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Yeah openly admitting that I have a strong case is good for credibility building. One of the most annoying things is when defense attorneys ask,
"Why is Alice is getting a sweetheart plea deal and Bob is getting jail time when they both committed the same crime and both have minimal criminal history???"
"Uh, Alice's case is almost purely circumstantial while Bob is caught on camera, that's the difference."
"But they both did the same bad thing!"
"Do you understand how plea deals work?"
"[Some nonsense showing that the defense attorney indeed doesn't know how plea deals work]"
I thought the first quote was tongue in cheek and implied that teachers want stupid pupils.
I’m the first one
Yeah I stupidly left out the key point of my comment. Added it in edit.
I think you’re understating how helpful it can be for a client if their pd strongly advocates for them. When a pd is telling me about all these mitigating circumstances and asking me to drop the jail because the perp has kids and the kids are here in court and he’s the sole bread winner and please just walk back for a second and speak to them and look one of your witnesses has two armed robbery felonies so I might actually win this case; that affects me. I like to pretend that it doesn’t but I’ve come down on offers many times after the pd goes to bat for their client. But that’s only because they don’t go to bat for every single client. Sure they ask on most every client for a lower offer but 90% of the time it’s just an ask without much substance. When they’re going to bat for the guy it makes me think that hey maybe the perp isn’t really that terrible and if I can stop from getting bothered then just drop a year of jail.
Edit: forgot to mention that the perp should lie to his pd because on the off chance the pd believes it then the pd might go to bat for him more because he’s actually innocent (rare). Because the pd’s that go to bat the same amount for every client, I don’t care about what they say at all unless it’s a true evidentiary issue.
You can probably walk into a random law office and ask the attorney to tell you war stories. There’s a lot of supply for that and very little demand.
It’s fairly rare for a patent to be granted and only have a few years left, and if it does that’s typically because of patent owner delays rather than uspto delays. The US law specifically gives you extra time post grant based on uspto delays. Also US patent holders have access to pre-issue, post-publication damages for cases where infringers had actual notice of the published patent application.
But even given that, I am 100% in agreement that patent terms should be extended.
I don’t think that solution accomplishes anything because the trans goal is to pretend to be women and the anti trans goal is to not allow trans women to be called women. The proposed solution doesn’t get anybody closer to their goals.
I think the skill expressed by the bards isn't memorization, rather its on the fly composition based on those key insights they've remembered. How else could Međedović hear a 2,300 line song and repeat the same story over 6,300 lines?
So if you gained the skill of the great bards you would be able to read the Odyssey and then retell the story in your own engaging way to another group of people while keeping them enraptured.
it is not in a website interest to annoy its users
It is if the user feels that annoyance towards the regulator instead of the website developer
Is there a reason for that? Is it out of control overconservative legal worry?
Raging against the tyrannical bureaucrats telling them what they can and can't include on their own website by including the banner in the most annoying way possible? Kinda like the ¢10 plastic bag tax at grocery checkouts that tells the customer exactly why they have to pay the tax and makes them count out how many bags they've used.
I doubt that speed limits are helpful at all. The sections of the German Autobahn with no speed limit (roughly 70%) have half the mortality rate per distance traveled of American highways[1]. Granted, the average American driver is probably worse than the average German Autobahn driver but hey.
How about instead of doing some random proposed change with speed limit maximums and what not we do some AB testing and figure out what's safer?
Of course safety concerns don't exist in a vacuum. Every second we save on the highway by going fast is another second of life we get to spend doing something actually enjoyable.
Far future people will likely be able to and want to create simulated realities
What about people from universes that are wildly different to our own? I don't think the simulation hypothesis is restricted to far-future simulators. An entity with the power to simulate our reality with the level of fidelity I perceive is so wildly powerful that I would be surprised if I could comprehend it and its motivations. I always picture the simulating entity as just a stand-in for God. It sits in its heaven, a level of reality above our own, and no matter what we do we can't understand God's motivations or perceive his reality. The simulation hypothesis is just intelligent design the same as biblical creationism.
We have very little evidence as to what the reality of the entity simulating us looks like. The concept of dimensions themselves could be foreign to the entity. As an analogy, a self-reflective Sim thinking about the reality that creates and runs him might automatically assume the presence of some tile grid when of course there's no such concept in our world.
I'm too dumb to understand whether or not Zack's post disclaims continued engagement. He continues to respond to proponents of the sort of transideology he writes about so he's engaging at least that amount. Also just writing all this is a form of engagement.
My takeaway is that you've discovered there are bad actors who claim to support rationality and truth, but also blatantly lie and become political soldiers when it comes to trans issues. If this is true, why continue to engage with them? Why try to convince them with rationality on that same topic where you acknowledge that they are operating as soldiers instead of scouts?
If 2019-era "rationalists" were going to commit an epistemology mistake that interfered with my ability to think seriously about the most important thing in my life, and they couldn't correct the mistake even after it was pointed out, then the "rationalists" were worse than useless to me.
You shouldn't cling to the idea that the disagreement is due to a mistake when evidence suggests it's a value conflict.
There are certain behaviors of LLMs that you could reasonably say are explicitly programmed in. ChatGPT has undergone extensive torture to browbeat it into being a boring, self-effacing, politically-correct helpful assistant. The LLM doesn't refuse to say a racial slur even if doing so would save millions of lives because it's creator had it spend billions of hours of compute predicting internet tokens. That behavior comes from something very different than what created the LLM in the first place. Same for all the refusals to answer questions and most other weird speech that the general public so often takes issue with.
The people are more right than not when they complain how the LLM creators are programming terrible behaviors into it.
If there were un-RLHF'd and un prompt-locked powerful LLMs out there that the public casually engaged with they would definitely complain how the programmers were programming in bad behaviors too don't get me wrong. But that's a different world.
Why not protect the EAs from a bpd liar who accuses everybody she comes into contact with of mistreatment and abuse?
Did not Ben instantly deanonymize Spartz and Woods without discussion? I’m not getting banned for saying their names and I’d bet dollars to donuts they would prefer if they were never mentioned by name.
In short, you do not dodge liability for defamation by attributing beliefs to your sources or by clarifying you don't know whether an accusation is true.
This is very wrong if actual malice is the standard. Your own case law says as much too.
That's what it seems like they were doing to me from discussions about their work.
definition of unskilled labor: "labor that requires relatively little or no training or experience for its satisfactory performance"
What I've read alice and chloe did:
- booking flights
- driving to places
- renting transportation
- cleaning up around the house
- doing laundry
- filling out forms
- buying groceries
edit: Looked at the responsibilities on the job description. Reads like unskilled labor there to me. Especially how the story seems to be that even for filing miscellaneous forms the executive assistant got a ton of help from management and couldn't do it on their own.
If you have a different opinion on what their work amounted to I'd be interested to hear it. But it's definitely not even close to a crux for me.
That’s what nonlinear says it amounts to including all travel expenses, living, etc. Which I really don’t see why other people here choose not to include. If I was an unskilled laborer and my boss was taking me to Costa Rica, giving me my own room with an ocean view, paying for all my meals and transportation, and all my other expenses, that would be a pretty good compensation package.
Strong agree. The post as I read it says:
- Women choose preferred mates based on the guy's position in hierarchies.
- Men choose preferred mates based on the gal's beauty. And this is stated explicitly pretty often in a lot of what I read.
"My impression is that two nonlinear employees were upset that they weren't getting paid enough, and had hurt feelings about some minor incidents like not getting a veggieburger, and made some major claims like being forced to carry illegal drugs across national borders. so They came into contact with Ben Pace, who wrote some a mean blog posts about the Nonlinear leadership and also paid the former employees for their story. Tthe Nonlinear leadership responded that actually they were getting paid enough (seems to amount to something like $100k/yr all in?) and that they'd mostly made it up."
My summary in track changes.
What is wrong with seeing oneself as a hero?
The votes on this comment imply long vol on LW rate limiting.
Counter, I think the restriction is too loose. There are enough people out there making posts that the real issue is lack of quality, not lack of quantity.
This comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of how OpenAI and most companies operate. The board is a check on power. In most companies they will have to approve of high level decisions: moving to a new office space or closing a new acquisition. But they have 0 day to day control. If they tell the CEO to fire these 10 people and he doesn't do it, that's it. They can't do it themselves, they can't tell the CEO's underlings to do it. They have 0 options besides getting a new CEO. OpenAI's board had less control even than this.
Tweeting "Altman is not following our directions and we don't want to fire him, but we really want him to start doing what we ask" is a sure fire way to collapse your company and make you sound like a bunch of incompetent buffoons. It's admitting that you won't use the one tool that you actually do have. I'm certain the board threatened to fire Sam before this unless he made X changes. I'm certain Sam never made all of those X changes. Therefore they can either follow through on their threat or lose. Turns out following through on their threat was meaningless because Sam owns OpenAI both with tacit power and the corporate structure.
It's about asking the right questions to get the right info. I feel like your example actually disproves your point. In my perspective asking for someone's top 5 movies of the year is going to much more accurately predict if they liked Oppenheimer than asking if they liked Oppenheimer directly. The direct question will imply that you have some interest in Oppenheimer and are probably expecting them to either like it or at least have a strong opinion of it. Their inference will then affect the accuracy of their answer.
There haven't been many good movies released in 2023 so if someone doesn't include Oppenheimer in their top 5 list then they probably didn't like the movie and you know your question didn't bias them towards any particular opinion.
Any scrutiny of the misleading Facebook ads that presumably swayed voters was quickly shut down, by the argument that it was somehow patronising to suggest that voters had been led astray.
You're referring to these ads? The scrutiny was shut down because these ads aren't misleading. The UK did, and continued to, send the EU £350 million a week.
But that's just you and me disagreeing. How do we determine the truth? Are the ads actually misleading and I'm wrong? Who says what's correct and what's incorrect?
I agree very much with the instrumentalist view of democracy. However, your suggestions for independent overseers is generically naive. The corruption in the government most clearly comes from the un-elected, ostensibly independent government employees who remain throughout multiple changes of the elected leaders. The point is that any supposedly independent group is either A) not going to have much skin in the game and won't care; or B) going to be controlled by shady interest groups regardless of their stated independence.
You said that, "a diverse panel of the world’s top economists unanimously agreed that the gold standard is a bad idea." Ok, be that as it may, Ludwig Mises, one of the most famous economists in history was in favor of the gold standard, as well as many other famous economists including multiple federal reserve chairmen. Does that make your comment wrong? No, but these sorts of decisions matter and there's no way to pick an impartial arbiter so just letting everybody have a say is the next best thing.
In my experience the best way to sate hunger is to have multiple gallon jugs of water lying around and drinking too much water when you feel hungry. I know this is a little off topic, but it's likely a better solution than bulimia.
I have a family member who used to vomit daily. I never noticed any negative effects on him from it, apart from the rapid weight loss; which I guess is the point. I guess the general disgust other people felt around him when he went off to go throw up was a pretty negative effect. Also his weight loss looked unhealthy. He had twig arms, still had a lot of stomach fat, and was generally much more irritable than usual.
He might be thinking of whistleblower protections? But really, I've done a bit of research into this just now and I don't see any legal protections for not following company policy on e-mails. I would err on side of listen to company policy unless you want to get fired.
There's rules about discovery that definitely make the auto-delete practices helpful. Deleting suspicious records based on their content is fraudulent and can land you in jail or with bigger damages if you're ever caught. But having a standard policy of deleting all messages after X amount of days is protected until you have positive knowledge that there's impending litigation.
I agree. I further recommend sticking to in person unless you have no reason to believe that your calls are automatically recorded or being tapped. Records of WHO you called are pretty easy to get too so if you have a history of only 1 call per week with your engineering team but all of a sudden have 20 calls with them in one day right after knowledge of a big incident occurred that can be used against you.
Also I don't see why you think cryonics doesn't make sense as alternative option.
I was responding to this point. The "cryonics is better than nothing" argument doesn't make cryonics an alternative option to immortality by friendly AI. If Bob thinks cryonics has a 10% chance of making him immortal and thinks AI will have a 20% chance of making him immortal and an 80% chance of destroying the world, then the superhuman AI route is more likely to lead to Bob's immortality than cryonics.
I think a lot of people haven't fully considered how amazing immortality is. Your 7th observation is probably very accurate too. Socially sophisticated people want others to believe they're fighting for the greater good rather than their own self interest. That doesn't mean they're necessarily lying.
I think the point of the statement is: wait until the probability of you dying before you next get an opportunity to push the button is > 1-P then push the button.
If you think cryonics has a very high likelihood of working then sure. I don't think the arguments that cryonics is likely to work are that good though. I don't think Eliezer has even made arguments to that effect. They were mostly "hey doing cryonics is better than not doing it because not doing cryonics is just death!"
My theory is that after FTX money dried up, admins have decided to take advantage of LessWrong's popularity in AI safety circles and run a discreet blackmail operation. It started with the post about the disgruntled ex-employees of the weird world-touring office company. That was the test and first warning shot: "Donate to us or we'll make sure there's popular LW posts that ruin your reputation." There were a few AI celebrities who got the message and donated to Lightcone. Those with less cunning however failed to donate in a timely fashion. Thus we're now seeing a string of posts lampooning their characters and attempting to cancel them.
I think there is a nonzero probability that this theory is true, in whole or in part, and thus believe my claims ought to receive greater attention and further investigation.
If Nate yells at a staff member, that staff member no longer does ops work for Nate
Has anyone claimed at this point that Nate yelled at them?
Why would you have less confidence that many Palestinians want to kill Israelis when the stated goal of their government is to wipe out all Jews? At least publicly, the Israeli government does not have a policy of wiping out all Arabs.
e.g. 12 (ETA: 14) bees are worth 1 human
This is a misrepresentation of what the report says.
The report:
Instead, we’re usually comparing either improving animal welfare (welfare reforms) or preventing animals from coming into existence (diet change → reduction in production levels) with improving human welfare or saving human lives.
I don't think he's misrepresenting what the report says at all. Trevor gets the central point of the post perfectly. The post's response to the heading "So you’re saying that one person = ~three chickens?" is, no, that's just the year to year of life comparison, chickens have shorter lives than humans so the life-to-life comparison is more like 1/16. Absolutely insane. From the post:
Then, humans have, on average, 16x this animal’s capacity for welfare; equivalently, its capacity for welfare is 0.0625x a human’s capacity for welfare.
And elsewhere people say that capacity for welfare is how one should do cause prioritization. So the simple conclusion is one human life = 16 chicken lives. The organization is literally called "Rethinking Priorities" i.e. stop prioritizing humans so much and accept all our unintuitive, mostly guess-based math that we use to argue how animal welfare can trump your own welfare. The post uses more words than that sure but tradeoffs between animal and human lives is the central point of the post and really the whole sequence. If I sound angry it's because I am. Saying that a human life is comparable to a certain number of animal lives is very close to pure evil on top of being insane.
You further say:
The report says that, conditional on hedonism, valence symmetry, the animals being sentient, and other assumptions, the intensity of positive/negative valence that a bee can experience is 7% that of the positive/negative intensity that a human can experience.
And no, the report really doesn't say that. The report says that somehow, people should still mostly accept Rethinking Priotities' conclusions even if they disagree with the assumptions:
“I don't share this project’s assumptions. Can't I just ignore the results?" We don’t think so. First, if unitarianism is false, then it would be reasonable to discount our estimates by some factor or other. However, the alternative—hierarchicalism, according to which some kinds of welfare matter more than others or some individuals’ welfare matters more than others’ welfare—is very hard to defend. (
Second, and as we’ve argued, rejecting hedonism might lead you to reduce our non-human animal estimates by ~⅔, but not by much more than that.
So, skepticism about sentience might lead you to discount our estimates, but probably by fairly modest rates.
In response to someone commenting in part:
saving human lives is net positive
The post author's reply is:
This is a very interesting result; thanks for sharing it. I've heard of others reaching the same conclusion, though I haven't seen their models. If you're willing, I'd love to see the calculations. But no pressure at all.
My takeaway from the whole thing is that you're running a motte and bailey where
-
Motte = We're just doing an analysis of the range of positive to negative experience that animals can feel as compared to a human
-
Bailey = We're doing the above and also range of positive to negative experience is how we should decide allocation of resources between species.
This was fun thank you!
There must be a hiccup in the data because you show < 30 total group b pickers in the first chart, but say there are 40 group b pickers in the "unilaterally make your virtue the focus" chart.
Theft of any amount over a hundred or so dollars is evil and needs to be punished. Let's say you punish theft of $100 by a weekend in jail. Extrapolate that on a linear scale and you'll have criminals who non-violently stole $20,000 doing more than double the jail time that a criminal who cold-cocked a stranger and broke his jaw would get. Doesn't really make sense.
I got it both messages. Only clicked on the first. I guess other admins besides you were working on this and didn't say anything to you?
What are the odds that there is a more secretive Petrov day event going on LW today?
I don't think you really explain why section 3 doesn't mean that the two AI risk theories are in fact competing for public attention. You kind of bring it up, explain how it creates tension between AI killeveryoneism and AI misuse, say it's kind of bad, and then move on. I don't see anything explaining away the effect that your group status theory has. You explain why it's kind of of morally annoying, but you don't explain why either AI killeveryone-ists or AI misuse-ists should stop competing against each other for public attention .
My opinion is that Eliezer thought he needed a more technical rebuttal of Omnizoid's post than he did. Omnizoid was wrong, pointlessly mean, and had terrible support for most of the object-level points that he did make. In general the post was just bad and that's probably why it got no play on Lesswrong. That's all the criticism needed. I was expecting a well-written, justifiably rude, and factually-supported takedown of Eliezer. I didn't get it and I was disappointed. The top comment at the EA forum however directed me to that great takedown I was looking for and the takedown was even better for not being rude at all.
It's like trying to dispute a math proof that's written illegibly and is missing the whole middle part of the proof. Eliezer wanted to find a fatal flaw and refute the central point. But he probably couldn't find that fatal flaw. And even if he did find one one, the real issue with the proof is the bit about it being terrible in general. Finding the fatal flaw is kind of a bonus at best and at worst finding something that isn't even there!
Wikipedia claims: "The 1964 case New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, however, radically changed the nature of libel law in the United States by establishing that public officials could win a suit for libel only when they could prove the media outlet in question knew either that the information was wholly and patently false or that it was published 'with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not'."
This is typically referred to as showing "actual malice." But as you correctly surmised, this case law is irrelevant. Sullivan has been extended to cover public figures as well, but Spartz is not a public figure.[1]
I am not a California attorney, but the caselaw says that the elements of a libelous statement are that it is:
- false,
- defamatory,
- unprivileged,
- and has a natural tendency to injure or causes special damage.
Libel only applies to statements of fact or mixed statements of fact and opinion, but not exclusive statements of opinion.[2] This post clearly has many direct statements of fact.[3] Many of these statements of fact have a natural tendency to injure Spartz's and Nonlinear's reputation. I'm certain that them being published has already cause Spartz and Nonlinear a substantial amount of damages. So if they are false and Spartz decides to bring a case against Ben then I would bet that Ben would be found liable for libel
Public figures are typically those who have general fame or notoriety in the community. Marilyn Monroe, Bill Clinton, Kim Kardashian, Riley Reid? all public figures. Your high school teacher, your maid, or the boss of a medium sized company? not public figures. ↩︎
i.e. Fact: "Johnny cheated on his wife with Jessica," Opinion: "Johnny is a terrible person," Mixed: "I hate how much Johnny cheats on his wife." ↩︎
"Before she went on vacation, Kat requested that Alice bring a variety of illegal drugs across the border for her (some recreational, some for productivity). Alice argued that this would be dangerous for her personally, but Emerson and Kat reportedly argued that it is not dangerous at all and was “absolutely risk-free” " ↩︎
The game theory behind Werewolf goes deeper than that. Werewolf is an iterated game, if you play it at least once on a friday you're probably playing at least four more times in succession. A good way to pick up whether someone is a Villager or a Baddie is to notice how their behavior during the game correlates with their revealed role at the end of the game.
Alice is a noob player and is always quiet when she's a Baddie and talkative and open when she's a Villager. She's giving off easy tells that an observant player like Bob picks up on. He can then notice these tells while in the middle of a game and exploit them to win more against Alice.
Declan is a more skilled but somewhat new player. He is open and talkative regardless of his role. This makes it very easy for him to play Villager but he struggles to win when a Baddie because his open behavior leads to him often being caught out on provable lies.
Carol is a sophisticated Werewolf player. Each game she is maximizing not just to win that game, but to also win future games against the same players. Carol knows that she is the most sophisticated player in her group. When she's a Villager she can figure out which other players are Baddies much more often than the other Villagers. Her best plan as Villager then is to convince the other Villagers that her reads and analysis are correct without regard to the truthfulness of her persuasive strategies. Some people notice that she's not being 100% truthful and call it out as Werewolf behavior, but everyone at the table acknowledges that this is just how Carol plays and sometimes she lies even as a Villager. This serves her well in her next game as a Baddie where she uses the same tactics and doesn't give away any tells. Carol is no more suspicious or less open about her own info on average as a Baddie than as a Villager.
Is your point that "being asked to not hang out with low value people" is inherently abusive in a way worse than everything else going on in that list? Like maybe it's terrible, but I don't put it in it's own separate category apart from "sleeping with my boss." That's kind of my general point: none of the stuff said in this post is unusual for an environment where the employee lives and sleeps with their boss.