Monthly Archives: January 2017

Between honesty and perjury

I've promoted Effective Altruism in the past. I will probably continue to promote some EA-related projects. Many individual EAs are well-intentioned, talented, and doing extremely important, valuable work. Many EA organizations have good people working for them, and are doing good work on important problems.

That's why I think Sarah Constantin’s recent writing on Effective Altruism’s integrity problem is so important. If we are going to get anything done, in the long run, we have to have reliable sources of information. This doesn't work unless we call out misrepresentations and systematic failures of honesty, and these concerns get taken seriously.

Sarah's post is titled “EA Has A Lying Problem.” Some people think this is overstated. This is an important topic to be precise on - the whole point of raising these issues is to make public discourse more reliable. For this reason, we want to avoid accusing people of things that aren’t actually true. It’s also important that we align incentives correctly. If dishonesty is not punished, but admitting a policy of dishonesty is, this might just make our discourse worse, not better.

To identify the problem precisely, we need language that can distinguish making specific assertions that are not factually accurate, from other conduct that contributes to dishonesty in discourse. I'm going to lay out a framework for thinking about this and when it's appropriate to hold someone to a high standard of honesty, and then show how it applies to the cases Sarah brings up. Continue reading

Guess culture screens for trying to cooperate

My friend Miri (quoted with permission) wrote this on Facebook a while back:

Midwesterners are intolerably passive aggressive. My family is sitting among some grass in the dunes because it's the only shady place and a park ranger drives by and says, "That grass you're sitting in--we try to protect that." I say the only thing that makes sense to say in response, which is, "Thanks for letting me know! We'll be careful with it." And I go back to my reading.

Then I look up and she's still there. I look at her for a few moments and she says, "You need to get out of there." I'm like, ok. Why can't you just say that the first time? Not everyone grew up in your damn convoluted culture. Say what you fucking mean.

In the comments, someone replied:

One of the best parts of NYC is that no one dances around what they mean to say here. On the contrary, once I heard a guy on the subway say, to confused-looking strangers, "Do you need some fucking help or what?”

This particular incident seems like obnoxious behavior on the part of the park ranger, but it got me curious about why this sort of norm seems to win out over more explicit communication in many places. Continue reading

Honesty, magic, and science

A chocolatier friend posted this to Facebook (quoted with permission):

Just turned down an invite to sell chocolate at an event because they were going to advertise it using *free Tarot readings*

Three reasons:

-Do we as a society need more of this nonsense?

-Do I want to deal with customers that naive?

-Do I trust organizers that are either credulous or unethically pandering?

Nope, nope and nope.

I think that this is an excellent example of sticking up for principles in ways that it seems a lot of the people around me find nonobvious: refusing to sanction something you think is deceptive. This is a good practice and needs to be more widespread.

I've previously criticized the practice of crediting "matching donations" drives with gains from controlling others’ behavior, but not the corresponding loss of information they would otherwise have contributed (or the loss from accepting their symmetrical control over you). Similarly, there’s a temptation to count the gains from exploiting an event full of Tarot-credulous customers to sell your actually-high-quality chocolate, but not to count the loss of allowing such an event to exploit you. When you help someone else attract attention to something dishonest, you are imposing costs on others.

That said, I think things like Tarot (and "Magic" in general) are hard to talk about reasonably because people mean such different things when talking about them. Obviously which Tarot cards one draws are determined by a pseudorandom process, and not one meaningfully causally entangled with the future life outcomes of the person for whom the Tarot cards are being read.

However, like many other divination processes, Tarot can serve as a seed around which the reader can signal-boost their own insights about the person being read for. Often we have subtle intuitions about each other that don't make it into consciousness but are fairly insightful. I've done a Tarot reading (once), and while I don't need the cards to weave a story about someone with my intuitions, it's easy for me to imagine someone only having access to that kind of intuition if they're in a headspace where they imagine that the cards are "telling" them the story.

I also wonder whether it's possible to consistently apply this epistemic standard. The replication crisis really happened and we need to update on it - even "science" isn't immune to casual deceptiveness and sloppiness with the facts. Someone giving a TED-style talk on psychology research is also likely to be saying stuff that's intuitive but not based on solid knowledge, and making up a story whereby we "know" these things because an experiment was performed.

(I'm not saying that science isn't real. Science was clearly real at some point in the past, and some forms of science and engineering now seem to be making real progress even to this day. I'm just saying that not ALL contemporary "science" is clearly better than Tarot.)

IF we don't apply this epistemic standard consistently, then what we're actually doing is calling out the out-group for deception, while tolerating in-group hypocrisy. We have cultural cover in our in-group for calling out Tarot as lies, but people would probably look at us funny for refusing to associate with someone giving a talk on power poses for the same reason. This might actually be the right choice, I'm not sure - in practice it's close to what I do - but it seems important to notice when that's what we're doing.

Exploitation as a Turing test

A friend recently told me me that the ghosts that chase Pac-Man in the eponymous arcade game don't vary their behavior based on Pac-Man's position. At first, this surprised me. If, playing Pac-Man, I'm running away from one of the ghosts chasing me, and eat one of the special “energizer” pellets that lets Pac-Man eat the ghosts instead of vice-versa, then the ghost turns and runs away.

My friend responded that the ghosts don't start running away per se when Pac-Man becomes dangerous to them. Instead, they change direction. Pac-Man's own incentives mean that most of the time, while the ghosts are dangerous to Pac-Man, Pac-Man will be running away from them, so that if a ghost is near, it's probably because it's moving towards Pac-Man.

Of course, I had never tried the opposite – eating an energizer pellet near a ghost running away, and seeing whether it changed direction to head towards me. Because it had never occurred to me that the ghosts might not be optimizing at all.

I'd have seen through this immediately if I'd tried to make my beliefs pay rent. If I'd tried to use my belief in the ghosts' intelligence to score more points, I'd have tried to hang out around them until they started chasing me, collect them all, and lead them to an energizer pellet, so that I could eat it and then turn around and eat them. If I'd tried to do this, I'd have noticed very quickly whether the ghosts' movement were affected at all by Pac-Man's position on the map.

(As it happens, the ghosts really do chase Pac-Man – I was right after all, and my friend had been thinking of adversaries in the game Q-Bert – but the point is that I wouldn’t have really known either way.)

This is how to test whether something's intelligent. Try to make use of the hypothesis that it is intelligent, by extracting some advantage from this fact. Continue reading