BC SOCIETY
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I think because the reward structure of being a bio-ethicist rewards saying level-headed sounding, cautious-sounding, conventional wisdom?

Though I'm not sure why that is.

 @JeffLadish I guess if you want to radically improve the world, you mostly don't go into a field that is about opining on other people's work, you go into something like Engineering and do the work?
@JeffLadish I note that Nick Bostrom is what a Bioethicist should be: he thinks hard about tradeoffs and risks, and crystalizes concepts like the Unilateralist's curse and black ball technologies.

But this is starting from a place of "The world could be vastly better. How do we get there?"
@JeffLadish I don't know why bioethics doesn't look more like a field of (less smart) Bostroms.
@JeffLadish I guess because everyone's disgust reactions are triggered by the actually good proposals, and in order to make those proposals the consensus of the field a lot of people have to bite the bullet and stick their neck out saying "I know this sounds crazy / absurd / vaguely evil...
@JeffLadish ...to our intuitions / etc, but it is actually the right thing to do."

And there are not enough people who are up for that, to reach a consensus?
@JeffLadish But economics, as a field, _does_ have this property. Economists are famously fine with policies that are abhorrent to the untrained intuition, but that they are confident are actually better on net. That's a good chunk of what economics is.
@JeffLadish But maybe economics has a solid enough theoretical underpinning, that it can manage to be that kind of field, while, the state of consensus in philosophy, and ethics in particular is confused?
@JeffLadish Like, if you have people still fighting over deontology vs. utilitarianism, it is pretty hard to build to a field wide consensus that we should obviously do covid variolation, because it will save lives on net.
@JeffLadish In which case the problem traces back to "Philosophy has bad feedback loops: you don't get to clearly know that you got the right answer. Which means philosophers are incentivized to make interesting and counterintuitive arguments, instead of to steer towards the actual truth."
@JeffLadish Ok. I think this is the answer to the original question: by the standards of science and engineering, you can settle a question to a sufficient degree of precision, and then move on to higher level questions using your answer to the first question as a foundation.
@JeffLadish But by the standards of philosophy, you can practically never settle a question. There is always space for more counter argument. If you settled the question, you wouldn't be able to argue about it any more!
@JeffLadish Which means that you don't build a foundation of answers to basic questions that you can assume, in trying to answer more complicated questions.

To do it right, bioethics would have to, at least in many areas, _assume_ utilitarianism.
@JeffLadish But if you try to assume utilitarianism, a bunch of philosophers will jump on you with many counterarguments and paradoxes and bullets to bite, all of which erode the ability of a bioethics field, as a whole, to stick to its guns about ideas that are counter-intuitive.
@JeffLadish One thing to note here is that the philosophical standards also challenge the foundations of science and engineering. Philosophy as a whole holds that we don't have rock solid reasons to trust our "obvious" answers to questions of epistemology and metaphysics.
@JeffLadish (Like whether there is an external world or whether knowledge is possible.)
@JeffLadish But the scientist and engineers just ignore the philosophers and assume those things anyway, at least for the purposes of doing their science.

And this works. It isn't necessarily philosophically grounded, but it works.
@JeffLadish And the difference is, I think, that the goal of science is to actually land on our all things considered most-correct answer (in part, so that engineering can build cool things like spaceships), while the goal of philosophy is to have air-tight ARGUMENTATION for our answer.
@JeffLadish If you're mostly trying to build spaceships, you don't really care about gettier problems, unless they're fucking up your ability to build working spaceships.
@JeffLadish And if you you just want to know how the sun sines, you don't really care that epistemology isn't grounded, because while you might be confused about the finer points, the finer points of epistemology are not going to get in the way of your getting correct beliefs about the sun.
@JeffLadish It turns out that you can generally build spaceships, and (more controversially) end up with correct beliefs about the sun, without having a solid irrefutable proof about the nature of "beliefs."
@JeffLadish Now it does turn out that having correct beliefs about what beliefs are, is pretty useful for getting more correct beliefs.

But having correct beliefs about what beliefs are turns out to not be the same thing as having solid irrefutable arguments for your belief about beliefs.
@JeffLadish This, by the way, is my main answer to the objection that I am projecting onto some folks that I talked to about critical rationality, recently.

(To be clear, I DON'T think that I definitely understood the points they made, and I may be responding to a straw-man.)
@JeffLadish But, I said recently that I thought that Bayes is the foundation of epistemology.

https://t.co/TfCQgRqUtv
@JeffLadish Different people gave different objections to that, but one objection was (if I understand it correctly) "But, where do your probabilities come from? Either you're infinitely certain of them, or you have an infinite stack of probabilities about the probability below them."
@JeffLadish https://t.co/8joOxuxaPp
@JeffLadish I think I could give some more detailed arguments about how this works, but I also want to dispute frame of the point being argued (if I understand it) a bit.
@JeffLadish It is totally possible to have a functioning brain / epistemology, that actually works for producing knowledge and steering through the world, which does not justify itself on its own terms.
@JeffLadish Like the question of "Does a Bayesian learning mechanism, work, in practice" is a separate question from "How do we justify that it works?"
@JeffLadish In general, I think many questions of the "but how do we justify it?" stripe, just don't matter very much.

For many things, we can't prove that it works, but it does work, and it is more interesting to move on to more advanced problems by assuming some things we can't prove.
@JeffLadish That is not to say that ALL questions of justification are irrelevant. Most of the time, even, it is very practically important to ask "how do we / can we know this is true?"
@JeffLadish But my goal in asking that is to figure out what's true, to the best of my ability, and to my own satisfaction, not to have an airtight argument that something is true.
@JeffLadish ...
Getting back to the original question, I think my answer was incomplete, and part of what is happening here is some self-selection regarding who becomes a bio-ethicist that I don't understand in detail.

Basically, I imagine that they tend towards conventional-mindedness.
@JeffLadish @threadreaderapp unroll

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Eli Tyre
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There's a particular kind of romantic partnership, with a certain sort of person, that I've wanted since I became a self-aware, directed agent at around age 15.

Empirically, this kind of relationship has been hard to achieve. It hasn't worked out yet, at least.

And this sometimes leaves me wondering if my standards are unreasonable.

In years past that desire was often very alive.

These days, I'm rarely directly or viscerally in contact with it.

I sometimes contemplate aiming for some other kind of romantic and/or sexual relationship instead. In part because I might be more effective if I...I don't know, got laid more? But that's not really the thing. More like, if I had someone around whom I could regularly relax.

But mostly, I don't pursue those alternative relationship-setups out of a sense of something like loyalty to myself + a vague sense of wrongness and/or sadness about it. It often feels like giving up or giving in.

[I might elaborate on the wrongness sometime.]
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Eli Tyre
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My catch all thread for this discussion of AI risk in relation to Critical Rationalism, to summarize what's happened so far and how to go forward, from here.

I started by simply stating that I thought that the arguments that I had heard so far don't hold up, and seeing if anyone was interested in going into it in depth with


So far, a few people have engaged pretty extensively with me, for instance, scheduling video calls to talk about some of the stuff, or long private chats.

(Links to some of those that are public at the bottom of the thread.)

But in addition to that, there has been a much more sprawling conversation happening on twitter, involving a much larger number of people.

Having talked to a number of people, I then offered a paraphrase of the basic counter that I was hearing from people of the Crit Rat persuasion.
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Eli Tyre
Eli Tyre
@EpistemicHope
I know some people who seem (to me) more concerned with receiving VALIDATION for their mental health issues than solving them.

They seem to care most about other people BELIEVING their problems are real.

I'm curious about this.

Like, it's more important to them that people know how debilitating their anxiety is, than to overcome the anxiety.

Or it's important to them that others believe that they're actually depressed, not "just sad."

Or they want people buy into the narrative that they've been traumatized, and might be something like offended if someone minimizes that.

What do we make of this?

1. One possibility is that if solving the problems seems hopeless or even just really hard, you need external support to be able to cope.

If no one cuts you slack because of your mental health stuff, maybe you're in a really bad place, so you need people to believe you.
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Eli Tyre
Eli Tyre
@EpistemicHope
CritRats!

I think AI risk is a real existential concern, and I claim that the CritRat counterarguments that I've heard so far (keywords: universality, person, moral knowledge, education, etc.) don't hold up.

Anyone want to hash this out with


For instance, while I heartily agree with lots of what is said in this video, I don't think that the conclusion about how to prevent (the bad kind of) human extinction, with regard to AGI, follows.

There are a number of reasons to think that AGI will be more dangerous than most people are, despite both people and AGIs being qualitatively the same sort of thing (explanatory knowledge-creating entities).

And, I maintain, that because of practical/quantitative (not fundamental/qualitative) differences, the development of AGI / TAI is very likely to destroy the world, by default.

(I'm not clear on exactly how much disagreement there is. In the video above, Deutsch says "Building an AGI with perverse emotions that lead it to immoral actions would be a crime."
SOCIETY
Eli Tyre
Eli Tyre
@EpistemicHope
I was reading something that suggested that trauma "tries" to spread itself. ie that the reason why intergenerational trauma is a thing is that the traumatized part in a parent will take action to recreate that trauma in the child.

This model puts the emphasis on the the parent's side: the trauma is actively "trying" to spread.

This is in contrast to my previous (hypothetical) model for IGT, which puts the emphasis on the child's side: kids are sponges that are absorbing huge amounts of info, including via very subtle channels. So they learn the unconscious reactions of the people around them.

(I say "hypothetical", because all while this sort of thing is in my hypothesis space, I haven't seen clear enough evidence that intergenerational trauma is a meaningful category that I solidly believe it is real.

More like, "here's a story for how this could work.")

On first glance, I was skeptical of this "active trauma" story.

Why on earth would trauma be agenty, in that way? It sounds like too much to swallow.
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The GRA of 2004 gave trans people the ability to change legal sex via a GRC, but only if they had a psychiatric diagnosis of dysphoria and only after having lived in role for 2 years. The spousal veto gave spouses a chance to annul or obtain a favourable divorce.

While this ultimately created the loophole in women's rights that we've been fighting against in the last few years, it catered for a tiny number of dysphoric transsexuals and so did not have an enormous impact.

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1/14 How do e-cigarettes (ECs) affect cigarette smoking among youth? My new paper with @FloeFoxon simulates each scenario and finds out which one best matches actual trends... https://t.co/dBB7kcnTls @jgitchell @mikepesko @SwitchFinder @jkelovuori @TobPolicy @Clive_Bates

2/14 First, let's talk about why this question is so difficult to answer: COUNTERFACTUALS. We can't know the alternate-reality answers, like which smokers would have never started in a world without ECs, and which nonsmokers would now be smoking without ECs as an option.

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Hinmafushi Council President Shan Ibrahim Stated To Sun That The Resort, Which Dug The Trench Creating A River On The Sandbank, Did Not Have Ownership Over The Sandbank.

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I've seen many news articles cite that "the UK variant could be the dominant strain by March". This is emphasized by @CDCDirector.

While this will likely to be the case, this should not be an automatic cause for concern. Cases could still remain contained.

Here's how: 🧵

One of @CDCgov's own models has tracked the true decline in cases quite accurately thus far.

Their projection shows that the B.1.1.7 variant will become the dominant variant in March. But interestingly... there's no fourth wave. Cases simply level out:

https://t.co/tDce0MwO61


Just because a variant becomes the dominant strain does not automatically mean we will see a repeat of Fall 2020.

Let's look at UK and South Africa, where cases have been falling for the past month, in unison with the US (albeit with tougher restrictions):


Furthermore, the claim that the "variant is doubling every 10 days" is false. It's the *proportion of the variant* that is doubling every 10 days.

If overall prevalence drops during the studied time period, the true doubling time of the variant is actually much longer 10 days.

Simple example:

Day 0: 10 variant / 100 cases -> 10% variant
Day 10: 15 variant / 75 cases -> 20% variant
Day 20: 20 variant / 50 cases -> 40% variant

1) Proportion of variant doubles every 10 days
2) Doubling time of variant is actually 20 days
3) Total cases still drop by 50%
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