The paragraph calling out certain people in our community for scoring points (and to some extent the last paragraph) felt, ironically, like you were suddenly scoring points, whereas the rest of the post was trying to win.
[Edit: Note that this is me responding to what turns out to be a misreading of the author’s intent, which was to call out the responders for scoring points rather than the named posters. I think it led somewhere worthwhile but Conner wasn’t doing the thing I thought he was doing.]
It also has an interesting implication, which is that scoring points won’t accomplish anything in the context of those three subjects—that it won’t help those people win. In Ben’s situation that seems valid. Ben’s mother is following the rule that curfew is curfew basically no matter what and Ben’s arguments are irrelevant. In the other referenced examples, that does not seem to be the situation. No, it’s not a sporting event where the most points wins, but it does not seem pointless to point out economic drivers of future AGI arms races if you’re trying to convince people of the likelihood of AGI arms races, it does seem like pointing out how toxic things evolve is an argument in favor of getting people to change those dynamics and/or recognize that the end products might be toxic, it does seem like pointing out what causes lynch mobs might be useful information that informs people’s actions.
That doesn’t mean that such actions are optimal. But I don’t think it’s fair to say that saying things to justify your beliefs is something people don’t do when trying to win. Arguments are won on points all the time. Beliefs are changed by point scoring all the time. Points are often not sufficient, but they are even more often helpful and they are also often required. Your points allow you to win, get people to listen, get you consideration, make people update, and so on.
A response might be, if they are helpful that’s not scoring points. But yes, they are totally scoring points. There are things that help you win that don’t score points, and there are things that both score points and help you win (and the other two quadrants as well).
What’s bad is when you score the wrong kind of points. Irrelevant points. Points that bounce off their targets. Especially points that only serve to drag the other person down rather than make a point. So what’s the difference between relevant points and irrelevant points, in this context?
My intuition is that it’s points that matter to you versus points that matter to the judges. Ben is scoring points that matter to him but don’t matter to the judges. Telling the cop you pay his salary really doesn’t help. If you’re scoring points that matter to the person you’re arguing with, or the audience, and shift their opinion, that’s a different story. Telling the cop that your wife is in labor and you’re driving her to the hospital is totally scoring points but also works if he buys it. Starving people point out their desperation, thereby scoring points in the eyes of their judge, in order to elicit help. Yes, it would be better/cleaner to win in a way that didn’t score points at all to avoid our natural inclination towards scoring more points than is efficient, but that doesn’t mean scoring points isn’t useful.
Relationships even depend on a points balance, in some sense. If you’re constantly scoring points in your own eyes but not scoring points in the other person’s eyes and they’re doing the same, that’s really bad. Both of you will think you’re way ahead on points and wonder why the other person is defecting slash being so terrible. Much better is if you can both put those points on the board in some sense, so no one thinks they’re somehow way ahead or feels totally unappreciated or unvalued or what not. This stuff matters.
I wonder how much of this is about naming things. I like that you’re attempting to name all your things with resonant terms, and I think that consequences like my reactions here are features rather than bugs because they lead to revealing real differences in world models and perceptions that would otherwise be harder to spot, but there is certainly the risk this is largely about terms instead.
My intuition is that it’s points that matter to you versus points that matter to the judges
This is pretty much 100% of it. Sometimes “the judges” are people whose opinion is decisive, like Ben’s mom, and sometimes “the judges” are just the universe (e.g. will these actions I’m taking result in the parachute opening or not).
Specifically, “scoring points instead of winning.”
I noticed I was sort of confusedly-in-disagreement with your first couple of paragraphs, and I think that boils down to me explaining things inadequately—your complaints felt invalid and your arguments and clarifications felt totally true, and I don’t think we actually disagreed. The above is an important distinction—it’s not about scoring points being bad in an absolute sense, it’s when you score points instead of winning.
In particular, I wasn’t claiming that Eliezer, Scott, and Brent are the ones doing this. I was claiming that the people who shoot back with something like “I don’t think we should listen to this guy, he doesn’t even have a PhD” are scoring points. They’re not playing the same game that Eliezer and Scott and Brent are playing (a truthseeking, accomplish-stuff sort of game) but rather the simpler, more known game of social status.
My claim there is that even the ones who care about e.g. AI arms races are not in that moment expressing that care—they’ve switched away from engaging with the ideas to engaging with the social subgame. Their true objection to (e.g.) some claim about economics is not “Eliezer doesn’t have a PhD.” They’re ignoring the economics question, and shifting into the trivial subgame and scoring points that are valid in that subgame but futile/useless in the larger game of “will I bring about my will in the world.” Maybe their point-scoring is kind of correlated with winning that larger game (because social status is a useful currency) just like my cousin Ben making logical arguments sometimes has an effect, sort of, maybe, if mom’s in the right mood. But it’s not highly likely to make a difference. It’s mostly pandering or self-gratification or something not motivated by the actual end goal.
(In contrast, something like the Yudkowsky-Hanson debate is not “scoring points instead of winning.” It’s scoring points in the actual relevant game.)
So yeah—I felt like most of your objection was to straw versions of what I was trying to say, and I apologize for the extent to which I set up those strawmen myself (and thus it’s not your fault you found yourself objecting to them). I wasn’t at all claiming that e.g. it’s “pointless to point out economic drivers of arms races” or that it’s “pointless to point out how toxic things evolve.” I was claiming that the response to those claims often shifts the conversation into a pointless subgame where people score futile points that have little-to-no bearing on the original topic, and that indeed this is why people in the Eliezer/Scott/Brent archetype often get tired and just drop out of the discussion at that moment. They recognize that no further progress is likely to be made and they’re not interested in scoring trivial points, so they go off to do something else instead.
Ah, that makes more sense. I agree that we mostly agree. I went back and read the paragraph in question and I see how that part of this happened. I blame pronouns—now that I know who/what everything is referring to it all makes sense. I think if you replaced “those people” with the “those responding” or something like that, this confusion doesn’t happen.
That doesn’t mean this isn’t also my fault, though; I didn’t even see the alternate/actual interpretation, and what you wrote was at worst ambiguous. So I was being somewhat uncharitable there in not looking for an alternate explanation, which seems bad.
The paragraph calling out certain people in our community for scoring points (and to some extent the last paragraph) felt, ironically, like you were suddenly scoring points, whereas the rest of the post was trying to win.
[Edit: Note that this is me responding to what turns out to be a misreading of the author’s intent, which was to call out the responders for scoring points rather than the named posters. I think it led somewhere worthwhile but Conner wasn’t doing the thing I thought he was doing.]
It also has an interesting implication, which is that scoring points won’t accomplish anything in the context of those three subjects—that it won’t help those people win. In Ben’s situation that seems valid. Ben’s mother is following the rule that curfew is curfew basically no matter what and Ben’s arguments are irrelevant. In the other referenced examples, that does not seem to be the situation. No, it’s not a sporting event where the most points wins, but it does not seem pointless to point out economic drivers of future AGI arms races if you’re trying to convince people of the likelihood of AGI arms races, it does seem like pointing out how toxic things evolve is an argument in favor of getting people to change those dynamics and/or recognize that the end products might be toxic, it does seem like pointing out what causes lynch mobs might be useful information that informs people’s actions.
That doesn’t mean that such actions are optimal. But I don’t think it’s fair to say that saying things to justify your beliefs is something people don’t do when trying to win. Arguments are won on points all the time. Beliefs are changed by point scoring all the time. Points are often not sufficient, but they are even more often helpful and they are also often required. Your points allow you to win, get people to listen, get you consideration, make people update, and so on.
A response might be, if they are helpful that’s not scoring points. But yes, they are totally scoring points. There are things that help you win that don’t score points, and there are things that both score points and help you win (and the other two quadrants as well).
What’s bad is when you score the wrong kind of points. Irrelevant points. Points that bounce off their targets. Especially points that only serve to drag the other person down rather than make a point. So what’s the difference between relevant points and irrelevant points, in this context?
My intuition is that it’s points that matter to you versus points that matter to the judges. Ben is scoring points that matter to him but don’t matter to the judges. Telling the cop you pay his salary really doesn’t help. If you’re scoring points that matter to the person you’re arguing with, or the audience, and shift their opinion, that’s a different story. Telling the cop that your wife is in labor and you’re driving her to the hospital is totally scoring points but also works if he buys it. Starving people point out their desperation, thereby scoring points in the eyes of their judge, in order to elicit help. Yes, it would be better/cleaner to win in a way that didn’t score points at all to avoid our natural inclination towards scoring more points than is efficient, but that doesn’t mean scoring points isn’t useful.
Relationships even depend on a points balance, in some sense. If you’re constantly scoring points in your own eyes but not scoring points in the other person’s eyes and they’re doing the same, that’s really bad. Both of you will think you’re way ahead on points and wonder why the other person is defecting slash being so terrible. Much better is if you can both put those points on the board in some sense, so no one thinks they’re somehow way ahead or feels totally unappreciated or unvalued or what not. This stuff matters.
I wonder how much of this is about naming things. I like that you’re attempting to name all your things with resonant terms, and I think that consequences like my reactions here are features rather than bugs because they lead to revealing real differences in world models and perceptions that would otherwise be harder to spot, but there is certainly the risk this is largely about terms instead.
This is pretty much 100% of it. Sometimes “the judges” are people whose opinion is decisive, like Ben’s mom, and sometimes “the judges” are just the universe (e.g. will these actions I’m taking result in the parachute opening or not).
I noticed I was sort of confusedly-in-disagreement with your first couple of paragraphs, and I think that boils down to me explaining things inadequately—your complaints felt invalid and your arguments and clarifications felt totally true, and I don’t think we actually disagreed. The above is an important distinction—it’s not about scoring points being bad in an absolute sense, it’s when you score points instead of winning.
In particular, I wasn’t claiming that Eliezer, Scott, and Brent are the ones doing this. I was claiming that the people who shoot back with something like “I don’t think we should listen to this guy, he doesn’t even have a PhD” are scoring points. They’re not playing the same game that Eliezer and Scott and Brent are playing (a truthseeking, accomplish-stuff sort of game) but rather the simpler, more known game of social status.
My claim there is that even the ones who care about e.g. AI arms races are not in that moment expressing that care—they’ve switched away from engaging with the ideas to engaging with the social subgame. Their true objection to (e.g.) some claim about economics is not “Eliezer doesn’t have a PhD.” They’re ignoring the economics question, and shifting into the trivial subgame and scoring points that are valid in that subgame but futile/useless in the larger game of “will I bring about my will in the world.” Maybe their point-scoring is kind of correlated with winning that larger game (because social status is a useful currency) just like my cousin Ben making logical arguments sometimes has an effect, sort of, maybe, if mom’s in the right mood. But it’s not highly likely to make a difference. It’s mostly pandering or self-gratification or something not motivated by the actual end goal.
(In contrast, something like the Yudkowsky-Hanson debate is not “scoring points instead of winning.” It’s scoring points in the actual relevant game.)
So yeah—I felt like most of your objection was to straw versions of what I was trying to say, and I apologize for the extent to which I set up those strawmen myself (and thus it’s not your fault you found yourself objecting to them). I wasn’t at all claiming that e.g. it’s “pointless to point out economic drivers of arms races” or that it’s “pointless to point out how toxic things evolve.” I was claiming that the response to those claims often shifts the conversation into a pointless subgame where people score futile points that have little-to-no bearing on the original topic, and that indeed this is why people in the Eliezer/Scott/Brent archetype often get tired and just drop out of the discussion at that moment. They recognize that no further progress is likely to be made and they’re not interested in scoring trivial points, so they go off to do something else instead.
Ah, that makes more sense. I agree that we mostly agree. I went back and read the paragraph in question and I see how that part of this happened. I blame pronouns—now that I know who/what everything is referring to it all makes sense. I think if you replaced “those people” with the “those responding” or something like that, this confusion doesn’t happen.
That doesn’t mean this isn’t also my fault, though; I didn’t even see the alternate/actual interpretation, and what you wrote was at worst ambiguous. So I was being somewhat uncharitable there in not looking for an alternate explanation, which seems bad.