All of Timothy Chan's Comments + Replies

Yes, a similar dynamic (relating to siding with another side to avoid persecution) might have existed in Germany in the 1920s/1930s (e.g. I imagine industrialists preferred Nazis to Communists). I agree it was not a major factor in the rise of Nazi Germany - which was one result of the political violence - and that there are differences.

I would add that it's shunning people for saying vile things with ill intent which seems necessary. This is what separates the case of Hanania from others. In most cases, punishing well-intentioned people is counterproductive. It drives them closer to those with ill intent, and suggests to well-intentioned bystanders that they need to choose to associate with the other sort of extremist to avoid being persecuted. I'm not an expert on history but from my limited knowledge a similar dynamic might have existed in Germany in the 1920s/1930s; people were forced to choose between the far-left and the far-right.

Given his past behavior, I think it's more likely than not that you're right about him. Even someone more skeptical should acknowledge that the views he expressed in the past and the views he now expresses likely stem from the same malevolent attitudes.

But about far-left politics being 'not racist', I think it's fair to say that far-left politics discriminates in favor or against individuals on the basis of race. It's usually not the kind of malevolent racial discrimination of the far-right - which absolutely needs to be condemned and eliminated by society... (read more)

I'm skeptical about the value of slowing down leading AI labs primarily because it likely reduces the influence of the values of EAs in shaping the deployment of AGI/ASI. Anthropic is the best example of a lab with people who share these values, but I'd imagine that EAs also have more overlap with the staff at OpenAI and DeepMind than actors who would catch up because of a slowdown. And for what it's worth, the labs were founded with the stated goal of benefiting humanity before it became far more apparent that current paradigms have a high chance of resul... (read more)

Thank you for bringing attention to fetal suffering - especially the possibility of suffering of <24 weeks fetuses.

Others have already pointed out that the interventions of applying anaesthetics to fetuses has issues of political tractability, but I think there's also a dynamic that could result in backfire on moral circle expansion efforts to include fetuses and/or other "less complex" entities.

Most people haven't spent time thinking about whether simpler entities can suffer and haven't formed an opinion so it seems like they're particularly susceptibl... (read more)

I think there's a connection that results from how both theories dissolve the concept of qualia. Eliminativism does this by saying qualia is actually physics and panpsychism (in its most expansive forms) does this by saying all physics has qualia. Both theories effectively make the "suffering" label less exclusive - and more processes would have a higher probability of being correctly associated with that label (unclear whether probability is the right word in the case of eliminativism). With panpsychism, processes are conscious and the only remaining ques... (read more)

A while back I wrote that I agreed with the observation that some of (new wave) EA’s norms seem similar to those of the religion imposed on me and others as children. My current thinking is that there may actually be a link connecting the culture in parts of Protestantism and some of the (progressive) norms EA adopts, along with an atypical origin that probably deserves more scrutiny. The "link" part might be more apparent to people who've noticed a "god-shaped hole" in the West that makes some secular movements resemble certain parts of religions. Th... (read more)

From the study it looks like participants were given a prompt and asked to "free-list" instead checking boxes so it might be more indicative of what's actually on people's minds.

The immoral behaviors prompt being:

The aim of this study is to learn which actions or behaviors are considered immoral. Please provide a list of actions and behaviors which, in your opinion, are immoral. Please list at least five examples. There are no correct answers, we are just interested in your opinion.

My impression is that the differences between the American and Chinese list... (read more)

Oh, I see. Do you know if she is ok with eating lamb/mutton/goat? I suspect there are also grazing effects (that might reduce wild-animal suffering overall) but I don't know whether they are as significant. Maybe @Brian_Tomasik knows?

Regarding the TCS PhD, is it possible to work on it remotely from London?

Another relevant article on "machine psychology" https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.13988 (interestingly, it's by a co-author of Peter Singer's first AI paper)

You seem to have written against proposing norms in the past. So apologies for my mistake and I'm glad that's not your intention. 

To be clear, I think we should be free to write as we wish. Regardless, it still seems to me that voicing support for an already quite popular position on restricting expression comes with the risk of strengthening associated norms and bringing about the multiple downsides I mentioned.

Among the downsides, yes, the worry that strengthening strong norms dealing with 'offensive' expression can lead to unfair punishments. This ... (read more)

It seems that you, correct me if I'm wrong, along with many who agree with you, are looking to further encourage a norm within this domain (on the basis of at least one example, i.e. the one example from the blog post, that challenged it).

This might benefit some individuals by reducing their emotional distress. But strengthening such a norm that already seems strong/largely uncontroversial/to a large extent popular in the context of this community, especially one within this domain, makes me concerned in several ways:

• Norms like these that target expression

FWIW, Brian Tomasik does a fuzzies/utilons split thing too. One justification is that it helps avoid cognitive dissonance between near-term causes and, in his mind, more effective longtermist causes.

My position, in contrast, is that I acknowledge the epistemic force of far-future arguments but maintain some commitment to short-term helping as an intrinsic spiritual impulse. Along the lines of Occam's imaginary razor, this allows me to avoid distorting my beliefs about the far-future question based on emotional pulls to stop torture-level suffering in the p

Yeah, in a scenario with "nation-controlled" AGI, it's hard to see people from the non-victor sides not ending up (at least) as second-class citizens - for a long time. The fear/lack of guarantee of not ending up like this makes cooperation on safety more difficult, and the fear also kind of makes sense? Great if governance people manage to find a way to alleviate that fear - if it's even possible. Heck, even allies of the leading state might be worried - doesn't feel too good to end up as a vassal state. (Added later (2023-06-02): It may be a question tha... (read more)

I generally agree with the meritocratic perspective. It seems a good way (maybe the best?) to avoid tit-for-tat cycles of "those holding views popular in some context abuse power -> those who don't like the fact that power was abused retaliate in other contexts -> in those other contexts, holding those views results in being harmed by people in those other contexts who abuse power".

Good point about the priors. Strong priors about these things seem linked to seeing groups as monoliths with little within-group variance in ability. Accounting for the si... (read more)

I've been doing a 1-year CS MSc (one of the 'conversion' courses in the UK). I took as many AI/ML electives as I'm permitted to/can handle, but I missed out on an intro to RL course. I'm planning to take some time to (semi-independently) up-skill in AI safety after graduating. This might involve some projects and some self-study.

It seems like a good idea to be somewhat knowledgeable on RL basics going forward. I've taken (paid) accredited, distance/online courses (with exams etc.) concurrently with my main degree and found them to be higher quality than co... (read more)

So in my comment I was only trying to say that the comment you responded to seemed to point to something true about the preferences of women in general vs. the preferences of women who are "highly educated urban professional-managerial class liberals in the developed world".

Such perspectives seem easy to miss for people (in general/of all genders, not just women) belonging to the elite U.S./U.S.-adjacent progressive class - a class that has disproportionate influence over other cultures, societies etc., which makes it seem worthwhile to discuss in spaces w... (read more)

There might be differences between identifying with feminism and 'being open to scholars of feminism, queer studies and gender studies' though. Most Americans probably aren't familiar with academia to know of its latest thinking.

And like how different people have different notions of what counts as discriminatory, racist, sexist, or not discriminatory, racist, sexist, it's possible that different people have different notions of what 'feminism' means. (Some might consider it a position supporting equal rights between the sexes - others a position supportin... (read more)

I'd be interested in this :)

(Presumably if coding can be done faster, AI can be created more quickly too)

Wait, which mechanisms did you have in mind? 

AI -> software coded up faster -> more software people go into AI -> AI becomes more popular?

AI -> coding for AI research is easier -> more AI research

AI -> code to implement neural networks written faster -> AI implemented more quickly (afaik not too big a factor? I might be wrong though)

AI -> code that writes e.g. symbolic AI from scratch -> AI?

EDIT2: It seems like the people responding to me don't really consider the possibility of missteps/someone's intent? That seems unfortunate.

EDIT: the link I posted earlier (https://hiddentribes.us/) is quite relevant in introducing nuance to what I wrote about people in "parts of the Anglosphere" becoming more sensitive. It's different for different people in the Anglosphere. E.g. about a 49-51 split on "harassment is commonplace" to "too many ordinary behaviors are labeled as sexual harassment" in the U.S.

I suspect my probabilities are probably very diffe... (read more)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruitarianism :(

Update (2023-04-27): In retrospect, I think I could have underestimated the probabilities, although perhaps not by much?

I still think there are strong differences between different parts of society/the world. A lot has changed this past decade, it seems. I would probably still assign higher-than-average probabilities to accusations in places where it's more costly to accuse (e.g. outside of English-speaking countries, more conservative areas etc.), and lower-than-average probability to accusations in places where it's less costly (or even slightly status-e... (read more)

Thanks for bringing that up again. I realized I misparsed a bit at the end. However, the conclusion it seems to imply seems a bit dubious, i.e. it seems that our starting credence is more 'resilient' than the passage presents it to be if we're anchoring to base rates. I edited in a section to my initial response to that comment.

I'm not sure that I'm equating those two. I personally wouldn't want to be a person who doesn't have enough information, but upon hearing a single accusation (from someone who I don't really know), will presume guilt (i.e. assign a moderately high probability). If A credibly accuses B then that's different, but I'd assume in most cases, things are more uncertain.

EDIT: Actually, regarding assault, yeah I think it seems to make sense to assign a moderately high probability (say ~80%), and you seem to be right that I'm using the "beyond reasonable doubt" prin... (read more)

I agree that legal standards and standards upheld in day-to-day life shouldn't be the same, but some of the 'willingness to believe bad things happened' I'm seeing in the social groups that EA draws from seems a bit immoderate, so I'm cautious of straying too far from those stricter standards (and straying too far also has a risk of undermining them).

To answer your other question (which you have now deleted), I downvoted your first comment instead of disagree-voting because it appeared to me that you were concentrating on instances where we evaluate accusa... (read more)

I see you're focusing on a particular subset of cases. I think it's also worth mentioning that in the majority of cases accusations are not made by friends. When I have limited knowledge about those involved, I tend to uphold stricter standards.

In the case where it is a friend, I'd assume those who I call friends are honest people (with sufficient mental health as to make accurate claims), so I think I'd tend to believe them in the sense of updating beyond a significant threshold. Although, I've also made the mistake of misjudging my friends' honesty in the past, so I might be careful not to be overly confident in my beliefs.

Thank you for pointing to your footnote.

Regarding believing accusations and presuming innocence, I think we're using 'believe' in two different senses.

I agree that (in the overwhelmingly vast majority of cases in which we're not multiplying by a Bayes factor of 1) one's probabilities should change after updating. In that sense, we should 'believe (or disbelieve)' accusations.

However, I'm not confident that we should 'believe' in the sense of updating our probabilities so that they're above a probability threshold high enough to mete out significant social ... (read more)

One reasonable, good-for-women social norm that is being questioned here: believing most women who make accusations of sexual misconduct.

I think it's not clear that 'conventional social norms' are all that conventional. Many of us live or grew up outside of the Anglo-American world (or grew up in another generation, or in less elite areas) and might place more importance to principles such as the presumption of innocence.

I clarified with the person who I thought had said that and they seem to agree with you. It turns out they were actually referring to other discussions I had with them. I personally don't know enough about illusionism to comment on it myself, but I'll defer to you both and remove that sentence.

Thanks for the correction :)

Thanks for the advice :)

I added a summary to the post (hopefully making it more readable).

I think it only works with a U.S. IP address. People can use a VPN if they're outside the U.S.

Yeah fair. It seems more accurate to say that some humans would choose (the modified, impartial form of) (2) over (1), and some other humans would choose (1) over modified (2).

It's just my intuition that people wouldn't want to subject their child to excruciating physical torture that could be 'infinite' in intensity, and although both options are bad, this would seem worse than the death of one's child.

P.S. Not sure why people are downvoting this? Intuitions can serve as weak evidence.

IIRC, Vinding used a similar example in his SFE book but framed it using 'impartial' terms. 

For impartiality, choice (1) might be modified to 'the excruciating, "maybe infinite" pain, for 1 hour (no long-term consequences) of one's own child'. In that case, I think it's plausible that humans would choose (2) over (1).

I also have (moderate) depression and anxiety but I guess I wouldn't consider my experiences 'intense/extreme suffering' (although 'extreme amounts of suffering', as you've written, might make sense here).

The kind of suffering that's experienced when, e.g. being eaten alive by predators, seems to me to be qualitatively different from the depression-induced suffering I experience. I somehow also 'got used to' depression-suffering after a while (probably independent of the anti-depressant effects) and also don't mind it as much as I did, but that numbness and somewhat bearable intensity doesn't seem to come with the 'more physical' causes of suffering.

FYI, if people want to look into what aliens might value, an interesting direction might be to think about convergent evolution. One (the only?) existing book on the topic: The Zoologist's Guide to the Galaxy/ Quanta magazine article. Geoffrey Miller mentioned related work in a comment a few months ago.

Is this pointless speculation? I suspect knowing about what aliens might value would be useful in understanding how to better implement Evidential Cooperation in Large Worlds (ECL) (right now, right here, on Earth) although some people may disagree with me o... (read more)

Not American, but I'm from Hong Kong and the higher acceptability of "saying things in a blunt way" in the socioeconomic circles I grew up in rings true to me. A caveat that traditional Chinese culture makes it more uncommon for discussions to center around sexual things. That said, it seems that if sexual things do come up, people aren't super averse to it in the way that people in elite Western circles are. (Except in and around church. I grew up Protestant.)

The main (economic) factor might be that my parents and relatives all grew up poor (a common back... (read more)

I noticed that replies to 'Community' shortform posts aren't automatically tagged 'Community'. Maybe it's worth fixing this?

A powerful speech from the same activist: 

I think it's beneficial for the community if someone presented a very different view (publicly):

While I don't know enough to comment on the 'pre-existing issues' section of your post, my view is that Bostrom's apology was sufficient.

I think a lot of people might be reacting excessively to mistakes that he made more than two decades ago.

Some words may be considered particularly inappropriate in certain socioeconomic and cultural contexts. However, it's important to recognize that others may be acting and speaking from a different background with different n... (read more)

Related:

I was brought up in a very religious environment. After reading this comment I'm reflecting on what I'm finding off-putting about that upbringing:

• The idea that there is a clear divide between good and evil.
• The idea that there are unforgivable sins/heresies.
• The idea that sexual things are bad, or are particularly bad.
• Laying claim to humility and being the underdog even though one's group has a lot of power.
• The idea that arguing against sacred beliefs is bad.
• Shaming those who have sinned and demanding that they repent.
• The idea that everything considered evil

I found parts of this 3-month old comment by a non-Western trans man writing about the masculinity-femininity divide to be really insightful and prescient.

Just as many people point to 'toxic masculinity' (which can also be present in women), I think they should also acknowledge the existence of 'toxic femininity' (which can also be present in men). FWIW, I think a lot of activists raised in (somewhat-functioning) democracies are underestimating the dangers of limiting free expression, the dangers of marginalizing people whose features were historically ass... (read more)