Q6: Hey, this was posted on April 1st. All of this is just an April Fool’s joke, right?
A: Why, of course! Or rather, it’s a preview of what might be needful to say later, if matters really do get that desperate. You don’t want to drop that on people suddenly and with no warning.
In my own accounting I’m going to consider this a lie (of the sort argued against in Q4) in possible worlds where Eliezer in fact believes things are this desperate, UNLESS there is some clarification by Eliezer that he didn’t mean to imply that things aren’t nearly this desperate.
Reasons to suspect Eliezer may think it really is this desperate:
Nate Soares writes in this post, “I (Nate) don’t know of any plan for achieving a stellar future that I believe has much hope worth speaking of. I consider this one of our key bottlenecks.”
Eliezer says in this dialogue “I consider the present gameboard to look incredibly grim, and I don’t actually see a way out through hard work alone. We can hope there’s a miracle that violates some aspect of my background model, and we can try to prepare for that unknown miracle; preparing for an unknown miracle probably looks like ‘Trying to die with more dignity on the mainline’ (because if you can die with more dignity on the mainline, you are better positioned to take advantage of a miracle if it occurs).”
I’ve heard through other channels that Eliezer is quite pessimistic about solving alignment at this point.
Lies are intended to deceive. If I say I’m a teapot, and everyone knows I’m not a teapot, I think one shouldn’t use the same word for that as for misrepresenting one’s STD status.
Doubly true on April 1st, which is among its other uses, an unusually good day to say things that can only be said with literally false statements, if you’d not be a liar.
What is the proposition you believe “everyone knows” in this case? (The proposition that seemed ambiguous to me was “Eliezer believes alignment is so unlikely that going for dying with dignity on the mainline is the right approach”).
If someone says X on April Fools, then says “April fools, X is false, Y is true instead!”, and they disbelieve Y (and it’s at least plausible to some parties that they believe Y), that’s still a lie even though it’s April Fools, since they’re claiming to have popped out of the April Fools context by saying “April Fools”.
I think this isn’t the first time I’ve seen the April Fools-April Fools joke, where someone says “True thing, April Fools, Lie!”, but I agree that this is ‘bad form’ in some way.
I had been, midway thru the post, intending to write a comment that was something like “hmm, does posting this on April 1st have more or less dignity than April 2nd?”, and then got to that point. My interpretation is something like: if someone wants to dismiss Eliezer for reasons of their psychological health, Eliezer wants them to have an out, and the best out he could give them was “he posted his main strategic update on April 1st, so it has to be a joke, and he confirmed that in his post.” But of course this out involves some sort of detachment between their beliefs and his beliefs.
In my terminology, it’s a ‘collusion’ instead of a ‘lie’; the sort of thing where I help someone believe that I liked their cooking because they would rather have that conclusion than be correlated with reality. The main difference between them is something like “whose preferences are being satisfied”; lies are typically win-lose to a much larger degree than collusions are. [Or, like, enough people meta-prefer collusions for them to be common, but meta-prefer not lying such that non-collusion lying is relatively rare.]
Obviously, you could have distributed a codebook and titled the article “Flagh guc Pontre” instead of “Death with Dignity”, but using a nonstandard mapping from symbols to ideas feels like giving up entirely on the concept of truth in communication.
Not lying. Saying a thing in such a way that it’s impossible to tell whether he believes it or not, and doing that explicitly.
Seems a very honest thing to do to me, if you have a thing you want to say, but do not want people to know whether you believe it or not. As to the why of that, I have no idea. But I do not feel deceived.
Thanks for asking about this. I was confused about the extent to which this is an April Fools joke. The discussion here helped clarify my confusion a decent amount, which has been decently useful for me.
In my own accounting I’m going to consider this a lie (of the sort argued against in Q4) in possible worlds where Eliezer in fact believes things are this desperate, UNLESS there is some clarification by Eliezer that he didn’t mean to imply that things aren’t nearly this desperate.
Reasons to suspect Eliezer may think it really is this desperate:
Nate Soares writes in this post, “I (Nate) don’t know of any plan for achieving a stellar future that I believe has much hope worth speaking of. I consider this one of our key bottlenecks.”
Eliezer says in this dialogue “I consider the present gameboard to look incredibly grim, and I don’t actually see a way out through hard work alone. We can hope there’s a miracle that violates some aspect of my background model, and we can try to prepare for that unknown miracle; preparing for an unknown miracle probably looks like ‘Trying to die with more dignity on the mainline’ (because if you can die with more dignity on the mainline, you are better positioned to take advantage of a miracle if it occurs).”
I’ve heard through other channels that Eliezer is quite pessimistic about solving alignment at this point.
Lies are intended to deceive. If I say I’m a teapot, and everyone knows I’m not a teapot, I think one shouldn’t use the same word for that as for misrepresenting one’s STD status.
Doubly true on April 1st, which is among its other uses, an unusually good day to say things that can only be said with literally false statements, if you’d not be a liar.
What is the proposition you believe “everyone knows” in this case? (The proposition that seemed ambiguous to me was “Eliezer believes alignment is so unlikely that going for dying with dignity on the mainline is the right approach”).
If someone says X on April Fools, then says “April fools, X is false, Y is true instead!”, and they disbelieve Y (and it’s at least plausible to some parties that they believe Y), that’s still a lie even though it’s April Fools, since they’re claiming to have popped out of the April Fools context by saying “April Fools”.
I think this isn’t the first time I’ve seen the April Fools-April Fools joke, where someone says “True thing, April Fools, Lie!”, but I agree that this is ‘bad form’ in some way.
I had been, midway thru the post, intending to write a comment that was something like “hmm, does posting this on April 1st have more or less dignity than April 2nd?”, and then got to that point. My interpretation is something like: if someone wants to dismiss Eliezer for reasons of their psychological health, Eliezer wants them to have an out, and the best out he could give them was “he posted his main strategic update on April 1st, so it has to be a joke, and he confirmed that in his post.” But of course this out involves some sort of detachment between their beliefs and his beliefs.
In my terminology, it’s a ‘collusion’ instead of a ‘lie’; the sort of thing where I help someone believe that I liked their cooking because they would rather have that conclusion than be correlated with reality. The main difference between them is something like “whose preferences are being satisfied”; lies are typically win-lose to a much larger degree than collusions are. [Or, like, enough people meta-prefer collusions for them to be common, but meta-prefer not lying such that non-collusion lying is relatively rare.]
It’s odd to me that you take a stance that I interpret as “saying something false was okay because it was convenient to do so”[1] given that I believe you dislike unneeded required context on “intelligent discourse” and that you once spent an impressive amount of time finding a way to never fully lie.
Obviously, you could have distributed a codebook and titled the article “Flagh guc Pontre” instead of “Death with Dignity”, but using a nonstandard mapping from symbols to ideas feels like giving up entirely on the concept of truth in communication.
Or the ol’ 4Chan creed “Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact.”
Not lying. Saying a thing in such a way that it’s impossible to tell whether he believes it or not, and doing that explicitly.
Seems a very honest thing to do to me, if you have a thing you want to say, but do not want people to know whether you believe it or not. As to the why of that, I have no idea. But I do not feel deceived.
Do you think it was clear to over 90% of readers that the part where he says “April fools, this is just a test!” is not a statement of truth?
It’s not clear to me. Maybe it is an April fool joke!
Also this comment:
Thanks for asking about this. I was confused about the extent to which this is an April Fools joke. The discussion here helped clarify my confusion a decent amount, which has been decently useful for me.