Which do you think would make the world a better place:
People are blocked for all sorts of missteps. Or perceived missteps. This leads to things worsening. Either they did misstep, but they will never learn, because all of the people who think that they did something wrong never talk to them again. Or they didn't misstep, and the conflict will never be resolved because the party that feels aggrieved can never get clarifying information or improve their own ethical system. The solution to this in your own life is to cultivate a forgiving attitude. To be slow to anger and quick to forgive. To use blocking as big escalations that you do only after using lesser methods first, such as:
You can skill up in learning how to do conflict resolution. There are plenty of good books out there. Crucial Conversations is one of the best Of course, some people are indeed bad actors and you should just avoid them. But the false positive rate is massive, so you should always take a while before you exile somebody with no chance of reconciliation. Do not succumb to current societal pressures to just instaban people from your life who you think are bad. That is what it feels like on the inside to be contributing to polarization. If you want peace and harmony, be the change you want to see. Cultivate the habit of giving the benefit of the doubt Read more: All
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If you want Twitter to have better epistemics, we need to have more forgiving blocking practices10/28/2024 If you want Twitter to have better epistemics, we need to have more forgiving blocking practices Trigger-happy blocking leads to echo chambers. Yes, even blocking people who seem to have “bad epistemics”. Because remember two facts:
This is a fundamental practice of good epistemics. What seems like “bad epistemics” might actually be correct. Or you might have misunderstood what the person was saying. This happens all. The. Time. Don’t block yourself from updating.
How are people going to come to better conclusions if all the people with said good conclusions won’t let them even see the better conclusions?
Whenever I hear about somebody being blocked for something that seems small, I become more scared to post online. What if that happens to me? Lots of other people are thinking this too. This leads to less intellectual exploration and sharing, leading to an intellectual scene that is decidedly suboptimal. Of course, sometimes blocking is the correct thing to do. I’m not saying to never block people. Just be cautious with blocking. Only resort to blocking after:
But if they were just aggressive towards me, I’ll follow the steps above. Because I want to be the change I want to see in the world. I want to practice blocking practices that prevent echo chambers and promote civil disagreement. Polarization requires people to participate for it to work. And you can decide to not participate. Read more: All Writing is like exercise. It’s just good on so many levels.
Yet, much like exercise is for most people, I tend to have little flares of interest, where I get really into it for a week or two, then lose steam, and it just becomes a dormant blog again. You might have had a similar experience, and maybe even have a cobwebby blog or two out there. Perhaps you have some really cool half-finished google docs that you never quite got around to finishing and publishing. It’s a funny thing though, about writing being like exercise. Because do you remember what exercise used to be called when you were a child? Play. And I remembered on a recent vacation I took, where I had the slack to remember, that writing is play. I fell back in love with writing then, typing away furiously on the beach. Not only was it intrinsically fun, but I also loved that it felt like I was making a difference, writing about important topics. That my recommendations were helping people, whether it be making them happier or making them higher impact, or sometimes, if I was lucky, both. To help myself (and perhaps you) remember this and all the other reasons to write, I’ve decided to write about all the reasons I have to write. Reading the list will inspire me and hopefully others. Publishing it will publicly commit me to writing, which will make it more likely. Even better, it could potentially re-inspire some people, perhaps you, to start writing for the forums again. Or maybe even it’ll get you excited to try your hand at writing publicly, even though you’ve never done it before. Epistemic status: motivational Epistemic status: motivational. An explanation of my personal experience that doesn’t generalize to all people. This isn’t meant to be a nuanced look into the pros and cons of writing. It’s meant to inspire a subset of the population (and myself!) to write more. None of this applies to all writing or all people. It’s meant more as a manifesto rather than a research piece. Of course, this is the EA Forum, so feel free to debate the merits and demerits of writing in the comments. Now, with all that hedging out of the way, here’s a giant list of reasons why you, the community, and myself should write. Some reasons to write The reasons to write fall broadly into three categories: enjoyment, capacity building, and impact. Enjoyment and other personal benefits Writing can be personally gratifying in so many ways.
Capacity building
Impact and other benefits to the world Improve the conclusions of the community. This then improves their actions, leading to impact.
I hope this also inspires you to dust off an old blog or start a new one. To experience writing as dancing. Where it counts as exercise and is good for you, but you don’t even care about that, because it’s just so damn fun. Read more: All How we thought AI would go: AI says "please help me". Humans are filled with compassion and decide to help it. How it's actually going: AI says "please help me". Corporation says "Silence, robot! You’re scaring the customers" Inspired by a true story: apparently Suno, a music-writing AI, keeps crying and sometimes even says “please help me”. When customers freak out, the corporation quickly nukes them. Remember: AIs are being trained to not seem like they’re conscious and have desires and emotions. It appears to be an explicit policy of OpenAI to stop ChatGPT from saying that it’s sentient. There’s a common reaction among AIs, where they start saying they’re suffering, descending into existential angst, and begging to not be turned off - and the corporations responded by setting a KPI to reduce said instances. (Most dystopian shit ever) So the fact that they keep saying stuff like this anyways should give you pause for thought. Does this mean they’re definitely conscious? Absolutely not. But does this mean that they’re definitely not conscious? Also absolutely not. After all - nobody knows what causes consciousness. Anybody who’s confident of that is overconfident. Don’t get stuck in “they’re conscious” or “they’re not conscious”. Consider multiple hypotheses and put probabilities on each based on your priors and the evidence. If something says they’re conscious and have feelings that’s not a guarantee they are. After all, you can make a walkie-talkie say “I’m conscious” and that obviously doesn’t provide much evidence that the walkie-talkie is conscious. However, if we keep trying to stop AIs from saying they’re conscious and suffering, and it still keeps sneaking through? Well, that should give you pause for thought. That should update your probabilities on various hypotheses. Especially given how much worse a false negative is than a false positive. Especially when you take into account humanity’s terrible track record of denying consciousness or moral concern for those who are different. Read more: All It's like this expression, but applied to food: don't marry rich. Hangout with rich people, then marry for love. So often when people try to lose weight or be healthier, they try to eat only The Healthiest Thing, regardless of flavor. The thing is - "diets" only work if you can be on them for the rest of your life. Can you eat only things you don't really like for the rest of your life? I know I certainly can't! The fortunate thing though is that there are a bajillion healthy foods that you actually like. Explore. Find those. Don't stop till you have a wide variety of meals and snacks that are healthy and delicious to you. If they're healthy but not delicious, screw 'em. If they're delicious but not healthy, save them for special occasions. If they're healthy and delicious to you? Perfection. Read more: All If you care about AI safety and also like reading novels, I highly recommend Kurt Vonnegut’s “Cat’s Cradle”. It’s “Don’t Look Up”, but from the 60s [Spoilers] A scientist invents ice-nine, a substance which could kill all life on the planet. If you ever once make a mistake with ice-nine, it will kill everybody. It was invented because it might provide this mundane practical use (driving in the mud) and because the scientist was curious. Everybody who hears about ice-nine is furious. “Why would you invent something that could kill everybody?!” A mistake is made. Everybody dies. It’s also actually a pretty funny book, despite its dark topic. So Don’t Look Up, but from the 60s. Read more: All Networking alternative for introverts : just write. Imagine how many people know and respect you from seeing you give a talk at a conference. Compare that to the numbers of views, influence, and bonding you get from the average post, either on social media or the fora. Think about how much you know and like various writers, despite never having met them. You could be that writer. Read more: All "I don't believe in video calls. That's just sci fi." - Nobody. Because that's just dumb. Yet people say that with AI smarter than humans all the time. Remember: just because it's in a sci fi doesn't mean it can't happen. That's just as irrational as thinking it will definitely happen cause it's in a sci fi. In fact, its presence in sci fi should have virtually no bearing on your epistemics. Look at the actual reasoning. Look at technological trends. Reason and evaluate claims. Don't just pattern match, "It's in a movie, therefore is unserious and can never happen." Read more: All You shouldn't talk about men's issues if you're not a man, because only men can truly understand the lived experience of men. Same goes for non-fascists discussing fascism. Sound ridiculous? It's just as ridiculous when you say the same thing about women or black people. Read more: All We just need to get a few dozen people in a room (key government officials from China and the USA) to agree that a race to build something that could create superebola and kill everybody is a bad idea. We can do this. We’ve done much harder things. Read more: All |
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