mike_hawke

Karma: 1,134

mike_hawke 4 Aug 2024 20:20 UTC
5 points
0
on: Dragon Agnosticism
I am agnostic about various dragons. Sometimes I find myself wondering how I would express my dragon agnosticism in a world where belief in dragons was prevalent and high status. I am often disturbed by the result of this exercise. It turns out that what feels like agnosticism is often sneakily biased in favor of what will make me sound better or let me avoid arguments.
This effect is strong enough and frequent enough that I don’t think the agnosticism described by this post is a safe epistemic fallback for me. However, it might still be my best option in situations where I want to look good or avoid arguments.
Possibly related:
Selective Reporting and the Tragedy of the Green Rationalists by Zack M Davis
Kolmogorov Complicity and the Parable of Lightning by Scott Alexander

mike_hawke 4 Aug 2024 0:07 UTC
5 points
0
in reply to: ryan_b’s comment on: Universal Basic Income and Poverty
Yeah, given that Eliezer mentioned Georgism no less than 3 times in his Dath Ilan AMA, I’m pretty surprised it didn’t come up even once in this post about UBI.
Personally, I wouldn’t be surprised to find we already have most or all the pieces of the true story.
- Ricardo’s law of rent + lack of LVT
- Supply and demand for low-skill labor
- Legal restrictions on jobs that disproportionately harm low-wage workers. For example, every single low wage job I have had has been part time, presumably because it wasn’t worth it to give me health benefits.
- Boumol effect?
- People really want to eat restaurant food, and seem to underestimate (or just avoid thinking about) how much this adds up.
- A lot of factors that today cause poverty would have simply caused death in the distant past.
That’s just off the top of my head
EDIT: Also the hedonic treadmill is such a huge effect that I would be surprised if it wasn’t part of the picture. How much worse is it for your kid’s tooth to get knocked out at school than to get a 1920′s wisdom tooth extraction?

mike_hawke 12 Jul 2024 0:42 UTC
20 points
10
in reply to: TracingWoodgrains’s comment on: Reliable Sources: The Story of David Gerard
That part is in a paragraph that starts with “My impression is...”.
Fair.
And yet I felt the discomfort before reading that particular paragraph, and I still feel it now. For me personally, the separators you included were not enough: I did indeed have to apply extra effort throughout the post to avoid over-updating on the interpretations as opposed to the hard facts.
Maybe I’m unusual and few other readers have this problem. I suspect that’s not the case, but given that I don’t know, I’ll just say that I find this writing style to be a little too Dark Artsy and symmetrical for my comfort.
I still think this post was net good to publish, and I might end up linking it to someone if I think they’re being too credulous toward Gerard. But if I do, it might be with some disclaimer along the lines of, “I think the author got a little carried away with a particular psychological story. I recommend putting in the effort to mentally separate the facts from the fun narrative.”
Also, to give credit where it’s due, the narrative style really was entertaining.
(EDIT: typos)

mike_hawke 11 Jul 2024 19:36 UTC
40 points
33
on: Reliable Sources: The Story of David Gerard
I read as far as this part:
Because Gerard was on LessWrong when the internet splintered and polarized, he saw the whole story through the lens of LessWrong, and on an instinctive level the site became his go-to scapegoat for all that was going wrong for his vision of the internet.
And I want to make a comment before continuing to read.
I’m uncomfortable with the psychologizing here. I feel like your style is inviting me to suspend disbelief for the sake of a clean and entertaining narrative. Not that you should never do such a thing, but I think it maybe warrants some kind of disclaimer or something. If you had written this specifically for LW, instead of as a linkpost to your blog, I would be suggesting major rewrites in order meet the standards I’m used to around here.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the true psychological story was significantly different than the picture you paint here. Especially if it involved real life events, e.g. some tragedy in his family, or problems with his friends or job. Would those things have even been visible in your research?
I’ll keep reading, but I’m now going to spend extra effort to maintain the right level of skepticism. None of what I’ve read so far contradicts my priors, but I’m going to avoid updating too hard on your interpretations (as opposed to the citations & other hard facts).
I am bothered that no other commenters have brought this up yet.

mike_hawke 12 Jun 2024 17:19 UTC
4 points
0
on: mike_hawke’s Shortform
Point well taken that technological development and global dominance were achieved by human cultures, not individual humans. But I claim that it is obviously a case of motivated reasoning to treat this as a powerful blow against the arguments for fast takeoff. A human-level AI (able to complete any cognitive task at least as well as you) is a foom risk unless it has specific additional handicaps. These might include:
- For some reason it needs to sleep for a long time every night.
- Its progress gets periodically erased due to random misfortune or enemy action.
- It is locked into a bad strategic position, such as having no cognitive privacy from overseers.
- It can’t copy itself.
- It can’t gain more compute.
- It can’t reliably modify itself.

I’ll be pretty surprised if we get AI systems that can do any cognitive task that I can do (such as make longterm plans and spontaneously correct my own mistakes without them being pointed out to me) but that can also only improve themselves very slowly. It really seems like, if I were able to easily edit my own brain, then I would be able to increase my abilities across the board, including my ability to increase my abilities.

mike_hawke 7 Jun 2024 21:15 UTC
2 points
0
on: A civilization ran by amateurs
The part about airports reminds me of “If All Stories were Written Like Science Fiction Stories” by Mark Rosenfelder:
https://www.bzpower.com/blogs/entry/58514-if-all-stories-were-written-like-science-fiction-stories/

No one else has mentioned The Case Against Education by Bryan Caplan. He says that after reading and arithmetic, schooling is mostly for signaling employable traits like conscientiousness, not for learning. I think Zvi Mowshowitz and Noah Smith had some interesting discussion about this years ago. Scott Alexander supposes that another secret purpose of school is daycare. Whatever the real purposes are, they will tend to be locked into place by laws. Richard Hanania has written a bit about what he thinks families might choose instead of standard schooling if the laws were relaxed.

mike_hawke 25 May 2024 2:31 UTC
3 points
1
in reply to: Maxwell Peterson’s comment on: Cooking
Without passing judgment on this, I think it should be noted that it would have seemed less out of place when the Sequences were fresh. At that time, the concept of immaterial souls and the surrounding religious memeplexes seemed to be a genuinely interfering with serious discussion about minds.

However, and relatedly, there was not a lot of cooking discussion on LW in 2009, and this tag was created in 2020.

mike_hawke 21 May 2024 19:42 UTC
3 points
1
on: Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike resign from OpenAI
I’m out of the loop. Did Daniel Kokotajlo lose his equity or not? If the NDA is not being enforced, are there now some disclosures being made?

mike_hawke 18 May 2024 2:08 UTC
31 points
3
in reply to: evhub’s comment on: Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike resign from OpenAI
Thanks for the source.
I’ve intentionally made it difficult for myself to log into twitter. For the benefit of others who avoid Twitter, here is the text of Kelsey’s tweet thread:
I’m getting two reactions to my piece about OpenAI’s departure agreements: “that’s normal!” (it is not; the other leading AI labs do not have similar policies) and “how is that legal?” It may not hold up in court, but here’s how it works:
OpenAI like most tech companies does salaries as a mix of equity and base salary. The equity is in the form of PPUs, ‘Profit Participation Units’. You can look at a recent OpenAI offer and an explanation of PPUs here: https://t.co/t2J78V8ee4
Many people at OpenAI get more of their compensation from PPUs than from base salary. PPUs can only be sold at tender offers hosted by the company. When you join OpenAI, you sign onboarding paperwork laying all of this out.
And that onboarding paperwork says you have to sign termination paperwork with a ‘general release’ within sixty days of departing the company. If you don’t do it within 60 days, your units are cancelled. No one I spoke to at OpenAI gave this little line much thought.
And yes this is talking about vested units, because a separate clause clarifies that unvested units just transfer back to the control of OpenAI when an employee undergoes a termination event (which is normal).
There’s a common legal definition of a general release, and it’s just a waiver of claims against each other. Even someone who read the contract closely might be assuming they will only have to sign such a waiver of claims.
But when you actually quit, the ‘general release’? It’s a long, hardnosed, legally aggressive contract that includes a confidentiality agreement which covers the release itself, as well as arbitration, nonsolicitation and nondisparagement and broad ‘noninterference’ agreement.
And if you don’t sign within sixty days your units are gone. And it gets worse—because OpenAI can also deny you access to the annual events that are the only way to sell your vested PPUs at their discretion, making ex-employees constantly worried they’ll be shut out.
Finally, I want to make it clear that I contacted OpenAI in the course of reporting this story. So did my colleague SigalSamuel They had every opportunity to reach out to the ex-employees they’d pressured into silence and say this was a misunderstanding. I hope they do.

mike_hawke 17 May 2024 20:40 UTC
26 points
2
on: Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike resign from OpenAI
Even acknowledging that the NDA exists is a violation of it.
This sticks out pretty sharply to me.
Was this explained to the employees during the hiring process? What kind of precedent is there for this kind of NDA?

mike_hawke 14 May 2024 22:54 UTC
4 points
0
on: mike_hawke’s Shortform
There are things I would buy if they existed. Is there any better way to signal this to potential sellers, other than tweeting it and hoping they hear? Is there some reason to believe that sellers are already gauging demand so completely that they wouldn’t start selling these things even if I could get through to them?

mike_hawke 29 Mar 2024 22:08 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: mike_hawke’s comment on: mike_hawke’s Shortform
Would I somehow feel this problem less acutely if I had never been taught Fahrenheit, Celcius, or Kelvin; and instead been told everything in terms of gigabytes per nanojoule? I guess probably not. Inconvenient conversions are not preventing me from figuring out the relations and benchmarks I’m interested in.

mike_hawke 29 Mar 2024 21:32 UTC
1 point
0
on: From the outside, American schooling is weird
It’s important to remember, though, that I will be fine if I so choose. After all, if the scary impression was the real thing then it would appear scary to everyone.
Reading this makes me feel some concern. I think it should be seriously asked: Would you be fine if you hypothetically chose to take a gap year or drop out? Those didn’t feel like realistic options for me when I was in high school and college, and I think this ended up making me much less fine than I would have been otherwise. Notably, a high proportion of my close friends in college ended up dropping out or having major academic problems, despite being the smartest and most curious people I could find.
My experiences during and after college seemed to make a lot more sense after hearing about ideas like credential inflation, surplus elites, and the signaling model. It seems plausible that I might have made better decisions if I had been encouraged to contemplate those ideas as a high schooler.

mike_hawke 29 Mar 2024 18:35 UTC
7 points
−4
on: mike_hawke’s Shortform
In measuring and communicating about the temperature of objects, humans can clearly and unambiguously benchmark things like daily highs and lows, fevers, snow, space heaters, refrigerators, a cup of tea, and the wind chill factor. We can place thermometers and thereby say which things are hotter than others, and by how much. Daily highs can overlap with fevers, but neither can boil your tea.

But then I challenge myself to estimate how hot a campfire is, and I’m totally stuck.
It feels like there are no human-sensible relationships once you’re talking about campfires, self-cleaning ovens, welding torches, incandescent filaments, fighter jet exhaust, solar flares, Venus, Chernobyl reactor #4, the anger of the volcano goddess Pele, fresh fulgurites, or the boiling point of lead. Anything hotter than boiling water has ascended into the magisterium of the Divinely Hot, and nothing more detailed can be said of them by a mortal. If I were omnipotent, omniscient, & invulnerable, then I could put all those things in contact with each other and then watch which way the heat flows. But I am a human, so all I can say is that anything on that list could boil water.

mike_hawke 25 Mar 2024 19:32 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Eli Tyre’s comment on: Vernor Vinge, who coined the term “Technological Singularity”, dies at 79
Presumably he understood the value proposition of cryonics and declined it, right?

mike_hawke 23 Mar 2024 19:45 UTC
1 point
0
on: Meta-Honesty: Firming Up Honesty Around Its Edge-Cases
If everyone in town magically receives the same speedup in their “verbal footwork”, is that good for meta-honesty? I would like some kind of story explaining why it wouldn’t be neutral.
Point for yes:
Sure seems like being able to quickly think up an appropriately nonspecific reference class when being questioned about a specific hypothetical does not make it harder for anyone else to do the same.
Point against:
The code of literal truth only lets people navigate anything like ordinary social reality to the extent that they are very fast on their verbal feet, and can respond to the question “How are you?” by saying “Getting along” instead of “Horribly” or with an awkward silence while they try to think of something technically true.
This particular case seems anti-inductive and prone to the euphemism treadmill. Indeed, one person one time can navigate ordinary social reality by saying “Getting along” instead of giving an awkward silence; but many people doing so many times will find that it tends to work less well over time. If everyone magically becomes faster on their verbal feet, they can all run faster on the treadmill, but this isn’t necessarily good for meta-honesty.
Implications: either cognitive enhancement becomes even more of a moral priority, or adhering to meta-honesty becomes a trustworthy signal of being more intelligent than those who don’t. Neither outcome seems terrible to me, nor even all that much different from the status quo.

mike_hawke 19 Mar 2024 17:43 UTC
8 points
6
on: How do you feel about LessWrong these days? [Open feedback thread]
One concrete complaint I have is that I feel a strong incentive toward timeliness, at the cost of timelessness. Commenting on a fresh, new post tends to get engagement. Commenting on something from more than two weeks ago will often get none, which makes effortful comments feel wasted.
I definitely feel like there is A Conversation, or A Discourse, and I’m either participating in it during the same week as everyone else, or I’m just talking to myself.
(Aside: I have a live hypothesis that this is tightly related to The Twitterization of Everything.)

mike_hawke 17 Mar 2024 15:25 UTC
1 point
0
on: Social Class
Glad to see some discussion of social class.
Here’s something in the post that I would object to:
Non-essential weirdnesses, on the other hand, should be eliminated as much as possible because pushing lifestyle choices onto disinterested working-class people is a misuse of class privilege. Because classes are hierarchical in nature, this is especially important for middle-upper class people to keep in mind. An example of non-essential weirdness is “only having vegan options for dinner”.

This example seems wrong to me. It seems like serving non-vegan options does in fact risk doing a great injustice (to the animals eaten). I tried and failed to think of an example that seemed correct, so now I’m feeling pretty unconvinced by the entire concept.
One contrary idea might be that class norms and lifestyle choices are usually load-bearing, often in ways that are deliberately obscured or otherwise non-obvious. Therefore, one may want to be cautious when labeling something a non-essential weirdness.
(Also maybe worth mentioning that I think class phenomena are in general anti-inductive and much harder to reach broad conclusions about than other domains.)

mike_hawke 16 Mar 2024 3:23 UTC
1 point
−6
on: Meta-Honesty: Firming Up Honesty Around Its Edge-Cases
- Most people, even most unusually honest people, wander about their lives in a fog of internal distortions of reality. Repeatedly asking yourself of every sentence you say aloud to another person, “Is this statement actually and literally true?”, helps you build a skill for navigating out of your internal smog of not-quite-truths. For that is our mastery.
I think some people who read this post ought to reverse this advice. The advice I would give to those people is: if you’re constantly forcing every little claim you make through a literalism filter, you might end up multiplying disfluencies and generally raising the cost of communicating with you. Maybe put a clause limit on your sentences and just tack on a generic hedge like “or something” if you need to.

mike_hawke 15 Mar 2024 0:47 UTC
12 points
8
on: ‘Empiricism!’ as Anti-Epistemology
Only praise yourself as taking ‘the outside view’ if (1) there’s only one defensible choice of reference class;
I think this point is underrated. The word “the” in “the outside view” is sometimes doing too much work, and it is often better to appeal to an outside view, or multiple outside views.