I expect people are downvoting without explanation because, frankly, this reads like sufficiently obvious sexism it’s difficult to believe that the author hasn’t noticed. Assuming you want an actual explanation of what’s wrong with this post, I think there are two main parts:
Epistemically speaking you are making very confident sweeping generalizations about something which is at best a tentative evopsych theory and at worst utter nonsense.
Socially, this is incredibly dehumanizing and othering. Women are not alien intelligences. We think the same way you do. Ferreting out the fundamental intentions of men works the exact same way as ferreting out the fundamental intentions of women.
I want to push back on anyone downvoting this because it’s sexist, dehumanizing, and othering (rather than just being a bad model). I am sad if a model/analogy has those negative effect, but supposing the model/analogy in fact held and was informative, I think we should be able to discuss it. And even the possibility that something in the realm of gender relations has relevant lessons for Alignment seems like we should be able to discuss it.
Or alternatively stated, I want to push for Decoupling norms here.
In contexts where the model will not be used to make decisions about humans (which are rare!), sexist is when something is a bad model in the direction of sexism. There are real differences; accurate representations of them are not sexism. Those differences are quite small, and are often misunderstood as large in ways that produce nonsenical models. As @eukaryote wrote, the specific evopsych proposal under consideration here is privileging a hypothesis.
Alternatively stated, you cannot convince me to decouple when there are real mechanistic reasons that the coupling exists, because then you’re simply asking me to suspend my epistemic evaluation of the model.
Of course, I also simply don’t believe in decoupling norms in general because reductionism doesn’t work to find the true mechanisms of reality in contexts where the mechanisms have significant amounts of complexity which is computationally intractable to discover by simulation, and therefore for practical purposes only exist as shapes in the macroscopic structure of worldstate; and decoupling/reductionism based models reliably mismodel those sorts of complex systems. One needs instead to figure out how to abstract over the coupling.
What do you mean “privileging a hypothesis”? The LW concept https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/privileging-the-hypothesis is about raising a hypothesis to consideration without enough to point to that hypothesis. I gave reasons for raising this hypothesis.
What does decoupling have to do with reductionism? Decoupling doesn’t mean “do reductionism”, it means decoupling factual questions from social / political tone and conflict. [Edit: I was partially wrong. The concept of “high/low-decouplers” described here https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/8fnch2/high_decouplers_and_low_decouplers/ is sort of related to reductionism, though is far from the same thing (because what you’re decoupling can be a high-level claim, holistic in the sense of abstract, if not holistic in the sense of letting in all the context). The idea of decoupling norms as described in the post Ruby linked, https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7cAsBPGh98pGyrhz9/decoupling-vs-contextualising-norms , is as I said, though more precisely stated as being about implications in general.]
In addition to what gears said, I think the sexist othering etc is not actually critical to the analogy, which is kind of the problem. “Figuring out the motives of people who kind of share goals with you but also have reasons to lie” is a pretty universal human experience. Adding some gender evopsych on top is just annoying (and prevents thinking about many of the more interesting ways in which this dynamic can play out).
I agree it’s not strictly critical to the analogy, and my rewrite removes the evpsych. But I actually think that this specific dynamic is plausibly the single most intense case of this dynamic, which is why I wrote about it specifically, and why the rewrite seems less interesting to me. What are some other cases where there are comparably strong pressures?
I appreciate you trying to explain. I literally still don’t understand.
Epistemically speaking you are making very confident sweeping generalizations about something which is at best a tentative evopsych theory and at worst utter nonsense.
The post is definitely speculative. Would it seem less bad if it were labeled as speculative? One of the sentences in the post is
(I’m ignoring the complexity of tribal living, so this is all a somewhat cartoon picture.)
The basic observation that women are relatively more interested in people is a standardly claimed psych finding. Not saying it’s not controversial, just that I’m not making it up. E.g. this paper https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00189/full has 335 citations. (I should have included that in the post.)
Epistemically speaking you are making very confident sweeping generalizations about something which is at best a tentative evopsych theory and at worst utter nonsense.
Could you be more specific? I think all the claims here are pretty obvious, except that this one is pretty speculative:
(Hence females tending on average to be relatively more interested in people over things, compared to males.)
Socially, this is incredibly dehumanizing and othering.
I agree that dehumanizing and othering is bad. I literally don’t see what’s dehumanizing here or what’s othering here. Can someone explain? I reread my post twice and still don’t get it. My guess is that trying to describe something about a feature of a group of people is being taken as othering. But like, surely that’s an okay thing to do somehow?
Women are not alien intelligences.
Of course. One of the sentences in the post ends with:
It would be somewhat less bad if it had been more clearly labeled speculative, but that’s not the fundamental issue. “cartoon” implies to me something like Newton’s laws—not correct exactly, but a good enough model to be going on for the purposes of the conversation. I think your object-level evopsych statements are closer to, uh, I don’t actually know physics nearly well enough to complete the analogy. Some sort of theory of a phenomenon that is not entirely proven to even exist, with some evidence for and some against, which a small minority group of scientists present as settled science and procede to write further papers using it as an assumption.
I was not saying you had made the claim up, but presenting controversial claims with no hedging is not great. As for everything else, your post implies strongly, without stating outright, various narratives about human motivations/evolution that are not, in fact, obvious. For instance, that women want to secure the loyalty of one man, while men want to have sex with as many women as possible, and that this adversarial dynamic is present in the modern day and results in women, in particular, having unique insight into figuring out the motives of partially aligned intelligences due to practice on men.
It’s okay to describe features of a group of people. Which features you’re describing, how you present your claims, and whether you’re in fact right all matter. In this case, you are, implicitly, making the claim that the difference between men and women is large enough that it makes sense to try to draw an analogy to the difference between humans and AIs, even though you explicitly stated that of course the difference is not as large.
To put it another way, I don’t actually see what using women and men here adds to the analogy beyond “sometimes, humans have to suss out the true intentions of other humans who partially share goals with them when those other humans have motive to deceive them”. To the extent that you are claiming there is a meaningful difference, I think that is [not entirely sure I am phrasing the following correctly] privileging gender as a special axis of human difference in a way that I think is meaningfully wrong and also find unpleasant.
(Somewhat more incidentally, I and many other women I know dislike the use of “females”, “mate”, etc in this context, though that is somewhat trivial and not actually a big deal so much as often correlated with things that do actually bother me.)
A guess about what’s happening: you’re seeing that I said “X” and you’re inferring that I believe “Y” because a lot of people who go around saying “X” also say “Y”. And you’re worried about that, because people who say “Y” have a disturbing pattern of going around mysteriously not noticing all the counterevidence against Y, and also advocating for harming others on the basis of Y being true. That’s a reasonable thing to worry about if you have good reason to think there are such people. But I think responding by punishing people who say “X”, while understandable, is an escalatory sort of action, and is a bad long term solution, and adds to the big pile of people silencing each other. So my somewhat prickly olive branch is: if this is something like what’s really going on, let’s talk about that explicitly.
As for everything else, your post implies strongly, without stating outright, various narratives about human motivations/evolution that are not, in fact, obvious. For instance, that women want to secure the loyalty of one man, while men want to have sex with as many women as possible, and that this adversarial dynamic is present in the modern day and results in women, in particular, having unique insight into figuring out the motives of partially aligned intelligences due to practice on men.
How does the post imply that? As you’ve stated them, I don’t agree with any of those things, and I didn’t say them, and I didn’t say anything that implied them, except that I said there is some (other) reason that might result in women in particular having unique insight.
In this case, you are, implicitly, making the claim that the difference between men and women is large enough that it makes sense to try to draw an analogy to the difference between humans and AIs, even though you explicitly stated that of course the difference is not as large.
No I’m not! Men and women are the same on any “human to AI” dimension! The analogy doesn’t rest on differences between men and women, except that there’s a desire to align in that direction, as described, coming from different incentives. I’m not making this claim that you’re saying I’m making! It’s other people’s fault if they make up an interpretation that I didn’t say and then ding me for saying that thing I didn’t say. The only analogy is that it’s a general intelligence trying to align another general intelligence.
I don’t actually see what using women and men here adds to the analogy
It’s an especially strong case of incentive to interpersonally suss out intentions. It’s the strongest one I could think of. What are some other very strong cases?
in a way that I think is meaningfully wrong
Why do you think it’s meaningfully wrong? Do you mean incorrect, or morally wrong?
I expect people are downvoting without explanation because, frankly, this reads like sufficiently obvious sexism it’s difficult to believe that the author hasn’t noticed. Assuming you want an actual explanation of what’s wrong with this post, I think there are two main parts:
Epistemically speaking you are making very confident sweeping generalizations about something which is at best a tentative evopsych theory and at worst utter nonsense.
Socially, this is incredibly dehumanizing and othering. Women are not alien intelligences. We think the same way you do. Ferreting out the fundamental intentions of men works the exact same way as ferreting out the fundamental intentions of women.
I want to push back on anyone downvoting this because it’s sexist, dehumanizing, and othering (rather than just being a bad model). I am sad if a model/analogy has those negative effect, but supposing the model/analogy in fact held and was informative, I think we should be able to discuss it. And even the possibility that something in the realm of gender relations has relevant lessons for Alignment seems like we should be able to discuss it.
Or alternatively stated, I want to push for Decoupling norms here.
In contexts where the model will not be used to make decisions about humans (which are rare!), sexist is when something is a bad model in the direction of sexism. There are real differences; accurate representations of them are not sexism. Those differences are quite small, and are often misunderstood as large in ways that produce nonsenical models. As @eukaryote wrote, the specific evopsych proposal under consideration here is privileging a hypothesis.
Alternatively stated, you cannot convince me to decouple when there are real mechanistic reasons that the coupling exists, because then you’re simply asking me to suspend my epistemic evaluation of the model.
Of course, I also simply don’t believe in decoupling norms in general because reductionism doesn’t work to find the true mechanisms of reality in contexts where the mechanisms have significant amounts of complexity which is computationally intractable to discover by simulation, and therefore for practical purposes only exist as shapes in the macroscopic structure of worldstate; and decoupling/reductionism based models reliably mismodel those sorts of complex systems. One needs instead to figure out how to abstract over the coupling.
What do you mean “privileging a hypothesis”? The LW concept https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/privileging-the-hypothesis is about raising a hypothesis to consideration without enough to point to that hypothesis. I gave reasons for raising this hypothesis.
What does decoupling have to do with reductionism? Decoupling doesn’t mean “do reductionism”, it means decoupling factual questions from social / political tone and conflict. [Edit: I was partially wrong. The concept of “high/low-decouplers” described here https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/8fnch2/high_decouplers_and_low_decouplers/ is sort of related to reductionism, though is far from the same thing (because what you’re decoupling can be a high-level claim, holistic in the sense of abstract, if not holistic in the sense of letting in all the context). The idea of decoupling norms as described in the post Ruby linked, https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7cAsBPGh98pGyrhz9/decoupling-vs-contextualising-norms , is as I said, though more precisely stated as being about implications in general.]
In addition to what gears said, I think the sexist othering etc is not actually critical to the analogy, which is kind of the problem. “Figuring out the motives of people who kind of share goals with you but also have reasons to lie” is a pretty universal human experience. Adding some gender evopsych on top is just annoying (and prevents thinking about many of the more interesting ways in which this dynamic can play out).
I agree it’s not strictly critical to the analogy, and my rewrite removes the evpsych. But I actually think that this specific dynamic is plausibly the single most intense case of this dynamic, which is why I wrote about it specifically, and why the rewrite seems less interesting to me. What are some other cases where there are comparably strong pressures?
Rewritten more abstractly: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ypvs4asdFq7riDWmd/interpersonal-alignment-intuitions
I appreciate you trying to explain. I literally still don’t understand.
The post is definitely speculative. Would it seem less bad if it were labeled as speculative? One of the sentences in the post is
The basic observation that women are relatively more interested in people is a standardly claimed psych finding. Not saying it’s not controversial, just that I’m not making it up. E.g. this paper https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00189/full has 335 citations. (I should have included that in the post.)
Could you be more specific? I think all the claims here are pretty obvious, except that this one is pretty speculative:
I agree that dehumanizing and othering is bad. I literally don’t see what’s dehumanizing here or what’s othering here. Can someone explain? I reread my post twice and still don’t get it. My guess is that trying to describe something about a feature of a group of people is being taken as othering. But like, surely that’s an okay thing to do somehow?
Of course. One of the sentences in the post ends with:
Is it related to this experience that I’ve had? https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bTsYQHfghTwZGnqPS/defensiveness-as-hysterical-invisibility
It would be somewhat less bad if it had been more clearly labeled speculative, but that’s not the fundamental issue. “cartoon” implies to me something like Newton’s laws—not correct exactly, but a good enough model to be going on for the purposes of the conversation. I think your object-level evopsych statements are closer to, uh, I don’t actually know physics nearly well enough to complete the analogy. Some sort of theory of a phenomenon that is not entirely proven to even exist, with some evidence for and some against, which a small minority group of scientists present as settled science and procede to write further papers using it as an assumption.
I was not saying you had made the claim up, but presenting controversial claims with no hedging is not great. As for everything else, your post implies strongly, without stating outright, various narratives about human motivations/evolution that are not, in fact, obvious. For instance, that women want to secure the loyalty of one man, while men want to have sex with as many women as possible, and that this adversarial dynamic is present in the modern day and results in women, in particular, having unique insight into figuring out the motives of partially aligned intelligences due to practice on men.
It’s okay to describe features of a group of people. Which features you’re describing, how you present your claims, and whether you’re in fact right all matter. In this case, you are, implicitly, making the claim that the difference between men and women is large enough that it makes sense to try to draw an analogy to the difference between humans and AIs, even though you explicitly stated that of course the difference is not as large.
To put it another way, I don’t actually see what using women and men here adds to the analogy beyond “sometimes, humans have to suss out the true intentions of other humans who partially share goals with them when those other humans have motive to deceive them”. To the extent that you are claiming there is a meaningful difference, I think that is [not entirely sure I am phrasing the following correctly] privileging gender as a special axis of human difference in a way that I think is meaningfully wrong and also find unpleasant.
(Somewhat more incidentally, I and many other women I know dislike the use of “females”, “mate”, etc in this context, though that is somewhat trivial and not actually a big deal so much as often correlated with things that do actually bother me.)
Thanks for engaging though, I continue to be grateful for you making the effort to help me understand what’s happening, including harms.
A guess about what’s happening: you’re seeing that I said “X” and you’re inferring that I believe “Y” because a lot of people who go around saying “X” also say “Y”. And you’re worried about that, because people who say “Y” have a disturbing pattern of going around mysteriously not noticing all the counterevidence against Y, and also advocating for harming others on the basis of Y being true. That’s a reasonable thing to worry about if you have good reason to think there are such people. But I think responding by punishing people who say “X”, while understandable, is an escalatory sort of action, and is a bad long term solution, and adds to the big pile of people silencing each other. So my somewhat prickly olive branch is: if this is something like what’s really going on, let’s talk about that explicitly.
How does the post imply that? As you’ve stated them, I don’t agree with any of those things, and I didn’t say them, and I didn’t say anything that implied them, except that I said there is some (other) reason that might result in women in particular having unique insight.
No I’m not! Men and women are the same on any “human to AI” dimension! The analogy doesn’t rest on differences between men and women, except that there’s a desire to align in that direction, as described, coming from different incentives. I’m not making this claim that you’re saying I’m making! It’s other people’s fault if they make up an interpretation that I didn’t say and then ding me for saying that thing I didn’t say. The only analogy is that it’s a general intelligence trying to align another general intelligence.
It’s an especially strong case of incentive to interpersonally suss out intentions. It’s the strongest one I could think of. What are some other very strong cases?
Why do you think it’s meaningfully wrong? Do you mean incorrect, or morally wrong?