Benquo

Karma: 11,425

Benquo Jan 3, 2025, 1:31 PM
7 points
3
in reply to: cousin_it’s comment on: Preference Inversion
OK, so we’ve got something like a factual disagreement. Here are some observations that would change my mind substantially:

Credible testimony from someone who’d previously been documented claiming that their variant of Christianity had inculcated in them an anti-sex attitude, that they’d been lying to normalize their non-culturally-conditioned aversion to sex.

An exposé demonstrating that many such prominently documented testimonies were fake and did not correspond to actual people making those claims.
Examples of the sort of thing I mean:
I try to find the Christian bible passages saying it’s better never to marry or have sex (e.g. Matthew 19:9-12, 1 Corinthians 7), and persistently fail to find them. Or someone persuasively explains that I’m idiosyncratically misinterpreting them, and I can’t find evidence of many people agreeing with me (e.g. those verses showing up when I do a Google search for “bible passages saying it’s better never to marry or have sex”).
A methodologically careful cross-cultural survey demonstrates that this sort of well-attested sex-aversion isn’t more common in people raised in high-commitment Christian communities, than in people in other cultures with no such messages.

What would change your mind?

Benquo Jan 3, 2025, 2:42 AM
10 points
2
in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: Preference Inversion
Consider two different contexts in which one might negotiate tradeoffs around work. When discussing work-life balance, you can openly weigh tradeoffs between career and personal time. But when asked ‘Why do you want to work at MegaCorp?’ in an interview, acknowledging you’re trading anything for a paycheck marks you as deviantly uncommitted. The system requires both pretense of pure dedication and practical compromises, while making that pattern itself unspeakable.
My post was about how this dynamic creates internalized preference inversion—where people become unable to even model certain tradeoffs to themselves, not just discuss them. And this isn’t just social pressure—you can actually be killed or imprisoned by cops or psychiatrists for ill-defined deviancy, with much conformity driven by vaguely intuited threats to construe you as the relevant sort of deviant.

Benquo Jan 2, 2025, 11:42 PM
6 points
3
in reply to: cousin_it’s comment on: Preference Inversion
Successful religions don’t suppress reproduction in practice. But many do maintain an explicit approval hierarchy that ranks celibacy and sexual restraint above typical sexual behavior, sometimes expressing overt disgust with sexuality. This creates a gradient of social rewards that aids group cohesion, but requires most people to be “imperfect” by design. An important failure mode is that some conscientious people try to fully internalize the explicit values, ending up with clinical symptoms of sexual aversion that persist even when officially sanctioned (e.g. in marriage).

Benquo Jan 2, 2025, 10:58 PM
10 points
−1
in reply to: cousin_it’s comment on: Preference Inversion
I don’t think I made those claims. I did say that clerics are often supposed to be celibate, and warriors are generally supposed to move towards danger, in a single sentence, so I see how those claims might have been confused.
The general pattern I’m pointing out is that some scarce resources, or the approval which is a social proxy for such resources, are allocated preferentially to people who adopt an otherwise perverse preference. These systems are only sustainable with large amounts of hypocrisy, where people are on the whole “bad” rather than “good” according to the approval criteria. (Elite overproduction is when societies fail to preserve this proportion.)
The plausibility of such inversions is demonstrated by their presence in other sorts of apes where they’re more clearly motivated by local incentives, as they may also have been in humans’ precivilized ancestral environment. Precivilized people didn’t have “peasants,” but in many contexts nondominant male apes may have persistent reproductive disadvantages, i.e. some territorial apes may have tournament-style mating for males.

Benquo Jan 2, 2025, 10:48 PM
4 points
0
in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: Preference Inversion
Sometimes people profess or try to reveal a preference for X, as a response to coercive pressures that are specifically motivated by prior underlying preferences for anti-X. This is what I’m calling preference inversion. My intuition is that generally, upon reflection, people would prefer to satisfy their and others’ preferences as calculated prior to such influences. I don’t know whether there are other sorts of analogous distorting factors nearly all reasonable people would not like to satisfy upon reflection, but in general, I’m using the term “intrinsic preferences” to refer to whatever’s left over after all such generally appealing adjustments.

Preference Inversion

BenquoJan 2, 2025, 6:15 PM

51 points

48 comments4 min readLW link

(benjaminrosshoffman.com)

Benquo Jan 2, 2025, 2:22 AM
11 points
0
in reply to: Benquo’s comment on: Scissors Statements for President?
Expanded this reply here: https://benjaminrosshoffman.com/the-drama-of-the-hegelian-dialectic/

Benquo Nov 6, 2024, 11:59 AM
57 points
11
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 Sep 2, 2024, 10:37 PM
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 Jun 25, 2024, 11:46 AM
23 points
9
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 Aug 25, 2023, 4:16 PM
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 Jul 30, 2023, 3:16 PM
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 Jul 23, 2023, 9:06 PM
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 (Jul 23, 2023, 11:56 PM; 8 points)

Benquo Jul 12, 2023, 5:02 PM
−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 Jul 12, 2023, 4:59 PM
−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 Jul 12, 2023, 4:52 PM
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 Jul 12, 2023, 4:51 PM
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 Jul 11, 2023, 3:45 PM
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 Jul 11, 2023, 3:39 PM
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

Prefer­ence Inversion

Preference Inversion