Benquo

Karma: 10,882

Benquo 6 Nov 2024 11:59 UTC
55 points
13
on: Scissors Statements for President?
X and Y are cooperating to contain people who object-level care about A and B, and recruit them into the dialectic drama. X is getting A wrong on purpose, and Y is getting B wrong on purpose, as a loyalty test. Trying to join the big visible org doing something about A leads to accepting escalating conditioning to develop the blind spot around B, and vice versa.

X and Y use the conflict as a pretext to expropriate resources from the relatively uncommitted. For instance, one way to interpret political polarization in the US is as a scam for the benefit of people who profit from campaign spending. War can be an excuse to subsidize armies. Etc.

I wrote about this here: http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/discursive-warfare-and-faction-formation/

Benquo 2 Sep 2024 22:37 UTC
5 points
4
in reply to: jimrandomh’s comment on: Jimrandomh’s Shortform Posts
I can’t tell quite what you think you’re saying because “worse” and “morality” are such overloaded terms that the context doesn’t disambiguate well.

Seems to me like people calling it “evil” or “awful” are taking an adversarial frame where good vs evil is roughly orthogonal to strong vs weak, and classifying the crime as an impressive evil-aligned act that increases the prestige of evil, while people calling it disgusting are taking a mental-health frame where the crime is disordered behavior that doesn’t help the criminal. Which one is a more helpful or true perspective depends on what the crime is! I expect people who are disgusted to be less tempted to cooperate with the criminal or scapegoat a rando than people who are awed.

Benquo 25 Jun 2024 11:46 UTC
19 points
10
in reply to: Jiro’s comment on: I would have shit in that alley, too
Possessing a home also imposes costs on everyone else—it costs scarce materials and labor to build, equip, and electrify/warm/cool/water a home, and it uses up scarce space in a way that excludes others. It’s not obvious that a homeless person who works & is taxed, and is thus contributing to collective capacity to build and maintain the amenities they take advantage of, is a free rider; you’d need to actually do the math to demonstrate that.

Benquo 25 Aug 2023 16:16 UTC
9 points
7
in reply to: Ben Pace’s comment on: My tentative best guess on how EAs and Rationalists sometimes turn crazy
Reality is sufficiently high-dimensional and heterogeneous that if it doesn’t seem like there’s a meaningful “explore/investigate” option with unbounded potential upside, you’re applying a VERY lossy dimensional reduction to your perception.

Benquo 30 Jul 2023 15:16 UTC
7 points
5
in reply to: Ben Pace’s comment on: My tentative best guess on how EAs and Rationalists sometimes turn crazy
There’s a common fear response, as though disapproval = death or exile, not a mild diminution in opportunities for advancement. Fear is the body’s stereotyped configuration optimized to prevent or mitigate imminent bodily damage. Most such social threats do not correspond to a danger that is either imminent or severe, but are instead more like moves in a dance that trigger the same interpretive response.

Benquo 23 Jul 2023 21:06 UTC
23 points
6
on: “Justice, Cherryl.”
It’s true that people who ask for “collaborative truth-seeking” are lying, but false that no one does it. Some things someone might do to try to collaborate on seeking the truth instead of pushing a thesis are:
- Active listening (e.g. trying to restate someone’s claims and arguments in one’s own words, especially where they seem most unclear or surprising.)
- Extending interpretive labor to try to infer the cause of a disagreement.
- Offering various considerations for how to think about a question instead of pushing a party line—and clarifying the underlying model in general terms even when one does have a clear thesis.
IME people are perfectly able to distinguish this from less collaborative behavior, though some are more likely to respond strongly positively, and others are more likely to complain that the first two are “judgmental,” “accusatory,” or “mind-reading,” and that the third is “unclear” because it doesn’t include a command to endorse some particular conclusion. The second group seems like it overlaps a lot with the sorts of people who ask for the sort of “epistemic charity” you’re complaining about.
People who are engaged in collaborative truth-seeking are more likely to talk about or simply demonstrate specific ways to accomplish particular component truth-seeking tasks better together, which is collaborative, and less likely to complain vaguely about how you should be more “collaborative,” which is not.
What links here?
- jimrandomh's comment on “Justice, Cherryl.” by Zack_M_Davis (23 Jul 2023 23:56 UTC; 8 points)

Benquo 12 Jul 2023 17:02 UTC
−12 points
0
in reply to: Sinclair Chen’s comment on: Blanchard’s Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer
https://www.theonion.com/why-do-all-these-homosexuals-keep-sucking-my-cock-1819583529 https://www.theonion.com/why-cant-anyone-tell-im-wearing-this-business-suit-iron-1819584239

Benquo 12 Jul 2023 16:59 UTC
−5 points
0
in reply to: Zack_M_Davis’s comment on: Blanchard’s Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer
I’m complying with Sinclair’s explicit preference to be treated as someone who might possibly do crimes, by not censoring the flow of credence from “people who don’t expect me to do crimes to them are making a mistake” to “I have done crimes to such people.” You are asking me to do exactly what Sinclair complained about and assume that they’re necessarily harmless, or to pretend to do this.

Benquo 12 Jul 2023 16:52 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Zack_M_Davis’s comment on: Blanchard’s Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer
Wouldn’t that imply more upside than downside in staying over?

Benquo 12 Jul 2023 16:51 UTC
7 points
0
in reply to: Benquo’s comment on: Blanchard’s Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer
Huh, I notice I casually used male pronouns here when I previously wasn’t especially inclined to. I guess this happened because I dropped politeness constraints to free up working memory for modeling the causal structure of the problem.

If this had been a lower-latency conversation with the implied greater capacity to make it awkward to ignore a legitimate question, my first reply would have been something like, “well, did you actually assault them? Seems like an important bit of information when assessing whether they made a mistake.” And instead of the most recent comment I’d have asked, “You identify as a woman. Do you think you are being naïve, or devaluing your sexualness or cleverness or agency? If so, why? If not, why?”

Benquo 11 Jul 2023 15:45 UTC
11 points
6
in reply to: orellanin’s comment on: Blanchard’s Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer
Examples of info she might have had:
- She was hoping to have sex with Sinclair, so theit sexual advances would not have been unwelcome.
- Harassment from acquaintances of her social class is more common than stranger assault but much less likely to be severely bad—acquaintance assault is socially constrained and thin-tailed, stranger assault is deviant and fat-tailed—which is not adequately captured by the statistics.
- She’s not the sort of person who can be easily traumatized by, or would have a hard time rejecting, unwanted advances.
- Sinclair is in fact discernibly unlikely to assault her because they’re obviously nonaggressive, sex-repulsed, or something else one can pick up from a vibe.
- Sinclair’s very small and she could just break Sinclair if she needed to.

Benquo 11 Jul 2023 15:39 UTC
5 points
3
in reply to: DanielFilan’s comment on: Blanchard’s Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer
Yes. It seems like RobertM is trying to appeal to some idea about fair play, by saying that people shouldn’t make even disjunctive hypothetical accusations because they wouldn’t like it if someone did that to them. But it seems relevant to evaluating that fairness claim that some accusations are discernibly more justified than others, and in this case RobertM seems not to have been able to think of any plausible crimes to disjunctively accuse me of. I am perplexed as to how “true accusations are better than false ones and you can discover by thinking and investigating which statements are more likely to be true and which are more likely to be wrong” seems to have almost fallen out of the Overton window for some important subset of cases on less wrong dot com, but that seems to be where we are.

Benquo 10 Jul 2023 19:02 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: RobertM’s comment on: Blanchard’s Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer
Which unspecified but grossly immoral act did the plain text of my comment seem like it implied a confession of?

Benquo 10 Jul 2023 15:27 UTC
4 points
−2
in reply to: RobertM’s comment on: Blanchard’s Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer
They imply irrationality via failure to investigate a confusion, so I thought it was within scope on a rationality improvement forum to point that out. Since there exists an alternative coherent construal I thought it was good practice to acknowledge that as well.

Benquo 10 Jul 2023 15:19 UTC
9 points
−6
in reply to: RobertM’s comment on: Blanchard’s Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer
The comment reported a trend of accurate appraisals characterized as mistakes, with an illustrative anecdote, not an isolated event. Other parts of the comment, like the bit about how not treating them as a likely assailant is “devaluing my sexualness or cleverness or agency” implies an identification of agency with unprovoked assault. This is not ambiguous at all. It seems like on balance people think that politeness calls for pretending not to understand when someone says very overtly that they mean people ill, want to be perceived as violent and aggressive, etc, up until it’s time to scapegoat them.

Benquo 10 Jul 2023 15:11 UTC
7 points
2
in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: Blanchard’s Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer
If someone keeps asking “why aren’t these women scared of me as a potential rapist?”, but isn’t actually raping any of them, well, there’s an obvious answer there—they’re using some information you’re not tracking - & it makes no sense not to propagate the confusion upstream to the ideology that causes you to make wrong statistical predictions about yourself that the people around you aren’t fooled by.
Not saying the obvious answer is sufficient on its own, but “what are they tracking that I’m not?” would be a reasonable epistemic response, and “people keep being wrong by accurately predicting my behavior when that goes against my ideology” is not.

Benquo 10 Jul 2023 6:12 UTC
−12 points
−42
in reply to: RobertM’s comment on: Blanchard’s Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer
Not very, but it’s the only coherent construal.

Benquo 10 Jul 2023 5:35 UTC
−33 points
−17
in reply to: Sinclair Chen’s comment on: Blanchard’s Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer
This seems like you are either confessing on the public internet to committing assault, or treating a correct prediction as discrediting because of the strength of your prior against the idea that a woman might accurately evaluate a man as unlikely to assault her.

Benquo 7 Jul 2023 14:31 UTC
6 points
in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: What Money Cannot Buy
I agree that streetlamp effects are a problem. I think you are imagining a different usage than I am. I was imagining deferring to LockPickingLawyer about locks so that I could only spend about 5 minutes on that part of the problem, and spend whatever time I saved on other problems, including other aspects of securing an enclosure. If I had $100M and didn’t have friends I already trusted to do this sort of thing, offering them $20k to red-team a building might be worth it if I were worried about perimeter security; the same mindset that notices you can defeat some locks by banging them hard seems like it would have a good chance at noticing other simple ways to defeat barriers e.g. “this window can be opened trivially from the outside without triggering any alarms”.
Holding math duels to the standard of finding high-value problems to work on just seems nuts; I meant them as an existence proof of ways to measure possession of highly abstract theoretical secrets. If someone wanted to learn deep math, and barely knew what math was, they could do a lot worse than hiring someone who won a lot of math duels (or ideally whoever taught that person) as their first tutor, and then using that knowledge to find someone better. If you wanted to subsidize work on deep math, you might do well to ask a tournament-winner (or Fields medalist) whose non-tournament work they respect.
I went through a similar process in learning how to use my own body better: qigong seemed in principle worth learning, but I didn’t have a good way to distinguish real knowledge (if any) from bullshit. When I read Joshua Waitzkin’s The Art of Learning, I discovered that the closely related “Martial” Art of Tai Chi had a tournament that revealed relative levels of skill—and that William C. C. Chen, the man who’d taught tournament-winner Waitzkin, was still teaching in NYC. So I started learning from him, and very slowly improved my posture and balance. Eventually one of the other students invited me to a group that practiced on Sunday mornings in Chinatown’s Columbus Park, and when I went, I had just enough skill to immediately recognize the man teaching there as someone who had deep knowledge and was very good at teaching it, and I started learning much faster, in ways that generalized much better to other domains of life. This isn’t the only search method I used—recommendations from high-discernment friends also led to people who were able to help me—but it’s one that’s relatively easy to reproduce.

Benquo 6 Jul 2023 22:48 UTC
0 points
0
in reply to: Ben Pace’s comment on: My tentative best guess on how EAs and Rationalists sometimes turn crazy
One more thing: the protagonists of The Matrix and Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985) are relatively similar to EAs and Rationalists so you might want to start there, especially if you’ve seen either movie.