Itâs easy for both to be true at the same time right? That is skeptics tone it down within EA, and believers tone it down when dealing with people *outside* EA.
David Mathersđ¸
Karma: 4,420
As the article in The Critic itself points out, it is hardly surprising that a group that is disproportionately made up of young, single men are more criminal than the general population, since young men are overwhelmingly more criminal than anyone else, and single men are likely plausibly worse. Itâs not clear what this tells us about immigrants even from Syria or Afghanistan, let alone anywhere else, if we control for that. My guess for what itâs worth is that they will still have higher crime rates even if you control if they are Syrians (donât know about Afghans, suspect more positive selection there), but youâd need to actually look.
Can you be more specific about what right-coded stuff you want OP to fund that they arenât?
I feel like on the one hand, I have no problem with GV not funding certain right-coded things where I think the ideas are genuinely bad for more or less standard reasons why socially liberal people donât like right-wing things, and thatâs also what GV thinks. But on the other hand, if the issue is (as I somewhat suspect) more like âDustin doesnât want to fund stuff that looks bad to influential people in the Democrat party because he doesnât want to lose influence, regardless of whether he personally thinks that stuff is badâ that seems a lot dodgier.
I suspect that it is either, the second, bad, influence-maxing thing or something else, since I doubt people are actually going to OP demanding funding for HDB-type stuff or âinvestigate whether women being allowed to have jobs is badâ*. But maybe intelligence enhancement stuff, minus any HBD connection, is a more plausible case of genuine ideological disagreement between GV and people who might want GV funding?
*Iâm not making this one up as a real right-Rationalist or former Rationalist take, I saw Roko say it on twitter.
I think Thorstad has written very good stuff-for example on the way in which arguments for small reductions in extinction risk. More politically, his reporting on Scott Alexander and some other figures connected to the communityâs racism is a useful public service and he has every right to be pissed off {EDIT: sentence originally ended here: I meant to say he has every right to be pissed of at people ignore or disparaging the racism stuff]. I donât even necessarily entirely disagree with the meta-level critique being offered here.
But it was still striking to me that someone responded to the complaint that people making the institutional critique tend not to actually have much in the way of actionable information, and to take a âlet me explain why these people came to their obviously wrong viewsâ tone, by posting a bunch of stuff that was mostly like that.
If my tone is sharp itâs also because, like Richard I find the easy, unthinking combination of âthe problem with these people is that they donât care about changing the systemâ with âwhy are they doing meat alternatives and not vegan outreach aimed at a particular ethnic group that makes up <20% of the population or animal sheltersâ to be genuinely enragingly hypocritical and unserious. Thatâs actually somewhat separate from whether EAs are insufficiently sympathetic to anticapitalist or âsocial justiceâ-coded.
Incidentally, while I agree with Jason that itâs âMoskowitz and Tuna ought to be able to personally decide where nearly all the money in the movement is spentâ that is the weird claim that needs defending, my guess is that at least one practical effect of this has been to pull the movement left, not right, on several issues. Open Phil spent money on anti- mass incarceration stuff, and vaguely left-coded macroeconomic policy stuff at a time when the community was not particularly interested in either of those things. Indeed I remember Thorstad singling out critiques of the criminal justice stuff as examples of the community holding left-coded stuff to a higher standard of proof. More recently you must have seen the rationalist complaints on the forum about how Open Phil wonât fund anything âright-codedâ. None of thatâs to say there are no problems in principle with unaccountable billionares of course. After all, our other major billionaire donor was SBF! (Though his politics wasnât really the issue.)
Yeah, I suppose that is fair.
Iâm not sure any of these except maybe the second actually answer the complaints Richard is making.
The first linked post here seems to defend, or at least be sympathetic to, the position that encouraging veganism specifically among Black people in US cities is somehow more an attempt at âsystemic changeâ with regard to animal exploitation than working towards lab-grown meat (the whole point of which is that it might end up replacing farming altogether).
The third post is mostly not about the institutional critique at all, and the main thing it does say about it is just that longtermists canât respond to it by saying they only back interventions that pass rigorous GiveWell-style cost benefit analysis. Which is true enough, but does zero to motivate the idea that there are good interventions aimed at institutional change available. Thorstad does also say âwell, havenât anti-oppression mass movements done a whole lot of good in the past; isnât a bit suspicious to think theyâve suddenly stopped doing soâ. Which is a good point in itself, but fairly abstract and doesnât actually do much to help anyone identify what reforms they should be funding.
The fourth post is extraordinarily abstract: the point seems to be that a) we should pay more attention to injustice, and b) people often use abstract language about what is rational to justify injustice against oppressed groups. Again, this is not very actionable, and Thorstadâs post does not really mention Craryâs arguments for either of these claims.
I think this goes some way to vindicating Richardâs complaint that not enough specific details are given in these sort of critiques, rather than undermining it actually (though only a little, these are short reviews, and may not do the stuff being reviewed justice.)
In fairness, you could consistently think âbillionaires are biased against intervention which are justified via premises that make âthe systemâ/âbillionaires sound badâ without believing we should abolish capitalism. The critique could also be pointing to a real problem, and maybe on that could be mitigated in various way, even if âabolish the systemâ is not a good idea. (Not a comment either way on whether your criticism of the versions of the institutional critique that have actually been made is correct.)
Firstly, itâs not really me you should be thanking, itâs not my project, I am just helping with it a bit.
Secondly, itâs just another version of this, donât expect any info about funding beyond an update to the funding info in this: https://ââwww.alignmentforum.org/ââposts/ââzaaGsFBeDTpCsYHef/ââshallow-review-of-live-agendas-in-alignment-and-safety
âpwning the childless cat ladiesâ I know this is just a joke in passing and not the point of the paper, but this is sexist (in the sense that it comes off hostile to women or at least gender-nonconforming women) and sexism should be avoided for both substantive and PR reasons.
Even if the conscious states in humans are more intense, it doesnât follow necessarily that consciousness makes them more intense. Probably some of these people would respond to you as follows more intense states have more influence in the brain, and so in humans they are more likely to attract the attention of introspective mechanisms and become conscious in particular, but in animals without introspection, having more influence does not mean being conscious, because there is no introspective mechanism to attract the attention of. (I am improvising here somewhat, Iâve never seent his combination of views specifically.)
I think that Dennett probably said inconsistent things about this over time.
People who deny animal consciousness are often working with a background assumption that any thing can in principle be perceived unconsciously, and that in practice loads of unconscious representation goes on in the human brain. Itâs not clear what use a conscious pain is above a unconscious perception of bodily damage.
Iâm working on a âwho has funded what in AI safetyâ doc. Surprisingly, when I looked up Lightspeed Grants online (https://ââlightspeedgrants.org/ââ) I couldnât find any list of what they funded. Does anyone know where I could find such a list?
âYou can have bits of your visual field, for instance, that youâre not introspectively aware of but are part of your consciousnessâ Maybe, but in the current context this is basically begging the question, whereas Iâve at least sketched an argument (albeit one you can probably resist without catastrophic cost).
EDIT: Strictly speaking, I donât think people with the Dennettian view have to or should deny that there is phenomenally conscious content that isnât in fact introspectively accessed. What they do/âshould deny is that there is p-conscious content that you couldnât access even if you tried.
Iâve seen Dan Dennett (in effect) argue for it as follows: if a human adult subject reports NOT experiencing something in a lab experiment and weâre sure theyâre sincere, and that they were paying attention to what they were experiencing, that is immediately pretty much 100% proof that they are not having a conscious experience of that thing, no matter what is going on in the purely perceptual (functional) regions of their brains and how much it resembles typical cases of a conscious experience of that thing. The best explanation for this is that its just part of our concept of âconsciousâ that a conscious experience is one that youâre (at least potentially) introspectively aware that youâre having. Indeed (my point not Dennettâs), this is how we found out that there is such a thing as âunconscious perceptionâ, we found out that information about external things can get into the brain through the eye, without the person being aware that that information is there. If we donât think that conscious experiences are ones youâre (at least potentially) introspectively aware of having, itâs not clear why this would be evidence for the existence of unconscious perception. But almost all consciousness scientists and philosophers of mind accept that unconscious perception can happen.
Hereâs Dennett (from a paper co-authored with someone else) in his own words on this, critiquing a particular neuroscientific theory of consciousness:
âIt is easy to imagine what a conversation would sound like between F&L and a patient (P) whose access to the locally recurrent activity for color was somehow surgically removed. F&L: âYou are conscious of the redness of the apple.â P: âI am? I donât see any color. It just looks grey. Why do you think Iâm consciously experiencing red?â F&L: âBecause we can detect recurrent processing in color areas in your visual cortex.â P: âBut I really donât see any color. I see the apple, but nothing colored. Yet you still insist that I am conscious of the color red?â F&L: âYes, because local recurrency correlates with conscious awareness.â P: âDoesnât it mean something that I am telling you Iâm not experiencing red at all? Doesnât that suggest local recurrency itself isnât sufficient for conscious awareness?â
I donât personally endorse Dennettâs view on this, I give to animal causes, and I think it is a big mistake to be so sure of it that you ignore the risk of animal suffering entirely, plus I donât think we can just assume that animals canât be introspectively aware of their own experiences. But I donât think the view itself is crazy or inexplicable, and I have moderate credence (25% maybe?) that it is correct.
Just the stuff I already said about the success he seems to have had. It is also true that many people hate him and think heâs ridiculous, but I think that makes him polarizing rather than disastrous. I suppose you could phrase it as âhe was a disaster in some ways but a success in othersâ if you want to.
I hate Trump as much as anyone but it seems unlikely EA can make much difference here, given how many other well-resourced, powerful actors there are trying to shape outcomes in US politics.
Yeah, Iâm not a Yudkowsky fan. But I think the fact that he mostly hasnât been a PR disaster is striking, surprising and not much remarked upon, including by people who are big fans.
The thing about Yudkowsky is that, yes, on the one hand, every time I read him, I think he surely must be coming across as super-weird and dodgy to ânormalâ people. But on the other hand, actually, it seems like he HAS done really well in getting people to take his ideas seriously? Sam Altman was trolling Yudkowsky on twitter a while back about how many of the people running/âfounding AGI labs had been inspired to do so by his work. He got invited to write on AI governance for TIME despite having no formal qualifications or significant scientific achievements whatsoever. I think if we actually look at his track record, he has done pretty well at convincing influential people to adopt what were once extremely fringe views, whilst also succeeding in being seen by the wider world as one of the most important proponents of those views, despite an almost complete lack of mainstream, legible credentials.
âI think your posting about him undermines your credibility elsewhere.â This seems worryingly like epistemic closure to me (though it depends a bit what âelsewhereâ refers to.) A lot of Thorstadâs work is philosophical criticism of longtermist arguments, and not super-technical criticism either. You can surely just assess that for yourself rather than discounting it because of what he said about an unrelated topic, unless he was outright lying. I mostly agree with Thorstadâs conclusions about Scottâs views on HBD, but whilst that makes me distrust Scottâs political judgement, it doesnât effect my (positive) view of the good stuff Scott has written about largely unrelated topics like whether antidepressants work, or the replication crisis.
Iâd also say that the significance of Scott sometimes pushing back against HBD stuff is very dependent on why he pushes back. Does he push back because he thinks people are spreading harmful ideas? Or does he push back because he thinks if the blog becomes too associated with taboo claims it will lose influence, or bring him grief personally? The former would perhaps indicate unfairness in Thorstadâs portrayal of him, but the latter certainly would not. In the leaked email (which I think is likely genuine, or heâd say it wasnât, but of course we canât be 100% sure) he does talk about stratigising to maintain his influence with liberals on this topic. My guess, as a long-time reader is that itâs a bit of both. I donât think Scott is sympathetic to people genuinely wanting to hurt Black people, and Iâm sure there are Reactionary claims about race that he thinks are just wrong. But heâs also very PR conscious on this topic in my view. And itâs hard to see why heâs had so many HBD-associated folk on his blogroll if he doesnât want to quietly spread some of the ideas.