I mean, I’m pretty sure I knew what caused it (this thread or this market), and I guess I knew from Zack’s stuff that rationalist cultism had gotten pretty far, but I still hadn’t expected that something this small would lead to being blocked.
FYI: I have a low bar for blocking people who have according-to-me bad, overconfident, takes about probability theory, in particular. For whatever reason, I find people making claims about that topic, in particular, really frustrating. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The block isn’t meant as a punishment, just a “I get to curate my online experience however I want.”
I think blocks are pretty irrelevant unless one conditions on the particular details of the situation. In this case I think the messages I were sharing are very important. If you think my messages are instead unimportant or outright wrong, then I understand why you would find the block less interesting, but in that case I don’t think we can meaningfully discuss it without knowing why you disagree with the messages.
I’m not particularly interested in discussing it in depth. I’m more like giving you a data-point in favor of not taking the block personally, or particularly reading into it.
(But yeah, “I think these messages are very important”, is likely to trigger my personal “bad, overconfident takes about proabrbility theory” neurosis.)
This is awkwardly armchair, but… my impression of Eliezer includes him being just so tired, both specifically from having sacrificed his present energy in the past while pushing to rectify the path of AI development (by his own model thereof, of course!) and maybe for broader zeitgeist reasons that are hard for me to describe. As a result, I expect him to have entered into the natural pattern of having a very low threshold for handing out blocks on Twitter, both because he’s beset by a large amount of sneering and crankage in his particular position and because the platform easily becomes a sinkhole in cognitive/experiential ways that are hard for me to describe but are greatly intertwined with the aforementioned zeitgeist tiredness.
Something like: when people run heavily out of certain kinds of slack for dealing with The Other, they reach a kind of contextual-but-bleed-prone scarcity-based closed-mindedness of necessity, something that both looks and can become “cultish” but where reaching for that adjective first is misleading about the structure around it. I haven’t succeeded in extracting a more legible model of this, and I bet my perception is still skew to the reality, but I’m pretty sure it reflects something important that one of the major variables I keep in my head around how to interpret people is “how Twitterized they are”, and Eliezer’s current output there fits the pattern pretty well.
I disagree with the sibling thread about this kind of post being “low cost”, BTW; I think adding salience to “who blocked whom” types of considerations can be subtly very costly. The main reason I’m not redacting my own whole comment on those same grounds is that I’ve wound up branching to something that I guess to be more broadly important: there’s dangerously misaligned social software and patterns of interaction right nearby due to how much of The Discussion winds up being on Twitter, and keeping a set of cognitive shielding for effects emanating from that seems prudent.
I disagree with the sibling thread about this kind of post being “low cost”, BTW; I think adding salience to “who blocked whom” types of considerations can be subtly very costly.
I agree publicizing blocks has costs, but so does a strong advocate of something with a pattern of blocking critics. People publicly announcing “Bob blocked me” is often the only way to find out if Bob has such a pattern.
I do think it was ridiculous to call this cultish. Tuning out critics can be evidence of several kinds of problems, but not particularly that one.
I agree that it is ridiculous to call this cultish if this was the only evidence, but we’ve got other lines of evidence pointing towards cultishness, so I’m making a claim of attribution more so than a claim of evidence.
Blocking a lot isn’t necessarily bad or unproductive… but in this case it’s practically certain blocking thousands will eventually lead to blocking someone genuinely more correct/competent/intelligent/experienced/etc… than himself, due to sheer probability. (Since even a ‘sneering’ crank is far from literal random noise.)
Which wouldn’t matter at all for someone just messing around for fun, who can just treat X as a text-heavy entertainment system. But it does matter somewhat for anyone trying to do something meaningful and/or accomplish certain goals.
In short, blocking does have some, variable, credibility cost. Ranging from near zero to quite a lot, depending on who the blockee is.
Eliezer Yudkowsky being tired isn’t an unrelated accident though. Bayesian decision theory in general intrinsically causes fatigue by relying on people to use their own actions to move outcomes instead of getting leverage from destiny/higher powers, which matches what you say about him having sacrificed his present energy for this.
Similarly, “being Twitterized” is just about stewing in garbage and cursed information, such that one is forced to filter extremely aggressively, but blocking high-quality information sources accelerates the Twitterization by changing the ratio of blessed to garbage/cursed information.
On the contrary, I think raising salience of such discussions helps clear up the “informational food chain”, allowing us to map out where there are underused opportunities and toxic accumulation.
It seems likely to me that Eliezer blocked you because he has concluded that you are a low-quality information source, no longer worth the effort of engaging with.
I agree that this is likely Eliezer’s mental state. I think this belief is false, but for someone who thinks it’s true, there’s of course no problem here.
Working on writing stuff but it’s not developed enough yet. To begin with you can read my Linear Diffusion of Sparse Lognormals sequence, but it’s not really oriented towards practical applications.
Meta-point: your communication pattern fits with following pattern:
Crackpot: <controversial statement>
Person: this statement is false, for such-n-such reasons
Crackpot: do you understand that this is trivially true because of <reasons that are hard to connect with topic>
Person: no, I don’t.
Crackpot: <responds with link to giant blogpost filled with esoteric language and vague theory>
Person: I’m not reading this crackpottery, which looks and smells like crackpottery.
The reason why smart people find themselves in this pattern is because they expect short inferential distances, i.e., they see their argumentation not like vague esoteric crackpottery, but like a set of very clear statements and fail to put themselves in shoes of people who are going to read this, and they especially fail to account for fact that readers already distrust them because they started conversation with <controversial statement>.
On object level, as stated, you are wrong. Observing heuristic failing should decrease your confidence ih heuristic. You can argue that your update should be small, due to, say, measurement errors or strong priors, but direction of update should be strictly down.
I do think if that thread got you blocked then that’s sad (my guess is I think you were more right than Eliezer, though I haven’t read the full sequence that you linked to).
I do think Twitter blocks don’t mean very much. I think it’s approximately zero evidence of “cultism” or whatever. Most people with many followers on Twitter seem to need to have a hair trigger for blocking, or at least feel like they need to, in order to not constantly have terrible experiences.
Most people with many followers on Twitter seem to need to have a hair trigger for blocking, or at least feel like they need to, in order to not constantly have terrible experiences.
I think that this is a point that people not on social media that much don’t get: You need to be very quick to block because otherwise you will not have good experiences on the site otherwise.
I think our instincts may be misleading here, because internet works differently from real life.
In real life, not interacting with someone is the default. Unless you have some kind of relationship with someone, people have no obligation to call you or meet you. And if I call someone on the phone just to say “dude, I disagree with your theory”, I would expect that person to hang up… and maybe say “sorry, I’m busy” before hanging up, if they are extra polite. The interactions are mutually agreed, and you have no right to complain when the other party decides to not give you the time. (And if you keep insisting… that’s what the restraining orders are for.)
On internet, once you sign up to e.g. Twitter, the default is that anyone can talk to you, and if you are not interested in reading the texts they send you, you need to block them. As far as I know, there are no options in the middle between “block” and “don’t block”. (Nothing like “only let them talk to me when it is important” or “only let them talk to me on Tuesdays between 3 PM and 5 PM”.) And if you are a famous person, I guess you need to keep blocking left and right, otherwise you would drown in the text—presumably you don’t want to spend 24 hours a day sifting through Twitter messages, and you want to get the ones you actively want, which requires you to aggressively filter out everything else.
So getting blocked is not an equivalent of getting a restraining order, but more like an equivalent of the other person no longer paying attention to you. Which most people would not interpret as evidence of cultism.
This is the key to understanding why I think it’s more okay to block than a lot of other people think, and the fact that the default is anyone can talk to you means you get way too much crap without blocking lots of people.
I think whether it’s cultism depends on what model one has of how cults work. I don’t know much about it so I might be totally ignorant, but I think a major factor is just engaging in a futile, draining activity powered by popularity, so one needs to carefully preserve resources and maintain appearances.
Huh, I guess you mean cult in a broader “polarization” sense? Like, where are the democratic and republican parties on the cultishness scale in your model?
Huh, I guess you mean cult in a broader “polarization” sense?
Idk, my main point of reference is I recently read is Some Desperate Glory, which was about a cult of terrorists. Polarization generally implies a balanced conflict which isn’t really futile.
Like, where are the democratic and republican parties on the cultishness scale in your model?
I don’t know much about how they work internally. Democracy is a weird systen because you’ve got the adversarial thing that would make it less futile but also the popularity contest thing that would make it more narcissistic and thus more cultish.
in order to not constantly have terrible experiences.
This explanation sounds like what they’d say. I think the real reason this is common is more a status thing: it’s a pretty standard strategy for people to try to gain status by “dunking” on tweets by more famous people, and blocking them is the standard countermeasure.
The more prominent you are, the more people want to talk with you, and the less time you have to talk with them. You have to shut them out the moment the cost is no longer worth paying.
I did not say that simply blocking me warrants an accusation of cultism. I highlighted the fact that I had been blocked and the context in which it occurred, and then brought up other angles which evidenced cultism. If you think my views are pathetic and aren’t the least bit alarmed by them being blocked, then feel free to feel that way, but I suspect there are at least some people here who’d like to keep track of how the rationalist isolation is progressing and who see merit in my positions.
We know what the root cause is, you don’t have to act like it’s totally mysterious. So the question is, was this root cause (pushback against Eliezer’s Bayesianism):
An important insight that Eliezer was missing (alarming!)
Worthless pedantry that he might as well block (nbd/pathetic)
Antisocial trolling that ought to be gotten rid of (reassuring that he blocked)
… or something else
Regardless of which of these is the true one, it seems informative to highlight for anyone who is keeping track of what is happening around me. And if the first one is the true one, it seems like people who are keeping track of what is happening around Eliezer would also want to know it.
Especially since it only takes a very brief moment to post and link about getting blocked. Low cost action, potentially high reward.
MIRI full-time employed many critics of bayesianism for 5+ years and MIRI researchers themselves argued most of the points you made in these arguments. It is obviously not the case that critiquing bayesianism is the reason why you got blocked.
Idk, maybe you’ve got a point, but Eliezer was very quick to insist what I said was not the mainstream view and disengage. And MIRI was full of internal distrust. I don’t know enough of the situation to know if this explains it, but it seems plausible to me that the way MIRI kept stuff together was by insisting on a Bayesian approach, and that some generators of internal dissent was from people whose intuition aligned more with non-Bayesian approach.
For that matter, an important split in rationalism is MIRI/CFAR vs the Vassarites, and while I wouldn’t really say the Vassarites formed a major inspiration for LDSL, after coming up with LDSL I’ve totally reevaluated my interpretation of that conflict as being about MIRI/CFAR using a Bayesian approach and the Vassarites using an LDSL approach. (Not absolutely of course, everyone has a mixture of both, but in terms of relative differences.)
I was surprised to see this on twitter:
I mean, I’m pretty sure I knew what caused it (this thread or this market), and I guess I knew from Zack’s stuff that rationalist cultism had gotten pretty far, but I still hadn’t expected that something this small would lead to being blocked.
FYI: I have a low bar for blocking people who have according-to-me bad, overconfident, takes about probability theory, in particular. For whatever reason, I find people making claims about that topic, in particular, really frustrating. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The block isn’t meant as a punishment, just a “I get to curate my online experience however I want.”
I think blocks are pretty irrelevant unless one conditions on the particular details of the situation. In this case I think the messages I were sharing are very important. If you think my messages are instead unimportant or outright wrong, then I understand why you would find the block less interesting, but in that case I don’t think we can meaningfully discuss it without knowing why you disagree with the messages.
I’m not particularly interested in discussing it in depth. I’m more like giving you a data-point in favor of not taking the block personally, or particularly reading into it.
(But yeah, “I think these messages are very important”, is likely to trigger my personal “bad, overconfident takes about proabrbility theory” neurosis.)
This is awkwardly armchair, but… my impression of Eliezer includes him being just so tired, both specifically from having sacrificed his present energy in the past while pushing to rectify the path of AI development (by his own model thereof, of course!) and maybe for broader zeitgeist reasons that are hard for me to describe. As a result, I expect him to have entered into the natural pattern of having a very low threshold for handing out blocks on Twitter, both because he’s beset by a large amount of sneering and crankage in his particular position and because the platform easily becomes a sinkhole in cognitive/experiential ways that are hard for me to describe but are greatly intertwined with the aforementioned zeitgeist tiredness.
Something like: when people run heavily out of certain kinds of slack for dealing with The Other, they reach a kind of contextual-but-bleed-prone scarcity-based closed-mindedness of necessity, something that both looks and can become “cultish” but where reaching for that adjective first is misleading about the structure around it. I haven’t succeeded in extracting a more legible model of this, and I bet my perception is still skew to the reality, but I’m pretty sure it reflects something important that one of the major variables I keep in my head around how to interpret people is “how Twitterized they are”, and Eliezer’s current output there fits the pattern pretty well.
I disagree with the sibling thread about this kind of post being “low cost”, BTW; I think adding salience to “who blocked whom” types of considerations can be subtly very costly. The main reason I’m not redacting my own whole comment on those same grounds is that I’ve wound up branching to something that I guess to be more broadly important: there’s dangerously misaligned social software and patterns of interaction right nearby due to how much of The Discussion winds up being on Twitter, and keeping a set of cognitive shielding for effects emanating from that seems prudent.
I agree publicizing blocks has costs, but so does a strong advocate of something with a pattern of blocking critics. People publicly announcing “Bob blocked me” is often the only way to find out if Bob has such a pattern.
I do think it was ridiculous to call this cultish. Tuning out critics can be evidence of several kinds of problems, but not particularly that one.
I agree that it is ridiculous to call this cultish if this was the only evidence, but we’ve got other lines of evidence pointing towards cultishness, so I’m making a claim of attribution more so than a claim of evidence.
Blocking a lot isn’t necessarily bad or unproductive… but in this case it’s practically certain blocking thousands will eventually lead to blocking someone genuinely more correct/competent/intelligent/experienced/etc… than himself, due to sheer probability. (Since even a ‘sneering’ crank is far from literal random noise.)
Which wouldn’t matter at all for someone just messing around for fun, who can just treat X as a text-heavy entertainment system. But it does matter somewhat for anyone trying to do something meaningful and/or accomplish certain goals.
In short, blocking does have some, variable, credibility cost. Ranging from near zero to quite a lot, depending on who the blockee is.
Eliezer Yudkowsky being tired isn’t an unrelated accident though. Bayesian decision theory in general intrinsically causes fatigue by relying on people to use their own actions to move outcomes instead of getting leverage from destiny/higher powers, which matches what you say about him having sacrificed his present energy for this.
Similarly, “being Twitterized” is just about stewing in garbage and cursed information, such that one is forced to filter extremely aggressively, but blocking high-quality information sources accelerates the Twitterization by changing the ratio of blessed to garbage/cursed information.
On the contrary, I think raising salience of such discussions helps clear up the “informational food chain”, allowing us to map out where there are underused opportunities and toxic accumulation.
It seems likely to me that Eliezer blocked you because he has concluded that you are a low-quality information source, no longer worth the effort of engaging with.
I agree that this is likely Eliezer’s mental state. I think this belief is false, but for someone who thinks it’s true, there’s of course no problem here.
Please say more about this. Where can I get some?
Working on writing stuff but it’s not developed enough yet. To begin with you can read my Linear Diffusion of Sparse Lognormals sequence, but it’s not really oriented towards practical applications.
Meta-point: your communication pattern fits with following pattern:
The reason why smart people find themselves in this pattern is because they expect short inferential distances, i.e., they see their argumentation not like vague esoteric crackpottery, but like a set of very clear statements and fail to put themselves in shoes of people who are going to read this, and they especially fail to account for fact that readers already distrust them because they started conversation with <controversial statement>.
On object level, as stated, you are wrong. Observing heuristic failing should decrease your confidence ih heuristic. You can argue that your update should be small, due to, say, measurement errors or strong priors, but direction of update should be strictly down.
Can you fill in a particular example of me engaging in that pattern so we can address it in the concrete rather than in the abstract?
I do think if that thread got you blocked then that’s sad (my guess is I think you were more right than Eliezer, though I haven’t read the full sequence that you linked to).
I do think Twitter blocks don’t mean very much. I think it’s approximately zero evidence of “cultism” or whatever. Most people with many followers on Twitter seem to need to have a hair trigger for blocking, or at least feel like they need to, in order to not constantly have terrible experiences.
This is a very useful point:
I think that this is a point that people not on social media that much don’t get: You need to be very quick to block because otherwise you will not have good experiences on the site otherwise.
I think our instincts may be misleading here, because internet works differently from real life.
In real life, not interacting with someone is the default. Unless you have some kind of relationship with someone, people have no obligation to call you or meet you. And if I call someone on the phone just to say “dude, I disagree with your theory”, I would expect that person to hang up… and maybe say “sorry, I’m busy” before hanging up, if they are extra polite. The interactions are mutually agreed, and you have no right to complain when the other party decides to not give you the time. (And if you keep insisting… that’s what the restraining orders are for.)
On internet, once you sign up to e.g. Twitter, the default is that anyone can talk to you, and if you are not interested in reading the texts they send you, you need to block them. As far as I know, there are no options in the middle between “block” and “don’t block”. (Nothing like “only let them talk to me when it is important” or “only let them talk to me on Tuesdays between 3 PM and 5 PM”.) And if you are a famous person, I guess you need to keep blocking left and right, otherwise you would drown in the text—presumably you don’t want to spend 24 hours a day sifting through Twitter messages, and you want to get the ones you actively want, which requires you to aggressively filter out everything else.
So getting blocked is not an equivalent of getting a restraining order, but more like an equivalent of the other person no longer paying attention to you. Which most people would not interpret as evidence of cultism.
This is the key to understanding why I think it’s more okay to block than a lot of other people think, and the fact that the default is anyone can talk to you means you get way too much crap without blocking lots of people.
I think whether it’s cultism depends on what model one has of how cults work. I don’t know much about it so I might be totally ignorant, but I think a major factor is just engaging in a futile, draining activity powered by popularity, so one needs to carefully preserve resources and maintain appearances.
Huh, I guess you mean cult in a broader “polarization” sense? Like, where are the democratic and republican parties on the cultishness scale in your model?
Idk, my main point of reference is I recently read is Some Desperate Glory, which was about a cult of terrorists. Polarization generally implies a balanced conflict which isn’t really futile.
I don’t know much about how they work internally. Democracy is a weird systen because you’ve got the adversarial thing that would make it less futile but also the popularity contest thing that would make it more narcissistic and thus more cultish.
This explanation sounds like what they’d say. I think the real reason this is common is more a status thing: it’s a pretty standard strategy for people to try to gain status by “dunking” on tweets by more famous people, and blocking them is the standard countermeasure.
The dunking seems like constant terrible experiences.
The more prominent you are, the more people want to talk with you, and the less time you have to talk with them. You have to shut them out the moment the cost is no longer worth paying.
People should feel free to liberally block one another on social media. Being blocked is not enough to warrant an accusation of cultism.
I did not say that simply blocking me warrants an accusation of cultism. I highlighted the fact that I had been blocked and the context in which it occurred, and then brought up other angles which evidenced cultism. If you think my views are pathetic and aren’t the least bit alarmed by them being blocked, then feel free to feel that way, but I suspect there are at least some people here who’d like to keep track of how the rationalist isolation is progressing and who see merit in my positions.
Again, people block one another on social media for any number of reasons. That just doesn’t warrant feeling alarmed or like your views are pathetic.
We know what the root cause is, you don’t have to act like it’s totally mysterious. So the question is, was this root cause (pushback against Eliezer’s Bayesianism):
An important insight that Eliezer was missing (alarming!)
Worthless pedantry that he might as well block (nbd/pathetic)
Antisocial trolling that ought to be gotten rid of (reassuring that he blocked)
… or something else
Regardless of which of these is the true one, it seems informative to highlight for anyone who is keeping track of what is happening around me. And if the first one is the true one, it seems like people who are keeping track of what is happening around Eliezer would also want to know it.
Especially since it only takes a very brief moment to post and link about getting blocked. Low cost action, potentially high reward.
MIRI full-time employed many critics of bayesianism for 5+ years and MIRI researchers themselves argued most of the points you made in these arguments. It is obviously not the case that critiquing bayesianism is the reason why you got blocked.
Idk, maybe you’ve got a point, but Eliezer was very quick to insist what I said was not the mainstream view and disengage. And MIRI was full of internal distrust. I don’t know enough of the situation to know if this explains it, but it seems plausible to me that the way MIRI kept stuff together was by insisting on a Bayesian approach, and that some generators of internal dissent was from people whose intuition aligned more with non-Bayesian approach.
For that matter, an important split in rationalism is MIRI/CFAR vs the Vassarites, and while I wouldn’t really say the Vassarites formed a major inspiration for LDSL, after coming up with LDSL I’ve totally reevaluated my interpretation of that conflict as being about MIRI/CFAR using a Bayesian approach and the Vassarites using an LDSL approach. (Not absolutely of course, everyone has a mixture of both, but in terms of relative differences.)