JohnBuridan

Karma: 825

JohnBuridan 19 Nov 2024 2:43 UTC
4 points
0
on: OpenAI Email Archives (from Musk v. Altman)
From a historical perspective this is an excellent treasure cache. Truly when you are the cutting edge of something ideas, relationships, personality, and economics all truly come together to drive history.

JohnBuridan 11 Nov 2024 5:11 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Martin Vlach’s comment on: Safety isn’t safety without a social model (or: dispelling the myth of per se technical safety)
I would not be surprised if lurking in the background of my thought is Tyler Cowen. He’s a huge influence on me. But I was thinking of specific examples. I don’t know of a good general history of “humanizing”.
What I had explicitly in mind was the historical development of automobile safety: seatbelts and airbags. There is a history of invention, innovation, deployment, and legal mandating that is long and varied for these.
How long did it take between the discovery of damaging chlorofluorocarbons and their demise? Or for asbestos and its abatement—how much does society pay for this process? What’s the delta between climate change research and renewables investment?
Essentially, many an externality can be internalized once it is named and drawn attention to and the costs are realized.

JohnBuridan 23 Jul 2024 13:51 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: AnthonyC’s comment on: The Act Itself: Exceptionless Moral Norms
Well said.

JohnBuridan 23 Jul 2024 1:05 UTC
11 points
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in reply to: Amalthea’s comment on: What are you getting paid in?
The casual policing of positive comments about Sam Altman is unnecessary. Is this Sam Altman sneer club? Grok the author’s intent and choose your own example. SA is a polarizing figure, I get it. He can be a distraction to the point of an example, but in this case I thought it made sense.

It is something for authors to be on the lookout for though. Some examples invite “missing the point.” Sam Altman is increasingly one example of a name that invites distracted thoughts other than the point intended.

JohnBuridan 21 Jul 2024 12:02 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Ustice’s comment on: Freedom and Privacy of Thought Architectures
Yes I’m assuming a locally run open weight model will be useful, but not ultimately not sufficient for very complex tasks. I hope that something of the sort I describe can and will exist before too much regulation and optimized monetization occurs.

JohnBuridan 1 Jul 2024 3:52 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Andrew_Critch’s comment on: Safety isn’t safety without a social model (or: dispelling the myth of per se technical safety)
And we don’t have good social models of technology for really any technology, even retrospectively. So AI is certainly one we are not going to align with human flourishing in advance. When it comes to human flourishing the humanizing of technologies take a lot of time. Eventually we will get there, but it’s a process that requires a lot of individual actors making choices and “feature requests” from the world, features that promote human flourishing.

JohnBuridan 2 Jun 2024 12:34 UTC
4 points
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on: Notifications Received in 30 Minutes of Class
At my school all the students have to deposit their cell phones into pouches at the office the beginning of the day.. cell phone strictness alone does not create interpersonal chatter. You just also spend a lot of time and work creating an actual culture of conversation. It’s an explicitly taught skill!

Your data on the elasticity of behavior matches my experience well..

JohnBuridan 11 May 2024 15:50 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: JenniferRM’s comment on: St. Louis – ACX Meetups Everywhere Spring 2024
Oh weird! I didn’t create this one.

JohnBuridan 15 Apr 2024 14:28 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: mhampton’s comment on: St. Louis ACX Meetups Everywhere Spring 2024
You are correct! Let me fix that!

JohnBuridan 2 Apr 2024 3:02 UTC
7 points
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in reply to: Austin Chen’s comment on: My Interview With Cade Metz on His Reporting About Slate Star Codex
I for one am definitely worse off.
1. I now have to read Scott on Substack instead of SSC.
2. Scott doesn’t write sweet things that could attract nasty flies anymore.

JohnBuridan 6 Jan 2024 15:05 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: gjm’s comment on: The Act Itself: Exceptionless Moral Norms
Very helpful comment!

Upon further reflection my example was ill-chosen. The flashlight clobbering example doesn’t trigger double-effect considerations, because there is only one immediate effect of the action—an unconscious intruder.
I wanted to use a simple example that had two effects , but I think you rightly point out that claiming the home-owner didn’t intend to make the guy unconscious is specious sophistry. His unconsciousness and the safety of the home are two aspects of the same effect. The unconscious intruder entails the safety of the home.
If we claim they are different effects, then we would have to imagine that can be separated, but the safety of the home in the example requires the incapacitation of the intruder. There is no significant difference between claiming “I intended to knock the intruder out” and “I intended to do actions that make my home safe.”

But do notice that if we use the definition of intention from OP, which I will stick to, that our intention was to achieve a safe home by using force to incapacitate the intruder with the attitudes appropriate, no gleeful pleasure-taking in finally getting the chance to clobber someone. I think everything in your final paragraph is correct about attitude and steps taken minimize unnecessary harm.
Our intention is the goal and will (which includes attitudes) to perform the acts to achieve that goal.

If we go to the terrorist compound case, then there are multiple effects: the deaths of the civilians and the death of the terrorist. These are separable in that the death of the civilians does not cause the death of terrorists nor vice versa. The same missile launch causes both. Because they are separable effects, it is possible to intend/will one effect, without willing the other effect.

My original example of the home intruder failed to identify two separable effects, but only a logical entailment of the clobbering. In that case, the considerations are simple proportionality, not DDE. Obviously, if I knock someone unconscious, I can’t then beat him to death. I have already achieved the goal. If I shoot him, he might die. But that may still be proportional. If I shoot him and then unload two magazine rounds into him, that would be disproportional.

What the SEP article means by “the good effect is not achieved through the bad effect” is not well-defined. But generally people in the lit interpret it to be the abstraction of “No capturing civilians to perform useful medical experiments.” I might rephrase the abstraction to, “No doing an action that has bad effects, in order to do a separate action that has good effects.” (But that’s tentative).

JohnBuridan 2 Jan 2024 20:05 UTC
1 point
1
in reply to: deeplearner’s comment on: The Act Itself: Exceptionless Moral Norms
Thanks for commenting. Welcome.
You right on both accounts.
There are some agreed upon universal principles that societies do develop. “No ****ing the young. No randomly killing people.”

Categorical imperative is exactly what I what I had in mind. However, the CI is not based upon what’s acceptable to the actor or to the society at large, but rather according to reason. “Act only on the maxim which you can at the same time will that it should be universal law.”

JohnBuridan 2 Jan 2024 16:45 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: gjm’s comment on: The Act Itself: Exceptionless Moral Norms
Your action only makes your home safe by means of knocking him out. This is in fact a nice clean example of something that is not permitted by traditional formulations of the doctrine of double effect, at least not if knocking the intruder out is considered bad.

It is precisely this instance for which DDE was formulated: to explain why it is permitted! https://aquinas.cc/la/en/~ST.II-II.Q64.A7.SC
Flashlight clobbering produces the good effect and the bad effect. They are coterminous events, even though one is logically necessary for the other. As you say, “a safe home by means of an unconscious intruder.”
You are also right. I shouldn’t have used “Thomistic” in the first place. But because real discussion of this gets started in Thomas’ work (his account is unclear and too curt), I introduced the term, and thereby introduced a lot more confusion than I intended!
Double-effect is a broad term, not every moral philosophy has discussion of double-effect. Xunzi’s Confucianism, Kant’s Groundwork, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Plato’s Republic all of which I have read recently do not have such a discussion. Kant, I guess, kind of does, but for Kant consequences, allegedly, don’t bear on the morality of an action at all.
Of course, you and I whom I presume both hold utilitarianism in at least somewhat high regard expect ethical systems to deal with these questions in detail.

[1] I am not exactly sure what you think I think is meant by intent. Intent means goal. It is debated whether the specific actions taken by the agent should be considered part of intent or not. In the OP, I said it did, especially for epistemic reasons. I argued that specific actions chosen reveal the intent and that is why we should care about “the act itself.”
Am I making any headway here?
I would like to find our cruxes, if we in fact have any.
BTW: double-effect discussion is not an RCC thing. It is used in hospital system decision-making, reformulated by professors at Harvard School of Medicine, and used as a framework by military professionals and international law courts.
Like, despite our internet space having a lot antipathy towards these types of discussions. Crafting a better and clearer framework is a worthy project and one I wish to do, at least for my own benefit if not others.

JohnBuridan 2 Jan 2024 1:17 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: gjm’s comment on: The Act Itself: Exceptionless Moral Norms
Standard modifies Thomistic, it’s not normative as in “this is the standard”, it’s descriptive, as in “this is how the philosophy books and articles on it generally work”.

I use that as a starting point, because it is the one which has discussion of double-effect. I privilege “double-effect” as a concept because it is the term which describes thinking through actions which have both positive and negative consequences, and also takes account of common sense things people care about like intent, means, and circumstances. Unless a person is a moral purist, one needs some account of double effect. Greater good benthamite utilitarianism would be one such account. I find such an account insufficient for guiding or analyzing action, but I’m not a priori beholden to any particular interpretation of what should be contained within an account of double-effect.

I think you misunderstood what is meant by intent. It’s not a statement one makes to oneself about what one is doing. That’d just be self-deception.

There are interesting questions about self-deception, though. As Bryan Caplan(?) recently wrote, “You never see politicians talk about ‘acceptable rates of human tragedy.’” To what extent do we play-act morality in order to generate the feeling of “clean hands?” When is that necessary? When, if ever, is it beneficial?

JohnBuridan 28 Nov 2023 23:13 UTC
1 point
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on: Update #2 to “Dominant Assurance Contract Platform”: EnsureDone
What is the best way to build a liquid market of DACs?
For these to be and competitive a lot of people need to see them.

JohnBuridan 28 Nov 2023 15:30 UTC
10 points
4
on: My techno-optimism [By Vitalik Buterin]
An excellent quote: “a market-based society that uses social pressure, rather than government, as the regulator, is not [the result of] some automatic market process: it’s the result of human intention and coordinated action.”

I think too often people work on things under the illusion that everything else just “takes care of itself.”
Everything requires effort.
Efforts in the long-run are elastic.
Thus, everything is elastic.
Don’t take for granted that industry will take care of itself, or art, or music, or AI safety, or basic reading, writing, and arithmetic skills. It’s all effort—all the way down..

JohnBuridan 26 Nov 2023 5:26 UTC
1 point
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on: Fertility as Metascience
What has more elasticity—birth rates or institutional and educational quality of the sort that leads to innovation? Clearly both are fairly inelastic in the short run (the shorter the run, the closer to perfect inelasticity), but in the long run a lot might be possible along both axes.
Metascience should focus on the institutional and educational quality questions (including creating better idea discovery processes!). Insofar as metascience depends on fertility, it is a heavily intermediated causal pathway, both by time, by generational differences and culture, by immigration policy, and by educational opportunities. All of which probably have greater elasticity in the short run than fertility. So I disagree with the broad brush used here.

Immigration’s effect on metascience is moderated by types of skilled immigration in the short run, not immigration as such. This is not a nitpick and not merely important practical political reasons. Conceptually, immigration is a big broad concept that should be broken down into its constituent mechanical parts, which includes admission of people based upon some quality, whether it be genius, family ties, lottery, bribe, or “points.”
Natalist and Immigration public policy people should work on their issues without much regard for 3rd order or 4th order effects for metascience. I think keeping these separate is conceptually important, even if they do ultimately causally bear on one another. Everything correlates with everything else.
The best we might do on the public policy level is nudge toward subcultures that are both scientifically advanced, epistemologically healthy, technologically cutting edge, and reproducing themselves at some above replacement rate through both education and children. If we nudge each part of the causal chain a bit towards greater fertility, high skilled immigration, and better institutions it could entirely counteract the trends you describe.
We don’t want to Canticle for Leibowitz and Children of Men ourselves to death. But I think the world model being proposed around fertility and technology by, say, Robin Hanson, is missing a good causal diagram that includes the elasticity of countervailing forces. I’m not saying the issue is not a big one, perhaps the biggest one. But I am terribly unimpressed with most thinking on this topic so far.

JohnBuridan 8 Nov 2023 4:47 UTC
5 points
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in reply to: JenniferRM’s comment on: On Overhangs and Technological Change
Since we are at no moment capable of seeing all that is inefficient and wasteful, and constantly discover new methods of wealth creation, we are at each moment liable to be accused of being horribly wasteful compared to our potential, no? There is no way to stand up against that accusation.

JohnBuridan 6 Nov 2023 2:22 UTC
5 points
−4
on: On Overhangs and Technological Change
The implication: overhangs CANNNOT be measured in advance (this is like a punctuated equilibrium model); they are black swan events. Is that how you see it?

JohnBuridan 6 Nov 2023 2:16 UTC
0 points
−3
in reply to: Pee Doom’s comment on: EA orgs’ legal structure inhibits risk taking and information sharing on the margin
Forming a nonprofit is not that difficult. It’s like four extra hours of work to get the 501c3 status and a decent time delay of several months. Having someone else to fill out the 990 for you is nice, though!