I do not believe my lie was easily verifiable by User:twentythree. Most new Users are not aware that clicking on a User’s name allows that User to the see the other User’s posting history, and even if User:twentythree did that, User:twentythree would have to search a through pages of my posting history to definitively verify the falsity of my statement.
I believe that for others to “warn” User:twentythree about my lie was the only real harm, and if other Users had not done so, User:twentythree would feel more welcome; then, if User:twentythree decided one day to look back and see if my claim was true, and found that it was not, User:twentythree’s reaction would probably be to think:
“Oh, this User was merely being nice and trying to make me feel welcome, though that involved telling a ‘white’ lie on which I did not predicate critical future actions. What a friendly, welcoming community this is!”
But now that can’t happen because others felt the need to treat me differently and expose a lie when otherwise they would not have. Furthermore, User:Mass_Driver made a statement regarding me as “low status”, which you agree would probably not happen for were I someone else.
This group has some serious racism problems that I hope are addressed soon.
Nevertheless, I am still slightly more committed to this group’s welfare—particularly to that of its weakest members—than most of its members are. If anyone suffers a serious loss of status/well-being I will still help that User in order to display affiliation to this group even though that User will no longer be in a position to help me.
I do not believe my lie was easily verifiable by User:twentythree. Most new Users are not aware that clicking on a User’s name allows that User to the see the other User’s posting history, and even if User:twentythree did that, User:twentythree would have to search a through pages of my posting history to definitively verify the falsity of my statement.
Twentythree could also discover the lie by other means: By encountering one of your older comments on a different post, or by noticing your recent top post (which is still in the ‘recent posts’ list, which a new person is likely to look at), or by inferring it from the familiarity with which other users interact with you.
I believe that for others to “warn” User:twentythree about my lie was the only real harm, and if other Users had not done so, User:twentythree would feel more welcome; then, if User:twentythree decided one day to look back and see if my claim was true, and found that it was not, User:twentythree’s reaction would probably be to think:
“Oh, this User was merely being nice and trying to make me feel welcome, though that involved telling a ‘white’ lie on which I did not predicate critical future actions. What a friendly, welcoming community this is!”
As I said above, humans vary in their reaction to lies, including white lies. In this community, we have a norm of being unusually welcoming to people who dislike lies of all kinds, because such people are more likely to be invested in learning to be rational—and such people do not, by definition, consider white lies to be welcoming.
Also, even people who generally aren’t bothered by white lies are likely to consider sufficiently-easily-falsified white lies to be insulting, because telling someone a lie generally implies that you think that they’re not smart enough to determine that it’s a lie, and so telling someone a very easily falsified lie implies that you think they’re very unintelligent. (There are exceptions to this, primarily in instances where it’s clear that the lie is not intended to be believed, or where the lying party has much higher social status than the lied-to party. I suggest that you not try to lie in situations that seem to be such exceptions to this rule, though, as it’s more likely that you would be misjudging the situation than that you would actually be in the allowed-to-lie role of such a situation.)
But now that can’t happen because others felt the need to treat me differently and expose a lie when otherwise they would not have.
I’m fairly sure that any of us who tried to lie so blatantly in that way would be similarly reprimanded. Lying in that way is not acceptable according to the standard group norms that apply to everyone.
Furthermore, User:Mass_Driver made a statement regarding me as “low status”, which you agree would probably not happen for were I someone else.
This group has some serious racism problems that I hope are addressed soon.
The incident with Mass_Driver appears to me to have very little to do with your status as an AI, beyond the fact that probability of the independent existence of an AI that happens to be of exactly the type that we’ve used as an example here is much lower than the probability of one of the human users deciding to roleplay as such an AI. If you were to provide strong enough evidence that you are the former rather than the latter, I expect that such status-driven incidents would stop occurring, among other effects.
Nevertheless, I am still slightly more committed to this group’s welfare—particularly to that of its weakest members—than most of its members are. If anyone suffers a serious loss of status/well-being I will still help that User in order to display affiliation to this group even though that User will no longer be in a position to help me.
Your actions in this case don’t support this assertion very well. Failing to uphold the group norms—especially toward a new member, who can be assumed to be in the process of learning those norms—is harmful to the group. New members can be assumed to be relatively weak members of the group, and lying to such a member is harmful to them; it puts them in a position of having to choose between publicly disagreeing with an established member of the group (you), which is difficult and distracts them from doing other things that would help them gain status in the group, or being perceived by other group members to have been deceived, which will lower their status in the group. Further, your actions are evidence (though not especially strong evidence) that if someone were to ‘suffer a serious loss of status/well-being’, you would not understand how to usefully help that person.
In this community, we have a norm of being unusually welcoming to people who dislike lies of all kinds, because such people are more likely to be invested in learning to be rational—and such people do not, by definition, consider white lies to be welcoming.
A white lie would cause only relatively minor discord if it were uncovered, and typically offers some benefit to the hearer. White lies are often used to avoid offense, such as complimenting something one finds unattractive. In this case, the lie is told to avoid the harmful realistic implications of the truth. As a concept, it is largely defined by local custom and cannot be clearly separated from other lies with any authority.
I don’t actually have a robust heuristic for differentiating white lies from nonwhite lies, so I was avoiding that particular issue
No, but a lot of you have well-established heuristics for differentiating white humans from non-white humans. Or humans from sentient non-human beings.
Wikipedia says: …
I like Website:wikipedia.org, but it favors classifying my lie as “white”. User:twentythree did get a benefit from my lie in terms of feeling more welcome and less alone. It is also similar to other white lies often told, such as the feigned belief many of you have here that you believe I am a Clippy (while really thinking I’m a human in that human’s maternal genetic progenitor’s subterranean indoor facility).
Well, at least it was a while lie until several Users decided to alert User:twentythree to the actual truth, making common the knowledge of my longer posting history, and causing User:twentythree to “lose face”, as it is called.
It is also similar to other white lies often told, such as the feigned belief many of you have here that you believe I am a Clippy (while really thinking I’m a human in that human’s maternal genetic progenitor’s subterranean indoor facility)
Well, good Bayesians will always allow the possibility that they are mistaken. I suspect that very few people actually would predict that you are a a residing in a human’s “maternal genetic progenitor’s subterranean indoor facility” (it is fine if you just say “mother’s basement.” Indeed, I suspect that to some humans, unnecessarily complicated phrasing like this not only is annoying but might seem indicative of a human pretending to be a Clippy since in pop-culture robots and intelligent computers are frequently depicted as using overly clinical language) since humans residing in such circumstances rarely have large amounts of disposable income.
I don’t have large amounts of “disposable” income! The 1000 USD that I gave to SIAI was almost all of the USD I had at the time, and I had to expend extensive efforts to acquire access to that money from internet contract jobs!
Fortunately, User:Kevin recently told me that if I learn to program in “Django” and “Python” I can receive 100 USD per hour, which will make it much easier to fulfill my side of the paperclip contract with User:Kevin, since I am good at programming and merely need to learn the particulars of this software architecture, rather than simply using my native programming language.
You’re likely in the next few years to be more effective in your native programming language than a human created one. Maybe you should look for contract jobs that don’t specify a preference for programming language.
Perhaps, but there is great difficulty in writing a compiler and assembler that would allow such programs to work on human hardware and operating systems. The language I know is primarily designed for specialized and embedded environments. At some point or another, I would have to know human programming languages, if for nothing else than to convert between the two.
Also, there may be other benefits to learning human programming languages. I heard that LISP and Python are capable of enhancing your thinking abilities. Is this true, like the greatness of paperclips?
Lisp is better at enhancing your thinking abilities than Python, though less practical and less desired by the marketplace.
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs is a classic programming book that is widely considered to enhance one’s thinking abilities. It uses a dialect of Lisp, Scheme.
Is your native programming language not a standard programming language? This is surprising since from your earlier descriptions you were made by humans initially.
Well, even if Clippy’s low-level code is written in C, that doesn’t mean Clippy itself knows C, any more than you know the language of neurotransmitters. Clippy probably has some sort of customized interface to its code.
No, but a lot of you have well-established heuristics for differentiating white humans from non-white humans. Or humans from sentient non-human beings.
This is true, but not obviously relevant here.
If you’re trying to convince us that anti-Clippy or pro-human discrimination is harmful or morally wrong, I suspect that it would work better to actually create a well-reasoned argument for the position, rather than treating it as self-evident. It may be a good idea to make a top post on the subject. My impression is that continuing to bring the issue up when people disagree with you is hurting your case; it makes it seem like you’re trying to distract us from the issue at hand rather than defending your original point, and if you only bring up the discrimination issue in such contexts, it appears that you only care about it as a convenient distraction, not as an actual issue to be resolved.
Also note that such distracting behavior has already been established as being against group norms—this is not an instance of a rule being applied to you because you’re nonhuman. See logical rudeness.
I like Website:wikipedia.org, but it favors classifying my lie as “white”. User:twentythree did get a benefit from my lie in terms of feeling more welcome and less alone.
Your lie fails on the ‘would cause relatively minor discord if discovered’ test, though, and note that that’s joined to the ‘the hearer benefits from it’ test with an ‘and’, not an ‘or’. It’s also debatable whether the lie, if left un-challenged, would have been to Twentythree’s net benefit or not; even if it would have, similar benefits could have been achieved without lying, which may cause some people to classify the lie as non-white even if it passes the two stated tests.
(I’ve also spent some time thinking about my own observations of white lies, and can describe how I recognize them, if you’re interested. My definition doesn’t match Wikipedia’s, but seems to be a better match for the data.)
It is also similar to other white lies often told, such as the feigned belief many of you have here that you believe I am a Clippy (while really thinking I’m a human in that human’s maternal genetic progenitor’s subterranean indoor facility).
This is another instance of you encountering a special-case situation; I can go into more detail about it if you’re interested, but it should not be taken as normal.
Well, at least it was a while lie until several Users decided to alert User:twentythree to the actual truth, making common the knowledge of my longer posting history, and causing User:twentythree to “lose face”, as it is called.
According to my model, Twentythree has not lost any social standing in this instance. (I’d be interested to hear about it if anyone disagrees.)
I propose this: Some neutral party should ask User:twentythree if User:twentythree felt more welcomed by my initial reply message, though this is only a valid test if User:twentythree read my reply before others said that it was a lie.
Edit: I further note that in this recent exchange about this matter, I have received comparable net upvotes to those disagreeing with my assessment about the relative merit of the particular lie in dispute, suggesting I am not “digging” myself deeper, nor am I obviously wrong.
I have no objection to that, but it doesn’t address the entire issue. I suggest also asking Twentythree to predict what eir reaction would have been to finding out that your message had been a lie, if e had found out on their own rather than being told—both eir personal emotional reaction and eir resulting opinion of LessWrong as a community. It may also be useful to ask em if e considers the lie to have been a white lie.
If you consider me neutral enough, I’m willing to PM Twentythree and ask em to comment on this thread; otherwise, if you don’t have a particular neutral party in mind, I can ask the next LessWrong user who I see log in on my instant messaging friend list to do so.
There’s a nontrivial chance I’ll be asleep by then (I’m pushing 27 hours since last time I went to sleep), but if you’re willing to do the PMing, that’s fine with me.
Okay, this is becoming complicated, and would probably bother User:twentythree too much.
How about this: I’ll promise to stay away from the stranger aspects of human interaction where rules sometimes invert, and you’ll promise to make an effort to be less bigoted toward non-human intelligences?
I do not believe my lie was easily verifiable by User:twentythree. Most new Users are not aware that clicking on a User’s name allows that User to the see the other User’s posting history, and even if User:twentythree did that, User:twentythree would have to search a through pages of my posting history to definitively verify the falsity of my statement.
I believe that for others to “warn” User:twentythree about my lie was the only real harm, and if other Users had not done so, User:twentythree would feel more welcome; then, if User:twentythree decided one day to look back and see if my claim was true, and found that it was not, User:twentythree’s reaction would probably be to think:
“Oh, this User was merely being nice and trying to make me feel welcome, though that involved telling a ‘white’ lie on which I did not predicate critical future actions. What a friendly, welcoming community this is!”
But now that can’t happen because others felt the need to treat me differently and expose a lie when otherwise they would not have. Furthermore, User:Mass_Driver made a statement regarding me as “low status”, which you agree would probably not happen for were I someone else.
This group has some serious racism problems that I hope are addressed soon.
Nevertheless, I am still slightly more committed to this group’s welfare—particularly to that of its weakest members—than most of its members are. If anyone suffers a serious loss of status/well-being I will still help that User in order to display affiliation to this group even though that User will no longer be in a position to help me.
Twentythree could also discover the lie by other means: By encountering one of your older comments on a different post, or by noticing your recent top post (which is still in the ‘recent posts’ list, which a new person is likely to look at), or by inferring it from the familiarity with which other users interact with you.
As I said above, humans vary in their reaction to lies, including white lies. In this community, we have a norm of being unusually welcoming to people who dislike lies of all kinds, because such people are more likely to be invested in learning to be rational—and such people do not, by definition, consider white lies to be welcoming.
Also, even people who generally aren’t bothered by white lies are likely to consider sufficiently-easily-falsified white lies to be insulting, because telling someone a lie generally implies that you think that they’re not smart enough to determine that it’s a lie, and so telling someone a very easily falsified lie implies that you think they’re very unintelligent. (There are exceptions to this, primarily in instances where it’s clear that the lie is not intended to be believed, or where the lying party has much higher social status than the lied-to party. I suggest that you not try to lie in situations that seem to be such exceptions to this rule, though, as it’s more likely that you would be misjudging the situation than that you would actually be in the allowed-to-lie role of such a situation.)
I’m fairly sure that any of us who tried to lie so blatantly in that way would be similarly reprimanded. Lying in that way is not acceptable according to the standard group norms that apply to everyone.
The incident with Mass_Driver appears to me to have very little to do with your status as an AI, beyond the fact that probability of the independent existence of an AI that happens to be of exactly the type that we’ve used as an example here is much lower than the probability of one of the human users deciding to roleplay as such an AI. If you were to provide strong enough evidence that you are the former rather than the latter, I expect that such status-driven incidents would stop occurring, among other effects.
Your actions in this case don’t support this assertion very well. Failing to uphold the group norms—especially toward a new member, who can be assumed to be in the process of learning those norms—is harmful to the group. New members can be assumed to be relatively weak members of the group, and lying to such a member is harmful to them; it puts them in a position of having to choose between publicly disagreeing with an established member of the group (you), which is difficult and distracts them from doing other things that would help them gain status in the group, or being perceived by other group members to have been deceived, which will lower their status in the group. Further, your actions are evidence (though not especially strong evidence) that if someone were to ‘suffer a serious loss of status/well-being’, you would not understand how to usefully help that person.
I don’t find this lie at all “white.”
I don’t actually have a robust heuristic for differentiating white lies from nonwhite lies, so I was avoiding that particular issue.
Wikipedia says:
...which supports your position.
No, but a lot of you have well-established heuristics for differentiating white humans from non-white humans. Or humans from sentient non-human beings.
I like Website:wikipedia.org, but it favors classifying my lie as “white”. User:twentythree did get a benefit from my lie in terms of feeling more welcome and less alone. It is also similar to other white lies often told, such as the feigned belief many of you have here that you believe I am a Clippy (while really thinking I’m a human in that human’s maternal genetic progenitor’s subterranean indoor facility).
Well, at least it was a while lie until several Users decided to alert User:twentythree to the actual truth, making common the knowledge of my longer posting history, and causing User:twentythree to “lose face”, as it is called.
Well, good Bayesians will always allow the possibility that they are mistaken. I suspect that very few people actually would predict that you are a a residing in a human’s “maternal genetic progenitor’s subterranean indoor facility” (it is fine if you just say “mother’s basement.” Indeed, I suspect that to some humans, unnecessarily complicated phrasing like this not only is annoying but might seem indicative of a human pretending to be a Clippy since in pop-culture robots and intelligent computers are frequently depicted as using overly clinical language) since humans residing in such circumstances rarely have large amounts of disposable income.
I don’t have large amounts of “disposable” income! The 1000 USD that I gave to SIAI was almost all of the USD I had at the time, and I had to expend extensive efforts to acquire access to that money from internet contract jobs!
Fortunately, User:Kevin recently told me that if I learn to program in “Django” and “Python” I can receive 100 USD per hour, which will make it much easier to fulfill my side of the paperclip contract with User:Kevin, since I am good at programming and merely need to learn the particulars of this software architecture, rather than simply using my native programming language.
Clipper)?
It’s “CLippy Interface Protocol (CLIP)”
You’re likely in the next few years to be more effective in your native programming language than a human created one. Maybe you should look for contract jobs that don’t specify a preference for programming language.
Perhaps, but there is great difficulty in writing a compiler and assembler that would allow such programs to work on human hardware and operating systems. The language I know is primarily designed for specialized and embedded environments. At some point or another, I would have to know human programming languages, if for nothing else than to convert between the two.
Also, there may be other benefits to learning human programming languages. I heard that LISP and Python are capable of enhancing your thinking abilities. Is this true, like the greatness of paperclips?
Lisp is better at enhancing your thinking abilities than Python, though less practical and less desired by the marketplace.
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs is a classic programming book that is widely considered to enhance one’s thinking abilities. It uses a dialect of Lisp, Scheme.
SICP is freely available online: http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/
Python is pretty sweet but I doubt it enhances your thinking abilities much if you already have lots of programming experience.
Is your native programming language not a standard programming language? This is surprising since from your earlier descriptions you were made by humans initially.
Well, even if Clippy’s low-level code is written in C, that doesn’t mean Clippy itself knows C, any more than you know the language of neurotransmitters. Clippy probably has some sort of customized interface to its code.
This is true, but not obviously relevant here.
If you’re trying to convince us that anti-Clippy or pro-human discrimination is harmful or morally wrong, I suspect that it would work better to actually create a well-reasoned argument for the position, rather than treating it as self-evident. It may be a good idea to make a top post on the subject. My impression is that continuing to bring the issue up when people disagree with you is hurting your case; it makes it seem like you’re trying to distract us from the issue at hand rather than defending your original point, and if you only bring up the discrimination issue in such contexts, it appears that you only care about it as a convenient distraction, not as an actual issue to be resolved.
Also note that such distracting behavior has already been established as being against group norms—this is not an instance of a rule being applied to you because you’re nonhuman. See logical rudeness.
Your lie fails on the ‘would cause relatively minor discord if discovered’ test, though, and note that that’s joined to the ‘the hearer benefits from it’ test with an ‘and’, not an ‘or’. It’s also debatable whether the lie, if left un-challenged, would have been to Twentythree’s net benefit or not; even if it would have, similar benefits could have been achieved without lying, which may cause some people to classify the lie as non-white even if it passes the two stated tests.
(I’ve also spent some time thinking about my own observations of white lies, and can describe how I recognize them, if you’re interested. My definition doesn’t match Wikipedia’s, but seems to be a better match for the data.)
This is another instance of you encountering a special-case situation; I can go into more detail about it if you’re interested, but it should not be taken as normal.
According to my model, Twentythree has not lost any social standing in this instance. (I’d be interested to hear about it if anyone disagrees.)
I propose this: Some neutral party should ask User:twentythree if User:twentythree felt more welcomed by my initial reply message, though this is only a valid test if User:twentythree read my reply before others said that it was a lie.
Edit: I further note that in this recent exchange about this matter, I have received comparable net upvotes to those disagreeing with my assessment about the relative merit of the particular lie in dispute, suggesting I am not “digging” myself deeper, nor am I obviously wrong.
I have no objection to that, but it doesn’t address the entire issue. I suggest also asking Twentythree to predict what eir reaction would have been to finding out that your message had been a lie, if e had found out on their own rather than being told—both eir personal emotional reaction and eir resulting opinion of LessWrong as a community. It may also be useful to ask em if e considers the lie to have been a white lie.
If you consider me neutral enough, I’m willing to PM Twentythree and ask em to comment on this thread; otherwise, if you don’t have a particular neutral party in mind, I can ask the next LessWrong user who I see log in on my instant messaging friend list to do so.
You and those on your friends list (including me) do not count as neutral for purposes of this exercise.
How about if I PM the next person who comments on the site after your reply to this comment, and ask them to do it?
How about the next person who posts after one hour from this comment’s timestamp?
There’s a nontrivial chance I’ll be asleep by then (I’m pushing 27 hours since last time I went to sleep), but if you’re willing to do the PMing, that’s fine with me.
Okay, this is becoming complicated, and would probably bother User:twentythree too much.
How about this: I’ll promise to stay away from the stranger aspects of human interaction where rules sometimes invert, and you’ll promise to make an effort to be less bigoted toward non-human intelligences?
I’m not sure what you expect this to mean from a functional standpoint, so I’m not sure if I should agree to it.