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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   Edited 2yr ago   34791 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022

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I confess that I might be misremembering but wasn't Bankman-Fried associated with the whole "external loci of control" and "free will is a myth" branch of rationalism/decision theory? I seem to remember something about that from one of the old SSC link round-ups. If so I'd be surprised if he did accept any responsibility.

Edit: NM found it, Looks like I was confusing Bankman-Fried with Barbara Fried but if I'm reading Wikipedia correctly I think this might actually be his mother.

https://www.bostonreview.net/forum/barbara-fried-beyond-blame-moral-responsibility-philosophy-law/

You're claiming rationalism thinks that philosophical debates about "free will" are meaningful and have relevance to assigning personal responsibility? By "rationalism" meaning LessWrong people? I don't believe you. And sure enough, I searched on LessWrong and found that not only does Eliezer Yudkowsky not agree with those like Barbara Fried, in 2008 he called it so trivial that it served as a "practice question" for aspiring rationalists, then later elaborated on his solution at further length.

https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/free-will

It's not like this is even restricted to one of the more obscure "sequences", I've seen "Dissolving the Question" cited elsewhere. Look, I'm sure there's people on /r/badphilosophy who would mock the arrogance of thinking you have easily dissolved a famous philosophical dilemma, and that would be annoying in its own way. But at least it would display at least some surface-level engagement with what was said. Grouping LessWrong in with a philosopher arguing that some inane sophistry about "free will" means we should adopt her preferred criminal-justice policy positions reflects an incredible lack of understanding of what they believe and how they think. Barbara Fried is engaging in the exact sort of thing that makes LessWrong people have such a poor opinion on the health of philosophy as a field.

You're claiming rationalism thinks that philosophical debates about "free will" are meaningful and have relevance to assigning personal responsibility? By "rationalism" meaning LessWrong people? I don't believe you.

To be fair, there was some [discussion about separating where internal and external locus of controls are accurate, which misses the point of the entire term. But it also was a tiny subdiscussion which none of the big movers and shakers spoke on, and which was not highly upvoted or supported.

You're claiming rationalism thinks that philosophical debates about "free will" are meaningful and have relevance to assigning personal responsibility?

No, I'm claiming that even if rationalists dismiss debates about free will as irrelevant, such debates are in fact relevant, and that there is a non-trivial portion of rationalists/EA activists who believe in external loci of control and act on that belief. I am implying that regardless of what Rationalists might classify as relevant or irrelevant that the beliefs of Bankman-Fried's mother might have had something to do with his observed behavior. and I am suggesting that the "strawman characterization" of utilitarianism as promoting sociopathic behavior is not made out of straw at all.

We shall know them by their fruits.

I don't think this is a good understanding of what LessWrong thought means when it considers the 'question' of free will 'solved.' And at the risk of saying Read The Sequences, there a Sequence Post on exactly that.

I have read it and to be blunt it rings a bit hollow when taken in the context of the wider corpus, and the general popularity of guys like Singer and Watts. As I've maintained for years now, I suspect that the so called "AI Alignment Problem" has much more to do with fundamental issues with rationalist/utilitarian mindset than it does with anything intrinsic to intelligence artificial or otherwise.

Yes, we've had this discussion recently, and I don't think you made a particularly compelling argument. And I think that just hand-waving that a core part of the rationalist text specifically says the failure mode you warn about is obviously something clearly and obviously wrong with references to Singer and Watts (wut?) manages to be even less compelling.

Yes, we've had this discussion recently, and I don't think you made a particularly compelling argument.

Yes we have, and I don't think you made a particularly compelling argument either.

As before, I will say that my take is similar to that of @IprayIam, ilforte @DaseindustriesLtd and others. The problem with utilitarianism is that a utilitarian cannot credibly commit to cooperate in any multi-agent game because their prime directive is to throw you under the bus/trolley the moment the they think that doing so might increase global utility.

I will freely admit that I am the crayon-eating retard of the bunch, and so I don't expect you to find my arguments particularly compelling, but I have yet to see you or anyone else offer a proper counter-argument to the above. It just gets dismissed as a strawman or a "that would never happen in practice", which I don't buy.

The problem with utilitarianism is that a utilitarian cannot credibly commit to cooperate in any multi-agent game because their prime directive is to throw you under the bus/trolley the moment the they think that doing so might increase global utility.

That's a fairer critique of utilitarianism in general, and while a lot of both Sequence-era and modern rationalist thought has been focused on solving problems related to it (most famously Parfit's Hitchhiker, but it underlies the strict version of Newcomb's Problem and some related matters that aren't as obviously tied to honesty), there's a reasonable complaint that even if you're running off a 'better' decision theory, outside of thought experiments it's really hard to prove it.

And then there's the reasonable rejoinder that the same issues exist for other foundations of morality : there's no way to prove that a deontologist's virtue of honesty doesn't have an asterisk for 'unless under duress' or 'unless I really want otherwise' or some other exception.

If you're interested in that discussion, we can have it. I've actually got mixed feelings on a lot of it!

But this isn't particularly related to FTX, or to your misunderstanding of what locus of control means, et cetera, or even that in terms of being dismissed because it would never happen in practice, that We've Seen The Skulls here to the point where Yudkowsky spent (too much, imo) time and focus on it!

FTX isn't someone throwing people under the bus the second they think it might increase global (or even personal!) utility; they're garden-variety scammers who caught the car they were chasing, and then fell off at sixty miles an hour. They donated more to their personal funds than they did to outreach, and hell, they spent more on a concussionball stadium endorsement than any individual grant. And that's the numbers if they'd managed to hold onto the bumper another few months: as is, they're extremely likely to end up in jail, with their (claimed) cause discredited, and many of the individual charities they said they were going to donate to broken.

For what it's worth, I do not endorse the "external locus of control" attack on Lesswrong. I am not familiar with the scholarship of Barbara Fried, but (going by the abstracts) @gattsuru and @sodiummuffin aren't shitting you when they say this isn't what Eliezer and his followers preach.

There is a strain of no-free-will demagoguery associated in academia with certain progressive political propositions; it's very loosely related to Consequentialist ethical theories (only in the sense of the corollary «well, we'll have to increase the odds of behaviors we like without much hope to shame people into them») and Utilitarian moral philosophy, and perfectly independent from the newfangled Singerian Rationalist/Effective Altruist cluster. If Barbara Fried also agrees with Singer, she arrives at that through some path not advised by Lesswrong sequences.

There are many different sets of people and many traditions in the group you distrust and lump together, and they have differences in their beliefs on many dimensions which are invisible in the sketch a disinterested layman can observe at a glance.

Yes, it's his mother.

Somehow I'm not surprised. This is why culture matters people.

I wonder if Mrs. Fried applies that logic to badthinkers, or just murderers and rapists.

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