A collection of some of my better notes

To encourage people to follow me on notes here I wanted to share a collection of some of my better notes. In general some of the notes are similar to the stuff in my main thread- only shorter.

Me vs Reagan on the human spirit

Let me be a naïve idiot for a moment. Some people say that the problem is that people are too ambitious. I think the problem is they’re not ambitious enough. They don't dream of great moral, scientific, political, romantic, familial, or artistic feats. They don't dream of being a saint, visionary, of founding a community or changing lives for the better. They dream of this trivial rubbish. Consumption isn’t just prepackaged goods, it’s prepackaged dreams and careers are prepackaged lives. Please go into the moonlight, look up at the stars and go back to a time when you wanted to change the world. I recognize that’s a very individualistic and moralistic analysis, but I’m willing to be an individualist about this. Go into the moonlight, thrust your soul up and yearn.

Language model creativity

I’ve seen Language Models reasoning, exercising divergent creativity, solving puzzles etc. I have never seen - and perhaps this just reflects my own ignorance - a language model creating a genuinely novel thought in response to some complex topic or argument say, in philosophy. It’s really hard to me to imagine, just as an example, a language model inventing externalism about mental content.

I’m not sure how you’d measure this sort of creativity. I’m not sure whether this is a distinct capacity LLM’s lack, or whether it’s just a much harder version of tasks they can already do. I do think it’s plausible that they fundamentals of language models bias them against this sort of thing- although I’m unsure.

“““Race and IQ”””

I really, fundamentally, in my bones do not understand why a person of good will and character would choose to be a “race and IQ guy”. Specifically, why any social scientist would choose to do research in support of the view that such differences exist.

Let’s leave aside the scientific case against this stuff (which I buy) aside for a moment and just focus on the pragmatics. Although I’m furious about this stuff, I do want to reach out, in semi-good faith, to urge anyone thinking of going down this road to reconsider. I’m going to be doing a fair bit of hectoring- just in the spirit of honesty- but I would genuinely urge anyone thinking of going into this stuff to think about what I have to say carefully for a few minutes.

We’re on the verge of discovering world shattering technologies that could transform intelligence as we know it- genetic engineering & artificial intelligence (both of which might render all this moot anyway). Our society is getting tenser and tenser and you’re like “I know what will make things better, abolishing a 70 year consensus and load bearing pillar NO BIOLOGICAL RACISM designed to make people treat each other decently and as equals. That will surely lead to justice, mercy and amity all round”.

Don’t give me “follow the science wherever it leads”. I’m not asking about how you formed your beliefs, I’m asking about why you have chosen to do work on this area rather than another. Why have you chosen this as your priority. You really think that if you get your way this is going to make society more pleasant, peaceful and joyous? Bollocks.

And don’t give me “what matters is that people regard others as having the same human worth, not the same average attributes”. That’s not how people think. You know that’s not how people think. Cut the bad faith.

What about the line that this stuff is necessary out of some charitable urge to support those you consider intellectually lesser races? ***Then Just Advocate For Welfare Funding***. Be the guy who’s says “I’m a conservative/libertarian, but we need to do more about poverty”. There’s no need to run it through a race and IQ machine.

If you go down this road, best case scenario, you’re almost unbelievably naïve about the political climate. Medium case scenario, you’re churlish beyond belief, “le epically trolling teh libs”. Worst case scenario you want to recreate something like segregation.

Relationship liberalism

People on Twitter are arguing about what some of them are calling “relationship liberalism”- the view that it is permissible to ask for almost anything in a relationship so long as you are up front about it, and so long as it meets certain broad acceptability requirements (e.g., not taking away people’s ability to say no).

I reckon relationship liberalism is wrong- there are restrictions on what you should ask for. I even think desiring certain things from a relationship- let alone asking for them- is wrong. E.g. even desiring your partner not to be friends with other members of their preferred gender(s) is wrong. That said, I do also think a hearty (yet moderate) dose of MYOB when it comes to other peoples intimate affairs is healthy, and I suppose that’s a kind of relationship liberalism-lite.

But let’s accept, for a moment, the underlying logic of relationship liberalism- that freely given consent is the overriding factor. I think even on this purely liberal account, there are some restrictions. In particular, making big and unusual demands about the terms of a relationship after you’re well and truly into the relationship seems to me wrong if there’s any hint you’ll terminate the relationship if those demands aren’t met (and unless you’re very careful, often there will be).

This is because when you’re in a relationship you often have effective monopsony power. and can effectively push a person into accepting terms they wouldn’t have accepted at the outset of the relationship.

This may be especially true in some circumstances. For example, when a couple have had children, I suspect this affects the woman’s chances to being able to find a new partner if the relationship breaks up more than the man’s chances. Thus it might be particularly bad faith for a man to make new demand under these circumstances. Another example is situations where one or both partners can’t divorce or separate for religious reasons. But even outside these cases, the sheer investment into the relationship makes it hard to back out, making imposing new demands bad.

Obviously there might be circumstances under which a renegotiation is more acceptable than other times- e.g. if someone has an affair but you don’t want to break up the marriage.

[Part of the reason I’m making this a note rather than a post is I think it may be inspired by a tweet I saw I’ve now lost.]

Should we expect “big events” to be multifactorial?

Stefan Schubert writes on Twitter:

“Many disparage "simplistic" explanations, instead listing multiple causes But ironically, that's often simplistic: it's usually unlikely that many factors all would point in the same direction Either they have common causes, or there are opposing factors”

I used to think this was true, now I don’t. While it may seem improbable that major events have multiple causes, all happening to point in the same direction, there’s a simple explanation for why a large class of events should be like this, viz there are built in stabilizing mechanisms in society, and these stabilizing mechanisms are only breached by multiple things ‘going wrong’, or in some cases ‘going right’.

To pick an example of a relatively minor event to illustrate the case: there are safeguards in place to prevent major medical errors. Hence major medical errors, when they happen, usually involve multiple independent or semi-independent points of failure. Similar reasoning applies to wars, recessions, etc. The reason why “big events” are often multi-factorial is that our security mechanisms prevent most of the potentially much larger class of single-factorial events from happening.

Sometimes this isn’t even a matter of disasters. To become a big star, for example, you’ve usually got to have multiple semi-independent things going you’re way- you’ve got to be good-looking, charismatic, talented, and lucky- and have few if any weaknesses. This is because competition knocks out ‘single factorial’ stars.

Kinds of orientation towards morality

In very inexact terms there are three kinds of people:

1. People who see ethics as structuring the totality of how you should live your life.

2. People who see ethics as a series of constraints and minimum bars they have to meet in their lives.

3. People who don’t care about ethics.

We could expand this out to five kinds, just to flesh things out and add a tiny bit of nuance (nowhere near enough nuance obviously):

1. People who see ethics as structuring the totality of how you should live your life.

2. People who see ethics as a huge part of life, perhaps even the biggest part, but not the only part.

3. People who see ethics as a series of constraints and minimum bars they have to meet in their lives.

4. People who see ethics as a small sphere of side constraints and occasional obligations largely only forbidding them from engaging in grossly destructive behavior.

5. People who don’t care about ethics.