Posts

Vote on Anthropic Topics to Discuss 2024-03-06T19:43:47.194Z
Voting Results for the 2022 Review 2024-02-02T20:34:59.768Z
Vote on worthwhile OpenAI topics to discuss 2023-11-21T00:03:03.898Z
Vote on Interesting Disagreements 2023-11-07T21:35:00.270Z
Online Dialogues Party — Sunday 5th November 2023-10-27T02:41:00.506Z
More or Fewer Fights over Principles and Values? 2023-10-15T21:35:31.834Z
Dishonorable Gossip and Going Crazy 2023-10-14T04:00:35.591Z
Announcing Dialogues 2023-10-07T02:57:39.005Z
Closing Notes on Nonlinear Investigation 2023-09-15T22:44:58.488Z
Sharing Information About Nonlinear 2023-09-07T06:51:11.846Z
A report about LessWrong karma volatility from a different universe 2023-04-01T21:48:32.503Z
Shutting Down the Lightcone Offices 2023-03-14T22:47:51.539Z
Open & Welcome Thread — February 2023 2023-02-15T19:58:00.435Z
Rationalist Town Hall: FTX Fallout Edition (RSVP Required) 2022-11-23T01:38:25.516Z
LessWrong Has Agree/Disagree Voting On All New Comment Threads 2022-06-24T00:43:17.136Z
Announcing the LessWrong Curated Podcast 2022-06-22T22:16:58.170Z
Good Heart Week Is Over! 2022-04-08T06:43:46.754Z
Good Heart Week: Extending the Experiment 2022-04-02T07:13:48.353Z
April 2022 Welcome & Open Thread 2022-04-02T03:46:13.743Z
Replacing Karma with Good Heart Tokens (Worth $1!) 2022-04-01T09:31:34.332Z
12 interesting things I learned studying the discovery of nature's laws 2022-02-19T23:39:47.841Z
Ben Pace's Controversial Picks for the 2020 Review 2021-12-27T18:25:30.417Z
Book Launch: The Engines of Cognition 2021-12-21T07:24:45.170Z
An Idea for a More Communal Petrov Day in 2022 2021-10-21T21:51:15.270Z
Facebook is Simulacra Level 3, Andreessen is Level 4 2021-04-28T17:38:03.981Z
Against "Context-Free Integrity" 2021-04-14T08:20:44.368Z
"Taking your environment as object" vs "Being subject to your environment" 2021-04-11T22:47:04.978Z
I'm from a parallel Earth with much higher coordination: AMA 2021-04-05T22:09:24.033Z
Why We Launched LessWrong.SubStack 2021-04-01T06:34:00.907Z
"Infra-Bayesianism with Vanessa Kosoy" – Watch/Discuss Party 2021-03-22T23:44:19.795Z
"You and Your Research" – Hamming Watch/Discuss Party 2021-03-19T00:16:13.605Z
Review Voting Thread 2020-12-30T03:23:06.075Z
Final Day to Order LW Books by Christmas for US 2020-12-09T23:30:36.877Z
The LessWrong 2018 Book is Available for Pre-order 2020-12-01T08:00:00.000Z
AGI Predictions 2020-11-21T03:46:28.357Z
Rationalist Town Hall: Pandemic Edition 2020-10-21T23:54:03.528Z
Sunday October 25, 12:00PM (PT) — Scott Garrabrant on "Cartesian Frames" 2020-10-21T03:27:12.739Z
Sunday October 18, 12:00PM (PT) — Garden Party 2020-10-17T19:36:52.829Z
Have the lockdowns been worth it? 2020-10-12T23:35:14.835Z
Fermi Challenge: Trains and Air Cargo 2020-10-05T21:51:45.281Z
Postmortem to Petrov Day, 2020 2020-10-03T21:30:56.491Z
Open & Welcome Thread – October 2020 2020-10-01T19:06:45.928Z
What are good rationality exercises? 2020-09-27T21:25:24.574Z
Honoring Petrov Day on LessWrong, in 2020 2020-09-26T08:01:36.838Z
Sunday August 23rd, 12pm (PDT) – Double Crux with Buck Shlegeris and Oliver Habryka on Slow vs. Fast AI Takeoff 2020-08-22T06:37:07.173Z
Forecasting Thread: AI Timelines 2020-08-22T02:33:09.431Z
[Oops, there is actually an event] Notice: No LW event this weekend 2020-08-22T01:26:31.820Z
Highlights from the Blackmail Debate (Robin Hanson vs Zvi Mowshowitz) 2020-08-20T00:49:49.639Z
Survey Results: 10 Fun Questions for LWers 2020-08-19T06:10:55.386Z
10 Fun Questions for LessWrongers 2020-08-18T03:28:05.276Z

Comments

Comment by Ben Pace (Benito) on Benito's Shortform Feed · 2024-03-17T21:48:57.359Z · LW · GW

I’d say most people assume I want “the answer” rather than “some bits of information”.

Comment by Ben Pace (Benito) on Tamsin Leake's Shortform · 2024-03-17T21:40:19.729Z · LW · GW

I don’t think it applies to safety researchers at AI Labs though, I am shocked how much those folks can make.

Comment by Ben Pace (Benito) on Benito's Shortform Feed · 2024-03-17T19:44:12.479Z · LW · GW

A common experience I have is that it takes like 1-2 paragraphs of explanation for why I want this info (e.g. "Well I'm wondering if so-and-so should fly in a day earlier to travel with me but it requires going to a different airport and I'm trying to figure out whether the time it'd take to drive to me would add up to too much and also..."), but if they just gave me their ~70% confidence interval when I asked then we could cut the whole context-sharing.

Comment by Ben Pace (Benito) on Benito's Shortform Feed · 2024-03-16T20:41:02.390Z · LW · GW

Often I am annoyed when I ask someone (who I believe has more information than me) a question and they say "I don't know". I'm annoyed because I want them to give me some information. Such as:

"How long does it take to drive to the conference venue?" 

"I don't know." 

"But is it more like 10 minutes or more like 2 hours?" 

"Oh it's definitely longer than 2 hours."

But perhaps I am the one making a mistake. For instance, the question "How many countries are there?" can be answered "I'd say between 150 and 400" or it can be answered "195", and the former is called "an estimate" and the latter is called "knowing the answer". There is a folk distinction here and perhaps it is reasonable for people to want to preserve the distinction between "an estimate" and "knowing the answer".

So in the future, to get what I want, I should say "Please can you give me an estimate for how long it takes to drive to the conference venue?".

And personally I should strive, when people ask me a question to which I don't know the answer, to say "I don't know the answer, but I'd estimate between X and Y."

Comment by Ben Pace (Benito) on Toward a Broader Conception of Adverse Selection · 2024-03-15T18:48:23.092Z · LW · GW

I think it is pretty obviously a joke :P

Comment by Ben Pace (Benito) on Toward a Broader Conception of Adverse Selection · 2024-03-15T01:59:30.302Z · LW · GW

(And in case anyone was led astray: the Marx quote at the start is from Groucho, not Karl.)

Comment by Ben Pace (Benito) on 'Empiricism!' as Anti-Epistemology · 2024-03-14T05:28:41.375Z · LW · GW

K. I recommend that people include links for those of us who mostly do not read Twitter.

Comment by Ben Pace (Benito) on 'Empiricism!' as Anti-Epistemology · 2024-03-14T05:09:57.324Z · LW · GW

Crossposted from where?

Comment by Ben Pace (Benito) on My Clients, The Liars · 2024-03-09T03:44:53.050Z · LW · GW

Curated! Very interesting to get a vivid sense of what goes on when people are facing strong pressures to lie, and how they go about doing this. Both their adamance that they were right and their transparency to you were both fascinating. And this was very engagingly written. Thanks for the post!

Comment by Ben Pace (Benito) on Using axis lines for good or evil · 2024-03-07T16:09:55.740Z · LW · GW

As someone who's spent a while designing charts for published books, I have generally been strongly against axis lines. One thing that has really influenced my approach to using lines is the section of Butterick's Practical Typography on tables.

Nowadays I remove all lines on tables and charts unless there's a strong argument in favor of one; implied lines are much easier on the eye.

This post overall moved me toward using gridlines a little bit more, for intuitively measuring distance when that's important.

Comment by Ben Pace (Benito) on Wholesome Culture · 2024-03-07T08:08:49.631Z · LW · GW

I think this essay raises many good points, but doesn’t grapple with (to me) the hardest part of wholesomeness: when do I ignore parts of the whole?

I think that sometimes you make the choice not think about something for a while. For instance, trivially, you can only track so many hypotheses in detail. While I am designing a product that I think will change the world, I will spend most of my time considering different hypotheses for what sort of product users want, and considering how to quickly falsify them and iterate. I will not spend a ton of time questioning whether capitalism is even good for civilization. Insofar as I’m choosing to give this product a shot, that is not a good use of mental resources - the assumption questioning comes before, and after (and occasionally in the middle of I have exceptional cause for a crisis of faith).

To me the hard question of wholesomeness is about knowing when you’re choosing look away from a thing because on reflection it’s not worth the cognitive space to be tracking it as a consideration, and knowing when you’re doing it improperly because it’s painful or emotionally draining or personally inconvenient to keep looking at the thing.

(And that emotional cost itself is a factor to be weighed on the scales.)

Some written guidance on this would be valuable, I’d say.

Comment by Ben Pace (Benito) on Vote on Anthropic Topics to Discuss · 2024-03-06T21:20:50.028Z · LW · GW

I assign >10% that Anthropic will at some point pause development for at least a year as a result of safety evaluations.

I think that if Anthropic cannot make a certain product-line safe and then they pivot to scaling up a different kind of model / product-line, I am not counting this as 'pausing development'. 

If they pause all novel capability development and scaling and just let someone else race ahead while pivoting to some other thing like policy or evals or something (while continuing to iterate on existing product lines) then I am counting that as pausing development.

Comment by Ben Pace (Benito) on Vote on Anthropic Topics to Discuss · 2024-03-06T20:26:32.434Z · LW · GW

I've added it back in. Seemed like a fairly non-specific word to me.

Comment by Ben Pace (Benito) on Vote on Anthropic Topics to Discuss · 2024-03-06T20:15:08.692Z · LW · GW

Plausible. I was imitating the phrasing used by an Anthropic funder here. I'm open to editing it in the next hour or so if you think there's a better phrasing.

Comment by Ben Pace (Benito) on Vote on Anthropic Topics to Discuss · 2024-03-06T20:12:10.535Z · LW · GW

I'm interested to know why you think that. I've not thought about it a ton so I don't think I'd be a great dialogue partner, but I'd be willing to give it a try, or you could give an initial bulleted outline of your reasoning here.

Comment by Ben Pace (Benito) on Vote on Anthropic Topics to Discuss · 2024-03-06T19:32:54.204Z · LW · GW

I assign >20% that many of the Anthropic employees who quit OpenAI signed Non-Disparagement Agreements with OpenAI.

Comment by Ben Pace (Benito) on Vote on Anthropic Topics to Discuss · 2024-03-06T19:29:22.909Z · LW · GW

Anthropic has (in expectation) brought forward the date of superintelligent AGI development (and not slowed it down).

Comment by Ben Pace (Benito) on Vote on Anthropic Topics to Discuss · 2024-03-06T19:28:57.365Z · LW · GW

I assign >50% probability to the claim that Anthropic will release products far beyond the frontier within the next 5 years.

Comment by Ben Pace (Benito) on Vote on Anthropic Topics to Discuss · 2024-03-06T19:28:52.305Z · LW · GW

I assign >20% probability to the claim that Anthropic will release products far beyond the frontier within the next 5 years.

Comment by Ben Pace (Benito) on Vote on Anthropic Topics to Discuss · 2024-03-06T19:28:38.858Z · LW · GW

I think Anthropic staff verbally communicated to many prospective employees, collaborators and funders that they were committed to not meaningfully advance the frontier with a product launch.

Comment by Ben Pace (Benito) on Vote on Anthropic Topics to Discuss · 2024-03-06T19:28:08.128Z · LW · GW

[This comment is present for voting purposes, it does not represent my opinions, see the OP for context.]

I think Anthropic’s counterfactual impact in the world has been net positive in expectation.

Comment by Ben Pace (Benito) on Vote on Anthropic Topics to Discuss · 2024-03-06T18:33:34.430Z · LW · GW

Poll For Topics of Discussion and Disagreement

Use this thread to

  1. Upvote topics you're interested in reading about.
  2. Agree/disagree with positions.
  3. Add new positions for people to vote on.
Comment by Ben Pace (Benito) on Good HPMoR scenes / passages? · 2024-03-04T03:30:02.466Z · LW · GW

Just a note that I've put this quote behind spoiler tags so that users don't accidentally read a major spoiler for the end of the book, and added the sentence "[Note: this is majorly spoiling the end of the book.]".

(Also it's quite funny to me that you and g-w1 both picked the same section to quote and I had to spoiler protect it both times.)

Comment by Ben Pace (Benito) on Good HPMoR scenes / passages? · 2024-03-03T23:29:40.828Z · LW · GW

Hey, I just edited in spoiler tags and the parenthetical "(added: major spoilers for the ending)", so that people don't immediately read one of the biggest spoilers.

Comment by Ben Pace (Benito) on Good HPMoR scenes / passages? · 2024-03-03T23:27:48.308Z · LW · GW

Quick babble of possible sections:

  • Harry teaching Draco about blood science (somewhere around chapters 20-25)
  • Harry explaining to Draco that muggles have been to the moon at platform 9 and 3/4 (early on, when first boarding for hogwarts)
  • Quirrell's epic first lecture, largely about the use of the killing curse (somewhere around chapters 15-20)
  • Harry arguing to Snape that the fact that the dark mark hasn't faded isn't that much bayesian evidence of the dark lord's death compared to the fact that everyone said he died and he disappeared for 11 years (chapter 86)
Comment by Ben Pace (Benito) on Consider giving money to people, not projects or organizations · 2024-03-02T21:01:20.892Z · LW · GW

As an added datapoint, I know of an IMO promising researcher who is now at a lab and is working on a write-up with the goal of persuading other people in the lab about what sort of research is important. This is better than doing capabilities work but is not the object-level research they were previously working on that seemed promising to me.

Comment by Ben Pace (Benito) on MIRI 2024 Mission and Strategy Update · 2024-03-02T20:58:24.248Z · LW · GW

But it seems like a good thing to do if indeed the solutions are not attainable.

Anyway, this whole question seems on the wrong level analysis. You should do what you think works, not what you think doesn't work but might trick others into trying anyway.

Added: To be clear I too found MIRI largely giving up on solving the alignment problem demoralizing. I'm still going to keep working on preventing the end of the world regardless, and I don't at all begrudge them seriously trying for 5-10 years.

Comment by Ben Pace (Benito) on The Parable Of The Fallen Pendulum - Part 1 · 2024-03-02T17:14:14.741Z · LW · GW

There is nothing complicated here. My first response to someone making a dumb mistake is to call it a dumb mistake. The more sophisticated explanations can come later.

Comment by Ben Pace (Benito) on The Parable Of The Fallen Pendulum - Part 1 · 2024-03-01T00:33:25.272Z · LW · GW

You fools. You utter morons. How did you make such a colossal mistake?

—The janitor

Comment by Ben Pace (Benito) on ryan_greenblatt's Shortform · 2024-02-29T21:33:22.463Z · LW · GW

I think people repeatedly say 'overconfident' when what they mean is 'wrong'. I'm not excited about facilitating more of that.

Comment by Ben Pace (Benito) on Acting Wholesomely · 2024-02-29T08:11:44.839Z · LW · GW

I’m curious if you have any ideas for what to say to someone who isn’t being wholesome in some context - who is avoiding looking at some part of reality. For instance, in the above example, what could someone say to me when I’m ignoring my impacts upon them?

A standard line people say is “you don’t care about hurting my feelings” and that’s not quite the right response, because I would then argue that your feelings are less important than serving the mission.

I’m looking for something like “You don’t seem to be aware of the impacts you’re having on me”. Or maybe “You don’t seem to understand what he impact of your speech”. But I’m not sure either of these would successfully communicate with the self-blinded Ben I describe, and I’d appreciate hearing another’s thoughts on how to communicate here.

Comment by Ben Pace (Benito) on New LessWrong review winner UI ("The LeastWrong" section and full-art post pages) · 2024-02-28T23:35:03.377Z · LW · GW

It's a nice idea to have an optional field on posts for the author to submit a summary with a max-length.

Comment by Ben Pace (Benito) on New LessWrong review winner UI ("The LeastWrong" section and full-art post pages) · 2024-02-28T23:33:09.371Z · LW · GW

I think there was a miscommunication; I don't mean to say that you are inaccurately describing some tribal lines that were going on in some other social scene, I mean that I have little faith that these tribal lines will be a remotely accurate guide to good ideas. Like national politics in the US which has two parties, I think it is wrong to think that one party has all the questions exactly right and the other party has all the questions exactly wrong, there are too many other social and political forces on where tribal lines are drawn for that to be a feasible outcome, and I think that when asking yourself a specific question it's better to just look at how reality pertains to that question (e.g. "What is the optimal tax rate? Which societies have done better and worse with different rates? What makes sense ethically from first principles?") rather than asking what different tribes say about it.

Comment by Ben Pace (Benito) on New LessWrong review winner UI ("The LeastWrong" section and full-art post pages) · 2024-02-28T18:09:02.982Z · LW · GW

In case it's unclear, the side image is temporary, just around to inform folks about the new Best Of collections and artworks.

Comment by Ben Pace (Benito) on Acting Wholesomely · 2024-02-28T18:05:46.491Z · LW · GW

I am more optimistic about the power of clear explanations. That's something I got from reading SlateStarCodex.

Comment by Ben Pace (Benito) on Acting Wholesomely · 2024-02-28T05:59:25.416Z · LW · GW

Your definition reads like a sazen to me. A good pointer once you know the concept, but won't get it across to someone who really hasn't gotten it yet.

Comment by Ben Pace (Benito) on Acting Wholesomely · 2024-02-28T05:58:24.691Z · LW · GW

Seems like a valid choice you can make when blogging, it's a high standard to meet. I'll just say that concept-shaped holes can be very hard to notice and that posts that can successfully show them to those who are missing them are very valuable.

Comment by Ben Pace (Benito) on Acting Wholesomely · 2024-02-28T05:53:21.792Z · LW · GW

I'd agree with that.

Because of this post, I've been thinking a little today about people who I consider wholesome, who often seem wiser than those who don't (I guess due to tracking things that others have pressures to not think about). I think the main thing I find upsetting about these people is that they tend to less often be holy madmen who commit their life to a cause or do something great, and instead they often do more typical human things like tradeoff against their career and impact on the world in order to get married and have kids.

I think the world will probably end soon and most value will be lost to us and I am kind of upset when people choose not to fight against that but instead to live a simpler and smaller life. Especially so when I thought we were fighting it together and then they just... stop. Then I feel kind of betrayed.

I think something that can go poorly when trying to be more wholesome is that, on finding yourself aware of a cost that you've been paying, you can also find that you do not have the strength now to choose to continue paying that cost. Now that you see how you've been hurting yourself, even though you've been getting great results, you cannot continue to inflict that upon yourself, and so you will instead give up on this course of action and do something less personally difficult.

Comment by Ben Pace (Benito) on New LessWrong review winner UI ("The LeastWrong" section and full-art post pages) · 2024-02-28T05:31:58.278Z · LW · GW

...just because some random tribal line is sometimes being drawn in some social scene doesn't mean it carves reality at its joints. Nothing you said is any argument that progress is bad, and by default I am a big fan of visions of technological progress. See my longer comment here for more details on my position on thinking about random tribal lines.

Comment by Ben Pace (Benito) on Benito's Shortform Feed · 2024-02-27T16:53:01.227Z · LW · GW

I guess it's just that I don't feel mastery over my communication here, I still anticipate that I will find it clunky to add in a whole chunk of sentences to communicate my epistemic status.

I anticipate often in the future that I'll feel a need to write a whole paragraph, say in the political case, just to clarify that though I think it's worth considering the possibility that the politician is somehow manipulating the evidence, I've seen no cause to believe it in this case. I feel like bringing up the hypothesis with a quick "though I'm tracking the possibility that Adam is somehow manipulating the evidence for political gain" pretty commonly implies that the speaker (me) thinks it is likely enough to be worth acting on, and so I feel I have to explicitly rule that out as why I'm bringing it up, leaving me with my rather long sentence from above.

"I think it's worth tracking the hypothesis that the politician wants me to believe that this policy worked in order to pad their reputation, and I will put some effort into checking for evidence of that, but to be clear I haven't seen any positive evidence for that hypothesis in this case, and will not be acting in accordance with that hypothesis unless I do."

Comment by Ben Pace (Benito) on Benito's Shortform Feed · 2024-02-27T16:45:03.335Z · LW · GW

"Keep in mind that X".

Comment by Ben Pace (Benito) on Acting Wholesomely · 2024-02-27T07:46:16.641Z · LW · GW

This post feels to me in some ways like the first chapter of a religious teaching. The post keeps talking about wholesomeness in a way where I have a (perhaps unjustified) sense the post is pretending or expecting me to know what it means, and talking like it has successfully explained it, but I’m not sure it succeeds (e.g. the circular definition for how to make wholesome decisions), and that feels common for religious texts about how to live a good life.

Comment by Ben Pace (Benito) on Acting Wholesomely · 2024-02-27T07:42:29.165Z · LW · GW

Pretty good essay. On first pass, I don’t feel like this post manages to communicate the concept of wholesomeness well enough to pin it down for someone who didn’t already know what this post was trying to communicate. I shall give it a quick go.

When I am choosing an action and justifying it as wholesome, what it often feels like is that I am trying to track all the obvious considerations, but some (be it internal or external) force is pushing me to ignore one of them. Not merely to trade off against it, but to look away from it in my mind. And agains that force I’m trying to defend a particular action as the best one call all things considered - the “wholesome” action.

I am having a hard time thinking of examples, in part because I think I’ve been doing better on this axis in recent years, but I think one of the most tempting versions of this to me has been to ignore people’s feelings and my impacts on them when I have a mission that is very important. For instance, I might think someone has done terribly at some work that they’re doing on a project I’m leading. Now, I think it’s good to be straight with people and it’s good communication to give feedback early and clearly. So I want to let them know that the work has been worse than useless and I regret handing it off to them. This will likely cause them some fear and feel destabilizing to their social status and that will cause them stress and who knows how they deal with that. It is tempting here for me to choose not to pay attention to that when I decide to give them feedback, and as I do so, and after. And I have a great justification - because the work is exceedingly important! And if they say “Ben I feel like you’re being hurtful and not caring about my feelings” I can say “But this is what I have to do for the mission! It’s important! We all agree on that!” And nobody around will disagree because it’s often been the core conceit of my social groups that the only reason we’re here, the only reason we do what we do, is because we think it’s important. And your feelings don’t weigh on the scales of making the project hurt.

(That all may be true, but it doesn’t justify me avoiding seeing the direct impacts of my actions. When I notice this, sometimes I have impulses to do other things too - like reassure them in other ways, or show that I still respect them for other things they’ve done, or pick a time and place that is less likely to be embarrassing, or a dozen other things depending on the context. Admitting what's happening to myself and acting on the subsequent impulses feels more “wholesome” to me.)

Anyway, I used to be much more willing to stop caring about the impact of my behavior directly on people if I felt that it would distract from getting the important things done. Now I aim to be fully aware, even though it’s actually hard and often quite painful to still go ahead with it while doing that.

Writing this out now I even notice a way I’ve not been very wholesome in my interactions with some individuals I’ve interacted with of late. Noticing why, is not sufficient to solve it, alas, because I am quite allergic to some aspects of the relationship and I think it would be counterproductive to just have it naively be present in our interactions, I might easily act poorly and just make things worse. (I want to think on this more.)

Once you look at the whole of your impact on someone, then you can decide for yourself whether or not to do it. Of course, often you will choose to hurt someone. Reporting a violent crime or theft to the police is often the better decision even though it hurts the individual who broke a law. Even if you look directly at the costs it imposes on them (and the benefits it imposes on their future victims as well as the benefits of maintaining a shared rule of law) I typically do not change my mind about whether I will choose to do something that hurts them.

Overall I would ask yourself “What parts of life and the world do I instinctively turn my attention away from when it comes up?”, and then try to expand the things you can look directly at when making decisions. But I think this is probably assuming already a high level of self-awareness that has some other pre-requisites[1].

Perhaps an easier question is “What decisions have I made that really hurt me to a surprising degree and what did information I turn my attention away from when I made those decisions that could have guided me better and why did I ignore it?” And then use that to notice when you’re susceptible from making less wholesome decisions in your life.

(…having now finished reading the post I see you do talk about this aspect of wholesomeness later on, in the section “Wholesome vs virtuous vs right?”)

  1. ^

    Added: A pre-requisite being that, when I ask what parts of the world you instinctively turn your attention away from when it comes up, you go "Oh yes, I can think of examples of this I've noticed in myself" rather than going "I dunno, I don't think I do?" or "How could I know that in-principle, surely I'm avoiding thinking about it?". This requires skills I have not pointed to in this comment.

Comment by Ben Pace (Benito) on Benito's Shortform Feed · 2024-02-27T00:14:05.366Z · LW · GW

...after two readings of this obviously awful recommendation I have come to believe that it is a joke.

Comment by Ben Pace (Benito) on Benito's Shortform Feed · 2024-02-26T20:57:39.335Z · LW · GW

I often wish I had a better way to concisely communicate "X is a hypothesis I am tracking in my hypothesis space". I don't simply mean that X is logically possible, and I don't mean I assign even 1-10% probability to X, I just mean that as a bounded agent I can only track a handful of hypotheses and I am choosing to actively track this one.

  • This comes up when a substantially different hypothesis is worth tracking but I've seen no evidence for it. There's a common sentence like "The plumber says it's fixed, though he might be wrong" where I don't want to communicate that I've got much reason to believe he might be wrong, and I'm not giving it even 10% or 20%, but I still think it's worth tracking, because strong evidence is common and the importance is high.
  • This comes up in adversarial situations when it's possible that there's an adversarial process selecting on my observations. In such situations I want to say "I think it's worth tracking the hypothesis that the politician wants me to believe that this policy worked in order to pad their reputation, and I will put some effort into checking for evidence of that, but to be clear I haven't seen any positive evidence for that hypothesis in this case, and will not be acting in accordance with that hypothesis unless I do."
  • This comes up when I'm talking to someone about a hypothesis that they think is likely and I haven't thought about before, but am engaging with during the conversation. "I'm tracking your hypothesis would predict something different in situation A, though I haven't seen any clear evidence for privileging your hypothesis yet and we aren't able to check what's actually happening in situation A."
  • A phrase people around me commonly use is "The plumber says it's fixed, though it's plausible he's mistaken". I don't like it. It feels too ambiguous with "It's logically possible" and "I think it's reasonably likely, like 10-20%" and neither of which is what I mean. This isn't a claim about its probability, it's just a claim about it being "worth tracking".

Some options:

  • I could say "I am privileging this hypothesis" but that still seems to be a claim about probability, when often it's more a claim about importance-if-true, and I don't actually have any particular evidence for it.
  • I often say that a hypothesis is "on the table" as way to say it's in play without saying that it's probable. I like this more but I don't feel satisfied yet.
  • TsviBT suggested "it's a live hypothesis for me", and I also like that, but still don't feel satisfied.

How these read in the plumber situation:

  • "The plumber says it's fixed, though I'm still going to be on the lookout for evidence that he's wrong."
  • "The plumber says it's fixed, though it's plausible he's wrong."
  • "The plumber says it's fixed, and I believe him (though it's worth tracking the hypothesis that's he's mistaken)."
  • "The plumber says it's fixed, though it's a live hypothesis for me that he's mistaken."
  • "The plumber says it's fixed, though I am going to continue to privilege the hypothesis that he's mistaken."
  • "The plumber says it's fixed, though it's on the table that he's wrong about that."

Interested to hear any other ways people communicate this sort of thing!

Added: I am reacting with a thumbs-up to all the suggestions I like in the replies below.

Comment by Ben Pace (Benito) on CFAR Takeaways: Andrew Critch · 2024-02-26T18:22:22.797Z · LW · GW

I make space in my week to be bored, and where there are no options for short-term distractions that will zombify me (like videogames or YouTube). I usually find that ideas come to me then that I want that take a bit more work but will be more satisfying, like learning a song on the guitar or reading a book or doing something with a friend.

Chatting with friends who are alive and wanting things is another way I notice such things in myself, usually I catch some excitement from them as I'm empathizing with them.

I wrote the above before reading Anna's comment to see how our answers differed; seems like our number 1 recommendation is the same! 

Cleaning things out also works for me, I did that yesterday and it helped me believe in my ability to make my world better. 

I also concur with the grieving one, but I never know how to communicate it. When I try, I come up with sentences like "Now vividly imagine failing to get the thing you want. Feel all the pain and sorrow and nausea associated with it. Great, now go get it!" but that doesn't seem to communicate why it helps and reads to me like unhelpful advice.

Comment by Ben Pace (Benito) on Jimrandomh's Shortform · 2024-02-22T03:35:00.787Z · LW · GW

I'm reading you to be saying that you think on its overt purpose this policy is bad, but ineffective, and the covert reason of testing the ability of the US federal government to regulate AI is worth the information cost of a bad policy.

I definitely appreciate that someone signing this writes this reasoning publicly. I think it's not crazy to think that it will be good to happen. I feel like it's a bit disingenuous to sign the letter for this reason, but I'm not certain.

Comment by Ben Pace (Benito) on Open Thread – Winter 2023/2024 · 2024-02-22T00:09:25.105Z · LW · GW

Someone told me that they like my story The Redaction Machine.

Comment by Ben Pace (Benito) on One True Love · 2024-02-19T22:16:35.912Z · LW · GW

I am extremely surprised to read that Russia has such a harsh gender ratio (86 men for every 100 women), that's way more aggressive than even China (105 men to 100 women).

I wanted to know why and so I interrogated ChatGPT for a bit, it explained the following:

  • The Soviet Union lost around 14% of its population during WWII whereas the UK and France each only lost around 2%.
  • Also (somehow) life expectancy for Russian men is 68, whereas for UK and French men it's like 79, and yet the women of Russia is like 78 (much closer to the UK and France's 83 and 85 respectively).

I am surprised I haven't seen more thinkpieces written about gender dynamics in Russia, which I expect would sway heavily in the men's favor as they're the minority.

I also generally update down on Russia's health and competence at war.

Comment by Ben Pace (Benito) on Intuition for 1 + 2 + 3 + … = -1/12 · 2024-02-18T20:42:25.255Z · LW · GW

This was a fun read and felt (for me) more simple and follow-able than most things I've read explaining math! Thank you.

I got up to the sums of powers of  being . That bit took a few close reads but I followed that there was a pattern where infinite sums of  equal , and there's reason to believe this holds for  between  and . Then you write that if we apply it to  then it's equal to , which is a daring question to even ask and also a curious answer! But what justification do you have for thinking that equation holds for  that aren’t between  and ? I think that this was skipped over (though I may be missing something simple).

(Also, if it does hold for numbers that aren't between  and  that I believe this also implies that all infinite sums of  equal to negative numbers, and suggests maybe all infinite sums of positive integers will too.)