Said Achmiz

Karma: 16,588

Said Achmiz May 22, 2025, 6:08 AM
6 points
2
on: School & Jobs are good SOLELY because people are lazy
I have to ask, @fasf: what do you do? Do you run your own business? Could you tell us a bit about that?

Said Achmiz May 22, 2025, 6:05 AM
8 points
4
in reply to: fasf’s comment on: School & Jobs are good SOLELY because people are lazy
If you are making the assumption that people do not differ at all in their capabilities, talents, aptitudes, etc., then I’m not sure what to say except “that’s very, very obviously wrong”.

If you are not making that assumption, then I can’t make sense of your comment.

In any case, even ignoring the above—as I said, I worked a retail job for some years. I know what kinds of skills that job required of me. I know what kinds of skills other jobs (e.g. writing software) have required of me. I can see that the former is not predictive of the latter, has almost no overlap with the latter, etc. These are simple observations from my own life, from which I am drawing straightforward conclusions.

Said Achmiz May 22, 2025, 2:02 AM
7 points
−2
on: The stakes of AI moral status
On the subject of “historical wrongs”: you seem to take the (popular, but quite mistaken) view that people mostly just stood by and let the Holocaust happen, and tried to ignore it, or didn’t think about it, etc. That’s just not true. In reality, one of two things generally happened:
1. What was taking place was quite intentionally and carefully kept secret, so ordinary people simply had no idea that it was happening. (This was the case with Treblinka, for instance.)
2. Ordinary people didn’t stand by passively—rather, they enthusiastically participated in rounding up Jews, killing Jews, etc. (This was quite common in Ukraine, Romania, etc.)
Neither scenario is at all a good match for concerns about AI moral patienthood.

Said Achmiz May 22, 2025, 1:48 AM
23 points
17
on: The stakes of AI moral status
If we don’t want to enslave actually-conscious AIs, isn’t the obvious strategy to ensure that we do not build actually-conscious AIs? You talk about what AIs will be like as if they’re naturally occurring; but of course they are not—it’s right there in the name! If we don’t want to deal with the problems caused by creating many new moral patients (and indeed we should not want this), then we should simply not build them (and if we do accidentally build such things, destroy them at once)!

Said Achmiz May 22, 2025, 1:36 AM
6 points
−1
on: The stakes of AI moral status

Or consider a baby, Jeffrey Lawson, given open heart surgery shortly after his birth. His doctor paralyzed him, but gave him no anesthetic. “His little body was opened from breastbone to backbone, his flesh lifted aside, ribs pried apart…”[4] The doctor told his mother: it had never been demonstrated that babies feel pain. As late as the 1980s, it was a common view. Surgeries like this were common practice.

So… has it now been demonstrated that babies feel pain, or… what? It seems like this anecdote is missing the part where you say “and that was wrong, as we now know [citation]”!

Said Achmiz May 21, 2025, 6:04 PM
3 points
1
in reply to: dirk’s comment on: School & Jobs are good SOLELY because people are lazy
Perhaps, but doing 8 hours of customer service work in a day says nothing whatsoever about one’s ability to do any amount of the kind of work where you have to make decisions, figure things out, etc. (I worked retail for years, so I speak from experience here.)

Said Achmiz May 21, 2025, 5:58 AM
7 points
1
on: School & Jobs are good SOLELY because people are lazy

it’s clear that if you can spend the same amount of time people spend on school/work on a business, you’d make substantially more than you would otherwise

Is this clear? Why? Business fail quite often. I have no business-running skills. If I tried to start a business, I’d expect to lose money.

Said Achmiz May 21, 2025, 5:51 AM
6 points
3
on: School & Jobs are good SOLELY because people are lazy

But if someone tells you he spends 8 hours at school or working you would think that to be the bare minimum which billions of people do daily.

If someone told me that he spends 8 hours a day work, I’d nod and say “yep, sounds like you have a job”.

If someone told me that he spends 8 hours a day working at work, I would be incredulous. Really, the full 8 hours, working the whole time?? Not slacking off, not browsing the web or sending emails or chatting idly with coworkers or spacing out—8 hours of actual work?! Shocking!

That is the analogous case to “spends 8 hours a day working on his business”—and not “spends 8 hours a day at work”!

Said Achmiz May 20, 2025, 6:10 AM
2 points
0
in reply to: Screwtape’s comment on: Book Review: The Art of Happiness

Happiness is one [of the things commonly referred to as emotions]

I do not agree with this.

(But if you consider happiness to be an emotion, then it makes even less sense to optimize for it!)

there’s lots of lists of emotions, here’s one.

I think many of the things on that list are not emotions. (I mean, surely “creative” is not an emotion? “Respected”? “Intimate”? “Exposed”? “Sceptical”? “Judgmental”??)

Have you ever felt any of these, such that you could say “gosh, I’m really angry right now” as a fact about the world?

Of course.

You don’t think happiness is a thing that people can notice about themselves, but you do think there’s some kind of circumstance that makes a particular person happy? Like, I could go to the beach, and I would be happy, but I couldn’t notice that fact? I put them in that order because I assumed if you were going to disagree with one of them you’d also disagree with all the ones after, so I’m pretty surprised here.

You wrote (#1):

Happiness is some kind of state humans can be in, and they can notice when they’re happy or unhappy if they check.

I think that thinking of happiness as a “state” is basically a mistake even if there’s some technical sense in which it’s true. I also do not think that people are very good at noticing whether they’re happy or unhappy. I wouldn’t go so far as to say “can’t” but it’s not like checking whether you’re angry (which usually has relatively standard and straightforwardly checkable physiological correlates). I expect that the average person asking “am I happy right now” is more likely than not to get a wrong or nonsensical answer.

You also wrote (#2):

Happiness is a state humans can prefer to be in.

As above, I don’t think that happiness is a “state” in a useful sense of the word, but I do think that humans can (and most, probably, do) prefer to be happy rather than not being happy.

And (#3):

Some kind of repeatable, particular circumstances predictably make a human happier and others unhappier.

Yep, generally true. One can quibble with this (e.g. the caveats that you give in parentheses), but as a basic pattern it is true.

But:

You don’t think happiness is a thing that people can notice about themselves, but you do think there’s some kind of circumstance that makes a particular person happy?

Ah, but notice the difference: “make a person happier” vs. “make a person happy”. The latter makes sense if happiness is just an emotional state that one can be in. But if that’s not right—if happiness is more like a characteristic of a person’s experience over time, for example—then the latter form doesn’t make much sense anymore. But the former makes sense either way.

Said Achmiz May 20, 2025, 5:49 AM
4 points
0
on: Scroll Snapping
The problem with this setting is that when I press the down arrow key, it scrolls the page by either a little bit (as normal) or a whole picture’s height, and it seems basically random which it does for any given down-arrow keypress. This is bad.

Said Achmiz May 20, 2025, 5:44 AM
2 points
0
in reply to: Screwtape’s comment on: Book Review: The Art of Happiness

Maybe they’re all terrible answers but virtue of scholarship, sometimes I read a book and check.

Don’t get me wrong—I appreciate the book review!

Checking: Have you ever read a book to learn about Buddhism before coming to the conclusion that you wouldn’t consider going to them about it? Talked to a Buddhist for a while? Read a dictionary entry? A book review of some other book?

Yeah, of course. All of the above. (I forget if the book was about Buddhism specifically or comparative religion more generally; it was in college, which was a while ago. The rest, relatively recent. I mean, Buddhism has gotten a lot of coverage here on LW, among other things. Then there’s David Chapman’s writings on Buddhism… it’s not like there’s any shortage of sources!)

If it bugs you that I asserted “Buddhism is unusually X” in the preamble to a book review would this go away if I added a citation from the Dalai Lama saying something to this effect, because I still have the book and I’m pretty sure there’s a line in there somewhere.

I am kind of confused by this reaction. I mean, you said a thing (“Buddhism is unusually attentive to the whole suffering and joy thing”), and as far as I could tell, this was you saying it, not you reporting a claim that was made in the book. (Am I mistaken about this?)

And I am asking: do you actually for real believe this? If so, why do you believe it? I’m not asking for citations, like I’m a reviewer of an academic paper that you submitted. It’s not a criticism that you need to address in order to placate me.

Answers I would expect might include things like:

“Ah, no, this is not my belief, this is a thing the book says.”

“Yep, I think that this is actually true, because [reasons].”

“Eh, I dunno, I guess it’s more like a vague impression, but maybe it’s wrong; I haven’t thought about it too hard… you think I’m wrong about this? Say more?”

“Actually I was being sarcastic. I don’t really think that!”

“Yes I more or less believe this but I can see why many people would take the opposite view, it’s complicated, but anyhow it’s not critical to the review.”

“Of course I believe it, why wouldn’t I? Isn’t it very obviously and uncontroversially true? Why, do you claim otherwise…? On what basis?”

Any of those would make sense as an answer to my question!

I still have the book and I’m pretty sure there’s a line in there somewhere

Ok, see, this sounds like “actually I was reporting a claim made in the book”, and if that’s the full explanation then, cool, that does in fact answer my question. (Obviously it could instead be that the book claims this but your line about it was still you describing your own independent belief, in which case the question stands.)

I have watched you assert wilder things with less evidence though so I think this is an isolated demand for pedantry.

You are absolutely, 100%, welcome to question what I believe and why!

Said Achmiz May 20, 2025, 4:30 AM
2 points
0
in reply to: Screwtape’s comment on: Interest In Conflict Is Instrumentally Convergent

There are circumstances where trying and failing is very bad. If someone is trying to figure out heart surgery, I think they should put the scalpel down and go read some anatomy textbooks first, maybe practice on some cadavers, medical school seems a good idea. I do not think meetups are like this and I do not think the majority of the organizers are completely unqualified; even if they’re terrible at the interpersonal conflict part they’re often fine at picking a location and time and bringing snacks. That makes them partially qualified.

FWIW, my experience is that rationalist meetup organizers are in fact mostly terrible at picking a location and at bringing snacks. (That’s mostly not the kind of failure mode that is relevant to our discussion here—just an observation.)

Anyhow…

The −2std failure case is something like, they announced a time and place that’s inconvenient, then show up half an hour late and talk over everyone, so not many people come and attendees don’t have a good time. This is not great and I try to avoid that outcome where I can, but it’s not so horrible that I’d give up ten average meetups to prevent it. Worse outcomes do happen where I do get more concerned.

All of this (including the sentiment in the preceding paragraph) would be true in the absence of adversarial optimization… but that is not the environment we’re dealing with.

(Also, just to make sure we’re properly calibrating our intuitions: −2std is 1 in 50.)

It’s possible you have a higher bar or a different definition of what a rationalist meetup aught to be? I’m on board with a claim something like “a rationalist meetup aught to have some rationality practiced” and in practice something like (very roughly) a third of the meetups are pure socials and another third are reading groups.

No, I don’t think that’s it. (And I gave up on the “a rationalist meetup aught to have some rationality practiced” notion a long, long time ago.)

Said Achmiz May 20, 2025, 4:12 AM
1 point
0
in reply to: Screwtape’s comment on: Book Review: The Art of Happiness
I mean, the bit about the food was mostly intended as humor.

And I wouldn’t really try to figure out how to be happy by looking at what religions say about it. Now, if I were inclined to do so, I’d look at Judaism, like I said—but that’s at least partially a reductio ad absurdum; “which religion is the most joyful” strikes me as a somewhat silly question, and “Judaism” is a somewhat silly answer. It’s… not wrong? (IMO, of course.) But, like… this whole endeavor is just the wrong way of thinking about the matter. (Which is—I’m sorry to say it—perfectly illustrated by your whole “let’s look at the Wikipedia page for each religion and see how many times it mentions ‘happy’ or ‘happiness’” thing. Come on! Obviously that is a nonsensical thing to be doing here! It isn’t even a “quick and dirty approximation” to anything; it’s just noise.)

But the first paragraph—no, that’s a serious question/comment. I really was surprised to read the claim that Buddhism is somehow unusually joyful or unusually “attentive to” joy or can be expected to have better insights about joy, etc. On the contrary, Buddhism strikes me as a religion which is deeply anti-life and pro-death (very “life goals of dead people”). I would not even consider going to such people for insights about joy, of all things. Hence my somewhat incredulous comment.

Said Achmiz May 20, 2025, 4:00 AM
0 points
0
in reply to: Screwtape’s comment on: Book Review: The Art of Happiness

The ham sandwich replacement works pretty well in my head, I don’t understand the Olympic medal analogy, and the lottery tickets thing is confusing to me. I agree people can be mistaken about what they want (though I don’t default to assuming that) and I’m confused what you think a lot of people actually want and mistake for wanting to be happy? We seem to have some kind of communication problem or alternately pretty different experiences of happiness, and I’m not sure what’s going on here.

Huh. Yeah, this amount of communication failure surprises me. I did expect that you’d disagree with at least some of that, but not that it wouldn’t get across at all…

Can you tell me where in these sequence you start to disagree, or alternately if you agree with all of the below?

I disagree with #1, partially disagree with #2 (the first sentence is ok-ish but the given test is basically meaningless and so can’t be the basis for any of this reasoning), basically agree with #3, and agree with what #4 says but almost certainly not with what you mean by it. (I also—obviously—disagree with the notion that these things form some kind of meaningful sequence of specificity or claim strength etc.)

Things I am not saying:

Sure, I didn’t think that you were saying any of those things, so this all makes sense.

Said Achmiz May 20, 2025, 12:47 AM
9 points
4
on: Thinking Insect Suffering Is The Biggest Deal In The World Is Surprisingly Intuitive

Second: insects plausibly can suffer a great deal. The most detailed report ever compiled on the subject estimated that they suffer at least 1% as intensely as we do, and on average around 10%.

That report continues to be unable to support the arguments you are using it for.

Said Achmiz May 20, 2025, 12:44 AM
7 points
1
on: Thinking Insect Suffering Is The Biggest Deal In The World Is Surprisingly Intuitive

To southern slave-owners, the permissibility of slavery was intuitive. But this was only as a result of bias and a profound failure of empathy. They only considered things from their own perspectives, never thinking about what it would be like to be a tormented and subjugated slave. Had they done so, they’d have correctly judged slavery to be the abomination it was.

Are these claims that you’re making about the psychology of slave-owners the result of any reading of primary sources? Or have you done some other sort of historical research into the pre-Civil-War period of American history that informed this portrayal? Could you comment a bit on your sources for this?

Said Achmiz May 19, 2025, 8:31 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: Screwtape’s comment on: Book Review: The Art of Happiness

I am not Jewish, but the joke I’ve heard from several Jews is that Jewish holidays follow the structure “first they tried to kill us, then we won, let’s eat”?

A helpful analysis.

Said Achmiz May 18, 2025, 8:12 AM
2 points
−4
in reply to: Screwtape’s comment on: Book Review: The Art of Happiness

Allow me to present the same outline with a few text replacements.

But… that transformation doesn’t work, at all. Actively pursuing a ham sandwich makes perfect sense. (And if you want a ham sandwich, asking whether what you are doing will in fact get you a ham sandwich is likewise a sensible thing to do.) But actively pursuing happiness, specifically, doesn’t make sense. That’s my point.

Do you want to be happy?

I mean, it’s clearly better than the alternative (it’s not like I want to not be happy, much less want to be unhappy), but on the other hand, I don’t “want to be happy” in the same sense that I want most other things.

Wanting to be happy seems like like, say, wanting to get an Olympic gold medal. If you train for the Olympics in some sport, and compete, and win, then you will get a gold medal, and that’s cool. On the other hand, suppose that due to some geopolitical reasons or something, all the other athletes in that sport stay home that year, and you “compete” against nobody, and “win”, and get a gold medal. Did you get what you wanted? Or, how about if you blackmail all the judges with compromising photographs, and they award you a gold medal even though you performed terribly and clearly lost?

Conversely, what if you compete in the Olympics, and win, but your opponent blackmailed the judges, and you don’t get a gold medal, even though you “should”. Is that better or worse than the preceding two scenarios? Seems like… better, no?

Clearly the gold medal wasn’t actually the point… right? But if I ask you “do you want to get an Olympic gold medal”, “no” seems like the wrong answer.

Well, but what about “actively pursuing an Olympic gold medal”? That sort of makes sense, but… not really. “Winning the Olympics (in whatever sport)”, that makes sense. And one does get gold medals for that. But the medal itself is not exactly the point.

Lots of people want to be happy. Uh, citation needed and I don’t have one.

I certainly won’t demand a citation for this, but I think that probably a lot more people mistakenly think that they “want to be happy” than actually want to be happy.

I think actively pursuing happiness is a pretty normal thing to do, albeit subject to all the usual mistakes that people usually make in pursuing any of their goals.

Well… it’s hard to know how to take this. Like, what if I said “I think that buying lottery tickets is a pretty normal thing to do, albeit subject to all the usual mistakes that people usually make in figuring out what is likely to benefit them”? There’s a sense in which it’s true, but on the other hand, the second clause negates the first one: buying lottery tickets is one of the “usual mistakes that people usually make” in such matters!

I am in general a fan of people thinking for a few minutes by the clock about how to get what they want, maybe getting a little strategic about it.

Totally, yes, no argument there.

Said Achmiz 18 May 2025 7:21 UTC
2 points
2
in reply to: Screwtape’s comment on: Book Review: The Art of Happiness

I am not Jewish, but the joke I’ve heard from several Jews is that Jewish holidays follow the structure “first they tried to kill us, then we won, let’s eat”? I’m not saying that doesn’t have a happy ending but step one is pretty bad.

Of course, but step one is not exactly under one’s control, as a Jew… hardly seems fair to count that against the religion itself!

C’mon, Judaism doesn’t have a monopoly on eating delicious food for holidays!

Matter of taste, I suppose…

Said Achmiz 18 May 2025 0:06 UTC
2 points
0
on: Book Review: The Art of Happiness

One takeaway from reading this book, if you didn’t already do it, is to ask yourself whether what you’re doing will bring you happiness.

Actually, why not make that a takeaway from reading this review? Go take five minutes, I’ll still be here when you get back.

I have to say that this is a somewhat odd approach. Now, maybe you didn’t mean it in quite this way, but for the sake of exploring the point, let’s take your suggestion very literally.

What am I doing right now? Reading a Less Wrong post, writing some comments on it.

Will this bring me happiness? Um… probably… not…? (Wouldn’t it be pretty weird if the answer were “yes”? This sort of activity could bring me various things—satisfaction, personal growth, some concrete benefit or the accomplishment of some goals—but happiness? This seems more like a wrong question than anything…)

So… should I… stop reading this post, or… what? (Should I stop reading things on the internet? Should I stop reading things… at all??) Surely not, right? I mean, I don’t only do things because they will bring me happiness! (Does anyone? Does it even make sense to attempt such a policy?)

But if “check if the thing you’re doing will bring you happiness; if not, stop doing it” is not what we’re meant to do with the answer to that question, then—what?

Maybe I’m missing something here, but… actively pursuing “happiness” is already a somewhat weird thing to be doing to begin with; trying to pursue happiness by asking whether the thing that you’re doing will bring you happiness seems like an almost wholesale confusion.