Deception Strategies

post by Thoth Hermes (thoth-hermes) · 2023-04-20T15:59:02.443Z · LW · GW · 2 comments

This is a link post for https://thothhermes.substack.com/p/deception-strategies

Contents

  My Objective:
None
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The following is an introductory-level summary of the basic ideas of my “Hive-Mind” paper in the first chapter:

It is a given that society is driven by people who perform various socially-sanctioned jobs. We will refer to these jobs as “tasks.” A task is performed by a group of task-performers. It is also a given that not all task-performers are paid to do so, but some are. We can also assume that most task-performers wish to be paid to perform their task, and that being paid for it is a sign that society has deemed said task-performer to be producing net good for society.

Most people who wish to perform a task must achieve visible social approval from their peers who also perform the task. Peers signal approval and disapproval to others based on their assessments of others’ performance. Some of these peers will be in the same boat as one who wishes to perform a task at the “elite” level (which we will now use to refer to the paid tier of task-performers). But the basic problem for any task-performer is this: How do you gain the acceptance of the “elite” tier task-performers?

This “elite” tier is generally a much more stark cut-off than if one were simply paid in exact accordance to their task-output. It is of course possible for all task-performers to receive not only approval, but compensation along with approval, in proportion to output x quality, but this is not what we generally observe. What is more typical is that one normally spends many years training for a profession and attempting to gain a set of credentials associated with that profession before they are afforded the right to seek employment (or at least expect that they would succeed in finding employment).

If one is unable to obtain the full set of credentials necessary for their position, or only obtain a subset of them, or even a full set of credentials from a low-enough rated set of credential-granting bodies, then they may end up in the set of individuals who are still task-performers, but effectively barred from membership in the “elite” tier.

What likely truly signifies membership in the “elite” tier is participation in the credential-granting process for whatever task is represented. Granting a credential is a special type of approval; It signifies entry into membership in this caste. Then we can infer from this that logically speaking, there is only one thing the credential does: Signify that the holder of the credential is “allowed” to perform the task it represents, and strongly imply that someone who does not hold this credential is not or should not be allowed to perform the task.

A credential-group is then heavily incentivized to spend effort trying to show that holding its credential is a meaningful signal of ability. It must be shown that those who do not hold the credential are unable to perform the task at sufficient quality, not merely that those who do hold it are able. There must be a justification for this signal, of course. Either it really is an accurate signal, and all can empirically observe for themselves that it is a good signal (in which case it provides redundant information), or, it is an inaccurate signal, and therefore credential-holders have to spend a portion of their effort on attempting to make it a more accurate signal.

Remember, the credential is only a binary signal. So what could it possibly be intended to mean, other than that having it means someone can do something successfully, and not having it means they can’t?

I want to show that a deception strategy emerges from the incentives granted by holding this credential, and also, that this strategy emerges as an alternative to winning at the task itself, which will not be possible for most of the individuals competing for “elitehood.”

Let’s first examine what a “lie” is:

Technically, a “lie” can fall into one of only a handful of categories. But there is only one category in which lies can definitively said to be actually false: Put-downs.

A “put-down” is a statement which is intended to denigrate, disparage, belittle, deprecate, or depreciate someone else. A put-down is not merely a disapproval, the word “no”, “stop”, or “don’t do that.” A put-down is meant to deliver the meaning that its target is incapable of doing something correctly.

This category of lies are the easiest to recognize as lies. Someone wearing a disguise is a completely different category of lies, as is responding to a question with an answer different from what one knows (or believes) to be the correct answer. We’re going to limit our analysis to the “put-down” category for now.

Calling someone stupid or crazy is a put-down, obviously. And these are also logically (trivially) false on the face of it.

This category is what I’d call the “bad” kind of lying, because they are meant to hurt the person they are delivered to. You can see that this must be the case, because any put-down, especially those delivered by someone inside a credential-group to someone on the outside of it, must be intended to impede the progress of its target. The other categories of deceptions are both harder to distinguish from the truth, as well as not-necessarily done with ill-intent.

I’d expect that thus far, you’d have a very hard time disagreeing with me on this.

Now, the problem (for society) is that these credential bodies are incentivized to perform mass put-downs as a strategy, because they exist only to prop-up the existence of the credential. Remember, the credential is not, strictly speaking, necessary at all.

If you have ability, then you will necessarily have been able to prove that to yourself and others too, via the direct output of your work. That would normally be enough signal which is also perfectly reliable. So this credential is not adding any additional information that we wouldn’t already have.

So why does it exist? We postulate that it exists primarily because that in the ‘primordial society’ before there are any credentials, there is still likely to be a rank-structure that people assign to themselves and others based on how able they are considered to be, but that these ranks are more fungible / fuzzy than a hard credential would be. So the group of people who consider themselves “poor or mediocre” performers, but also recognize that politics plays into the rank-structure, can signal to each other that they are willing to play a “deception game.” They do this by signaling that they are willing to ‘outgroup’ (as a verb) other people: They signal approval only to each other, and signal disapproval to anyone not willing to play this game with them. This strategy affords them membership in a group which artificially grants higher status than anyone not in the group (from their perspective), without them needing to perform skillfully at the actual task.

The credential-groups can simulate elite-level ability by praising each other highly in the open, and negating others highly in the open as well. So credential-groups are also incentivized to be fairly talky, as well as interact with each other and outsiders heavily in the public sphere.

So the big problem for all of us is that society is predicted to have - and does have - lots of credential groups who each have a fairly hefty amount of actual status, and that these groups will be the source of a lot of fairly predictable, but wrong insights that get repeated at large.

The main one will be that of “mistake”-based judgement of other work, that consists heavily of the ideology that certain ideas can just be flat wrong, or that many principled attempts to discover or create new theories or inventions can be or are doomed to fail.

One observation that we can make is that members of the credential-group like to openly criticize or shame other people based on their own interpretation of whatever their target believes or appears to believe. A benefit we can gain from this observation is that the target of the put-down might actually have a higher chance of succeeding than what we would otherwise assign to them from our prior(s) alone.

My Objective:

I would like to be able to devise a counter-strategy to these deception strategies that helps higher-quality, more true and more valuable insights to gain a larger and more resilient share of the intellectual real-estate, wherever it is written and recorded in public, visible places.

I believe we can do this wherever we notice that the discussion-enabling infrastructure appears to favor deception-based tactics (e.g. banning or downvoting, since these are negation-based by definition), and by making rigorous arguments against the idea that applying these methods leads to a genuinely “well-kept garden.”

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