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PoignardAzur
Karma: 284
This makes a lot of sense to me and helps me articulate things I’ve thought for a while. (Which, you know, is the shit I come to LessWrong for, so big thumbs up!)
One of the first times I had this realization was in one of my first professional experiences. This was the first time in my life where I was in a team that wasn’t just LARPing a set of objectives, but actually trying to achieve them.
They weren’t impressively competent, or especially efficient, or even especially good at their job. The objectives weren’t especially ambitious: it was a long-running project in its final year, and everybody was just trying to ship the best product they could, where the difference between “best they could” and “mediocre” wasn’t huge.
But everyone was taking the thing seriously. People in the team were communicating about their difficulties, and anticipating problems ahead of time. Managers considered trade-offs. Developers tried to consider the UX that end-users would face.
Thinking about it, I’m realizing that knowing what you’re doing isn’t the same as being super good at your job, even if the two are strongly correlated. What struck me about this team wasn’t that they were the most competent people I ever worked with (that would probably be my current job), it’s that they didn’t feel like they were pretending to be trying to achieve their objectives (again, unlike my current job).
And sometimes people will say things to me like “capitalism ruined my twenties” and I have a similarly eerie feeling about, like it’s a gestalt slapped together
Ugh, that one annoys me so much. Capitalism is a word so loaded it has basically lost all meaning.
Like, people will say things like “slavery is inextricably linked to capitalism” and I’m thinking, hey genius, slavery existed in tribal civilizations that didn’t even have the concept of money, what do you think capitalism even is?
(Same thing for patriarchy.)
Anecdotally, I’ve had friends who explicitly asked for an honest answer to these kinds of questions, and if given a positive answer would tell me “but you’d tell me if it was negative, right?”… and still, when given a negative answer, would absolutely take it as a personal attack and get angry.
Obviously those friendships were hard to maintain.
Often when people say they want an honest answer, what they mean is “I want you to say something positive and also mean it”, they’re not asking for something actionable.
And that, kids, is why nobody wants to date or be friends with a rationalist.
I meant “get players to cooperate within a cooperative-game-with-prisoners-dilemmas”, yes.
So imagine how much richer expressions of character could be if you had this whole other dimension of gameplay design to work with. That would be cohabitive.
4X games and engine-building games have a lot of that. For instance, in Terraforming Mars, your starting corporations will have different start bonuses that radically shape your strategy throughout the entire game. In a 4X game, you might have a faction with very cheap military production that will focus on zerg-rushing other players; and a faction with research bonuses that will focus more on long-term growth.
Even in a MostPointsWin system, these differences can make different factions with very different “personalities” in both gameplay and lore.
Actually, I feel like a lot of engine-building systems could go from MostPointsWin to cooperation by just adding some objectives. Eg you could make Terraforming Mars cooperative just by adding objectives like “Create at least X space projects”, “Reach oxygen level Y”, “Have at least Z trees on the planet” and having each player pick one. Which is basically what the video game Terraformers did (since it’s a single-player game, MostPointsWin can’t work).
Some other game designs elements:
One easy way to get players to cooperate is to give them a common loss condition. You mention having a Moloch player, which can be pretty cool (asymetric gameplay is always fun), but it can be environmental. Something like “everyone must donate at least X coals per turn to the communal furnace, else everyone freezes to death”, or the opposite, “every coal burned contributes to global warming, past a certain cap everybody loses”.
Like you say, binary win/lose conditions can be more compelling than “get as many points as possible”. (I think this is a major reason the MostPointsWin systems are so common.) You can easily get from one to the other by having eg “medals” where you get gold medal for getting 20 points, silver medal for getting 15 points, etc. Or with custom objectives, The Emperor’s gold medal is having 12 tiles, the silver medal is having 8 tiles, etc, while The Druid’s gold medal is preserving at least 8 trees, silver is 6 trees, etc.
Here’s a cooperation game people haven’t mentioned yet: Galerapagos.
The base idea is: you’re all stuck on a desert island, Robinson Crusoe style. You need to escape before the island’s volcano erupts. The aesthetics are loosely inspired by Koh Lanta, the French equivalent of Survivor.
Each player can do a certain number of actions, namely fish, collect water, help build an escape raft, and scavenge for materials. Each player has an individual inventory.
While it’s possible for everyone to escape alive, there’s some incentives to defect from the group (eg keep your own stash of food while other players starve to death). From what I heard the “tragedy of the commons” elements really start to matter when you have a large (>6) number of players.
Perhaps I’m being dense, and some additional kernel of doubt is being asked of me here. If so, I’d appreciate attempts to spell it out like I’m a total idiot.
I don’t know if “dense” is the word I use, but yeah, I think you missed my point.
My ELI5 would be “You’re still assuming the problem was ‘Kurt didn’t know how to use a pump’ and not ‘there was something wrong with your pump’”.
I don’t want to speculate too much beyond that eg about the discretionary budget stuff.
Thanks again! (I have read that book, and made changes on account of it that I also file under partial-successes.)
Happy to hear that!
I think it’s cool that you’re engaging with criticism and acknowledging the harm that happened as a result of your struggles.
And, to cut to the painful part, that’s about the only positive thing that I (random person on the internet) have to say about what you just wrote.
In particular, you sound (and sorry if I’m making any wrong assumption here) extremely unwilling to entertain the idea that you were wrong, or that any potential improvement might need to come from you.
You say:
For whatever it’s worth: I don’t recall wanting you to quit (as opposed to improve).
But you don’t seem to consider the idea that maybe you were more in a position to improve than he was.
I don’t want to be overly harsh or judgmental. You (eventually) apologize and acknowledge your responsibility in employees having a shitty time, and it’s easy for an internet stranger to over-analyze everything you said.
But. I do feel confident that you’re expressing a lack of curiosity here. You’re assuming that there’s nothing you possibly have done to make Kurt’s experience better, and while you’re open to hearing if anyone presents you with a third option, you don’t seem to think seeking out a third option is a problem you should actively solve.
My recollection of the thought that ran through my mind when you were like “Well I couldn’t figure out how to use a bike pump” was that this was some sideways attempt at begging pardon, without actually saying “oops” first, nor trying the obvious-to-me steps like “watch a youtube video” or “ask your manager if he knows how to inflate a bike tire”, nor noticing that the entire hypothesized time-save of somebody else inflating bike tires is wiped out by me having to give tutorials on it.
Like, here… You get that you’re not really engaging with what Kurt is/was saying, right?
Kurt’s point is that your pump seemed harder to use than other bike pumps. If the issue is on the object level, valid answers could be asking what types of bike pumps he’s used to and where the discrepancy could come from, suggesting he buy a new pump, or if you’re feeling especially curious asking that he bring his own pump to work so you can compare the two; or maybe the issue could come not from the pump but from the tires, in which case you could consider changing them, etc.
If the issue is on the meta level and that you don’t want to spend time on these problems, a valid answer could be saying “Okay, what do you need to solve this problem without my input?”. Then it could be a discussion about discretionary budget, about the amount of initiative you expect him to have with his job, about asking why he didn’t feel comfortable making these buying decisions right away, etc.
Your only takeaway from this issue was “he was wrong and he could have obviously solved it watching a 5 minutes youtube tutorial, what would have been the most efficient way to communicate to him that he was wrong?”. At no point in this reply are you considering (out loud, at least) that hypothesis “maybe I was wrong and I missed something”.
Like, I get having a hot temper and saying things you regret because you don’t see any other answers in the moment. But part of the process is to communicate despite a hot temper is to be willing to admit you were wrong.
Perhaps I’m missing some obvious third alternative here, that can be practically run while experiencing a bunch of frustration or exasperation. (If you know of one, I’d love to hear it.)
The best life-hack I have is “Don’t be afraid to come back and restart the discussion once you feel less frustration or exasperation”.
Long-term, I’d recommend looking into Non-Violent Communication, if you haven’t already. There’s a lot of cruft in there, but in my experience the core insights work: express vulnerability, focus on communicating you needs and how you feel about things, avoid assigning blame, make negotiable requests, and go from there.
So for the bike tire thing the NVC version would be something like “I need to spend my time efficiently and not have to worry about logistics; when you tell me you’re having problems with the pump I feel stressed because I feel like I’m spending time I should spend on more important things. I need you to find a system where you can solve these problems without my input. What do you need to make that happen?”
Of all the things that have increased my cynicism toward the EA ecosystem over the years, none has disturbed me quite as much as the ongoing euphemisms and narrative spin around Nate’s behavior.
I’ll make a tentative observation: it seems that you’re still being euphemistic and (as you kind of note yourself) you’re still self-censoring a bit.
The words that you say are “he’s mean and scary” and “he was not subject to the same behavioral regulation norms as everyone else”. The words I would have said, given your description and his answer below is “he acts like an asshole and gets away with it because people enable him”.
I’ve known bosses that were mean and scary, but otherwise felt fair and like they made the best of a tough situation. That’s not what you’re describing. Maybe Nate is an amazing person in other ways, and amazingly competent in ways that make him important to work with, but. He sounds like a person with extremely unpleasant behavior.
ACX Paris Meetup—August 11 2023
Fascinating paper!
Here’s a drive-by question: have you considered experiments that might differentiate between the lottery ticket explanation and the evolutionary explanation?
In particular, your reasoning that formation of inductions heads on the repeated-subsequence tasks disproves the evolutionary explanation seems intuitively sound, but not quite bulletproof. Maybe the model has incentives to develop next-token heads that don’t depend on an induction head existing? I dunno, I might have an insufficient understanding of what induction heads do.
Dumb question: what about VR games like Beat Saber?
Do you think there’s some potential for applying the skills, logic, and values of the rationalist community to issues surrounding prison reform and helping predict better outcomes?
Ha! Of course not.
Well, no, the honest answer would be “I don’t know, I don’t have any personal experience in that domain”. But the problems I have cited (lack of budget, the general population actively wanting conditions not to improve) can’t be fixed with better data analysis.
From anecdotes I’ve had from civil servants, directors love new data analysis tools, because they promise to improve outcomes without a budget raise. Staff hates new data analysis tools because they represent more work for them without a budget raise, and they desperately want the budget raise.
I mean, yeah, rationality and thinking hard about things always helps on the margin, but it doesn’t compensate for a lack of budget or political goodwill. The secret ingredients to make a reform work are money and time.
Good summary of beliefs I’ve had for a while now. I feel like I should come back to this article at some point to unpack some of the things it mentions.
I’ve tried StarCoder recently, though, and it’s pretty impressive. I haven’t yet tried to really stress-test it, but at the very least it can generate basic code with a parameter count way lower than Copilot’s.
Similarly, do you thoughts on AISafety.info ?
Quick note on AISafety.info: I just stumbled on it and it’s a great initiative.
I remember pitching an idea for an AI Safety FAQ (which I’m currently working on) to a friend at MIRI and him telling me “We don’t have anything like this, it’s a great idea, go for it!”; my reaction at the time was “Well I’m glad for the validation and also very scared that nobody has had the idea yet”, so I’m glad to have been wrong about that.
I’ll keep working on my article, though, because I think the FAQ you’re writing is too vast and maybe won’t quite have enough punch, it won’t be compelling enough for most people.
Would love to chat with you about it at some point.
I think this is a subject where we’d probably need to hash out a dozen intermediary points (the whole “inferential distance” thing) before we could come close to a common understanding.
Anyway, yeah, I get the whole not-backing-down-to-bullies thing; and I get being willing to do something personally costly to avoid giving someone an incentive to walk over you.
But I do think you can reach a stage in a conversation, the kind that inspired the “someone’s wrong on the internet” meme, where all that game theory logic stops making sense and the only winning move is to stop playing.
Like, after a dozen back-and-forths between a few stubborn people who absolutely refuse to cede any ground, especially people who don’t think they’re wrong or see themselves as bullies… what do you really win by continuing the thread? Do you really impart outside observers with a feeling that “Duncan sure seems right in his counter-counter-counter-counter-rebuttal, I should emulate him” if you engage the other person point-by-point? Would you really encourage a culture of bullying and using-politeness-norms-to-impose-bad-behavior if you instead said “I don’t think this conversation is productive, I’ll stop now”?
It’s like… if you play an iterated prisoner’s dilemma, and every player’s strategy is “tit-for-tat, always, no forgiveness”, and there’s any non-zero likelihood that someone presses the “defect” button by accident, then over a sufficient period of time the steady state will always be “everybody defects, forever”. (The analogy isn’t perfect, but it’s an example of how game theory changes when you play the same game over lots of iterations)
(And yes, I do understand that forgiveness can be exploited in an iterated prisoner’s dilemma.)
My objection is that it doesn’t distinguish between [unpleasant fights that really should in fact be had] from [unpleasant fights that shouldn’t].
Again, I don’t think I have a sufficiently short inferential distance to convince you of anything, but my general vibe is that, as a debate gets longer, the line between the two starts to disappear.
It’s like… Okay, another crappy metaphor is, a debate is like photocopying a sheet of paper, and adding notes to it. At first you have a very clean paper with legible things drawn on it. But as it progresses, you have a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy, you end up with something that has more noise from the photocopying artifacts than signal from what anybody wrote on it twelve iterations ago.
At that point, no matter how much the fight should be had, you’re not waging it efficiently by participating.
I’ve just watched Disney’s Strange Worlds which explicitly features a cohabitive game in its plot called Primal Outpost.
The rules aren’t really shown, we just know that it’s played with terrain tiles, there are monsters, and the goal is ultimately to create a sustainable ecosystem. The concept honestly looked really cool, but the movie underperformed, so I don’t think we’re going to see a tie-in game, unfortunately.
But it shows that the basic idea of a cohabitative game is more appealing that you might think!
(No but seriously, if anyone knows of a Primal Outpost knock-off, I need to know about it.)