In English
What would happen if a superintelligent AI was aligned with your values?
The details here are a little too much in the “superintelligence is magic that can achieve anything” direction to my taste (I don’t think that anything will just be instantly teleported into safety, superintelligent AI or not), but I don’t doubt that the same results could be achieved via more mundane means. And it’s nice to have some more uplifting visions of the future.
The Choose Your Own Adventure Book or Ghost Ship Model of Will
I first put the core idea into words when someone I met at a workshop said she often had trouble being on time for things. She would notice that it was time to go a meeting soon but that she still had three minutes, so she could, keep reading her novel. And then, ten minutes later she’d actually stop and end up late, which she didn’t like. To this, I said something like “Ah. Apparently, your choice points don’t happen very often when you’re reading a novel. So, if you want to avoid being late, maybe you should seize choice points shortly before you need to leave, because you probably won’t get another one in time.”
The metaphor here is that your agency has a structure somewhat more like a choose your own adventure book than the completely free “I can do whatever I want whenever I want” which we often see it as. Of course, the chose your own adventure book metaphor is too constraining; it offers too few choices compared to one’s experience of the real world. Nonetheless, it captures the sporadicalness of the choice points.
Patri Friedman on political views
In a comment someone implied that one should have “a stable set of political views that are interrelated and coherent to some degree.”
I think I might disagree with this, and thought y’all might find it interesting.
So my claim is that to the degree that political views are describing mechanisms and outcomes in the real world, the real world is so complex that I’m actually not sure that an accurate description would be “interrelated and coherent” to a significant degree.
In fact I’ll hypothesize that most of the time when people choose view B partly based on how related and coherent it is with view A, they are making a worse choice (for building an accurate model of reality) than if they chose view B solely based on how it seems to empirically fit the world.
Coherence is beautiful and appealing, our mind likes simpler models, but except in the few cases where reality has a strong simplicity orientation (laws of physics), generally a move towards simplicity is a move towards a smaller, more impoverished space of models which is thus less likely to be an accurate description of complex reality. You are throwing away degrees of freedom when trying to fit a very irregular curve.
I think the laws of physics & mathematics have spoiled us because they are so universal, present everywhere, extremely important when they apply, and have so much simplicity and elegance. And I feel like I may be becoming (through a combination of reflecting on past idiocy, and getting really into meditation) such a radical empiricist that I view the desire to find simple models for the world as an omnipresent human foolishness.
I will caveat that the legibility & computational tractability of simple models do matter, our brains can only manage a certain size of model, I just think we will generally understand reality better by viewing it with curiosity and openness to it being modeled by incoherent, unrelated sub-models, rather than trying to force it to conform to our current set of (imperfect and incomplete) models.
On Anchor Collapse and Actually Deciding
Say you’re afraid of dogs. You don’t want to be afraid of dogs, of course, because you like dogs and everyone knows that only some dogs are mean. […] and you don’t want to be stupid, so you deny that the other side of the argument even exists. “There’s no reason for it”/”its irrational”/”I have a phobia”. […]
But let’s be real here. Dogs bite. I’ve been bit. If you’re phobic, you’ve probably been bit too. If you give yourself some room to not worry about looking stupid and look at the facts, there’s a reason to be afraid of dogs. You can’t guarantee you won’t get bit again, and getting bit really freaked you out. You really don’t want it to happen again. Once you admit this you can start to frame it as a decision. […]
So you’ve admitted that yes, the dog might bite you, and that would be really bad. But you still want to pet the dog! So you tell me “jimmmy! I want to not be afraid of dogs so I can pet them!”
“So pet the dog”
“But it might bite me!”
“It might”
“But I don’t want it to bite me!
“You don’t. And if it does, it will be real hurty. Have you considered that maybe you shouldn’t pet the dog?”
“But I want to pet the dog!”
“Then pet the dog”
“But it might bite me!”
…And we can go on all day like this. You’re wanting to pet the dog and not be afraid, but you’re also not wanting to get bit. As if there’s anything I can do about it. The risk is part of the territory. […]
And the way people often handle these is to just get sick of the struggle and suppress one side. “Okay, I know its a nice doggy so I’m gonna pretend that I’m okay with risking getting bit when really I’m not and I’ll just suppress that”. Only what they actually say to themselves is more like “I know its safe. I already decided. The fear is irrational and I want it gone.”
But that’s not shitting or getting off the pot. That’s not collapsing the anchors. The two desires are still separate, so that’s not actually deciding. […]
But that’s nonsense. Of course you don’t want to get bit. Who wants to get bit? Getting bit is hurty and bad. And you want to pet the doggy. At the same time. Of course you want to pet the doggy. Doggies are cute and nice. And you haven’t let yourself go there because “I can’t have it so I’m not allowed to think it” but you really wish you could pet the dog with no risk of it biting you. It’s the best of both worlds. It would be really nice to pet the dog with no risk of it biting you. […]
The interesting thing is what happens the moment you stop holding the desires apart and experience them both simultaneously. This is collapsing anchors.
And it goes something like this…
I want to pet the doggie, and if I do, I might get bit.
…
…
…
(Seriously, give it a moment. Shit takes time.)
…
Is it worth it?
Am I willing to stick my hand out and pet that dog knowing that there is some chance that the dog is going to bite it?
And then you sigh a bit. And then you’re silent. And you picture not the separate issues of petting (good!) and being bit (bad!) but the combination package of getting to pet the dog but maaaaaybe getting bit. […]
If your answer is yes, then you can say “yes, I want to pet the dog, even knowing that I might get bit. I still want to pet the dog because it’s worth it. I want that package deal where my hand gets bit sometimes.”
Or if your answer is no, then you say “No, I don’t want to pet the dog. It’s not worth the chance of getting bit”. And that’s the end of it. It’s not “but I wish I could pet it and it wouldn’t bite me!” because you know that comes with the territory – it’s a dog and you can’t predict them perfectly. […]
And either way, there’s no conflict. No two separate desires. Just a congruent choice coming from a decision you had not made before.
See also:
Duncan Sabien’s concept of “Fabricated options“, which is when you don’t collapse the two and insist that of course there has to be a way where you pet the dog and are guaranteed to not get bitten.
Internal Double Crux, which is a technique for integrating both the “I want to pet the dog” and “I might get bitten”.
Adam Davis on a student with an apparent trauma history
This semester’s unusual student experience was an office hour in which I heard “I can’t be told I’m wrong. It upsets me, and I freak. I shut down. You have to say things like, ‘there’s another way of looking at it,’ or ‘have you thought about it this way?’”
I tried “You might not know about this… (?)” Nod.
If you were expecting a rant on the lines of “Ach! These young snowflakes today!” keep scrolling. There’s plenty out there.
There is not the least question that this was a person already fragile, damaged, subjected to sustained abuse, who cultivated withdrawal as a firstline coping mechanism. Also not in doubt: without her courageously frank explanation and clear request, I and my colleagues would surely have done something to drive her away. Years ago, when no such conversation would have been imaginable, she’d simply have quit showing up one day, and we’d maybe have wondered, briefly, why.
Oh stop. There’s no prospect of my building her “resilience,” “grit,” whatever word we use to make it feel all right to be callous, by asserting my right — and I do indeed have the right, and the privilege — to say whatever I want to say, however I want to say it. The world is better, not worse, because she declares a need for accommodation, and gets it. We are not weaker. Our precious bodily fluids are just fine.
She’s finishing the semester. That’s big. That’s a real thing.
And here’s another real thing: it occurs to me that what she was asking wasn’t, actually, the least bit unreasonable. In fact, although I can’t specifically recall telling a student, in so many words, “you’re wrong,” mmm, there are lots of things we quite routinely say that come close enough, and there are many fully functional alternatives that get us through the necessaries just fine. Her request makes me reflect on how I communicate with all kinds of people who maybe don’t have the kind of guts and poise and self-understanding she has.
Oh, she is not weak.
Somebody said, “we’re all just walking each other home.” When kindness does not come to us easily or naturally, as it assuredly does not come easily or naturally to me, noop, it’s all the more important to sink effort into it.
There was a lot of debate of this on my Facebook.
Some people were saying that “we should get this person to work on her problem rather than accommodating her in this way”. But actually accommodating her can be an important first step in helping her fix the problem!
Often people with these kinds of issues experience strong shame about it because others send the message that it’s unreasonable/not okay. That shame then makes it harder to deal with the original issue because it’s painful to think about.
If there are people who communicate with their behavior that the person doesn’t need to feel deep shame about their problem, then that actually makes it easier to work on the problem itself.
There was also a bunch of debate about whether this was reasonable, whether it’s even possible to finish a degree without being told you’re wrong, etc.. I think this was a bit ambiguous from the original post. My interpretation was that the specific phrasing of “you’re wrong” was triggering to the student, but she was open to having the same point communicated with a different phrasing, and that e.g. having assignments marked down for problems wouldn’t be an issue. The fact that her lecturer didn’t consider there to be an issue would be in line with this interpretation.
Some people with experience in education also chimed in, pointing out that they’ve never had a reason to say “you’re wrong” to a student – that there’s always a better way of expressing it, and it just seems like common decency not to embarrass a student.
In any case, even if it was the case that “she can’t realistically expect people to accommodate her this way”… if someone has this issue, it’s likely due to something like cPTSD, which can easily take years to recover from. So it’s simultaneously true that it will be a major problem for her until she gets over it, and that getting over it may take very long and require accommodation and external support to get there. That combination of facts sucks, but just saying “she should get over it” isn’t going to solve anything.
How the incels warped my research
I have generally tried to ignore the manosphere. But as an evolutionary psychologist, I’ve found that hard to do. You can hardly read two paragraphs of incel ideology without coming across references to my field.
Louis Bachaud and Sarah Johns recently published a content analysis of manosphere messaging in the journal Evolutionary Human Sciences, explaining the ways in which our research gets appropriated by manosphere circles.
For example, incels maintain a wiki page of scientific citations they claim support their worldview — an annotated bibliography of misogyny. In one case, in a sort of Russian nesting doll of misrepresentation, the incel wiki quotes a paper citing a study of mine as demonstrating that women prefer dominant men — which they further twist into the incel notion that women actually prefer violent men as romantic partners.
Reading this entry, I thought, “That’s odd, I don’t remember ever publishing on dominance preferences — do the incels know my work better than I do?” No. I double-checked: That study didn’t even mention dominance preferences.
Curiously overlooked in this whole wiki section on women’s preferences is the fact that kindness is repeatedly found to be among the most desired qualities in large-scale, cross-cultural studies of mate preferences. […]
Like any biological approach to behavior, evolutionary psychology has always been controversial. In part, this is owing to some truly bad actors in the field. All it takes is some thoughtless tweets or blog posts for the entire field to earn a reputation as a safe space for provocateurs. […] This allows the manosphere to sell its audience a scientific consensus around its ideology that simply does not exist. Its members appropriate and mischaracterize the literature on evolutionary psychology to lend a scientific patina to their hateful, misogynistic, and dangerous ideas.
For instance, incels are obsessed with the “dual mating strategy” hypothesis, a divisive idea that interprets fluctuations in women’s sexual desire as evidence that women have evolved to seek out men with “good genes” at the most fertile point in their menstrual cycle. Incels use this hypothesis to explain, in their eyes, why relationships are doomed: No matter how good a partner you are, women will always be looking to sleep around with someone better.
Part of the problem is that the dual mating strategy hypothesis was indeed a popular idea among evolutionary psychologists until about 2016. After that, it became one of the more prominent epicenters of psychology’s replication crisis, which revealed that large swaths of psychology research were based on unreliable findings. But even before this major setback, the dual mating strategy hypothesis was critiqued by some evolutionary psychologists like my friend and colleague Jim Roney. Nonetheless, Jim’s work gets hardly any play in manosphere circles, and the hypothesis has since morphed into a version quite unlike the one promoted by incels.
At the end of the day, incels attempt to draw from evolutionary theory a power it does not have. Evolution is not destiny. It is a powerful tool for explaining how we came to be who we are today, but it cannot tell us who we should be today or who we can be tomorrow.
“I lost trust”: Why the OpenAI team in charge of safeguarding humanity imploded
Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike announced their departures from OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, on Tuesday. They were the leaders of the company’s superalignment team — the team tasked with ensuring that AI stays aligned with the goals of its makers, rather than acting unpredictably and harming humanity.
They’re not the only ones who’ve left. Since last November — when OpenAI’s board tried to fire CEO Sam Altman only to see him quickly claw his way back to power — at least five more of the company’s most safety-conscious employees have either quit or been pushed out. […]
… the real answer may have less to do with pessimism about technology and more to do with pessimism about humans — and one human in particular: Altman. According to sources familiar with the company, safety-minded employees have lost faith in him.
“It’s a process of trust collapsing bit by bit, like dominoes falling one by one,” a person with inside knowledge of the company told me, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Compare enough statistics, some of them are going to correlate closely just by random chance. For example, the popularity of the first name “Eleanor” in the US closely correlates with the amount of wind power generated in Poland, r=0.993, p<0.01.
Apparently I organised a student protest against a teacher
This is the best thing I’ve read in a long time. Autistic child who has problems understanding social norms reacts to a mean teacher, without realizing it ends up organizing a student revolt and causing the teacher to get replaced.
First, we need to understand what kind of polity the Old Republic – and thus the Empire – is. And here, the phrasing I go to (somewhat imprecise) is that the Republic was a ‘Republic of Princes’ in the same sense that the Holy Roman Empire was an empire of ‘princes’ or more technically ’imperial states. […]
In short, the Republic was not a democracy of people but a republic of states, the ‘princes’ which in turn governed their own territory internally. These ‘princes’ could be any form of government. And indeed, the imperial states of the Holy Roman Empire could be noble rulers, but also bishops ruling cities (the ‘prince-archbishops’), monks running abbeys (Imperial prelates), grandmasters running holy orders, and even cities governing themselves (free and imperial cities). So too with the Republic, which is why the Trade Federation can sit on the Senate alongside democratic Naboo and monarchic Alderaan. […]
… what I think a historian of this period, looking back would conclude about the Star Wars story would be this: the Clone Wars were essentially a civil war between the princes of the Rim territories against the princes of the core regions (as the later effectively ruled the senate). That civil war produced political momentum among some of the core princes towards centralization, which fuels the career of Palpatine. Palpatine’s reign and the Empire in general is thus understood as a reaction to the Clone Wars primarily aimed at centralizing power at the expense of the princes. […]
[…] now there are simmering tensions which the Imperial Navy is supposed to tamp down. As a result, imperial designers reach for escalation dominance in their designs, aiming to build ships which can, on their own, intimidate the militaries of the princes – because remember, the ‘princes’ (planetary governments of whatever form) all have their own small navies – in order to avoid a conflict. The [Imperial Star Destroyer] is the end result of that design philosophy: a gun-platform powerful enough to be effectively beyond the ability of any planetary princely navy to fight effectively.
Certain days driving home in Hanoi, metis would take me.
The hundreds of bikes and cars moving unpredictably required of me an intense focus in all directions at once, a broad awareness and an intense focus working as one. If I couldn’t track the speed, direction, and distance of every vehicle behind and ahead of me, and stay open to noticing potholes, sudden braking cars, or swerving buses – I might not survive the drive home. I’d seen enough dead bodies and broken bones on the roads to know that traffic was powerful and indifferent to me, the way the ocean is to sailors, the way the jungle is to hunters.
On certain magic days, when the traffic and my focus merged into a liquid exchange, something would happen and I’d be beyond focus and awareness. Beyond my self and my neck-swiveling calculations of swerving trajectories. On those days, I was a fluid entity of sensory intuition – heat on the side of my face and the thick tang of stale diesel exhaust told me without looking that I had a bus to my left. The honks and revs around me, the way each one muffled, or grew shriller, or faded, became an internal picture of the vehicles around me – how they were rushing up on me, turning to a side street, falling behind… The flicker of red reflection off the edge of my glasses told me the car ahead had tapped its brake lights. The sudden drop of the bike’s engine a few feet away told me they were suddenly braking in reaction.
Wordlessly, thoughtlessly, acting simply as an aspect of the situation pouring around and through me, I banked left and revved to get ahead of the bus, before it could block me off from the gap between it and the truck in front of us. I couldn’t see the traffic ahead, but everything I could see, hear, feel, and smell (the exhaust got a touch thicker, didn’t it?) told me there was a blockage in traffic ahead on the right side – and my experience with these roads told me obstacles like that don’t stay on one side of the road for long, they spread quickly until only a trickle of traffic can make it through the gridlock. I could either break ahead of the mess right now, from the left, or I’d be stuck here for 10 minutes waiting. I slipped through the gap just before the bus closed it, and sped out ahead. Me and the 2 or 3 others who had banked left rushed out into open road as the knot behind us tightened. […]
I wish I didn’t have to say that those dangerous, exhaust-fume-reeking days in Hanoi were some of the greatest peak experiences of my life, but here we are. I have journal entries from that year, long winding devotional prose poems to the Goddess of the Gap – an embodiment of that perfect gap in traffic that moves with divine smoothness, if you can just devote yourself to it and prove yourself worthy of staying in it. […]
I came literal inches from death over and over again in pursuit of it. […]
I drove around Hanoi without a helmet for a long time. I didn’t really understand why. It was stupid, I knew it was stupid. I felt really Alive without it though, and I couldn’t figure out how I could be so smart in so many ways, and so deadly stupid about this – and how even while knowing all this and thinking about it, I kept not wearing a helmet, because some blood-deep devotion to the Goddess of the Gap was somehow making me Alive, waking up some latent essence that had been sleeping inside me my whole life.
The arrow doesn’t fly if the bowstring is never pulled taut. Without tension – true, dangerous tension – you never even get the opportunity to hit the target.
A Woman Who Left Society to Live With Bears Weighs in on “Man or Bear”
When I’m alone in the backcountry and come across a man, I feel a very low level of vigilance. Depending on the situation, I might even be happy to see him. He’s a fellow human! Maybe we’ll be friends! I’m likely to smile genuinely and say hello.
I don’t feel afraid, but I am aware. As we chat, my intuition absorbs a thousand things at once. His body language. His tone. How he looks at me and interacts. Most of the time, this produces an increased sense of security. Most men are friendly, respect my boundaries, and don’t want to hurt me. Most of the time, I feel very safe around men.
But not all the time. Sometimes, my intuition absorbs things that increase my level of vigilance. […] It could be something he says. Maybe he makes a comment about my body or my appearance. Or he asks if I’m carrying a weapon and then presses for details about where I’m camping that night. Sometimes, it’s a shift in his tone, a leer, the way he puts his body in my space. But, usually, it’s a combination of things, a totality of behaviors that add up to a singular reality: this man is either not aware that he’s making me uncomfortable, or he doesn’t care. Either way, this is the danger zone. Even if he has no intention of harming me, the outcome of that intention is no longer possible for me to assess or predict.
In this moment, my mind snaps into a single, crystalline point of focus. My intuition rises to the surface of my skin. I become a creature of exquisite perception. The world is a matrix of emotional data: visceral, clear, direct.
I need to get away from the man. But I need to do it in a way that doesn’t anger him. This is the tricky bit. Men who lack social awareness or empathy often also lack other skills in emotional management. And usually, what men in these situations actually want is closeness. They’re trying to get closer to me, physically or emotionally, in the only way they know how. That combination of poor emotional skillsets and a desire to get closer is exactly what puts me in danger.
If I deny his attempts at closeness by leaving or setting a boundary, he could feel frustrated, rejected, or ashamed. If he doesn’t know how to recognize or manage those feelings, he’s likely to experience them as anger. And then I’m a solo woman stuck in a forest with an angry man, which is exactly what women are most afraid of.
There’s no time to think, so I operate on instinct. My task is ridiculously complex. I need to deescalate any signs of aggression, guide the man into a state of emotional balance, and exit the situation safely, all at once. This process requires all of my attention, energy, and intellect. It’s really hard.
I’ve been in this position so many times that it exhausts me just to write about it. Sometimes, it’s not that I’m afraid of men; I’m just really, really tired.
Spencer Greenberg on distributions and personality traits
Important but often overlooked: when groups differ a small amount in their means, they may differ *dramatically* in their tails.
For instance, in a personality study, we found males to have a little bit lower average compassion score than females (1.4 vs. 2) […]
Small differences like this in averages are typically not noticeable or important. Most people are somewhere near the middle.
If you knew only someone’s compassion level and had to guess their sex from it, you’d be wrong more than one-third of the time (predicting optimally)!
However, small differences in means can lead to much bigger differences in the “tails” (i.e., way on the right or way on the left of the chart). In other words, whereas the percentage of people just above the mean (or just below it) may come from the two groups in roughly equal proportions, the percentage of people who have very high levels of the traits (or very low levels of it) may come from just one of the two groups most of the time.
To see this happening for the example of compassion: despite only a small difference in mean compassion levels between males and females, among just the most compassionate people in our study, there were about 2x more females than males […].
Moreover, the least compassionate people […] were almost all males! […]
Similarly, on average, females usually test only a bit higher than males on peacefulness and forgiveness.
But, if we look at the tails of behavior, we see extreme differences. Males accounted for 96% of U.S. mass shootings and 90% of homicide convictions.
I suspect that one reason so many people believe that groups differ much more, on average, than they really do (and engage in dichotomizing and stereotyping) is that tail behavior is sometimes much more visible than typical behavior.
When you meet most people, you don’t really think about whether their compassion level is slightly above average or slightly below average (and then correlate it with sex). You just wouldn’t even notice one way or the other.
But when you see that the vast majority of serial killers are male, that stands out.
Most males are not very low in compassion. But most people who are very low in compassion are males!
For instance, ~4x more males than females have psychopathy/sociopathy.
Suomeksi (In Finnish)
Paljon puhetta tyhjästä – Tekoäly ja tunteet, vieraana Kaj Sotala.
Olin vieraana Paljon puhetta tyhjästä -podcastissa, kolmena isona pääteemana tekoälyn uhkakuvat, tekoälyn mahdollisuudet, sekä mielen rakenne ja toiminta. Ei tullutkaan kuin neljän tunnin keskustelu.
Karkea sisällysluettelo:
0:00:00 – Intro
0:04:14 – Transhumanismi, teknologinen singulariteetti, tekoälyn uhkakuvat
2:06:03 – Tekoälyn myönteiset mahdollisuudet
2:46:40 – Mielen rakenne ja toiminta
(Käytänpä mä paljon “silleen” -sanaa.)
Sosiaaliturvaleikkausten vaikutukset työnteon kannustimiin
Vuonna 2024 voimaan tulevat sosiaaliturva- ja veromuutokset muuttavat melko paljon Kelan työttömyysetuuksia saavien kotitalouksien käytettävissä olevia tuloja ja työnteon rahallisia kannustimia. Esimerkkitalouksia koskevan tarkastelumme perusteella kannustimet työskentelyyn pienillä palkoilla tai osa-aikaisesti heikkenevät. Kun toimeentulotuki huomioidaan, kannustimet voivat heikentyä jopa yllättävän suurilla, yli mediaanitulon palkoilla.
The second article is paywalled; the abstract says: “Men, more than women, prefer attractive, young mates, and women, more than men, prefer older mates with financial prospects. Cross-culturally, both sexes have mates closer to their own ages as gender equality increases. Beyond age of partner, neither pathogen prevalence nor gender equality robustly predicted sex differences or preferences across countries.” No mention of kindness there; but maybe it is in the article.
The first article is freely available. First 13 ½ pages are the article itself, followed by 25 pages of “open peer commentary”, followed by 7 pages of author’s response, and the rest is a list of references.
I have only read carefully the first 13 pages, there was no mention of kindness. Ctrl+F “kindness” finds two occurrences. The first one is in the peer commentary, under “Some psychoanalytic considerations” written by a different author, asking: “Is it implied that similarities between the sexes in mate preference are actually more important than differences? Here the psychoanalyst would observe that the elaborateness of mother-child interaction has greatly increased in the course of hominid evolution, and that adults of both sexes have learned to value kindness and intelligence specifically in the context of early interaction with the mother. Both sexes are looking for signals of future parental investment; what better mechanism for learning these signals than lessons learned from the mother—that is, the parent who invests the most?”
The second occurrence is in the author’s response, in section “Is there a species-typical or sex-typical human
nature?”, where the author specifically considers the overlapping parts of male and female preferences. And within that part, kindness and intelligence are most highly valued by men and women of all cultures.
So… hey, I know that I suck at reading scientific papers, so it is quite possible that I have missed something important here… but it seems to me like it is the complaining guy who misrepresents the conclusions of one of the papers he links. (I just noticed that he is a co-author of the paywalled article, so that one probably supports his conclusions better.)
More precisely, if we know that “both men and women value X highly” and “women value Y more than men”, it is not enough to conclude whether women value X or Y higher. These statements are consistent with the universes where (a) both men and women value X at 10 points, and women value Y at 5 points, and men value Y at 0 points; or (b) both men and women value X at 10 points, and women value Y at 15 points, and men value Y at 0 points. In both situations, X is preferable than the minimum/average value of Y, but in the former women prefer X to Y, and in the latter they prefer Y to X.
*
A different objection could be made against using questionnaires as tools to reveal preferences. First, there will be bias toward socially acceptable answers. Notice that kindness and intelligence also happen to be universally non-controversial good traits (except for intelligence being recently problematic among the woke).
Second… as a thought experiment, imagine that everyone chooses X over Y, and everyone feels bad about their choice afterwards. (It could be because they changed their minds and now think that Y is better than X. But it could also be that they wanted both, and now their need for X is saturated, so they wish they could have Y, too.) The questionnaires will all tell you about the importance of Y. But the revealed preferences tell a different story.
Thanks for checking the sources in that article! I hadn’t done that.
I now took a quick look at the first paper as well. While “kindness” did only have two hits, searching for “kind” also brought up this bit from the article itself:
EDIT: Looks like the second paper was accessible via sci-hub; it has this:
Great, thanks! I missed that. Especially this part is interesting:
Now that I think about it, there is also a problem with using general information to solve one’s personal problems.
As an example, suppose that women want traits A, B, C, where A is more important than B, and B is more important than C. You happen to have traits A, C, D. Obviously, the part you should worry about is B, even if the research says “A is more important than B”. The relation is not linear; you can’t compensate for lack of B by having even more A. (Also, there are probably diminishing returns at trying to be even more A.)
So, to use a specific example, if you are kind and smart, but have no money, you should get a job. This advice is useful in both universes where kindness is more important than money, or where money is more important than kindness. You already have the kindness, but you don’t have the money.
*
Eh, I guess this may seem like “Viliam was wrong, but he still insists that he was right in some sense”. Well, I am out of the dating game, already 15 years in a monogamous relationship, so this is not a sensitive topic for me now. But I remember the moment in the past when my dating success dramatically increased practically overnight, and it definitely wasn’t caused by a sudden increase in IQ, or by me becoming more kind. It felt more like a move in the direction opposite to kindness, a kind of “fuck trying to be nice and do the right thing, let’s just do the things the dark parts of internet recommend in order to get laid”, and yes it worked. (On the other hand, things like kindness seem to be valued more in hindsight, in the sense that a girl who breaks up with me later says to her friends that she sometimes misses my kindness.) So whenever I am reading about how all the cynics on the internet are wrong, I feel some cognitive dissonance that I am trying to solve.
At this moment my best guess is that kindness is generally nice, but there is also such thing as too much kindness. I want my friends to be nice to me, but I also want them to be able to defend me and themselves from our potential enemies; and I need some credible signal that they could do that if necessary. (Or, as Jordan Peterson would say, “good” is not the same as “harmless”. A good person is one who could hurt you, but chooses not to.) There is “kindness” that is a choice, and “kindness” that is a strategy to survive by avoiding conflict. I suppose the former is attractive, and the latter is not. But to make it clear that your kindness is a choice, you must sometimes be visibly not-kind.
Yeah this sounds right to me.
On the “student with a trauma history” thing:
The commentary (both the quote of the original, and your own) seems to entirely dismiss the possibility of selective ways of looking at the issue, opting to only consider corrective approaches (which indeed are unlikely to work) and (in a rather one-sided way) structural approaches. This seems to me to be a huge blind spot.
My own view is that the analysis given in the original source is extremely bad, and the approach described therein creates horrible incentives, in ways well understood. The world absolutely is worse because the student in question declares a need for accommodation, and gets it.
Ignoring selective dynamics prevents you from seeing how these negative consequences could be possible even in principle (never mind whether they occur true in practice). Seems bad.
Would the selective approach in this case be something like “ignore the request and let them drop out if they can’t handle that”, or something else?
I agree that there are definite incentive problems to take into account. However in this specific case, where the cost of accommodation is basically zero (just using slightly different language), I don’t think they’re an issue.
Yep. (Of course “ignore” can be finessed, but you’ve certainly got the gist of it.)
(I will also note that the strategy is “ignore the request”; “let them drop out if they can’t handle that” sneaks in a model of the consequences. It is not an entirely unreasonable model, but it’s certainly not the only plausible one. We should be very wary of privileging one possibility in such cases.)
I strongly disagree with your evaluation of the cost, and am surprised to see you make such a claim. Surely you must know that “just” using (“slightly”) different language is far from costless?
As for incentives, you pay lip service to them, but I don’t think you are taking them at all seriously. Assume the cost of one accommodation to be “basically zero”. It does not follow from this that the expected total cost of all requested accommodations, conditional on the policy of “grant requested accommodations” being instituted, will be “basically zero”, or even “less than astronomical”. (Indeed, we can observe that such an optimistic prediction turns out to be manifestly false.)
(Quite often, the second-order consequences, the effects of incentive gradients, etc., are the downsides of some proposed policy. Saying “but incentives aside…” is the equivalent of the proverbial “other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?”.)
Okay. In that case I’m not sure why you say that my commentary is dismissing the selective ways of looking at the issue. When I wrote it, the two options I had in mind were “agree to the request” or “deny/ignore the request”. (I mean, I did “dismiss” the selective ways in the sense that I thought they’d be a bad way of dealing with the issue, but I interpret you to have meant “dismiss” in the sense of “not consider at all”.)
In the general case it’s not necessarily costless. But in this particular case, at least her teacher seemed to think that it was, if not literally costless, then a very small cost. And if I was in his position, I think it would be a very negligible cost for me to implement. Remembering to use different language would take a little bit of effort at first, but then become automatic very quickly.
(I’m again assuming that the request can be incorporated while still delivering all of the teaching and grading etc. essentially unchanged. If it was the case that she couldn’t easily be corrected on mistakes in assignments or something similar, that would substantially change my position.)
I agree. I did not mean to argue for a blanket policy of granting all requested accommodations, nor did I interpret the original poster to be arguing for that.
Because you talk quite a bit about what will or will not fix this student’s problem, whether it is easy or hard for this student to “get over it”, how long it would take for this student to fix the problem, what this student’s experience is like, etc., etc. (Likewise the author of the quoted original post.)
These concerns all belong to a corrective view. From a selective view, all of them are irrelevant. What is relevant instead is questions like: supposing that we adopt a policy of granting such requests, what will the student body (likewise: the class, the results of the course, etc.) be like? If we adopt a policy of not granting such requests, what will said things be like? And so on.
So, you say that you thought that selective ways would be a bad way of dealing with the issue. Well, that’s a perfectly coherent view. But it needs to be argued for, not just left as a totally unstated background assumption.
I would not conclude this from the quoted post. I would conclude only that this person found it prudent or desirable to make a Facebook post that claimed such things. While there is surely a correlation between these two things, it is not nearly strong enough to allow us to treat them as identical.
(And, in this particular case, the post is strongly performative in tone, further weakening said correlation.)
For one thing, cognitive costs of alterations like this vary across individuals. Some may find such adjustments as easy as you describe them being for you; others will not. Instituting a policy of making, and requiring, such adjustments, selects against the latter sort of individual. (There’s that selective view again!)
Some of my best teachers, instructors, professors, etc. have seemed very much like the latter sort. I find this unlikely to be coincidence.
For another thing, some obvious questions we could ask would be: ok, so you’re going to not ever tell this student that she’s wrong. Are you also not going to tell the other students that they’re wrong? What if they ask you “so, am I wrong about this?”, or “so, is this wrong?”? What if they ask you “so, what so-and-so just said—that’s wrong, isn’t it?” You might be tempted to describe various evasions which you could use, but now suppose that another student is (again, to take just one possible example) on the autism spectrum, and has a difficult time understanding euphemisms, indirection, etc.? Suppose that they’re not a native speaker? Suppose that they’re on the spectrum and they’re not a native speaker?
(It took me barely a minute to come up with this example. And it’s far from being unrealistic—I can tell you that from personal experience! How many other such “competing access needs” scenarios are induced by granting this one “almost costless” accommodation?)
What if one of the other students tells this student that she’s wrong? Must you now police the speech of your students for this particular linguistic landmine, in addition to your own speech?
What if someone of your students are (like the professors described earlier) the sorts of people who find it difficult to “adjust” their language in this manner?
In short, it is very easy to say that making some adjustment would be nearly costless. It is quite another thing to actually consider all the costs. This is doubly so because there are considerable incentives (!) to make such claims.
And I haven’t even gotten to the distortionary effect on your own cognition, from not just avoiding such straightforward constructions as “you’re wrong” (and similar), but automatically avoiding them! Perhaps one could make an argument that having your brain automatically flinch away from responding to a clearly wrong statement with “that’s wrong” is not as bad as it sounds… but that certainly wouldn’t be the way I’d bet.
Well, that’s certainly an assumption, yes…
I believe that you did not mean to argue for such a blanket policy, but I do not believe for a moment that the original poster wasn’t.
Fair enough, I’ll elaborate then.
You’re thinking about the selective view in a way that focuses on people who have the incentive to make these kinds of requests. Meanwhile I’m more focused on the people who wouldn’t have an incentive to make these kinds of requests, if not for the fact that their trauma makes it excessively costly for them to not have their requests accommodated. It’s not even the case that, as your link to the Vladimir_M comment implies, that they have developed this as an unconscious strategy for getting something that makes them better off. Having this problem just makes them worse off.
If such people make requests that are low-cost for us to grant, while very costly for them if we do not grant them, that has the consequence of making it significantly costlier and harder for them to graduate. And even if they do manage to graduate, it may make it significantly harder for them to overcome their problems later in life. So then one selective effect is that the school as a whole loses people who would otherwise have been good students. But also on a broader level, society as a whole suffers as these people become increasingly worse off and less capable of contributing, when a more accommodating policy could have allowed them to thrive.
(This is a somewhat personal topic for me, as I have a close relative who had to drop out of university due to mental health problems and ultimately ended up on an early disability pension when they would have preferred to be working. And things wouldn’t have needed to go very differently for something similar to happen to me.)
So my view is that it’s bad to take an “ignore/deny” type approach because the selective effects have an overall negative composition on both the student body of that particular school, as well as on the composition of society in general.
That’s true. Though if these people have difficulty making accommodations that would make some of their students significantly better off, then that seems to me like evidence that they’re not among the best teachers, and that it might be good to select against them.
Also this bit sounds like we are now talking about something like… what university-level policies should be like, and while that’s not an unreasonable direction to be going in, I was originally thinking of this just as a discussion of the choices of this particular teacher. It seems to me like one should first get on the same page about whether his specific decision was good or bad, before trying to consider possible policy implications. (Since it can be that a particular choice made individually is good or bad, but trying to create an institution-wide policy that everyone/no-one should make the same choice has unintended effects; but one can’t talk about the policy-level tradeoffs before first knowing what the effects on the individual level are.)
It’s easy to generate lots of “what ifs”, but a long list of them doesn’t mean they’d be hard to answer in practice. Your first two questions in particular seem to me to have obvious answers—automatically extending the policy to all students only makes sense, but if someone explicitly wants to know if they are wrong or not, then they presumably won’t mind being told if they are.
On my Facebook wall where I originally shared this post, various people chimed in with their experiences from either teaching or work, and several mentioned that this wouldn’t really come up for them because they had never had a reason to tell anyone “you’re wrong” anyway. E.g. one person said:
And another said:
While not everyone agreed, many people seemed to have the position that avoiding “you’re wrong”-type language is just a net improvement and that they’ve never ran into a situation where one would need to use it (and I think at least some of those people do also work in fields with people on the spectrum). This also matches my own experience, and makes me skeptical of how likely it is for any of your scenarios to turn out to be a problem in practice.
If anything, the systematic effects seem positive, in that applying the same policy to all students would likely also make several others feel more comfortable.
Of course, it would be silly to argue that there could never be any costs associated with this. It’s certainly likely that trying to accommodate, if not this particular request, then some other request of vaguely the same type would eventually get us into a challenging scenario. But if that happens, one can figure out the best course of action when it happens, and then possibly re-evaluate the overall approach if it does turn out to be more costly.
In any case, it would seem bad to me if this teacher, in considering whether to grant the request, would conclude that he has to deny it because of some complicated hypothetical scenario that assumed other students reacted in very specific ways. Given that it’s also very plausible that none of that happens and everything goes just fine.
Fair enough, so I’ll rephrase: there seem to be very small immediate costs for this particular teacher to accommodate the request. It is of course possible that some major unexpected cost comes up, but if that happens, he can consider them and then shift his approach accordingly.
I have a hard time seeing this as particularly problematic, given the previously mentioned view that saying “you’re wrong” just doesn’t seem to be necessary in general. “Having your brain automatically flinch away from” something sounds bad if you phrase it like that, but part of the process of acquiring any skill is to learn to automatically flinch away from performing the skill in a bad way. Similarly, if there’s little reason to ever say “you’re wrong” while there are good reasons to avoid it, then I see this less as distorting cognition and more as optimizing it (or more specifically optimizing the skill of good communication).
That’s unfortunate for your relative, of course, and they have my sympathies. But I don’t think anyone would call it implausible that this person would’ve benefited from being granted accommodations for their difficulties. The question is what this would cost their professors, the other students, society in general, etc.
You could in theory make several arguments here, and you seem to be making some of them—but it’s not clear which and when. You could say:
(a) It would cost the professors / other students / society so little to accommodate your relative that, on altruistic grounds, we should do this, because the benefit to the accommodated person is so great and the total cost is so low.
(b) The professors / other students may pay a non-trivial cost to accommodate your relative, but this is outweighed by the benefit to society from having this person be accommodated, so we should do it (which is to say, we should force any unwilling cost-bearers to bear the cost against their wishes, as a form of redistribution of resources).
(c) The professors, the other students, and society would all benefit from accommodating your relative, so we should obviously do it because it’s good for everyone.
(d) The professors / other students / society may pay a non-trivial cost to accommodate your relative, but we should do it anyway, because… something. (Social justice?)
Argument (d) seems hard to justify morally. Argument (c) is very implausible empirically. Argument (b) also seems hard to justify morally, but perhaps marginally less so than (d). Argument (a) also seems implausible empirically, as I’ve already discussed.
How can this be true? Why is it better to have the student body contain students who have this sort of mental disability, than to not have the student body contain such students?
I have described some of the costs and negative effects of such a thing. But here you seem to be saying not merely that the costs and negative effects are very low, but that actually there are benefits? What could they be…?
I am not sure why you say this. Why do you say that such people can’t be getting something that makes them better off? If they successfully get their preferences (a.k.a. “needs”, etc.) acknowledged and accommodated, that is a distinct advantage relative to the base case where they are just a regular person with no special needs! This seems very obvious!
This seems to be making the assumption that such people (on average) “would otherwise have been good students”. I do not think that this is the least bit warranted.
Additionally, this perspective suffers from the problem of “the seen vs. the unseen”. The student who needs such an accommodation is taking the place of the student who doesn’t. Which of them is more likely to be a good student generally, and to contribute to society later? I think it’s clear that it’s the latter.
Casting such accommodations as improvements in the expected social benefit provided by the university is just not remotely plausible.
I mean, yes, but having that preference gives them no special advantage relative to not having it.
Suppose that I have a gluten intolerance and need to have gluten-free food available. It’s of course true that getting to have gluten-free food is now a distinct advantage to me, compared to a scenario where I couldn’t get gluten-free food. But the fact that I have a gluten intolerance doesn’t make me better off overall. If I get accommodated, then at best I get to the same neutral level of “can eat food without getting terrible symptoms” that everyone else is at. And more realistically, I won’t even get to that zero level but rather will sometimes accidentally eat food with gluten, will miss out on tasty foods I’d enjoy, etc., so it’d be better for me to not have the intolerance.
Likewise, if someone gets terribly upset about being told “you’re wrong”, then if that’s accommodated, at best they get to the same zero level as everyone who doesn’t get terribly upset about it. And it’s more likely that they won’t get perfectly accommodated, so not only will they gain nothing, but will also need to endure discomfort they wouldn’t need to endure if they didn’t have that sensitivity. So if they don’t already have that pre-existing sensitivity, there’s no incentive for them to develop it.
Why not? I know plenty of otherwise intelligent, creative etc. people who also have serious mental health problems.
But of course it does! It grants them a reason to seek to have the preference satisfied, which is an advantage if (a) having the preference satisfied is a sufficiently superior state to not having the preference at all, and (b) conditional on having the preference, satisfaction is sufficiently likely.
(Basically all of this is explained in the previously-linked Vladimir_M comments, so I do encourage you to reread them if you haven’t done so.)
On the contrary, it is not only plausible but very easy to end up in a superior end state in this scenario. Suppose that having gluten-free food provided for you is costly and difficult, and that you can convince or otherwise cause others to expend their resources on providing you with gluten-free food. This is a signal of your social status, clearly visible to anyone who observes such behavioral interactions. And, in turn, there are many, many situations when an even relatively small advantage in social status is more important (by any relevant measure) than an even quite substantial loss in sensory pleasure from food. (I trust that no examples are needed to illustrate this general point.)
In such a case, it would indeed be better for you to have the gluten intolerance than not to have it.
Note that this logic predicts that we should see people who don’t actually have gluten intolerance, to pretend to do so (as any status signal will attract imitators/fakers). And indeed this is precisely what we do see.
The above logic applies here too. (And this is definitely, and very comprehensively, treated in the linked discussion thread…)
That is not the correct question. The correct question is whether, on average, such people are equally good students to people without such serious mental problems (“such”, note; mental health problems, serious or no, are not monolithic, nor uniform in their effects on academic performance), or better, or worse. (And remember that we are not comparing to general population averages here, but to the population subsets selected for going to college!)
For your assumption to be warranted, it would have to be the case that someone who has a mental breakdown when told that they’re wrong would, if accommodated for that particular disability, be about as good a student on average as… well, the average student. This is highly implausible. (For one thing, remember that mental disorders are highly correlated with one another!)
Sorry, but I think you’re somewhat misunderstanding me. The incentive to make such requests is one part of the selective view. But it’s not the only part. “What will the student body be like if we [ do / don’t ] adopt a policy of granting such accommodations” is a question that can coherently be asked (and which has a non-trivial answer) even if we totally set aside questions of incentives!
On the contrary, it is nothing of the sort. The best teachers are those who are best at teaching, period. Making accommodations for mental illness is, at best, orthogonal to this. If one teacher is better at teaching than another, that’s that.
Sorry, but I do not find this plausible. The quoted original post is very clearly advocating for people to do as he describes himself doing.
What’s more, in such a case, the choices of any particular teacher are, in fact, effectively part of the university’s policies, if they affect other students. We do not know for a fact whether that’s so, but my examples show, I think, that it’s hard for them to avoid doing so.
Ah, and so you demonstrate the point I just made. Now we’ve got a situation where the accommodations granted to one student immediately and substantially degrade the clarity of communication to all the other students. Having made what is allegedly just a personal choice on one teacher’s part, we’ve barely started exploring the consequences and we’re already into “making the learning environment worse for everyone” territory!
I’m not surprised that it’s easy to find any number of anecdotes like this. (Although I was particularly amused by “My academic field is history, if that matters”—oh, I’d say it matters quite a bit!) But what is the use of such things? I can recall plenty of times where my teachers have said “that’s wrong” or “you’re wrong”, where my college professors have said such things, my coworkers to me or to each other, my bosses to me or to my coworkers, and of course I to various people… but what does any of this prove? Only that people’s experience is different…
I find this position to be wildly implausible. A net improvement, really? I’m sorry, but this does not pass the smell test… and as I said, I have encountered scenarios similar to those which I have described, many times.
This is possible. Does it outweigh the downsides? It seems to me that it can’t even plausibly begin to do so.
Indeed, the teacher should not deny the request for such a reason. He should deny the request on far more general principles than that, namely that (a) that there are many possible ways for other students to react that would impose serious costs and cause detrimental effects, (b) the very predictable (and not at all hypothetical) effects of granting the request would be bad even aside from any specific reactions on the part of any specific students, and (c) the incentives created by granting the request would be far-reaching and almost universally bad.
(There is also an even more general principle, which is that the default response to any requests that one change one’s behavior in order to mitigate some supposed problem that someone else is having, should be “no”. Of course, in this particular case we have many more specific reasons to respond in the negative, but still this is a solid default, and well worth keeping in mind, because the aforementioned specific reasons exhibit patterns which recur in many other circumstances.)
Can he? One of the effects of having such requests granted is the creation of precedent, and the shifting of the Overton window. In other words, decisions like this exhibit hysteresis. This is yet another of the many dangers and downsides of granting requests like this: you limit your ability to say “no” in the future, and restrict not only your own future choices, but those of your colleagues, etc.
Grant such a request once, and you will find very quickly that you have incurred an obligation.
(Of course, I am quite sure that the author of the quoted original post is well aware of this, and indeed that this is his explicit goal. But that just gives us another reason to resist such advocacy!)
I’m sorry, but this reads to me like naked Dark Arts. Having your brain flinch away from thinking “that’s wrong” when you hear something that is wrong is disastrous—the worst kind of cognitive distortion. We should be doing everything in our power to identify and root out such flinches, not encouraging them!