Said Achmiz

Karma: 16,353

Said Achmiz Apr 21, 2025, 4:26 AM
4 points
2
in reply to: DanB’s comment on: Three Months In, Evaluating Three Rationalist Cases for Trump
If an EA could go back in time to 1939, it is obvious that the ethically correct strategy would be to…?

Said Achmiz Apr 20, 2025, 7:29 AM
7 points
0
in reply to: eva_’s comment on: A Dissent on Honesty
… stuff about perverse utility functions …

Well, there’s a couple of things to say in response to this… one is that wanting to get the girl / dowry / happiness / love / whatever tangible or intangible goals as such, and also wanting to be virtuous, doesn’t seem to me to be a weird or perverse set of values. In a sense, isn’t this sort of thing the core of the project of living a human life, when you put it like this? “I want to embody all the true virtues, and also I want to have all the good things.” Seems pretty natural to me! Of course, it’s also a rather tall order (uh, to put it mildly…), but that just means that it provides a challenge worthy of one who does not fear setting high goals for himself.

Somewhat orthogonally to this, there is also the fact that—well, I wrote the footnote about the utility function being metaphorical for a reason. I don’t actually think that humans (with perhaps very rare exceptions) have utility functions; that is, I don’t think that our preferences satisfy the VNM axioms—and nor should they. (And indeed I am aware of so-called “coherence theorems” and I don’t believe in them.)

With that constraint (which I consider an artificial and misguided one) out of the way, I think that we can reason about things like this in ways that make more sense. For instance, trying to fit truth and honesty into a utility framework makes for some rather unnatural formulations and approaches, like talking about buying more of it, or buying it more cheaply, etc. I just don’t think that this makes sense. If the question is “is this person honest, trustworthy, does he have integrity, is he committed to truth”, then the answer can be “yes”, and it can be “no”, and it could perhaps be some version of “ehhh”, but if it’s already “yes” then you basically can’t buy any more of it than that. And if it’s not “yes” and you’re talking about how cheaply you can buy more of it, then it’s still not “yes” even after you complete your purchase.

(This is related to the notion that while consequentialism may be the proper philosophical grounding for morality, and deontology the proper way to formulate and implement your morality so that it’s tractable for a finite mind, nevertheless virtue ethics is the “descriptively correct as an account of how human minds implement morality, and (as a result) prescriptively valid as a recommendation of how to implement your morality in your own mind, once you’ve decided on your object-level moral views”. Thus you can embody the virtue of honesty, or fail to do so. You can’t buy more of embodying some virtue by trading away some other virtue; that’s just not how it works.)

I think you understand that, f other people noticed a pattern that everything you said was false, irrelevant, or unimportant, they would eventually stop bothering to listen when you talk, and this would mean you’d lose the ability to get other people to know things, which is a useful ability to have.

Yes, of course; but…

Whether the specific person you address is better off in each specific case isn’t materal because you aren’t trying to always make them better off, you’re just trying to avoid being seen as someone who predictibly doesn’t make them better off.

… but the preceding fact just doesn’t really have much to do with this business of “do you make people better off by what you say”.

My claim is that people (other than “rationalists”, and not even all or maybe even most “rationalists” but only some) just do not think of things in this way. They don’t think of whether their words will make their audience better off when they speak, and they don’t think of whether the words of other people are making them better off when they listen. This entire framing is just alien to how most people do, and should, think about communication in most circumstances. Yeah, if you lie all the time, people will stop believing you. That’s just directly the causation here, it doesn’t go through another node where people compute the expected value of your words and find it to be negative.

(Maybe this point isn’t particularly important to the main discussion. I can’t tell, honestly!)

I took great effort to try to right down my policy as something explicit in terms a person could try to do (even though I am willing to admit it is not really correct mostly because finite agent problems), because a person can’t be a real Rule Consequentialist without actually having a Rule. What is the rule for “Only lie when doing so is the right thing to do”? It sounds like an instruction to pass the act to my rightness calculator, but if I program that rule into my rightness calculator, and then give it any input, it gets into an infinite loop. I have an Act Consequentialist rightness calculator as a backup, but if I pass the rule “only lie when doing so is the right thing to do” into that as a backup I’m just right back at doing act consequentialism.

If you can write down a better rule for when to lie the than what I’ve put above (that is also better than the “never” or “only by coming up with galaxy-brained ways it technically isn’t lying” or Eliezer’s meta-honesty idea that I’ve read before) I’d consider you to have (possibly) won this issue, but that’s the real price of entry. It’s not enough to point out the flaws where all my rules don’t work, you have to produce rules that work better.

Well… let’s start with the last bit, actually. No, it totally is enough to point out the flaws. I mean, we should do better if we can, of course; if we can think of a working solution, great. But no, pointing out the flaws in a proffered solution is valuable and good all by itself. (“What should we do?” “Well, not that.” “How come?” “Because it fails to solve the problem we’re trying to solve.” “Ok, yeah, that’s a good reason.”) In other words: “any solution that solves the problem is acceptable; any solution that does not solve the problem is not acceptable”. Act consequentialism does not solve the problem.

But as far as my own actual solution goes… I consider Robin Hanson’s curve-fitting approach (outlined in sections II and III of his paper “Why Health is Not Special: Errors in Evolved Bioethics Intuitions”) to be the most obviously correct approach to (meta)ethics. In brief: sometimes we have very strong moral intuitions (when people speak of listening to their conscience, this is essentially what they are referreing to), and as those intuitions are the ultimate grounding for any morality we might construct, if the intuitions are sufficiently strong and consistent, we can refer to them directly. Sometimes we are more uncertain. But we also value consistency in our moral judgments (for various good reasons). So we try to “fit a curve” to our moral intuitions—that is, we construct a moral system that tries to capture those intuitions. Sometimes the intuitions are quite strong, and we adjust the curve to fit them; sometimes we find weak intuitions which are “outliers”, and we judge them to be “errors”; sometimes we have no data points at all for some region of the graph, and we just take the output of the system we’ve constructed. This is necessarily an iterative process.

If the police arrest your best friend for murder, but you know that said friend spent the whole night of the alleged crime with you (i.e. you’re his only alibi and your testimony would completely clear him of suspicion), should you tell the truth to the police when they question you, or should you betray your friend and lie, for no reason at all other than that it would mildly inconvenience you to have to go down to the police station and give a statement? Pretty much nobody needs any kind of moral system to answer this question. It’s extremely obvious what you should do. What does act and/or rule consequentialism tell us about this? What about deontology, etc.? Doesn’t matter, who cares, anyone who isn’t a sociopath (and probably even most sociopaths who aren’t also very stupid) can see the answer here, it’s absurdly easy and requires no thought at all.

What if you’re in Germany in 1938 and the Gestapo show up at your door to ask whether you’re hiding any Jews in your attic (which you totally are)—what should you do? Once again the answer is easy, pretty much any normal person gets this one right without hesitation (in order to get it wrong, you need to be smart enough to confuse yourself with weird philosophy).

So here we’ve got two situations where you can ask “is it right to lie here, or to tell the truth?” and the answer is just obvious. Well, we start with cases like this, we think about other cases where the answer is obvious, and yet other cases where the answer is less obvious, and still other cases where the answer is not obvious at all, and we iteratively build a curve that fits them as well as possible. This curve should pass right through the obvious-answer points, and the other data points should be captured with an accuracy that befits their certainty (so to speak). The resulting curve will necessarily have at least a few terms, possibly many, definitely not just one or two. In other words, there will be many Rules.

(How to evaluate these rules? With great care and attention. We must be on the lookout for complexity, we must continually question whether we are in fact satisfying our values / embodying our chosen virtues, etc.)

Here’s an example rule, which concerns situations of a sort of which I have written before: if you voluntarily agree to keep a secret, then, when someone who isn’t in on the secret asks you about the secret, you should behave as you would if you didn’t know the secret. If this involves lying (that is, saying things which you know to be false, but which you would believe to be true if you were not in possession of this secret which you have agreed, of your own free will, to keep), then you should lie. Lying in this case is right. Telling the truth in this case is wrong. (And, yes, trying to tell some technical truth that technically doesn’t reveal anything is also wrong.)

Is that an obvious rule? Certainly not as obvious as the rules you’d formulate to cover the two previous example scenarios. Is it correct? Well, I’m certainly prepared to defend it (indeed, I have done so, though I can’t find the link right now; it’s somewhere in my comment history). Is a person who follows a rule like this an honest and trustworthy person, or a dishonest and untrustworthy liar? (Assuming, naturally, that they also follow all the other rules about when it is right to tell the truth.) I say it’s the former, and I am very confident about this.

I’m not going to even try to enumerate all the rules that apply to when lying is wrong and when it’s right. Frankly, I think that it’s not as hard as some people make it out to be, to tell when it is necessary to tell the truth and when one should instead lie. Mostly, the right answer is obvious to everyone, and the debates, such as they are, mostly boil down to people trying to justify things that they know perfectly well cannot be justified.

Indeed, there is a useful heuristic that comes out of that. In these discussions, I have often made this point (as I did in my top-level comment) that it is sometimes obligatory to lie, and wrong to tell the truth. The reason I keep emphasizing this is that there’s a pattern one sees: the arguments most often concern whether it’s permissible to lie. Note: not, “is it obligatory to tell the truth, or is it obligatory to lie”—but “is it obligatory to tell the truth, or do I have no obligation here and can I just lie”.

I think that this is very telling. And what it tells us (with imperfect but nevertheless non-trivial certainty) is that the person asking the question, or making the argument against the obligation, knows perfectly well what the real—which is to say, moral—answer is. Yes, the right thing to do is to tell the truth. Yes, you already know this. You have reasons for not wanting to tell the truth. Well, nobody promised you that doing the right thing will always be personally convenient! Nevertheless, very often, there is no actual moral uncertainty in anyone’s mind, it’s just “… ok, but do I really have to do the right thing, though”.

This heuristic is not infallible. For example, it does not apply to the case of “lying to someone who has no right to ask the question that they’re asking”: there, it is indeed permissible to lie^[1], but no particular obligation either to lie or to tell the truth. (Although one can make the case for the obligation to lie even in some subset of such cases, having to do with the establishment and maintenance of certain communicative norms.) But it applies to all of these, for instance.

The bottom line is that if you want to be honest, to be trustworthy, to have integrity, you will end up constructing a bunch of rules to aid you in epitomizing these virtues. If you want to try to put together a complete list of such rules, that’s certainly a project, and I may even contribute to it, but there’s not much point in expecting this to be a definitively completable task. We’re fitting a curve to the data provided by our values, which cannot be losslessly compressed.
1. ↩︎
  Assuming that certain conditions are met—but they usually are.

Said Achmiz Apr 20, 2025, 1:49 AM
15 points
0
on: A Dissent on Honesty
Detailed commentary, as promised:

Rationality can be about Winning, or it can be about The Truth, but it can’t be about both. Sooner or later, your The Truth will demand you shoot yourself in the foot, while Winning will offer you a pretty girl with a country-sized dowry. The only price will be presenting various facts about yourself in the most seductive order instead of the most informative one.

If your highest value isn’t Winning, you do not get to be surprised when you lose. You do not even get to be disappointed. By revealed preference, you have to have a mad grin across your face, that you were able to hold fast to your highest-value-that-isn’t-winning all the way to the bitter end.

What if my highest value is getting a pretty girl with a country-sized dowry, while having not betrayed the Truth?

Then, if I only get one of those things, it’s worse than getting both of those things (and possibly so much worse that I don’t even consider them worthwhile to pursue individually; but this part is optional). Is there a law against having values like this? There is not. Do you get to insist that nevertheless I have to choose, and can’t get both? Nope, because the utility function is not up for grabs^[1]. Now, maybe I will get both and maybe I won’t, but there’s no reason I can’t have “actually, both, please” as my highest value.

The fallacy here is simply that you want to force me to accept your definition of Winning, which you construct so as not to include The Truth. But why should I do that? The only person who gets to define what counts as Winning for me is me.

In short, no, Rationality absolutely can be about both Winning and about The Truth. This is no more paradoxical than the fact that Rationality can be about saving Alice’s life and also about saving Bob’s life. You may at some point end up having to choose between saving Alice and saving Bob, and that would be sad; and you would end up making some choice, in some manner, as fits the circumstance. The existence of this possibility is not particularly interesting, and has no deep implications. The goal is “both”.

(That said, the bit about the two armies was A++, and I strong-upvoted the post just for that.)

Technical Truth is as Bad as Lying

I wholly agree with this section…

… except for the last paragraph—specifically, this:

The purpose of a word is to carve reality at a joint useful for the discussion taking place, and we should pause here to note that the joint in question isn’t “emits true statements”, it’s “emits statements that the other party is better off for listening to”.

No, it’s not.

I’m not sure where this meme comes from^[2], but it’s just wrong. Unless you are, like, literally my mother, “is the other party, speficially, better off for listening to this thing that I am saying” constitutes part of my motivation for saying things approximately zero percent of the time. It’s just not a relevant consideration at all—and I don’t think I’m even slightly unusual in this.

I say and write things^[3] because I consider those things to be true, relevant, and at least somewhat important. That by itself is very often (possibly usually) sufficient for a thing to be useful in a general sense (i.e., I think that the world is better for me having said it, which necessarily involves the world being better for the people in it). Whether the specific person to whom the thing is nominally or factually addressed will be better off as a result of what I said or wrote is not my concern in any way other than that.

Sometimes I am additionally motivated by some specific usefulness of some specific utterance, but even in the edge case where the expected usefulness is exclusive to the single person to whom the utterance is addressed, I don’t consider whether that person will be better off for having listened to the thing in question. Maybe they won’t be! Maybe they will somehow be harmed. That’s not my business; they have the relevant information, which is true (and which I violated no moral precepts by conveying to them)—the rest is up to them.

Therefore if someone says “but if you lie, they’ll be better off”, my response is “weird thing to bring up; what’s the relevance?”.

Biting the Bullet

Basically correct. I will add that not only is it not always morally obligatory to tell the truth, but in fact it is sometimes morally obligatory to lie. Sometimes, telling the truth is wrong, and doing so makes you a bad person. Therefore the one who resolves to always tell the truth, no matter what, can in fact end up predictably doing evil as a direct result of that resolution.

There is no royal road to moral perfection. There is no way to get around the fact that you will always need to apply all of your faculties, the entirety of your reason and your conscience and everything else that is part of you, in order to be maximally sure (but never perfectly sure!) that you are doing the right thing. The moment you replace your brain with an algorithm, you’ve gone wrong. This fact does not become any less true even if the algorithm is “always tell the truth”. You can and should make rules, and you can and should follow them (rule consequentialism is superior to act consequentialism for all finite agents), and yet even this offers no escape from that final responsibility, which is always yours and cannot be offloaded to anyone or anything, ever.

Lie by default whenever you think it passes an Expected Value Calculation to do so, just as for any other action.

No, this is a terrible idea. Do not do this. Act consequentialism does not work. It doesn’t work no matter how much we say “yeah but just make up numbers” or “yeah you can’t actually do the calculation, but let’s pretend we can”. The numbers are fake and meaningless and we can’t do the calculation.

It’s still a better policy than just trusting people.

Definitely don’t just trust people. Trust, but verify. (See also.)

When your friends ask you about how trustworthy you are, make no implications that you are abnormally honest. Tell them truthfully (if it is safe to do so) about all the various bad incentives, broken social systems, and ordinary praxis that compel dishonesty from you and any other person, even among friends, and give them sincere advice about how to navigate these issues.

This, I agree with.

Cooperative Epistemics

I agree with all of this section. What I’ll note here is that there are people who will campaign very hard against the sort of thing you are advocating for here (“Do them the charity of not pretending they wouldn’t be making a terrible mistake by imagining they can take you or anyone else at their word. Build your Cooperative Epistemics on distrust instead.”), and for the whole “trying to start a communist utopia on the expectation that everybody just” thing. I agree that this actually has the opposite result to what anyone sensible would want.

Saying words is just an action, like any other action. You judge actions by their consequences. Are people made worse off or not? Most of the time, you’re not poisoning a shared epistemic well. The well was already poisoned when you got here. It’s more of a communal dumping ground at this point. Mostly you’d just be doing the sensible thing like everybody else does, except that you lack the instinct and intuition and need to learn to do it by rote.

When it makes sense to do so, when the consequences are beneficial, when society is such that you have to, when nobody wants the truth, when nobody is expecting the truth, when nobody is incentivising the truth: just lie to people.

This, on the other hand, is once again a terrible idea.

Look, this is going to sound fatuous, but there really isn’t any better general rule than this: you should only lie when doing so is the right thing to do.

“When the consequences are beneficial”—no, you can’t tell when the consequences will be beneficial, and anyhow act consequentialism does not and cannot work, so instead you should be a rule consequentialist and adopt rules about when lying is right, and when lying is wrong, and only lie in the first case and not the second case. (And you should have meta-rules about when you make your rules known to other people—hint, the answer is “almost always”—because much of the value of rules like this comes from them being public knowledge. And so on, applying all the usual ethical and meta-ethical considerations.)

“When society is such that you have to”—too general; furthermore, people, and by “people” I mean “dirty stinking liars who lie all the time, the bastards”, use this sort of excuse habitually, so you should be extremely wary of it. However, sometimes it actually is true. Once again you cannot avoid having to actually think about this sort of thing in much more detail than the OP.

“When nobody wants the truth”—situations like this are often the ones where telling the truth is exceptionally important and the right thing to do. But sometimes, the opposite of that.

“When nobody expects the truth”—ditto.

“When nobody is incentivizing the truth”—ditto.

The well was already poisoned when you got here. It’s more of a communal dumping ground at this point.

Wells can be cleaned, and new wells can be dug. (The latter is often a prerequisite for the former.)
1. ↩︎
  The metaphorical utility function, that is.
2. ↩︎
  Although I have certain suspicions.
3. ↩︎
  That is, things which should be construed as in some sense possibly being true or false. In other words, I do not include here things like jokes, roleplaying, congratulatory remarks, flirting, requests, exclamations, etc.

Said Achmiz Apr 19, 2025, 12:49 AM
1 point
3
in reply to: Elizabeth’s comment on: A Dissent on Honesty

The hard cases are much more interesting. What about lying to my landlord about renting a room on airbnb? What about saying your class will make people millionaires for the low low price of $1,000 (hey, it could happen)? What about hiding the rats from the health inspector?

None of these seem like hard cases to me. Lying is wrong (and pretty obviously so) in all three of these cases.

Said Achmiz Apr 18, 2025, 10:00 PM
4 points
2
on: Consequentialists should have a comprehensive set of deontological beliefs they adhere to
I don’t see any mention of rule consequentialism in this post.

Is your idea just rule consequentialism?

Said Achmiz Apr 15, 2025, 10:08 AM
8 points
2
in reply to: eva_’s comment on: A Dissent on Honesty
Ok, thanks. (You omit from your enumeration rule consequentialists who are not utilitarians, but I infer that you have a similar attitude toward these as you do towards rule utilitarians.)

Well, as I am most partial to rule consequentialism, I have to agree that “this issue is much more thorny”. On the one hand, I agree with you that “never lie” is not a good rule to endorse (if even for the very straightforward reason that lying is sometimes not only permissible, but in fact is morally obligatory, so if you adopted a “never lie” rule then this would obligate you to predictably behave in an immoral way). On the other hand, I consider act consequentialism^[1] to be obviously foolish and doomed (for boring, yet completely non-dismissable and un-avoidable, reasons of bounded rationality etc.), so your proposed solution where you simply “do the Expected Utility Calculation” is a non-starter. (You even admit that this calculation cannot be done, but then say to pretend to do it anyway; this looks to me like saying “the solution I propose can’t actually work, but do it anyway”. Well, no, if it can’t work, then obviously I shouldn’t do it, duh.)

(More commentary to come later.)
1. ↩︎
  Utilitarianism, specifically (of any stripe whatsoever, and as distinct from non-utilitarian consequentialist frameworks) seems to me to be rejectable in a thoroughly overdetermined manner.

Said Achmiz Apr 15, 2025, 9:30 AM
9 points
4
on: A Dissent on Honesty
I agree with a lot of things in this post and disagree with a lot of things in this post, but before I comment in more detail, I would like to clarify one thing, please:

Are you aware that there exist moral frameworks that aren’t act consequentialism? And if so, are you aware that some people adhere to these other moral frameworks? And if so, do you think that those people are all idiots, crazy, or crazy idiots?

(These questions are not rhetorical. Especially the last one, despite it obviously sounding like the most rhetorical of the set. But it’s not!)

Said Achmiz Apr 15, 2025, 2:01 AM
5 points
1
in reply to: Mo Putera’s comment on: Slopworld 2035: The dangers of mediocre AI
The obvious response, which I thought of as soon as I saw this, is indeed contained in multiple reply tweets:

How about bank teller employment divided by total population size?

Ok but USA population went up +20% from 1990 to 2010 so tellers per capita did decrease over this period.

(McKenzie did not reply to either of these, for some reason.)

If you don’t normalize for population, graphs and claims like this are profoundly misleading. (Similarly to normalizing geographic data for population density, correcting for inflation, etc.)

Said Achmiz Apr 15, 2025, 1:47 AM
4 points
4
on: The Bell Curve of Bad Behavior
Why would the right tail of Debbie’s distribution be longer than it seems?

The left tail—sure, that makes sense. Perhaps Debbie’s a sociopath (in a strong or weak sense of the term), inventing good or acceptable actions that don’t exist, hiding bad actions that do exist. But why would she be hiding good actions that exist? What sorts of actions might these be?

Or perhaps Debbie’s just a weird person with a very different outlook (maybe there’s even some mental illness involved, maybe something else). In this case it would make sense if Debbie sometimes acted in ways outside the norm, but didn’t particularly advertise these things (she may actively hide them, but might not need to, if they’re sufficiently surprising that they wouldn’t be revealed unless someone said something). But this doesn’t square with inventing middle-of-the-distribution actions that never happened—off-kilter weirdoes aren’t like this.

So what explains that symmetrical dissimulation and mid-curve confabulation? It doesn’t map even approximately to any personality type, or set of motivations, that I can think of.

Said Achmiz Apr 12, 2025, 8:10 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: Navigation by Moonlight

I do not believe that any such frog-boiling has ever happened to me.

Nor to me. I can’t map the described scenario to anything in my experience.

Said Achmiz Apr 12, 2025, 7:05 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: jimmy’s comment on: Navigation by Moonlight

Noticing a basketball is forming an accurate mental representation of the basketball. This mental representation is not the basketball. The map is not the territory, the quotation is not the referent. They’re fundamentally different things, no matter how good you are at recognizing basketballs.

Yes, of course.

Noticing that you’ve noticed the basketball is noticing this mental representation—which again is not the basketball. Noticing that you’ve noticed the basketball is when you form a mental representation of the fact that you’ve formed a mental representation of the basketball. This representation of your mental construct is as different from the mental construct it represents as the your mental construct of a basketball is different from the basketball it represents. They’re fundamentally different things, regardless of how good you are at recognizing when you’ve noticed a thing.

On the contrary: these are not fundamentally different things, but rather, the same kind of thing—namely, they are both mental representations. (We might say that they are different instances, but not different classes.) And it is entirely possible that they simply co-occur basically always, as @Richard_Kennaway describes.

But especially if Bob were preoccupied he might not have taken note of his obstacle avoidance, might fail to find in his memory a mental representation of this object he did indeed represent at the time, and say—incorrectly—“No, I didn’t notice it”. The fact that he stepped around the basketball is proof that he noticed it. The fact that he said “I didn’t notice it”, doesn’t negate the fact that he noticed it, it shows that he didn’t notice that he noticed the basketball.

On the contrary again: what you are describing here is simply Bob not having noticed the basketball, and then truthfully reporting this fact.

(Note that this is different from the scenario where Bob is not preoccupied, notices the basketball, steps around, but then forgets that this happened; and, when later asked, falsely reports that he did not notice the basketball. In other words, these are what Dennett colorfully described in Consciousness Explained as the “Stalinesque” and “Orwellian” scenarios, respectively.)

This is reminiscent of the famous hypnosis experiment where people were hypnotized and told that a chair placed in their path was invisible. The people instructed to fool the researchers into believing they had been hypnotized all walked into the chair, as one would. The people who were genuinely hypnotized walked around the chair, and when asked why they took the path they did, showed that they had no idea why they did what they did. They had noticed the chair, and not that they had noticed it.

Here you are again describing these people not having noticed the chair.

If you pick up the basketball, and tell the kid you left it on the court, you’ve shown that you’ve both noticed the basketball and also the fact that you noticed the basketball.

If you walk around the basketball, and tell the kid you haven’t seen it, you’ve shown that you’ve noticed the basketball but not the fact that you’ve noticed the basketball.

If you walk right past the basketball wishing you had one to play with, you’ve shown that you didn’t notice the basketball—and so you can’t have noticed that you noticed

And if you walk around the basketball, wishing you had one to play with, you’ve shown that…?

The weird part about this is that it can be hard to imagine not noticing. It’s hard to miss a big orange ball on black asphalt, so it’s hard to imagine there being a basketball there and not noticing it. It can seem like the distinction between the ball being there and noticing the ball being there isn’t worth tracking because you’ll never fail to notice it—except in the obvious cases like if it’s a moonless night and you’re blind but that doesn’t count, right?

I have not had this experience (of it being hard to imagine this distinction); it has always been clear to me that it’s important and worth tracking. But of course I am aware that some people do think thus.

Similarly, if the only time you’re looking at your own mental representations, they’re metaphorically big and bright orange against a black background, it’s going to be hard to imagine not noticing them—except for the things that are “unconscious” and therefore “impossible to notice” but you can insist that those “don’t count” either.

Sure. Have you ever noticed individual hydrogen atoms? No? Well, why doesn’t that serve as an example of a thing that you didn’t notice? Because you can’t notice them, of course. (Unless you have one of them fancy quantum microscopes, anyway.)

And similarly, once you start looking for representations that are hard to find, and start finding them where you hadn’t seen them immediately, it gets a lot more obvious that there’s* a lot* of things represented in your mind which you haven’t yet noticed. And that there’s simply too much external reality represented in your head for you to represent all of the object level representations you have.

There are plenty of “low-level” representations in our brains (and auxiliary organs) which are inaccessible to conscious awareness. These are of a different kind than mental representations as we ordinarily think of them. For example, take color vision: would you say that we “notice” the individual lightness values of the three color channels formed by signals from the three types of cone cells in our retina? I think that it would be very silly to say that yes, we notice this information, but we do not notice that we notice it, etc. No, we are simply unaware of it, because our visual cortex begins to combine and transform the color channel information long before it gets anywhere near the processes that we could reasonably describe as constituting any “noticing” of anything whatsoever.

Noticing the basketball and noticing that you have noticed the basketball are fundamentally different things, because basketballs and noticing basketballs are fundamentally different things.

Consequent does not follow from antecedent. A mental representation is the same kind of thing as another mental representation.

(Computer science analogy: NSString is a different kind of thing from NSString*. But NSString* and NSString** are the same kind of thing, and so is NSString***, NSSTring****, etc.)

(Of course, you need to know about NSString** to understand the pattern, otherwise you might think that there are two kinds of things: objects, and pointers to objects. It’s once you go to that second level of indirection that you realize that actually, there are two kinds of things: objects, and pointers to [objects, and pointers to [objects, and pointers to [objects, and …]]]… or, in other words, there are two kinds of things: objects, and pointers to things. Thus also with mental representations: to establish the recursion, you must have mental representations of mental representations… at which point you realize that there are two kinds of things: stuff out there in reality, and mental representations of things.)

The same applies to anyone who thinks they see everything their mind is representing and responding to.

“Blindsight, but for social cues” is the grand revelation that all of this has been leading up to…?

Said Achmiz Apr 12, 2025, 1:18 AM
2 points
0
in reply to: jimmy’s comment on: Navigation by Moonlight
I was more or less with you for most of this comment, but it seems to me that you go astray in the end, in two ways.

First:

The thing is, when you look at the people who best approximate this ideal, they’re by definition the ones that are very skilled in self awareness.

This doesn’t work at all. Now, if we remove the words “by definition”, then we’d be left with an empirical claim, which could be true or false (I think it’s false, but more on that later), which is fine. But “by definition”? No, absolutely not.

The reason it’s wrong is that you’re equivocating between two concepts: someone who (as @Richard_Kennaway put it) “is always aware of their own existence, whose own presence is as ineluctable to them as their awareness of the sun when out of doors on a bright sunny day: for such a person, to be aware is always to be aware of themselves”, and someone who is “very skilled in self awareness”. You could claim that those are, empirically, the same thing! But they are not the same thing by definition. One is defined in one way, and the other is defined in another way. To claim that these two concepts have the same referent is an empirical claim.

Second:

“Different minds may operate differently” is definitely true in a sense, but the distinction I’m drawing is fundamental, and the minds that are the least aware of it are those for whom it is* most* important—because there’s fruit there, and you can’t start picking it until you see it. “I’m just so skilled in self awareness that I literally have never noticed myself making this mistake—and have never noticed all the other people making it either” is a self disproving statement.

Perhaps it is, but that’s because it is a mischaracterization of the concept described in the grandparent comment. Instead we can imagine a person saying: “I have never made this mistake myself (so naturally I have never noticed myself making this mistake, there having never been anything to notice in that regard); unsurprisingly, it thus also never occurred to me that other people might make such a mistake”.

Such a statement may be true or false, and we may draw various conclusions about its author in either case; but “self-disproving” it certainly is not.

For my part, while I won’t claim to embody the ultimate extreme on the spectrum described in the grandparent, I’m certainly quite a bit closer to the latter end of it than to the former end. Likewise, I have read, and participated in, enough conversations like this one to be aware that other people’s mind work differently; but I certainly find it strange. And yet, am I “skilled in self awareness”? You could claim that, or conversely disclaim it, but either way it seems to me to be more like a wrong question than anything else. As far as I can tell, there is no distinction between noticing a thing and noticing when I’ve noticed a thing. (Unless you mean something banal like “thinking about the fact that I’ve noticed a thing”? But that is not “noticing”, of course; one may notice all sorts of things, and then proceed to not think about them.)

Said Achmiz Apr 11, 2025, 8:37 PM
2 points
0
on: [Error communicating with LW2 server]
test summary
test details more details

Said Achmiz Apr 11, 2025, 6:10 AM
2 points
0
in reply to: jimmy’s comment on: Navigation by Moonlight
1. I told you that I addressed this failure mode in another comment. Why did you ignore when I told you this instead of reading that comment and responding to what I said over there instead? Isn’t that the *only *thing that makes sense, if that’s all you want to talk about?
I read the comment in question (this one, yes? if that’s not the comment you meant then please link the correct one) and it did not seem to me to have addressed this. (I did not particularly find anything specific to respond in it, either, although I certainly can’t say that I agree with the model you give therein.)
1. Why are you talking whether men pick up on these things in general?
Because, as I have said, I agree with johnswentworth when he wrote:

Sometimes this is due to the woman in question not recognizing how subtle she’s being, and losing out on a date with a man she’s still interested in.

I would guess that this is approximately 100% of the time in practice, excluding cases where the man doesn’t pick up on the cues but happens to ask her out anyway. Approximately nobody accurately picks up on womens’ subtle cues, including other women (at least that would be my strong guess, and is very cruxy for me here). If the woman just wants a guy who will ask her out, that’s still a perfectly fine utility function, but the cues serve approximately-zero role outside of the woman’s own imagination.

EDIT: In fact, let me expand on this.

Your linked comment answers the question “why don’t women just ask, if they really want the guy”. (I find the answer unconvincing, as I said, but that’s actually beside the point here.) But the reason I brought up the scenario in question wasn’t to pose the question “why don’t women just ask”, but rather to point out that in said scenario:
1. The woman is definitely sending cues as hard as she can.
2. The man does not pick up on those cues.
3. If asked later, the man will say that he did not perceive any cues. (Indeed, he’d be surprised by the question—“Cues, what cues? From whom…? That one woman? Flirting? With whom? With me?! No, you’ve got something mixed up, surely…”)
4. If asked later, the woman will say that the man did not pick up on any cues. (And will be very frustrated by this; she was being so obvious, how could this absolute dunce of a man not have noticed?! Ridiculous! And she was really into the guy, too…)
So even in this case where one person is trying as hard as they can to send cues, nevertheless the other person is totally oblivious. (Does this happen all the time? Yes it does.)

Given this, does the suggestion that actually, everyone is perceiving all the cues all the time, is obviously silly. If even trying this hard, “sending” this “loudly”—at such extreme “transmission intensity”—can fail to be enough to get the signal through, at all, then how could it be true that the signal is actually successfully getting through pretty much all the time? The answer is obvious: it can’t be true.

(Now, you might say: “but I am making no such suggestion, because you have misunderstood my…”—sure, fair enough. But this should, at least, clearly and definitively answer the question of why I brought up that scenario and what relevance I think it has to the general question.)

(Edit ends.)

So, to again try to summarize: you claim that people (and in particular, men) “sense the cues” that other people (and in particular, women) send. What exactly it means to “sense the cues”, in your usage, remains unclear. It likewise remains unclear how (or if) that claim is responsive to johnswentworth’s claim quoted above (with which I agree). It certainly seemed like you were disagreeing with him. But then, based on your later explanation of how you are using the relevant words, it seemed like you were not disagreeing with him but instead were saying… something… unrelated…?

Could you, perhaps, express your position on this matter using the same terminology as is being used by your interlocutors? (I understand if you prefer an idiosyncratic usage, and it’s fine if you return to that usage afterwards, but it would help if you could “translate” your point into the normal usage at least temporarily, just so that we could at least get clear on what it is that you’re actually saying.)

Even though it’s normally rude to point out so bluntly like this, I certainly prefer the respect of “What you’re saying sounds obviously dumb. What am I missing?” than the polite fictions that condescend and presuppose that you’re not only in error but also too emotionally immature to admit it.

Yes, of course, likewise.

EDIT: By the way, this is false in my experience:

You’re still misunderstanding what I’m saying though. Again, you can’t judge truth of a statement until you know what the statement means.

Well, I’m definitely confused about at least one thing. Namely, I am confused about whether you claim that you have already explained what you mean by “sense the cue”.

If you haven’t already explained it… well, the obvious question is “why not”, but never mind that, we can move past it, and instead proceed to: please do go ahead and explain it.

If you have already explained it (as seems to me to be the case), then what makes you think that, despite your explanation, I do not understand what you meant? (As far as I can tell, you’re not saying “aha, I conclude from this here statement of yours that you didn’t understand my explanation”, but rather “I know in advance that you didn’t understand my explanation, and on the basis of that fact, I conclude that this here statement of yours is false”. But how do you know it in advance…?)

flinching from admitting what you sense

Needless to say, I can’t decipher this comment, because I am once again (or still?) not sure how you’re using the word “sense” here…

Perhaps you could go ahead and explain what you think is wrong with the billboard analogy I offered?

As a meta-level comment, I’d like to note that I’ve asked quite a few questions to try to understand your points, and you’ve ignored almost all of them, whereas I have (as you see) tried to respond directly to your questions in my replies. (Perhaps it seemed to you like the questions were rhetorical? But no, I actually did want answers to them!) For example, in the grandparent I asked:

What do you mean by “matter” here?

That wasn’t a rhetorical question; I really would like to know what you meant when you disputed my alleged assumption that you have to be aware of things for them to “matter”. In what sense do things you’re not aware of “matter”? (I can think of some obvious cases where this is true—one need not be aware of electromagnetism for it to affect you, for instance—but presumably you don’t suspect me of being a solipsist with regard to physics, so this can’t be what you meant. On the other hand, if someone is trying to communicate something to you—“sending cues”—but you are not aware of this, then, clearly, you cannot be receiving the message that is being transmitted. Is that something you dispute? Or does “matter” mean something else entirely here?)

(And likewise with the other questions I asked; they were meant to help me understand your points, not as some sort of rhetorical ploys. But let’s start with that last question, at least; it’ll do for now.)

Said Achmiz Apr 10, 2025, 6:30 PM
3 points
0
in reply to: jimmy’s comment on: Navigation by Moonlight
It all hinges on the fact that your assumption that you have to be aware of things for them to matter is unjustified—and, it turns out, very very false.

What do you mean by “matter” here?

Remember, we’re talking about the following situation:
1. Woman attempts to “send cues”, with the intended result being that a certain man will perceive these cues and react in a certain desired way.
2. Man has no idea that this is happening.
3. Man does not react in the desired way to the supposed cues that the woman is supposedly sending (and how could he, not being aware of any such things?).
4. Woman is annoyed, frustrated, etc., that she is not getting what she wants.
Now you’re claiming that, somehow, these cues are nevertheless being “sensed” (ok, sure), and also that they nevertheless “matter” in some way.

What is the meaning of “matter” in this context that makes your claim true?

EDIT: By the way, this is false in my experience:

But it is also true that people will call what I refer to as “sensing the cue” “sensing the cue”.

I’ve never encountered this usage from anyone other than you.

Said Achmiz Apr 10, 2025, 7:30 AM
8 points
0
in reply to: jimmy’s comment on: Navigation by Moonlight
I think perhaps you have missed the point I was making, which is that what you call “being aware that you have sensed a cue” is just what everyone else calls “sensing the cue” (perhaps “perceiving the cue” might be a better phrase, by the way; that does seem to me to be more consonant with how the concepts of perception and sensation are used elsewhere…). Whatever we call it, the interesting and important thing is the part where the intended cue-recipient ends up having any idea whatsoever that a cue is being sent (or, more likely, instead fails to end up with any such idea).

Thus we had the following exchange:

johnswentworth:

Approximately nobody accurately picks up on womens’ subtle cues, including other women (at least that would be my strong guess, and is very cruxy for me here). … (Of course there’s an obvious alternative hypothesis: most men do pick up on such cues, and I’m overindexing on myself or my friends or something. I am certainly tracking that hypothesis, I am well aware that my brain is not a good model of other humans’ brains, but man it sure sounds like “not noticing womens’ subtle cues” is the near-universal experience, even among other women when people actually try to test that.)

jimmy:

In short, approximately everybody senses women’s cues whether they recognize it or not, whether they know what to do with it or not, and they’re only subtle and ambiguous to the extent that their purpose is served by being subtle and ambiguous.

Now, given the way you are using the phrase “sensing the cue”, we can now see that the second quote is totally non-responsive to the first. Like, it’s literally just a non sequitur.

An analogy: suppose that certain billboards, signs, etc., were designed in such a way that they secretly also worked like those Magic Eye pictures, and if you squinted at them just right, you could see a hidden image. Suppose that such special double-duty displays weren’t marked in any obvious way.

Now, suppose I said: “You know how some billboards and signs and such are secretly also magic eye images? I have no idea how to spot when a sign is one of those! Much less how to squint at them the right way, even if I did spot them…” And suppose you replied: “Well, you know, the light reflected from the those signs is hitting your retina, so you can totally tell that the signs exist.”

Would that be an even remotely useful reply?

Does the reply point out any errors in the complaint, or contradict the complaint in any way at all? No, of course not. Does the reply talk about anything whatsoever to do with the reason why the problem exists? Not in the least. Can it possibly point the way to a solution? Not a chance.

If you follow this up with “ah, but there is a distinction between noticing ‘the billboard exists’ and noticing ‘I have noticed that the billboard exists’”, is that relevant or useful? It is not. Yes, I am indeed aware of billboards, and aware of my awareness of billboards, and aware of that… is this fact even slightly relevant to my (and most people’s) hypothetical inability to spot which billboards are, hypothetically, also secretly Magic Eye images? Alas, no.

Said Achmiz Apr 10, 2025, 1:52 AM
6 points
0
in reply to: jimmy’s comment on: Navigation by Moonlight
Specifically, I assume you’re objecting to the first part “approximately everybody senses women’s cues whether they recognize it or not”, but you don’t seem to be noticing the distinction between “sensing the cue” and “being aware that you have sensed a cue, and having concluded that it counts as an a cue”. These are easy to conflate, but they’re wildly different things.

What is the distinction between “sensing the cue” and “being aware that you have sensed a cue”?

If, in “approximately everybody senses women’s cues whether they recognize it or not”, you mean by the phrase “sense women’s cues” something which can be done without even being aware that you have sensed anything, then what exactly are you saying? Is this claim falsifiable at all? How would you falsify it?

How would the world look different in the following two cases:
1. Everyone senses women’s cues, although some (many?) people do this without having any awareness at all that they have sensed anything whatsoever.
2. Some people do not sense women’s cues.
What observations would you expect to make in one of those scenarios but not in the other?

Heck, in high school a girl told my mom that she wanted to have my baby, and I was still telling my friends “You’re wrong, she’s not into me”. I get that.

Which is perfectly sensible, because I have in fact encountered cases where women would say things like that to men, but give no other indication of being interested in said men, and would react with bafflement to suggestions that they were interested in dating said men, etc. (Being a third party in these cases, I could observe in a disinterested way, and found these observations quite instructive.)

The same, by the way, can be said of this:

But if she holds unbroken eye contact, flat out doesn’t respond to anything he says in attempt to distract her or test her resolve, and leans all the way in until her lips are mere millimeters from his, waiting for minutes until he responds.… that’s yin, but not something that can be missed, you know?

I have absolutely known women who have done this with guys whom they had no intention whatsoever to kiss or do anything else with.

At the same time, I couldn’t help but respond to what she was actually doing. When she’d jump in front of me to try to stop me and get my attention, I could change direction and walk around her, but I had to sense her presence in order to do that. Sure, I had alternate explanations for why she was doing what she was doing, but that shows recognition of the thing to be explained.

As far as I can tell, you are using the phrase “sense a cue” in a way that I can only describe as completely useless. Obviously it is impossible to literally not perceive the the physical presence of a woman in front of you (assuming that you aren’t blind, it’s not dark, your eyes aren’t closed, etc.), but that is not what anyone means by “sense a cue”. What the phrase means is “recognize a specific action or behavior as a cue”.

“Recognition of the thing to be explained” is worth nothing.

For example, suppose I am walking down the street and I see a woman walking in the opposite direction toward me. Is this a “thing to be explained”? Taking the broad view, sure. What might the explanation be? Obviously it is “this woman happens to have some reason to be walking in that direction, just like any number of people who walk down streets every day”. What is the correct reaction? Nothing; no reaction is required or appropriate.

Or: I’m riding the subway and a woman brushes my arm as she walks past. Is this a “thing to be explained”? Sure. What might the explanation be? Obviously it is “it’s a crowded subway car and there’s no particular reason to take extreme care not to make physical contact with anyone, and this sort of accidental casual contact happens all the time”. What is the correct reaction? Ignore it; no reaction is required or appropriate.

Or: the woman in the cafe is smiling when she hands me my order. Is this a “thing to be explained”? Sure. What might the explanation be? Obviously it is “she smiles at everyone; she just smiled at the old lady before me, and now she’s smiling at the couple after me; being friendly is good for business, probably”. What is the correct reaction? Smile back, be polite, otherwise nothing; no special reaction is required or appropriate.

In each of these cases, I “recognized the thing to be explained”; and the explanation for thing to be explained was it was a totally mundane behavior that had nothing to do with anyone sending any cues.

In the cases of failing to notice cues, what happens is that a man “recognizes the thing to be explained” in the same way that I “recognized the thing to be explained” in my three examples above; he identifies the explanation for the thing as something mundane; he then does not react in any particular way, because generally in such mundane cases no special reaction is required or appropriate. But whoops! Actually the woman was strenuously sending all sorts of cues! But the man completely failed to perceive any of them, because the idea that these cues were somehow extremely obvious was just a fantasy in the woman’s head. All the man perceived was various behaviors which have various mundane explanations, just like the overwhelming majority of behaviors in which we engage every day.

So, back to the actually useful question: is it possible to not recognize a behavior or action as a deliberate cue that is being sent? Yes, absolutely it’s possible, it happens all the time and is definitely the explanation for approximately 100% of cases of “woman sends cues, guy doesn’t respond, woman does nothing more and doesn’t get date”, exactly as @johnswentworth wrote.
What links here?
- Said Achmiz's comment on Navigation by Moonlight by Jacob Falkovich (Apr 11, 2025, 6:10 AM; 2 points)

Said Achmiz Apr 9, 2025, 6:50 PM
4 points
2
in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: Navigation by Moonlight

Approximately nobody accurately picks up on womens’ subtle cues, including other women (at least that would be my strong guess, and is very cruxy for me here).

Indeed, this is well supported by innumerable examples from various social media of discussions where a man asks “the following situation happened involving a woman, please enlighten me as to its meaning”, and gets the mostly wildly divergent array of answers from women (most of whom, of course, are completely confident in their answer’s correctness, and many of whom express bafflement, or even indignation, that anyone could possibly think that the truth might be otherwise).

Said Achmiz Apr 9, 2025, 6:45 PM
6 points
0
in reply to: jimmy’s comment on: Navigation by Moonlight

The other issue with your choice of denominator is that if the woman definitely wants the date she likely won’t be subtle.

You mean, like the woman in your anecdote about your friend tutoring in college…?

The problem with your argument is that it doesn’t at all explain all the cases where the woman definitely wants a date, is definitely interested in the guy, is very frustrated by (what she would characterize as) the guy’s obliviousness (and quite likely complains about this to her friends), and yet still won’t say anything.

When you have a situation where the woman knows the man is going to be interested in her

But of course this is an absurd requirement. If she knows he’s going to be interested, of course that makes it vastly easier!

… and yet, according to your own account, women still won’t say anything in that situation, despite having a guarantee of a positive response. What does that tell you?

really really obvious clues like leaning in and forcing the man to contend with the fact that she’s there waiting to be kissed

In fact there is no such as “forcing the man to contend with” anything. People (not just men) are, as it turns out, perfectly capable of totally ignoring a cue like this, and indeed of not even noticing it in the first place. A woman who thinks that leaning in and waiting to be kissed is somehow a guarantee that a man will correctly perceive the cue, is sadly, sadly mistaken.

In short, approximately everybody senses women’s cues whether they recognize it or not, whether they know what to do with it or not, and they’re only subtle and ambiguous to the extent that their purpose is served by being subtle and ambiguous.

Sorry, but this is empirically false.

Said Achmiz Apr 8, 2025, 12:55 AM
14 points
7
on: Coupling for Decouplers

So you can only imagine the excitement when, a few years after LessWrong was established, we found that *literally all every part of your brain does is make Bayesian updates to minimize prediction errors. *Scott Alexander wrote several excited articles about it. I wrote several excited articles about it. And most everyone else said ok cool story we’re gonna ignore it and just do AI posting now.

Did we “find” this? That’s not what seems to me to have happened.

As far as I can tell, this is a speculative theory that some people found to be very interesting. Others said “well, perhaps, this is certainly an interesting way of thinking about some things, although there seem to be some hiccups, and maybe it has some correspondence to actual reality, maybe not—in any case do you have a more concrete model and stronger evidence?” and got the answer “more research is needed”. Alright, cool, by all means, proceed, research more.

And then nothing much came of it, and so of course it was thereafter mostly ignored. What is there to say about it or do with it?