jchan
For certain kinds of questions (e.g. “I need a new car; what should I get?”), it’s better to ask a bunch of random people than to turn to the internet for advice.
In order to be well-informed, you’ll need to go out and meet people IRL who are connected (at least indirectly) to the thing you want information about.
In the following, I will use the term “my DIT” to refer to the claim that:
In some specific non-trivial contexts, on average more than half of the participants in online debate who pose as distinct human beings are actually bots.
I agree with this version, and I was surprised to see that the Wikipedia definition also includes the bit about it being a deliberate conspiracy, which seems like a strawman, since I have always understood the “Dead Internet Theory” to include only the first part. There’s a lot of stuff on the internet that’s very obviously AI-generated, and so it’s not too far a stretch to suppose that there’s also a lot of synthetic content that hides it better. But this can be explained far more simply than by some vast conspiracy—as SEO, marketing, and astroturfing campaigns.
If Dead Internet Theory is correct, when you see something online, the question you should ask yourself is not “Is this true?” but “Why am I seeing this?” This was always the case to some extent of any algorithmically-curated feed (where the algorithm is anything more complex than “show me all of the posts in reverse chronological order”), but is even more significant when the content itself is algorithmically generated.
If I’m searching online for information about e.g. what new car I should buy, there’s a very strong incentive for all the algorithms involved (both the search engine itself, and the algorithm that spits out the list of recommended car models) to sell their recommendations to the highest bidder and churn out ex post facto justifications explaining why their car is really the best. These algorithms are almost totally uncorrelated with the underlying fact about which car I’d actually want, so I know to consider it of very little value. On the other hand, I would argue, asking a bunch of random acquaintances for car recommendations is much more useful because, although they might not be experts, they were at least not specifically selected in order to deceive me. Even if I ask a friend and they say “Well, I haven’t bought a new car in years, but I heard my coworker’s cousin bought the XYZ and never stops complaining about it”, then this is much more useful information than anything I could find online, because it’s much less likely that my friend’s coworker’s cousin was specifically being paid to say that.
More broadly, on many questions of public concern there may be parties with a strong interest in using bots to create the impression of a broad consensus one way or another. This means that you have no choice but to go out into the real world and ask people, and hope ideally that they’re not simply repeating what they read online, but have some non-AI-mediated connection to the thing.
However, in Many-Worlds Interpretation (MWI), I split my measure between multiple variants, which will be functionally different enough to regard my future selves as different minds. Thus, the act of choice itself lessens my measure by a factor of approximately 10. If I care about this, I’m caring about something unobservable.
If we’re going to make sense of living in a branching multiverse, then we’ll need to adopt a more fluid concept of personal identity.
Scenario: I take a sleeping pill that will make me fall asleep in 30 minutes. However, the person who wakes up in my bed the next morning will have no memory of that 30-minute period; his last memory will be of taking the pill.
If I imagine myself experiencing that 30-minute interval, intuitively it doesn’t at all feel like “I have less than 30 minutes to live.” Instead, it feels like I’d be pretty much indifferent to being in this situation—maybe the person who wakes up tomorrow is not “me” in the artificial sense of having a forward-looking continuity of consciousness with my current self, but that’s not really what I care about anyway. He is similar enough to current-me that I value his existence and well-being to nearly the same degree as I do my own; in other words, he “is me” for all practical purposes.
The same is true of the versions of me in nearby world branches. I can no longer observe or influence them, but they still “matter” to me. Of course, the degree of self-identification will decrease over time as they diverge, but then again, so does my degree of identification with the “me” many decades in the future, even assuming a single timeline.
This can be a great time-saver because it relies on each party to present the best possible case for their side. This means I don’t have to do any evidence-gathering myself; I just need to evaluate the arguments presented, with that heuristic in mind. For example, if the pro-X side cites a bunch of sources in favor of X, but I look into them and find them unconvincing, then this is pretty good evidence against X, and I don’t have to go combing through all the other sources myself. The mere existence of bad arguments for X is not in itself evidence against X, but the fact that they’re presented as the best possible arguments is.
Of course the problem is, outside of a legal proceeding, parties rarely have that strong an incentive to dig up the best possible arguments. Their time is limited as well, and they don’t really suffer much consequence from failing to convince you. Also, the discussion medium might structurally impede the best arguments from being given (e.g. replies in a Twitter thread need to be posted quickly or else nobody will see them). Or worse yet, a skilled propaganda campaign can flood the zone with bad pro-X arguments from personages who appear to be pro-X but are secretly against it, knowing that the audience is going to be evaluating these arguments using the adversarial heuristic.
In my experience, Americans are actually eager to talk to strangers and make friends with them if and only if they have some good reason to be where they are and talk to those people besides making friends with people.
A corollary of this is that if anyone at an [X] gathering is asked “So, what got you into [X]?” and answers “I heard there’s a great community around [X]”, then that person needs to be given the cold shoulder and made to feel unwelcome, because otherwise the bubble of deniability is pierced and the lemon spiral will set in, ruining it for everyone else.
However, this is pretty harsh, and I’m not confident enough in this chain of reasoning to actually “gatekeep” people like this in practice. Does this ring true to you?
I highly recommend Val Plumwood’s essay Tasteless: towards a food-based approach to death for a “green-according-to-green” perspective.
Plumwood would turn the “deep atheism” framing on its head, by saying in effect “No, you (the rationalist) are the real theist”. The idea is that even if you’ve rejected Cartesian/Platonic dualism in metaphysics, you might still cling for historical reasons to a metaethical-dualist view that a “real monist” would reject, i.e. the dualism between the evaluator and the evaluated, or between the subject and object of moral values. Plumwood (I think) would say that even the “yin” (acceptance of nature) framing is missing the mark, because it still assumes a distinction between the one doing the accepting and the nature being accepted, positing that they simply happen to be aligned through some fortunate circumstance, rather than being one and the same thing.
It’s a question of whether drawing a boundary on the “aligned vs. unaligned” continuum produces an empirically-valid category; and to this end, I think we need to restrict the scope to the issues actually being discussed by the parties, or else every case will land on the “unaligned” side. Here, both parties agree on where they stand vis-a-vis C and D, and so would be “Antagonistic” in any discussion of those options, but since nobody is proposing them, the conversation they actually have shouldn’t be characterized as such.
On the contrary, I’d say internet forum debating is a central example of what I’m talking about.
This “trying to convince” is where the discussion will inevitably lead, at least if Alice and Bob are somewhat self-aware. After the object-level issues have been tabled and the debate is now about whether Alice is really on Bob’s side, Bob will view this as just another sophisticated trick by Alice. In my experience, Bob-as-the-Mule can only be dislodged when someone other than Alice comes along, who already has a credible stance of sincere friendship towards him, and repeats the same object-level points that Alice made. Only then will Bob realize that his conversation with Alice had been Cassandra/Mule.
(Example I’ve heard: “At first I was indifferent about whether I should get the COVID vaccine, but then I heard [detestable left-wing personalities] saying I should get it, so I decided not to out of spite. Only when [heroic right-wing personality] told me it was safe did I get it.”)
#1 - I hadn’t thought of it in those terms, but that’s a great example.
#2 - I think this relates to the involvement of the third-party audience. Free speech will be “an effective arena of battle for your group” if you think the audience will side with you once they learn the truth about what [outgroup] is up to. Suppose Alice and Bob are the rival groups, and Carol is the audience, and:
Alice/Bob are SE/SE (Antagonist/Antagonist)
Alice/Carol are SF/IE (Guru/Rebel)
Bob/Carol are IF/SE (Siren/Sailor)
If this is really what’s going on, Alice will be in favor of the debate continuing because she thinks it’ll persuade Carol to join her, while Bob is opposed to the debate for the same reason. This is why I personally am pro-free-speech—because I think I’m often in the role of Carol, and supporting free speech is a “tell” for who’s really on my side.
Ten Modes of Culture War Discourse
I think this is not a great example because the virtues being extolled here are orthogonal to the outcome.
Would it still be possible to explain these virtues in a consequentialist way, or is it only some virtues that can be explained in this way?
And consequentialists can choose to value their own side more than the other side, or to be indifferent between sides, so I’m not sure what the conflict between virtue ethics and consequentialism would be here.
The special difficulty here is that the two sides are following the same virtue-ethics framework, and come into conflict precisely because of that. So, whatever this framework is, it cannot be cashed out into a single corresponding consequentialist framework that gives the same prescriptions.
It could be that people regard the likelihood of being resurrected into a bad situation (e.g. as a zoo exhibit, a tortured worker em, etc.) as outweighing that of a positive outcome.
Aren’t there situations (at least in some virtue-ethics systems) where it’s fundamentally impossible to reduce (or reconcile) virtue-ethics to consequentialism because actions tending towards the same consequence are called both virtuous and unvirtuous depending on who does them? (Or, conversely, where virtuous conduct calls for people to do things whose consequences are in direct opposition.)
For example, the Iliad portrays both Achilles (Greek) and Hector (Trojan) as embodying the virtues of bravery/loyalty/etc. for fighting for their respective sides, even though Achilles’s consequentialist goal is for Troy to fall, and Hector’s is for that not to happen. Is this an accurate characterization of how virtue-ethics works? Is it possible to explain this in a consequentialist frame?
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It’s also nice to be able to charge up in a place where directly plugging in your device would be inconvenient or would risk theft, e.g. at a busy cafe where the only outlet is across the room from your table.
I want to say something like: “The bigger N is, the bigger a computer needs to be in order to implement that prior; and given that your brain is the size that it is, it can’t possibly be setting N=3↑↑↑↑↑3.”
Now, this isn’t strictly correct, since the Solomonoff prior is uncomputable regardless of the computer’s size, etc. - but is there some kernel of truth there? Like, is there a way of approximating the Solomonoff prior efficiently, which becomes less efficient the larger N gets?
If the space of possibilities is not arbitrarily capped at a certain length, then such a distribution would have to favor shorter strings over longer ones in much the same way as the Solomonoff prior over programs (because if it doesn’t, then its sum will diverge, etc.). But then this yields a prior that is constantly predicting that the universe will end at every moment, and is continually surprised when it keeps on existing. I’m not sure if this is logically inconsistent, but at least it seems useless for any practical purpose.