localdeity

Karma: 2,198

localdeity 5 Nov 2024 12:22 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Matt Goldenberg’s comment on: Matt Goldenberg’s Short Term Feed
The political version of the question isn’t functionally the same as the skin cream version, because the former isn’t a randomized intervention—cities that decided to add gun control laws seem likely to have other crime-related events and law changes at the same time, which could produce a spurious result in either direction. So it’s quite reasonable to say “My opinion is determined by my priors and the evidence didn’t appreciably affect my position.”

localdeity 27 Oct 2024 2:11 UTC
31 points
10
on: localdeity’s Shortform
90% awful idea: “Genetic diversity” in computer programs for resistance to large-scale cyberattacks.

The problem: Once someone has figured out the right security hole in Tesla’s software (and, say, broken into a server used to deliver software updates), they can use this to install their malicious code into all 5 million Teslas in the field (or maybe just one model, so perhaps 1 million cars), and probably make them all crash simultaneously and cause a catastrophe.
The solution: There will probably come a point where we can go through the codebase and pick random functions and say, “Claude, write a specification of what this function does”, and then “Claude, take this specification and write a new function implementing it”, and end up with different functions that accomplish the same task, which are likely to have different bugs. Have every Tesla do this to its own software. Then the virus or program that breaks into some Teslas will likely fail on others.
One reason this is horrible is that you would need an exceptionally high success rate for writing those replacement functions—else this process would introduce lots of mundane bugs, which might well cause crashes of their own. That, or you’d need a very extensive set of unit tests to catch all such bugs—so extensive as to probably eat up most of your engineers’ time writing them. Though perhaps AIs could do that part.

localdeity 23 Oct 2024 18:22 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Why I quit effective altruism, and why Timothy Telleen-Lawton is staying (for now)
To me, that will lead to an environment where people think that they are engaging with criticism without having to really engage with the criticism that actually matters.
This is a possible outcome, especially if the above tactic were the only tactic to be employed. That tactic helps reduce ignorance of the “other side” on the issues that get the steelmanning discussion, and hopefully also pushes away low-curiosity tribalistic partisans while retaining members who value deepening understanding and intellectual integrity. There are lots of different ways for things to go wrong, and any complete strategy probably needs to use lots of tactics. Perhaps the most important tactic would be to notice when things are going wrong (ideally early) and adjust what you’re doing, possibly designing new tactics in the process.
Also, in judging a strategy, we should know what resources we assume we have (e.g. “the meetup leader is following the practice we’ve specified and is willing to follow ‘reasonable’ requests or suggestions from us”), and know what threats we’re modeling. In principle, we might sort the dangers by [impact if it happens] x [probability of it happening], enumerate tactics to handle the top several, do some cost-benefit analysis, decide on some practices, and repeat.
If you frame the criticism as having to be about the mission of psychiatry, it’s easy for people to see “Is it ethical to charge poor patients three-digit fees for no-shows?” as off-topic.
My understanding/guess is that “Is it ethical to charge poor patients three-digit fees for no-shows?” is an issue where the psychiatrists know the options and the impacts of the options, and the “likelihood of people actually coming to blows” comes from social signaling things like “If I say I don’t charge them, this shows I’m in a comfortable financial position and that I’m compassionate for poor patients”/”If I say I do charge them, this opens me up to accusations (tinged with social justice advocacy) of heartlessness and greed”. I would guess that many psychiatrists do charge the fees, but would hate being forced to admit it in public. Anyway, the problem here is not that psychiatrists are unaware of information on the issue, so there’d be little point in doing a steelmanning exercise about it.
That said, as you suggest, it is possible that people would spend their time steelmanning unimportant issues (and making ‘criticism’ of the “We need fifty Stalins” type). But if we assume that we have one person who notices there’s an important unaddressed issue, who has at least decent rapport with the meetup leader, then it seems they could ask for that issue to get steelmanned soon. That could cover it. (If we try to address the scenario where no one notices the unaddressed issue, that’s a pretty different problem.)

localdeity 23 Oct 2024 8:02 UTC
9 points
3
on: Why I quit effective altruism, and why Timothy Telleen-Lawton is staying (for now)
I want to register high appreciation of Elizabeth for her efforts and intentions described here. <3
The remainder of this post is speculations about solutions. “If one were to try to fix the problem”, or perhaps “If one were to try to preempt this problem in a fresh community”. I’m agnostic about whether one should try.
Notes on the general problem:
- I suspect lots of our kind of people are not enthusiastic about kicking people out. I think several people have commented, on some cases of seriously bad actors, that it took way too long to actually expel them.
- Therefore, the idea of confronting someone like Jacy and saying “Your arguments are bad, and you seem to be discouraging critical thinking, so we demand you stop it or we’ll kick you out” seems like a non-starter in a few ways.
- I guess one could have lighter policing of the form “When you do somewhat-bad things like that, someone will criticize you for it.” Sort of like Elizabeth arguing against Jacy. In theory, if one threw enough resources at this, one could create an environment where Jacy-types faced consistent mild pushback, which might work to get them to either reform or leave. However, I think this would take a lot more of the required resources (time, emotional effort) than the right people are inclined to give.
  - Those who enjoy winning internet fights… Might be more likely to be Jacy-types in the first place. The intersection of “happy to spend lots of time policing others’ behavior” and “not having what seem like more important things to work on” and “embodies the principles we hope to uphold” might be pretty small. The example that comes to mind is Reddit moderators, who have a reputation for being power-trippers. If the position is unpaid, then it seems logical to expect that result. So I conclude that, to a first approximation, good moderators must be paid.
  - Could LLMs help with this today? (Obviously this would work specifically for online written stuff, not in-person.) Identifying bad comments is one possibility; helping write the criticism is another.
- Beyond that, one could have “passive” practices, things that everyone was in the habit of doing, which would tend to annoy the bad actors while being neutral (or, hopefully, positive) to the good actors.
  - (I’ve heard that the human immune system, in certain circumstances, does basically that: search for antibodies that (a) bind to the bad things and (b) don’t bind to your own healthy cells. Of course, one could say that this is obviously the only sensible thing to do.)
Reading the transcript, my brain generated the idea of having a norm that pushes people to do exercises of the form “Keep your emotions in check as you enumerate the reasons against your favored position, or poke holes in naive arguments for your favored position” (and possibly alternate with arguing for your side, just for balance). In this case, it would be “If you’re advocating that everyone do a thing always, then enumerate exceptions to it”.
Fleshing it out a bit more… If a group has an explicit mission, then it seems like one could periodically have a session where everyone “steelmans” the case against the mission. People sit in a circle, raising their hands (or just speaking up) and volunteering counterarguments, as one person types them down into a document being projected onto a big screen. If someone makes a mockery of a counterargument (“We shouldn’t do this because we enjoy torturing the innocent/are really dumb/subscribe to logical fallacy Y”), then other people gain status by correcting them (“Actually, those who say X more realistically justify it by …”): this demonstrates their intelligence, knowledge, and moral and epistemic strength. Same thing when someone submits a good counterargument: they gain status (“Ooh, that’s a good one”) because it demonstrates those same qualities.
Do this for at least five minutes. After that, pause, and then let people formulate the argument for the mission and attack the counterarguments.

localdeity 23 Oct 2024 5:44 UTC
7 points
0
on: Why I quit effective altruism, and why Timothy Telleen-Lawton is staying (for now)
Issues in transcript labeling (I’m curious how much of it was done by machine):
- After 00:07:55, a line is unattributed to either speaker; looks like it should be Timothy.
- 00:09:43 is attributed to Timothy but I think must be Elizabeth.
- Then the next line is unattributed (should be Timothy).
- After 00:14:00, unattributed (should be Timothy).
- After 00:23:38, unattributed (should be Timothy)
- After 00:32:34, unattributed (probably Elizabeth)

localdeity 10 Oct 2024 3:14 UTC
3 points
−1
in reply to: cubefox’s comment on: Why I’m not a Bayesian
Grammatically, the most obvious interpretation is a universal quantification (i.e. “All men are taller than all women”), which I think is a major reason why such statements so often lead to objections of “But here’s an exception!” Maybe you can tell the audience that they should figure out when to mentally insert ”… on average” or “tend to be”. Though there are also circumstances where one might validly believe that the speaker really means all. I think it’s best to put such qualified language into your statements from the start.

localdeity 9 Oct 2024 22:11 UTC
5 points
2
in reply to: Richard_Ngo’s comment on: Why I’m not a Bayesian
Are you not familiar with the term “vacuously true”? I find this very surprising. People who study math tend to make jokes with it.
The idea is that, if we were to render a statement like “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” into formal logic, we’d probably take it to mean the universal statement “For all X such that X is a colorless green idea, X sleeps furiously”. A universal statement is logically equivalent to “There don’t exist any counterexamples”, i.e. “There does not exist X such that X is a colorless green idea and X does not sleep furiously”. Which is clearly true, and therefore the universal is equally true.
There is, of course, some ambiguity when rendering English into formal logic. It’s not rare for English speakers to say “if” when they mean “if and only if”, or “or” when they mean “exclusive or”. (And sometimes “Tell me which one”, as in “Did you do A, or B?” “Yes.” “Goddammit.”) Often this doesn’t cause problems, but sometimes it does. (In which case, as I’ve said, the solution is not to give their statement an ambiguous truth value, but rather to ask them to restate it less ambiguously.)
“Dragons are attacking Paris” seems most naturally interpreted as the definite statement “There’s some unspecified number—but since I used the plural, it’s at least 2—of dragons that are attacking Paris”, which would be false. One could also imagine interpreting it as a universal statement “All dragons are currently attacking Paris”, which, as you say, would be vacuously true since there are no dragons. However, in English, the preferred way to say that would be “Dragons attack Paris”, as CBiddulph says. “Dragons are attacking Paris” uses the present progressive tense, while “Dragons attack Paris” uses what is called the “simple present”/”present indefinite” tense. Wiki says:
The simple present is used to refer to an action or event that takes place habitually, to remark habits, facts and general realities, repeated actions or unchanging situations, emotions, and wishes.^[3] Such uses are often accompanied by frequency adverbs and adverbial phrases such as always, sometimes, often, usually, from time to time, rarely, and never.
Examples:
- I always take a shower.
- I never go to the cinema.
- I walk to the pool.
- He writes for a living.
- She understands English.
This contrasts with the present progressive (present continuous), which is used to refer to something taking place at the present moment: I am walking now; He is writing a letter at the moment.
English grammar rules aren’t necessarily universal and unchanging, but they do give at least medium-strength priors on how to interpret a sentence.

localdeity 8 Oct 2024 18:25 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: abramdemski’s comment on: Why I’m not a Bayesian
to the point where you can’t really eliminate the context-dependence and vagueness via taboo (because the new words you use will still be somewhat context-dependent and vague)
You don’t need to “eliminate” the vagueness, just reduce it enough that it isn’t affecting any important decisions. (And context-dependence isn’t necessarily a problem if you establish the context with your interlocutor.) I think this is generally achievable, and have cited the Eggplant essay on this. And if it is generally achievable, then:
Richard is arguing against foundational pictures which assume these problems away, and in favor of foundational pictures which recognize them.
I think you should handle the problems separately. In which case, when reasoning about truth, you should indeed assume away communication difficulties. If our communication technology was so bad that 30% of our words got dropped from every message, the solution would not be to change our concept of meanings; the solution would be to get better at error correction, ideally at a lower level, but if necessary by repeating ourselves and asking for clarification a lot.
Elsewhere there’s discussion of concepts themselves being ambiguous. That is a deeper issue. But I think it’s fundamentally resolved in the same way: always be alert for the possibility that the concept you’re using is the wrong one, is incoherent or inapplicable to the current situation; and when it is, take corrective action, and then proceed with reasoning about truth. Be like a digital circuit, where at each stage your confidence in the applicability of a concept is either >90% or <10%, and if you encounter anything in between, then you pause and figure out a better concept, or find another path in which this ambiguity is irrelevant.

localdeity 8 Oct 2024 17:49 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: cubefox’s comment on: Evaluating the truth of statements in a world of ambiguous language.
Presumably anything which is above 50% eggplant is rounded to 100%, and anything below is rounded to 0%.
No, it’s more like what you encounter in digital circuitry. Anything above 90% eggplant is rounded to 100%, anything below 10% eggplant is rounded to 0%, and anything between 10% and 90% is unexpected, out of spec, and triggers a “Wait, what?” and the sort of rethinking I’ve outlined above, which should dissolve the question of “Is it really eggplant?” in favor of “Is it food my roommate is likely to eat?” or whatever new question my underlying purpose suggests, which generally will register as >90% or <10%.
And you appear to be saying in 99% of cases, the vagueness isn’t close to 50% anyway, but closer to 99% or 1%. That may be the case of eggplants, or many nouns (though not all), but certainly not for many adjectives, like “large” or “wet” or “dusty”. (Or “red”, “rational”, “risky” etc.)
Do note that the difficulty around vagueness isn’t whether objects in general vary on a particular dimension in a continuous way; rather, it’s whether the objects I’m encountering in practice, and needing to judge on that dimension, yield a bunch of values that are close enough to my cutoff point that it’s difficult for me to decide. Are my clothes dry enough to put away? I don’t need to concern myself with whether they’re “dry” in an abstract general sense. (If I had to communicate with others about it, “dry” = “I touch them and don’t feel any moisture”; “sufficiently dry” = “I would put them away”.)
And, in practice, people often engineer things such that there’s a big margin of error and there usually aren’t any difficult decisions to make whose impact is important. One may pick one’s decision point of “dry enough” to be significantly drier than it “needs” to be, because erring in that direction is less of a problem than the opposite (so that, when I encounter cases in the range of 40-60% “dry enough”, either answer is fine and therefore I pick at random / based on my mood or whatever); and one might follow practices like always leaving clothes hanging up overnight or putting them on a dryer setting that’s reliably more than long enough, so that by the time one checks them, they’re pretty much always on the “dry” side of even that conservative boundary.
Occasionally, the decision is difficult, and the impact matters. That situation sucks, for humans and machines:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buridan’s_ass#Buridan’s_principle
Which is why we tend to engineer things to avoid that.

localdeity 8 Oct 2024 13:07 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: cubefox’s comment on: Evaluating the truth of statements in a world of ambiguous language.
The edges of perhaps most real-world concepts are vague, but there are lots of central cases where the item clearly fits into the concept, on the dimensions that matter. Probably 99% of the time, when my roommate goes and buys a fruit or vegetable, I am not confounded by it not belonging to a known species, or by it being half rotten or having its insides replaced or being several fruits stitched together. The eggplant may be unusually large, or wet, or dusty, or bruised, perhaps more than I realized an eggplant could be. But, for many purposes, I don’t care about most of those dimensions.
Thus, 99% of the time I can glance into the kitchen and make a “known unknown” type of update on the type of fruit-object there or lack thereof; and 1% of the time I see something bizarre, discard my original model, and pick a new question and make a different type of update on that.

localdeity 8 Oct 2024 11:58 UTC
−2 points
0
on: Overview of strong human intelligence amplification methods
I don’t think you mentioned “nootropic drugs” (unless “signaling molecules” is meant to cover that, though it seems more specific). I don’t think there’s anything known to give a significant enhancement beyond alertness, but in a list of speculative technologies I think it belongs.

localdeity 8 Oct 2024 9:57 UTC
5 points
1
in reply to: cubefox’s comment on: Evaluating the truth of statements in a world of ambiguous language.
I would be surprised if grocery stores sold edge cases… But perhaps it was a farmer’s market or something, perhaps a seller who often liked to sell weird things, perhaps grew hybridized plants. I’ll take the case where it’s a fresh vegetable/fruit/whatever thing that looks kind of eggplant-ish.
Anyway, that would generally be determined by: Why do I care whether he bought an eggplant? If I just want to make sure he has food, then that thing looks like it counts and that’s good enough for me. If I was going to make a recipe that called for eggplant, and he was supposed to buy one for me, then I’d want to know if its flesh, its taste, etc., were similar enough to an eggplant to work with the recipe (and depending on how picky the target audience was). If I were studying plants for its own sake, I might want to interrogate him about its genetics (or the contact info of the seller if he didn’t know). If I wanted to be able to tell someone else what it was, then… default description is “it’s an edge case of an eggplant”, and ideally I’d be able to call it a “half-eggplant, half-X” and know what X was; and how much I care about that information is determined by the context.
I think, in all of these cases, I would decide “Well, it’s kind of an eggplant and kind of not”, and lose interest in the question of whether I would call it an “eggplant” (except in that last case, though personally I’m with Feynman’s dad on not caring too much about the official name of such things) in favor of the underlying question that I cared about. My initial idea, that there would be either a classical eggplant or nothing in the kitchen, turned out to be incoherent in the face of reality, and I dropped the idea in favor of some new approximation to reality that was true and was relevant to my purpose.
What do you know, there’s an Eliezer essay on “dissolving the question”. Though working through an example is done in another post (on the question “If a tree falls in a forest...?”).

localdeity 8 Oct 2024 0:23 UTC
1 point
−4
on: Advice for journalists
Are you familiar with the term “bounded distrust”? Scott and Zvi have written about it; Zvi’s article gives a nice list of rules. You seem to have arrived at some similar ideas.

localdeity 7 Oct 2024 22:14 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: ProgramCrafter’s comment on: What is it like to be psychologically healthy? Podcast ft. DaystarEld
I’ve heard that, for sleep in particular, some people have Received Wisdom that everyone needs 8 hours of sleep per day, and if they’re not getting it, that’s a problem, and this has led some people who naturally sleep 7 hours to worry and stress about it, causing insomnia and whatnot.
Of course, ideally such people would have better ability to manage such worries (and better “I should do some more googling before stressing about it too hard” reflexes), but in practice many do not.

localdeity 7 Oct 2024 21:07 UTC
3 points
−2
on: Evaluating the truth of statements in a world of ambiguous language.
You may be inspired by, or have independently invented, a certain ad for English-language courses.
My take on this stuff is that, when a person’s words are ambiguous in a way that matters, then what should happen is you ask them for clarification (often by asking them to define or taboo a word), and they give it to you, and (possibly after multiple cycles of this) you end up knowing what they meant. (It’s also possible that their idea was incoherent and the clarification process makes them realize this.)
What they said was an approximation to the idea in their mind. Don’t concern yourself with the truth of an ambiguous statement. Concern yourself with the truth of the idea. It makes little sense to talk of the truth of statements where the last word is missing, or other errors inserted, or where important words are replaced with “thing” and “whatever”; and I would say the same about ambiguous statements in general.
If the person is unavailable and you’re stuck having to make a decision based on their ambiguous words, then you make the best guess you can. As you, say, you have a probability distribution over the ideas they could have meant. Perhaps combine that with your prior probabilities of the truth values to help compute the expected value of each of your possible choices.
What links here?
- localdeity's comment on Why I’m not a Bayesian by Richard_Ngo (7 Oct 2024 20:04 UTC; 12 points)

localdeity 7 Oct 2024 20:04 UTC
12 points
9
in reply to: tailcalled’s comment on: Why I’m not a Bayesian
It’s a decent exploration of stuff, and ultimately says that it does work:
Language is not the problem, but it is the solution. How much trouble does the imprecision of language cause, in practice? Rarely enough to notice—so how come? We have many true beliefs about eggplant-sized phenomena, and we successfully express them in language—how?
These are aspects of reasonableness that we’ll explore in Part Two. The function of language is not to express absolute truths. Usually, it is to get practical work done in a particular context. Statements are interpreted in specific situations, relative to specific purposes. Rather than trying to specify the exact boundaries of all the variants of a category for all time, we deal with particular cases as they come up.
If the statement you’re dealing with has no problematic ambiguities, then proceed. If it does have problematic ambiguities, then demand further specification (and highlighting and tabooing the ambiguous words is the classic way to do this) until you have what you need, and then proceed.
I’m not claiming that it’s practical to pick terms that you can guarantee in advance will be unambiguous for all possible readers and all possible purposes for all time. I’m just claiming that important ambiguities can and should be resolved by something like the above strategy; and, therefore, such ambiguities shouldn’t be taken to debase the idea of truth itself.
Edit: I would say that the words you receive are an approximation to the idea in your interlocutor’s mind—which may be ambiguous due to terminology issues, transmission errors, mistakes, etc.—and we should concern ourselves with the truth of the idea. To speak of truth of the statement is somewhat loose; it only works to the extent that there’s a clear one-to-one mapping of the words to the idea, and beyond that we get into trouble.

localdeity 7 Oct 2024 19:31 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: tailcalled’s comment on: Why I’m not a Bayesian
I am dismayed by the general direction of this conversation. The subject is vague and ambiguous words causing problems, there’s a back-and-forth between several high-karma users, and I’m the first person to bring up “taboo the vague words and explain more precisely what you mean”?

localdeity 7 Oct 2024 19:23 UTC
6 points
0
in reply to: cubefox’s comment on: Why I’m not a Bayesian
Solution: Taboo the vague predicates and demand that the user explain more precisely what they mean.

localdeity 7 Oct 2024 4:00 UTC
10 points
4
on: Why I’m not a Bayesian
Statements do often have ambiguities: there are a few different more-precise statements they could be interpreted to mean, and sometimes those more-precise statements have different truth values. But the solution is not to say that the ambiguous statement has an ambiguous truth value and therefore discard the idea of truth. The solution is to do your reasoning about the more-precise statements, and, if someone ever hands you ambiguous statements whose truth value is important, to say “Hey, please explain more precisely what you meant.” Why would one do otherwise?
By the way:
colorless green ideas sleep furiously
There is a straightforward truth value here: there are no colorless green ideas, and therefore it is vacuously true that all of them sleep furiously.

localdeity 19 Sep 2024 8:49 UTC
3 points
1
in reply to: Michael Cohn’s comment on: Pronouns are Annoying
Using the pronoun people ask you to use has become a proxy for all sorts of other tolerant/benevolent attitudes towards that person and the way they want to live their life, and to an even greater extent, refusing to do that is a proxy for thinking they should be ignored, or possibly reviled, or possibly killed.
There’s an interesting mechanic here, a hyperstitious cascade. In certain educational environments, people are taught to use approved language with protected-class members. In that environment, anyone who uses forbidden language is, therefore, some kind of troublemaker. That then makes it somewhat less illegitimate for the most sensitive of those protected-class members to say they feel threatened when someone uses forbidden language. Which then makes it all the more important to teach people to use approved language, and have harsher enforcement on it. If this goes far enough, then we get to where one can make the case that unpunished usage of forbidden language constitutes a hostile environment, which would therefore drive out the protected classes and hence violate civil rights law.