LessWrong 2.0 Reader

Personally, I read approximately everything you (Elizabeth) write on the Forum and LW, and occasionally cite it to others in EA leadership world. That's why I'm pretty sure your work has had nontrivial impact. I am not too surprised that its impact hasn't become apparent to you though.

[...]

I don't see solutions or great ways forward yet, and I sense that nobody really does

That does sound like learned helplessness and that the EA leadership filters people out who would see ways forward.

Let me give you one:

If people in EA would consider her critiques to have real value, then the obvious step is to give Elizabeth money to write more. Given that she has a Patreon the way to give her money is pretty straightforward. If the writing influences what happens in EV board discussions, paying Elizabeth for the value she provides for the board would be straightforward. 

If she would get paid decently, I would expect she would feel she's making an impact. 

Paying Elizabeth might not be the solution to all of EA's problems, but it's a way to signal priorities. Estimate the value she provides to EA and then pay her for that value and publically publish as EV a writeup that EV thinks that this is the amount of value she provides to EA and was paid by EV. 

I like this post. I made similar observations and arguments in The Translucent Thoughts Hypotheses and Their Implications [LW · GW] but these were less clear and buried at the end of the post.

Your definition of the Heaviside step function has H(0) = 1.
Your definition of L has L(0) = 1/2, so you're not really taking the derivative of the same function.

I don't really believe nonstandard analysis helps us differentiate the Heaviside step function. You have found a function that is quite a lot like the step function and shown that it has a derivative (maybe), but I would need to be convinced that all functions have the same derivative to be convinced that something meaningful is going on.  (And since all your derivatives have different values, this seems like a not useful definition of a derivative)

Alternatively

Still . . .

The early signs have been promising.

What concrete things did he change at CEA that are promising signs?

If I say that other psychiatrists at the conference are engaging in an ethical lapse when they charge late fees to poor people then I'm engaging in an uncomfortable interpersonal conflict. It's about personal incentives that actually matter a lot to the day-to-day practice of psychiatry. 

While the psychiatrists are certainly aware of them charging poor people, they are likely thinking about it normally as business as usual instead of considering it as an ethical issue. 

If we take Scott's example of psychiatrists talking about racism being a problem in psychiatry I don't think the problem is that that racism is unimportant. The problem is rather that you can get points by virtue signaling talking about the problem and find common ground around the virtue signaling if you are willing to burn a few scapegoats while talking about the issues of charging poor people late fees is divisive. 

Washington DC is one of the most liberal places in the US with people who are good at virtue signaling and pretending they care about "solving systematic racism" yet, they passed a bill to require college degrees for childcare services. If you apply the textbook definition of systematic racism, requiring college degrees for childcare services is about creating a system that prevents poor Black people to look after children. 

Systematic racism that prevents poor Black people from offering childcare services is bad but the people in Washington DC are good at rationalising. The whole discourse about racism is of a nature where people score their points by virtue signaling about how they care about fighting racism. They practice steelmanning racism all the time and steelmanning the concept of systematic racism and yet they pass systematic racist laws because they don't like poor Black people looking after their children. 

If you tell White people in Washington DC who are already steelmanning systematic racism to the best of their ability that they should steelman it more because they are still inherently racist, they might even agree with you, but it's not what's going to make them change the laws so that more poor Black people will look after their children. 

That tactic helps reduce ignorance of the "other side" on the issues that get the steelmanning discussion

If you want to reduce ignorance of the "other side", listening to the other side is better than trying to steelman the other side. Eliezer explained problems with steelmanning well in his interview with Lex Friedmann.

Also, in judging a strategy, we should know what resources we assume we have (e.g. "the meetup leader is following the practice we've specified and is willing to follow 'reasonable' requests or suggestions from us"), and know what threats we're modeling.

Yes, as far as resources go, you have to keep in mind that all people involved have their interests.

When it comes to thread modelling reading through Ben Hoffman's critique of GiveWell based on his employment at it, give you a good idea of what you want to model.

Thanks, good point! I suppose it's a balancing act and depends on the specifics in question and the amount of shame we dole out. My hunch would be that a combination of empathy and shame ("carrot and stick") may be best.  

I agree that the problem of "evil" is multifactorial with individual personality traits being only one of several relevant factors, with others like "evil/fanatical ideologies" or misaligned incentives/organizations plausibly being overall more important. Still, I think that ignoring the individual character dimension is perilous. 

It seems to me that most people become much more evil when they aren't punished for it. [...] So if we teach AIs to be as "aligned" as the average person, and then AIs increase in power beyond our ability to punish them, we can expect to be treated as a much-less-powerful group in history - which is to say, not very well.

Makes sense. On average, power corrupts / people become more malevolent if no one holds them accountable—but again, there seem to exist interindividual differences with some people behaving much better than others even when having enormous power (cf. this section [EA · GW]). 

The problem is that even small differences in values can have massive differences in outcomes when the difference is caring about truth while keeping the other values similar. As Elizabeth wrote Truthseeking is the ground in which other principles grow [EA · GW]. 

Apparently a Thompson-hack-like bug occurred in LLVM (haven't read the post in detail yet). Interesting.