Meteuphoric

Crossposted from world spirit sock puppet.

often worry that people are being too deferential about their beliefs. I also hear others worrying about this, and nobody seemingly worrying about the reverse, except perhaps my friends and therapists (and I guess honestly people who know cranks, so that’s a bit troubling).

Which leads me to wonder, supposing it’s true that many people are too deferential, what might people do to change it? And can I offer them useful advice, as a person who might be not deferential enough?

Tonight I talked to Joe Carlsmith about this; here are some ideas mostly from the conversation:

1. A thing that has discouraged me from having independent views and broadcasting them is the concern that my views are extremely ignorant. At the normal pace of new information appearing, I am just too slow a reader to be acceptably up on it. At the AI-news rate, it’s very hopeless. And even if you recognize that situation at a high level, it can be easy to get to thinking ‘I want to write something about W, but I’ll need to read X, Y and the sequence on Z and all the responses to it first’.

It was helpful to me to give up on this kind of expectation, and accept that I’m going to be ignorant and have views anyway. I think this is the right thing to do because a) everyone is fairly ignorant and we don’t want the public discussion to be only the few people who don’t realize they are ignorant or care, and b) saying what you guess is true then letting people point you to why you are wrong is often more efficient than scouring all writing on the topic, and c) there’s value from more independent thinking on a topic, and being informed comes with being less independent. Bringing us to—

1. Being sufficiently out of the loop can actually help, as long as you are bold enough not to be silenced by this—if you don’t know what others’ views are, you have to come up with your own.
2. Focus on having your own beliefs at a relatively high level. For instance, “Shouldn’t we be stopping AI though?.. Wait, does that argument make sense?” is the kind of thing you can think about and discuss reasonably well without needing to know a lot of technical or fast-moving details, until a more manageable few are brought up in the argument. And my sense is that these kinds of questions—e.g. is our basic strategy what it should be?—are actually neglected.
3. Which brings us to status. Intellectual deference probably follows normal patterns of status-based deference. So it probably helps to be either high status or arrogant. That’s a lot of effort, but you can have the experience of being high status or arrogant by talking to people who are relatively lower status or deferential, such as children.
4. It probably helps to be brought up in a situation where you learned to distrust the thinking of everyone around you. It’s probably ideal to be taught by your parents that everyone else around is an idiot, then to come to distrust your parents opinions also.
5. That’s hard to get later in life. But perhaps you can get something similar from experiencing apparently venerable intellects confidently asserting things, then later observing them to be false.
6. If you are in conversations where it seems like the other person isn’t making sense, try to assume that is what’s going on, rather than the potentially much more salient explanation that you are a fool.
7. Give esteem to people asking potentially silly questions. It can help to expose yourself to impressive people who do this.

Niels Bohr quotes are helpful (HT Wikiquote)

1. Refuse to ‘understand’ things unless they are very clear. I don’t really know how to do this, because I don’t know what the alternative is like—being steadfastly confused about things seems to come naturally to me and I don’t know how else to be, but maybe you have both affordances available here and could lean one way or the other.
2. Something something do real thinking versus fake thinking. Ironically, this point I am deferring on, because I haven’t finished listening to Joe’s (so far very interesting) post.
3. If you are going to pass on information that you don’t deeply understand, track that it is a different thing, for instance by saying ‘something something…’

Crossposted from world spirit sock puppet.

A common view around me seems to be that journalists are frequently dishonorable and dangerous, and talking to them is a risk to be avoided unless you have a very specific piece of information that you seek to publicize. Then you should carefully ensure that you are as off the record as practical, and prepare to aggressively pivot the topic back to your agenda.

My own attitude is different: journalists are to be talked to as much as possible, and ideally in a relaxed fashion. If a journalist wants to observe you in some unusual circumstance, say yes. Don’t have an agenda much more than in the rest of life; basically listen to their questions and say what you think. (Note: I don’t have strong reason to believe this is safe for others or even for me.)

As evidence of the commitment with which I act in this way, this New Yorker piece describes me as ‘an oversharer’, before detailing some of my incompetent and substance-involving preparations for a dinner party at my house. (To be clear, I consider that accurate and agreeable coverage.)

I’ve talked to a lot of journalists, so how do I survive such recklessness? Well, in my experience, journalists are usually delightful: smart, sincere people trying hard to understand important topics and convey them to the public. And I’m impressed by how well they do. When I meet them, they are usually spending a tiny number of days diving into a complicated and wild situation, and while their summary isn’t perfect, I think it’s pretty good!

And what they write about me rarely feels adversarial. I can think of maybe two cases where it felt unfair or unfriendly, though there might be more I’m forgetting. And meanwhile there’s also the upside chance of them writing whole articles explaining your ideas to a large audience.

How is it that I and other people can have such divergent views here? Policies for interacting with journalists are hardly abstract philosophy—the people with the other views presumably also get to repeatedly experience talking with journalists.

One theory is that we have different expectations. What seems to me like imperfect summarization maybe seems to others like lies. What seems to me like accurate summarization maybe seems to others like ‘making me look weird’. I’ve noticed some weird-to-me expectations about the nature and constraints of journalism—like, thinking it would be better if a New Yorker article was about a technical paper and didn’t contain personal anecdotes. These expectations seems wrong about where the value of such an article comes from.

Another possibility is that we have different risk tolerances. The same low (but real) risk of a journalist writing a hit piece or randomly otherwise misusing their powers might be a deal-breaker for someone else, while I’m not very emotionally troubled by it. (My feelings: “You’re saying they could lie about me? That seems like a them problem? Can’t they lie about me anyway? Is my input that helpful? I’ll just say they lied about me, and we can have a public disagreement about it, and then maybe other journalists will come to talk to me.”) If I had more information I really needed to hide, this might be different.

Another class of theories is that we are different people, and either journalists treat us differently, or we come in contact with different journalists.

For instance, maybe people trying to learn about expert surveys of AI researchers tend to be in a cooperative mindset. But I’ve talked to journalists about my dating life, AI destroying the world, and all manner of other AI-related questions (as well as about accidentally getting into a physical altercation with nationalistically enthusiastic protesters, and probably oleander trees, and I bet some other stuff, but it’s less clear I would remember if I didn’t like the coverage in those cases.)

Someone suggested the other day that maybe I’m just a likable person, or likable to journalists. Similarly, my demeanor might just discourage being an asshole to me somehow—perhaps I seem unusually cooperative or too naive to be taken advantage of without feeling bad.

Perhaps journalists are responding to these different attitudes themselves. Probably journalists are like everyone else: they can somewhat tell if you are on their side or seeing them as an enemy to be thwarted and steered and then escaped from unscathed. And perhaps seeing the latter causes them to suspect you and find it more likely that you are weird and troubling, and shouldn’t have your words quoted without qualification or your behavior described uncritically.

If I recall, I have basically always had the attitude I have here, and it has only been strengthened by my experience talking to maybe hundreds of journalists. I think I’m also attracted to this attitude beyond pragmatism. So if journalists were responding to the attitudes, I would have had a different experience from the start.

I don’t really know what to make of this. I feel reasonably good about my policies for myself, but I don’t know if I can recommend them, because I don’t understand why they go fine for me. I can still record what I’ve experienced here, and send it out for other people to see. Which is maybe what talking to journalists is all about.

Crossposted from world spirit sock puppet.

Every way I know to store clothes I hate, to a first approximation.

I hate my current nominal method: keeping them folded on open-front shelves, because they fall out on the floor and I can’t see almost any of them without taking a bunch out. My shelves also happen to be too tall, so I throw my sweaters at the top shelf and they tumble out and impressively twist their arms around and yank down other types of clothing on their way, which on net I hate though I’m glad to have observed it once.

I hate my current actual method: keeping them in a giant mound on the floor in front of a set of open-front shelves. It stops me from being able to reach the shelves, so is self reinforcing. I do enjoy observing feedback loops, so it has that going for it. But in downsides: the only underpants I’ve been able to locate lately are those which I left in my boyfriend’s room and he washed and put in his more functional clothing system.

I hate wardrobes. It’s really annoying to hang things on coat-hangers or to take them off. But honestly I don’t think that’s my true rejection. I may not have tried wardrobes much since childhood, when I used to wait for sleep fearfully in a dark room looking at the big wooden wardrobe with the shape of a fox’s head in the wood, much like the wardrobe in the horror story we read at school in which a wardrobe contained a dead fox which was involved in some then-barely-conceivably fucked up shenanigans, which triggered a years-long departure from acceptable mental health for me. But while that may color my view, the coat-hangers are no good anyway.

I hate chests of drawers, and there my mind doesn’t even raise practical considerations before recollecting chests of drawers of my childhood. Chests of drawers are where you worry about rotting easter eggs that you had hoped to hoard as treasure among your underwear. Chests of drawers are what you stare at while you try to calculate how likely the marks on your leg are to be from a deadly snake, and whether you should be so bold as to tell a parent, and decide to just wait it out and see. And also, you have to pull the drawers out, and they are often sticky, and you can’t see lots of clothes at once, and they are always wanting to be too full to easily open. And they are just unaesthetic somehow. And generally made of fake wood, which I hate.

I hate a chair for keeping not-quite-clean clothes. Chairs are not great for this and are great for sitting on, so what is this nonsense? Most of humans need an object for this purpose, and the best we can come up with is repurposing an object designed for a totally different use that is only serviceable at all because it has two bits that things can hang on and a flattish surface? What if we didn’t have clothes racks and just always used bikes?

I changed my mind, I don’t really hate little bins on shelves, but I don’t love them. You can’t see into them without moving them, and you can’t see very well even if you do move them. So you have to dig around in them but they are too small for that and it’s like trying to mix too much cake mix in a too small bowl. I guess I could have a lot more of them and keep them emptier, but then it’s hard to know which one you should move to a poke-around-able location. Also they tend to be unaesthetic.

There are some more obscure options, which I suppose I merely expect to hate if I tried them. A thing with rotating arms for hanging things, since half the annoyance of hanging clothes is wedging them awkwardly between too-tight other clothes. Just lots and lots of hooks. Several big baskets on the floor. Just don’t wear clothes. Surreptitiously leave all of my clothes in my boyfriend’s room. Nothing good here.

This afternoon I once again set out to find the ideal or at least okay clothes storage system, since I’m moving rooms and changing everything. And I came across the idea of ‘Grab & Go No Fold Clothes Organization’, which is to say storing clothes like potato chips: in boxes with partially-but-not-fully cut out fronts. I wonder if this is the answer: see the clothes, but the clothes don’t fall on the ground. No moving things, no shoving clothes awkwardly between clothes. Underpants on tap. No risk of this reminding me of any part of the past, at least until the future.

Crossposted from world spirit sock puppet.

Suppose you and Bobby the car salesman are haggling over the price of a car. You could try saying that you won’t pay more than $3k, but Bobby can equally retort that he won’t sell it for less than $4k. If you guys manage to negotiate a sale, it will probably be at more than $3k (and involve revealing both of you as liars).

Now imagine the same situation, but you only have $3k and Bobby knows it. Now, if $3k is actually ok for him, you win and get your price.

Now imagine you are rich but you have a boyfriend at home who has only agreed to a $3k expenditure on a used car at this time, and thinks any more would be crazy. It’s shared money, so to pay more you would need to go away and get his permission, and it wouldn’t be easy. If Bobby believes you, then your situation is much like being poor again, and you win.

My guess is I read about this in Thomas Schelling’s The Strategy of Conflict when I was a teenager. The general observation is that being more constrained can often be helpful in a negotiation. Which is a bit shocking because it undermines the seeming truism that more power—more options, more resources—is always better for getting what you want.

A less general observation that also stuck with me about this is that you can trivially arrange to have such constraints through having an associate, such as a stubborn and spending-conscious boyfriend. (Ok, finding one of those is not trivial, especially if you have other desiderata.)

This is all background. The thing I want to point out is that being part of an organization rather than a free agent means creating and using this effect all over the place.

This is most obvious with timing and deadlines. I am a relatively free agent, and I am quite good at making deadlines for myself and then taking them seriously. But I feel like other people I casually negotiate with about how to spend time, aka my friends, often feel like deadlines I make are not very real, since I could just ignore them. Because it’s just an agreement with myself, it’s up for negotiation with myself. And if I insist on respecting these lines I drew myself that have no legible consequences, then it feels like I’m being weird and stubborn and unfriendly or perhaps charmingly neurodivergent. So I often don’t—once it’s a negotiation, then negotiating hard for my own goals, against my friends, doesn’t feel very friendly to anyone.

Now consider a friend working in an org. They can casually throw out that they have this thing due tomorrow, and everyone will take it as a hard constraint. I will take it as a hard constraint. I might even offer to help get it done, even though I have other things I want to do. Whereas if I had not only insisted on my imaginary deadline but hoped for any help in fulfilling it, I think that would often feel unreasonable of me.

The org believably cuts off the person’s options, like the boyfriend, and so the person implicitly wins many negotiations (or what would have been negotiations), all in the direction of doing more for the org, and without seeming unfriendly to their friends.

My own difficulties with this are partly a me problem—I’m probably not very good at ‘defending boundaries’. But my point is that if you are a solo human then there’s a whole skill-requiring task of ‘defending boundaries’ that just becomes trivially easy if you have an org around you to cut off certain possibilities. And also if your boundaries are ‘I am going to do this project tonight definitely regardless of if you want me to do something else’ then that will land a way with other people that reporting on your org’s boundary policing—‘I have to do this by tomorrow, alas’—will not.

I think this ‘service’ and making use of it is rarely intentional, but I’d guess it’s very effective, and is a dynamic that makes people more likely to join orgs rather than being solo. It just looks like ‘it’s harder to get things done on my own’ and a component of ‘it’s harder to structure my time’ and ‘I find I keep on doing stuff other than my work’.

Crossposted from world spirit sock puppet.

It’s not always better to be more capable. As I mentioned yesterday, it can (famously) be helpful in negotiations to have your hands tied. That is, to be disempowered from giving up everything the other party wants.

I had previously thought of this as a somewhat rare corner case of human behavior—I for one don’t haggle very often—but I now think negotiations where this is an element are are quite common: yesterday I described it in friendly (and honest) negotiations about how to spend time, for instance. And I also see a related thing in the practice of dietary commitments.

But is being less capable helpful outside of negotiating? And is this going to become AI related?

Yes and yes!

Commitments: more good things come to those who can commit (e.g. rides out of deserts, secrets, trust, love). ‘Committing’ generally involves cutting off certain options to yourself, whether in practical terms or via you being the kind of honorable person who can’t bear to do a thing they promised not to do. These are both kinds of limitations. If you were a more powerful creature, who was fully capable of breaking down any barrier, and fully capable of breaking a promise—a creature to whom all options were always open—then commitments would be less available to you.

Transparency: a big way humans know what is going on inside other humans, well enough to trust them, is that there is a connection between what is happening inside them and what is happening on their faces and in their bodies, and they usually can’t control this very well. People who can break this connection and control their external behavior independently tend to be feared and distrusted. It is valuable to be unable to stop these signals escaping.

Consistency: a big way we predict how a specific human will behave in the future is that each human has specific kinds of behavior that come easily to them, and it is hard for them to behave entirely differently. So if you are friends with someone who you have observed be attentive and kind to other people for five years, it is very likely that they continue behaving in that way going forward. Whereas a creature with more freedom of behavior could wholly inhabit that persona for five years, then change to a different one.

Relatedly, we know a lot about what to expect from a human stranger because of our prior knowledge of humans. If humans had the power to rewrite their internal dynamics and become totally different creatures, then we would much less know what to expect from one.

Scope of risk: people are safer to interact with if you know they are limited in their ability to cause destruction. You might prefer to hire a person who you think would be less able to wrest control of your organization if they wanted to. You might prefer to babysit a child who does not know how to pick locks or set fires. So a person might be more employable, or be taken care of by better babysitters, if they are less capable. Similarly, an extremely capable AI system might be a less desirable accountant than a human, if you can only fully trust the human to not be up to the task of hacking your accounts.

These are all to do with interacting with other creatures. For a creature alone in the universe, I don’t know of any situation where they are better off being less capable. But when you need to trust another creature, it is better to know more about them, and better to know they are cut off from options that might harm you.

In the usual picture of AI progress, AI is worse than humans at various tasks, and we are waiting for it to surpass us everywhere, at which point humans will be obsolete as labor. But in a world where AI needs to interact with other agents (humans or AIs) the aforementioned value of being less capable complicates things: perhaps there are skills where AI is already more capable than humans, but where that capability is a liability. For instance, lying smoothly and otherwise generating outward behavior that isn’t revealing about internal dynamics, switching between entirely different personas, and hacking skills. Given that, what does the trajectory look like?