I think it’s very likely that the people who made the ads are deliberately alluding to “opinions are like assholes”. And very unlikely that their intention is to say “masks are like assholes”. I think what they’re trying to do is to deliver a little surprise, a little punchline. You see “X are like opinions”, some bit of your brain is expecting a rude criticism, and oh! it turns out they’re saying something positive about X and something positive about having opinions. So (they hope) the reader gets a pleasant surprise and is a bit more willing to pay attention and a bit more likely to remember.
Whether any of that works is another question. It may be that the subtext that actually comes through is, after all, “masks are like assholes”. (That’s clearly what came through for Ben, but I suggest that maybe Ben is strongly predisposed to see hostile authoritarianism in certain contexts of which this is one.) It might be an incompetently made ad. But that is not at all the same thing as an ad that is trying to degrade and humiliate, and it is not at all the same thing as an ostensibly pro-mask ad that is really “anti-mask propaganda”.
It’s not that when the people behind the ad sat down and asked “What are we trying to do?”, they twirled their mustaches and said “I know! Let’s degrade and humiliate!”. It’s about what bleeds through about their attitude when they “try to get people to wear masks”, which they fail to catch.
For example, if a microwave salesman said “Microwaves are like women. Great in the kitchen!”, you don’t have to reject the idea that they’re trying to sell microwaves to notice what their ad implies about their perspective on women. Maybe it’s incompetence that they’d love to fix if anyone informs them about why it might not be the most universally non-offensive line to use, but it still shows something about how they view women.
However, if they use this line at a feminist convention, and they aren’t paid on commission… and you don’t quickly hear “Oops! Sorry, I fucked up!”… it starts to say something not just about his perspectives on women, but also his ability and/or inclination to take into account the perspectives of his target audience. The more the context makes the offensiveness difficult to miss, the harder it becomes to believe that the person is trying oh so hard to be not offensive so that they can sell microwaves, and the more it starts to seem like provoking offense and failing to sell microwaves is something they’re at least indifferent to, if not actively enjoying.
So when someone says “Masks are like opinions” and reminds you that opinions are like assholes (and stinky assholes at that, which the full saying specifies), right before encouraging you to have an opinion, it’s pretty hard to hear that as expressing “I’d love to hear your opinion!”? Do you really think that’s the best way they can think to convey their heart-felt attitude of “Let’s all expose our opinions to each other so that we can share their contents and take them in!”? Or do you notice that they went out of their way to point at “No one wants that shit, so keep it hidden behind multiple layers”, and then didn’t disclaim that interpretation, and infer that maybe the fact that this slipped past their filters signals that “We’re not interested in your dissent” isn’t actually something they’re trying super hard to avoid signalling?
Keep in mind, this isn’t some “orthogonal” failure mode that makes for a small deviation from an otherwise good ad—the way “simple oversight” predicts. The people who aren’t wearing masks have actively formed an opinion on the topic which contradicts the idea of wearing masks. The anti-mask sentiment is *explicitly* about giving the finger to an authority who they see as trying to condescend to them while sneering at them, and the ad that is “trying” to combat this literally associates their opinions with shit—while portraying itself as supportive, no less. It is quite literally the exact wrong signal to send if you want to get people to wear masks, so as far as “simple oversights” go, it’d have to be an amazing one. However, it is dead nuts center of what “alignment failure of the type pointed at by anti-maskers” predicts.
“Masks = assholes” is just the wrong explanation for the valid observation that there’s an “Eat shit” vibe coming through.
After hitting “submit” I realized that “alignment failure” is upstream of this divergence of analyses.
By “alignment failure”, I mean “the thing they are optimizing for isn’t aligned with the thing they claim to be optimizing for”. It’s a bit “agnostic” on the cause of this, because the cause isn’t so clearly separable into “evil vs incompetent”. Alignment failure happens by default, and it takes active work to avoid.
Goodharting is an example. Maybe you think “Well, COVID kills people, so we want people to not get COVID, so… let’s fine people for positive COVID tests!”. Okay, sure, that might work if you have mandatory testing. If you have voluntary testing though, that just incentivizes people to not get tested, which will probably make things worse. At this point, someone could complain that you’re aiming to make COVID *look* like it’s not a problem, not actually aiming to solve the problem. They will be right in that this is the direction your interventions are pointing, *even if you didn’t mean to and don’t like it*. In order to actually help keep people healthy and COVID free, you have to keep your eyes on the prize and adjust your aim point as necessary. In order to aim at aiming to keep people healthy and COVID free, you have to keep your eyes on the prize of alignment, and act to correct things when you see that your method of aiming is no longer keeping convergence.
When it comes to things like pro-mask advertisements, it’s oversimplifying to say “It’s an honest mistake” and it’s *also* oversimplifying to say “They WANT to exercise power, not save lives” (hopefully). The question is where, *exactly* the alignment between stated goals and effects break. And the way to tell is to try different interventions and see what happens.
What happens if you say “All I got from your ad was ‘eat shit’! Go to hell you evil condescending jerk!”? Do they look genuinely surprised and say “Shoot, I’m so sorry. I definitely care about your opinion and I have no idea how I came off that way. Can you please explain so that I can see where I went wrong and make it more clear that my respect for your opinion and autonomy is genuine?”?
Do they think “Hm. This person seems to think that I’m condescending to him, and I don’t want them to think that, yet I notice that I’m not surprised. Is it true? Do I have to check my inner alignment to the goal of saving lives, and maybe humble myself somewhat?”
What if you state the case more politely? What if you go out of your way to explain it in a way that makes it easy for them to continue to see themselves as good people, while also making it unmistakable that remaining a “good person who cares about saving lives” requires running ads which don’t leak contempt? Do they change the ad, mind how they’re coming off and how they’re feeling more closely, and thank you for helping them out? Or do they try making up nonsense to justify things before finally admitting “Okay, I don’t actually care about people I just like being a jerk”?
My own answer is that the contempt is likely real. It’s likely something they aren’t very aware of, but that they likely would be if they were motivated to find these things. It’s likely that they are not so virtuous and committed to alignment to their stated goals of being a good person that you can rudely shove this in their face and have them fix their mistakes. If you play the part of someone being stomped on, and cast them as a stomper, they will play into the role you’ve cast them in while dismissing the idea that they’re doing it. How evil!
However, it’s also overwhelmingly likely that if you sit down with them and see them for where they’re at, and explain things in a way that makes it feel okay to be who they are and shows them *how* they can be more of who they want to see themselves as being, they’ll choose to better align themselves and be grateful for the help. If you play the part of someone who recognizes their good intent and who recognizes that there are causal reasons which are beyond them for all of their failures, and cast them in the role of someone who is virtuous enough to choose good… they’ll probably still choose to play the part you cast them in.
That’s why it’s not “Simple mistake, nothing to see here” and also not “They’re doing it on purpose, those irredeemable bastards!”. It’s kinda “accidentally on purpose”. You can’t just point at what they did on purpose and expect them to change because they did in fact “do it on purpose” (in a sense). You *can*, however, point out the accident of how they allowed their purpose to become misaligned (if you know how to do so), and expect that to work.
Aligning ourselves (and others) with good takes active work, and active re-aiming, both of object level goals and meta-goals of what we’re aiming for. Framing things as either “innocent mistakes” or “purposeful actions of coherent agents” misses the important opportunity to realign and teach alignment
Some optimizer computed by a human brain is doing it on purpose. I agree that it seems desirable to be able to coherently and nonvacuously say that this is generally not something the person wants. I tried to lay out a principled model that distinguishes between perverse and humane optimization in Civil Law and Political Drama.
So your suggestion of what’s going on introduces an important divergence from what Ben and Ben have been saying (unless I missed it, in which case my apologies to them). You’re suggesting that the ad is hostile (as Ben also proposes) but that the hostility is towards non-mask-wearers and that what it’s suggesting is asshole-like is their anti-masking opinions.
This is much more plausible psychologically than what (if I understand right) Ben was proposing. Benquo described the ad as “anti-mask propaganda” and as “trying to degrade and humiliate mask-wearers”. Ben Pace suggests that the people making the ad want to degrade “the people their coalition is forcing to wear masks”. And I don’t think any of that makes psychological sense. But, yes, it’s possible that the people making please-mask ads are (consciously or not) hostile towards people who don’t want to wear masks.
I think this hypothesis is a plausible alternative to mine where they’re not trying to be hostile but intend to point up a contrast between what they say and the old joke about assholes. But it isn’t compatible with Ben’s characterization of his complaint about the ads as “complaining about anti-mask propaganda”: if you’re right then the ads are very much not anti-mask propaganda.
Right, it sounds like you mostly get what I’m saying.
I’d quibble that “the people their coalition is forcing to wear masks” are the anti-maskers (since pro-maskers are being nice and obedient, and therefore aren’t being “forced”). It’s pretty easy to slip into contempt for people not respecting your well-deserved authoritah, so that even when they start doing it you think “About fucking time!” and judge them for not doing it earlier or more enthusiastically, instead of showing gratitude for the fact that they’re moving in the right direction. I know I’ve been guilty of it in the past.
I don’t mean to imply that the people behind the ads are to be seen as shitty people, or in this light alone, and I think in the course of describing this perspective which I viewed as needing to be conveyed I may have failed to make that clear. I do actually agree with your take on what they see themselves as doing, and that it’s not entirely illegitimate.
I responded to my own comment trying to lay out better what I meant exactly by “alignment failure” and how “they’re not (meta) trying to be hostile” and “they’re trying to humiliate and degrade” aren’t actually mutually exclusive.
For what it’s worth, I didn’t take you to be asserting that the people behind the ads are shitty people (either unconditionally or conditional on your conjecture about their motives being correct).
Thanks for the feedback. To be clear, I didn’t mean that I inferred that you took it that way, just that after I finished writing I realized I was doing the “pretty critical of people for doing very normal things” thing, and that it often comes off that way if I’m not careful to credibly disclaim that interpretation.
I got “masks are like assholes” from the sentence, even before I read the Ben’s analysis.
I think it’s very likely that the people who made the ads are deliberately alluding to “opinions are like assholes”. And very unlikely that their intention is to say “masks are like assholes”. I think what they’re trying to do is to deliver a little surprise, a little punchline. You see “X are like opinions”, some bit of your brain is expecting a rude criticism, and oh! it turns out they’re saying something positive about X and something positive about having opinions. So (they hope) the reader gets a pleasant surprise and is a bit more willing to pay attention and a bit more likely to remember.
Whether any of that works is another question. It may be that the subtext that actually comes through is, after all, “masks are like assholes”. (That’s clearly what came through for Ben, but I suggest that maybe Ben is strongly predisposed to see hostile authoritarianism in certain contexts of which this is one.) It might be an incompetently made ad. But that is not at all the same thing as an ad that is trying to degrade and humiliate, and it is not at all the same thing as an ostensibly pro-mask ad that is really “anti-mask propaganda”.
It’s not that when the people behind the ad sat down and asked “What are we trying to do?”, they twirled their mustaches and said “I know! Let’s degrade and humiliate!”. It’s about what bleeds through about their attitude when they “try to get people to wear masks”, which they fail to catch.
For example, if a microwave salesman said “Microwaves are like women. Great in the kitchen!”, you don’t have to reject the idea that they’re trying to sell microwaves to notice what their ad implies about their perspective on women. Maybe it’s incompetence that they’d love to fix if anyone informs them about why it might not be the most universally non-offensive line to use, but it still shows something about how they view women.
However, if they use this line at a feminist convention, and they aren’t paid on commission… and you don’t quickly hear “Oops! Sorry, I fucked up!”… it starts to say something not just about his perspectives on women, but also his ability and/or inclination to take into account the perspectives of his target audience. The more the context makes the offensiveness difficult to miss, the harder it becomes to believe that the person is trying oh so hard to be not offensive so that they can sell microwaves, and the more it starts to seem like provoking offense and failing to sell microwaves is something they’re at least indifferent to, if not actively enjoying.
So when someone says “Masks are like opinions” and reminds you that opinions are like assholes (and stinky assholes at that, which the full saying specifies), right before encouraging you to have an opinion, it’s pretty hard to hear that as expressing “I’d love to hear your opinion!”? Do you really think that’s the best way they can think to convey their heart-felt attitude of “Let’s all expose our opinions to each other so that we can share their contents and take them in!”? Or do you notice that they went out of their way to point at “No one wants that shit, so keep it hidden behind multiple layers”, and then didn’t disclaim that interpretation, and infer that maybe the fact that this slipped past their filters signals that “We’re not interested in your dissent” isn’t actually something they’re trying super hard to avoid signalling?
Keep in mind, this isn’t some “orthogonal” failure mode that makes for a small deviation from an otherwise good ad—the way “simple oversight” predicts. The people who aren’t wearing masks have actively formed an opinion on the topic which contradicts the idea of wearing masks. The anti-mask sentiment is *explicitly* about giving the finger to an authority who they see as trying to condescend to them while sneering at them, and the ad that is “trying” to combat this literally associates their opinions with shit—while portraying itself as supportive, no less. It is quite literally the exact wrong signal to send if you want to get people to wear masks, so as far as “simple oversights” go, it’d have to be an amazing one. However, it is dead nuts center of what “alignment failure of the type pointed at by anti-maskers” predicts.
“Masks = assholes” is just the wrong explanation for the valid observation that there’s an “Eat shit” vibe coming through.
After hitting “submit” I realized that “alignment failure” is upstream of this divergence of analyses.
By “alignment failure”, I mean “the thing they are optimizing for isn’t aligned with the thing they claim to be optimizing for”. It’s a bit “agnostic” on the cause of this, because the cause isn’t so clearly separable into “evil vs incompetent”. Alignment failure happens by default, and it takes active work to avoid.
Goodharting is an example. Maybe you think “Well, COVID kills people, so we want people to not get COVID, so… let’s fine people for positive COVID tests!”. Okay, sure, that might work if you have mandatory testing. If you have voluntary testing though, that just incentivizes people to not get tested, which will probably make things worse. At this point, someone could complain that you’re aiming to make COVID *look* like it’s not a problem, not actually aiming to solve the problem. They will be right in that this is the direction your interventions are pointing, *even if you didn’t mean to and don’t like it*. In order to actually help keep people healthy and COVID free, you have to keep your eyes on the prize and adjust your aim point as necessary. In order to aim at aiming to keep people healthy and COVID free, you have to keep your eyes on the prize of alignment, and act to correct things when you see that your method of aiming is no longer keeping convergence.
When it comes to things like pro-mask advertisements, it’s oversimplifying to say “It’s an honest mistake” and it’s *also* oversimplifying to say “They WANT to exercise power, not save lives” (hopefully). The question is where, *exactly* the alignment between stated goals and effects break. And the way to tell is to try different interventions and see what happens.
What happens if you say “All I got from your ad was ‘eat shit’! Go to hell you evil condescending jerk!”? Do they look genuinely surprised and say “Shoot, I’m so sorry. I definitely care about your opinion and I have no idea how I came off that way. Can you please explain so that I can see where I went wrong and make it more clear that my respect for your opinion and autonomy is genuine?”?
Do they think “Hm. This person seems to think that I’m condescending to him, and I don’t want them to think that, yet I notice that I’m not surprised. Is it true? Do I have to check my inner alignment to the goal of saving lives, and maybe humble myself somewhat?”
What if you state the case more politely? What if you go out of your way to explain it in a way that makes it easy for them to continue to see themselves as good people, while also making it unmistakable that remaining a “good person who cares about saving lives” requires running ads which don’t leak contempt? Do they change the ad, mind how they’re coming off and how they’re feeling more closely, and thank you for helping them out? Or do they try making up nonsense to justify things before finally admitting “Okay, I don’t actually care about people I just like being a jerk”?
My own answer is that the contempt is likely real. It’s likely something they aren’t very aware of, but that they likely would be if they were motivated to find these things. It’s likely that they are not so virtuous and committed to alignment to their stated goals of being a good person that you can rudely shove this in their face and have them fix their mistakes. If you play the part of someone being stomped on, and cast them as a stomper, they will play into the role you’ve cast them in while dismissing the idea that they’re doing it. How evil!
However, it’s also overwhelmingly likely that if you sit down with them and see them for where they’re at, and explain things in a way that makes it feel okay to be who they are and shows them *how* they can be more of who they want to see themselves as being, they’ll choose to better align themselves and be grateful for the help. If you play the part of someone who recognizes their good intent and who recognizes that there are causal reasons which are beyond them for all of their failures, and cast them in the role of someone who is virtuous enough to choose good… they’ll probably still choose to play the part you cast them in.
That’s why it’s not “Simple mistake, nothing to see here” and also not “They’re doing it on purpose, those irredeemable bastards!”. It’s kinda “accidentally on purpose”. You can’t just point at what they did on purpose and expect them to change because they did in fact “do it on purpose” (in a sense). You *can*, however, point out the accident of how they allowed their purpose to become misaligned (if you know how to do so), and expect that to work.
Aligning ourselves (and others) with good takes active work, and active re-aiming, both of object level goals and meta-goals of what we’re aiming for. Framing things as either “innocent mistakes” or “purposeful actions of coherent agents” misses the important opportunity to realign and teach alignment
Some optimizer computed by a human brain is doing it on purpose. I agree that it seems desirable to be able to coherently and nonvacuously say that this is generally not something the person wants. I tried to lay out a principled model that distinguishes between perverse and humane optimization in Civil Law and Political Drama.
So your suggestion of what’s going on introduces an important divergence from what Ben and Ben have been saying (unless I missed it, in which case my apologies to them). You’re suggesting that the ad is hostile (as Ben also proposes) but that the hostility is towards non-mask-wearers and that what it’s suggesting is asshole-like is their anti-masking opinions.
This is much more plausible psychologically than what (if I understand right) Ben was proposing. Benquo described the ad as “anti-mask propaganda” and as “trying to degrade and humiliate mask-wearers”. Ben Pace suggests that the people making the ad want to degrade “the people their coalition is forcing to wear masks”. And I don’t think any of that makes psychological sense. But, yes, it’s possible that the people making please-mask ads are (consciously or not) hostile towards people who don’t want to wear masks.
I think this hypothesis is a plausible alternative to mine where they’re not trying to be hostile but intend to point up a contrast between what they say and the old joke about assholes. But it isn’t compatible with Ben’s characterization of his complaint about the ads as “complaining about anti-mask propaganda”: if you’re right then the ads are very much not anti-mask propaganda.
Right, it sounds like you mostly get what I’m saying.
I’d quibble that “the people their coalition is forcing to wear masks” are the anti-maskers (since pro-maskers are being nice and obedient, and therefore aren’t being “forced”). It’s pretty easy to slip into contempt for people not respecting your well-deserved authoritah, so that even when they start doing it you think “About fucking time!” and judge them for not doing it earlier or more enthusiastically, instead of showing gratitude for the fact that they’re moving in the right direction. I know I’ve been guilty of it in the past.
I don’t mean to imply that the people behind the ads are to be seen as shitty people, or in this light alone, and I think in the course of describing this perspective which I viewed as needing to be conveyed I may have failed to make that clear. I do actually agree with your take on what they see themselves as doing, and that it’s not entirely illegitimate.
I responded to my own comment trying to lay out better what I meant exactly by “alignment failure” and how “they’re not (meta) trying to be hostile” and “they’re trying to humiliate and degrade” aren’t actually mutually exclusive.
For what it’s worth, I didn’t take you to be asserting that the people behind the ads are shitty people (either unconditionally or conditional on your conjecture about their motives being correct).
Thanks for the feedback. To be clear, I didn’t mean that I inferred that you took it that way, just that after I finished writing I realized I was doing the “pretty critical of people for doing very normal things” thing, and that it often comes off that way if I’m not careful to credibly disclaim that interpretation.
REMOVED
This is a helpful datapoint for me. I’ve never heard the phrase that is apparently being riffed on.