A talented developer can fluently translate a high level description of an algorithm into code in a language or ecosystem they are familiar with.
Could you say a little bit more about what “fluency” is in this context? It’s doing all the work in this section but I’m not sure I understand what you’re trying to communicate.
California is not capable of extracting tax revenue from companies like Google in any meaningful way, so we shouldn’t expect them to be capable of taking stronger, less directly self-benefiting action. If they can’t get Google to pay them, they can’t get Google to stop AI.
What is California’s great track record in this space? They have caused “May cause cancer in California” to be printed many times. We shouldn’t expect them to save us.
In general, committing to any stance as a personal constant (making it a “part of your identity”) is antithetical to truthseeking. It certainly imposes a constraint on truthseeking that makes the problem harder.
But, if you share that stance with someone else, you won’t tend to see it. You’ll just see the correctness of your own stance. Being able to correctly reason around this is a hard-mode problem.
While you can speak about specific spectra of stances (vegan-carnist, and others), in reality, there are multiple spectra in play at any given time (the one I see the most is liberal-radical but there are also others). This leads to truthseeking constraints or in a word biases in cross-cutting ways. This seems to play out in the interplay of all the different people committing all the different sins called out in the OP. I think this is not unique to veganism at all and in fact plays out in virtually all similar spaces and contests. You always have to average out the ideological bias from a community.
There is no such thing as an epistemic environment that has not declared war on you. There can be no peace. This is hard mode and I consider the OP here to be another restatement of the generally accepted principle that this kind of discussion is hard mode / mindkilling.
This is why I’m highly skeptical of claims like the comment-grandparent. Everyone is lying, and it doesn’t matter much whether the lying is intentional or implicit. There is no such thing as a political ideology that is fully truth-seeking. That is a contradiction in terms. There is also no such thing as a fully neutral political ideology or political/ethical stance; everyone has a point of view. I’m not sure whether the vegans are in fact worse than the carnists on this. One side certainly has a significant amount of status-quo bias behind it. The same can be said about many other things.
Just to be explicitly, my point of view as it relates to these issues is vegan/radical, I became vegan roughly at the same time I became aware of rationalism but for other reasons, and when I went vegan the requirement for b12 supplementation was commonly discussed (outside the rationalist community, which was not very widely vegan at the time) mostly because “you get it from supplements that get it from dirt” was the stock counterargument to “but no b12 when vegan.”
I think the critical difference is that while marital rape might not be a legal crime, and might not be seen as wrong by people who aren’t subjected to it, it’s obviously wrong for the person suffering it, and obviously identifiable as coercive and abusive even to the perpetrator.
The spectrum then becomes (recognized as wrong x feels wrong) → (not recognized as wrong → feels wrong) → (recognized as wrong x doesn’t feel wrong) → (not recognized as wrong x doesn’t feel wrong).
I think people are only talking about quadrant 3 when saying “sexual abuse attitudes could be [bad].” And that is, like you point out, something that people experience differently, and depends on the specifics of the case rather than the category. It’s a near certainty that some of the cases described in this comment are in fact nonconsensual and traumatic, for example. But if someone who did not experience trauma from that practice emigrated to the West and was told over and over again that something deeply traumatic happened to them, this seems like an instance where the problem could be “created out of thin air” as you put it.
Overall, though, the question is whether quadrant 2 or quadrant 3 is bigger, and I think it’s very likely that quadrant 3, while existent, is not as large as quadrant 2. Thanks for pointing this out.
The firearm use is a weird thing to point out. The usual explanation I see here is that social programming directed towards women drives them to value appearance more highly and use methods that are not as disfiguring, which means no firearms, but also no trains, bridges, high buildings, and so on.
Control is not a constant, and ability to effectively control depends on the social context. The state itself has acted as a counterweight to parental control for hundreds of years, and capital also acts as a counterweight—if you don’t want to live the way your parents want you to live or marry who they want you to marry, you can run away to the city and live free, which is easier if there are strong laws preventing you from being hunted down and honor-killed and jobs waiting for you in the urban center. Control was arguably at all-time lows in the late 60s and 70s. But the 80s are a period of reaction against these excesses, and safetyism can be argued to have started in the 80s. The first law mandating car seats is passed in 1979 and the first law mandating seat belts in 1984. More tellingly, the satanic ritual abuse panic kicks off hard in 1983 with the McMartin trial and the next year satanic ritual abuse panic advocates testify before Congress. Stranger danger spreads as a meme, reducing the ability of young people to travel freely via hitchhiking, even though the actual risk remains low.
The Internet disrupts this control process by creating a new space where young people are more able to navigate than parents. I’d argue this is the cause of the decline through the 90s: increased freedom from the nascent Internet. Gradually, this is curtailed as BBSs become forums, and forums become social media. At the same time, censorship is productized and sold to parents, and as early as 2008 schools were having extracurricular brainwashing sessions designed to scare children away from using the Internet as a vehicle of expression because “what’s on the Internet is forever.” I do not understand how parental and state oversight could be said to be minimal on social media. Schools install spyware on their own devices and recommend parents do the same. “Parental control features” are ubiquitous and you can’t crack your mom’s password with a l0phtcrack CD because Windows Vista didn’t use NTLM hashes. The endpoints are controlled. You live in a panopticon. Even Kindles have parental controls, but paper books don’t.
2011 is arguably the death rattle of free speech on the Internet. Wikileaks goes from being the place where you download the Scientology PDFs to being a terrorist group in the eyes of the US government and I think promotes a lot more walling-off of the gardens of the Internet. Reddit shuts down several subreddits in 2011, going from being a free speech social media website to what it is now. SOPA is introduced in October. If the Internet gave young people hope in the 90s, 2011 is the year that hope started dying, amidst the Arab Spring, the Eurozone collapse, and the Occupy movement. The high school first years in the fall of 2011 would graduate the spring of 2016, just in time to see Trump elected.
And finally, conservatives live in the country. The country is inherently less conducive to control than the city. Insurgents hide in the countryside. People go to parties in the fields. You can light huge bonfires and get drunk next to them and nobody will see or hear you. People in cities have to have better coordinating to create spaces like this, which is limited by a censored and surveilled Internet. Conservativism as an ideology is less conducive to paternalistic control. But I think the urban/rural divide is the main driver here.
We have been going through a societal cycle of increasing control since the 80s that was disrupted by the computer and the Internet, but since 2011, smartphones, and social media, the Internet has become another vehicle of control, rather than the liberatory technology it once was that made life literally worth living for so many young people. To me, this explains all of the holes much more parsimoniously than “Socrates was wrong about books, but I’m right about network television tiktok.” The falsification for this is if there are any similar studies showing that abstaining from forums or BBS’s or other pre-social-media Internet coordination systems improves mental health. I don’t expect to see that. I remember the free Internet.
You’re quite welcome.
I honestly have no idea. It might be in Expect Resistance somewhere, which if not directly about this topic, is generally about it.
I may have been (edit: was probably) thinking about The Promise of Defeat, by Moxie Marlinspike, anarchist cyrptographer sailor extraordinaire and the author of the Signal protocol (and the original Signal app, though he’s no longer with the project).
Imagine what it was like for those of us who were talking about transhumanism, AI alignment, morphological freedom, cryonics, nootropics, keto diets, kettlebells, etc., in 2010, not 2023.
Welcome to the bleeding edge. It’s not an easy life.
The most important thing to do is to learn to trust your research and the truth over what the tribe says. This can be very hard. I eventually sold most of my bitcoin after all my friends and family spent the summer of 2012 or so screaming at me that it was a bubble, a scam, etc., which seemed confirmed when the price crashed from $35 down to $5 -- don’t make that mistake.
Learn to isolate yourself from people that are reliably harmful. Don’t be a crab in the bucket. Get out of the bucket. Deal with helping out the people you care about later.
Read anarchists. Anarchists have had no hope since 1936 and still have never stopped fighting. I’m pretty sure there’s a CrimethInc. essay on exactly this topic.
I’m not saying it’s bad to do these things.
I’m saying that if you’re doing them as a distraction from inner pain, you’re basically drunk.
How is this falsifiable?
Can you point to five people who have done this, but still have a different orientation from you?
The problem isn’t that access to emotion is ableist. I think that suggestion is itself ableist, neurodiverse people have complete access to their emotions, their emotional reactions to certain things might simply be different.
The problem is that no matter what you do, if you come to a conclusion different from OP, you are simply still “disembodied.” You just need to “do more work.” This is a way of counting the hits and excusing the misses. “Embodiment” is not “being in touch with your emotions,” it is acting in the manner prescribed.
What is ableist is saying that there is a single state, “embodiment,” which coincidentally overlaps entirely with several other things prescribed, and if you are not in that state, there is a psychological problem with you. This is neurotypical supremacy.
As I said in the other post in this thread to which you replied, there are other ways to deal with this. You do not have to do breathwork. You do not have to meditate. You do not have to “listen to your body.” These are ideological prescriptions. They poorly emulate cognitive-behavioral therapy, which is a much more effective way to process emotions and resolve maladaptive behavior patterns.
This is why the comment parent and myself think that this post is manipulative. It presents a real problem, but frames it in terms such that the only possible solution is the wholesale adoption of the author’s ideology. The honest post on this topic would have mentioned other solutions, which maybe the author did not personally experience but understands, through systematizing and integrating their own experiences and the experiences of others, to be also solutions to the same problem.
Lots of ink, but lots to think about. I’m thankful for this post fwiw.
The “no technical meaning” could maybe be an indicator of sarcasm. But you’re right that there was no way for you to know I wasn’t just misapplying the term in the same way as the OP.
I don’t think this relates to group polarization per se but I take your point.
I didn’t mean “triggered” to mean extremely so, someone can be mildly triggered and again, I apologize for (in my perception, based on your comment) doing that. I think you did the right thing.
It does strike me as a rather fully general counterargument, written in a deliberately obfuscatory/”woo” style. The focus on “listening to your body” seems like an obfuscation, it’s an appeal to something deliberately put beyond measurement. This does seem like it could apply to anything anyone cares about (you’re a Red Sox fan? You’re addicted to the suffering, your body is telling you to stop, land on Earth and get sober!). If you have any reasons to disagree, that’s coming from a place of addiction and you need to stop caring and presumably follow a similar life-path to OP because that is the only thing that works, everything else is a death-cult.
I don’t buy it, to say the least, and I think it’s only the social connections that people have to the OP that make anyone treat it charitably. People have been saying this since the earliest days of the discussion of this topic on the Internet; this fully general counterargument predates Eliezer Yudkowsky being appropriately pessimistic about AI.
I also think that the characterization that all rationalism comes from “disembodiment” is essentially an ableist slur. Using ableist slurs and appealing to the hierarchy of ableism is always manipulative and is never appropriate. Unfortunately as people have come to the rationalist community more with the intention of using it as a springboard for their own careers, we’ve had to deal with more and more overt and covert ableism as a rather underhanded way of putting a thumb on the scales. If we’re to truly abandon the supremacy of the neurotypical, and truly embrace neurodiversity, we also have to embrace a diversity of “embodiment” (to the extent that is a valid and real concept, which I doubt), which the OP thoroughly does not.
I completely agree and I think that levying the charges “disembodied” against anything on the opposite side of the mental dichotomy of “woo” is a weasel-word for the ableist slur of “autistic.” I’m sorry this wasn’t more clear, but I thought that sentence was fairly dripping as is. I’ve written about this before as it applies to this topic, which is not to excuse the harm I’ve done if I’ve triggered you, but to show that I’ve precommitted to this stance on this issue.
It was always a Cthulhu LARP. Remember that one thing?
Groups polarize over time. One of the ways to signal group membership is to react explosively to the things you’re supposed to react explosively to. This is why as politics in the US have polarized, everyone has grown more breathless and everything is ${OUTGROUP}ist. You gain ${KARMA} by being more breathless and emotional. You can only stop this with explicit effort, but if you do that, you look dissociated, disembodied, autistic, and the social pressure against that is stronger than the social pressure against letting (totally normal, status-quo) group polarization get to the point of literally mindkilling people.
The military also has techniques to avoid this, but there are similar social pressures against them from both sides of the equation, because the military is low-status both to the postrationalist types (like OP) and to actual rationalists (like the people setting social norms at CFAR). So you don’t see those being used.
It’s completely possible to have the alignment research you want, you’ll just have to set the group norms, which is a completely orthogonal problem that involves a lot of things besides alignment research. Personally I think this would be a very good thing to do and I encourage you to try for the experience of it if nothing else.
I don’t know what’s up with the 80% category
Interestingly I’ve had the same issue, though I’m also not as well calibrated at the lower levels as you are, I also have a noticable calibration dip at around 80%.
Wolves don’t seem to have any capability to morally introspect. Do you agree with this?
If you do, it seems silly to expect them to behave morally. Humans, on the other hand, can behave morally, at least on average.
There is no such thing as “well-treated livestock.” If you think this is incorrect, devise a livestock method behind the veil of ignorance and share it here. But generally murder is not well-treatment. Rape is not well-treatment. If you were a farmed animal, you would have been murdered at the age of seven, extrapolating from the average age of farmed animal murder as a percentage of lifespan. Do you think it is okay to murder a seven-year-old assuming it is painless? If you were murdered at seven, would you consider it a life well-lived? Would you prefer to be slaughtered “painlessly” at age seven, or perhaps live longer and be killed by wolves?
Not to be inflammatory, but I don’t believe that the reasons for your abandoning veganism actually were these. It is far too convenient. You probably just wanted to taste meat again. If you have some health excuse, I recommend blending your meat into a tasteless, drinkable slurry to avoid these arguments—and if you really did abandon veganism simply because you’re hopeless about the wild animal’s suffering, you should be happy to do this! If it isn’t about your ability to eat meat, that is. If it is, you should be honest and say you abandoned veganism because you enjoy the taste of blood in your mouth.
Are you a wolf? Come on.
You’re ignoring an important aspect. Humans directly cause the suffering of farmed animals. It could be more important to eliminate the rape and murder humans directly inflict on farmed animals prior to optimizing the wild ecosystem. For example, there could be other negative utility from social technologies/institutions around industrialized animal rape and murder. I see the Holocaust as one such example of what those who rape and murder nonhumans will eventually (and inevitably) do to humans.
Writing algorithms that are 50 lines of code seems like one definition of fluency, and one that is probably relevant in compilers/backend, but this also rings a little hollow to me, in terms of the pragmatics of real software engineering.
In my experience, most software engineering is using libraries, not language features; how would you describe fluency over libraries? Is “glue code” like command-line flags or CRUD web app routing subject to this? Should that code also “just flow”? In my experience truly powerful developers are able to do this, but even many Google L5s will just look up this code every time. Is that “fluent”? Is there a better concept to be applying here other than “fluency”?
My impression is that this is outside the scope of what you’re describing, “implementing algorithms.” This is an important part of software engineering, but I would say it’s not entirely overlapping with what I would call “building <things/tools/products>”. Would you agree? How would you relate these two aspects?