Thanks for clarifying. It was easy for me to forget that as well as being a moderator, you’re also just another user with a stake in what happens to LW.
Gram_Stone
Karma: 1,776
Genuine question: Did the Apolitical Guideline become an Apolitical Rule? Or have I always been mistaken about it being a guideline?
Planning the Enemy’s Retreat
Additional data point: I see [deleted].
I know this is on the blogroll right now, but since it was originally on Facebook I thought it might be nice to start a place for discussion on LW. Linkposts are also quite a bit more visible than the blogroll.
Yudkowsky’s ‘Four Layers of Intellectual Conversation’
This post is already getting too long so I deleted the section on lessons to be learned, but if there is interest I’ll do a followup. Let me know what you think in the comments!
I at least would be interested in hearing anything else that you have to say about this topic. I’m not averse to private conversation on the matter either; most such conversations of mine are private.
Hypothesis: Fiction silently allows people to switch into truthseeking mode about politics.
A history student friend of mine was playing Fallout: New Vegas, and he wanted to talk to me about which ending he should choose for the game’s narrative. The conversation was mostly optimized for entertaining one another, but I found that this was a situation where I could slip in my real opinions on politics without getting wide-eyed stares! Like this one:
The question you have to ask yourself is “Do I value democracy because it is a good system, or do I value democracy per se?” A lot of people will admit that they value democracy per se. But that seems wrong to me. That means that if someone showed you a better system that you could verify was better, you would say “This is good governance, but the purpose of government is not good governance, the purpose of government is democracy.” (I do, however, understand democracy as a ‘current best bet’ or ‘local maximum’.)
I have in fact gotten wide-eyed stares for saying things like that, even granting the final pragmatic injunction on democracy as local maximum. I find that weird, because it seems like one of the first steps you would take towards thinking about politics clearly, not even as cognitive work but for the sake of avoiding cognitive anti-work, to not equivocate democracy with good governance. If you were further in the past and the fashionable political system were not democracy but monarchy, and you, like many others, consider democracy preferable to monarchy, then upon a future human revealing to you the notion of a modern democracy, you would find yourself saying, regrettably, “This is good governance, but the purpose of government is not good governance, the purpose of government is monarchy.”
But because we were arguing for fictional governments, I seemed to be sending an imperceptibly weak signal that I would defect in a real tossup between democracy and something else, and thus my conversation partner could entertain my opinion whilst looking through truthseeking goggles instead of political ones.
The student is one of two people with whom I’ve had this precise conversation, and I do mean in the particular sense of “Which Fallout ending do I pick?” I slipped this opinion into both, and both came back weeks later to tell me that they spent a lot of time thinking about that particular part of the conversation and that the opinion I shared seemed deep. If Eliezer’s hypothesis about the origin of feelings of deepness is true, then this is because they were actually truthseeking when they evaluated my opinion, and the opinion really got rid of a real cached thought: “Democracy is a priori unassailable.”
In the spirit of doing accidentally effective things deliberately, if you ever wanted to flip someone’s truthseeking switch, you might do it by placing the debate within the context of a fictional universe.
Something I’ve been meaning to say for a while:
Keyword: Utopian studies.
Genuine question: why do you anticipate that we’ll assume that you’re being disingenuous?
If you don’t get a proper response, it may be worthwhile to make this into its own post, if you have the karma. (Open thread is another option.)
I’ve always really liked this idea. I already do the toothbrushing thing. Hygiene’s a good category to pull from. A few others I use:
Feeling of cold air
Warmth of sunlight
Warmth of water, be it bathing, dishwashing, etc.
Smell of clean laundry
Smell of coffee/warm beverages
Feel of wearing freshly cleaned clothing
Feel of a fresh shave
I often have long hair, and notice that my hair actually starts to feel heavier the longer it goes unwashed, so, the lightness of freshly washed hair
But I would say that these disadvantages are necessary evils that, while they might be possible to mitigate somewhat, go along with having a genuinely public discourse and public accountability.
I’m often afraid of being an unwanted participant, so I’ve thought about this particular point somewhat. The worst case version of this phenomenon is the Eternal September, when the newbies become so numerous that the non-newbies decide to exit en masse.
I think there’s something important that people miss when they think about the Eternal September phenomenon. From Wikipedia:
Every September, a large number of incoming freshmen would acquire access to Usenet for the first time, taking time to become accustomed to Usenet’s standards of conduct and “netiquette”. After a month or so, these new users would either learn to comply with the networks’ social norms or tire of using the service.
The lever that everyone has already thought to pull is the ‘minimize number of new users’ lever, primed perhaps by the notion that not pulling this lever apparently resulted in the destruction of Usenet. Additionally, social media platforms often have moderation features that make pulling this lever very easy, and thus even more preferable.
But cultures don’t have to leave new users to learn social norms on their own; you could pull the ‘increase culture’s capacity to integrate new users’ lever. It makes sense that that lever hasn’t been pulled, because it requires more coordination than the alternative. This post calls for a similar sort of coordination, so it seems like a good place for me to mention this possibility.
This applies not just to social norms, but to shared concepts, especially in cultures like this one, where many of the shared concepts are technical. It’s easy to imagine that everyone who decreases discussion quality lacks the desire or wherewithal to become someone who increases discussion quality, but some newbies may have the aspirations and capability to become non-newbies, and it’s better for everyone if that’s made as easy as possible. In that way, I find that some potential improvements are not difficult to imagine.
“letting people sell their organs after they’re dead doesn’t seem like it would increase the supply that much”
seems very suspect. If you could sell the rights to your organs, there’s now incentive to set up a “pay people to be signed up for organ donation” business. This is also not harmful to the donor, unlike kidneys.
True. More than anything I was trying to bite off a small piece of the larger ‘organ market question’. Given your comment, a better way to do this would have been to note that even perfectly allocating all cadaveric organs would still be insufficient to get a kidney to everyone who needs one. Although one thing I don’t like about your proposal is that things could get very shady if people ‘don’t consent’ to have their organs taken after they’ve already sold their rights and have therefore ‘legally consented’. In my scheme I imagine people not getting paid unless the kidney’s already out.
Also, for added horror, a link to this may be worth including somehow.
Just for added horror, or is there a larger point? (It’s okay if there’s no larger point. I ask because I’ve seen a general ‘you don’t want to legally create new incentives around organ trade, look at China’ sort of objection that I didn’t address in the article and that I would be prepared to address if that’s where you’re going.)
Kidney Trade: A Dialectic
I think these are important points, but an important counterpoint is the subject of The American System and Misleading Labels:
How much of the benefit of living in a democracy is in the small influences that voters occasionally manage to exert on the political process? And how much of that benefit is from power-wielders being too scared to act like historical kings and slaughter you on a whim?
Arguably, the chief historical improvements in living conditions have not been from voters having the influence to pass legislation which (they think) will benefit them, but, rather, from power-wielders becoming scared of doing anything too horrible to voters. Maybe one retrodiction (I haven’t checked) would be that if you looked at the history of England, you would find a smooth improvement in living conditions corresponding to a gradually more plausible threat of revolution, rather than a sharp jump following the introduction of an elected legislature.
This debate is the main reason that I’m fascinated by post-democratic ideas, but dial my skepticism up to 11 with regards to their real-world consequences.
Upvoted. Thank you for hosting.
6 - Trump’s move wasn’t bad: Yudkwosky didn’t take into account the support of other intellectuals in the same sphere
Both user:hg00 and I argued that Eliezer stopped searching for expert opinions in a motivated way, but I concluded that relying on expert opinion, which ultimately appears to indicate that Trump will probably have more negative effects on our foreign policy than Clinton, was correct anyway. The OP specifies that the purpose of the discussion is to evaluate methodology, and remains silent on the evaluation of conclusions. I request that the summary you’ve written be edited to reflect this. (Removing the phrase ‘Trump’s move wasn’t bad’ seems sufficient to me; maybe explicitly mention motivated cognition?)
I also tentatively suggest appending the summary to the OP once you expect that you won’t have to edit it again.
The foreign policy issue is coming up a lot. Apparently some people are arguing that Hillary may have been just as dangerous but for different reasons. I don’t think myself an expert, so I’m using the ‘look at what experts think’ heuristic, somewhat like Eliezer.
We all know about the open letter from Republican national security experts.
In a relatively highly upvoted comment, hg00 points out that Eliezer omitted a similar letter from 88 retired high-ranking military officers.
hg00 omits that Clinton received 95 endorsements from retired military leaders (later 110).
The Atlantic points out that Mitt Romney received 500 endorsements in 2012. So both lists of endorsements may be historically low.
An article in the Washington Post cites surveys conducted by the Teaching, Research, and International Policy (TRIP) Project implying that most international relations experts (IR) positively regard Clinton’s ability to conduct international relations, and that expert opinions are considerably less polarized than public opinion on each candidate’s ability to conduct international relations:
This survey, the ninth in a series of snap polls conducted by the Teaching, Research and International Policy (TRIP) Project, includes responses from 744 of the 4,078 IR scholars teaching and/or researching at colleges and universities throughout the United States.
[...]
Which candidate reflects the foreign policy views of IR scholars?
An overwhelming majority (82 percent) responded “Hillary Clinton” (see Figure 1, below). Just under 4 percent of the scholars surveyed said “Donald Trump,” while 14 percent chose to write in a third-party candidate, other national political figure, or some variation on “none of the above.”
We asked respondents to identify their own political leanings, and Figure 2 shows a similar preference order is apparent across the ideological spectrum. Clinton most closely reflects the foreign policy views of 90 and 84 percent of liberal and moderate respondents, respectively. Exactly half the conservative IR scholars in our poll prefer Clinton, while only 7 percent prefer Trump. Among no ideological subgroup does Trump come close to breaking out of third place.
[...]
IR scholars lean left, but this preference for Clinton over Trump likely reflects respondents’ expertise on foreign policy as much as their ideology. To illustrate this point, consider a recent Pew Research Center survey of the general public, which asks which candidate would do a better job on foreign policy. Among conservative members of the public, 54 percent prefer Trump to Clinton, but only 7 percent of conservative foreign policy experts prefer Trump. And while 23 percent of self-described moderate voters believe that Trump would be better on foreign policy, only 5 percent of moderate scholars agree.
[We] asked IR scholars how the election of Clinton or Trump would affect relations between the United States and its allies. Figure 3 shows that over 95 percent of scholars said Trump would have a negative effect on relations between the United States and NATO states, and 91 percent of scholars believe that the election of Donald Trump would cause NATO allies to doubt the U.S. commitment to the defense of Europe. By comparison, about 3 percent of scholars said Clinton would have a negative effect on relations between the United States and its NATO allies, and only 2 percent said her election would lead NATO allies to doubt the U.S. commitment.
[...]
Who will deal best with Russia?
On the campaign trail, Trump asked, “When you think about it, wouldn’t it be nice if we got along with Russia?” He has argued that the United States would be better off finding common ground with Russia and cooperating more effectively to defeat the Islamic State and negotiate a settlement in Ukraine.
IR scholars we surveyed are skeptical that Trump’s purported dealmaking skills would benefit the United States. Our respondents believe that any future deals between Russia and a Trump administration would be “less likely” to benefit the United States. Broadly speaking, scholars see the election of Hillary Clinton as a continuation of Obama’s foreign policy and thus expect “no effect” of a Clinton presidency (see Figure 4).
Willing to discuss this (maybe the surveys are less reliable than they appear?), but based on expert opinion, I believe that Clinton would have had better effects on our foreign policy. Given the outsized effects of the POTUS’s foreign policy positions, I perceive Trump’s election as an event with large negative expected value.
At the moment, I think EY could have looked into his objection a little more, and I also think it pans out in his favor anyway. For now at least.
Bostrom published that in 2002? Wow!
I always see you commenting on Stuart Armstrong’s posts, so I actually just assumed you were alluding to that work in the great-great-grandparent. I wonder if I should start erring on the side of assuming that people do want pointers to the literature.
I thought you might like to hear about some of the literature on this problem. Forgive me if you’re already aware of this work and I’ve misunderstood you.
Manfred writes:
If people are memory-wiped at some interval, then this increases the probability I should assign to being in room B—probability of being in a specific room, given that your state of information is that you suddenly find yourself in a room, is proportional to the number of times “I have suddenly found myself in a room” is somebody’s state of information.
In Anthropic Bias: Observation Selection Effects in Science and Philosophy, Nick Bostrom describes a thought experiment known as ‘Mr. Amnesiac’ to illustrate the desirability of a theory of observation selection effects that takes this kind of temporal uncertainty into account:
Mr. Amnesiac, the only observer ever to exist, is created in Room 1, where he stays for two hours. He is then transported into Room 2, where he spends one hour, whereupon he is terminated. His severe amnesia renders him incapable of retaining memories for any significant period of time. The details about the experimental situation he is in, however, are explained on posters in both rooms; so he is always aware of the relevant non-indexical features of his world.
Not unlike Manfred’s arguments in favor of betting on room B under imperfect recall, Bostrom’s solution here is to propose observer-moments, time intervals of observers’ experiences of arbitrary length, and reason as though you are a randomly selected observer-moment from your reference class, as opposed to just a randomly selected observer (in philosophy, Strong Self-Sampling Assumption vs. Self-Sampling Assumption). With this assumption and imperfect recall, you would conclude in Mr. Amnesiac that the probability of your being in Room 1 = 2⁄3 and of being in Room 2 = 1⁄3, and that you should bet on Room 1.
But I don’t think there’s anything mysterious there. If I understand correctly, we are surreptitiously asking the room B people to bet 1000 more times per observer than the room A people. Yet again, the relevant consideration is “How many times is this experience occurring?”
Nitpick: If we do include imperfect recall, doesn’t this actually just make us indifferent between room A and room B, as opposed to making us prefer room B? Room A people collectively possess 100 trillion observer-moments that belong to 100 trillion observers, room B people collectively possess 1000 observer-moments per observer times 100 billion observers = 100 trillion observer-moments that belong to 100 billion observers. Our credence should be 50⁄50 and we’re indifferent between bets. Or am I confused?
I think this is worth pointing out because it seems like an easy mistake to use my reasoning to justify dictatorship. I also think this is an example of two ships passing in the night. Eliezer was talking about a meta-level/domain-general ethical injunction. When I was talking to the student, I was talking about how to avoid screwing up the object-level/domain-specific operationalization of the phrase ‘good governance’.
My argument was that if you’re asking yourself the question, “What does the best government look like?”, assuming that that is indeed a right question, then you should be suspicious if you find yourself confidently proposing the answer, “My democracy.” The first reason is that ‘democracy’ can function as a semantic stopsign, which would stop you dead in your tracks if you didn’t have the motivation to grill yourself and ask, “Why does the best government look like my democracy?” The second reason is that the complement of the set containing the best government would be much larger than the set containing the best government, so if you use the mediocrity heuristic, then you should conclude that any given government in your hypothesis space is plausibly not the best government. If you consider it highly plausible that your democracy is the end state of political progress, then you’re probably underestimating the plausibility of the true hypothesis. And lastly, we hope that we have thereby permitted ourselves to one day generate an answer that we expect to be better than what we have now, but that does not require the seizure of power by any individual or group.
If, in the course of your political-philosophical investigations, you find yourself attempting to determine your preference ordering over the governments in your hypothesis space, and, through further argumentation, you come to the separate and additional conclusion that dictatorship is preferable to democracy, then the ethical injunction, “Do not seize power for the good of the tribe,” should kick in, because no domain is supposed to be exempt from an ethical injunction. It just so happens that you should also be suspicious of that conclusion on epistemic grounds, because the particular moral error that that particular ethical injunction is intended to prevent may often be caused by an act of self-deception. And if you add a new government to your hypothesis space, and this government somehow doesn’t fit into the category ‘dictatorship’, but also involves the seizure of power for the good of the tribe, then the ethical injunction should kick in then too, and you should once more be suspicious on epistemic grounds as well.
What do you think about all of that?