I think this is the vital thing: not ‘does academia work perfectly’, but ‘can you work more effectively THROUGH academia’. Don’t know for sure the answer is yes, but it definitely seems like one key way to influence policy. Decision makers in politics and elsewhere aren’t going to spend all their time looking at each field in detail, they’ll trust whatever systems exist in each field to produce people who seem qualified to give a qualified opinion.
DavidAgain
Karma: 740
Isn’t there an argument that having a million voices synthesising and popularising and ten doing detailed research is much less productive than the opposite? Feels a bit like Aristophanes:
”Ah! the Generals! they are numerous, but not good for much”Everyone going around discussing their overarching synthesis of everything sounds like it would produce a lot of talk and little research
They often look the same.
You make a bit of effort to make conversation with someone you don’t know: they give the minimum responses, move away when they can do so, and don’t reciprocate initiation.
This could be shyness or arrogance. Very tough to tell the difference. Plus the two can actually be connected: if you see yourself as very different from others, the natural instinct is a mixture of insecurity (‘I don’t fit!’) with arrogance (‘I see things these guys don’t’). I think the main way not to end up with a mix of both is just if one is very strong: if you’re too insecure to be arrogant or too arrogant to be insecure.
I basically agree with you, but I think situation B to quite that extent is rare. And of course identifying similarity to that is pretty open to bias if you just don’t like that movement.
Concrete example—I used to use the Hebrew name of God in theological conversations, as this was normal at my college. I noticed a Jewish classmate of mine was wincing. I discussed it with him, he found it uncomfortable, I stopped doing it. Didn’t cost me anything, happy to do it.
Also, I think some of this is bleeding over from ‘I am not willing to inconvenience myself’ to actively enjoying making a point (possibly in some vague sense that it will help them reform, though not sure if that’s evidenced). I can get that instinct, and the habit of “punishing” people who push things can make sense in game theory terms. But I think the idea of not feeling duty-bound is different to getting to the position where some commenters might turn UP the music.
You seem to be equivocating between ‘a step towards being a utility monster’ and ‘being a utility monster’. Someone asking you to turn your music down is surely more likely to just be them actually having an issue with noise. There are literally hundreds of things I do without even feeling that strongly about them. So it seems eminently sensible to me that people tell me if they do matter a lot to them. If everyone in society gets to do that, even with a few free-riders, everyone ends up better off.
Obviously one way to organise the universally better off thing is to turn every interaction of this kind into a contractual agreement. But this is not how we deal with interactions between neighbours, generally. So you just act flexibly for others when asked unless you’ve got a fairly strong reason not to (including them constantly making unreasonable demands).
This reads like quite a lot of bile towards a hypothetical person who doesn’t like loud music.
You don’t know what the neighbour’s tried, you’re putting a lot of weight on the word ‘complained’, which can cover a range of different approaches, and you’re speculating about her nefarious motivations.
In my experience with neighbours, co-workers, generally other people, it’s best to assume that people aren’t being dicks unless you have positive reasons to think they are. And to lean towards accommodation.
Interesting question. Not sure I agree with the premise, in that certainly where I live, I don’t think there is a clear objective line of acceptable noise dictated by ‘social norms’. I’d say that the social expectation should and does include reference to others’ preferences and your own situation.
So if someone has a reason to dislike noise, you make more effort to avoid noise. But on the other hand, you’re more tolerant of noise if, e.g. someone’s just had a baby, than if they just like playing TV at maximum volume. Bit of give and take and all that.
Basically, I don’t think there’s really a hard division between ‘objective requirement’ and ‘completely free favour you might choose to do’ (unless the objective requirement is REALLY low, like at the legal level. But at that point doing what’s ‘required’ would be seen almost universally as asshattery).
Social interaction is more complicated and blurry like that
Haven’t seen this solution elsewhere: I think it’s actually strong on its own terms, but doubt it’s what Eliezer wants (I’m 90% sure it’s about AI boxing, exploiting the reliability granted by Unbreakable Vows and parsetongue)
However, this being said, I think Harry could avoid imminent death by pointing out that if a prophecy says he’ll destroy the world, then he presumably can’t do that dead. Given that we have strong reasons to think prophecies can’t be avoided, this doesn’t mean killing him is safe, but the opposite—what Voldemort should do is make him immortal. Then the point at which he destroys the world can be delayed indefinitely. Most likely to a point when Voldemort gets bored and wants to die, after the heat death of the universe.
This isn’t a great solution for Harry, because the best way to keep him alive would be paralysed/imprisoned in some fairly extreme way. But it should hit the criteria. The one really big point against it is that all this info is very available to Voldemort, so not sure why he hasn’t come up with it himself.
I love this idea in general: but don’t see how he could have faked the map, given:
“Did you tamper with thiss map to achieve thiss ressult, or did it appear before you by ssurprisse?”
“Wass ssurprisse,” replied Professor Quirrell, with an overtone of hissing laughter. “No trickss.”
Interesting and useful post!
But on your last bullet, you seem to be conflating ‘leadership’ with ‘people presenting the idea’. I’m not sure they are always the same thing: the ‘leaders’ of any group are quite often going to be there because they’re good at forging consensus and/or because they have general social/personal skills that stop them appearing like cranks.
Take a fringe political party: I would guess that people promoting that party down the pub or in online comments on newspaper websites or whatever are more likely to be the sort of advocate you describe. But in all but the smallest fringe parties, you’d expect the actual leadership to have rather more political skill.
To me it sounds like the full information provided to avoid being incomplete would be so immense and complex that you’d need another AI just to interpret that! But I may be wrong.
Not sure what allowing a small chance of false negatives does: you presumably could just repeat all your questions?
More substantially, I don’t know how easy ‘deception’ would be to define—any presentation of information would be selective. Presumably you’d have to use some sort of definition around the AI knowing that the person it’s answering would see other information as vital?
On the terminal value, the first thing I thought when I read this post was the quote below. Not sure if I actually find it convincing psychology, or I just find it so aesthetically effective that it gains truthiness.
Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know what no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.”
Second thing I thought was that if the query was genuine, adamzerner would in some ways be ideal to be appointed dictator of something, thought probably less great at actually trying to win at the Game of Politics (you win or you’re deselected)
Others are probably right that politicians have plenty of genuine choices, where they don’t have to use their decisions to cater to lobbyists (or even voters). It’s a bit different in the UK, because legislators also form the executive: congressmen may have rather blunter tools to get their way, but Ministers in the UK definitely make LOADS of decisions and a large number aren’t fixed by voter demand, lobby power or even party position: working in the civil service supporting Ministers I’ve seen fairly substantial changes to policy made simply because the individual Minister is replaced by one with a different outlook.
There’s also the point that politicians ‘cater to’ THEIR voters/lobbyists, for the most part. They rely on the support of those that broadly agree with them.
I also think you’re approaching this too much as if being a politician is something someone’s worked out carefully as a strategy to do a specfic thing. People find politics exciting and engaging—a lot of this, though not all, is because of genuinely caring about the issues—and that’s why they want to be involved with it. Once involved, they want to be succesful, that’s human nature. I doubt many people go into politics purely because they’ve calculated it’s the way they can get a list of policies delivered, although I think there are a few and they can add a lot to the political process.
Come to think of it, it’s worth you looking at other countries if you’re interested in this. Your theory of lobbying assumes that individual politicians can rack up $ms of advertising money, but various countries have spending caps (UK) or have systems of proportional representation that mean you can’t really advertise as an individual. If you observe the same phenomena without the personal job-security element, then your model is probably flawed!
I think my intuition depends on the context, to be honest: and I don’t have Diamond’s book to hand (don’t think I own it, though I read it a few years ago).
I think it’s clear that the briefest possible explanation of why a specific event happened is the key positive causes. Then you have the option of including two other sorts of things
Why the countervailing factors didn’t stop it
Why similar things did not happen at other times/places in similar conditions
Say you’re explaining why a country elected a particular political party. You would most naturally talk about the positives: ‘polls showed they were trusted on issues X and Y’. You’d mostly talk about overcoming negatives where there was a important change in that area—people previously didn’t like them because they associated them with policy Z, but the new leader convinced many voters that this was a thing of the past’. It wouldn’t be as relevant in a short summary to say ‘they probably lost some votes because of issues A and B’ or ‘while another party in a different country is trusted on the same issues, they lost an election six months later—the difference is due to C and D’
There’s a difference here with policy debates, because they are saying what we should do, rather than trying to trace the line of what led to a particular thing that happened. Personally, I’d be much happier giving a one-sided account that said ‘political position X is widely supported because of the following factors’ than a one-sided account that said ‘political position X SHOULD BE widely supported because of the following factors’, even if the following detail was identical.
A lot of this might be quite parochial and based on various academic/journalistic/professional traditions, though. I’m trying to wrap my head round the underlying point about facts causing their evidence but this not applying to policy debates/moral positions/multiple factor explanations. I think I basically agree that multiple factor explanations are analagous to policy debates in this regard, but I’m trying to unpack some examples on the moral front to see if I agree there...
Cheers for the thoughtful response! I think your global warming argument is subtly different: people don’t want to just explain why temparatures rose at a certain point in the past (which would be the equivalent of Diamond’s argument). They want to understand whether we should expect temparatures to rise in the future.
The question here is not ‘Why did Athens beat Sparta’, but closer to ‘as Corinthians watching the arms race, should we expect Athens or Sparta to win next time’. In this case, we definitely want to know both sides, even if Athens has won all of the conflicts we’ve seen: for instance if all the other conflicts they won with ships and this is a landlocked struggle for some reason, that would change our conclusions.
What stands out here is that this sort of balanced account is what you want as soon as you expect your beliefs to ‘pay rent’. A historical explanation which simply explains what series of events led to a certain event isn’t necessarily particularly useful, even if it’s true.
So for instance, a historian might seek to show that the First World War was caused by the shooting of Franz Ferdinand or that it inevitably followed from the alliance system of the early twentieth century. These explanations wouldn’t necessarily ask ‘what other things might cause world wars?’ or ‘what things were going on that might have stopped this world war?’ unless they were directly relevant. And because of that, the primary purpose is to establish once particular incident of causation, not to draw general lessons that shooting archdukes is a Bad Idea or that all world wars are caused by the fallacious belief that having two huge blocs would deter each other..
On the other hand, historians might argue that more general economic/social laws apply through history: that slave cultures are at a significant advantage/disadvantage in war, that wars tend to lead to greater/lesser power for the previously downtrodden, that feudal systems tend to turn into democratic systems or whatever. For those cases the aspiration is to have some predictive power, and so both sides are needed.
Very interesting. I wonder how general the roles are. What you talk about at the end is basically bystander effect: I believe that different people are more or less vulnerable to that, and I wonder whether being more ‘bystander’ prone goes with being more likely to go along with pressure to conform (Millgram etc.) and possibly (to make it clear this isn’t a straightforwardly ethical thing) more likely to collaborate in Prisoner’s Dilemma. The most important role question might be simply whether you see yourself as a generalised Agent with responsibility for what actually happens beyond fulfilling set roles you’ve been given.
To quote HPMOR again: ‘PC or NPC, that is the question’
I don’t think I really disagree with any of this! My point was that, as things stand, this isn’t a case of individuals having confirmation bias, but of the system of how we as a society/culture/academy tend to approach the concept of ‘explaining something’.
As far as I can see, your approach ends up not being focused on actually explaining a specific thing at all, but rather identifying all the stuff going on in a certain area under certain categories. Reminds me a bit of http://lesswrong.com/lw/h1/the_scales_of_justice_the_notebook_of_rationality/ in that regard.
If we know loads about a certain thing then this might also clearly point to why it was ‘inevitable’ that what happened did. But before then (and I doubt we know that much about Athens/Sparta or about the rise of agriculture), it mainly functions to turn ‘explanations’ into ‘enumerations of relevant facts’. This is good in some ways because it stops people thinking issues have been resolved—I can imagine lots of people take Diamond’s analysis to ‘disprove’ other accounts of the rise of agriculture, for instance. The downside is that given our psychology as it is, I suspect we think about things better when people are creating hypotheses and arguing for/against them rather than contesting the detail of a list of possible factors with no clear conclusion.
This is very interesting indeed! I’m not sure how much we can get to bias, or whether it’s about what the argument is trying to say. Is he asserting that those 8 are the (only) relevant things that could make agriculture more likely? It’s awhile since I read it, but I saw it more as saying that those 8 are the reason why historically it was the Fertile Crescent. Not that it would always be those things on any remotely similar world, or even necessarily that it would always be there if you re-ran history. In fact, as you say, he seems to mostly be arguing why it’s plausibly NOT the ‘people from the Fertile Crescent are superior’ argument. Or more strongly, why the geographical case is more compelling than the gene-based one.
Say there’s a ninth category (I dunno, ‘distance from steppes which tend to be full of dangerous nomads’) which Fertile Crescent scores badly on, and which makes it ‘less likely’ to develop agriculture. If what we’re trying to explain is why Fertile Crescent succeeded, we don’t necessarily focus on that. If we wanted to give a complete explanation, we might do, but it’s not necessary. Similarly, if we wanted to say ‘why did Sparta beat Athens’ we could point to the army, and if we wanted to ask ‘why did Athens beat Sparta’, we’d point to the navy (or whatever). The fact we can go either way shows that this explanation isn’t strong enough to be predictive, but it gives a compelling alternative to ‘innate cultural/genetic superiority’
“Have you tried flying into a third world nation today and dragging them out of backwardness and poverty? What would make it easier in the 13th century?”
I think this is an interesting angle. How comparable are ‘backward’ nations today with historical nations? Obvious differences in terms of technology existing in modern third world even if the infrastructure/skills to create and maintain it don’t. In that way, I suppose they’re more comparable to places in the very early middle ages, when people used Roman buildings etc. that they coudn’t create themselves. But I also wonder how 13th century government compares to modern governments that we’d consider ‘failed states’.