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.
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.
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’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.
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).
I disagree with Ben. I think the usage that Mark is referring to is a reference to Death with Dignity. A central example of my usage is
it would be undignified if AI takes over because we didn’t really try off-policy probes; maybe they just work; 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.”
“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.
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.
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’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.)
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).
I disagree with Ben. I think the usage that Mark is referring to is a reference to Death with Dignity. A central example of my usage 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.