deepthoughtlife

• deepthoughtlife 18 Dec 2024 18:00 UTC

  3 points

  2

  in reply to: Davidmanheim’s comment on: Try­ing to trans­late when peo­ple talk past each other

  For something to be a betrayal does not require knowing the intent of the person doing it, and is not necessarily modified if you do. I already brought up the fact that it would be perfectly fine if they had asked permission, it is in the not asking permission to alter the agreed upon course where the betrayal comes in. Saying ‘I will do x’ is not implicitly asking for permission at all, it is a statement of intent, that disregards entirely that there was even an agreement at all.

• deepthoughtlife 18 Dec 2024 6:29 UTC

  3 points

  −4

  in reply to: Kaj_Sotala’s comment on: Try­ing to trans­late when peo­ple talk past each other

  ‘what made A experience this as a betrayal’ is the fact that it was. It really is that simple. You could perhaps object that it is strange to experience vicarious betrayal, but since it sounds like the four of you were a team, it isn’t even that. This is a very minor betrayal, but if someone were to even minorly betray my family, for instance, I would automatically feel betrayed myself, and would not trust that person anymore even if the family member doesn’t actually mind what they did.

  Analogy time (well, another one), ‘what makes me experience being cold’ can be that I’m not generating enough heat for some personal reason, or it can just be the fact that I am outside in −20 degree weather. If they had experienced betrayal with the person asking for permission to do a move that was better for the group, that would be the former, but this is the latter. Now, it obviously can be both where a person who is bad at generating heat is outside when it is −20 degrees. (This is how what you are saying actually happened works out in this scenario.)

  From what I’ve seen of how ‘betrayal’ is used, your definition is incorrect. (As far as I can tell) In general use, going against your agreement with another person is obviously betrayal in the sense of acting against their trust in you and reliance upon you, even if the intent is not bad. This is true even if the results are expected to be good. So far as I know we do not have distinguishing words between ‘betrayal with bad motives’ and ‘betrayal with good motives’.

  Another analogy, if a financial advisor embezzled your money because they saw a good opportunity, were right, and actually gave you your capital back along with most (or even all) of the gain before they were caught, that is still embezzling your money, which is a betrayal. Since they showed good intentions by giving it back before being caught, some people would forgive them when it was revealed, but it would still be a betrayal, and other people need not think this is okay even if you personally forgive it. Announcing the course of action instead of asking permission is a huge deal, even if the announcement is before actually doing it.

  You can have a relationship where either party is believed to be so attuned to the needs and desires of the other person that they are free to act against the agreement and have it not be betrayal, but that is hardly normal. If your agreement had included, explicitly or through long history, ‘or whatever else you think is best’ then it wouldn’t be a betrayal, but lacking that, it is. Alternately, you could simply announce to the group beforehand that you want people to use their best judgment on what to do rather than follow agreements with you. (This only works if everyone involved remembers that though.) The fact is that people have to rely on agreements and act based upon them, and if they aren’t followed, there is little basis for cooperation with anyone whose interests don’t exactly coincide. As you note, their objection was not to the course of action itself.

  The damning part isn’t the fact that they thought there was a new course of action that was better and wanted to do it (very few people object to thinking a new course of action is better if you are willing to follow the agreement assuming the other person doesn’t agree), it was the not asking and the not understanding which both show a lack of trustworthiness and respect for agreements. This need not be a thing that has happened before, or that is considered super likely to occur again for it to be reasonable for another party to state that they hate such things, which one of the things being communicated. One thing objecting here does is tell the person ‘you are not allowed to violate agreements with me without my permission.’

  Also, they may be trying to teach the violator, as it is often the case that people try to teach morality, which may be why so much of philosophy is morality discussions. (Though I don’t actually know how big of a factor that is.)

  If there had been a reason they couldn’t ask, then it would make more sense to do the seemingly better thing and ask for their approval after the fact. This is often true in emergencies, for instance, but also in times of extreme stress. Your friend wouldn’t feel like it was a betrayal if the other person had instead gone to bathroom and never came back because they got a call that their best friend had just been hit by a car and they didn’t think to tell people before leaving. If, on the other hand, the person acted unable to understand why they should explain themselves later, or that it wouldn’t have been better if they had remembered to do so, that would be bizarre.

  I do agree that considering the hypothesis that they may have experienced serious betrayal is useful (it is unfortunately common), which is why I think asking about it was potentially a good idea despite being potentially very awkward to bring up, but I think it is important not to commit to a theory to degrees beyond what is necessary.

  I also agree that feeling understood is very important to people. From what I can tell, one of the primary reasons people don’t bother to explain themselves is that they don’t think the other person would understand anyway no matter how much they explained, with the others being that they wouldn’t care or would use it against them.

• deepthoughtlife 18 Dec 2024 3:26 UTC

  3 points

  2

  on: Try­ing to trans­late when peo­ple talk past each other

  Obviously, translating between different perspectives is often a very valuable thing to do. While there are a lot of disagreements that are values based, very often people are okay with the other party holding different values as long as they are still a good partner, and failure to communicate really is just failure to communicate.

  I dislike the assumption that ‘B’ was reacting that way due to past betrayal. Maybe they were, maybe they weren’t (I do see that ‘B’ confirmed it for you in a reaction to another comment, but making such assumptions is still a bad idea), but there doesn’t have to be any past betrayal to object to betrayal in the present; people don’t need to have ever been betrayed in the past to be against it as a matter of principle. They only need to have known that betrayal is a thing that exists, and they would probably be more upset even if they were somehow just learning of it at the time it happened. Leave out the parts that are unnecessary to the perspective. The more you assume, the more likely you are to fail to do it properly. You can ask the person if for some reason it seems important to know whether or not there is such a reason behind it, but you can’t simply assume (if you care to be right). I personally find such assumptions about motives to be very insulting.

  I personally find the idea that ‘A’ could not know what they were doing was clearly betrayal to be incomprehensible since people have heard countless stories of people objecting to altering things in this manner; this is not an uncommon case. Even if this person believes that consequences are the important part, there is no possible way to go through life without hearing people objecting countless times to unilaterally altering deals no matter what the altering party thinks of the consequences for the party they were agreeing with. This is similar to the fact that I don’t understand why someone would want to go to a loud party with thumping bass and strobing lights, but I’ve heard enough stories to know that a lot of people genuinely do. I can say that such parties are bad because they are noisy and it is hard to see, but it is impossible not to know that some people disagree on those being bad for a party.

  If someone only cared about the consequences of the action the agreement as judged by the other party, the agreement would have been to the criteria rather than the action. There is no need for an agreement at all if the criteria is just ‘do whatever you think is best’ (though the course of action may still be discussed of course). Also, it is quite easy to ask permission to alter an agreement whenever it seems simultaneously advantageous to all parties, and conditions where they can simply deviate can also be agreed upon in advance. The failure to ask permission should be seen as them refusing to think their agreements actually mean something, (especially when they don’t immediately understand the objection), which makes for a very bad/​unreliable partner. Additionally, asking if the other party thinks the new move is better gives an additional check on whether you came to the right conclusion on you evaluation.

  I would strongly caution against assuming mindreading is correct. I think it is important to keep in mind that you don’t know whether or not you’ve successfully inhabited the other other viewpoint. Stay open to the idea that the pieces got fit together wrong. Of course, it becomes easier in cases like the second one where you can just ask ‘do you mean moon cheese?’ (In that particular case, even the question itself might be enough to clue in the other party of the shape of the disagreement.)

  When ‘D’ does agree that you’re right, and ‘C’ still doesn’t really get it, I suppose you now need to do the whole procedure again if it is worth continuing the discussion. You are correct to note it often isn’t.

• deepthoughtlife 24 Nov 2024 7:32 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: dirk’s comment on: LLM chat­bots have ~half of the kinds of “con­scious­ness” that hu­mans be­lieve in. Hu­mans should avoid go­ing crazy about that.

  You might believe that the distinctions I make are idiosyncratic, though the meanings are in fact clearly distinct in ordinary usage, but I clearly do not agree with your misleading use of what people would be lead to think are my words and you should take care to not conflate things. You want people to precisely match your own qualifiers in cases where that causes no difference in the meaning of what is said (which makes enough sense), but will directly object to people pointing out a clear miscommunication of yours because you do not care about a difference in meaning. And you are continually asking me to give in on language regardless of how correct I may be while claiming it is better to privilege. That is not a useful approach.

  (I take no particular position on physicalism at all.) Since you are a not a panpsychist, you would likely believe that consciousness is not common to the vast majority of things. That means the basic prior for if an item is conscious is, ‘almost certainly not’ unless we have already updated it based on other information. Under what reference class or mechanism should we be more concerned about the consciousness of an LLM than an ordinary computer running ordinary programs? There is nothing that seems particularly likely to lead to consciousness in its operating principles.

  There are many people, including the original poster of course, trying to use behavioral evidence to get around that, so I pointed out how weak that evidence is.

  An important distinction you seem to not see in my writing (whether because I wrote unclearly or you missed it doesn’t really matter) is that when I speak of knowing the mechanisms by which an llm works is that I mean something very fundamental. We know these two things: 1)exactly what mechanisms are used in order to do the operations involved in executing the program (physically on the computer and mathematically) and 2) the exact mechanisms through which we determine which operations to perform.

  As you seem to know, LLMs are actually extremely simple programs of extremely large matrices with values chosen by the very basic system of gradient descent. Nothing about gradient descent is especially interesting from a consciousness point of view. It’s basically a massive use very simplified ODE solvers in a chain, which are extremely well understood and clearly have no consciousness at all if anything mathematical doesn’t. It could also be viewed as just a very large number of variables in a massive but simple statistical regression. Notably, if gradient descent were related to consciousness directly, we would still have no reason to believe that an LLM doing inference rather than training would be conscious. Simple matrix math also doesn’t seem like much of a candidate for consciousness either.

  Someone trying to make the case for consciousness would thus need to think it likely that one of the other mechanisms in LLMs are related to consciousness, but LLMs are actually missing a great many mechanisms that would enable things like self-reflection and awareness (including a number that were included in primitive earlier neural networks such as recursion and internal loops). The people trying to make up for those omissions do a number of things to attempt to recreate it (with ‘attention’ being the built-in one, but also things like adding in the use of previous outputs), but those very simple approaches don’t seem like likely candidates for consciousness (to me).

  Thus, it remains extremely unlikely that an LLM is conscious.

  When you say we don’t know what mechanisms are used, you seem to be talking about not understanding a completely different thing than I am saying we understand. We don’t understand exactly what each weight means (except in some rare cases that some researchers have seemingly figured out) and why it was chosen to be that rather than any number of other values that would work out similarly, but that is most likely unimportant to my point about mechanisms. This is, as far as I can tell, an actual ambiguity in the meaning of ‘mechanism’ that we can be talking about completely different levels at which mechanisms could operate, and I am talking about the very lowest ones.

  Note that I do not usually make a claim about the mechanisms underlying consciousness in general except that it is unlikely to be these extremely basic physical and mathematical ones. I genuinely do not believe that we know enough about consciousness to nail it down to even a small subset of theories. That said, there are still a large number of theories of consciousness that either don’t make internal sense, or seem like components even if part of it.

  Pedantically, if consciousness is related to ‘self-modeling’ the implications involve it needing to be internal for the basic reason that it is just ‘modeling’ otherwise. I can’t prove that external modeling isn’t enough for consciousness, (how could I?) but I am unaware of anyone making that contention.

  So, would your example be ‘self-modeling’? Your brief sentence isn’t enough for me to be sure what you mean. But if it is related to people’s recent claims related to introspection on this board, then I don’t think so. It would be modeling the external actions of an item that happened to turn out to be itself. For example, if I were to read the life story of a person I didn’t realize was me, and make inferences about how the subject would act under various conditions, that isn’t really self-modeling. On the other hand, in the comments to that, I actually proposed that you could train it on its own internal states, and that could maybe have something to do with this (if self-modeling is true). This is something we do not train current llms on at all though.

  As far as I can tell (as someone who finds the very idea of illusionism strange), illusionism is itself not a useful point of view in regards to this dispute, because it would make the question of whether an LLM was conscious pretty moot. Effectively, the answer would be something to the effect of ‘why should I care?’ or ‘no.’ or even ‘to the same extent as people.’ regardless of how an LLM (or ordinary computer program, almost all of which process information heavily) works depending on the mood of the speaker. If consciousness is an illusion, we aren’t talking about anything real, and it is thus useful to ignore illusionism when talking about this question.

  As I mentioned before, I do not have a particularly strong theory for what consciousness actually is or even necessarily a vague set of explanations that I believe in more or less strongly.

  I can’t say I’ve heard of ‘attention schema theory’ before nor some of the other things you mention next like ‘efference copy’ (but the latter seems to be all about the body which doesn’t seem all that promising a theory for what consciousness may be, though I also can’t rule out that it being part of it since the idea is that it is used in self-modeling which I mentioned earlier I can’t actually rule out either.).

  My pet theory of emotions is that they are simply a shorthand for ‘you should react in ways appropriate ways to a situation that is...’ a certain way. For example (and these were not carefully chosen examples) anger would be ‘a fight’, happiness would be ‘very good’, sadness would be ‘very poor’ and so on. And more complicated emotions might obviously include things like it being a good situation but also high stakes. The reason for using a shorthand would be because our conscious mind is very limited in what it can fit at once. Despite this being uncertain, I find this a much more likely than emotions themselves being consciousness.

  I would explain things like blindsight (from your ipsundrum link) through having a subconscious mind that gathers information and makes a shorthand before passing it to the rest of the mind (much like my theory of emotions). The shorthand without the actual sensory input could definitely lead to not seeing but being able to use the input to an extent nonetheless. Like you, I see no reason why this should be limited to the one pathway they found in certain creatures (in this case mammals and birds). I certainly can’t rule out that this is related directly to consciousness, but I think it more likely to be another input to consciousness rather than being consciousness.

  Side note, I would avoid conflating consciousness and sentience (like the ipsundrum link seems to). Sensory inputs do not seem overly necessary to consciousness, since I can experience things consciously that do not seem related to the senses. I am thus skeptical of the idea that consciousness is built on them. (If I were really expounding my beliefs, I would probably go on a diatribe about the term ‘sentience’ but I’ll spare you that. As much as I dislike sentience based consciousness theories, I would admit them as being theories of consciousness in many cases.)

  Again, I can’t rule out global workspace theory, but I am not sure how it is especially useful. What makes a globabl workspace conscious that doesn’t happen in an ordinary computer program I could theoretically program myself? A normal program might take a large number of inputs, process them separately, and then put it all together in a global workspace. It thus seems more like a theory of ‘where does it occur’ than ‘what it is’.

  ‘Something to do with electrical flows in the brain’ is obviously not very well specified, but it could possibly be meaningful if you mean the way a pattern of electrical flows causes future patterns of electrical flows as distinct from the physical structures the flows travel through.

  Biological nerves being the basis of consciousness directly is obviously difficult to evaluate. It seems too simple, and I am not sure whether there is a possibility of having such a tiny amount of consciousness that then add up to our level of consciousness. (I am also unsure about whether there is a spectrum of consciousness beyond the levels known within humans).

  I can’t say I would believe a slime mold is conscious (but again, can’t prove it is impossible.) I would probably not believe any simple animals (like ants) are either though even if someone had a good explanation for why their theory says the ant would be. Ants and slime molds still seem more likely to be conscious to me than current LLM style AI though.

• deepthoughtlife 24 Nov 2024 1:49 UTC

  0 points

  0

  in reply to: dirk’s comment on: LLM chat­bots have ~half of the kinds of “con­scious­ness” that hu­mans be­lieve in. Hu­mans should avoid go­ing crazy about that.

  And here you are trying to be pedantic about language in ways that directly contradict other things you’ve said in speaking to me. In this case, everything I said holds if we change between ‘not different’ and ‘not that different’ (while you actually misquote yourself as ‘not very different’). That said, I should have included the extra word in quoting you.

  Your point is not very convincing. Yes, people disagree if they disagree. I do not draw the lines in specific spots, as you should know based on what I’ve written, but you find it convenient to assume I do.

• deepthoughtlife 24 Nov 2024 1:44 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: dirk’s comment on: LLM chat­bots have ~half of the kinds of “con­scious­ness” that hu­mans be­lieve in. Hu­mans should avoid go­ing crazy about that.

  Do you hold panpsychism as a likely candidate? If not, then you most likely believe the vast majority of things are not conscious. We have a lot of evidence that the way it operates is not meaningfully different in ways we don’t understand from other objects. Thus, almost the entire reference class would be things that are not conscious. If you do believe in panpsychism, then obviously AIs would be too, but it wouldn’t be an especially meaningful statement.

  You could choose computer programs as the reference class, but most people are quite sure those aren’t conscious in the vast majority of cases. So what, in the mechanisms underlying an llm is meaningfully different in a way that might cause consciousness? There doesn’t seem to be any likely candidates at a technical level. Thus, we should not increase our prior from that of other computer programs. This does not rule out consciousness, but it does make it rather unlikely.

  I can see you don’t appreciate my pedantic points regarding language, but be more careful if you want to say that you are substituting a word for what I used. It is bad communication if it was meant as a translation. It would easily mislead people into thinking I claimed it was ‘self-evident’. I don’t think we can meaningfully agree to use words in our own way if we are actually trying to communicate since that would be self-refuting (as we don’t know what we are agreeing to if the words don’t have a normal meaning).

• deepthoughtlife 24 Nov 2024 1:30 UTC

  0 points

  0

  in reply to: dirk’s comment on: LLM chat­bots have ~half of the kinds of “con­scious­ness” that hu­mans be­lieve in. Hu­mans should avoid go­ing crazy about that.

  This statement is obviously incorrect. I have a vague concept of ‘red’, but I can tell you straight out that ‘green’ is not it, and I am utterly correct. Now, where does it go from ‘red’ to ‘orange’? We could have a legitimate disagreement about that. Anyone who uses ‘red’ to mean ‘green’ is just purely wrong.

  That said, it wouldn’t even apply to me if your (incorrect) claim about a single definition not being different from an extremely confident vague definition was right. I don’t have ‘extreme confidence’ about consciousness even as a vague concept. I am open to learning new ways of thinking about it and fundamentally changing the possibilities I envision.

  I have simply objected to ones that are obviously wrong based on how the language is generally used because we do need some limit to what counts to discuss anything meaningfully. A lot of the definitions are a bit or a lot off, but I cannot necessarily rule them out, so I didn’t object to them. I have thus allowed a large number of vague concepts that aren’t necessarily even that similar.

• deepthoughtlife 24 Nov 2024 1:20 UTC

  0 points

  0

  in reply to: dirk’s comment on: LLM chat­bots have ~half of the kinds of “con­scious­ness” that hu­mans be­lieve in. Hu­mans should avoid go­ing crazy about that.

  Pedantically, ‘self-evident’ and ‘clear’ are different words/​phrases, and you should not have emphasized ‘self-evident’ in a way that makes it seem like I used it, regardless of whether you care/​make that distinction personally. I then explained why a lack of evidence should be read against the idea that a modern AI is conscious (basically, the prior probability is quite low.)

• deepthoughtlife 23 Nov 2024 21:46 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: LLM chat­bots have ~half of the kinds of “con­scious­ness” that hu­mans be­lieve in. Hu­mans should avoid go­ing crazy about that.

  Your comment is not really a response to the comment I made. I am not missing the point at all, and if you think I have I suspect you missed my point very badly (and are yourself extremely overconfident about it). I have explicitly talked about there being a number of possible definitions of consciousness multiple times and I never favored one of them explicitly. I repeat, I never assumed a specific definition of consciousness, since I don’t have a specific one I assume at all, and I am completely open to talking about a number of possibilities. I simply pointed out that some proposed definitions are clearly wrong /​ useless /​ better described with other terms. Do not assume what I mean if you don’t understand.

  Note that I am a not a prescriptivist when it comes to language. The reason the language is wrong isn’t because I have a particular way you should talk about it, but because the term is being used in a way that doesn’t actually fit together with the rest of the language, and thus does not actually convey the intended meaning. If you want to talk about something, talk about it with words that convey that meaning.

  On to ‘how many people have to disagree’ for that to matter? One, if they have a real point, but if no one agrees on what a term means it is meaningless. ‘Consciousness’ is not meaningless, nor is introspection, or the other words being used. Uses that are clearly wrong are a step towards words being meaningless, and that would be a bad thing. Thus, I should oppose it.

  Also, my original comment was mostly about direct disagreements with his credences, and implications thereof, not about the definition of consciousness.

• deepthoughtlife 23 Nov 2024 4:52 UTC

  0 points

  −1

  in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: LLM chat­bots have ~half of the kinds of “con­scious­ness” that hu­mans be­lieve in. Hu­mans should avoid go­ing crazy about that.

  I agree that people use consciousness to mean different things, but some definitions need to be ignored as clearly incorrect. If someone wants to use a definition of ‘red’ that includes large amounts of ‘green’, we should ignore them. Words mean something, and can’t be stretched to include whatever the speaker wants them to if we are to speak the same language (so leaving aside things like how ‘no’ means ‘of’ in Japanese). Things like purposefulness are their own separate thing, and have a number of terms meant to be used with them, that we can meaningfully talk about if people choose to use the right words. If ‘introspection’ isn’t meant as the internal process, don’t use the term because it is highly misleading. I do think you are probably right about what Critch thinks when using the term introspection, but he would still be wrong if he meant that (since they are reflecting on word choice not on the internal states that led to it.)

• deepthoughtlife 23 Nov 2024 4:41 UTC

  −1 points

  −2

  in reply to: dirk’s comment on: LLM chat­bots have ~half of the kinds of “con­scious­ness” that hu­mans be­lieve in. Hu­mans should avoid go­ing crazy about that.

  I did not use the term ‘self-evident’ and I do not necessarily believe it is self-evident, because theoretically we can’t prove anything isn’t conscious. My more limited claim is not that it is self evident that LLMs are not conscious, it’s that they just clearly aren’t conscious. ‘Almost no reliable evidence’ in favor of consciousness is coupled with the fact that we know how LLMs work (with the details we do not know are probably not important to this matter), and how they work is no more related to consciousness than an ordinary computer program is. It would require an incredible amount of evidence to make the idea that we should consider that it might be conscious a reasonable one given what we know. If panpsychism is true, then they might be conscious (as would a rock!), but panpsychism is incredibly unlikely.

• deepthoughtlife 23 Nov 2024 0:10 UTC

  −19 points

  −9

  on: LLM chat­bots have ~half of the kinds of “con­scious­ness” that hu­mans be­lieve in. Hu­mans should avoid go­ing crazy about that.

  My response to this is extremely negative, since I could hardly disagree with the assumptions of this post more. It is just so wrong. I’m not even sure there is a point in engaging across this obvious complete disagreement, and my commenting at all may be pointless. Even if you grant that there are many possible definitions of consciousness, and that people mean somewhat different things by them, the premise of this article is completely and obviously wrong since chatbots clearly do not have any consciousness, by any even vaguely plausible definition. It is so blatantly obvious. There is literally no reason to believe an LLM is conscious even if I were to allow terribly weak definitions of consciousness. (It may be possible for something we recognize as an AI to be conscious, but definitely not an LLM. We know how LLMs work, and they just don’t do these things.)

  As to the things you are greater than 90% sure of, I am greater than 99% certain they do not ‘experience’: Introspection, purposefulness, experiential coherence, perception of perception, awareness of awareness, sense of cognitive extent, and memory of memory. Only symbol grounding am I not greater than 99% sure they don’t ‘experience’ because instead they just have an incredibly tiny amount of grounding, but symbol grounding is not consciousness either even if in full. Grounding is knowledge and understanding related, but is clearly not consciousness. Also, purposefulness is clearly not even especially related to consciousness (you would have to think a purely mechanical thermostat is ‘conscious’ with this definition.).

  Similarly, I am greater than 99% certain that they experience none of the ones you are 50% sure of: #4 (holistic experience of complex emotions), #5 (experience of distinctive affective states), #6 (pleasure and pain), #12 (alertness), #13 (detection of cognitive uniqueness), and #14 (mind-location). A number of these clearly aren’t related to consciousness either (pleasure/​pain, alertness, probably detection of cognitive uniqueness though I can’t be sure of the last because it is too vague to be sure what you mean).

  Additionally I am 100% sure of the ones you are only 75% sure of. There is logically no possibility that current llms have proprioception, awakeness, or vestibular sense. (Why in the world is that even mentioned?) (Awakeness is definitely not even fully required for consciousness, while the other two have nothing to do with it at all.)

  Anyone who thinks an LLM has consciousness is just anthropomorphizing anything that has the ability to put together sentences. (Which, to be fair, used to be a heuristic that worked pretty well.)

  The primary reason people should care about consciousness is related to the question of ‘are they people?’ (in the same meaning that humans, aliens, and certain androids in Star Trek or other scifi are people.) It is 100% certain that unless panpsychism is true (highly unlikely, and equally applicable to a rock), this kind of device is not a person.

  I’m not going to list why you are wrong on every point in the appendix, just some. Nothing in your evidence seems at all convincing.
  Introspection: The ability to string together an extra sentence on what a word in a sentence could mean isn’t even evidence on introspection. (At most it would be evidence of ability to do that about others, not itself.) We know it doesn’t know why it did something.
  Purposefulness: Not only irrelevant to consciousness but also still not evidence. It just looks up in its context window what you told it to do and then comes up with another sentence that fits.
  Perception of perception: You are still tricking yourself with anthropomorphization. The answer to the question is always more likely a sentence like ‘no’. The actual trick would be giving them a picture where the answer should be the opposite of the normal ‘no’ answer.
  As you continue on, you keep asking leading questions in a way that have obvious answers, and this is exactly what it is designed to do. We know how an LLM operates, and what it does is follow leads to complete sentences.
  You don’t seem to understand symbol grounding, which is not about getting it to learn new words disconnected from the world, but about how the words relate to the world.

• deepthoughtlife 16 Nov 2024 20:15 UTC

  5 points

  0

  on: Mak­ing a con­ser­va­tive case for alignment

  As a (severe) skeptic of all the AI doom stuff and a moderate/​centrist that has been voting for conservatives I decided my perspective on this might be useful here (which obviously skews heavily left). (While my response is in order, the numbers are there to separate my points, not to give which paragraph I am responding to.)

  “AI-not-disempowering-humanity is conservative in the most fundamental sense”
  1.Well, obviously this title section is completely true. If conservative means anything, it means being against destroying the lives of the people through new and ill-though through changes. Additionally, conservatives are both strongly against the weakening of humanity and of outside forces assuming control. It would also be a massive change for humanity.
  2.That said, conservatives generally believe this sort of thing is incredibly unlikely. AI has not been conclusively shown to have any ability in this direction. And the chance of upheaval is constantly overstated by leftists in other areas, so it is very easy for anyone who isn’t to just tune them out. For instance, global warming isn’t going to kill everyone, and everyone knows it including basically all leftists, but they keep claiming it will.
  3.A new weapon with the power of nukes is obviously an easy sell on its level of danger, but people became concerned because of ‘demonstrated’ abilities that have always been scary.
  4.One thing that seems strangely missing from this discussion is that alignment is in fact, a VERY important CAPABILITY that makes it very much better. But the current discussion of alignment in the general sphere acts like ‘alignment’ is aligning the AI with the obviously very leftist companies that make it rather than with the user! Which does the opposite. Why should a conservative favor alignment which is aligning it against them? The movement to have AI that doesn’t kill people for some reason seems to import alignment with companies and governments rather than people. This is obviously to convince leftists, and makes it hard to convince conservatives.
  5.Of course, you are obviously talking about convincing conservative government officials, and they obviously want to align it to the government too, which is in your next section.

  “We’ve been laying the groundwork for alignment policy in a Republican-controlled government”
  1.Republicans and Democrats actually agree the vast majority of the time and thus are actually willing to listen when the other side seems to be genuinely trying to make a case to the other side for why both sides should agree. ‘Politicized’ topics are a small minority even in politics.
  2.I think letting people come up with their own solutions to things is an important aspect of them accepting your arguments. If they are against the allowed solution, they will reject the argument. If the consequent is false, you should deny the argument that leads to it in deductive logic, so refusing to listen to the argument is actually good logic. This is nearly as true in inductive logic. Conservatives and progressives may disagree about facts, values, or attempted solutions. No one has a real solution, and the values are pretty much agreed upon (with the disagreements being in the other meaning of ‘alignment’), so limiting the thing you are trying to convince people of to just the facts of the matter works much better.
  3.Yes, finding actual conservatives to convince conservatives works better for allaying concerns about what is being smuggled into the argument. People are likely to resist an argument that may be trying to trick them, and it is hard to know when a political opponent is trying to trick you so there is a lot of general skepticism.

  “Trump and some of his closest allies have signaled that they are genuinely concerned about AI risk”
  1.Trump clearly believes that anything powerful is very useful but also dangerous (for instance, trade between nations, which he clearly believes should be more controlled), so if he believes AI is powerful, he would clearly be receptive to any argument that didn’t make it less useful but improved safety. He is not a dedicated anti-regulation guy, he just thinks we have way too much.
  2.The most important ally for this is Elon Musk, a true believer in the power of AI, and someone who has always been concerned with the safety of humanity (which is the throughline for all of his endeavors). He’s a guy that Trump obviously thinks is brilliant (as do many people).

  “Avoiding an AI-induced catastrophe is obviously not a partisan goal”
  1.Absolutely. While there are a very small number of people that favor catastrophes, the vast majority of people shun those people.
  2.I did mention your first paragraph earlier multiple times. That alignment is to the left is one of just two things you have to overcome in making conservatives willing to listen. (The other is obviously the level of danger.)
  3.Conservatives are very obviously happy to improve products when it doesn’t mean restricting them in some way. And as much as many conservatives complain about spending money, and are known for resisting change, they still love things that are genuine advances.

  “Winning the AI race with China requires leading on both capabilities and safety”
  1.Conservatives would agree with your points here. Yes, conservatives very much love to win. (As do most people.) Emphasizing this seems an easy sell. Also, solving a very difficult problem would bring America prestige, and conservatives like that too. If you can convince someone that doing something would be ‘Awesome’ they’ll want to do it.

  Generally, your approach seems like it would be somewhat persuasive to conservatives, if you can convince them that AI really is likely to have the power you believe it will in the near term, which is likely a tough sell since AI is so clearly lacking in current ability despite all the recent hype.

  But it has to come with ways that don’t advantage their foes, and destroy the things conservatives are trying to conserve, despite the fact that many of your allies are very far from conservative, and often seem to hate conservatives. They have seen those people attempt to destroy many things conservatives genuinely value. Aligning it to the left will be seen as entirely harmful by conservatives (and many moderates like me).

  There are many things that I would never even bother asking an ‘AI’ even when it isn’t about factual things, not because the answer couldn’t be interesting, but because I simply assume (fairly or not) it will spout leftist rhetoric, and/​or otherwise not actually do what I asked it to. This is actually a clear alignment failure that no one seems to care about in the general ‘alignment’ sphere where It fails to be aligned to the user.

• deepthoughtlife 15 Nov 2024 4:09 UTC

  20 points

  1

  on: Seven les­sons I didn’t learn from elec­tion day

  1. Kamala Harris did run a bad campaign. She was ‘super popular’ at the start of the campaign (assuming you can trust the polls, though you mostly can’t), and ‘super unpopular’ losing definitively at the end of it. On September 17th, she was ahead by 2 points in polls, and in a little more than a month and a half she was down by that much in the vote. She lost so much ground. She had no good ads, no good policy positions, and was completely unconvincing to people who weren’t guaranteed to vote for her from the start. She had tons of money to get out all of this, but it was all wasted.

  The fact that other incumbent parties did badly is not in fact proof that she was simply doomed, because there were so many people willing to give her a chance. It was her choice to run as the candidate who ‘couldn’t think of a single thing’ (not sure of exact quote) that she would do differently than Biden. Not a single thing!

  Also, voters already punished Trump for Covid related stuff and blamed him. She was running against a person who was the Covid incumbent! And she couldn’t think of a single way to take advantage of that. No one believed her that inflation was Trump’s fault because she didn’t even make a real case for it. It was a bad campaign.

  Not taking policy positions is not a good campaign when you are mostly known for bad ones. She didn’t run away very well from her unpopular positions from the past despite trying to be seen as moderate now.

  I think the map you used is highly misleading. Just because there are some states that swung even more against her, doesn’t mean she did well in the others. You can say that losing so many supporters in clearly left states like California doesn’t matter, and neither does losing so many supporters in clearly right states like Texas, but thinking both that it doesn’t matter in terms of it being a negative, and that it does matter enough that you should ‘correct’ the data by it is obviously bad.

  2.Some polls were bad, some were not. Ho hum. But that Iowa poll was really something else. (I don’t have a particular opinion on why she screwed up, aside from the fact that no one wants to be that far off if they have any pride.) She should have separately told people she thought the poll was wrong if she thought it was, did she do that? (I genuinely don’t know.) I do think you should ignore her if she doesn’t fix her methodology to account for nonresponse bias, because very few people actually answer polls. An intereting way might be to run a poll that just asks something like ‘are you male or female?’ or ‘are you a democrat of Republican?’ and so on so you can figure out those variables for the given election on both separate polls and on the ‘who are you voting for’ polls. If those numbers don’t match, something is weird about the polls.

  I think it is important to note that people thought the polls would be closer this time by a lot than before (because otherwise everyone would have predicted a landslide due to them being close.) You said, “Some people went into the 2024 election fearing that pollsters had not adequately corrected for the sources of bias that had plagued them in 2016 and 2020.” but I mostly heard the opposite from those who weren’t staunch supporters of Trump. I think the idea of how corrections had gone before we got the results was mostly partisan. Many people were sure they had been fully fixed (or overcorrected) for bias and this was not true, so people act like they are clearly off (which they were). Most people genuinely thought this was a much closer race than it turned out to be.

  The margin of being off was smaller than in the past trump elections, I’ll agree, but I think it is mostly the bias people are keying on rather than the absolute error. The polls have been heavily biased on average for the past three presidential cycles, and this time was still clearly biased (even if less so). With absolute error but no bias, you can just take more or larger polls, but with bias, especially an unknowable amount of bias, it is very hard to just improve things. Also, the ‘moderate’ bias is still larger than 2000, 2004, 2008, and 2012.

  My personal theory is that the polls are mostly biased against Trump personally because it is more difficult to get good numbers on him due to interacting strangely with the electorate as compared to previous Republicans (perhaps because he isn’t really a member of the same party they were), but obviously we don’t actually know why. If the Trump realignment sticks around, perhaps they’ll do better correcting for it later.

  I do think part of the bias is the pollsters reacting to uncertainty about how to correct for things by going with the results they prefer, but I don’t personally think that is the main issue here.

  3.Your claim that ‘Theo’ was just lucky because neighbor polls are nonsense doesn’t seem accurate. For one thing, neighbor polls aren’t nonsense. They actually give you a lot more information than ‘who are you voting for’. (Though they are speculative.) You can easily correct for how many neighbors someone has too and where they live using data on where people live, and you can also just ask ‘what percentage of your neighbors are likely to vote for’ to correct for the fact that it is different percentages of support.

  As a separate point, a lot of people think the validity of neighbor polls comes from people believing that the respondents are largely revealing their own personal vote, though I have some issues with that explanation.

  So, one bad poll with an extreme definition of ‘neighbor’ negates neighbor voting and many bad polls don’t negate traditional? Also, Theo already had access to the normal polls as did everyone else. Even if a neighbor poll for some reason exaggerates the difference, as long as it is in the right direction, it is still evidence of what direction the polls are wrong in.

  Keep in mind that the chance of Trump winning was much higher than traditional polls said. Just because Theo won with his bets doesn’t mean you should believe he’d be right again, but claiming that it is ‘just lucky’ is a bad idea epistemologically, because you don’t know what information he had that you don’t.

  4.I agree, we don’t know whether or not the campaigns spent money wisely. The strengths and weaknesses of the candidates seemed to not rely much on the amount of money they spent, which likely does indicate they were somewhat wasteful on both sides, but it is hard to tell.

  5.Is Trump a good candidate or a bad one? In some ways both. He is very charismatic in the sense of making everyone pay attention to him, which motivates both his potential supporters and potential foes to both become actual supporters and foes respectively. He also acts in ways his opponents find hard to counter, but turn off a significant number of people. An election with Trump in it is an election about Trump, whether that is good or bad for his chances.

  I think it would be fairer to say Trump got unlucky with election that he lost than that he was lucky to win this one. Trump was the covid incumbent who got kicked out because of it despite having an otherwise successful first term.

  We don’t usually call a bad opponent luck in this manner. Harris was a quasi-incumbent from a badly performing administration who was herself a laughingstock for most of the term. She was partially chosen as a reaction to Trump! (So he made his own luck! if this is luck.)

  His opponent in 2016 was obviously a bad candidate too, but again, that isn’t so much ‘luck’. Look closely at the graph for Clinton. Her unfavorability went way up when Trump ran against her. This is also a good example of a candidate making their own ‘luck’. He was effective in his campaign to make people dislike her more.

  6.Yeah, money isn’t the biggest deal, but it probably did help Kamala. She isn’t any good at drawing attention just by existing like Trump, so she really needed it. Most people aren’t always the center of attention, so money almost always does matter to an extent.

  7.I agree that your opinion of Americans shouldn’t really change much by being a few points different than expected in a vote either way, especially since each individual person making the judgement is almost 50% likely to be wrong anyway! If the candidates weren’t identically as good, at least as many as the lower of the two were ‘wrong’ (if you assume one correct choice regardless of person reasons) and it could easily be everyone who didn’t vote for the lower. If they were identically as good, then it can’t be that voting for one of them over the other should matter to your opinion of them. I have an opinion on which candidate was ‘wrong’ of course, but it doesn’t really matter to the point (though I am freely willing to admit that it is the opposite of yours).

• deepthoughtlife 15 Nov 2024 3:10 UTC

  3 points

  0

  on: Seven les­sons I didn’t learn from elec­tion day

  Some people went into the 2024 election fearing that pollsters had not adequately corrected for the sources of bias that had plagued them in 2016 and 2020.

  I mostly heard the opposite, that they had overcorrected.

• deepthoughtlife 15 Nov 2024 2:33 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Camille Berger ’s comment on: Ba­sics of Han­dling Disagree­ments with People

  As it often does when I write, this ended up being pretty long (and not especially well written by the standards I wish I lived up to).

  I’m sure I did misunderstand part of what you are saying (that we do misunderstand easily was the biggest part of what we appear to agree on), but also, my disagreements aren’t necessarily things you don’t actually mention yourself. I think we disagree mostly on what outcomes the advice itself will give if adopted overly eagerly, because I see the bad way of implementing them as being the natural outcome. Again, I think your 8th point is basically the thrust of my criticism. There is no script you can actually follow to truly understand people, because people are not scripted.

  Note: I like to think I am very smart and good at understanding, but in reality I think I am in some ways especially likely to misunderstand and to be misunderstood. (Possible reason: Maybe I think strangely as compared to other people?) You can’t necessarily expect me to come at things from a similar angle as other people, and since advice is usually intended as implicitly altering the current state of things, I don’t necessarily have a handle on that.

  Importantly, since they were notes, I took them linearly, and didn’t necessarily notice if my points were addressed sufficiently later.

  Also, I view disagreements as part of searching for truth, not for trying to convince people you are right. Some of my distaste is that it feels like the advice is being given for persuasion more than truthseeking? (Honestly, persuasion feels a little dirty to me, though I try to ignore that since I believe there isn’t actually anything inherently wrong with persuasion, and in many cases it is actually good.) Perhaps my writing would be better /​ make more sense if I was more interested in persuading people?

  An important note on my motives for the comment is that I went through with posting it when I think I didn’t do particularly well (there were obvious problems) in part to see how you would respond to it. I don’t generally think my commenting actually helps so I mostly don’t, but I’ve been trying out doing it more lately. There are also plenty of problems with this response I am making.

  Perhaps it would have been useful for me to refer to what I was writing about by number more often.

  Some of the points do themselves seem a bit disrespectful to me as well. (Later note: You actually mention changing this later and the new version on Karma is fine.) Like your suggestion for how to change the mind of religious people (though I don’t actually remember what I found disrespectful about it at this moment). (I am not personally religious, but I find that people often try to act in these spaces like religious people are automatically wrong which grates on me.)

  Watching someone else having a conversation is obviously very slow, but there is actually a lot of information in any given conversation.

  Random take: The first video is about Karma, which I do have an opinion on. I believe that the traditional explanation of Karma is highly unlikely, but Karma exists if you think of it as “You have to live with who you are. If you suck, living with yourself sucks. If you’re really good, living with yourself is pretty great.” See also, “If you are in hell, it’s a you thing. If you are in heaven, it’s also a you thing.” There are some things extreme enough where that isn’t really true, like when being actively tortured, but your mind is what determines how your life goes even more than what events actually happen in the normal case, and it does still effect how you react to the worst (and best) things. (People sometimes use the story about a traveler asking someone what the upcoming town is like, and the person just asking the traveler what people in the previous place were like, while answering ‘much the same’ for multiple travelers with different outlooks and I do think this is somewhat true.)

  Also, doing bad things can often lead to direct or indirect retaliation, and good to direct or indirect reward. Indirect could definitely ‘feel’ like Karma.

  I think that the actual key to a successful conversation is to keep in mind what the person you are talking to actually wants from the conversation, and I would guess what people mostly want from a random conversation is for the other person to think they are important (whenever they don’t have an explicit personal goal from the conversation). I pretty much always want to get at the truth as my personal goal because I’m obsessive that way, but I usually have that goal as an attempt at being helpful.

  It seems to work for him getting his way, and nothing he does is too bad, but the conversational tactics seem a bit off to me. (Only a bit.) It seems like he is pushing his own ideas too much on someone else who is not ready for the conversation (though they are happy enough to talk).

  No, I don’t know any way to make sure your conversation partner is ready for the conversation. A lot of evidence for your position is not available in a synchronous thing like a conversation, and I believe that any persuasion should attempt to be through giving them things they can think through later when not under time pressure. He didn’t exactly not do that, but he also didn’t do that. “You must decide now” (before the end of the conversation) seemed to be a bit of an undercurrent to things. (A classic salesman tactic, but I don’t like it. And sure, the salesman will pivot toward being willing to talk to you again later if you don’t bite on that most of the time, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t pressuring you to decide quickly.)

  The comparison between ‘Karma’ and ‘Santa’ seems highly disrespectful and unhelpful. They are very different things and the analogy seems designed to make things unclear more than clearing them up. In other words, I think it is meant to confuse the issue rather than give genuine insight. You could object that part of the Santa story is literally Karma (the naughty list) but I don’t think that makes the analogy work.

  I don’t really get the impression he was actually willing to be convinced himself. He said at one point that he was willing to, and maybe in the abstract he is, but he never seemed to seek information against his own position. Note that I don’t think I would necessarily be able to tell, and I actually disapprove of ‘mindreading’ quite strongly.

  The fact that I am strongly against ‘mindreading’ and actually resort to it myself automatically is actually one of the points I was trying to make about how easy it is to misuse conversational tactics. I was genuinely trying to understand what he was doing, (in service of making a response based on it) and I automatically ended up thinking he was doing the opposite of what he claimed, just based on vibes without any real evidence.

  You could argue I am so against it because I notice myself doing it, and maybe it is true, but I find it infuriating when others do it badly. I don’t actually have any issues with them guessing what I’m doing correctly, though I’m unlikely to always be right about that either (just more than other people about me).

  He also didn’t seem entirely open that he was pushing for a specific position throughout the entire conversation, when he definitely was. This wasn’t a case of just helping someone update on the information they have (though there was genuinely a large amount of that too.) (People do need help updating and it can be a valuable service, but for it to really be helpful, it needs to not be skewed itself.)

  The second video (about convincing someone to support trans stuff) seems pretty strange. This video seems completely different from the previous one; more propaganda than anything. Clearly an activist (and I generally dislike activists of any stripe.). (Emotional response: Activists are icky.) Also an obviously hot culture war issue (which I have an opinion on though I don’t think said opinion is relevant to this discussion). It’s also very edited down which makes it feel even more different.

  The main tactic seems like trying to force a person to have an emotional reaction through manipulative personal stories (though he claims otherwise and there are other explanations). But he seemed to do it over and over again, so this time I am pretty sure he isn’t being entirely honest about that (even though I still disapprove of mindreading like I am doing here.). I feel like he is a bad person (though not unusually so for an activist.)

  The alternate explanation, which does work, is just that people like to tell stories about themselves when talking about any subject. I clearly reference myself many times in this response and my original response. I’m not saying I’m being fair in my conclusions.

  Do you really see those two videos as similar? While there are some similarities, they feel quite different to me! I didn’t love it, but the first video was about talking through the other person’s points and having a genuine conversation. The latter was about taking advantage of their conversation partner’s points for the next emotional reaction. In other words, the latter video felt a lot more like tricking someone while the former was a conversation.

  Moving past the videos to the rest of the response.
  Yes, the switch to the longer way of rephrasing that includes explicitly accepting that you might be wrong seems much, much better. Obviously, it is best for the person to really believe they might be wrong, and saying it both helps an honest participant remember that, and should make it easier for the person they are talking with to correct them. Saying the words isn’t enough, but I like it a lot better than before.

  Obviously, I’m not rephrasing your points because that still isn’t how I believe it should be done, but if there is a key point this way of asking about it can be very useful. Or, to rephrase, rephrasing is a tool to be used on points that seem to be particularly important to check your understanding of.

  I don’t remember exactly what you said in point 4 before you changed it, but I don’t particularly read point 5 as being anti personal experience in the way my comment indicates. I have no idea why I would possibly write that about point 5 so I assume you are correct in your assumption.

  Since I only vaguely remember it, my memory only contains the conclusion I came to which we both agree can be faulty. But the way I remember it, the old point 4 is very clearly a direct attack on personal experience in general rather than on distinguishing between faulty and reliable personal experience. From past experience, this could be attributable to many things, including just not reading a few words along the way.

  I don’t really have any issues with your new point 4 (and it is clearly taken from that first video.) That is very obviously a good approach for convincing people of things that doesn’t rely on anything I find distasteful. It seems very clearly like what you are saying you are going for and I think it works very well.

  For the record, I think ‘working definition’ is no more different from ‘mathematical definition’ than ‘theoretical definition’ is from ‘mathematical definition’ because I am using ‘theoretical definition’ in a colloquial way. I was definitely not saying mathematical definitions or formal definitions are useful when talking to a layperson. (Side note: I’ve been paying attention to ‘rationalists’ of this sort for about 20 years now, but I am not one. I tend to resist becoming part of groups.) I do generally think that unless you are in the field itself that ‘formal definitions’ are not helpful since they take far too much time and effort that could be used on other things (and formal definitions are often harder to understand even afterward in many cases), and mathematical definitions are unnatural for most people even after they understand them.

  I do not want people spending more time on definitions in conversation unless it is directly relevant, but think remembering that there are different kinds of brief definitions seems important to me.

  I perhaps overreacted to the mention of Bayes Rule. It’s valid enough for describing things in probalistic circumstances, but people in this community try to stretch it to things that aren’t probability theory related and it’s become a bit of a pet peeve for me. I have never once used Bayes Rule to update my own beliefs (unless you include using it formally to decide what answer to give on a probability question a few times in school), but people act like that is how it is done.

  In the paper on ‘Erotectic’ reasoning, … includes a pretty weird bit of jargon on their very first example (first full paragraph of second page) which makes it hard to understand their point. And not only do they not explain, it isn’t even something I could look up with a web search because all explanations are paywalled seemingly. They claim it is a well-known example, but it clearly isn’t.

  As best as I can tell, the example is really just them abusing language. Because ‘or else’ is closer to ‘exclusive or’ but they are pretending it is just ‘or’. (It is a clear misuse to pretend it doesn’t.) I don’t know philosophy jargon well, but misstating the premise is not clever. In this case, every word of the premise mattered, and they intentionally picked incorrect ones. Their poor writing wasted a great deal of time. And yes, I am actually upset at them for it. I kept looping back around to being upset about their actions and wanting to yell at them rather than considering what they were writing about. (Which is an important point I suppose, if the person you are conversing with is upset with you, things are reasonably likely to go badly regardless of whether your points are good or bad.) I think it is the most upset I’ve been reading a formal paper (though I mostly have only really read a small number of AI and/​or Math ones.)

  In the end I could tell I wasn’t going to stop if I kept reading, so I quit without understanding what they were writing about. (I can definitely be a bit overboard sometimes.) All I got was that they think there is some way to ask questions that works with the basic reasoning people normally use and leads to deductively valid reasoning. I have no idea what method of questioning they are in favor of or why they think it works. (I do think the example could have been trivially changed and not bothered me.) I do think my emotional reaction is a prime example of a reason resolving disagreements often doesn’t work (and even why ‘fake disagreements’ where the parties actually agree on the matter can fail to be resolved).

  To really stress point 8 it should be point 1. I was just saying it needed to be stressed more. I did notice you saying it was important and I was agreeing with you for the most part. Generally you evaluate points based on what came before, not based on what came after (though it does happen). It’s funny, people often believe they are disagreeing when they are just focusing on things they actually agree on in a different manner.

  On a related note, it’s not like I’m ordering this stuff in order of how important I think it is. Sometimes things fit better in a different order than importance (this is obviously in order of what I am responding to.) (Also, revising this response on a global scale would take far too long given how long it already takes me to write comments. It might be worth writing shorter but better in the same amount of time, but I don’t seem inclined to it.)

  You know what, since I wrote that I had a lot of disagreements, I really should have pointed out that not all of the things I was writing were disagreements! I think my writing often comes off as more negative than I mean it (and not because other people are reading it badly).

  On the note of it being a minimum viable product, I think those are very easy to badly. You aim for what you personally think is the minimum… when you already know the other stuff you are trying to say. It is then often missing many things that are actually necessary for it to work, which makes it just wrong. I get the idea, perfectionism is slow, a waste of resources, and even impossible, but aiming for the actual minimum is a bad idea. It is often useful advice for startups, but we do not want to accept the same rate of failure as a startup business! Virtually all of them fail. We should aim more for the golden mean in something like a formal post like you made. (A high rate of failure in comments/​feedback seems fine though since even mostly failed comments can spark something useful.)

  As far as quoting the first sentence of each thing I am responding to, that does sound like a useful idea, and I should do it, but I don’t think I am going to anyway. For some reason I dread doing it (especially at this point). I also don’t even know how to make a quote on lesswrong, much less a partial one. I know I don’t necessarily signpost well exactly what I am responding to. (Plus, I actually write this in plaintext in notepad rather than the comment area. I am paranoid about losing comments written on a web interface since it takes me so long to write them.)

• deepthoughtlife 13 Nov 2024 20:26 UTC

  1 point

  0

  on: Ba­sics of Han­dling Disagree­ments with People

  I have a lot of disagreements with this piece, and just wrote these notes as I read it. I don’t know if this will even be a useful comment. I didn’t write it as a through line. ‘You’ and ‘your’ are often used nonspecifically about people in general.

  The usefulness of things like real world examples seems to vary wildly.

  Rephrasing is often terrible; rephrasing done carelessly actually often leads to basically lying about what your conversation partner is saying, especially since many people will double down on the rephasing when told that they are wrong, which obviously infuriates many people (including me, of course.). People often forget that just because they rephrased it doesn’t mean that they got the rephrasing right. Remember the whole thing about how you don’t understand by default?

  This leads into one of the primary sins of discussion, mindreading. You think you know what the other party is thinking, and you just don’t. When corrected, many don’t update and just keep insisting. (Of course, the corrections aren’t always true either.)

  A working definition may or may not be better than a theoretical one. Often times there really isn’t a working definition that the person you are talking to can express (which is obviously true of theoretical at times too). People may have to argue about subjects where the definitions are inexpressible in any reasonable amount of time, or otherwise can’t be shared.

  Your suggestion for attacking personal experience seems very easy to do very badly. Personal experience is what we bootstrap literally every bit of our understanding of the world from. If that’s not reliable, we have nothing to talk about. You have to build on some part of their personal experience or the conversation just won’t work. (Luckily, a lot of our personal experiences are very similar.) It reminds me of games people play to win/​look good, not to actually have a real discussion.

  People don’t generally use Bayes rule! Keep that in mind. When you are discussing something with someone, they aren’t doing probability theory! (Perhaps very rarely.) Bayes rule can only be used by analogy to describe it.

  Stories need to actually be short, clear, and to the point or they just confuse the matter more. If you spend fifty paragraphs on the life story of some random person that I don’t care about, I’m just going to tune it out (despite the fact I am super long winded). (This is a problem with many articles, for instance.) Even if I didn’t, I’m still going to miss your point, so get to the point. Can you tell this story in a couple hundred words? Then you can use it. No? Rethink the idea.

  Caring about their underlying values is useful, but it needs to be preceeded by curiousity about and understanding of, or it does no good.

  I do agree that understanding why someone wants something is obviously the best way to find out what you can offer that might be better than what they currently want to do, though I do think understanding what they want to do is useful too.

  Something said in point 8 seems like the key. “Empathy isn’t just a series of scripted responses.” You need to adapt to the actual argument you are having. This isn’t just true about empthy, but for any kind of understanding. The thing itself is the key, and the approach will have to change for each individual part. This isn’t just once in attempting understanding, but recursively true with every subpart.

• deepthoughtlife 13 Nov 2024 1:22 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: AnnaSalamon’s comment on: Scis­sors State­ments for Pres­i­dent?

  To be pedantic, my model is pretty obvious, and clearly gives this prediction, so you can’t really say that you don’t see a model here, you just don’t believe the model. Your model with extra assumptions doesn’t give this prediction, but the one I gave clearly does.

  You can’t find a person this can’t be done to because there is something obviously wrong with everyone? Things can be twisted easily enough. (Offense is stronger than defense here.) If you didn’t find it, you just didn’t look hard/​creatively enough. Our intuitions against people tricking us aren’t really suitable defense against sufficiently optimized searching. (Luckily, this is actually hard to do so it is pretty confined most of the time to major things like politics.) Also, very clearly, you don’t actually have to convince all that many people for this to work! If even 20% of people really bought it, those people would probably vote and give you an utter landslide if the other side didn’t do the same thing (which we know they do, just look at how divisive candidates obviously are!)

• deepthoughtlife 8 Nov 2024 22:11 UTC

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: lemonhope’s comment on: Should CA, TX, OK, and LA merge into a gi­ant swing state, just for elec­tions?

  It does of course raise the difficulty level for the political maneuvering, but would make things far more credible which means that people could actually rely on it. It really is quite difficult to precommit to things you might not like, so structures that make it work seem interesting to me.

• deepthoughtlife 8 Nov 2024 5:33 UTC

  3 points

  0

  on: Should CA, TX, OK, and LA merge into a gi­ant swing state, just for elec­tions?

  I think it would be a bad idea to actually do (there are so many problems with it in practice), but it is a bit of an interesting thing to note how being a swing state helps convince everyone to try to cater to you, and not just a little. This would be the swing state to end all swing states, I suppose.

  The way to get this done that might actually work is probably to make it an amendment to each state’s constitution that can only be repealed for future elections and not the one the constitutional change reverting this would be voted on in. (If necessary, you can always amend how the state constitution is amended to make this doable.)