Strong upvote. As another female ai researcher: yeah, it’s bad here, as it is everywhere to some degree.
To other commenters, especially ones hesitant to agree that there have been problems due to structural issues, claiming otherwise doesn’t make this situation look better—the local network of human connections can only look good to the outer world of humans by being precise about what problems have occurred and what actual knowledge and mechanisms can prevent them. you’re not gonna retain your looking good points to the public by groveling about it, nor by claiming there’s no issue; you’ll retain looking good points by actually considering the problem each time it comes up, discussing the previous discussions, etc. (though, of course, like, efficiently, according to taste. Not everyone has to write huge braindumps like I find myself often wanting to.) nobody can tell you how to be a good person; just be one. put your zines in the slot in the door and we’ll copy em and print em out. but dont worry about making a fuss apologizing; make a fuss explaining a verifiable understanding.
Some local fragments of social network are somewhat well protected by local emotional habits; but many subgroups have unhealthy patterns even now, years and years after the event in the article.
So, to minimizing commenters, don’t dismiss the messenger; people being upset are not a reason for you to be upset too, it’s a reason for you to have sympathy and take time to think. You’re safe from this criticism with me, and I will argue for you to be safe from it for the most part even if you’ve caused harm, because I believe in reparative and restorative justice; victims aren’t safe until there’s a network of solidarity that prevents the harm in the first place and the process of getting there can be accelerated by frequent sources of harm getting to [pretend to not be causing harm]{comment 7mo later: ehh, I mean more like, others won’t apply current typical retribution; not hiding of the harm} if they’ll help as hard as they can with preventing anyone from ever harming another again—starting with themselves.
(Though it’s understandable if you’re sympathetically upset or worried about being a victim. These things are less gendered than popular portrayal implies.)
In the local words: Simulacrum 3 is not optional, you just gotta ensure you can promise to be on Simulacrum 1 when discussing issues and your views about how to deal with them.
To whistleblower67, some commentary on why I’m here: very few communities live like the future we should have, though some institutions are better at preventing abuse than others—I imagine there are institutions the reader thinks of as good, maybe better than the lesswrong crowd or maybe not, and I would caution that many of those institutions also have abuse patterns. eg, universities come to mind as probably having a slightly lower rate of abusers but still very much not zero, except, now that I say that I’m not even confident. I initially hoped that it would be less terrible here in the rat community; it hasn’t been. it’s the same problem as every other online network I’ve been in, and this one has it about as bad as a typical online network of emotional connections, maybe worse sometimes, maybe better others. Which is to say, fuckin awful, not to be minimized, we don’t heal all communities magically with a snap of our fingers. I want to feel comfy here—and I don’t.
And also, I’m not leaving the research field just because nobody agentically abusive wants to fess up to having been an agentic abuser. If human-scale community abusers are enough to stop our research on inter-agent coprotective alignment, that seems bad, especially if some of the people working on inter-agent coprotective alignment don’t care to actually work on it because they themselves are misaligned with decency! It seems to me that these situations are issues of the interpersonal alignment problem not being solved: how do we design a system where the members of that system can learn to trust each other when needed and distrust when it isn’t valid, so that if someone is abused, the victim can speak out against the abuser safely, and yet the abuser cannot use this same system against the victim.
If you have suggestions for other forums I should also visit to discuss the mechanical details of coprotective ai design as an independent researcher, I’d love to hear them, ideally in DM so the annoying boys don’t join too quick. but there are plenty of ladies roughing it here in the hope of making a difference, plenty of “people of gender” so to speak, in general. We can protect each other, but doing so is not trivial; don’t join this community blindly, but don’t join any community blindly. To build solidarity, one must be ready to defend those in need.
and a quick demo of what this looks like when I don’t feel so agitated by the topic:
The links from my referenced comment, pasted here for others passing by:
https://www.microsolidarity.cc/articles/cults—this site is in general my favorite site on the internet right now; it discusses how to create healthy co-supportive, solidarity-heavy social groups without accepting domination or cutting off friendships. Domination and isolation being a key component of cults.
it is the system of unfairness that must end, not the people in it, even on top. no death penalty, no penalty of forced labor, no penalty of total confinement, for causing harm to others, in my view. Temporary confinement and fair representation of harms to the social network instead. We need to change how these systems of justice work fundamentally in order to make them durable to the degree needed to protect against the coming era.
Strong upvote. As another female ai researcher: yeah, it’s bad here, as it is everywhere to some degree.
To other commenters, especially ones hesitant to agree that there have been problems due to structural issues, claiming otherwise doesn’t make this situation look better—the local network of human connections can only look good to the outer world of humans by being precise about what problems have occurred and what actual knowledge and mechanisms can prevent them. you’re not gonna retain your looking good points to the public by groveling about it, nor by claiming there’s no issue; you’ll retain looking good points by actually considering the problem each time it comes up, discussing the previous discussions, etc. (though, of course, like, efficiently, according to taste. Not everyone has to write huge braindumps like I find myself often wanting to.) nobody can tell you how to be a good person; just be one. put your zines in the slot in the door and we’ll copy em and print em out. but dont worry about making a fuss apologizing; make a fuss explaining a verifiable understanding.
Some local fragments of social network are somewhat well protected by local emotional habits; but many subgroups have unhealthy patterns even now, years and years after the event in the article.
So, to minimizing commenters, don’t dismiss the messenger; people being upset are not a reason for you to be upset too, it’s a reason for you to have sympathy and take time to think. You’re safe from this criticism with me, and I will argue for you to be safe from it for the most part even if you’ve caused harm, because I believe in reparative and restorative justice; victims aren’t safe until there’s a network of solidarity that prevents the harm in the first place and the process of getting there can be accelerated by frequent sources of harm getting to [pretend to not be causing harm]{comment 7mo later: ehh, I mean more like, others won’t apply current typical retribution; not hiding of the harm} if they’ll help as hard as they can with preventing anyone from ever harming another again—starting with themselves.
(Though it’s understandable if you’re sympathetically upset or worried about being a victim. These things are less gendered than popular portrayal implies.)
In the local words: Simulacrum 3 is not optional, you just gotta ensure you can promise to be on Simulacrum 1 when discussing issues and your views about how to deal with them.
To whistleblower67, some commentary on why I’m here: very few communities live like the future we should have, though some institutions are better at preventing abuse than others—I imagine there are institutions the reader thinks of as good, maybe better than the lesswrong crowd or maybe not, and I would caution that many of those institutions also have abuse patterns. eg, universities come to mind as probably having a slightly lower rate of abusers but still very much not zero, except, now that I say that I’m not even confident. I initially hoped that it would be less terrible here in the rat community; it hasn’t been. it’s the same problem as every other online network I’ve been in, and this one has it about as bad as a typical online network of emotional connections, maybe worse sometimes, maybe better others. Which is to say, fuckin awful, not to be minimized, we don’t heal all communities magically with a snap of our fingers. I want to feel comfy here—and I don’t.
And also, I’m not leaving the research field just because nobody agentically abusive wants to fess up to having been an agentic abuser. If human-scale community abusers are enough to stop our research on inter-agent coprotective alignment, that seems bad, especially if some of the people working on inter-agent coprotective alignment don’t care to actually work on it because they themselves are misaligned with decency! It seems to me that these situations are issues of the interpersonal alignment problem not being solved: how do we design a system where the members of that system can learn to trust each other when needed and distrust when it isn’t valid, so that if someone is abused, the victim can speak out against the abuser safely, and yet the abuser cannot use this same system against the victim.
If you have suggestions for other forums I should also visit to discuss the mechanical details of coprotective ai design as an independent researcher, I’d love to hear them, ideally in DM so the annoying boys don’t join too quick. but there are plenty of ladies roughing it here in the hope of making a difference, plenty of “people of gender” so to speak, in general. We can protect each other, but doing so is not trivial; don’t join this community blindly, but don’t join any community blindly. To build solidarity, one must be ready to defend those in need.
and a quick demo of what this looks like when I don’t feel so agitated by the topic:
Cults are bad actually, and I often say so with links to cult resistance education on this forum when people fret about cults or even giggle about cults being fun, because of the issues that have occurred around here from people thinking trusting authorities is a good idea.
The links from my referenced comment, pasted here for others passing by:
it is the system of unfairness that must end, not the people in it, even on top. no death penalty, no penalty of forced labor, no penalty of total confinement, for causing harm to others, in my view. Temporary confinement and fair representation of harms to the social network instead. We need to change how these systems of justice work fundamentally in order to make them durable to the degree needed to protect against the coming era.