Kaj_Sotala

Karma: 47,636

Kaj_Sotala 12 Nov 2024 12:28 UTC
4 points
2
in reply to: PoignardAzur’s comment on: The hostile telepaths problem
Sounds plausible to me. Alternatively, telling you that they didn’t over-apologize still communicates that they would have over-apologized in different circumstances, so it can be a covert way of still delivering that apology.

Kaj_Sotala 11 Nov 2024 14:51 UTC
2 points
2
in reply to: Alex Lintz’s comment on: The hostile telepaths problem
A crucial part of every IFS session is to ask the protector what age they think you are (often, at least in examples, it would say something like 5-12) and then you could reveal to it that actually you’re 30 (or whatever).
I wouldn’t put it as strongly as to say that it’s a crucial part of every IFS session. It can sometimes be a very useful question and approach, sure, but I’ve had/facilitated plenty of great sessions that didn’t use that question at all. And there are people who that question just doesn’t resonate with.

Kaj_Sotala 8 Nov 2024 10:54 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Foyle’s comment on: Should CA, TX, OK, and LA merge into a giant swing state, just for elections?
As far as I know, the latest representative expert survey on the topic is “Thousands of AI Authors on the Future of AI”, in which the median time for a 50% chance of AGI was either in 23 or 92 years, depending on how the question was phrased:
If science continues undisrupted, the chance of unaided machines outperforming humans in every possible task was estimated at 10% by 2027, and 50% by 2047. [...] However, the chance of all human occupations becoming fully automatable was forecast to reach 10% by 2037, and 50% as late as 2116 (compared to 2164 in the 2022 survey).
Not that these numbers would mean much because AI experts aren’t experts on forecasting, but it still suggests a substantial possibility for AGI to take quite a while yet.

Kaj_Sotala 3 Nov 2024 21:25 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: The Median Researcher Problem
Hmm… let me rephrase: it doesn’t seem to me like we would actually have a clear community norm for this, at least not one strong enough to ensure that the median community member would actually be familiar with stats and econ.

Kaj_Sotala 3 Nov 2024 19:32 UTC
12 points
4
on: The Median Researcher Problem

community norms which require basically everyone to be familiar with statistics and economics,

I think this is too strong. There are quite a few posts that don’t require knowledge of either one to write, read, or comment on. I’m certain that one could easily accumulate lots of karma and become a well-respected poster without knowing either.

Kaj_Sotala 3 Nov 2024 19:23 UTC
11 points
0
in reply to: quetzal_rainbow’s comment on: The Median Researcher Problem
I had the thought while reading the original post that I recall speaking to at least one researcher who, pre-replication crisis, was like “my work is built on a pretty shaky foundation as is most of the research in this field, but what can you do, this is the way the game is played”. So that suggested to me that plenty of median researchers might have recognized the issue but not been incentivized to change it.

Lab leaders aren’t necessarily in a much better position. If they feel responsibility toward their staff, they might feel even more pressured to keep gaming the metrics so that the lab can keep getting grants and its researchers good CVs.

Kaj_Sotala 2 Nov 2024 20:09 UTC
34 points
0
on: Science advances one funeral at a time
I’ve seen one paper arguing against Planck’s claim:
Unquestionably, there are scientists in every generation who tenaciously cling to knowledge they learned in their youth, and who refuse to consider new theories that challenge fundamental beliefs. The life-long resistance of Joseph Priestley to oxygen theory, Louis Agassiz to evolutionary theory, and Harold Jeffreys to continental drift are among the notable cases. It is virtually a truism that the last adherents to a fading scientific tradition will be elderly scientists. Yet documented episodes where resistance of isolated individuals crystallizes into generational disputes, or where an ageing scientific elite actually delays community-wide adoption of a new idea, are exceedingly rare. A review of the historical record suggests, on the contrary, that the period of active dissemination and adoption of scientific innovations—even those of revolutionary proportion—is typically shorter than that required for one generation of scientists to replace another. [...]
Curiously, the episode which prompted Planck’s observation—the ‘controversy’ surrounding his youthful reformulation of the second law of thermodynamics—seems a poor illustration of the ‘fact’ Planck claims to have learned. According to Planck’s own sketchy chronology (he provides few dates), not much more than ten years seems to have elapsed between his first unsuccessful attempts at gaining recognition, and the ‘universal acceptance’ of his dissertation thesis on the irreversible process of heat conduction. Nor does it appear that age was an important factor influencing adoption of the theory. Wilhelm Ostwald, one of the leaders of the opposition ‘Energetics’ school prominently mentioned by Planck, was only five years older than Planck, whereas Ludwig Boltzmann, whose theoretical work on entropy, in no small measure (as Planck grudgingly concedes) helped bring the scientific community around to Planck’s view, was fourteen years Planck’s senior.
Some quantitative data permit more systematic examination of age differences in receptivity, for both Lavoisier’s and Darwin’s landmark contributions. In a study of the Chemical Revolution, McCann reports a negative correlation between author’s age and the use of the oxygen paradigm in scientific papers written between 1760 and 1795. On closer inspection of the data, he finds that the earliest group of converts to the oxygen paradigm (between 1772 and 1777) were middle-aged men with close ties to Lavoisier; the inverse age effect became manifest only after 1785, during the ten-year period of ‘major conversion and consolidation’. McCann also contends that the age structure of the British community during the latter half of the eighteenth century impeded acceptance of the new theory. In contrast to the declining age of French scientists during this period, the increasing average age of British scientists held back the pace of acceptance of oxygen theory among British scientists of all age strata.
As for evolutionary theory, Hull and his colleagues find weak support for ‘Planck’s Principle’ among nineteenth-century British scientists. The small minority of scientists who held out against the theory after 1869 were, on average, almost ten years older than earlier adopters. Age in 1859 (the year the Origin of Species was published) was unrelated, however, to speed of acceptance for the great majority of those converting to evolutionary theory by 1869. [...]
… we can distinguish high- risk and low-risk contexts for theory choices of individual scientists. A high-risk context is one in which there is substantial resistance to the new theory. Prevailing scientific opinion views it as controversial, a heretical assault on existing knowledge, or even being beyond the pale of serious scientific discourse. Adoption of a new theory in a high-risk context presumably exacts some perceived or actual professional costs. Given such a social setting, structural constraints of life-course position would be hypothesized to be more important than motivational factors in determining theory-choice behaviour. This implies, for example, that the earliest adopters of controversial theories should be disproportionately composed of middle-career and senior scientists and a corresponding deficit of young scientists.
In a low-risk context, a new theory is generally regarded as a legitimate claimant to knowledge, or one which has already attracted a sizeable following; consequently its adoption exposes one to only minimal professional costs. The social patterning of theory-choice behaviour in this context is hypothesized to be dominated by motivational factors, tending to reinforce more rapid adoption by younger scientists. [...]
During the early stages in the adoption of a new theory, age differences between supporters of the new theory and defenders of the status quo are expected to be either relatively small or (particularly if the new idea is perceived as being unusually controversial) tending toward older age for the first supporters. With the passage of time and greater acceptance of the new theory, we expect the influx of new converts to be increasingly drawn from the ranks of younger scientists. Such a correspondence between changes in the context of appraisal and age-based differences in theory choice is evident in McCann’s data on French scientists’ reception of the oxygen paradigm during the different subperiods of his study. It will be recalled that the earliest followers of oxygen theory were middle-aged scientists, and the greater propensity of younger scientists only became manifest several years later, at the point when community-wide conversion was well under way.
In the remainder of this paper, I present a rigorous test of the expanded age hypothesis proposed above. It is based upon new findings from a study of the reception of plate tectonics in the earth sciences during the 1960s. Compared with earlier studies, it permits a more precise delineation of the historical stages in prevailing scientific opinion, and introduces into the analysis controls on possible confounding factors correlated with age, such as foci of research interest and professional eminence. [...]
Development of the theory of plate tectonics ranks among the stellar scientific achievements of this century. General acceptance of this conceptual framework necessitated the abandonment of a communal belief in the horizontal immobility of the earth’s crust which had guided geological research since the middle of the nineteenth century. Plate tectonics theory substituted the diametrically opposed premise that the earth’s crus is divided into large crustal plates which move slowly over the upper mantle.
The swift adoption of plate tectonics during the late 1960s stands in stark contrast to the extremely bitter controversy encountered by earlier proponents of a ‘mobile’ earth. Alfred Wegener’s continental drift theory, the forerunner of present-day mobilist theory, was subjected to extremely hostile attacks during the 1920s and fell into nearly universal disrepute. British geophysicists working on reconstruction of the ancient configurations of the earth’s magnetic field rekindled interest in continental drift during the middle 1950s. [...] Despite the advocacy by Hess and a few other distinguished earth scientists, large-scale horizontal displacement of the crust remained an anathema for most earth scientists well into the 1960s. Then, in 1966-67, a confluence of empirical discoveries in marine geology, geomagnetic studies and seismology provided for many geologists incontrovertible proof favouring the seafloor spreading model, and the mobilist perspective more generally. [...] By the early 1970s, the great majority of earth scientists had adopted plate tectonics, and the theory was well on its way to becoming the dominant theoretical orientation in many fields of the earth sciences. [...]
To obtain data on the dynamics of individual theory choice that under earth scientists’ shifts from the stabilist to the mobilist programme research, I examined the publications of ninety-six North American eart scientists actively engaged in pertinent research during the 1960s a early 1970s. I also gathered biographical information for each scientis including their training, research interests and career histories. [...]
The dependent variable for this study is the year in which a scientist decided to adopt the mobilist programme of research rather than to continue working within a stabilist programme. [...] Before 1966, when prevailing scientific opinion still ran strongly against the mobilist perspective, the small number of scientists adopting the programme were considerably older (in terms of career age) than other scientists active during this early period. Thus, scientists adopting the programme through 1963 were on average nineteen years ‘older’ than non-adopters. [...] Adopters in 1964 were twenty-three years older than non-adopters. [...] Only with the shift in scientific opinion favourable to mobilist concepts beginning in 1966, do we start to see a progressive narrowing, and then reversal, in the age differentials between adopters and non-adopters.

Kaj_Sotala 31 Oct 2024 18:45 UTC
2 points
2
in reply to: Valentine’s comment on: The hostile telepaths problem
True, though I think that judgment tends to be hard to effectively mask in this kind of context (though maybe psychopaths would be able to fake it; I don’t know). At least my own experience inclines me to agree with this person:
I’ve worked with and/or done swaps with a lot of different practitioners (IFS, aletheia, VIEW, regular talk therapy, bodywork, voice work etc), and what I found to be the most effective element of their skill set (for me) is: non-judgmental, loving presence…
many times I have explored the same topic with two different practitioners within a few days of each other; and it’s in those cases that the impact of the difference in the quality of non-judgmental loving presence is most noticeable.
the degree to which the quality of the presence is non-judgmental can be VERY subtle, but the system can pick up on it. it might not even be a strong enough signal to notice it consciously, but it will greatly impact how the session unfolds.

Kaj_Sotala 29 Oct 2024 19:47 UTC
8 points
10
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Habryka’s Shortform Feed
On Windows the font feels actively unpleasant right away, on Android it’s not quite as bad but feels like I might develop eyestrain if I read comments for a longer time.

Kaj_Sotala 29 Oct 2024 13:35 UTC
4 points
6
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Habryka’s Shortform Feed
Seeing strange artifacts on some of the article titles on Chrome for Android (but not on desktop)

Kaj_Sotala 29 Oct 2024 10:22 UTC
13 points
19
in reply to: cubefox’s comment on: Habryka’s Shortform Feed
Yeah it feels uncomfortably small to read to me now

Kaj_Sotala 28 Oct 2024 12:06 UTC
31 points
6
in reply to: Ivan Vendrov’s comment on: The hostile telepaths problem
Now I can make the question more precise—why do you think it’s safe to have more access to your thoughts and feelings than your subconscious gave you? And how exactly do you plan to deal with all the hostile telepaths out there (possibly including parts of yourself?).
An answer I’d give is that for a lot of people, most of the hostile telepaths are ultimately not that dangerous if you’re confident enough to be able to deal with them. As Valentine mentioned, often it’s enough to notice that you are actually not anymore in the kind of a situation where the strategies would be necessary.
Unfortunately, many of the strategies also behave in such a way as to make themselves necessary, or to prevent the person from noticing that they could be abandoned:
- Maybe I had a parent that wanted me to be dependent on them, so that they could control me. Even if I manage to break away from that parent, I may still have the belief that if someone wants to control me, then I have to genuinely believe that I cannot escape their control or they’ll hurt me. This belief will tend to get me into abusive relationships… and then that strategy again becomes necessary for protecting me while in the relationship, when I would never have gotten into that relationship in the first place if not for that very strategy!
- Maybe I believe that if I cause someone else any discomfort, I have to say I’m really sorry and experience genuine distress. As a result, I always execute this strategy, believing it to be crucial for my safety. If I were to ever not execute it, I might notice that some people are actually okay with me not reacting in such an extreme way… but because I always execute it, I never get the chance to notice that it’d be safe not to.
One of the ways by which these kinds of strategies get implemented is that the psyche develops a sense of extreme discomfort around acting in the “wrong” way, with successful execution of that strategy then blocking that sense of discomfort. For example, the thought of not apologizing when you thought someone might be upset at you might feel excruciatingly uncomfortable, with that discomfort subsiding once you did apologize.
I believe this is also related to the way that awareness narrows around the strategy—feeling the original discomfort is very unpleasant, and the mind tends to want to contract awareness in ways that keep discomfort out. If awareness to broaden, then it would become aware of the unpleasant thing that the strategy is trying to push out of awareness. So for example, in the center of that discomfort of not-yet-having-apologized might be a memory of a time when you weren’t really sorry and your mother was upset at you… and if you were to instead execute the strategy of desperately apologizing, then that would feel somewhat less painful and your awareness would naturally contract around that act of desperate apology, causing the original memory and the pain associated with that to drop away.
And something that practices like meditation can do is to bring the original discomfort into awareness in such a way that it can gradually stop feeling so unpleasant. (Though this can also go badly and bring something painful into awareness faster than the person is capable of dealing with it.) If that happens so that the original pain stops feeling so painful, then the self-deceptive strategies can stop creating situations where they perpetuate their own need to exist.
Now that’s not to say that you would be guaranteed to be safe. A brief discussion I had on Twitter:
Me: I wonder to what extent significant parts of Buddhism got so focused on renunciation because that’s the “safe” kind of mental transformation in the sense of not upsetting secular rulers.
While the kind of practice that dismantles societal programming and makes you go out in the world to change things, can easily become a threat for established power structures and a target for being rooted out.
Societal forces exerting evolutionary pressure on spiritual practice and selecting it for increased harmlessness/renunciation.
(Parallels of this idea in the context of corporate mindfulness training programs and such left as an exercise for the reader.)
(Or for that matter, parallels in the context of notions like “our group of ten people meditating is by itself an act of healing the world”, which have some truth to them but also conveniently keep any change pretty localized and non-threatening.)
David Chapman: Yes this is very much the case in the history of sutrayana vs vajrayana. Vajrayana was typically reserved for the aristocratic elite, for this reason, and intermittently also appropriated by anti-establishment forces when they could.
Romeo Stevens (@romeostevensit ): The ambitious sects were indeed wiped out
Aneesh Mulye: This wasn’t so much of a thing in India; yes, it happened, but engagement with the world and with rulers was def a part of Indian Buddhist (and Shaiva, and most if not all other) traditions.
One solution involved only an elite having access to the hardcore agentifying stuff.
The extermination of all Indian Buddhism (what’s called ‘Tibetan’ today, but that’s just because it survived only in Tibet), and all Tantrik institutions (and Indic, generally), engaged with the world as they were, at the hands of the hateful Muslims, is why this didn’t survive.
So apparently there were times in history when meditators did get a lot more confidence and self-insight, used that to become more powerful until they were seen as threats and wiped out, and that’s why so many of the surviving meditative traditions are focused on things like withdrawing from the world and living as ascetics.

Kaj_Sotala 28 Oct 2024 11:17 UTC
17 points
2
on: The hostile telepaths problem
Like if there’s an email I keep freezing around. I can tell there’s something there. I might even have some intuitive guesses about what it is!
…but I do not check. I don’t introspect on whether my guesses feel right.
Instead, I hypothesize. What hostile telepath problem might someone in my shoes be trying to solve such that this behavior arises?
I tried doing this and it felt promising, and then I noticed a familiar feeling of wanting tell a person affected by my possible self-deception how I’d now solved the problem and would behave differently from now on. And I remembered that on each previous time when I’d had that feeling and told the other person something like that, my behavior had in fact not changed at all as a consequence.
And now I’m chuckling at myself.

Kaj_Sotala 28 Oct 2024 11:12 UTC
13 points
3
on: The hostile telepaths problem
So in many cases, “trauma processing” can basically mean noticing you’re not a child anymore. You have power. So you don’t have to appease the hostile telepaths just because they’re adults.
Yes, definitely. And this is also why it’s often so important for the therapist—if this is done in the context of therapy—to exhibit unconditional positive regard toward the client. If the therapist is genuinely accepting of any thoughts and feelings that the client brings up, then that opens the door for the client’s parts to start considering the possibility that maybe they can tell the truth and still be accepted. And once it has become possible to tell the truth to at least one person, it becomes possible to tell it to yourself as well.
(Though maybe I should say that the therapist needs to either experience unconditional positive regard toward the client, or successfully deceive themselves and the client into thinking that they do. Heh.)
One additional tangle is that often the client’s issue is less about needing to act in a certain way, and more about needing to be a certain way. At some point, one frequently goes from “it’s bad to break something and not be genuinely sorry on that particular instance” to “it’s bad to be the kind of person who wouldn’t automatically feel sorry and who needed to fake being sorry”.
This makes it harder to get to the point where the therapist could provide evidence that they are fine with you not being sorry in that particular instance, because getting there would require you to reveal that it’s possible for you to not automatically feel sorry, and that feels dangerous by itself!
And what you’ve written also gets to the limitations of therapy—that no matter how much positive regard the therapist might have toward their client, if they are still e.g. living with an abusive partner, just the therapist’s warmth and support may not be enough to produce a shift. (I haven’t had clients with situations that extreme, but I’ve certainly noticed times when we started making much more progress once they broke up with a partner or quit a job that they had been trying to force themselves to do, and then suddenly new parts of them came to awareness that could now be convinced they were safe.)

Kaj_Sotala 28 Oct 2024 10:08 UTC
16 points
5
in reply to: Gordon Seidoh Worley’s comment on: The hostile telepaths problem
I bet something similar could work for getting kids to appologize.
Also, for getting them to say thank you. When kids are at a certain age, adults frequently seem to be reminding them to say thank you for gifts and such; I have a vague memory of adults also reminding me of this, when I was at that age. But these days I automatically say thank you for various things, and mean it.

Kaj_Sotala 27 Oct 2024 12:01 UTC
2 points
1
in reply to: jbash’s comment on: The Summoned Heroine’s Prediction Markets Keep Providing Financial Services To The Demon King!
But the Summoned Heroine doesn’t know that until the end, and it’s stated that she specifically set up the market to “help them anticipate and counter the Demon King’s next moves”.

Kaj_Sotala 2 Oct 2024 14:02 UTC
10 points
6
on: Self-Help Corner: Loop Detection
Oh nice observation! I hadn’t thought of complaining as a way to externalize the detection of blindspots, but that makes a lot of sense.
This also reminds me of “You should complain about it”, which also talked about complaining as a way of creating common knowledge about problems, but for a group:
Complaining often feels like unloading a burden, and it allows us to achieve shared feeling: Before complaining, you knew that the situation was bad, and you assumed that the others around you also knew that but you weren’t sure. After complaining together, you know that they think it’s bad too, and they know that you know, and you know that they know, etc. The object of complaint has reached shared understanding in a way that it wasn’t before. You know you’re not alone in feeling bad about it.
Sharing your pain this way is a bonding activity. When you complain to each other, you increase the social ties between you, because you each know and trust each other a little bit more than you did before. You’ve shared feeling, and you’ve demonstrated that you are someone who it is safe to share feelings with. [...]
Complaining, in and of itself, is unlikely to ever fix anything… other than your mood, your social relationships with your coworkers, and your shared understanding of the problems that everyone is facing. Little things like that.
Also, it turns out, those are all really useful things to have if you are going to fix anything else.
If you are one person with a problem, you have very little leverage. If you are ten people with the same problem, you have rather a lot more leverage… unless you don’t know that you are ten people with the same problem, in which case you are ten people who are not doing anything about it because you don’t think you have the leverage to fix the problem.
Complaining does not make much of a difference, but it creates the conditions in which you can all work together to make a difference.

Kaj_Sotala 2 Oct 2024 7:44 UTC
8 points
7
in reply to: FeepingCreature’s comment on: Cryonics is free
I would generally expect that an organization’s ability to execute on things unrelated on their core competency would be only weakly correlated to their ability to execute on their actual core competency.

Kaj_Sotala 29 Sep 2024 18:47 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Thane Ruthenis’s comment on: “Slow” takeoff is a terrible term for “maybe even faster takeoff, actually”

IMO, soft/smooth/gradual still convey wrong impressions. They still sound like “slow takeoff”, they sound like the progress would be steady enough that normal people would have time to orient to what’s happening, keep track, and exert control.

That is exactly the meaning that I’d thought was standard for “soft takeoff” (and which I assumed was synonymous with “slow takeoff”), e.g. as I wrote in 2012:

Bugaj and Goertzel (2007) consider three kinds of AGI scenarios: capped intelligence, soft takeoff, and hard takeoff. In a capped intelligence scenario, all AGIs are prevented from exceeding a predetermined level of intelligence and remain at a level roughly comparable with humans. In a soft takeoff scenario, AGIs become far more powerful than humans, but on a timescale which permits ongoing human interaction during the ascent. Time is not of the essence, and learning proceeds at a relatively human-like pace. In a hard takeoff scenario, an AGI will undergo an extraordinarily fast increase in power, taking effective control of the world within a few years or less. [Footnote: Bugaj and Goertzel defined hard takeoff to refer to a period of months or less. We have chosen a somewhat longer time period, as even a few years might easily turn out to be too little time for society to properly react.] In this scenario, there is little time for error correction or a gradual tuning of the AGI’s goals.

(B&G didn’t actually invent soft/hard takeoff, but it was the most formal-looking cite we could find.)

Kaj_Sotala 25 Sep 2024 20:26 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: TsviBT’s comment on: A Path out of Insufficient Views

For example, I’d expect many strands to incorporate something like the negation

Some yes, though the strands that I personally like the most lean strongly into those statements. The interpretation of Buddhism that makes the most sense to me sees much of the aim of practice as first becoming aware of, and then dropping, various mental mechanisms that cause motivated reasoning and denial of what’s actually true.