttal
I am going to focus on what has come up as the core of the disagreement between us.
It seems to me that privacy is a really powerful way of thinking for yourself.
Here are some reasons why it looks like this to me.
I think that one of the big attack vectors in my social community has been totalization, where a single axis of value is all that exists (the end of the world is all that matters). Anything that is not useful for saving the world, or is weakly counterproductive, is considered bad and dismissed. (See the great Jacob Geller video on Art in the Pre-Apocalypse.) It is also the case that I find that simulating very different shoulder advisors with different perspectives, from a different status hierarchy, is very good. But I find that when I try to bring them up in my local status hierarchy, their perspectives are dismissed and they’re denigrated as not having the kinds of attributes that are worth of respect. As such, in order to be successful at this, I have kept my other social hierarchies a secret such that my world-saving one doesn’t start beating down on the other one. I currently think this has been quite useful and suspect that, at the end of my life, I may look back and view this as a superpower.
There are parts of my life that are very difficult and confusing and painful to think about, and also where I have found the local culture’s advice / received wisdom has been negative and painful for me. As such I’ve chosen to think about those things alone and separately and avoid trying to connect them to my local community, which I think would otherwise hurt me. There’s a trust issue here.
Over the years I’ve found that relying on others to treat my private thoughts well has been harmful, and I have nobody to rely on to think my thoughts and respect them other than myself. I do an immense amount of private journaling, in the last 2 years I’ve written an average of 500 words every day. It’s a key aspect of my journaling that this is not shared with anyone else, that I can say thoughts that would have very wild social repercussions — not punishment directly, but just enough social effects that I need to do a bunch of social modeling to manage them. (This is related to how one of the worst parts of my living in a group house was the fact that I had to pass through a common space to go to the bathroom — I had to boot up potential social modeling regularly throughout the day and night.) This has allowed my thoughts to take long-chain thoughts in directions that otherwise would have a lot of friction, and reach conclusions and ideas that I can reach without having to fight a constant uphill battle.
It seems to me that Ronny’s position is that in order to think for yourself and avoid the pressures of conformity, you should also make it a goal to not need privacy. I think this is maybe a useful heuristic (to explore why you are having privacy and whether you can safely drop it) but I don’t think it is at all a requirement. I think the goal should be to think for yourself and figure out what’s true and how to take right action, and if privacy is a useful tool for that, then we should not be prejudiced against it. I think that Ronny has got many good ways of fighting through the frictions people put upon you for thinking openly in public and being open about yourself / your mind / your life, but I think he is missing the value of also simply sidestepping all of those frictions and thinking long-chain thoughts out of sight of the other superintelligent chimps.
Final Counterarguments
Ronny argues that my strategy will make me lonely and isn’t good for avoiding conformity.
I’ll say some things about both.
Loneliness
Here are two quick quotes from the best book on founding a company I’ve read, “The Hard Thing About Hard Things” by Ben Horowitz.
This is the last step of the section on hiring
And here’s a section “The Most Difficult CEO Skill”. He talks about difficult decisions
I recommend the book, I learned a lot from it.
I would also talk about great mathematicians like Grothendieck and Andrew Wiles who did so much great work alone and avoiding people. I think there’s a lot of pointers here to a tactic of “your thinking has to be yours and separate from other people.” If you’ve read HPMOR you know that Godric Gryffindor was lonely and Eliezer is lonely. I am lonely and I know other people I highly respect who are too. Sorry. I don’t see this as something that one can simply overcome.
Conformity
Ronny wrote this toward the end of the debate.
You write “it’s not just practice… eventually people will stop trying to control you”. Yes, sometimes certain social scenes change their expectations of you. But the basics of being a human with social psychology do not change. Part of picking who you’re accountable to is part of recognizing this. It seems to me that a big difference between Mr Smith and Crazy Eye Travis is probably who his friends actually are (I am skeptical that they’re the same people).
“Nonconformity-maxing” is not the goal. “Having true beliefs and taking right action” is the goal, and then you have to fight the pressures of conformity. If you try to take a life where it is legible that you were a non-conformist, this does not make you right, and may impair you.
My guess is that sometimes you need to be able to conform, and you still need to be able to think for yourself. I think it’s really hard to do Crazy Eye Travis and actually have rigorous thought and interface with somewhat-corrupt-somewhat-competent hierarchies like academia and industry and so on (‘interface’, a word which here also includes ‘reading all their papers and modeling their incentives and talking to them and figuring out what’s true’, as well as potentially working with them in high-stakes situations).
Do you think the government wants to work with Crazy Eye Travis on something high stakes? I think they’ll ouster him early. You need to be able to think as well as conforming, to not only play non-conformism. It still seems to me like having secret lives and secret thoughts is a fine addition to Crazy Eye Travis and not losing much and potentially gaining a lot.
I’m surprised that the frame around Crazy Eye Travis is framed around whether his friends will pressure him or his own psychology, instead of the environmental consequences. Most opera houses are not going to let you in if your ass is hanging out. Nor will banks or bigtech jobs. Failure to conform with institutions typically results in losing access to those institutions.
I agree with your perspective almost entirely (for reasons basically building on top of what Zvi has written about at length before), so I would be a lot more curious to see what Ronny’s argument was during the debate (if he is okay with sharing it, of course).
I know you have referenced and quoted part of his reasoning, but it’s a bit weird to read a rebuttal to someone’s argument without first reading the argument itself, in their own words.
Thanks for writing this up—at least for myself, I think I agree with the majority of this, and it articulates some important parts of how I live my life in ways that I hadn’t previously made explicit for myself.