“Agnostic” doesn’t necessarily mean “unknowable and not subject to testing”. Much more often it has the weaker meaning “not currently known”. There is a house being built across the street. Is there a work van parked in front of it right now? I don’t know. This is certainly knowable and subject to testing—I could get up, walk over to a window in the front of the house, and look. But I don’t care enough to do that, so I continue to now know if there is a work van parked in front of the house across the street. I am agnostic about the existence of such a work van.
River
Karma: 454
For people who do test prep seriously (I used to be a full time tutor), this has been known for decades. One of the standard things I used to tell every student was if you have no idea what the answer is, guess B, because B is statistically most likely to be the correct answer. When I was in 10th grade (this was 2002), I didn’t have anything to gain by doing well on the math state standardized test, so I tested the theory that B is most likely to be correct. 38% of the answers on that test were in fact B.
> This is pretty weird. As far as we know, humans don’t tend to prefer choices labeled B, so we’re not sure where this could have come from in the training data. As humans, it initially didn’t even occur to us to look for it!Remember, LLMs aren’t modeling how a human reading text would process the text. LLMs are trying to model the patterns in the texts that are in the training data itself. In this case, that means they are doing something closer to imitating test writers than test takers. And it is well known that humans, including those who write tests, are bad at being random.
In the automatic response they told me that they expect to give me the decision before this deadline.
Contrary to the promise, I don’t get any response.There is an obvious disconnect here. A statement that someone “expects” to do something is not a promise, especially not when made in an automated response. If Igor misread this as a promise, and given that he has not provided exact quotes of the other alleged promises, it seems quite plausible that nobody ever promised anything, and that Igor was imprudent in re-arranging his life based on a pending grant application. If I’m right about that, then Igor has defamed EAIF by accusing them of “lies”.
Great post!
> a client can show me where they buried their dozen murder victims and I wouldn’t be allowed to tell a soul, even if an innocent person is sitting in prison for their crimes.For any Alaskan serial murderers reading this, do note that this does not apply to you. Your Alaskan attorney can breach attorney-client privilege to prevent an innocent person from going to jail. See Rule 1.6(b)(1)(C).
That’s it. You continue to refuse to engage with the argument that a norm against lawsuits is harmful. You presume that such a norm exists, to try to illegitimately shift the burden to me to show that it does not. Now you presume that lawsuits are more harmful than a norm against lawsuits, to again try to illegitimately shift the burden to me to show the reverse. Even if your position were sound, your argumentative tactics are dirty, and I will not continue to engage with them.
I am talking about the community norm of not using lawsuits to settle arguments (and, more generally, disputes that are… just about words, let’s say). It’s not exclusively a property of small communities—that’s my point.
Then you misunderstood what I was trying to point at when I brought up the distinction about the scale of a community. I was trying to point at the fact that when lawsuits occur, there is likely already too much negative feeling between the parties for them to enjoy direct interactions even in a small group context, and if there isn’t already, the lawsuit causes it. I was pointing to a fact about human psychology, which on a pragmatic level we need to arrange our social structures to deal with. I was not pointing to a norm about using libel lawsuits.
At this point, you’ve failed to engage with my point that having a norm against lawsuits is harmful, even though lawsuits themselves are also harmful. I’m guessing your case for having such a norm is that lawsuits are harmful, which is not something I dispute. Is there any more to say?
But the fact that we’ve not deviated from the behavior the norm would mandate, is evidence of the norm’s effective existence.
Negligible evidence, especially in comparison to the lack of any past discussion of such a norm. Your argument here is so bad, and your choice of language so ambiguous, that I have to question whether you are even arguing in good faith.
Can you articulate what exactly the property of small communities is that we are talking about, and what its benefits are? I still am not forming a coherent picture of what the heck you are talking about because, again, the thing I was trying to point to in making this distinction I think is inherently a property of small groups.
Are you seriously now claiming that all of society has a norm against lawsuits? I think that is just obviously wrong, particularly for the US. And the misappropriation of the more traditional “arguments get arguments, not bullets” is just astoundingly oblivious. Lawsuits are a kind of argument! They are an example of the thing we are supposed to do instead of bullets!
No, I cannot empirically observe that the rationalist community has operated by such a norm. I can empirically observe that I know of no instance where one rationalist has actually filed a libel suit against another, but this is much more likely to be due to either (1) my ignorance of such a suit, or (2) the low rate of actually filing libel lawsuits in society at large combined with the small size of the rationalist community. I know of no instance of a rationalist going to space either, but I’m pretty sure we don’t have a norm against it. I’d never heard anyone speak of such a norm until the NL drama. That is significant evidence that there is no such norm.
May I ask which city you live in?
I agree that these different sorts of communities exist along a continuum. What startles me is that you seem to think that the intimacy of the something of the smaller community can and should be scaled to the larger sort of community. To my mind, it is inherently a property of the small size. Trying to scale it sets of loud alarm bells. I’m not sure to what extent I endorse this, but possibly one way of summarizing the problems of overly controlling organizations like cults is that they try to take the intimacy or something of a small community and scale it.
I also strongly disagree with your presumption that we are talking about “Going from having [the understanding that we do not use libel suits within the community], to not having it”. I have never understood the rationalist community to have such a norm. From where I am sitting, Habryka is trying to create such a norm out of nothing, and I am not ok with that.
As I believe I have said already, I agree that libel suits, and law suits generally, can be damaging, and I certainly do not encourage anyone to use them. I’m just pointing out that having a norm against using lawsuits can be even more damaging.
A real court would apply complex rules of evidence, which sometimes involve balancing but often are more categorical. But yes, it’s a different notion of public interest than whatever one rando thinks is public interest.
I agree that there is a significant difference between cases where the accused knows the identity of the accuser and cases where they do not, and we should split our analysis.
In cases where the accused does not know the identity of the accuser, I think the accusations would necessarily be so vague that I wouldn’t update much on them, and I would hope other rationalists and EAs wouldn’t either, but clearly there is a significant contingent of people in these communities who do not share my epistemic scruples. Given that, I don’t know, seems a mess. But your rule that only the accused should share the identity of the accuser seems too absolute—surely accusers are sometimes in the wrong, and sometimes malicious, and in that case having their identities publicly known seems good. Yes that will result in some amount of social punishment, and if the accusations were false and malicious, then I think that is good.
The case where the accused does know the identity of the accuser is where my above logic about the accused appearing retaliatory would suggest it is better for a third party to name the accuser.
I think you are using an inapplicable definition of “community”. Your example of a D&D group calls to mind a “community” in the sense of “a group of single digit number of people who are in the same room socially interacting on a recurring basis.” In this sense of the word, neither EA nor rationality is a community. I agree that we should not expect Ben/Alice/Chloe to be in the same community with Kat/Emerson, for this narrow sense of community. And my assumption is that they weren’t on the day before Ben made his post. And that is fine.
There is a broader sense of the word “community”, which we might define as “an extended social network with shared identity and values”, which does apply to EA and rationality. I don’t see a reason why two people in a legal dispute shouldn’t be able to remain in this sort of community.
Why do you think that third parties shouldn’t name an accuser? If an accusation is being handled in the court of public opinion, presumably it is because the public has an interest in the truth of the matter, and therefor I would think that any member of the public who has relevant evidence ought to be able to present it. If the accusation depends on the credibility of the accuser, then the identity of the accuser seems like relevant evidence. If anything, I’d think the accused should be particularly hesitant to name the accuser, at least as a strategic matter, for fear of appearing retaliatory. Third parties, not being under that constraint, might be in a better position to name the accuser.
I find the general response to the threat of a libel suit to be deeply concerning. It is true that libel suits, and lawsuits generally, are expensive, time consuming, and generally unpleasant for everyone involved, including the victors. That is why I think NL ultimately made the right decision not to sue. That said, I also think that it is important not to use social pressure to discourage lawsuits. And I think we can all see this when we look at other communities from an outside perspective. When a community mistreats its members badly enough, it is important that the law be there as an escape hatch, and attempting to interfere with that by creating norms against lawsuits is therefor likely to be very harmful. The Amish famously will never seek recourse in the secular legal system, no matter how bad the wrong or what the circumstances are. Does anyone here admire this aspect of the Amish culture? Cults also famously use all kinds of pressure tactics to prevent members from seeking out the law. This is bad. We should not be like this. So when I see the way Habryka for example talks about the threat of a libel suit in this case, or Gwern, or a number of others, that sets off alarm bells for me. I don’t think Habryka is a cult leader right now, but I do think he is veering uncomfortably in that direction and I hope he changes course.
I did not know this. How long has this been around?
Still strikes me as a really bad idea to ignore the norms that actual financial markets have developed over centuries of experience, but I am curious if this will actually solve the problem of judges biased by having a position in their own markets.
I knew they did not prohibit it, but I am surprised they are actively encouraging it. In any real-money market, doing anything analogous would almost certainly be grossly illegal. I have significant restrictions on my real-life trading, and I just work at a company that sells information about the market, but doesn’t actually run it. I’ve found the practice of people betting in their own markets on manifold to predictably result in unfair resolutions, and so I do judge people who do it, and I judge more harshly if they don’t actively disclose the fact. I came to manifold on the expectation that it was trying to be like a real-money prediction market, and just couldn’t because of laws in the US. As I see them diverging more and more from the standards of real markets, I become more and more disappointed. But you do make a fair point that perhaps I should judge Manifold more than the market makers if they are actively encouraging such bad behavior.
I would were the judge not betting in the market. You really should be more upfront about that.
“anything related to”, depending how it’s interpreted, might be overly broad, but something like this seems like a necessary implication, yes. Is that a bad thing?
Oh, I agree that utilitarian considerations, particularly in the case of an existential threat, might warrant breaking a norm. I’m not saying Toner did anything wrong in any objective sense, I don’t have a very strong view about that. I’m just trying to question Zvi’s argument that Sam and OpenAI did something unusually bad in the way they responded to Toner’s choice. It may be the case that Toner did the right and honorable thing given the position she was in and the information she had, and also that Sam and openAI did the normal and boring thing in response to that.
You do seem to be equivocating somewhat between board members (who have no formal authority in an organization) and the board itself (which has the ultimate authority in an organization). To say that a dissenting board member should resign before speaking out publicly is very different from saying that the board itself should not act when it (meaning the majority of its members) believe there is a problem. As I am reading the events here, Toner published her article before the board decided that there was something wrong and that action needed to be taken. I think everyone agrees that when the board concludes that something is wrong, it should act.
requiring that those who most have the need and the ability to scrutinise the power of a corporation do so the least.
I have no idea how you got that from what I said. The view of governance I am presenting is that the board should scrutinize the corporation, but behind closed doors, not out in public. Again, I’m not entirely confident that I agree with this view, but I do think it is normal for people involved in governance and therefor doesn’t indicate much about Altman or openAI one way or the other.
Interesting. I’m not sure exactly what you mean by “fiscal sponsor”, and I don’t really want to go down that road. My understanding of nonprofit governance norms is that if a board member has concerns about their organization (and they probably do—they have a shit tone more access and confidential information than most people, and no organization is perfect) then they can express those concerns privately to the rest of the board, to the executive director, to the staff. They are a board member, they have access to these people, and they can maintain a much better working relationship with these people and solve problems more effectively by addressing their concerns privately. If a board member thinks something is so dramatically wrong with their organization that they can’t solve it privately, and the public needs to be alerted, my understanding of governance norms is that the board member should resign their board seat and then make their case publicly. Mostly this is a cached view, and I might not endorse it on deep reflection. But I think a lot of people involved in governance have this norm, so I don’t think that Sam Altman’s enforcement of this norm against Toner is particularly indicative of anything about Sam.
I am quite glad to see that Lighthaven is on a path to financial sustainability, as I sometimes attend events there, and I am very much not looking to be subsidized by anyone’s charity. One clarifying question. The rough Lighthaven budget above has a line for “interest”. Am I correct in assume that that is the entire mortgage payment, both interest and principal, not just the interest? In other words, by successfully making the $1M payment each year, the amount you owe the bank is going down each year and will eventually hit zero?