It helps, but this could be solved with increased affection for your children specifically, so I don’t think it’s the actual motivation for the trait.
The core is probably several things, but note that this bias is also part of a larger package of traits that makes someone less disagreeable. I’m guessing that the same selection effects that made men more disagreeable than women are also probably partly responsible for this gender difference.
I suspect that the psychopath’s theory of mind is not “other people are generally nicer than me”, but “other people are generally stupid, or too weak to risk fighting with me”.
That is true, and it is indeed a bias, but it doesn’t change the fact that their assessment of whether others are going to hurt them seems basically well calibrated. The anecdata that needs to be explained is why nice people do not seem to be able to tell when others are going to take advantage of them, but mean people do. The posts’ offered reason is that generous impressions of others are advantageous for trust-building.
Mr. Portman probably believed that some children forgot to pay for the chocolate bars, because he was aware that different people have different memory skills.
This was the explanation he offered, yeah.
This post is about a suspected cognitive bias and why I think it came to be. It’s not trying to justify any behavior, as far as I can tell, unless you think the sentiment “people are pretty awful” justifies bad behavior in of itself.
The game theory is mostly an extended metaphor rather than a serious model. Humans are complicated.
Elon already has all of the money in the world. I think he and his employs are ideologically driven, and as far as I can tell they’re making sensible decisions given their stated goals of reducing unnecessary spend/sprawl. I seriously doubt they’re going to use this access to either raid the treasury or turn it into a personal fiefdom. It’s possible that in their haste they’re introducing security risks, but I also think the tendency of media outlets and their sources will be to exaggerate those security risks. I’d be happy to start a prediction market about this if a regular feels very differently.
If Trump himself was spearheading this effort I would be more worried.
Anthropic has a bug bounty for jailbreaks: https://hackerone.com/constitutional-classifiers?type=team
If you can figure out how to get the model to give detailed answers to a set of certain questions, you get a 10k prize. If you can find a universal jailbreak for all the questions, you get 20k.
Yeah, one possible answer is “don’t do anything weird, ever”. That is the safe way, on average. No one will bother writing a story about you, because no one would bother reading it.
You laugh, but I really think a group norm of “think for yourself, question the outside world, don’t be afraid to be weird” is part of the reason why all of these groups exist. Doing those things is ultimately a luxury for the well-adjusted and intelligent. If you tell people over and over to question social norms some of those people will turn out to be crazy and conclude crime and violence is acceptable.
I don’t know if there’s anything to do about that, but it is a thing.
So, to be clear, everyone you can think of has been mentioned in previous articles or alerts about Zizians so far? Because I have only been on the periphery of rationalist events for the last several years, but in 2023 I can remember sending this[1] post about rationalist crazies into the San Antonio LW groupchat. A trans woman named Chase Carter, who doesn’t generally attend our meetups, began to argue with me that Ziz (who gets mentioned in the article as an example) was subject to a “disinformation campaign” by rationalists, her goals were actually extremely admirable, and her worst failure was a strategic one in not realizing how few people were like her in the world. At the next meetup we agreed to talk about it further, and she attended (I think for the first time) to explain a very sympathetic background of Ziz’s history and ideas. This was after the alert post but years before any of the recent events.
I have no idea if Chase actually self-identifies as a “Zizian” or is at all dangerous and haven’t spoken to her in a year and a half. I just mention her as an example; I haven’t heard her name brought up anywhere and I really wouldn’t expect to know any of these people to begin with on priors.
Misremembered that I sent the alert post into the chat, but actually it was the Habryka post about rationalist crazies.
I know you’re not endorsing the quoted claim, but just to make this extra explicit: running terrorist organizations is illegal, so this is the type of thing you would also say if Ziz was leading a terrorist organization, and you didn’t want to see her arrested.
Why did 2 killings happen within the span of one week?
According to law enforcement the two people involved in the shootout received weapons and munitions from Jamie Zajko, and one of them also applied for a marriage certificate with the person who killed Curtis Lind. Additionally I think it’s also safe to say from all of their preparations that they were preparing to commit violent acts.
So my best guess is that:
Teresa Youngblut and/or Felix Bauckholt were co-conspirators with the other people committing violent crimes
They were preparing to commit further violent crimes
They were worried that they might be arrested
They made an agreement with each other to shoot it out with law enforcement in the event someone tried to arrest them
If the press/law enforcement isn’t lying, they were stopped on the road by a border patrol officer that was checking up on a visa, they thought were about to be taken in for something more serious, and *Teresa pulled a gun
The border patrol officer seems like a hero. Whether he meant it or not, he died to save the lives of several other people.
I think an accident that caused a million deaths would do it.
I think this post is quite good, and gives a heuristic important to modeling the world. If you skipped it because of title + author, you probably have the wrong impression of its contents and should give it a skim. Its main problem is what’s left unsaid.
Some people in the comments reply to it that other people self-deceive, yes, but you should assume good faith. I say—why not assume the truth, and then do what’s prosocial anyways?
You’re probably right, I don’t actually know many/haven’t actually interacted personally with many trans people. But also, I’m not really talking about the Zizians in particular here, or the possibility of getting physically harmed? It just seems like being trans is like taking LSD, in that it makes a person ex-ante much more likely to be someone who I’ve heard of having a notoriously bizarre mental breakdown that resulted in negative consequences for the people they’ve associated themselves with.
“Assumed to be dangerous” is overstated, but I do think trans people as a group are a lot crazier on average, and I sort of avoid them personally.
It also seems very plausible to me, unfortunately, that a community level “keep your distance from trans people” rule would have been net positive starting from 2008. Not just because of Ziz; trans people in general have this recurring pattern of involving themselves in the community, then deciding years later that the community is the source of their mental health problems and that they should dedicate themselves to airing imaginary grievances about it in public (or in this case committing violent crimes).
be “born a woman deep down”
start a violent gang
This is the craziest shit I have ever read on LessWrong, and I am mildly surprised at how little it is talked about. I get that it’s very close to home for a lot of people, and that it’s probably not relevant to either rationality as a discipline or the far future. But like, multiple unsolved murders by someone involved in the community is something that I would feel compelled to write about, if I didn’t get the vague impression that it’d be defecting in some way.
Most of the time when people publicly debate “textualism” vs. “intentionalism” it smacks to me of a bunch of sophistry to achieve the policy objectives of the textualist. Even if you tried to interpret English statements like computer code, which seems like a really poor way to govern, the argument that gets put forth by the guy who wants to extend the interstate commerce clause to growing weed or whatever is almost always ridiculous on its own merits.
The 14th amendment debate is unique, though, in that the letter of the amendment goes one way, and the stated interpretation of the guy who authored the amendment actually does seem to go the exact opposite way. The amendment reads:
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside
Which is pretty airtight. Virtually everyone inside the borders of the United States is “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States, certainly people here on visa, with the possible exception of people with diplomatic immunity. And yet:
So it seems like in this case the textualism vs. intentionalism debate is actually possibly important.
What’s reality? I don’t know. When my bird was looking at my computer monitor I thought, ‘That bird has no idea what he’s looking at.’ And yet what does the bird do? Does he panic? No, he can’t really panic, he just does the best he can. Is he able to live in a world where he’s so ignorant? Well, he doesn’t really have a choice. The bird is okay even though he doesn’t understand the world. You’re that bird looking at the monitor, and you’re thinking to yourself, ‘I can figure this out.’ Maybe you have some bird ideas. Maybe that’s the best you can do
Sarcasm is when we make statements we don’t mean, expecting the other person to infer from context that we meant the opposite. It’s a way of pointing out how unlikely it would be for you to mean what you said, by saying it.
There are two ways to evoke sarcasm; first by making your statement unlikely in context, and second by using “sarcasm voice”, i.e. picking tones and verbiage that explicitly signal sarcasm. The sarcasm that people consider grating is usually the kind that relies on the second category of signals, rather than the first. It becomes more funny when the joker is able to say something almost-but-not-quite plausible in a completely deadpan manner. Compare:
“Oh boyyyy, I bet you think you’re the SMARTEST person in the WHOLE world.” (Wild, abrupt shifts in pitch)
“You must have a really deep soul, Jeff.” (Face inexpressive)
As a corollary, sarcasm often works more smoothly when it’s between people who already know each other, not only because it’s less likely to be offensive, but also because they’re starting with a strong prior about what their counterparties are likely to say in normal conversation.
Moral intuitions are odd. The current government’s gutting of the AI safety summit is upsetting, but somehow less upsetting to my hindbrain than its order to drop the corruption charges against a mayor. I guess the AI safety thing is worse in practice but less shocking in terms of abstract conduct violations.