Where’s that ‘should’ coming from? (Or are you just explaining the concept rather than endorsing it?)
AdeleneDawner
Karma: 4,600
This was basically my answer—I can’t play as an AI using this strategy, for obvious reasons, but an AI that used its one sentence to give a novel and easily-testable solution to a longstanding social problem of some sort (or an easily-testable principle that suggests one or more novel solutions) would probably get at least a second sentence from me (though not a typed response; that seems to open up a risky channel). Especially if the AI in question didn’t actually have access to a lot of information about human culture or me personally and had to infer that a solution like that would be useful from near-base principles—that’s not proof of Friendliness, but an AI using its one guaranteed communication to do something that has a decent chance of improving the world per our definition without any prompting whatsoever sure looks suspiciously like Friendly to me.
That parses as ‘do not let others conduct experiments’. Probably not what you’re aiming for.
If you have the resources to put something at the south pole, you probably have the resources to scatter a couple dozen stonehenges/pyramids/giant stone heads around; then you don’t have to specify unambiguously, plus redundancy is always good.
I think it’s a failed utopia because it involves the AI modifying the humans’ desires wholesale—the fact that it does so by proxy doesn’t change that it’s doing that.
(This may not be the only reason it’s a failed utopia.)
Actually, it’s my bad—I found your comment via the new-comments list, and didn’t look very closely at its context.
As to your actual question: Being told that someone has evidence of something is, if they’re trustworthy, not just evidence of the thing, but also evidence of what other evidence exists. For example, in my scenario with gwern’s prank, before I’ve seen gwern’s web page, I expect that if I look the mentioned drug up in other places, I’ll also see evidence that it’s awesome. If I actually go look the drug up and find out that it’s no better than placebo in any situation, that’s also surprising new information that changes my beliefs—the same change that seeing gwern’s “April Fools” message would cause, in fact, so when I do see that message, it doesn’t surprise me or change my opinion of the drug.
In your scenario, I trust Merck’s spokesperson much less than I trust gwern, so I don’t end up with nearly so strong of a belief that third parties will agree that the drug is a good one—looking it up and finding out that it has dangerous side effects wouldn’t be surprising, so I should take the chance of that into account to begin with, even if the Merck spokesperson doesn’t mention it. This habit of keeping possible information from third parties (or information that could be discovered in other ways besides talking to third parties, but that the person you’re speaking to wouldn’t tell you even if they’d discovered it) into account when talking to untrustworthy people is the intended lesson of the original post.
Someone claiming that they have evidence for a thing is already evidence for a thing, if you trust them at all, so you can update on that, and then revise that update on how good the evidence turns out to be once you actually get it.
For example, say gwern posts to Discussion that he has a new article on his website about some drug, and he says “tl;dr: It’s pretty awesome” but doesn’t give any details, and when you follow the link to the site you get an error and can’t see the page. gwern’s put together a few articles now about drugs, and they’re usually well-researched and impressive, so it’s pretty safe to assume that if he says a drug is awesome, it is, even if that’s the only evidence you have. This is a belief about both the drug (it is particularly effective at what it’s supposed to do) and what you’ll see when you’re able to access the page about it (there will be many citations of research indicating that the drug is particularly effective).
Now, say a couple days later you get the page to load, and what it actually says is “ha ha, April Fools!”. This is new information, and as such it changes your beliefs—in particular, your belief that the drug is any good goes down substantially, and any future cases of gwern posting about an ‘awesome’ drug don’t make you believe as strongly that the drug is good—the chance that it’s good if there is an actual page about it stays about the same, but now you also have to factor in the chance that it’s another prank—or in other words that the evidence you’ll be given will be much worse than is being claimed.
It’s harder to work out an example of evidence turning out to be much stronger than is claimed, but it works on the same principle—knowing that there’s evidence at all means you can update about as much as you would for an average piece of evidence from that source, and then when you learn that the evidence is much better, you update again based on how much better it is.
What would a ritual that’s just about rationality and more complex than a group recitation of the Litany of Tarsky look like?
non-zero engineering resources
effectively zero
Getting someone to sort a list, even on an ongoing basis, is not functionally useful if there’s nobody to take action on the sorted list.
Actually, I can think of at least one type of situation where this isn’t true, though it seems unwise to explain it in public and in any case it’s still not something you’d want associated with LW, or in fact happening at all in most cases.
Regardless of your intentions, I know of one person who somewhat seriously considered that course of action as a result of the post in question. (The individual in question has been talked out of it in the short term, by way of ‘the negative publicity would hurt more than the money would help’, but my impression is that the chance that they’ll try something like that has still increased, probably permanently.)
Tangent: This basically does that. It doesn’t work perfectly on hpmor, though—it swaps the pronouns just fine, but only some of the names, so you have to not only remember that Harry is now Harriet but also do that without being thrown off by the fact that Hermione is still Hermione but with male pronouns. That’s patchable (eg, eg), but I don’t know that it’d be worth the trouble.
have a much better understanding of
This isn’t what I was talking about.
We don’t need to know the details of what a character is trying to do to see that they’re acting in a goal-directed kind of way, or to infer some general things about the types of goals they’re going after. It’s kind of like—imagine watching a documentary about rubber balls, and there’s a two-minute clip in it about how they’re shipped that shows a truck and gives a vague handwavey map of the transportation network. At the end of the documentary, you’ll know much more about rubber balls than trucks, but that doesn’t make rubber balls more complex or more interesting than trucks are—and you have enough information to know that, even if you can’t say much more about trucks than that they exist and can carry things over long distances.
What I was actually trying to get at is a bit more subtle than even that, though—even the boys who aren’t actively trying to become specific plausible types of narratively-coherent adults are pulled into that by the assumptions of the people surrounding them, whereas the girls don’t just care less individually (of the ones you named, only Padma has anything remotely like a realistic goal for adult-herself, as opposed to a simple set of character traits or a silly fantasy that obviously won’t happen), the people around them don’t take an interest in the issue, either.
I’m not sure I’m quite on the same wavelength here, but what I’m seeing is that the boys are mostly proto-somethings—not just the obvious ones, like Harry being on the road to being a Light Lord or Draco gearing up to be the first reasonably-enlightened Lord Malfoy, but even relatively minor characters like Neville and Ron, you can get a pretty good idea of what kinds of people they’re going to be when they grow up by looking at what they’re like now and extrapolating—and the question of what kinds of people they’ll be is taken seriously, too, in how things are framed and how the other characters react to things. (Harry’s very first interaction with Neville, for example.) The girls don’t really seem to have that same quality of being adults in training; even Hermione’s heroism arc was more about her reputation and ego in the here-and-now than anything I can imagine her continuing past age 16 or so, and it takes a lot more work to imagine any of them having interesting roles as adults—it feels like it really doesn’t matter whether any of them do anything more interesting than being housewives.
I’m pretty sure what MixedNuts is referring to is the phenomenon of nursing home residents being raped by staff/family, not nursing home residents raping people—I don’t actually know how common the former actually is, but when I worked in a nursing home we were specifically trained to be on the lookout for it and told that it is indeed a thing that happens, mostly (according to the training) because the victims are, as MixedNuts mentioned, easy targets—they have limited access to people who they can report abuse to and are often written off as confused, among other issues. (Also, I never saw any instances of catcalling in the four years I worked in a home, and I mostly wouldn’t expect to given the dynamic of seeing the same people all the time—main exception would be someone who got hit particularly hard by the disinhibition effect that dementia sometimes has, in which case catcalling from that person would be the least of your worries and they probably wouldn’t be kept with the general population of residents. (My home sent such people to a facility that specialized in such things, which on one hand sucked but on the other let us keep our non-dangerous dementia patients integrated with the facility, which was pretty awesome for them.))
Which would be a problem if the dynamiter was trying to minimize the number of stones rather than maximizing the amount of blood, I suppose.
“Would be”. As in, “don’t become a stone; if I can’t get blood from you I’m liable to blow you up instead”.
I’m not sure you’re right that we won’t see any increase in autism prevalance—there are still some groups (girls, racial minorities, poor people) that are “underserved” when it comes to diagnosis, so we could see an increase if that changes, even if your underlying theory is correct. Still upvoted, tho.
This seems like a red herring to me. Fine, IRC gives you the same kind of socialization opportunities that most people can get in meatspace, which you can’t get there, and so losing it would be particularly painful. But nobody is suggesting that you should lose it that I’ve seen; all you’re being asked to do is apply the same sorts of filters that people are expected to apply in any public social situation, or as pragmatist said, “any public forum”.
(I guess I appreciate being thought of but it does seem like somewhat undermining your point to tag people who haven’t used the site in checks seven-almost-eight years.)