I’m writing a book about epistemology. It’s about The Problem of the Criterion, why it’s important, and what it has to tell us about how we approach knowing the truth.
I’ve also written a lot about AI safety. Some of the more interesting stuff can be found at the site of my currently-dormant AI safety org, PAISRI.
Why is the proposed model avoiding discomfort? I’m unclear on why you think that model explains the observed behavior better than another model, like being too eager to be helpful and thus too willing to sacrifice goals to produce an answer it thinks the user will like.
Glad my comment was helpful. I’ve certainly been guilty of the same thing, though I was blaming rationalists for being bad at winning rather than scientists. I realized I was doing it because that’s a communication strategy that works on me: point out how I’m being foolish, convince me I’m being a fool, and then I’ll be motivated to be less foolish. Turns out this doesn’t work most of the time because its success depends on the convincing, and because the thing being said is adversarial you get approximately one chance to convince. Only do it if you are sure you can one-shot your reader.
Physicalism, like all metaphysical claims, is an unprovable assumption. That’s okay, science still works anyway. We don’t have to understand how the world ultimately is to develop accurate predictions of what we experience.
I think you’re noticing something real going on where science killed religion and destroyed a lot of valuable social technology in the process. This is tricky to untangle, because religion had gotten busy making metaphysical claims, science proved they were wrong, but then science swooped in to offer alternative metaphysical claims (also wrong) instead of avoiding the matter because people demanded to know how things really are and were discontent with simply having a model that accurately predicts.
But taking the it out on physicalism in a way that drags the good parts of science through the mud is short sighted and likely to drive off a lot of folks (and I think why you’re getting downvotes: you argue for too much in this post).
Did you know that you can just do things?
I can’t remember where I first heard that phrase, but it became a meme over the course of the week.
For what it’s worth, “you can just do things” is a TPOT meme (TPOT being a rationalist adjacent scene on X/Twitter this is simultaneous so over and totally back) that has spread to the Less Wrong community due to extensive overlap. Of course, rationalists were just doing things before, so TPOT can’t take any credit there, but this specific phrase as a meme has its origins with Brooke, the founder of Vibecamp, back about 2 years ago.
Besides the definition that I disagree on respect, I also disagree even if that word is replaced by “validation”. Whether people choose to do something according to social approval or not is independent of gender. The problem is what society consider as socially approvable behavior for certain groups. If as a society people approve men to be more prudent in taking risks, are you saying men still “want” to take risks? In other words the point I am getting at is, if for women, the socially approvable behavior is to take less risks, and for men the socially approvable behavior is to take more risks, then for a women and a men who choose to conform to these expectations, they are both asking for validation.
Yes, it seems you have some idea about what “respect” means that’s the source of the disagreement. I think you are somehow failing to grasp the full nature of respect and keep looking at it in narrow ways (or that’s how I would classify what’s happening).
It doesn’t mean the same thing as “validation” because “validation” is more generic. A woman might be validated by the acceptance of her friends. A man might be validated by the respect he receives from others.
I’m not sure how much help I can be here. Dictionaries don’t do a great job of explaining all the nuance of what the word “respect” means or what it means in the context of this post. It’s a word that points to a kind of status acknowledgement between people. I didn’t mean any of this to be complicated. If you are missing some intuition for what I mean by “respect” that’s a bit outside the scope of what I wanted to write here (I’m not saying it’s wrong to not share my intuition, just that I probably don’t have time or energy to teach the intuition that most readers seem to share with me.).
There’s a lot in your reply. I’ll start a thread addressing just one point for now, and can come back to more later once we finish talking about this one (depending on my time and energy for doing that).
First of all, what I take as “safety” and “respect” do not belong to the same dimension. Respect is something everyone want and need, and it is independent of how much “safety” a person want. Any human without respect feels not a human. From your context, I would think by “respect” you probably meant something else as “validation” or “admiration” or even “authority”/”power”. The safety-respect trade-off seems to be best along the lines of “risk-averse” vs “risk-taking”.
All goals can be traded off against each other, even if they are not directly competing goals, because each person has finite resources (time, energy, etc.) to pursue them, so the tradeoff happens at the level of “how much time, energy, etc. am I going to put in to getting more safety, respect, etc.”. And my claim is that men put more effort into getting respect than women, and women put more effort into getting safety.
Now sometimes there are direct tradeoffs, like @Cole Wyeth mentioned in this comment about UFC fights. In fact, men frequently take on dangerous jobs because it earns them respect. Big game hunting was perhaps the original dangerous job for humans, as was war. In modern times men do things like risk their financial safety for a shot at high variance gains.
Women of course sometimes do these things, but on the whole men engage in more risk taking behavior that will help them earn respect than women do (men also show a general willingness to take more risks, but this doesn’t make sense by itself unless there is something to gain, like respect, from risk taking).
Conversely, women take fewer risks and less seek respect. For example, more women work in professions than men where outsized gains are impossible but they can also expect steady employment. They won’t get lots of respect as an individual as a nurse, paralegal, etc. (though they may be respect as a member of a group because the group is respected), but they will get a lot of safety in knowing they can always do the job. We also see similar patterns in how women seek mates (they mostly prefer men who are reliable to men who are taking big risks (which means women much prefer men who have taken risks in the past and already won to men who will continue to take risks and have no yet made it)), choose friends, pick vacations, etc.
On your point about feeling non-binary, I think there’s broadly three ways men and women can adopt behaviors normally associated with the other sex.
First, just random variation that doesn’t mean anything. This would be a good explanation if someone is mostly gender conforming and just as a few quirks.
Second, some kind of gender dysphoria. This might be a good explanation if someone feels deeply that they are the wrong sex.
Third (and why I wanted to leave this comment), adaptive response to trauma. That is, a person’s life history may include some things where they were in a painful situation, possibly repeatedly, where the standard behavior for their sex was maladaptive and they identified that behavior as the source of pain, then swapped to the other sex’s behavior in that situation and it made the pain go away, so they end up looking non-conforming but would actually be more modal if they healed their trauma.
I bring this up mostly because I can think of several ways I was less male behaving in the past and am more male behaving now and mostly what happened is that I dealt with a lot of psychological stuff I was hung up on, and once the hangups were gone, my behavior flipped to be more typically male because, in mind sight, I was avoiding some male coded behaviors out of fear and thus getting pulled towards the female attractor as an alternative. This may be true of some other readers, so might be helpful to know there’s multiple possible causes of the same results from something like the inventories you link.
generally views existing social-status games as irrelevant and damaging
This is an interesting point worth looking at closer.
Rationalist culture does often make bids to reject traditional social games. This is a feature of most cultures that seek to establish particular norms. Such cultures replace standard social status games with other social status games, and rationalists try to make these games better by groundiung them in tracking something useful to us like truth.
For example, Less Wrong karma is a rather explicit social status game, even if it isn’t intended to be. Lots of people try to ignore it or are mad about it (and sometimes they are mad because they don’t have a lot of karma and feel that unjustly places them low in the status game karma measures), but high karma does tend to correlate with a kind of status. If you know nothing else about two Less Wrong users and one has 5000 karma and one has 100 karma you should correctly infer that the 5000 karma user has more status among Less Wrong users than the 100 karma user.
The less explicit games are about, say, who most people trust to be right and have good judgement. Some rationalists have earned a lot of respect because they say and write things people find useful or convincing and believe are true. This is itself also a social status game, though it’s grounded in proving truth and one can lose status by being wrong, which is unlike a lot of social status games that are only grounded in social reality and are mostly popularity contests.
So I think it’s wrong to say social status games are irrelevant or even damaging per se because, as I see it, they are just a fact of life for humans. The interesting question is, do we create status games that benefit us all, or do we create status games that let some exploit others. I see rationalists as trying to create better status games that more benefit everyone (other than, perhaps, those who would lose status if rationalists norms became more widespread).
You edited your comment into something I can more clearly reply to, so I retracted my original response. Thanks!
It’s not unfair to think that I’m reasoning about stereotypes here because stereotypes often reflect common behavioral patterns. I didn’t give must justifications because to me these patterns seem obvious.
I don’t claim that they are universal patterns, though. Like all patterns, this is rather fuzzy. I offer something more like an 80⁄20 explanation of differences in male/female motivation. There will of course be counter examples because humans are complex systems that are difficult to predict, so at best I can point to the category of things we call “men” and “women” and talk about the behaviors that are frequently associated with them.
I mostly offer an evolutionary explanation (which is not strictly the same thing as a biological one) because I think it’s the source of the difference. The full context of how someone meets the world obviously comes in to play here, though notably it’ll be influenced heavily by the biological and cultural conditions created by evolutionary processes. This helps explain why there are so many counter examples: individuals have life histories that create many opportunities to introduce variation, though I think not so much variation that the pattern disappears and the theory holds no explanatory power.
For additional data point: I am a man and generally care a lot about in-person social disapproval; it’s probably my main motivation when there’s another person in the room. I care much less about active adulation, and basically never even think about my own physical safety. I notice I am confused about whether this would count as “respect” or “safety.”
I’d say this is respect. If one is disapproved of, one is not respected.
My rough guess is that about 20% of men give up on caring about respect. My best theory is that they don’t think they can get it, so they stop putting effort into it, or seek it out only in very restricted ways that make “respect” stop feeling like the right word to describe what they’re doing, like getting good at a video game that no one ever sees them play or cultivating a sense that they are secretly better than everyone else in a way no one can detect.
I’d be interested in more data about non-modal men.
Did you read the post? Your main point is addressed directly in the post.
I don’t mean to be rude but I’m not sure how to respond other than copy and pasting the text here or saying the same words another way.
I like to encourage my friends to become part of The System.
What is The System? It’s the system of small debts owed among friends where no one knows exactly how much is owed to whom, so everyone is forever tied together by their small debts.
Out at the bar? Buy a round, then someone else buys the next round, and so on, taking turns. Don’t go enough rounds for everyone to buy a round? No problem. You just owe the group a round next time.
Going on a trip? One person pays for the hotel, another for the flights, another for the car, another for some meals, etc.
This also enables a feeling of equality among friends by the wealthy friends paying for more stuff and the less wealthy friends paying for less stuff. The wealthier friends track this in their head and pay careful attention to how much their less wealthy friends are being asked to spend, and politely cover the difference without ever making a big deal of it so that everyone is included.
Many people are afraid of being part of The System. It’s like they have avoidant attachment style for friendship. That’s okay, they just have to be coaxed into it and shown that it’s safe to be part of The System. Take the first step with no expectation that they return the favor, do this a couple times, and many will start to get that there really is no formal debt to be repaid and they’ll relax and contribute.
Obviously freeriders are a strain on The System. The people who totally avoid paying their fair share in proportion to their wealth. These are bad friends and you stop inviting them to things. Thankfully, it usually doesn’t come to that. Mostly people want to be part of The System once they see the benefits it provides.
If you’re not already in it, you should join The System!
Ugh, I just noticed the “If you enjoyed reading this, subscribe to never miss another post.” bit gets included from the Substack CTA. @habryka is there a way to filter these out? I assume other folks whose blog is on Substack have similar artifacts during the import.
(I am not sure whether your claim is compatible with nihilism. I am not an expert on nihilism.)
I think it should be, though a nihilist probably doesn’t care because it doesn’t mean anything anyway.
As far as I can see, this fails to cross the is-ought divide. The existentialist would agree that living beings have been shaped by evolution, and that this could in some sense be called a “purpose”, but each of us still can and must choose our own purpose.
Can you say more? I personally dissolved my original is-ought confusion a while ago and I’m not sure sure what you mean by failing to cross the divide.
My guess is you’re talking about the metaphysical kind of divide many people put between is and ought, treating them as fundamentally different things? If so, I’d just say we don’t know. What I know is that I know is from what I observe, and I know ought from what I expect, and these are both known through beliefs, which are all one kind of thing, and the only divide is in how I relate to certain beliefs as observations vs. expectations.
I wouldn’t say I’m redefining “consciousness” exactly. Rather, “consciousness” has a vague definition, and I’m offering a more precise definition in terms of what I think reasonably captures the core of what we intend to mean by “consciousness” and is consistent with the world as we find it. Unfortunately, since “consciousness” is vaguely defined, people disagree on intuitions about what the core of it is.
Personally I try to just avoid using the term “consciousness” these days because it’s so confusing, but other people like to say it, and closed loop feedback is how I make sense of it.
As to why I think closed-loop feedback is the right way to think about “consciousness”, I included some links to things I wrote a while ago in a sibling comment reply.
Yes.
Yes.
Depends. Some traditions have ossified koan practice and so there is a canonically correct presentation that must be given even if the student has seen through the koan. Others don’t. I would say that a specific presentation is not the heart of koan practice; correct understanding is.
They will ring the bell and send you away. A koan is for the student to be worked out, and nothing is learned if they are handed the “answer” because there is no “answer” in a conventional sense. Thinking of a koan as a question or riddle that has an answer is misunderstanding koans. Koans’ purpose is to break the student’s ontology so they can see the world without automatically applying their views and judgements. This helps the student come to know the world as it is directly by forcing them to look at it. A correct presentation of a koan is the one that the teacher can read through nonverbal cues that has led the student to have such an experience of seeing directly.
Put another way, koans are about gnosis, not episteme or doxa.