Jiro

Karma: 4,886

Jiro Mar 17, 2025, 7:05 AM
2 points
0
in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Counting Objections to Housing
Food gets used up quickly, but it takes a long while to use up housing, so banning new housing really isn’t comparable to banning making food.

Jiro Mar 8, 2025, 6:45 AM
5 points
0
in reply to: ymeskhout’s comment on: How to Corner Liars: A Miasma-Clearing Protocol

I don’t know where you’re getting this notion that speculation is evasion

The liar faces a conundrum. He can ask to modify the theory again, which is perfectly fine, but whatever he comes up with to accommodate “dog isn’t sick” fact will directly contradict the preceding “Gillian stole cookies but didn’t eat them” theory.

You’ve described this kind of speculation as specific to liars, yet innocent people will end up having to do it too.

If a client is either factually innocent or guilty-but-sober-minded, there’s no difficulty getting them to admit the incriminating nature of incriminating evidence.

If an innocent person was shown evidence, of course he’s going to try to explain why the evidence is consistent with his innocence. Why do you think he wouldn’t do this?

Jiro Mar 7, 2025, 7:42 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: ymeskhout’s comment on: How to Corner Liars: A Miasma-Clearing Protocol
If they have no idea what is going on, but have been accused, they need to do what they can to maximize the chance of being believed. Sometimes this means responding with a theory. And such responses will look like evasion by your standards.

There aren’t (useful) “other ways” for an innocent person with no direct knowledge to act, unless he gets lucky, like by catching the culprit.

Jiro Mar 6, 2025, 10:11 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: ymeskhout’s comment on: How to Corner Liars: A Miasma-Clearing Protocol
But if the innocent person doesn’t know what’s going on (other than his own innocence), his alternative theory might not comport with reality—because he has no idea what’s going on. All he can do is make hypotheses and try to confirm them. It may take several hypotheses before he gets it right. If you’re going to “force liars to commit to a single alternative theory”, you’ve put the innocent person in a position where unless he gets lucky and picks the right answer the first time, he can’t defend himself because he committed to the theory and it turned out not to be true, and he doesn’t get to change it.

Jiro Mar 6, 2025, 6:54 AM
1 point
−1
in reply to: Zero Contradictions’s comment on: Market Capitalization is Semantically Invalid
There’s no way for anyone to know that you didn’t write the essay unless they already know that your username isn’t an alias of the writer. You didn’t write “here is a post by someone else” or anything else which makes clear that the post is not yours, let alone that you don’t endorse it. In fact the essay starts with “In this essay, I will”, making the normal assumption that the only person whose username is attached to the post is who “I” refers to.

Jiro Mar 6, 2025, 2:35 AM
1 point
0
in reply to: Zero Contradictions’s comment on: Market Capitalization is Semantically Invalid
If you’re sharing it, but don’t endorse it, you should say that you don’t endorse it. If not, readers have a right to assume that you endorse it.

(And you seem to be in this limbo where you’re sort of endorsing it but sort of not.)

Jiro Mar 6, 2025, 2:23 AM
2 points
0
in reply to: ymeskhout’s comment on: How to Corner Liars: A Miasma-Clearing Protocol
The response wouldn’t actually be lying, but it would be indistinguishable by an outsider from the kind of deflection that you describe here and that you consider part of lying.

And I don’t think “this example is unrealistically convenient” lets you handwave this away. The exact response “maybe a friend of Gillian’s stopped over” is specific to your example, but that type of response is not. If Jake is innocent in this scenario but accused of lying, the only possible response is to try to come up with ways to explain the available information. That’s the exact same thing that would be deflection when done by a guilty person.

Jiro Mar 5, 2025, 3:44 PM
6 points
1
on: Weirdness Points

The same goes for wearing a suit. I don’t imply that anyone else should wear a suit, and the people around me don’t imply that I shouldn’t wear a suit. Telling other people what to do isn’t socially expensive because it costs “weirdness points”. It is socially expensive because people don’t like it when you tell them to do things they don’t want to do.

By that reasoning you could refuse to ever say “please” and “thank you”. After all, you’re not telling anyone else not to say “please” and “thank you”.

There are two things going on in the vegan example that you haven’t noticed. First, it’s possible for something to be bad for more than one reason. Something can be pushy, and weird even ignoring the pushiness, at the same time. Second, being vegan by itself doesn’t cost you that many weirdness points, because being vegan is a thing that people are familiar with as part of our society, not just as something that one strange guy does.

Wearing a suit when people don’t expect a suit is more like refusing to eat round foods, or taking all your meals on green plates, than it is like veganism. If you just made up the weird action (not the thing you’re basing it on—suits already exist, but round foods already exist too), it’s going to be seen as a lot weirder than something seen occasionally in society.

Jiro Mar 4, 2025, 3:30 AM
2 points
−2
in reply to: Kaj_Sotala’s comment on: You can just wear a suit

Refusing to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ would fall squarely in the category that people would have a reason to feel negative about.

It’s not like wearing a suit in a swimming pool. Never saying “thank you” doesn’t physically damage things. It just makes people upset because of the social inappropriateness, like the inappropriate suit.

Jiro Feb 28, 2025, 4:22 PM
3 points
−3
in reply to: Kaj_Sotala’s comment on: You can just wear a suit
This reasoning would justify violating any social convention whatsoever. “Refusing to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ signals confidence and self-esteem”.

Yes, it does, but signalling those things and signalling social cluelessness are entwined. “My self esteem is more important than these petty rules” can mean that you think you are really important compared to the rules, or that the rules are unimportant compared to you. You’re also overrating self-esteem. Signalling self-esteem is often a bad thing.

(Remember how fedoras became a sign of cluelessness? It’s not very different from out of context suits.)

Jiro Feb 27, 2025, 7:48 PM
4 points
1
in reply to: Ben’s comment on: You can just wear a suit

But, the social signalling game is exhausting.

Yes, but that doesn’t mean that you can just avoid it and its consequences. Like war, you may not be interested in it, but it is interested in you. And if you can’t avoid sometimes messing up, you can at least avoid making it worse than it has to be (such as by gratuitously wearing inappropriate clothes).

They have actually just genuinely had enough with the hall of mirrors game and have declared themselves to no longer be playing.

Yes, but he’s acting like it’s a triumphant success. Voluntarily deciding “I don’t want social skills” is a surrender that seriously harms you. If you can’t get social skills perfect, at least do what you can. And he certainly can avoid wearing inappropriate suits, even if he might mess up deciding when to buy drinks.

As a political comparison, Donald Trump didn’t propose putting a “Rivera of the Middle East” in Gaza because he is politically clueless, he did so because he doesn’t care about being politically clued-in and he wants everyone to know it.

Genuinely communicating “I don’t care and I want you to know it” without communicating bad things at the same time is countersignalling. Not just anyone can countersignal. Trump can do this because he’s in a powerful position that implies a certain amount of cluefulness (and even then, his opponents are happy to jump on this sort of stuff as evidence of cluelessness).

Jiro Feb 27, 2025, 4:47 PM
34 points
14
on: You can just wear a suit
Spend your weirdness points wisely.

Wearing a suit in an inappropriate context is like wearing a fedora. It says “I am socially clueless enough to do random inappropriate things”. The fact that people will eventually stop asking you about the suit does not mean that you are no longer saying this message, nor does it mean that people will stop listening to it.

And if your reaction is “I’m just not conforming. I’m not harming anyone, why do they care?”, it’s sending a message. Messages don’t need to cause harm for people to react to them.

That’s because if you wear a suit in a casual culture, then you want to be sending the subconscious message It’s no big deal that I’m wearing a suit.

You have a limited ability to choose the message that your action sends. It may not be possible to wear the suit and avoid sending the message that you are socially clueless. You also have a limited ability to make people believe your message. You can send the message “I think the suit is no big deal”, but nobody is forced to agree that the suit is no big deal.

Jiro Feb 24, 2025, 7:02 AM
2 points
0
in reply to: Milan W’s comment on: A fable on AI x-risk
Because 1) they would be able to trade with (or threaten) humans and 2) even ignoring that, humans behave differently towards obvious sentients—anti-slavery movements and anti-whale-oil movements are not comparable.

Jiro Feb 24, 2025, 3:05 AM
2 points
0
on: A fable on AI x-risk
This example is being chosen in hindsight. You could easily have E-coli being afraid that the apes would evolve into something that destroys them, or humans being afraid that dogs would evolve into something that would destroy them.

Also, if whales could argue like this, whale relations with humans would be very different, and hunting whales for lamp oil would be unlikely, or at least would be about the same status as hunting humans for slaves is now.

Jiro Feb 24, 2025, 2:49 AM
2 points
0
on: Against Unlimited Genius for Baby-Killers
To make an analogy, which involves accusations of baby killing in a completely unrelated context, imagine an abortion opponent who calls someone a baby killer in a context where it’s not obvious he’s talking about abortion. When questioned on this, he replies “I sincerely think abortion is baby killing, so my description was accurate, to the best of my knowledge”. What’s wrong with his reasoning?

What’s wrong with his reasoning is that if you’re trying to honestly and accurately communicate, you need to describe someone’s position in uncontroversial terms. It doesn’t matter whether you personally think abortion is baby killing; you’re communicating with people who don’t, and it’s not your place to say “well, if I assume my side of this controversial issue is right, then my description is accurate”. If you want your description to be accurate, describe it in ways that would give an accurate impression even to people who disagree with you.

“He thinks terrorists should have access… well, that’s true because I personally think he has no good or principled way to exclude terrorists” is at worst just that kind of deception. (At best, of course, it’s pedantry after all.)

Jiro Feb 24, 2025, 1:03 AM
12 points
3
in reply to: lsusr’s comment on: The case for the death penalty

The important question to ask is “how many innocent people” are worth killing to achieve an end? A 2014 study estimated that 4% of death row inmates would be exonerated, had they remained under sentence of death indefinitely,

“Exonerated” doesn’t usually mean “innocent”, it typically means “is guilty of something slightly lesser”.

Jiro Feb 22, 2025, 8:37 AM
−3 points
−1
in reply to: James Camacho’s comment on: The case for the death penalty

We could have the exact same court procedures, just change the law on the books from 3–5 years to 3–5 fingers.

We could, but with actual humans, we won’t.

Or are you just stating, without any justification

“By observing human beings” is not “without any justification”. We know what societies that mutilate prisoners are like, because plenty of them have existed.

Also, individuals don’t have to “become irrational” for the ones who are already irrational to gain more influence.

Jiro Feb 22, 2025, 8:37 AM
4 points
2
in reply to: Shankar Sivarajan’s comment on: The case for the death penalty
You won’t find systems with none at all, but you can easily find systems with those aspects to a significantly larger or smaller degree.

Jiro Feb 22, 2025, 2:51 AM
−1 points
0
in reply to: James Camacho’s comment on: The case for the death penalty
I would agree that eight years of imprisonment can be as bad or worse as mutilation. But the problem is that punishing people by mutilation has different incentives than punishing them with jail—at least among actual human punishers. When you look at the history of societies that punish people by mutilation, you find that mutilation goes hand in hand (no pun intended) with bad justice systems—dictatorship, corruption, punishment that varies between social classes, lack of due process, etc. Actual humans aren’t capable of implementing a justice system which punishes by mutilation but does so in a way that you could argue is fair.

Jiro Feb 22, 2025, 12:05 AM
17 points
3
on: The case for the death penalty

We accept that innocent people die due to our actions all the time, and making a special exception here is an isolated demand for rigour.

This is also true for life imprisonment, actually. We’ll be sentencing some innocent people to life imprisonment. And although perhaps some of them will be exonerated, it’s a statistical certainty that not all of them will be, and a statistical certainty that therefore we will destroy some innocent people’s lives piecemeal. But we’re okay with that, or at least it doesn’t get the ire that the death penalty does.

In fact, this is a general problem with all public policies. Anything you do that affects a large number of people is going to statistically kill a number of innocents, unless it’s the absolute optimal policy. You can’t avoid killing innocents whether you have executions or not.