This can be quite frustrating if you want to figure out “what happens if I do X”, and all the answers provided by science turn out to be about “what happens if people kinda want to do X, but then most of them don’t”.
I mean, it is good and potentially important to know that most people who kinda want to do X will fail to actually do it… but it doesn’t answer the original question.
a majority of long-term monogamous, hetero relationships are sexually unsatisfying for the man after a decade or so.
This seems supported by the popular wisdom. Question is, how much this is about relationships and sex specifically, and how much it is just another instance of a more general “life is full of various frustrations” or “when people reach their goals, after some time they became unsatisfied again” i.e. hedonistic treadmill.
sexual satisfaction is basically binary
Is it?
most women eventually settle on a guy they don’t find all that sexually attractive, so it should not be surprising if that relationship ends up with very little sex after a few years.
So, basically those women pretend to be more attracted than they are (to their partner, and probably also to themselves) in order to get married. Then they gradually stop pretending.
But why is it so important to get married (or whatever was the goal of the original pretending), but then it is no longer important to keep the marriage happy? Is that because women get whatever they want even from an unhappy marriage, and divorces are unlikely? That doesn’t feel like a sufficient explanation to me: divorces are quite frequent, and often initiated by women.
I guess I am not sure what exactly is the women’s utility function that this model assumes.
Why don’t the men in question just leave?
Kids, not wanting to lose money in divorce, other value the partner provides, general lack of agency, hoping that the situation will magically improve… probably all of that together.
Also, it seems to me that often both partners lose value on the dating market when they start taking their relationship for granted, stop trying hard, gain weight, stop doing interesting things, and generally get older. Even if the guy is frustrated, that doesn’t automatically mean that entering the dating market again would make him happy. I imagine that many divorced men find out that an alternative to “sex once a month” could also be “sex never” (or “sex once a month, but it also takes a lot of time and effort and money”).
This could be addressed by making a user interface which not only gives the user’s prompt to the LLM, but also provides additional instructions and automatically asks additional questions. The answers to those additional questions could be displayed in smaller font as a side note, or maybe as graphical icons. One such question would be “in this answer, did you simplify things? if yes, tell me a few extra things I could pay attention to in order to get a better understanding of the topic” or something like that.
If you know a fact about humans, then mammals are not important. Humans like stories. Doesn’t matter if mammals in general don’t.
If you don’t know a fact about humans, but somehow you know the fact about mammals, you can use it as evidence (although not as a proof). For example, in a culture with a strong religious taboo against human autopsy they could dissect various mammals, and make probabilistic statements about human anatomy.
Today, a more typical situation is two groups of people, each declaring that they know for a fact that humans are / are not X. In such situation, if you have no way to verify the fact directly, I guess you could use the information about mammals to make a probabilistic estimate about which group is correct.
Also, from a perspective of a scientist, if all mammals are X, then the fact that humans are also X is… not completely guaranteed, but not really surprising. On the other hand, if all other mammals are X but humans don’t… that is definitely possible, but it makes me really curious why. What is the difference, and what was the possible reason evolution made it so?
Good point.
I think there are still two different topics, although with some overlap: how to budget and how to get rich. Good budgeting is good, whether you are poor or rich. If you are poor, it can help avoid losing everything. If you are rich, it can help avoid wasting all your money and becoming non-rich.
But the (implied) idea that budgeting can make poor people rich, or that it is the main force that keeps poor and rich apart… that does not automatically follow, and actually many people doubt it. Hypothetically they may be wrong, but this needs to be checked separately.
Basically, budgeting can never save more money than “your income, minus the minimum necessary expenses”. If your income is e.g. $300 a month, there is no way you could save more than $300 a month. Realistically, you probably can’t even save $50 a month.
Even if you every month put $50 into passively managed index funds (which already seems like an unrealistic best case scenario for someone who makes $300 a month), this will not make you rich. It will help you save $600 a year, $6000 a decade, so maybe $300 000 during a lifetime, generating a passive income of $12000 a year, that is $1000 a month by the time you are old and retired, under the most optimistic scenario. And I am sure that most rich people spend more than $1000 a month.
So what you need is a combination of decent income + good budgeting + good investing, and then keep doing that for decades. Which means that even assuming that it can make you rich, it will only make you rich in a distant future, not now. In other words, if you started poor, even if you are doing everything right, you can still be poor, because the expected wealth is still a few decades in the future, not here and now.
EDIT: And meanwhile, a rich person has inherited a trust fund from their parents, spends as much money as the fund gives them every month, and doesn’t have to worry about anything. The only budgeting skill needed is something like “make sure your monthly expenses do not exceed $20000 this month”.
Then maybe I can link to those posts in a larger post
Yes, this seems to me like a good strategy for posting on LW. Start with smaller, then generalize (and link to previous posts when needed).
One advantage is that when things go wrong—if one of the smaller articles is strongly rejected—it gives you an opportunity to stop and reflect. Maybe you were wrong, in which case it is good that you didn’t write the more general article (because it would be downvoted). Maybe the LW readers were wrong, but that still means that you should communicate your (smaller, specific) point better, before moving to more general claims.
Another advantage is that, if your circumstances or priorities change, and suddenly you don’t have time to write for LW anymore, the smaller self-contained articles still provide value.
I have seen people make a mistake of posting a long outline first (which sometimes even got lots of upvotes), and then part 2 got downvoted because readers fundamentally disagreed with it… and now what? If someone disagrees with the part 2, they probably won’t be happy about part 3 which builds upon the part 2, so now every part would get a downvote.
I would suggest choosing a less grandiose topic. Something more specific; perhaps something that you know well. (“What is true of one apple may not be true of another apple; thus more can be said about a single apple than about all the apples in the world.”—source)
As a reader I prefer it when the posts are self-contained; when I get a value from the post even without clicking any of the links. The information linked should be optional to the experience.
Looking at the topics of my posts… books I have read (1, 2, 3), things happening in the rationality community (1, 2), some psychological things I have noticed (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), questions (1, 2, 3, 4), things that started like comments but turned out to be too long (1, 2, 3), playing with math (1, 2). There is no theory of everything, no proposal to fix humanity, etc.
feedback expressing painpoints/emotion is valuable, whereas feedback expressing implementation/solutions is not.
Yep. Or, let’s say that the kind of feedback that provides solutions is worthless 99% of time. Because it is possible in principle to provide a good advice, it’s just that most people do not have the necessary qualification and experience but may be overconfident about their qualification.
I find it ironical that popular wisdom seems to go the other way round, and “constructive criticism” is praised as the right thing to do. Which just doesn’t make sense; for example I can say that a meal tastes bad, even if I don’t know how to cook; or I can complain about pain without being able to cure it.
I agree that something being “natural” doesn’t make it “right”. But “natural” is still a force of nature that you have to include in your predictions… unless you are okay with getting your predictions systematically wrong.
Applying this to the examples you mentioned:
Males are more aggressive in most animals; therefore, male humans should be expected to be more aggressive.
Yes, 100% agree. Notice that this doesn’t say anything about aggression being good or otherwise desirable; the statement is positive, not normative.
Do you have an alternative explanation for gender ratios in violent crime statistics?
Females are the natural caregivers in most mammals; therefore, human mothers should primarily raise children.
Okay, we have a “should” here; that is a mistake. But we could make a positive statement out of it, something like “on average, females will be more successful caregivers than males”, especially if they are randomly selected from the population (rather than self-selected).
Of course, “more successful” does not automatically translate to “should”; we need to balance it against other interests.
Hierarchies exist in many animal groups; therefore, human social hierarchies and inequality are natural and acceptable.
Here, I would make a statement like “human social hierarchies are a natural attractor, so if you want to avoid them, you need to think really carefully about how to design your group, because it is very unlikely to happen automatically”.
Alpha males dominate in many mammal groups; therefore, dominant, assertive men should naturally be leaders.
Similarly, something like “there are many dominant men, so you either need to accept that you will have a leader like this (and maybe focus on figuring out how to choose the best one out of multiple candidates) or you need to think really carefully about how to avoid this outcome”.
Animals eat meat; therefore, human meat consumption is natural and morally acceptable.
The positive statement would be something like: “you need to think really carefully about designing a vegetarian diet that will be healthy in long term, because the most likely outcome of ‘just don’t eat meat, duh’ is some kind of nutritional deficiency”.
Metaphorically speaking, opposing the nature is like opposing gravity. Yes, you can build airplanes and tall buildings. But you need to design them carefully, otherwise a disaster will happen. Just saying “I hate gravity, it is such an oppressive concept that it should not be allowed to mention in a polite society” is not going to do it.
The people outside the town who buy houses here either expect to rent them expensively, or to use them as an investment because they expect the costs of housing to grow. (Or a combination of both.)
Refusing to build more houses means doing exactly the thing they want—it keeps the rents high, and it keeps the costs growing.
If you have 500 000 people in the town, and 100 000 houses are owned by people outside the town, you should build more houses until there are 600 000 of them (i.e. not only 500 000). Then the people outside the town will find it difficult to rent their houses expensively, and may start worrying that the costs will not grow sufficiently to justify their investments.
My problem with democracy is that most people are stupid. More precisely, they are relatively good at saying whether they are happy or unhappy, starving or fed, etc. They can give a relatively reliable “thumb up” or “thumb down” feedback to the government. But if you ask them about the specific steps that should be taken to make them better fed, etc., many of the popular suggestions will be quite insane.
For example, people can have a legitimate complaint about healthcare being inaccessible for them, and yet the suggestion many would propose will be something like “government should spend more money on homeopathy and spiritual healing, and should definitely stop vaccination and other evil unnatural things”.
This seems inevitable to some degree. We can’t realistically expect that everyone will be an expert on everything. And we want to allow feedback such as “the experts are hurting us, and we want that to stop”, but we don’t really want the non-experts to micro-manage the experts.
The traditional solution is to give people only the “thumb up/down” kind of feedback. For example, in capitalism, you can choose to buy or not to buy a certain kind of product or service, but you can’t e.g. go to a restaurant and demand that they start cooking meals according to your recipe, no matter how good that recipe sounds to you. But you can start your own restaurant that will cook according to your recipes, and then the customers will vote on the result.
Even this approach has many problems, because some things seem good in short term, but are harmful in long term, and these often get a “thumb up” from the non-experts. The more tasty food can be less healthy. The economic problems or successes of today may be a consequence of things that the previous government did.
The problem with democracy is externalities. People who vote for stupid things don’t only hurt themselves; they equally hurt their neighbors. It would be better to set up things in a way that when people insist on doing the wrong thing, they hurt themselves more than they hurt the others. But this itself is a subject to voting, and many people oppose it.
...shortly, I am worried that this would allow democratic micro-management, i.e. the rule of stupid.
That said, I am not sure what is the optimal level of democracy, but I am suspicious of the assumption that more is necessarily better.
Ah, then I believe the answer is “no”.
On the time scale of current human lifespan, I guess I could point out that some old people are unkind, or that some criminals keep re-offending a lot, so it doesn’t seem like time automatically translates to more kindness.
But an obvious objection is “well, maybe they need 200 years of time, or 1000”, and I can’t provide empirical evidence against that. So I am not sure how to settle this question.
On average, people get less criminal as they get older, so that would point towards human kindness increasing in time. On the other hand, they also get less idealistic, on average, so maybe a simpler explanation is that as people get older, they get less active in general. (Also, some reduction in crime is caused by the criminals getting killed as a result of their lifestyle.)
There is probably a significant impact of hormone levels, which means that we need to make an assumption about how the God-emperor would regulate their own hormones. For example, if he decides to keep a 25 years old human male body, maybe his propensity to violence will match the body?
tl;dr—what kinds of arguments should even be used in this debate?
Well, if we assume that humans are fundamentally good / inevitably converging to kindness if given enough time… then, yeah, giving someone God-emperor powers is probably going to be good in long term. (If they don’t accidentally make an irreparable mistake.)
I just strongly disagree with this assumption.
Sounds to me like wishful thinking. You basically assume that in 1 000 000 years people will get bored of doing the wrong thing, and start doing the right thing. My perspective is that “good” is a narrow target in the possibility space, and if someone already keeps missing it now, if we expand their possibility space by making them a God-emperor, the chance of converging to that narrow target only decreases.
Basically, for your model to work, kindness would need to be the only attractor in the space of human (actually, post-human) psychology.
A simple example of how things could go wrong is for Genghis Khan to set up an AI to keep everyone else in horrible conditions forever, and then (on purpose, or accidentally) wirehead himself.
Another example is the God-emperor editing their own brain to remove all empathy, e.g. because they consider it a weakness at the moment. Once all empathy is uninstalled, there is no incentive to reinstall it.
EDIT: I see that Thane Ruthenis already made this argument, and didn’t convince you.
Yes, if you have 500 000 people in town, you need to produce food for 500 000 people all the time. While if you have 500 000 people in town, you only need to build houses for 500 000 once.
But the logic of “there is a shortage of X, therefore the proper solution is to ban the production of X and hope that the problem will magically go away” is insane either way.
“I’m tired of this simplified idea that building more buildings here will solve the affordable housing problem”
I am tired of this simplified idea that giving people more food will solve the hunger problem. (Insert sophisticated arguments about how supermarkets throw away lots of perfectly okay food, etc.) Therefore, making more food should remain banned.
Are people fundamentally good?
Maybe some people are, and some people are not?
Are they practically good?
Not sure if we are talking about the same thing, but I think that there are many people who just “play it safe”, and in a civilized society that generally means following the rules and avoiding unnecessary conflicts. The same people can behave differently if you give them power (even on a small scale, e.g. when they have children).
But I think there are also people who try to do good even when the incentives point the other way round. And also people who can’t resist hurting others even when that predictably gets them punished.
Given more information about someone, your capacity for having {commune, love, compassion, kindness, cooperation} for/with them increases more than your capacity for {hatred, adversariality} towards them increases.
Knowing more about people allows you to have a better model of them. So if you started with the assumption e.g. that people who don’t seem sufficiently similar to you are bad, then knowing them better will improve your attitude towards them. On the other hand, if you started from some kind of Pollyanna perspective, knowing people better can make you disappointed and bitter. Finally, if you are a psychopath, knowing people better just gives you more efficient ways to exploit them.
I’d like to know how you handle arguing for something like “usability” in the face of a morally urgent argument like “don’t be eurocentric.”
I would probably start with rejecting the premise that I have to listen to other people’s arguments.
(This makes even more sense when we know that the people who loudly express their opinions are often just a tiny minority of users. However, it is perfectly possible to ignore the majority, too.)
I think this is a mistake that many intelligent people make, to believe that you need to win verbal fights. Perhaps identifying as a rationalist can make it even worse, if you conflate “being rational” with “winning verbal fights”. The trick is to realize that it is perfectly possible to hear a verbal argument against doing X, and then do X anyway (without having to win the verbal fight first, or at all).
Similar here. I wouldn’t want to constrain my 100 years older self too much, but that doesn’t mean that I identify with something very vague like “existence itself”. There is a difference between “I am not sure about the details” and “anything goes”.
Just like my current self is not the same as my 20 years old self, but that doesn’t mean that you could choose any 50 years old guy and say that all of them have the same right to call themselves a future version of my 20 years old self. I extrapolate the same to the future: there are some hypothetical 1000 years old humans who could be called future versions of myself, and there are many more who couldn’t.
Just because people change in time, that doesn’t mean it is a random drift. I don’t think that the distribution of possible 1000 years old versions of me is very similar to a distribution of possible 1000 years old versions of someone else. Hypothetically, for a sufficiently large number this might be possible—I don’t know—but 1000 years seems not enough for that.
Seems to me that there are some things that do not change much as people grow older. Even people who claim that their lives have dramatically changed, have often only changed in one out of many traits, or maybe they just found a different strategy how to follow the same fundamental values.
At least as an approximation: people’s knowledge and skills change, their values don’t.
Occam’s razor says that Trump makes populist statements that appeal to the kind of person who votes for Trump. Whether those are actually good ideas is irrelevant. Mercantilism sounds good to a person who doesn’t know much about economy. Territorial expansion rhymes with “make great”.
21st-century economics is just as irrelevant as e.g. 21-st century medicine. Scientists are not an important group of voters.