I’m an admin of LessWrong. Here are a few things about me.
I generally feel more hopeful about a situation when I understand it better.
I have signed no contracts nor made any agreements whose existence I cannot mention.
I believe it is good take responsibility for accurately and honestly informing people of what you believe in all conversations; and also good to cultivate an active recklessness for the social consequences of doing so.
Yeah, I recently removed it from the user menu because it was taking up space and getting ~no clicks. Generally I think question-posts were a miss as a feature. While I don’t expect us to deprecate it, it gets extremely little use. (Similarly dialogues were getting ~no clicks, so that’s now something you do from the user page of the person you wish to dialogue with.)
At my CFAR Workshop in 2015, probably the most valuable bit was meeting Oliver Habryka at the afterparty and talking under the stars for an hour or two, our working relationship and friendship grew immediately out of that meeting.
The conversation went pretty deep into x-risk and rationality, but it was more that it created a connection around that sort of thinking. I do think that a bunch of the value I get from connecting with people at events like these is that then I later feel comfortable sharing them on google docs or sending them emails for feedback on ideas.
(I made this a question post, which seemed natural, but I/you can change it back if you disprefer.)
These are fine points about differing values and actions, but I do want to defend that Eliezer is explicitly using the concept of dignity in the standard way (i.e. acting in a way worthy of respect). There is a kind of dignity in choosing to end your life when you are well and happy rather than when you are broken and in pain, which is not the same as maximizing log odds of survival, but nonetheless Eliezer’s essay is explicitly claiming that the latter is what it means for a civilization to act with dignity.
“Wait, dignity points?” you ask. “What are those? In what units are they measured, exactly?”
And to this I reply: Obviously, the measuring units of dignity are over humanity’s log odds of survival—the graph on which the logistic success curve is a straight line. A project that doubles humanity’s chance of survival from 0% to 0% is helping humanity die with one additional information-theoretic bit of dignity.
Gotcha. I think this text that you wrote is really ambiguous:
I mostly don’t really know what this means? I think it means “if I told someone that I did X, I would feel a bit embarassed.”
It’s ambiguous between you not having an explicit understanding of what the meaning of the words are, versus you not understanding what the person you’re speaking with is intending to convey (and the first meaning is IMO the more natural one).
I think having good norms around tabooing words is tricky. In this case, my sense is that some people are using the word in a relatively meaningless way that is actively unhelpful, but also that some people are using the word to mean something quite important, and it’s not great to remove the word for the second group. I think if you want to move toward people not using the word, you will get more buy-in if you include a proposed alternative for the second group, and in the absence there should mostly be a move toward “regularly ask someone to taboo the word” so that you can distinguish between the two kinds of uses.
When/how did you learn it? (Inasmuch as your phrasing is not entirely metaphorical.)
The following quote from Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince often runs through my mind, and matches up with what Eliezer is advising us to collectively do in that essay.
“It was, he thought, the difference between being dragged into the arena to face a battle to the death and walking into the arena with your head held high. Some people, perhaps, would say that there was little to choose between the two ways, but Dumbledore knew—and so do I, thought Harry, with a rush of fierce pride, and so did my parents—that there was all the difference in the world.”
...?
Death with Dignity is straightforwardly using the word dignity in line with its definition (and thus in line with the explanation I gave), so if you think that’s the usage Mark is referring to then you should agree with the position that dignity is a word that is being consistently used to mean “the state or quality of being worthy of honor or respect”.
It seems to me that you have a concept-shaped hole, where people are constantly talking about an idea you don’t get, and you have made a map-territory error in believing that they also do not have a referent here for the word. In general if a word has been in use for 100s of years, I think your prior should be that there is a referent there — I actually just googled it and the dictionary definition of dignity is the same as I gave (“the state or quality of being worthy of honor or respect”), so I think this one is straightforward to figure out.
It is certainly possible that the other people around you also don’t have a referent and are just using words the way children play with lego, but I’d argue that still is insufficient reason to attempt to prevent people who do know what the word is intended to mean from using the word. It’s a larger discussion than this margin can contain, but my common attitude toward words losing their meaning in many people’s minds is that we ought to rescue the meaning rather than lose it.
But it’s a very important concept! It means doing something that breaks your ability to respect yourself. For instance, you might want to win a political election, and you think you can win on policies and because people trust you, but you’re losing, and so you consider using attack-ads or telling lies or selling out to rich people who you believe are corrupt. You can actually do these and get away with it, and they’re bad in different ways, but one of the ways it’s bad is you no longer are acting in a way where you relate to yourself as someone deserving of respect. Which is bad for the rest of your life, where you’ll probably treat yourself poorly and implicitly encourage others to treat you poorly as well. Who wants to work with someone or be married to someone or be friends with someone that they do not respect? I care about people’s preferences and thoughts less when I do not respect them, and I will probably care about my own less if I do not respect myself, and implicitly encourage others to not treat me as worthy of respect as well (e.g. “I get why you don’t want to be in a relationship for me; I wouldn’t want to be in a relationship with me.”)
To live well and trade with others it is important to be a person worthy of basic respect, and not doing undignified things (“this is beneath me”) is how you maintain this.
This reads to me as a good faith effort to engage, but I think there’s a lot of background assumptions/positions that you’re not aware of that leave this comment talking past most readers here. I’ll just mention one.
Your first two critiques are about elites getting access to advanced tech sooner, and inequality being inconsitent with altruism. I don’t see either as a problem, and my sense is it’s pretty standardly accepted around these parts by most that inequality is fine, and that overall free trade and scientific innovation have risen the life outcomes of all people. The quality of medical care, food, access to knowledge, life expectancy, access to technology, has risen massively over the last 300 years for all people. Other than untouched hunter-gatherer tribes there are no people living in the conditions of 1700, and in most developed countries even the lowliest people today have access to better healthcare than the Kings of that time.
I bring it up not as a knockdown response, but simply because you spent a lot of time engaging with an idea without being aware of the counterposition that is common in these waters, which suggests you may wish to read more before pouring such effort into a long comment as this one.
I can recommend looking through the tagged posts in economics, moloch, industrial revolution, or incentives, for more on this particular topic.
I support this particular dress code, and think it would make the evening feel more unified in intent, but I want to push back slightly on the reasoning.
My overriding message is that a norm beats no norm, regardless of what that norm may be.
Many people are busy, and not all people are wealthy, and I don’t think all fashion norms would be good. For instance, if everyone had to buy a relatively expensive tuxedo (as has been the norm in other events I’ve been to in the world, such as some classical music concerts and some Oxford events), this would I think be net costly and not worth it.
I have grown slightly more willing to dress up for events in recent times, I’m not quite sure why but probably in part because I’m a little wealthier than I was before, and in part because more of my social circle is dressing nicely. But I want to bring up that it’s good to avoiding runaway signaling, where each year people add slightly more expectations and requirements for signaling that you respect the in-group (“I think this year everyone should wear a glittery lightcone pendant and a hat with a special anti-death symbol on it”) to the point where the dress code is overly expensive and time-costly.
I suggest the heuristic that it is good for a dress code to ideally never require buying new cloths to meet it, if you don’t want to.
And I think this dress code works well because my best guess is the vast majority of people have black clothes.
Third, we gave the model a secret “scratchpad”—a workspace where it could record its step-by-step reasoning. We told the model to use the scratchpad to reason about what it should do (as far as the model was aware, the scratchpad was invisible to users and to Anthropic). This allowed us to observe whether the model planned to fake alignment, and how it would go about doing so.
This feels like amusingly like tricking a child. “Remember kiddo, you can reason out loud about where you’re going to hide and I won’t hear it. Now let’s play hide and seek!”
I gave my strongest hypothesis for why it looks to me that many many people believe it’s responsible to take down information that makes your org look bad. I don’t think alternative stories have negligible probability, nor does what I wrote imply that, though it is logically consistent with that.
There are many anti-informative behaviors that are widespread for which people do for poor reasons, like saying that their spouse is the best spouse in the world, or telling customers that their business is the best business in the industry, or saying exclusively glowing things about people in reference letters, that are best explained by the incentives on the person to present themselves in the best light; at the same time, it is respectful to a person, while in dialogue with them, to keep a track of the version of them who is trying their best to have true beliefs and honestly inform others around them, in order to help them become that person (and notice the delta between their current behavior and what they hopefully aspire to).
Seeing orgs in the self-identified-EA space take down information that makes them look bad is (to me) not that dissimilar to the other things I listed.
I think it’s good to discuss norms about how appropriate it is to bring up cynical hypotheses about someone during a discussion in which they’re present. In this case I think raising this hypothesis was worthwhile it for the discussion, and I didn’t cut off any way for the person in question to continue to show themselves to be broadly acting in good faith, so I think it went fine. Li replied to Habryka, and left a thoughtful pair of comments retracting and apologizing, which reflected well on them in my eyes.
List of posts that seem promising to me, that are about to fall out of the annual review in 10 mins because only I have voted on them:
I’m nominating this! On skimming, this is a very readable dialogue with an AI about ethics, lots of people seem to have found it valuable to read. I hope to give it a full read and review in the review period.
I appreciated reading this layout of a perspective for uncollaborative truth-seeking discourse, even though I disagree with many parts of it. I’ll give it a positive vote here in the last two hours of the nominations period, I hope someone else gives it one too.
Curated! Writing down the basics is a valuable thing to do, to help get on the same page with those who don’t realize they are missing them. Some of Scott Alexander’s best writing does this too. I agree with all of these listed and can’t recall seeing them all written out explicitly before, so thanks for that.
(“Curated”, a term which here means “This just got emailed to 30,000 people, of whom typically half open the email, and for ~1 week it gets shown at the top of the frontpage to anyone who hasn’t read it.”)