https://mentalengineering.info/
Trans rights! End all suffering!
Apparently the left-leaning stuff I wrote on here got censored and only the shit I now disagree with remains.
Fluttershy
Karma: 1,157
Putting communication through a filter imposes a cost, which will inevitably tend to discourage communication in the long term.
As does allowing people to be unduly abrasive. But on top of that, communities where conversations are abrasive attract a lower caliber of person than one where they aren’t. Look at what happened to LW.
Moreover, the cost is not the same for everyone
It’s fairly common for this cost to go down with practice. Moreover, it seems like there’s an incentive gradient at work here; the only way to gauge how costly it is for someone to act decently is to ask them how costly it is to them, and the more costly they claim it to be, the more the balance of discussion will reward them by letting them impose costs on others via nastiness while reaping the rewards of getting to achieve their political and interpersonal goals with that nastiness.
I’m not necessarily claiming that you or any specific person is acting this way; I’m just saying that this incentive gradient exists in this community, and economically rational actors would be expected to follow it.
communicative clarity and so-called “niceness”
That’s a horrible framing. Niceness is sometimes important, but what really matters is establishing a set of social norms that incentivize behaviors in a way that leads to the largest positive impact. Sometimes that involves prioritizing communicative clarity (when suggesting that some EA organizations are less effective than previously thought), and sometimes that involves, say, penalizing people for acting on claims they’ve made to other’s emotional resources (reprimanding someone for being rude when that rudeness could have reasonably been expected to hurt someone and was entirely uncalled for). Note that the set of social norms used by normal folks would have gotten both of these cases mostly right, and we tend to get them both mostly wrong.
I appreciate your offer to talk things out together! To the extent that I’m feeling bad and would feel better after talking things out, I’m inclined to say that my current feelings are serving a purpose, i.e. to encourage me to keep pressing on this issue whenever doing so is impactful. So I prefer to not be consoled until the root issue has been addressed, though that wouldn’t have been at all true of the old version of myself. This algorithm is a bit new to me, and I’m not sure if it’ll stick.
Overall, I’m not aware that I’ve caused the balance of the discussion (i.e. pro immediate abrasive truthseeking vs. pro incentives that encourage later collaborative truthseeking & prosociality) to shift noticeably in either way, though I might have made it sound like I made less progress than I did, since I was sort of ranting/acting like I was looking for support above.
Your comment was perfectly fine, and you don’t need to apologize; see my response to komponisto above for my reasons for saying that. Apologies on my part as there’s a strong chance I’ll be without internet for several days and likely won’t be able to further engage with this topic.
Duncan’s original wording here was fine. The phrase “telling the humans I know that they’re dumb or wrong or sick or confused” is meant in the sense of “socially punishing them by making claims in a certain way, when those claims could easily be made without having that effect”.
To put it another way, my view is that Duncan is trying to refrain from adopting behavior that lumps in values (boo trans people) with claims (trans people disproportionately have certain traits). I think that’s a good thing to do for a number of reasons, and have been trying to push the debate in that direction by calling people out (with varying amounts of force) when they have been quick to slip in propositions about values into their claims.
I’m frustrated by your comment, komponisto, since raising a red-flag alert, saying that something is poorly worded at best, and making a large number of more subtle negative implications about what they’ve written are all ways of socially discouraging someone from doing something. I think that Duncan’s comment was fine, I certainly think that he didn’t need to apologize for it, and I’m fucking appalled that this conversation as a whole has managed to simultaneously promote slipping value propositions into factual claims, and promote indirectly encouraging social rudeness, and then successfully assert in social reality that a certain type of overtly abrasive value-loaded proposition making is more cooperative and epistemically useful than a more naturally kind style of non-value-loaded proposition making, all without anyone actually saying something about this.
assess why the community has not yet shunned them
Hi! I believe I’m the only person to try shunning them, which happened on Facebook a month ago (since Zack named himself in the comments, see here, and here). The effort more or less blew up in my face and got a few people to publicly say they were going to excluded me, or try to get others to exclude me from future community events, and was also a large (but not the only) factor in getting me to step down from a leadership position in a project I’m spending about half of my time on. To be fair, there are a couple of places where Zack is less welcome now also, (I don’t think either of us have been successfully excluded from anything other than privately hosted events we weren’t likely to go to anyways), and someone with the viewpoint that shunning him was the wrong thing for me to do also stepped down from an equivalent leadership position in order to maintain a balance. So, I guess we’re in a stalemate-like de facto ceasefire, though I’d be happy to pick up the issue again.
I still stand by my response to Zack. It would have been better if I’d been skilled enough to convince him to use a less aggressive tone throughout his writing by being gentler myself; that’s an area where I’m still trying to grow. I think that collaborative truthseeking is aided rather than hindered by shunning people who call others “delusional perverts” because of their gender. This is, at least in part, because keeping discussions focused on truthseeking, impact, etc. is easier when there are social incentives (i.e. small social nudges that can later escalate to shunning) in place that disincentivize people from acting in ways that predictably push others into a state where they’re hurt enough that they’re unable to collaborate with you, such as by calling them delusional perverts. I know that the process of applying said social incentives (i.e. shunning) doesn’t look like truthseeking, but it’s instrumental to truthseeking (when done with specificity and sensitivity/by people with a well-calibrated set of certain common social skills).
This all sounds right, but the reasoning behind using the wording of “bad faith” is explained in the second bullet point of this comment.
Tl;dr the module your brain has for detecting things that feel like “bad faith” is good at detecting when someone is acting in ways that cause bad consequences in expectation but don’t feel like “bad faith” to the other person on the inside. If people could learn to correct a subset of these actions by learning, say, common social skills, treating those actions like they’re taken in “bad faith” incentivizes them to learn those skills, which results in you having to live with negative consequences from dealing with that person less. I’d say that this is part of why our minds often read well-intentioned-but-harmful-in-expectation behaviors as “bad faith”; it’s a way of correcting them.
nod. This does seem like it should be a continuous thing, rather than System 1 solely figuring things out in some cases and System 2 figuring it out alone in others.
Good observation.
Amusingly, one possible explanation is that the people who gave Gleb pushback on here were operating on bad-faith-detecting intuitions—this is supported by the quick reaction time. I’d say that those intuitions were good ones, if they lead to those folks giving Gleb pushback on a quick timescale, and I’d also say that those intuitions shaped healthy norms to the extent that they nudged us towards establishing a quick reality-grounded social feedback loop.
But the people who did give Gleb pushback more frequently framed things in terms other than them having bad-faith-detecting intuitions than you’d have guessed, if they were actually concluding that giving Gleb pushback was worth their time based on their intuitions—they pointed to specific behaviors, and so on, when calling him out. But how many of these people actually decided to give Gleb feedback because they System-2-noticed that he was implementing a specific behavior, and how many of us decided to give Gleb feedback because our bad-faith-detecting intuitions noticed something was up, which led us to fish around for a specific bad behavior that Gleb was doing?
If more of us did the latter, this suggests that we have social incentives in place that reward fishing around and finding specific bad behaviors, but to me, fishing around for bad behaviors (i.e. fishing through data) like this doesn’t seem too much different from p-hacking, except that fishing around for social data is way harder to call people out on. And if our real reasons for reaching the correct conclusion that Gleb needed to get pushback were based in bad-faith-detecting intuitions, and not in System 2 noticing bad behaviors, then maybe providing social allowance for the mechanism that actually led some of us to detect Gleb a bit earlier to do its work on its own in the future, rather than requiring its use to be backed up by evidence of bad behaviors (junk data) that can be both p-hacked by those who want to criticize independently of what was true, or hidden by those with more skill than Gleb, would be a good idea.
At a minimum, being honest with ourselves about what our real reasons are ought to help us understand our minds a bit better.
I’m very glad that you asked this! I think we can come up with some decent heuristics:
If you start out with some sort of inbuilt bad faith detector, try to see when, in retrospect, it’s given you accurate readings, false positives, and false negatives. I catch myself doing this without having planned to on a System 1 level from time to time. It may be possible, if harder, to do this sort of intuition reshaping in response to evidence with System 2. Note that it sometimes takes a long time, and that sometimes you never figure out, whether or not your bad-faith-detecting intuitions were correct.
There’s debate about whether a bad-faith-detecting intuition that fires when someone “has good intentions” but ends up predictably acting in ways that hurt you (especially to their own benefit) is “correct”. My view is that the intuition is correct; defining it as incorrect and then acting in social accordance with it being incorrect incentivizes others to manipulate you by being/becoming good at making themselves believe they have good intentions when they don’t, which is a way of destroying information in itself. Hence why allowing people to get away with too many plausibly deniable things destroys information: if plausible deniability is a socially acceptable defense when it’s obvious someone has hurt you in a way that benefits them, they’ll want to blind themselves to information about how their own brains work. (This is a reason to disagree with many suggestions made in Nate’s post. If treating people like they generally have positive intentions reduces your ability to do collaborative truth-seeking with others on how their minds can fail in ways that let you down—planning fallacy is one example—then maybe it would be helpful to socially disincentivize people from misleading themselves this way by giving them critical feedback, or at least not tearing people down for being ostracizers when they do the same).
Try to evaluate other’s bad faith detectors by the same mechanism as in the first point; if they give lots of correct readings and not many false ones (especially if they share their intuitions with you before it becomes obvious to you whether or not they’re correct), this is some sort of evidence that they have strong and accurate bad-faith-detecting intuitions.
The above requires that you know someone well enough for them to trust you with this data, so a quicker way to evaluate other’s bad-faith-detecting intuitions is to look at who they give feedback to, criticize, praise, etc. If they end up attacking or socially qualifying popular people who are later revealed to have been acting in bad faith, or if they end up praising or supporting ones who are socially suspected of being up to something who are later revealed to have been acting in good faith, these are strong signals of them having accurate bad-faith-detecting intuitions.
Done right, bad-faith-detecting intuitions should let you make testable predictions about who will impose costs or provide benefits to you and your friends/cause; these intuitions become more valuable as you become more accurate at evaluating them. Bad-faith-detecting intuitions might not “taste” like Officially Approved Scientific Evidence, and we might not respect them much around here, but they should tie back into reality, and be usable to help you make better decisions than you’d been able to make without using them.
I think the burden of evidence is on the side disagreeing with the intuitions behind this extremely common defensive response
Note also that most groups treat their intuitions about whether or not someone is acting in bad faith as evidence worth taking seriously, and that we’re remarkable in how rarely we tend to allow our bad-faith-detecting intuitions to lead us to reach the positive conclusion that someone is acting in bad faith. Note also that we have a serious problem with not being able to effectively deal with Gleb-like people, sexual predators, etc, and that these sorts of people reliably provoke person-acting-in-bad-faith-intuitions in people with (both) strong and accurate bad-faith-sensing intuitions. (Note that having strong bad-faith-detecting intuitions correlates somewhat with having accurate ones, since having strong intuitions here makes it easier to pay attention to your training data, and thus build better intuitions with time). Anyways, as a community, taking intuitions about when someone’s acting in bad faith more seriously on the margin could help with this.
Now, one problem with this strategy is that many of us are out of practice at using these intuitions! It also doesn’t help that people without accurate bad-faith-detecting intuitions often typical-mind fallacy their way into believing that there aren’t people who have exceptionally accurate bad-faith-detecting intuitions. Sometimes this gets baked into social norms, such that criticism becomes more heavily taxed, partly because people with weak bad-faith-detecting intuitions don’t trust others to direct their criticism at people who are actually acting in bad faith.
Of course, we currently don’t accept person-acting-in-bad-faith-intuitions as useful evidence in the EA/LW community, so people who provoke more of these intuitions are relatively more welcome here than in other groups. Also, for people with both strong and accurate bad-faith-detecting intuitions, being around people who set off their bad-faith-sensing intuitions isn’t fun, so such people feel less welcome here, especially since a form of evidence they’re good at acquiring isn’t socially acknowledged or rewarded, while it is acknowledged and rewarded elsewhere. And when you look around, you see that we in fact don’t have many people with strong and accurate bad-faith-detecting intuitions; having more of these people around would have been a good way to detect Gleb-like folks much earlier than we tend to.
How acceptable bad-faith-detecting intuitions are in decision-making is also highly relevant to the gender balance of our community, but that’s a topic for another post. The tl;dr of it is that, when bad-faith-detecting intuitions are viewed as providing valid evidence, it’s easier to make people who are acting creepy change how they’re acting or leave, since “creepiness” is a non-objective thing that nevertheless has a real, strong impact on who shows up at your events.
Anyhow, I’m incredibly self-interested in pointing all of this out, because I have very strong (and, as of course I will claim, very accurate) bad-faith-detecting intuitions. If people with stronger bad-faith-detecting intuitions are undervalued because our skill at detecting bad actors isn’t recognized, then, well, this implies people should listen to us more. :P
For more explanation on how incentive gradients interact with and allow the creation of mental modules that can systematically mislead people without intent to mislead, see False Faces.
Well, that’s embarrassing for me. You’re entirely right; it does become visible again when I log out, and I hadn’t even considered that as a possibility. I guess I’ll amend the paragraph of my above comment that incorrectly stated that the thread had been hidden on the EA Forum; at least I didn’t accuse anyone of anything in that part of my reply. I do still stand by my criticisms, though knowing what I do now, I would say that it wasn’t necessary of me to post this here if my original comment and the original post on the EA Forum are still publicly visible.
Some troubling relevant updates on EA Funds from the past few hours:
On April 20th, Kerry Vaughan from CEA published an update on EA Funds on the EA Forum. His post quotes the previous post in which he introduced the launch of EA Funds, which said:
We only want to focus on the Effective Altruism Funds if the community believes it will improve the effectiveness of their donations and that it will provide substantial value to the EA community. Accordingly, we plan to run the project for the next 3 months and then reassess whether the project should continue and if so, in what form.
In short, it was promised that a certain level of community support would be required to justify the continuation of EA Funds beyond the first three months of the project. In an effort to communicate that such a level of support existed, Kerry commented:
Where we’ve received criticism it has mostly been around how we can improve the website and our communication about EA Funds as opposed to criticism about the core concept.
Around 11 hours ago, I pointed out that this claim was patently false.
(I stand corrected by the reply to this comment which addressed this bullet point: the original post on which I had commented wasn’t hidden from the EA Forum; I just needed to log out of my account on the EA Forum to see it after having downvoted it.)
Between the fact that the EA Funds project has taken significant criticism, failed to implement a plan to address it, acted as if its continuation was justified on the basis of having not received any such criticism, and signaled its openness to being deceptive in the future by doing all of this in a way that wasn’t plausibly deniable, my personal opinion is that there is not sufficient reason to allow the EA Funds to continue to operate past their three-month trial period, and additionally, that I have less reason to trust other projects run by CEA in light of this debacle.
GiveWell reanalyzed the data it based its recommendations on, but hasn’t published an after-the-fact retrospective of long-run results. I asked GiveWell about this by email. The response was that such an assessment was not prioritized because GiveWell had found implementation problems in VillageReach’s scale-up work as well as reasons to doubt its original conclusion about the impact of the pilot program.
This seems particularly horrifying; if everyone already knows that you’re incentivized to play up the effectiveness of the charities you’re recommending, then deciding to not check back on a charity you’ve recommended for the explicit reason that you know you’re unable to show that something went well when you predicted it would is a very bad sign; that should be a reason to do the exact opposite thing, i.e. going back and actually publishing an after-the-fact retrospective of long-run results. If anyone was looking for more evidence on whether or not they should take GiveWell’s recommendations seriously, then, well, here they are.
Ok, thank you, this helps a lot and I feel better after reading this, and if I do start crying in a minute it’ll be because you’re being very nice and not because I’m sad. So, um, thanks. :)
Second edit: Dagon is very kind and I feel ok; for posterity, my original comment was basically a link to the last paragraph of this comment, which talked about helping depressed EAs as some sort of silly hypothetical cause area.
Edit: since someone wants to emphasize how much they would “enjoy watching [my] evaluation contortions” of EA ideas, I elect to delete what I’ve written here.
I’m not crying.
There’s actually a noteworthy passage on how prediction markets could fail in one of Dominic’s other recent blog posts I’ve been wanting to get a second opinion on for a while:
NB. Something to ponder: a) hedge funds were betting heavily on the basis of private polling [for Brexit] and b) I know at least two ‘quant’ funds had accurate data (they had said throughout the last fortnight their data showed it between 50-50 and 52-48 for Leave and their last polls were just a point off), and therefore c) they, and others in a similar position, had a strong incentive to game betting markets to increase their chances of large gains from inside knowledge. If you know the probability of X happening is much higher than markets are pricing, partly because financial markets are looking at betting markets, then there is a strong incentive to use betting markets to send false signals and give competitors an inaccurate picture. I have no idea if this happened, and nobody even hinted to me that it had, but it is worth asking: given the huge rewards to be made and the relatively trivial amounts of money needed to distort betting markets, why would intelligent well-resourced agents not do this, and therefore how much confidence should we have in betting markets as accurate signals about political events with big effects on financial markets?
The idea that there’s much to be gained by crafting institutions, organizations, and teams which can train and direct people better seems like it could flower into an EA cause, if someone wanted it to. From reading the first post in the series, I think that that’s a core part of what Dominic is getting at:
We could significantly improve the decisions of the most powerful 100 people in the UK or the world for less than a million dollars (~£10^6) and a decade-long project on a scale of just ~£10^7 could have dramatic effects.
Regarding tone specifically, you have two strong options: one would be to send strong “I am playing” signals, such as by dropping the points which men’s rights people might make, and, say, parodying feminist points. Another would be to keep the tone as serious as it currently is, but qualify things more; in some other contexts, qualifying your arguments sounds low-status, but in discussions of contentious topics on a public forum, it can nudge participants towards cooperative truth-seeking mode.
Amusingly, I emphasized the points of your comment that I found agreeable in my first reply, both since you’re pretty cool, and also since I didn’t want the fact that I’m a hardcore feminist to be obvious enough to affect the discourse. However, to the extent which my reply was more serious than your comment, this could have made me look like the less feminist one out of the two of us :D
Yeah, 10⁄10 agreement on this. Like it’d be great if you could “just” donate to some AI risk org and get the promised altruistic benefits, but if you actually care about “stop all the fucking suffering I can”, then you should want to believe AI risk research is a scam if it is a scam.
At which point you go oh fuck, I don’t have a good plan to save the world anymore. But not having a better plan shouldn’t change your beliefs on whether AI risk research is effective.