I sometimes see/hear people say that “X would be a really undignified”. I mostly don’t really know what this means? I think it means “if I told someone that I did X, I would feel a bit embarassed.” It’s not really an argument against X. It’s not dissimilar to saying “vibes are off with X”.
Not saying you should never say it, but basically every use I see could/should be replaced with something more specific.
I disagree with Ben. I think the usage that Mark is talking about is a reference to Death with Dignity. A central example (written by me) is
it would be undignified if AI takes over because we didn’t really try off-policy probes; maybe they just work really well; someone should figure that out
It’s playful and unserious but “X would be undignified” roughly means “it would be an unfortunate error if we did X or let X happen” and is used in the context of AI doom and our ability to affect P(doom).
Death with Dignity is straightforwardly using the word dignity in line with its definition (and thus in line with the explanation I gave), so if you think that’s the usage Mark is referring to then you should agree with the position that dignity is a word that is being consistently used to mean “the state or quality of being worthy of honor or respect”.
The following quote from Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince often runs through my mind, and matches up with what Eliezer is advising us to collectively do in that essay.
“It was, he thought, the difference between being dragged into the arena to face a battle to the death and walking into the arena with your head held high. Some people, perhaps, would say that there was little to choose between the two ways, but Dumbledore knew—and so do I, thought Harry, with a rush of fierce pride, and so did my parents—that there was all the difference in the world.”
That essay is advising optimizing the log odds of survival when the odds of survival are 0%.
People at the end of their lives may have a do-not-resuscitate policy because they want the dignity of dying on their own terms and not leaving behind a mangled corpse and medical debt. But a DNR policy doesn’t maximize log odds of survival.
Other people may choose to be cryogenically frozen in a country with legal euthanasia, which maximizes log odds of survival. For them, that is a dignified choice. But it’s an unusual set of values and actions.
On LW I see people using the term in both the general way and the specific way. So I think you are both right.
These are fine points about differing values and actions, but I do want to defend that Eliezer is explicitly using the concept of dignity in the standard way (i.e. acting in a way worthy of respect). There is a kind of dignity in choosing to end your life when you are well and happy rather than when you are broken and in pain, which is not the same as maximizing log odds of survival, but nonetheless Eliezer’s essay is explicitly claiming that the latter is what it means for a civilization to act with dignity.
“Wait, dignity points?” you ask. “What are those? In what units are they measured, exactly?”
And to this I reply: Obviously, the measuring units of dignity are over humanity’s log odds of survival—the graph on which the logistic success curve is a straight line. A project that doubles humanity’s chance of survival from 0% to 0% is helping humanity die with one additional information-theoretic bit of dignity.
But it’s a very important concept! It means doing something that breaks your ability to respect yourself. For instance, you might want to win a political election, and you think you can win on policies and because people trust you, but you’re losing, and so you consider using attack-ads or telling lies or selling out to rich people who you believe are corrupt. You can actually do these and get away with it, and they’re bad in different ways, but one of the ways it’s bad is you no longer are acting in a way where you relate to yourself as someone deserving of respect. Which is bad for the rest of your life, where you’ll probably treat yourself poorly and implicitly encourage others to treat you poorly as well. Who wants to work with someone or be married to someone or be friends with someone that they do not respect? I care about people’s preferences and thoughts less when I do not respect them, and I will probably care about my own less if I do not respect myself, and implicitly encourage others to not treat me as worthy of respect as well (e.g. “I get why you don’t want to be in a relationship for me; I wouldn’t want to be in a relationship with me.”)
To live well and trade with others it is important to be a person worthy of basic respect, and not doing undignified things (“this is beneath me”) is how you maintain this.
I’ve sometimes said that dignity in the first skill I learned (often to the surprise of others, since I am so willing to look silly or dumb or socially undignified). Part of my original motivation for bothering to intervene on x-risk, is that it would be beneath my dignity to live on a planet with an impending intelligence explosion on track to wipe out the future, and not do anything about it.
I think Ben’s is a pretty good description of what it means for me, modulo that the “respect” in question is not at all social. It’s entirely about my relationship with myself. My dignity or not is often not visible to others at all.
It seems to me that you have a concept-shaped hole, where people are constantly talking about an idea you don’t get, and you have made a map-territory error in believing that they also do not have a referent here for the word. In general if a word has been in use for 100s of years, I think your prior should be that there is a referent there — I actually just googled it and the dictionary definition of dignity is the same as I gave (“the state or quality of being worthy of honor or respect”), so I think this one is straightforward to figure out.
It is certainly possible that the other people around you also don’t have a referent and are just using words the way children play with lego, but I’d argue that still is insufficient reason to attempt to prevent people who do know what the word is intended to mean from using the word. It’s a larger discussion than this margin can contain, but my common attitude toward words losing their meaning in many people’s minds is that we ought to rescue the meaning rather than lose it.
I know what the word means, I just think in typical cases people should be saying a lot more about why something is undignified, because I don’t think people’s senses of dignity typically overlap that much, especially if the reader doesn’t typically read LW. In these cases I think permitting the use of the word “undignified” prevents specificity.
Gotcha. I think this text that you wrote is really ambiguous:
I mostly don’t really know what this means? I think it means “if I told someone that I did X, I would feel a bit embarassed.”
It’s ambiguous between you not having an explicit understanding of what the meaning of the words are, versus you not understanding what the person you’re speaking with is intending to convey (and the first meaning is IMO the more natural one).
I think having good norms around tabooing words is tricky. In this case, my sense is that some people are using the word in a relatively meaningless way that is actively unhelpful, but also that some people are using the word to mean something quite important, and it’s not great to remove the word for the second group. I think if you want to move toward people not using the word, you will get more buy-in if you include a proposed alternative for the second group, and in the absence there should mostly be a move toward “regularly ask someone to taboo the word” so that you can distinguish between the two kinds of uses.
Should explicitly depend on values instead of gesturing at conflationary social approval. It could be undignified for a credentialist student to pass on an opportunity to safely cheat. It’s undignified to knowingly do the clearly wrong thing, for some notion of “wrong” you endorse (or would endorse on reflection, if it was working properly).
“Undignified” is really vague
I sometimes see/hear people say that “X would be a really undignified”. I mostly don’t really know what this means? I think it means “if I told someone that I did X, I would feel a bit embarassed.” It’s not really an argument against X. It’s not dissimilar to saying “vibes are off with X”.
Not saying you should never say it, but basically every use I see could/should be replaced with something more specific.
I disagree with Ben. I think the usage that Mark is talking about is a reference to Death with Dignity. A central example (written by me) is
It’s playful and unserious but “X would be undignified” roughly means “it would be an unfortunate error if we did X or let X happen” and is used in the context of AI doom and our ability to affect P(doom).
...?
Death with Dignity is straightforwardly using the word dignity in line with its definition (and thus in line with the explanation I gave), so if you think that’s the usage Mark is referring to then you should agree with the position that dignity is a word that is being consistently used to mean “the state or quality of being worthy of honor or respect”.
The following quote from Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince often runs through my mind, and matches up with what Eliezer is advising us to collectively do in that essay.
That essay is advising optimizing the log odds of survival when the odds of survival are 0%.
People at the end of their lives may have a do-not-resuscitate policy because they want the dignity of dying on their own terms and not leaving behind a mangled corpse and medical debt. But a DNR policy doesn’t maximize log odds of survival.
Other people may choose to be cryogenically frozen in a country with legal euthanasia, which maximizes log odds of survival. For them, that is a dignified choice. But it’s an unusual set of values and actions.
On LW I see people using the term in both the general way and the specific way. So I think you are both right.
These are fine points about differing values and actions, but I do want to defend that Eliezer is explicitly using the concept of dignity in the standard way (i.e. acting in a way worthy of respect). There is a kind of dignity in choosing to end your life when you are well and happy rather than when you are broken and in pain, which is not the same as maximizing log odds of survival, but nonetheless Eliezer’s essay is explicitly claiming that the latter is what it means for a civilization to act with dignity.
But it’s a very important concept! It means doing something that breaks your ability to respect yourself. For instance, you might want to win a political election, and you think you can win on policies and because people trust you, but you’re losing, and so you consider using attack-ads or telling lies or selling out to rich people who you believe are corrupt. You can actually do these and get away with it, and they’re bad in different ways, but one of the ways it’s bad is you no longer are acting in a way where you relate to yourself as someone deserving of respect. Which is bad for the rest of your life, where you’ll probably treat yourself poorly and implicitly encourage others to treat you poorly as well. Who wants to work with someone or be married to someone or be friends with someone that they do not respect? I care about people’s preferences and thoughts less when I do not respect them, and I will probably care about my own less if I do not respect myself, and implicitly encourage others to not treat me as worthy of respect as well (e.g. “I get why you don’t want to be in a relationship for me; I wouldn’t want to be in a relationship with me.”)
To live well and trade with others it is important to be a person worthy of basic respect, and not doing undignified things (“this is beneath me”) is how you maintain this.
I’ve sometimes said that dignity in the first skill I learned (often to the surprise of others, since I am so willing to look silly or dumb or socially undignified). Part of my original motivation for bothering to intervene on x-risk, is that it would be beneath my dignity to live on a planet with an impending intelligence explosion on track to wipe out the future, and not do anything about it.
I think Ben’s is a pretty good description of what it means for me, modulo that the “respect” in question is not at all social. It’s entirely about my relationship with myself. My dignity or not is often not visible to others at all.
When/how did you learn it? (Inasmuch as your phrasing is not entirely metaphorical.)
It seems to me that you have a concept-shaped hole, where people are constantly talking about an idea you don’t get, and you have made a map-territory error in believing that they also do not have a referent here for the word. In general if a word has been in use for 100s of years, I think your prior should be that there is a referent there — I actually just googled it and the dictionary definition of dignity is the same as I gave (“the state or quality of being worthy of honor or respect”), so I think this one is straightforward to figure out.
It is certainly possible that the other people around you also don’t have a referent and are just using words the way children play with lego, but I’d argue that still is insufficient reason to attempt to prevent people who do know what the word is intended to mean from using the word. It’s a larger discussion than this margin can contain, but my common attitude toward words losing their meaning in many people’s minds is that we ought to rescue the meaning rather than lose it.
I know what the word means, I just think in typical cases people should be saying a lot more about why something is undignified, because I don’t think people’s senses of dignity typically overlap that much, especially if the reader doesn’t typically read LW. In these cases I think permitting the use of the word “undignified” prevents specificity.
Gotcha. I think this text that you wrote is really ambiguous:
It’s ambiguous between you not having an explicit understanding of what the meaning of the words are, versus you not understanding what the person you’re speaking with is intending to convey (and the first meaning is IMO the more natural one).
I think having good norms around tabooing words is tricky. In this case, my sense is that some people are using the word in a relatively meaningless way that is actively unhelpful, but also that some people are using the word to mean something quite important, and it’s not great to remove the word for the second group. I think if you want to move toward people not using the word, you will get more buy-in if you include a proposed alternative for the second group, and in the absence there should mostly be a move toward “regularly ask someone to taboo the word” so that you can distinguish between the two kinds of uses.
Should explicitly depend on values instead of gesturing at conflationary social approval. It could be undignified for a credentialist student to pass on an opportunity to safely cheat. It’s undignified to knowingly do the clearly wrong thing, for some notion of “wrong” you endorse (or would endorse on reflection, if it was working properly).