User Comment Replies

I don't think this is right -- whether it's okay to sue Ben surely depends on the information Ben had at the time of making his decision, not information he didn't have access to?

Chris Leong7mo17

It doesn’t seem accurate to characterise Ben as not having access to information if they promise to send it over as soon as they can and a) they don’t unduly delay b) there is no urgent need to publish.

I guess I see Ben as making a bet that the yet-to-revealed information ends up being underwhelming and it feels to me that if he ends up being wrong then some of the downside should accrue to him.

That said, I would really rather not see anyone sue anyone here as it’d be rather damaging to the community.

At the same time, it feels a bit inconsistent to simulta... (read more)

Lukas_Gloor7mo16

Before I agree-voted here, this comment had three disagree votes and no agree votes. Are the people who disagree-voted missing the fact that Ben had a 3h conversation with Emerson(? I think, otherwise Kat) about all the allegations? Surely, if you think something about Ben's summary of his findings is so massively wrong that it warrants a libel lawsuit threat, it would have come up in that 3h conversation. Besides, Ben's post already makes it clear that Emerson and Kat dispute Alice's judgment, so it's not like he's knowingly lying about things with intent... (read more)

Sharing Information About Nonlinear

ColinAitken7mo67

I think this is unacceptable, and unless serious evidence appears that Ben behaved dishonestly ~~in a way nobody seems to currently be claiming~~ (e.g. if he had personally doctored the texts from Kat to add incriminating phrases), I think filing this kind of lawsuit would be cause for the EA community to permanently cut all ties with Nonlinear and with Emerson in particular. I believe this even if it turns out Nonlinear has evidence that the main claims in the post are false.

[Edit 12/15/23 -- Nonlinear's update makes stronger claims about Ben's ac... (read more)

D0TheMath

7mo

I think Habryka has mentioned that Lightcone could withstand a defamation suit, so there’s not a high chance of financially ruining him. I am tentatively in agreement otherwise though.

StrongMinds should not be a top-rated charity (yet)

ColinAitken1y42

I want to second this! Not a mental health expert, but I have depression and so have spent a fair amount of time looking into treatments / talking to doctors / talking to other depressed people / etc.

I would consider a treatment extremely good if it decreased the amount of depression a typical person experienced by (say) 20%. If a third of people moved from the "depression" to "depression-free" category I would be very, very impressed. Ninety-five percent of people moving from "depressed" to "depression free" sets off a lot of red flags for me,... (read more)

Ben Millwood1y14

I think some adjustment is appropriate to account for the fact that people in the US are generally systematically different from people in (say) Uganda in a huge range of ways which might lead to significant variation in the quality of existing care, or the nature of their problems and their susceptibility to treatment. As a general matter I'm not necessarily surprised if SM can relatively easily achieve results that would be exceptional or impossible among very different demographics.

That said, I don't think these kinds of considerations explain a 95% cure rate, I agree that sounds extreme and intuitively implausible.

Potatoes: A Critical Review

ColinAitken2y1

honestly re-reading my comment, that is a very fair question. That part was very poorly phrased.

I think what I had in mind is that the issue with continuous DID goes away if you assume constant effect sizes that are linear in treatment effect. When this doesn't hold, you start to estimate some weird parameter, which Goodman-Bacon, Sant'Anna, and Callaway describe in detail in the link you provided.

I like this paper because it tells us what happens under misspecification, which is exciting because in practice everything is misspecified all the time! But a c... (read more)

Michael_Wiebe

This paper makes that point about linear regressions in general.

Potatoes: A Critical Review

ColinAitken2y1

I don't think the recent diff-in-diff literature is a huge issue here -- you're computing a linear approximation, which might be bad if the actual effect size isn't linear, but this is just the usual issue with linear regression. The main problem the recent diff-in-diff literature addresses is that terrible things can happen if a) effects are heterogenous (probable here!) and b) treatment timing is staggered (I'm not super concerned here since the analysis is so course and assumes roughly similar timing for all units getting potatos.)

They try to establish ... (read more)

Michael_Wiebe

What is this referring to?

Besides evidence or logical arguments, how do you invite people into EA values?

Answer by ColinAitkenJan 07, 20227

My initial thoughts for the first question, quoted from the linked post (so not all examples are EA-specific):

So if I want people to grow in the ways I’ve grown, I think I need to do a lot less arguing and a lot more applying. Less “here’s why I’m right” and more “here’s a question that’s important to me we figure out together.” Less “agree with my worldview” and more “walk this walk with me.” A few ideas have come to mind so far:
Framing: instead of a “do you believe in X?” or “do you think X is important?” conversation, starting a “what do you think we ca

ColinAitken3y3

These thoughts are super helpful for understanding where you're coming from, so thank you!! I really appreciate you taking the time to write them all out -- my thoughts will be much shorter because I don't have much to add, not because they weren't thought-provoking and interesting!

I think we have somewhat different beliefs about what makes the speaker's actions wrong --I think for me it lands very far to one side of the "clearly evil" to "clearly good" trolley problem spectrum and it's wrongness is a) very clear to me, and b) very hard for me to pin... (read more)

WSCFriedman

I'm glad you aren't offended! I get easily worried that I might be saying things in an offensive manner and I appreciate you reassuring me that I didn't! I am always very happy to write long and elaborate reviews of fiction and I am glad you appreciated it. And I would agree that the protagonist is evil (indeed, he admits he is evil - he's quite clear that he enjoyed what he did) and also took a set of actions which may have had net-positive utility. I don't think we know that it did; it's possible that some vague combination of making people distrust EA-style arguments, imposing costs on people both directly (his victims) and indirectly (court costs, prison costs, stress to everyone vaguely associated, costs of additional security precautions taken because his existence is evidence of the world being less safe than you thought) and so forth and so on made it net-negative. But I will confidently deny that he was in an epistemic position to expect his actions would be positive, let alone the optimal decision. I could theoretically imagine a world in which this was false, and he genuinely did have the knowledge required for his actions to actually be both ex post and ex ante optimal, but I don't actually think I can actually imagine a world in which I was in the epistemic state of knowing that he knew his actions were ex post and ex ante optimal; my mental state in such a world would be sufficiently different that I'm not sure I'd be the same person. So I'm really quite comfortable condemning him, though I'll admit I'd vote for life imprisonment instead of execution. And Unsong is very interesting! It doesn't always succeed at what it's doing, as I mentioned I find the protagonist kind of boring, but it's trying such fascinating things and it succeeds sufficiently often to be worth reading.

[Creative Writing Contest] An Ordinary Plea

ColinAitken3y2

You both raise very good points, and I think you've convinced me there are ways to do this that don't come across as propaganda.

At the same time, I would still stand by my stance that having more EA villains in fiction would overall be a good thing for EA. Good villains are thought-provoking even though their actions are evil -- Killmonger in Black Panther and Karli in the Falcon/Winter Soldier series come to mind as pop culture characters who've made me think much more than the heroes in their respective films/shows.

I think that the rationalist/EA f... (read more)

WSCFriedman

Also I want to do a completely separate post in response to one of your short comments: "What's wrong with the speaker's super-harsh utilitarianism?" My immediate response, just automatic on reflex without engaging my brain's slow mode, is "planning fallacy / arrogance / sin of pride." What's wrong is that he assumes he's in a sufficiently strong level of knowledge, self-discipline, and self-control that he actually can pull off his ubermensch act, instead of it all going horribly wrong and blowing up in his face. That's always what's wrong with characters doing that. That's why so much EA thought focuses on the question of how to 'first, do no harm'. That's why EA takes the High Modernists so seriously as an object lesson, that's why rationalist circles are the only ones I've ever been in where you can just say "Chesterton's Fence!" and the burden of proving an argument automatically switches over to the party arguing for a reform. Writers have been asking that question and giving basically that answer for, what, a hundred and fifty years? Since "Crime and Punishment," I think, which is apparently from 1866. The most recent modern artwork that I found memorable that said it was Fate/zero, back in, IIRC, 2012. I'm not going to say you can't update timeless and eternal themes for a modern audience, that's a perfectly reasonable thing to do, but I didn't actually find that the story started interesting EA-type conversations (though, again, I thought it was very well-written - your voice and prose style are excellent), and the specific reason for that is because I didn't really see that it was doing anything new or exciting, philosophically speaking. Insofar as you intended it to have a different moral answer, that... didn't really come across? It was just asking the same question that had been answered so many times before.

WSCFriedman

(For clarification: Step One is that the story has to work as a story, I agree with that completely, if I'm passing that over in my response, it isn't because I disagree, but because I agree too much to have anything interesting to say on it.)

WSCFriedman

The odd thing is, I would use HPMOR as a model of how to do it right. Its main failing is that it fails to make it clear that the protagonist isn't a perfect propaganda figure, and shouldn't be emulated - that the audience ends up thinking that the protagonist is making giant mistakes throughout the story because the author thinks those are the correct decisions, not because he's an eleven-year-old in over his head. But the author agrees with him enough that if you aren't paying careful attention, he comes off as an arrogant jerk the author endorses, instead of a person with many virtues and the vice of being an arrogant jerk. (Clarification: I tried to read HPMOR twice and disliked it before I fell in love the third time. I think it is genuinely Great Art, but flawed in the way most Great Art is flawed - that of aiming for being twice as good as the best art that previously existed and ending up being an uneven mix of 160% as good and 60% as good, which may well make you throw the book at the wall during the 60% parts.) But that side-note aside: I agree that making all EA-style figures into saints is a risk. People may well get turned off at being preached to; I know I do. Again, see my comment on "Blue Bird and Black Bird." But... If you've ever read Scott Alexander's Unsong - I don't know if you have - the central figure in the story is the Comet King. He isn't the hero; the hero is a not-very-interesting nebbish stuck in the world the Comet King made. But the Comet King is EA, is really presented as purely good, and is a genuinely psychologically fascinating character. Every page he's on blazes with light and life and joy, and yet he isn't a Mary Sue, because by the time the main story starts, he has already lost. The book is about the aftermath of a perfectly good hero failing to save the world, the book is unquestionably pro-effective-altruist, and where the book fails, it isn't because it's being too pro-effective-altruist, it's because the protagonist if

[Creative Writing Contest] An Ordinary Plea

ColinAitken3y2

To be completely honest, I think that "making people reading it think more kindly of effective altruism" is a good goal for creative nonfiction, but not a very helpful goal for fiction. My experience with writing fiction (mostly plays) is that fiction is a really poor platform for convincing people of ideas (I almost always zone out if I feel like a playwright is trying to convince me to believe something), but it's a really good platform for raising difficult questions that readers have to think through themselves. I suppose my hope with this villain is t... (read more)

WSCFriedman

I second everything Sophia said, but would like to raise a few other points to clarify: First, I also dislike works-that-fit-in-my-brain's-internal-category-labeled-propaganda. (As some evidence of this, I'll offer my comment on 'blue bird and black bird'.) Nonetheless I feel that there is an enormous range for stories in which "make people reading it think more kindly of X" is a clear goal that do not fit in my brain's internal category of propaganda. It's quite clear that Lois McMaster Bujold is opposed to eternal smouldering guerilla wars of resistance and in favor of artificial wombs, and none of that makes the Vorkosigan Saga non-amazing. I can also offer basically any culture-clash story; usually those have the objective of making the audience say "both cultures have their good points and their bad points and their inhabitants are both human", but a lot of those still work effectively without making the audience zone out. None of those flip my "I am being propagandized to" switch. Two possible explanations for what's going on. First is the worldview emphasis. If the author "presents a world in which X is true," the audience can ask themselves, "is this world consistent? Does it resemble our world?" If it is straightforwardly true that, in the Lord of the Rings, power inherently corrupts, reading the Lord of the Rings gives us an opportunity to look at a world in which power inherently corrupts. Insofar as it seems coherent and non-self-contradictory, the audience has an example of "what could be" to compare that fictional world to their real world. Maybe it doesn't give you any useful real-world experience; maybe Tolkien is relying on factors that don't exist in his world, or are too weak to have the effects he describes. But by expanding the audience's worldview, the author gives them a new model to use to analyze reality. Second is Yudkowsky's line: "Nonfiction conveys knowledge. Fiction conveys experience." We don't, most of us, have experience with try

Sophia

I upvoted your comment because what you said was interesting even if I disagree with the overall sentiment. I agree that fiction is good for raising difficult questions and exploring nuance. I also agree that didactic fiction can be a bit off-putting. However, most fiction expresses a writer's beliefs about the world and what they value (most writers will take inspiration from what they already know and what they think). When the writing is good, this tends not to be off-putting because the writer handled this with enough nuance. An author's best guess of what is good or bad (or true or false) can still come through pretty clearly without the reader feeling like they have to agree with them because there's enough going on, there is enough complexity and enough nuance, in the story for readers to be able to put different emphasis on different elements (and therefore for readers to feel free enough to come to their own conclusions for the author's point of view to not be off-putting). Simple messages in fiction, dealt with no nuance, make for bad writing. Fiction that makes readers think and confront difficult questions can make for much better fiction. It doesn't follow that fiction can't change people's impressions of what is good or bad (or true or false). If you can change people's impressions of what is good or bad (or true or false), it seems worth taking that into account. Is it a good goal for fiction to confront a reader with any difficult question without considering whether this difficult question is worth thinking about over other questions? My guess is, in full EA spirit, that it is better to choose which difficult questions to ask (especially if some difficult questions will lead people to missing questions/considerations that you think are way more important). I think maybe a good goal for fiction could be to leave the reader with a better understanding of your point of view/the way you see the world than if they hadn't read your piece whilst al

[Creative Writing Contest] An Ordinary Plea

ColinAitken3y1

[Edited to add that I am the author of the above piece, not sure if that is clear from the rest of the comment]

I fully agree with your first statement and disagree with the second. I think maybe some of this is a disagreement on the goal of stories: I really don't like morality plays where I feel like the author is trying to tell me what to believe. I much prefer stories of flawed people ending up in terrible places or doing terrible things that force me to figure out for myself where the protagonist went wrong. This is, of course, a personal prefere... (read more)

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