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Say I go swimming in a place where the lifeguard can’t see me. Is it my fault I drowned or the lifeguards?
The issue is not whose fault it is for the crime, but whose fault it is for the using up the extra resources to prevent the crime, which is not an issue in the lifeguard example. And that itself is a specific case of "how much more than average do you have to use the commons before you can be blamed for overusing the commons". Which is partly a matter of degree and depends on things like how much you use it, what people's expectations are, what reasonable expectations are, and what the intentions are of the people providing the resources.
My family doesn’t go to these casinos, we just travel to Vegas because we have friends nearby. We’re benefiting but not contributing.
I've done that myself (for busses to Atlantic City). Since the owner can change the price freely, and can change it incrementally or for specific customers, I'd generally not consider it to be overusing the commons if there is a price. In the case of loss-leader trips, it's also very hard to overuse the trips anyway, as opposed to just using them more than average--you probably couldn't use more than one trip every couple of days.
If stores in Taiwan charged for use of bathrooms, and the government rented out spaces for homeless on the ground, and charged a "homeless stay tax" which covers the costs of police and such, I would agree that it would be okay to go homeless and use them at the given prices. (If there is a two tier price where the homeless are charged more, the homeless tourist would have to pay the homeless tier price, and not cheat even if it isn't enforced well.)
I don't have to make up things after the fact to say "he probably chose the polygamy example because polygamy is weird". It's obvious.
He claimed that monogamy was rejected by the upper class sufficiently enough to cause divorce and single parenthood to spike
There are various types of opposition to monogamy. Outright support of polygamy is not the only one.
I can’t make up and apply new criteria like “bizarrely unconventional”,\
Yes you can. Of course, it's not "making it up", it's "figuring it out". If there are obvious explanations why he might want to use that example other than "he's biased against leftists", you shouldn't jump to "he's biased against leftists". And "polygamy is a lot weirder" is too obvious an explanation for you to just ignore it.
nor can I just accept Henderson’s framework when I’m critiquing it.
If you're criticizing his version and not your version, you pretty much are required to accept his framework.
I believe the relevant phrase is "aged like milk".
Sure, polyamory is bizarre and unconventional, but that only further undermines Henderson’s assertion that it was widely adopted (enough to have an impact) by both the upper and lower class of society circa 1960-1970s.
He's not asserting that the upper class rejected monogamy in a way that was widely adopted. He does say this about his classmates, but his classmates aren't the entire upper class.
You may be assuming that if the lower classes did it, and the upper classes promote it, that implies that the upper classes must be responsible for the lower classes doing it. That doesn't follow. A luxury belief is something that people have on an individual level, so there's no requirement that the individual have any influence. (In this case, I'd say that there are several aspects to rejecting monogamy, and some are common enough beliefs that the upper class may have some influence, and some are not. Polygamy falls in the second category.)
I didn’t present the oil tycoon story as a luxury belief example, but rather as an example of a story that carried the same “saying but not doing” lesson.
You said that he didn't use such a story because he thinks anti-leftist examples are uniquely compelling. "It isn't bizarrely unconventional" and "it isn't even a luxury belief" are alternate explanations to "he's biased against leftists".
I did present “support for a harsh criminal justice system” as an example of a luxury belief that Henderson would contest, even though it perfectly fits his template.
Support for a harsh criminal justice system isn't bizarrely unconventional, so there is still a reason other than "he's biased against leftists".
And luxury beliefs should imply a more extreme elite/non-elite imbalance than just "somewhat fewer people support it". A substantial number of poor people support a harsh criminal justice system, even if not as many as rich people. For the same reason, supporting Trump isn't a luxury belief.
I cannot fathom what Henderson finds so uniquely compelling about his particular version of the parable, except that it features a blatantly hypocritical leftist. Had his classmate been a Republican oil tycoon who extolled the virtues of going to church but didn’t go himself, would Henderson be repeating that story for so many years after the fact?
What makes it compelling is not that it features a hypocritical leftist, but that the belief he actually follows is the one professed by the vast, vast, majority of society, and the one that he claims to believe is bizarre and unconventional. The Republican not going to church wouldn't be a compelling example because the belief in going to church is not unconventional, and the belief in not going to church is, while common, not as overwhelmingly believed in as monogamy.
(And if you think that monogamy isn't like this, you're in a bubble. Remember when Scott claimed that exclusive marriage vows were just boilerplate that you weren't supposed to obey, and he got the biggest pileon ever saying otherwise?)
It's also questionable whether the Republican example is a luxury belief at all. In order for it to be a luxury belief, church would have to be harmful to church-goers and he would have to be avoiding the harmful effects by not going. You might try to say "well, church is time-consuming and that's harmful", but that's a very noncentral example of harm caused by church.
If the lower class copies one upper class trend but not another, isn’t that evidence they’re not impressionable lemmings aping everything they see?
Trends take a while to trickle down. So if the upper class returns to monogamy, the lower classes may not have gotten that far yet.
There's also trends that stick around because they are overall harmful, but they do benefit someone, and the benefit is also greater for poor people. If it was trendy to shoplift cheap items, the upper class wouldn't gain much from following the trend, so it would end easily. But the lower class would gain from successfully shoplifting even cheap items, so they would be much more willing to continue the trend, even though they also lose more from stores passing the cost of shoplifting on to their customers.
I'd ask you to estimate the distribution of the loss leader among customers and compare your usage of it to the average rate, and maybe the high end rate. I necessarily have to make up numbers, but I wouldn't be surprised if 50% of airline seats were cheap seats. It would then be impossible for you to use cheap seats at more than twice the rate of the average person. I'd also expect that even without you, there would be a substantial number of customers who use cheap seats all the time. If a substantial number use them all the time, you being a person that uses them all the time is not greatly far from what is expected. And I'd expect that the rate at which you take trips doesn't differ greatly from the rate at which those other people take trips.
It's true that if everyone only bought cheap seats, the price structure would be unsustainable. But there's a big difference between something that would be unsustainable if everyone did it and something that would be unsustainable if done by even a relatively small number of people. If 5% of the population used public restrooms as often as a homeless person, public restrooms would become unsustainable, never mind "everyone".
Also, some of the amenities in question are run by the government. The government doesn't do loss leaders; it doesn't let you camp out in public parks because it wants to attract more paying customers who incidentally might want to sleep there. It's a government, it runs on taxes.
Is me creating an opportunity for someone to commit a crime constitute my doing something bad to the commons or is it on the actual criminals?
It's on both.
The rest of it, about shoplifting, seems hard to connect, as no one is advocating doing something illegal.
The shoplifting comparison has nothing to do with whether shoplifting is illegal. The point of the comparison is that you can endlessly speculate that something really has a positive effect by imagining some scenario where it does. I am able to imagine such a positive effect for shoplifting, but it would not convince you that shoplifting is positive. I'm not going to be convinced that homelessness is positive by you imagining some scenario where it is.
If I guess I am contributing more than I am taking by my level of noise then is this okay?
My answer to this is the same as for the similar question about shoplifting: I would expect that if homelessness or shoplifting had a positive effect, stores and governments would act as though it does. You personally cannot become "okay" on your own--you don't get to decide that your shoplifting is actually contributing more to tourist publicity than it harms the stores, and you don't get to decide that your homelessness creates a positive contribution.
So then the first question is, “Did I personally contribute to an increased crime rate or decreased safety on the island?” I think the answer is obviously no, but I would be interested to hear if I am overlooking something.
You didn't commit extra crimes, but it requires more resources to protect you from crimes. (And again, since you are a single person, the extra resources get lost in the noise. But if many people did this, there would be more crime.)
You still aren’t giving any reason why I should assume I am contributing to bad outcomes instead of good ones or neutral ones.
I could say the same thing about the shoplifter. There are scenarios where shoplifting might, in theory, be a benefit to the stores. It would not be possible to prove that these scenarios are false. Maybe it really is true that tourists like being able to occasionally shoplift and otherwise spend enough money to make up for the loss. You can invent an infinite number of such scenarios.
What I can observe, however, is that stores don't gather together to promote an area of town as the shoplifting district, and nobody's trying to legalize shoplifting. The people who would best know about the consequences seem to think the bad outcomes are the realistic scenario. Likewise, Taiwan doesn't take out ads saying "come to Taiwan and experience being homeless" or even have designated homeless encampment areas, shopping malls don't compete on how good their homeless person amenities are, and I really doubt that being homeless gives you high status among your colleagues at work, if you even told them.
I’m normally suspicious of zoning but “you can’t put a garbage dump next to a school in a neighborhood” seems pretty basic.
Such zoning would itself raise the taxes you pay on your land.
You never mention, for example, my days spent snorkeling in Hualien.
I never mention it because you are not overusing it compared to someone in a home.
even regular middle class people might be using more of the countryside in a destructive way in their time off than I am
"People who are not causing the particular harm I am causing, may be causing different sorts of harm" doesn't really justify it.
To think of it another way, if a culture of (lawful and clean) vagabonds were to evolve in Taiwan, for all we know it might create a new culture of innovation, versus the “lie flat” culture that some of Asia is falling pray to.
This is a rationalization. It's like saying "if a culture of shoplifters arose, for all we know it could create a culture of innovation, where stores benefit from the publicity caused by shoplifting, customers consider stores with frequent shoplifters to have high quality goods so shoplifting attracts customers, tourists shoplift occasionally but spend more money in the areas where they shoplift, etc." You can always invent hypothetical scenarios where your harm doesn't really cause harm. The clause after the "for all we know" is wishful thinking and supported by nothing whatsoever.
Seriously, being homeless might create a Silicon Valley?
No, I don't concede that. Even for an empty lot, the guy who owns it presumably owns it for a reason. Like buildings, it's plausible that this reason 1) cannot just easily transfer to a new piece of land, and 2) is not reduced in value so much by the garbage dump that building the garbage dump isn't worth it.
Also, if he sells it, someone else can build a building on it, thus increasing the taxes he has to pay on the remaining portion. And if he builds a garbage dump, it discourages other people from building nearby and raising his taxes; selling doesn't do that.
And if they do, and I claim I already paid it, how certain are they I’m lying? And how likely are they to win the court case if so?
When you pay it off, Joey should be sending you a document stating that the debt is paid, and you should also have a record of a bank transfer or other paper trail showing that the money got to Joey. If his children demand the money and you claim you already paid it, the court will ask for this paperwork and will have no trouble deciding that you're lying if you can't produce it.
The answer to "why can't I just abuse the system?" is "they're not idiots; they'll have thought of it".
You're also stuck with the land since you've got some buildings on it and you can't move the buildings, so selling it has huge switching costs.
Of course, you'll need land to build the garbage dump on, but the garbage dump can affect the property values of a larger sized area than the actual dump. Also note that the garbage dump unequally reduces the value of different uses of the land, so the querstion "doesn't the garbage dump reduce the value of the building by enough to make up for the tax savings" may not be a yes. In some cases, the building that's already on the land may even produce a garbage dump as a side effect--consider a factory, for instance.
why not just sell your land to someone who would use it more productively to beguin with?
Because the market price of your land is zero.
At any rate, implicitly the system is designed for the number of people doing this. No?
No. That's like saying that stores' budgets are designed to allow for a certain amount of shoplifting (which is true), so it's okay to shoplift. The fact that the system is designed to survive some amount of cheating, and that it doesn't spend as much effort to catch cheaters as it could, doesn't make cheating okay.
Back to my question above, what actual drain did I pose on society?
That depends on your definition of drain. If by "drain" you mean "used far more than your fair share" everything you did that wouldn't be done so often by someone with a home was a drain. Your post mentions using public restrooms, using public places for sleeping, and being protected from crime even though you lived in the streets (and presumably was more vulnerable to crime than you would be in a home).
Other than keeping things clean and obeying laws, what should I do to make sure I haven’t done harm?
Get a home?
(And if your answer is "that means I have to pay for my restroom and sleeping space, and that would cost me money", that's pretty much the point.)
Society is set up to function under the assumption that most people have homes and are imposing those "costs". It is not set up to function under the assumption that a lot of people are homeless and use public restrooms, sleep in public places, etc. Those things can only exist because they are used by a small number of people under a rare set of circumstances.
You can describe homes as using "scarce space" but there's enough "scarce" space that most people can have homes and use some of it. The public restrooms in existence couldn't handle a situation where even 10% of the population was homeless, never mind most of the population.
This seems wrong. The construction of a building mainly affects the value of the land around it, not the land on which it sits.
That brings up the splitting question.
If two people owning adjacent parcels of land each build a garbage dump, they will in fact reduce both of their taxes since they each affect each other's.
And if we're going with "the government tracks such things and does calculations to prevent splitting from mattering" then it should be possible to build it on your own land and still get the tax reduction.
I am inclined to think "this is polluting the commons". All the things you used to survive are meant to be used by people who have homes and only occasionally need those things (and often pay indirectly, such as by making purchases in a store where they use the bathroom). The fact that they are free is a price structure that is only possible because people who use them are occasional users who rarely need them. Deliberately going without a home in the knowledge that you can survive using the free services is using much more than your fair share of the commons and if many people behaved like you, the free services would disappear.
Of course, you can argue "if they didn't want homeless people using them, they shouldn't provide them for free to homeless people". The consequence of this attitude, at large, is why we can't have nice things.
I am generally not thrilled with the idea of humor where the joke is how badly you can strawman your opponent. You also end up with Schroedinger's comedian, a phenomenon that happens a lot with real-world comedians too: the comedian is making an insightful comment about a real world issue, up until someone points out that they are saying something flawed or outright false, to which the reply is "it's just humor. It doesn't have to be accurate".
If I were a similar homeless man and needed food, I would have robbed someone. Yet that doesn't lead me to conclude anything negative about people who don't want to be robbed.
The problem with feeding prisoners vegan food to make their lives worse is similar to the problem with forcing them all to convert to Islam to make their lives worse--there's a group of people in the real world who would really like to convert others to Islam, and forcing prisoners to convert is a huge benefit to this group. The problem isn't just that the prisoners' lives are made worse; it's that it does so in a way which people are motivated to do for other reasons unrelated to prisoners or crime, creating both a moral hazard, and a dubious handout to outsiders who should not just be receiving handouts.
If a tech company forced me to move to NYC, I would object for a combination of two separate reasons: 1--any change in my life is going to be hard--it may take me away from people I know, I need to learn the geography again, I live in Lothlórien right now and if I move to NYC nobody speaks Quenya, etc. And 2--things that are specific about NYC above and beyond the fact that change is going to be a problem by itself; for instance, I might hate subways, and I might hate subways whether I'm exposed to lots of them or not.
#2 can be a personal problem for me, but I notice that people in NYC aren't, on the average, in general less happy than people who live elsewhere, so it seems like #2 isn't a real issue when averaged over the whole population. #1 can be an issue even averaged over the whole population, of course, but #1 isn't unique to moving to NYC, and applies to a whole bunch of other changes to the point where it's most of the way to being a fully general argument against any change.
I'd expect the same to be true in the case of AI: The "change is a problem" component is negative, but it's no worse than any other sort of change, and the "AI specifically is a problem" component would include some people who are harmed and some people who benefit and overall it's going to be a wash.
Or to put it another way, just because I wouldn't want a tech company to move me to NYC, that doesn't imply that NYC is a worse place to live than where I am now.
"This very clearly does not" apply to X and "I have an argument that it doesn't apply to X" are not the same thing.
(And it wouldn't be hard for a court to make some excuse like "these specific harms have to be $500m, and other harms 'of similar severity' means either worse things with less than $500m damage or less bad things with more than $500m damage". That would explain the need to detail specific harms while putting no practical restriction on what the law covers, since the court can claim that anything is a worse harm.
Always assume that laws of this type are interpreted by an autistic, malicious, genie.)
If your model is not projected to be at least 2024 state of the art and it is not over the 10^26 flops limit?
It's not going to be 2024 forever. In the future being 2024 state of the art won't be as hard as it is in actual 2024.
That developers risk going to jail for making a mistake on a form.
- This (almost) never happens.
Because prosecuting someone for making a mistake on a form happens when the government wants to go after an otherwise innocent person for unacceptable reasons, so they prosecute a crime that goes unprosecuted 99% of the time.
The bill says the $500 million must be due to cyberattacks on critical infrastructure, autonomous illegal-for-a-human activity by an AI, or something else of similar severity. This very clearly does not apply to ‘$500 million in diffused harms like medical errors or someone using its writing capabilities for phishing emails.’
"Severity" isn't defined. It's not implausible to read "severity" to mean "has a similar cost to".
I guess in the average case, the contrarian’s conclusion is wrong, but it is also a reminder that the mainstream case is not communicated clearly, and often exaggerated or supported by invalid arguments.
This enables sanewashing and motte-and-bailey arguments.
I've heard, in this context, the partial counterargument that he was using traits which are a little fuzzy around the edges (where is the boundary between round and wrinkled?) and that he didn't have to intentionally fudge his data in order to get results that were too good, just be not completely objective in how he was determining them.
Of course, this sort of thing is why we have double-blind tests in modern times.
What happens if you ask it about its experiences as a reincarnated spirit?
I feel this conflates different kinds of weirdness, by using an overly vague definition and talking about cases where certain narrow kinds of weirdness are useful.
I couldn't even come up with counterexamples because of the vagueness. Being rude to strangers is weird, but surely you're not the only person who has done this, so you could argue "well, a lot of people do that so it's not weird enough to count". And then there's reference class manipulation. "Yes, there was only one Unabomber, but he should be considered as a member of the class 'violent political protests' and there are too many of that class to count it as weird".
Pointing to weirdness as good is like crackpots pointing to Galileo and Einstein. If you're doing something weird, it gets bad reactions, and you blame that on the weirdness, it's far more likely that you're just trying to excuse some character flaw in yourself than that you're the lone Einstein that nobody understands.
Features to benefit people accused of X may benefit mostly people who have been unjustly accused. So looking at the value to the entire category "people accused of X" may be wrong. You should look at the value to the subset that it was meant to protect.
Slavery is one subject that it's highly likely ChatGPT is specifically programmed to handle differently for political reasons. How did you get around this problem?
If they are, that link doesn't show it. First of all, it doesn't show Japanese prices at all. Second, even though it claims to "reflect restaurants of all sizes and segments", it doesn't, because a burger at McDonald's or Wendy's is not $16 and they obviously excluded fast food restaurants. How much is a burger in Japan if you exclude fast food?
Yet, that’s not what happened; inflation has been higher in the US. In Japan, you can get a good bowl of ramen for $6. In an American city, today, including tax and tip you’d probably pay more like $20 for something likely worse.
I'd be unsurprised if you could get a jar of peanut butter or a turkey in the US for a lot less than you could in Japan. This tells you nothing about the economy.
Non-instant ramen (or peanut butter) is vastly more popular in one country than another. Comparing the prices between the US and Japan is trying to compare the prices of a specialty food and a common food. Of course the prices will be different.
I'm going to be a party pooper here and point out that though this may be presented as an April Fool's joke, its main joke is that in a live debate, it is extremely funny to strawman your opponent's side. That's bad practice whether done as a joke or not.
Many of these things are subject to the objection "and you know who else proclaims that they're innocent? Innocent people."
Advice which says "don't act like you're innocent, and be skeptical of someone who claims to be innocent" is generally bad advice.
It also pattern-matches to a very clumsy smear, which I get the impression is triggering readers before they manage to appreciate how it relates to the thesis.
It doesn't just pattern match to a clumsy smear. It's also not the only clumsy smear in the article. You're acting as though that's the only questionable thing Metz wrote and that taken in isolation you could read it in some strained way to keep it from being a smear. It was not published in isolation.
I’m just arguing that there is a tension between common rationalist ideology that one should have a strong presumption in favor of telling the truth, and that Cade Metz shouldn’t have doxxed Scott Alexander.
His doxing Scott was in an article that also contained lies, lies which made the doxing more harmful. He wouldn't have just posted Scott's real name in a context where no lies were involved.
Another is recipes for destruction, where you give a small hostile faction the ability to unilaterally cause harm. ... But that seems less relevant for his real name, when it is readily available and he ends up facing tons of attention regardless.
By coincidence, Scott has written about this subject.
Not being completely hidden isn't "readily available". If finding his name is even a trivial inconvenience, it doesn't cause the damage caused by plastering his name in the Times.
The vague insinuation isn't "Scott agrees with Murray", the vague insinuation is "Scott agrees with Murray's deplorable beliefs, as shown by this reference". The reference shows no such thing.
Arguing "well, Scott believes that anyway" is not an excuse for fake evidence.
I think some kinds of criticism are good and some are not. Criticizing you because I have some well-stated objection to your ideas is good. Criticizing you by saying "Zach posts in a place which contains fans of Adolf Hitler" is bad. Criticizing you by causing real-life problems to happen to you (i.e. analogous to doxing Scott) is also bad.
The reason that I can make a statement about journalists based on this is that the New York Times really is big and influential in the journalism profession. On the other hand, Poor Minorities aren't representative of poor minorities.
Not only that, the poor minorities example is wrong in the first place. Even the restricted subset of poor minorities don't all want to steal your company's money. The motte-and-bailey statement isn't even true about the motte. You never even get to the point of saying something that's true about the motte but false about the bailey.
it seems really unlikely that he’s gotten any better at even the grammar of rationalist communication.
You don't need to use rationalist grammar to convince rationalists that you like them. You just need to know what biases of theirs to play upon, what assumptions they're making, how to reassure them, etc.
The skills for pretending to be someone's friend are very different from the skills for acting like them.
I understood the comment I was responding to as saying that Zack was helping Cade do a better job of disguising himself as someone who cared about good epistemics.
Yes, but disguising himself as someone who cares about good epistemics doesn't require using good epistemics. Rather it means saying the right things to get the rationalist to let his guard down. There are plenty of ways to convince people about X that don't involve doing X.
Scott is already too charitable. I'd even say that Scott being too charitable made this specific situation worse. I don't find this to be a worthwhile thing about Scott either for us to emulate, or for Scott to take further.
"Quokka" is a meme about rationalists for a reason. You are not going to have unerring logical evidence that someone wants to harm you if they are trying to be at all subtle. You have to figure it out from their behavior.
Sometimes it just isn't true that both sides are reasonable and have useful perspectives.
His behavior is clearly accepted by the New York Times, and the Times is big and influential enough among mainstream journalists that this reflects on the profession in general.
explaining any obvious cutouts that make someone an Okay Journalist.
Not lying (by non-Eliezer standards) would be a start.
"Outperform at talking about epistemics" doesn't mean "perform better at being epistemically correct", it means "perform better at getting what he wants when epistemics are involved".
People say make an idea a story, and I still get slammed.
The idea still has to be worthwhile and argued well. Making it a story may help, but it isn't a cureall.
I find these excuses to be terrible reasoning.
-- Exactly what does it mean to be "entangled closer with physical reality"? Naively I would believe that everything is entangled with physical reality to a degree of 100%. And I don't think you can easily describe a concept of "entangled with physical reality" that is something you'd reasonably want to do, that justifies walking barefoot, and that has no other strange implications.
-- Exactly where are you getting your information about how much rigid movement is natural? It sounds like a scientific claim without the science.
-- "Natural" has some of the same problems as "entangled with physical reality"--lots of things are natural from smallpox to cyanide. If you can articulate a definition of "natural" that explains why you'd actually want it, and which applies to walking barefoot (including to sidewalks and streets, which I'd call not natural!), I'd like to see it.
-- Why in the world would you want to "reduce what you need and broaden what you tolerate"? Is that just reasoning from "I was taught as a child to not be too greedy, and reducing what I need is sort of like being less greedy"? And if I wanted to broaden what I tolerate, I'd go learn Japanese, not walk barefoot.
-- "Sharp objects are rare" is another way of saying "yeah, there are some". Shoes are like seatbelts in this sense. They protect against things that are rare, but which happen.
-- You're not "opening people's minds" by ignoring their objections to you walking barefoot. That's just taking "I ignore social cues" and treating it as a virtue instead of a deficiency.
It’s not crazy to hazard that some of the more-strongly-stigmatized things on the list above have incidence that’s 10x or even 100x what is readily apparent, just like the number of trans folk in the population is wildly greater than the median American would have guessed in the year 1980.
There's an alternative explanation: trans is mostly a social contagion and the incidence actually went up by 10x or 100x, rather than always being there but you never noticed it.