LessWrong 2.0 Reader

I agree that virtues should be thought of as trainable skills, which is also why I like David Gross's idea of a virtue gym [LW · GW]:

Two misconceptions sometimes cause people to give up too early on developing virtues:

1. that virtues are talents that some people have and other people don’t as a matter of predisposition, genetics, the grace of God, or what have you (“I’m just not a very influential / graceful / original person”), and
2. that having a virtue is not a matter of developing a habit but of having an opinion (e.g. I agree that creativity is good, and I try to respect the virtue of creativity that way, rather than by creating).

It’s better to think of a virtue as a skill like any other. Like juggling, it might be hard at first, it might come easier to some people than others, but almost anyone can learn to do it if they put in persistent practice.

We are creatures of habit: We create ourselves by what we practice. If we adopt habits carelessly, we risk becoming what we never intended to be. If instead we deliberate about what habits we want to cultivate, and then actually put in the work, we can become the sculptors of our own characters.

What if there were some institution like a “virtue gymnasium” in which you could work on virtues alongside others, learning at your own pace, and building a library of wisdom about how to go about it most productively? What if there were something like Toastmasters, or Alcoholics Anonymous, or the YMCA but for all of the virtues?

Conversations with LLMs could be the "home gym" equivalent I suppose.

The link in the OP explains it:

In ~2020 we witnessed the Men’s/Women’s World Cup Scandal. The US Men’s Soccer team had failed to qualify for the previous World Cup, whereas the US Women’s Soccer team had won theirs! And yet the women were paid less that season after winning than the men were paid after failing to qualify. There was Discourse.

I was in the car listening to NPR, pulling out of the parking lot of a glass supplier when my world shattered again.³ One of the NPR leftist commenters said roughly ~‘One can propose that the mens team and womens team play against each other to sort this out—’

At which point I mentally pumped my fist in the air and cheered. I had been thinking exactly this for WEEKS. I couldn’t quite understand why no one had said it! As we all know, men and women are largely undifferentiated. Soccer is a perfect example of this, because the sport doesn’t allow men to use their upper-body strength advantage at all. The one thing that makes men stand out is neutralized here, and a direct competition would put this thing to rest and humiliate all the sexists. I smiled and waited to see how the right-wing asshat would squirm out of having to endorse a match that we all knew would shut him up.

The left-wing commentator continued ‘—is what one would say if one is a right-wing deplorable that just wants to laugh while humiliating those that are already oppressed. Naturally none of us would ever propose such a thing, we aren’t horrible people. Here’s what they get wrong…”

I didn’t hear any more after that, because my world had shattered again. A proponent of my side was not only admitting that the women’s team would lose badly, but that everyone knew and had always known that the women’s team would lose badly, so the only reason one would even suggest such a thing was to humiliate them.

Here I was, in my late 30s, still believing that men and women are basically the same, like a fucking chump. Do these people realize how much of my life, my personal and public decisions, my views of my fellow man and my plans for the future, were predicated on this being actually true? Not a single person had ever once bothered to take me aside and whisper “Hey, we know this isn’t actually true, we’re just acting this way because it leads to better outcomes for society, on net, if we do. Obviously we make exceptions for the places where the literal truth is important. Welcome to the secret club, don’t tell the kids.”

These were the people who always had told me men and women are equal in all things, explicitly saying that anyone who actually really believed this was a deplorable right-wing troll. I could taste the betrayal in my mouth. It tasted of bile. How had this happened to me again?

A couple years prior I had lost a woman I dearly loved, as well as the associated friend group, when I had Not Gotten The Joke about a different belief and accidentally acted as if I believed something that everyone agreed to say was true was Actually True⁴. I didn’t understand what had happened back then. Now it was starting to make sense. I was too damn trusting and autistic to make a reliable ally in a world bereft of truth. 

Huh, Aella is more commited to the anti-shower stance than even Twitter would think.

Thanks! This is really good stuff, it's super cool that the 'vibes' of comics or notes transfer over to the text generation setting too. 

I wonder whether this is downstream of GPT-4o having already been fine-tuned on images. I.e. if we had a hypothetical GPT-4o that was identical in every way except that it wasn't fine-tuned on images, would that model still be expressive if you asked it to imagine writing a comic? (I think not). 

Some quick test with 4o-mini: 

Obviously this could also be because the model is smaller, etc. Should check old versions of gpt-4o when I'm at my laptop 

So what made you change your mind?

The methods for converting policies to utility functions assume no systematic errors, which doesn't seem compatible with varying the intelligence levels.

This.

In particular imagine if the state space of the MDP factors into three variables x, y and z, and the agent has a bunch of actions with complicated influence on x, y and z but also just some actions that override y directly with a given value.

In some such MDPs, you might want a policy that does nothing other than copy a specific function of x to y. This policy could easily be seen as a virtue, e.g. if x is some type of event and y is some logging or broadcasting input, then it would be a sort of information-sharing virtue.

While there are certain circumstances where consequentialism can specify this virtue, it's quite difficult to do in general. (E.g. you can't just minimize the difference between f(x) and y because then it might manipulate x instead of y.)

anything that outputs decisions implies a utility function

I think this is only true in a boring sense and isn't true in more natural senses. For example, in an MDP, it's not true that every policy maximises a non-constant utility function over states.

Yes, virtue ethics implies a utility function, because anything that outputs decisions implies a utility function. In this case, I'm noting that for virtue ethics, the derivative of that utility with respect to intelligence is positive. 

Any chance we could get Ghibli Mode back? I miss my little blue monster :(