tikimixologist
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User ID: 257
tikimixologist
1yr ago
I suspect sex would be reasonably safe. But we already have a preview of what might happen if your personal utopia does is not what the zeitgeist wants. There was a Rimworld mod called "European Phenotype and Names Only (White Humans)" which modifies a single player game. It's banned.
https://www.eurogamer.net/paradox-pulls-discriminatory-stellaris-mod-that-made-all-humans-white
We embrace the idea that players mod the game to best represent how they want to play, we do NOT however wish to enable discriminatory practices.
tikimixologist
1yr ago
First is because of the Republican's insistence on 'Whiteness & Christianity' being core to the platform.
This is simply false and has been false for decades. Here's what George W. Bush said about the topic on Sept 17, 2001 for example:
The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That's not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace. These terrorists don't represent peace. They represent evil and war."
Leftists insist that Republicans are racist, and push this meme by misleading media stories. A Bush II example of this was James Byrd (black guy) getting murdered by racists in Texas while Bush was governor. Leftists who oppose the death penalty wanted a hate crime law, Bush said such a law was unnecessary because Texas has strict laws against murder. Texas eventually executed the killers based on those laws.
A Trump example of this is creatively editing a statement to imply Trump described white supremacists as "fine people" when he explicitly said he wasn't referring to them. (Full quotes here: https://www.politifact.com/article/2019/apr/26/context-trumps-very-fine-people-both-sides-remarks/ )
Now I fully believe that Indians and Chinese believe this to be true - but their belief has nothing to do with any actual mainstream Republican views. Your second reason explains quite well why Indian and Chinese Americans believe this, regardless of how true it is.
tikimixologist
1yr ago
Typically "cost of living" is "a made up number to justify wealth redistribution".
I can't recall ever seeing a "cost of living" number that was lower than the 70-80'th percentile of global income after adjusting for PPP.
tikimixologist
1yr ago
Why focus so much on class in his options for dealing with tricky class signaling games?
(1) Reading up on the intra-community accounts from a couple years back
I am aware of the occasional mentally unstable woman (e.g. Kathy Forth) making vague claims that plausibly mean very little. E.g. her only concrete claim is that someone touched her leg and her complaint about such resulted in his immediate expulsion. Keerthana Gopalakrishnan has similarly minor concrete claims (asked out 3x in a year) plus internal narratives ("felt unsafe").
I am not aware of anything that suggests rationalist communities have a problem worse than communities which are not considered problematic (e.g. cardiology, anti-moneylaundering, education, journalism). Perhaps if you want to make this claim you can provide evidence of it. The Time Magazine article and the various conclusions you drew (but which it did not actually say) are not such evidence.
By the same token, given the community norms, the weird/kinky/awkward/shy are encouraged to not be afraid and to let it all out. That then causes problems such as guy thinking "okay, we're friends, right? so it's perfectly normal for me to talk about jerking off in front of her" in relation to a woman who is not part of that particular community and does not know the norms.
No one claims this happened except you. Time Magazine does not. The guy who believes Time Magazine is referring to him says something entirely different happened. No one disputes him, and in the event of a dispute there is highly likely to be plenty of evidence.
I'll note you also claimed it happened during a job interview and he was her boss, which you seem to have retreated from. Why do you keep making claims such as these? Do you have some firsthand knowledge that the rest of us lack?
What did you mean when you said "I can believe it, because [insert rant about quokkas]"? I assumed it was referencing this which is entirely about my Claim 2 - that innocent rationalists will be harmed by evil and dangerous journalists/grifters/etc if they don't develop defense mechanisms. Did you mean something else?
tikimixologist
1yr ago
You claimed before:
Everything that the doomers claim AI would do assumes a biological utility function, such as maximizing growth, reproduction, and fitness.
[Instrumental convergence] Very much is an assumption
Now you claim:
I think it is what Wikipedia says it is
But Wikipedia says it is a conclusion derived from different assumptions which Wikipedia lists. None of them have anything to do with a biological utility function. So it's pretty clear you either a) don't think it is what Wikipedia says it is or b) didn't read wikipedia or anything else about it. But for some reason you still feel the need to make dismissive statements.
Feel free to leave me "on read". It is clear you are not here to discuss this in good faith. You might want to check out a subreddit called /r/sneerclub - it may be to your liking.
tikimixologist
1yr ago
Very much is an assumption and not "how the world works". It's an article of faith masquerading as a scientific explanation of how things ought to be.
What do you think instrumental convergence is?
I am becoming suspicious that you are spouting dismissive words without those words actually referencing any ideas.
The only conclusion about how things ought to work comes from the field of Physics for me, not "AI ethics".
Does physics not suggest that controllable energy sources are a necessary step in doing lots of different things?
No it didn't because I don't make generative AI predictions or think about them at all.
That much is clear.
tikimixologist
1yr ago
Everything that the doomers claim AI would do assumes a biological utility function, such as maximizing growth, reproduction, and fitness. It's very anthropomorphizing in the same way pop culture depictions of aliens just happen to be bipeds with two eyes and ears and a nose, and not a cloud of gas or whatever.
They do not assume this at all. You clearly haven't actually read about instrumental convergence which is a conclusion about how the world works and not an assumption.
But this goes contra to my understanding of what neural networks are, namely just function approximations by and large.
Did your understanding generate a track record of correct predictions about recent AI developments? The statement that "it's crazy that..." suggests you did not.
tikimixologist
1yr ago
But it exists within the realm of psychology, and therefore effective treatments will also be within the realm of psychology: therapy and medications.
I don't think the conclusion follows.
I, like many men, have a similar problem to transgender folks: I'm Dwayne Johnson in the body of a 40+ computer programmer. The solution is squats, deadlifts, bench press, road work and clean eating, not therapy and medication. Body transformation >> body acceptance, at least in this particular case where body transformation has so many other benefits. And it's pretty easy to reverse the transformation and go back to dad bod if desired.
The principle that "what starts in psychology stays in psychology" seems to be false.
Now in the transgender case it's trickier because body transformation doesn't work very well and it seems like the desire for body transformation is often far less permanent than the transformation itself. But that is fundamentally a question of cost/benefit analysis (and I think the modern world is getting it wrong).
Abstract principles like what you describe don't help. If we had a 100% perfect and reversible gender transition, there would be no reason not to let people try on an opposite gender body just for fun.
tikimixologist
1yr ago
You seem to be making two entirely separate claims across your various comments here:
Claim 1: "Prominent EA types/the community as a statistical average have actually engaged in bad behavior in excess of base rates. This is harmful and morally wrong." (e.g. here: https://www.themotte.org/post/381/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/67827?context=8#context https://www.themotte.org/post/381/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/67831?context=8#context )
Claim 2: "Prominent EA types have followed a strategy which is suboptimal in the presence of hostile adversaries who wish to mislead the public about them without technically lying." (What I'm replying to right now.)
I think most people here disagree with (1) and agree with (2). For example in my comment above I'm disputing claim 1 and in reply you're asserting the truth of claim 2. That's pretty confusing, and I think if you want the conversation to be productive you should make it explicit which claim you are discussing.
They do seem to be different cases. This is classic "he said, she said": he's saying "we were pals", she's saying "he's the guy interviewing me for a job".
It isn't "he said, she said" because Time Magazine didn't say he was the interviewer or her prospective boss. Time Magazine did not say anything at all about the presence or absence of a preexisting relationship. They said:
"...an unsettling experience with an influential figure in EA whose role included picking out promising students and funneling them towards highly coveted jobs. After that leader arranged for her to be flown to the U.K. for a job interview, she recalls being surprised to discover that she was expected to stay in his home, not a hotel."
I can totally understand how you drew this (most likely false) conclusion, but technically Time Magazine did not lie.
They simply exploited the fact that you believe that they would have mentioned a preexisting weirdo rationalist relationship with odd social experiments if one existed, and that they would have mentioned the interview was with someone else entirely.
Also, I do not believe that the guy is lying about either a) being her interviewer or b) the preexisting relationship. These are both easy to prove one way or the other and if he were lying about such easily provable things, one would expect someone to call it out.
But I'm happy to be proven wrong: if the accuser claims he is lying and he doesn't dig up texts/FB messages/etc to prove they were friends before and after, I will consider her case to be proven. Similarly if the accuser claims he's lying and digs up an interview schedule listing him, I'll consider her case proven.
And your bro was telling you about chicks he was hitting on/fucking. He wasn't going "Bro, you are so hot, hang on a mo, gotta go jerk off because that's the effect you have on me".
Yes, he was following a pattern for which there is a mainstream "script" so you can easily pattern match it. Other similar things he has said include "damn bro back that fine ass up let me get it on camera". Entirely work inappropriate and inappropriate for some friendships, but totally reasonable for him to say to me at the gym after filming my first successful 4 plate deadlift.
Weirdo rationalists are weirdos and making up their own script that you are unfamiliar with. Is anything non-mainstream fundamentally illegitimate and evil? One must not do it even with the full consent of all involved?
tikimixologist
1yr ago
Again, I don't think this is a case of "lied about by clout-chasers". He seems to have admitted that things happened as the bare account of it had it,
Perhaps a better way to describe it is "technically true statements written about by clout chasers in a manner that causes reasonable people to infer totally false conclusions".
For example, here's one totally false conclusion drawn by someone I think you would agree is a fairly intelligent person drawing reasonable inferences from the facts presented:
How would you feel if you walked into an office for an interview and your potential boss (male) said "Just be a sec, I gotta go jerk off"?
How would you feel if you had a friend with whom you regularly discussed sexual stuff, they referred you for a job at a place they didn't work at, you visited the city and stayed in their house, and then they brought sexual stuff while you were visiting?
Fixed that for you.
This has happened to me, BTW, and it was totally unremarkable. A bro with whom I regularly discuss banging chicks referred me to a job. I visited him and he told me about how he's banging a cool rocker chick with big tits (or something like that, this was long back and I forget the details). The only difference here is that instead of being bros who bang hot chicks in a mainstream manner, it was weird nerds doing weird nerd stuff in a subculture that the establishment wants to attack.
But of course, I actually read the detailed statement and apology (linked in the OP) instead of just the hit piece: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/QMee23Evryqzthcvn/a-statement-and-an-apology
He was not her potential boss or involved in the decisionmaking process.
I was employed as a researcher at that time
My role didn’t develop to connecting people with different positions until later, and this wasn’t part of my self-conception at the time
(However it makes sense to me that this was her perception)
I was not affiliated with the org she was interviewing at
I’d suggested her as a candidate earlier in the application process, but was not part of their decision-making process
The interaction did not happen in an office, and the implication that they only knew each other professionally is false. This was one interaction in a long personal relationship in which apparently many such interactions took place as part of a weird social experiment:
We had what I perceived as a preexisting friendship where we were experimenting with being unusually direct and honest (/“edgy”)
Including about sexual matters
There was what would commonly be regarded as oversharing from both sides (this wasn’t the first time I’d mentioned masturbation)
Our friendship continued in an active way for several months afterwards
tikimixologist
1yr ago
You might be shocked to discover that people seeking power often learn how to emulate the behaviors and values of those they wish to manipulate. You usually don't recognize it until after you've been burned. (Learned from experience.)
tikimixologist
1yr ago
In his statement he said he and she were doing some weird full-disclosure-of-everything kinda social experiment, with both parties explicit consent. But now, retroactively, it's decided there's some power dynamic caused by him being involved in a community she's also involved in that makes this bad.
tikimixologist
1yr ago
But its one thing to say "people will make up lies about you, sometimes." and another to be shocked at how the behavior that you admit to and the other facets of your public persona might lead people to weird conclusions about you.
That isn't what she's talking about, however.
Consider a concrete example of hers: "drug roulette". She is not talking about internet randos sneering at her "oh that silly drug roulette and sex party chick, can't wait for her next twitter poll about fucking gnomes". That would be a vaguely reasonable thing for people who don't know her and dislike her to say.
How might people end up with the belief that she may have hosted drug-fueled orgies where edgy sorts of behavior occurred?
According to her, it's because someone wrote on the internet that a) they attended parties she hosted b) drug roulette happened at more than one and c) one of the drugs is rohypnol.
That is not a "leap to incorrect conclusions" nor is it in any way based on her reputation or an edgy joke. It's based on an unambiguous and literal interpretation of a statement that someone made about her.
I would assume Keerthana Gopalakrishnan, plus probably others with mainstream views/ordinary philanthropy grifters who are backing her. There's speculation it's a group of people out of Oxford.
Chronologically, the first thing that happened was her making a post on eaforums that ended with a bunch of demands that EA change to make her happy. She admitted that she knew it wasn't up to the normal epistemic standards of EA:
Also, the post is not optimized for analytical/argumentative quality. My only goal is to speak my mind
After a bit of entirely polite pushback she demanded the post be taken down and went to the media.
https://ea.greaterwrong.com/posts/NacFjEJGoFFWRqsc8/women-and-effective-altruism
(Or maybe she had gone to the media prior and the reporter suggested a badly received post on the forums would look good in the story. Keerthana does seem to be struggling pretty hard to interpret the post as badly received in spite of half the responses being "you're so brave".)
Another question arises: why does she even want to be part of EA? She clearly does not align at all with EA epistemics or values:
For a community that is so alarmist for 5 or 1 or 0.1 percentage of X-risk from AI, giving a wide berth for sexual harassment is utterly hypocritical.
The most obvious answer is that she simply viewed EA as a place she could effectively grift, probably by subverting it with mainstream memes and turning the eye of Sauron on it.
tikimixologist
1yr ago
Well, its too soon to say. This seems to be the first sexual misconduct allegation confirmed against an official EA leader, so you can't really call the TIME story which broke it to be a complete pile of journalistic garbage.
I don't think that anyone claimed it was journalistic garbage in the sense that the specific incidents had not occurred. Rather, the claim was that most of the incidents are so vague that basically everything there might be completely innocuous. For example, the second paragraph merely describes Gopalakrishnan getting asked out. The 7'th paragraph describes one adult "grooming" another adult (I believe this means "asking out") as well as the incident with Owen Cotton-Barratt.
This is strung together in a manner designed to trick casual readers into believing EA is somehow more dangerous than other more socially accepted subcultures, such as journalism or ordinary philanthropy, even though no evidence of this has been presented.
The core question here is whether a social and ideological group is allowed to be weird and also if members can ask each other out, particularly if that subculture has money that some mainstream folks wish to capture. The EA-aligned folks (Yudkowsky, Aella) seem to think weirdness should be permitted. Gopalakrishnan and Time seem to think subcultures they dislike should change to accommodate them.
tikimixologist
1yr ago
The book is a very good just-so story with an honest author who more or less admits that's what he's telling.
It's particularly visible towards the end when it attempts to explain European dominance as opposed to Chinese, Arab or Indian dominance, but then admits that had one guy made a different choice (the emperor of China and the treasure fleets) then European dominance likely would not have happened.
tikimixologist
1yr ago
If you actually look at nuclear development, electricity deregulation made it impossible to do the long-term funding to build nuclear reactors, because the time to get your money back is such a long tail.
Depends on whether you look at the cost before or after the government imposed regulations that make it impossible for nuclear to be cheap, specifically the "as safe as possible" standard (as opposed to "meet X bar of safety as cheap as possible").
It's perhaps worth contemplating who was president at the time of the price spike.
tikimixologist
1yr ago
I can believe the relation exists and causality goes the opposite way. Anecdote: the woke tech company I work for recently had a big layoff+bad stock market results and now suddenly there's just less of all this stuff.
Teams devoted to diversity/etc had fairly big cuts, while teams devoted to making money with tech had comparatively small cuts. Within the tech part of the org it's openly acknowledged that individual performance played a big role in who got cut. Most of the people whose names you recognize for woke stuff are gone and the people who remain you recognize because of what they shipped.
Based on the research I did when my wife was pregnant, I came away with the understanding that both this overall fact and the specific causes were fairly well known: gestational diabetes and preeclampsia.
Gestational diabetes is not suspected to be directly racially linked, rather the suspected pathway is black -> (pre-pregnancy obesity, during-pregnancy weight gain) -> gestational diabetes.
Preeclampsia is less understood, but is known to be highly correlated to sickle cell and is theorized to be influenced by sickle cell's recessive form as well. Fibroids (main cause: low vitamin D which has the literal biochemical cause of more melanin -> less vitamin D) are also suspected to play a role.
In any case, if we wanted to actually measure racism as opposed to blame everything for it, the simple way to do so would be to look at the underlying rates of gestational diabetes and preeclampsia. Treatment after getting these conditions is susceptible to racism but actually getting the conditions is not. So high rates of (preeclampsia death / # of people with preeclampsia) might be evidence of racism, but (# of people with preeclampsia / # of pregnancies) would be evidence of bad genetic luck.
Eyeballing their "Most Dangerous Counties" list, we find:
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64% American Indian, primary industries coal mining and ranching. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Horn_County,_Montana
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Baltimore (a city)
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Calhoun County, about which I can find almost no information because it's tiny and irrelevant beyond a few stories about drug overdoses.
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A 62% black county, with major industries being agriculture, manufacturing and "health care/social services". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillips_County,_Arkansas
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Holmes County, which is the dangerous part of Jackson Mississippi (a city or suburb)
I think there's two ways to think about an area being safe, and you+bloomberg are using a different one than most folks here.
Bloomberg/your numbers are meaningful if by moving to Big Horn County, I would then also give up my laptop class remote work job and take up lumberjacking. In the kitchen I'd stop cooking vegan adaptations of low carb japanese food and instead cook the heavily fried fatty foods more typical to American Indians, as well as the heavy drinking common to that demographic. (In spite of my nic I don't actually drink much, and actually specialize in low ABV stuff. Shoju FTW!) And I guess my genetics would also change.
However most people assume that they would move to a new place, adapt their current lifestyles to what is available locally (regular instead of malabar spinach), and not make adaptations that are too far removed (daily opioids laced with fentanyl instead of LSD microdoses).
tikimixologist
1yr ago
Phonics and DI aren't "silver bullets". They are merely interventions that reliably perform better than all known alternatives. Their inability to solve all problems is not a reason to give them up.
Also teaching outcomes are quite straightforward to measure, thanks to standardized tests.
To summarize your post:
Machines had a specific organizational structure in 1910.
Pittsburg does not meet this model.
Therefore a different - but related - organizational structure in 2020 could not have interfered with elections.
You may object to the term "political machine" by insisting that the term apply only to the 1910 structure. That's fine. But then lets just apply the term Machina to the 2020 version.
A Machina is a group of organizations with a shared interest in maintaining a stream of graft and they also have some political leanings. The visible elected official at the top is not of primary importance because the graft is no longer vulnerable to interruption by a single elected official. So concretely speaking, Bloomberg or Guliani can get elected mayor of NYC. The net result is that NYC still spends 10x what the rest of the world spends on subways and that money is spread around the Machina, while Bloomberg - a competent adminstrator with no desire to continue this - has no power to do anything about it.
Similarly, Trump has no real power over the federal Machina and it mostly continues doing what it wants.
And the main thing that is known within the Machina is that you should keep quiet about stuff because even if you speak up, the court will come up with a reason to dismiss your case, the media won't say anything, the administrative procedure will find a reason to delay it, etc.
The latter is where a small conspiracy to rig votes by the small but more ideological wing can live. Nothing you've presented contradicts this thesis.
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