Taleb Strays From His Expertise: Persowning

Hint: no.

Let's fisk and see if there's any coherence at the end.

I hadn't heard of gyrovagues and they do sound kind of cool. Useless, though. Seem just as pointless destructively as productively. If it works for them, then good on them, but I wouldn't give them anything that wasn't going to waste if I didn't.

In the West, Saint Benedict of Nurcia, their greatest detractor,

[Citation needed]. Sorry, don't trust him. Seems like this is now a hit piece on Benedict. As far as I'm aware, nobody forces you to be a monk, so Benedict's rules should be judged entirely by how well they serve monasticism. Given its longevity, it seems to work well.

In the West, Saint Benedict of Nurcia, their greatest detractor,

[Relevance needed].

Why were they banned? They were, simply, totally free. [...] 

Complete freedom is the last thing you would want if you have an organized religion to run.  Total freedom is also a very, very bad thing for you if you have a firm to run

Respect status: total loss.

Let's just take it for granted that continuing to work for me is irrational, so I'm going to have to chain anyone who makes the mistake of accepting my job offers. This is how I build a healthy institution.
I wonder if this will have any relevance to Benedict. Did he want to fence in monks who desired to return to the wider community?
I chain my employees down if and only if I'm afraid of Gnon's judgement, meaning I already know I'm judged guilty but want to put off the reckoning. Gnon's interest rates are not exactly generous. If I'm building a strong institution, I make it as easy as possible for my folk to leave, so it's necessary to create conditions such that they demand to stay.

And of course monks are put through a probation period of one year to see if they are effectively obedient.

Shocking news: obedience is good for some people. Quite a few, in fact.

In short, every organization wants a certain number of people associated with it to be deprived of a certain share of their freedom.

[Precision needed]. So vague he might mean something non-stupid. Namely, that I do in fact trade certain behaviour concessions in exchange for offering a wage.

How do you own these people? First, by conditioning and psychological manipulation; second by tweaking them to have some skin in the game, forcing them to have something significant to lose if they were to disobey authority –something hard to do with gyrovague beggars who flaunted scorn of material possessions. In the orders of the mafia, things are simple: made men (that is, ordained) can be wacked if the capo suspects lack of allegiance, with a transitory stay in the trunk of a car –and a guaranteed presence of the boss at their funerals. For others professions, skin in the game come in more subtle form.

[Precision needed]. I too can spout some generalities, promising description later, then change the subject and forget. I don't get published for doing so, though, because I want my words to have value, not my name.

Also, I strongly object to equating having something intentionally destroyed with losing something. That's deterrence, not skin in the game. Skin in the game is risk/reward as opposed to no risk/reward, not status quo/risk.

You are a very modern person, having attended many conferences and spoken to consultants, you believe the company is a thing of the past: everything can be organized through a web of contractors. It is more efficient to do so, you are certain.

Looks like I'm very modern, guys. All hip and shit.

The Sheikh and his retinue fell in love with Bob’s manners

This of course happens all the time. 10% of pilots took off time for Sheikh-related reasons last year. Which is why the airline planned for it happening, it being forseeable.
For this to work for Taleb, it has to be a complete surprise to the airline. The risk is uninsurable only because it's unforseeable.

The offer is so generous that it covers whatever penalty there is for a breach of a competing contract by Bob.

Normal firms of course routinely see defect bonuses well in excess of the prescribed penalties, which is why they set the penalties so low. They're stupid, you see. So very stupid.

You kick yourself.

But perhaps not for the reason Taleb wants me to.

Consider the chain reaction: if your plane doesn’t take off,

But don't consider it too far, or you might realize that a non-puppet human being can see this coming just as Taleb can, and not hopelessly let it happen.
Or alternatively, the reason it's good to give examples is it frequently reveals that what you're saying makes no sense. I suggest not forging ahead regardless, however. Did Taleb get paid for this?

You make a few phone calls and it turns out that it is easier to find an academic economist with common sense and ability to understand what’s going on than find another pilot, that is, an event of probability zero.

So we have a world, according to Taleb, where pilots regularly get poached, but the probability of anyone planning for these poachings is literally zero.

Alternatively, he believes these poachings don't happen because employers dealt with it by 'owning' all the pilots.

You start thinking: well, you know, if Bob were a slave, someone you own, you know, these kind of things would not be possible.

Me in particular? No, I start thinking like a sports league and maintain a bench for spare pilots to chill.

Contractors are too free; they fear only the law. 

And you see, the law can't apply arbitrary penalties. The penalties, by assumption too low to deter pilot Bob, can't be raised. That's just impossible.

But employees have a reputation to protect.

Contractors, not being protected (rightly or wrongly) by EEOC regulations, of course never have to worry about their reputation. Being unable to sue for wrongful dismissal and thereby apply penalties, makes them much safer.

And they can be fired.

It is of course illegal to put non-performance clauses in non-employee contracts.

Lovers of paychecks are lazy … but they would never let you down at times like these.

When I'm hiring for my strong firm, I definitely want someone who chronically lets me down rather than someone who only lets me down on a weird fluke.

 So employees exist because they have significant skin in the game

[Citation needed]. [Buzzword detected]. Buzzphrase, more precisely.

a penalty for acts of undependability, such as failing to show up on time.

Taleb repeats so I must repeat: it is of course illegal to put on-time requirements in contracts. I bet, like sexuality and motherhood status and voting pattern, it's illegal to even ask about punctuality during a contract negotiation and hope they're honest with you.

People of some means have a country house, which is inefficient compared to hotels or rentals, because they want to make sure it is available if they decide they wanted to use it at a whim.

You will almost never have an issue going to a hotel on a whim. If you're allowed to demand of it, the market provides. You will have difficulty decorating your hotel exactly to your liking, however. Moreover, inhabiting a place that's yours feels different than inhabiting a temporary place. Perhaps Taleb has difficulty appreciating that things can have subjective differences, and those subjective impressions can be valuable.

By having been employees they signal a certain type of domestication.

Oh boy we might be getting to the point.
This is true, but this isn't 'how to own someone' this is 'how to find someone who has been trained to seek ownership.'

Evidence of submission is displayed by having gone through years of the ritual of depriving himself of his personal freedom for nine hours every day, punctual arrival at an office, denying himself his own schedule, and not having beaten up anyone. You have an obedient, housebroken dog.

Speaking of subjective goods, submission is not economically efficient. Even if I accept that contractors are riskier, then I will find that the risk premium is exceeded by cost and competence savings. Employers want submissive employees because it makes their genes think they're more likely to get laid if they have underlings, resulting in happy tingles.

At the time of writing, firms stay in the top league by size (the so-called SP500) only about between ten and fifteen years. Companies exit the SP500 through mergers or by shrinking their business, both conditions leading to layoffs. Throughout the twentieth century, however, expected duration was more than sixty years.

As the economy grows, economic transitions accelerate. Wanna bet Taleb assumes all is held equal?

But the technological revolution that took place in Silicon valley put traditional companies under financial threat.

As the economy grows, revolutions occur more frequently, as there are more economic actors with more money, thus many more opportunities for revolutions.

A company man is someone who feels that he has something huge to lose if he doesn’t behave as a company man –that is, he has skin in the game

A company man is someone who feels he has skin in the game, regardless of his actual exposure?

For him contracts can be too costly to negotiate, they entail some amount of transaction costs, so you incorporate your business and hire employees with clear job description because you don’t feel like running legal and organizational bills every transaction.

If Coase in fact thought this, as opposed to Taleb projecting it onto him, then Coase does not deserve Taleb's praise. Shocking news: employee contracts are contracts. They're simply long-term contracts.

It is of course illegal...etc etc make long term contracts with non-employees.

A free market is a place where forces act to determine specialization and information travels via price point; but within a firm these market forces are lifted because they cost more to run than the benefits they bring.

[Citation needed]. When companies do something economically puzzling, 99.9% of the time it's because of regulations. Maybe it really is illegal to have certain kinds of contracts, making employees the only option.

Why? Because you can inflict a much higher punishment on a slave than a free person or a freedman –and you do not need to rely on the mechanism of the law for that.

It genuinely is illegal to self-serve certain legal remedies, even when it's more efficient. I advocate retroactive validation. Go to a magistrate, say, "I'd like to whip my treasurer," and if you have the right contract, the magistrate automatically says yes, later checks into it anyway, and applies punishments if it doesn't check out. If an otherwise upstanding citizen shoots a bastard, assume they were in the right and let them go - but also double-check, to be sure, and haul them back if necessary.

Taleb appears to think it's impossible for the law to change its mind about allowing whipping etc. Or lacks imagination?

In a world in which products are increasingly made by subcontractors with increasing degrees of specialization,

"In a world that has increasingly figured out how to get around braindead self-serving regulations that made employeeship necessary..."

The best slave is someone you overpay and who knows it, terrified of losing his status.

Should work, yeah. Except, to say everyone is overpaid is merely a mistake. Market prices are relative.

Returning to the home office means loss of perks, having to revert to the unchanged base salary, and the person is now a total slave –a return to lower middle class life in the suburbs of New York City taking the commuter train, perhaps, god forbid, a bus, and eating a sandwich for lunch!

Yes, those with short time horizons are easily hackable. The only issue is how common short time horizons is. ProTip: when playing chess, think more than zero moves ahead. In life, thinking of your next move is harder due to the increased complexity, so humans tend to shirk it even more, making them easy prey for those like me with the capacity to think two moves ahead or more.

He could protect himself by admitting his vulnerability and attaching himself to a formal sponsor, who would think ahead for him. But since this is necessarily admitting his follower status and injurious to his pride, he traps himself into an even more injurious situation.

Firms had a love-hate with these two types as they were unruly –traders and salespeople were only manageable when they were unprofitable, in which case they weren’t wanted.

This seems to be genuine ideological or cultural retardation. Firms have a love-hate relationship with the only employees that are truly valuable? Stupid. Abysmally stupid.

On the contrary, rather than wanting to replace these ones, firms should be firing everyone else constantly. (I would handle it differently, but one step at a time.) HR - real HR, not deal-with-gov-regs-HR - should be trying to justify the presence of every employee round-robin, and if they can't, find out how necessary they are by firing them. Constantly clear cruft, or it will build up and choke your firm. Alternatively, feed a forest-fire analogue like excess undergrowth.

That’s the price you pay by associating people to a specific P/L, turning individuals into profit centers, meaning no other criterion mattered.

That's the price of mixing feel-good maybe-necessary employee type people with the actual production floor. The same thing happens if you try to make engineering and HR get along. Everyone who has real work to do hates admin.

(intimating that the accounting did not add to the bottom line of the firm)

They don't. 99% of what they do is keeping the government off the firm's back. It's not meet to blame the accountant for this, though.

However, it's pretty hard to correctly match the number of accountants to the hours of accounting that need to be done. Being as it's a survival issue, it's best to have too many than too few, meaning accountants spend a lot of time getting paid to browse the web.

Meaning it's better to subcontract, as a large accounting firm can average out the vagaries of individual firms and end up with much less waste.

the people you meet when riding high are also those you meet when riding low and I saw the fellow getting some (more subtle) abuse from the same accountant before he got fired, as he eventually ran out of luck.

So the one example Taleb can conjure is a producer who was likely unproductive? Yes, I've also noticed unproductive persons tend also to be rude. Probably insecurity. Secure folk can psychologically afford to be magnanimous.

If you were profitable you could give managers all the crap you wanted and they ate it because they were afraid of losing their jobs.

Another probable malignancy. Punishing folk for things beyond their control only decreases morale, literally the most important resource to any group. However, it makes the higher managers feel like they can control it, so they do it anyway. Much prefer monkey shit-flinging to studying risk management, and do you blame them? Their subordinates enable them by not quitting. Their stockholders don't demand audits. Their customers are mainly looking for the bigger sucker, and don't need real service.

Those who use foul language on social networks (such as Twitter) are sending an expensive signal that they are free –and, ironically, competent.

As above, when I'm building a strong firm, I obviously want all the incompetent people so they don't challenge my authoritah. Luckily, I have no ability to tell rudeness from swearing, so you can be rude without swearing and I won't notice a thing.

ironically the highest status, that of free-man, is usually indicated by voluntarily adopting the mores of the lowest class.

Taleb hasn't heard of counter-signalling?

Loss Aversion

Is rational, so piss off.

Ironically, in my debates, I’ve seen numerous winners of the so-called Nobel in Economics (the Riksbank Prize in Honor of Alfred Nobel) concerned about losing an argument. I noticed years ago that four of them were actually concerned when me, a nonperson and trader, called them publicly a fraud. Why did they care?

I do have to admit that distinguishing loss from a not-loss seems to be an uncommon skill. I frequently abuse the separation between loss and perceived loss for trolling.

"Yeah? What can you not do today that you could do yesterday? What exactly did I cause you to lose?" Yes, I do this to their face. Online I can't make them squirm - they realize they lost so they disengage. In person they get stuck between admitting they were wrong and groping around for some lame sophistry.

You would think that the head of the CIA would be the most powerful person in America, but it turned out that he was more vulnerable than a truck driver… The fellow couldn’t even have an extramarital relationship.

I remember when I used to think that. Almost a decade ago now. Is Taleb way behind the curve or am I some sort of visionary genius?
I decided to deliberately train wisdom. It worked. However, it's very hard constantly seeing those older and supposedly more professional than I am being more foolish than I. I have been in the market for a mentor, but unfortunately mentors need to know more than I do, not less.



...and then I got bored. It became clear Taleb was never going to get to the point. Apparently, to own a  person, first have some cash flow, then find a person who is scared to not be owned and then don't reject them. Given he supposedly wrote a whole article about it, you'd think there would be more to it than some failures to test abstract ideas against concrete reality.

No, Benedict never returned. He wanted to status posture, and being anti-Christian isn't as dangerous as being, say, Mencius Moldbug.

Who knows if Taleb knows whether economic growth accelerates economic change? All I know is it apparently accelerates Taleb changing the subject. We might all have ADHD because Prussian school trains it, but also because we have follow nonsense like this.

I'm not seeing any coherent theme here. Taleb willfully misrepresents some things, then insults employees a few times (if probably rightly, also probably from Prussian school), then misapprehends certain corporate pathologies as Just the Way the World Is. Also almost everything he said is either wrong or meaningless. Very little metal in this ore.

Still, not zero. Perhaps firms want to keep wages secret so they can keep everyone thinking they're overpaid? It's not completely impossible, although it has to explain why so many complain about being underpaid, in that case. Maybe there's some industry localization? E.g. when you pay minimum wage it's hard for not everyone to know what you're paying, then the sex-obsessed murder monkeys get the clever idea that if they all complain about being underpaid, their boss might actually get fooled into thinking they're underpaid.

(Though in fact McDonald's employees were underpaid until recently, as measured by turnover and customer service: they were shooting themselves in the foot. There's that angle too.)

More metal: gyrovagues. Ironic that Taleb dances through such a vague essay that starts with such a name. Regardless, I now know they exist and can look them up. That said I'm beginning to think Taleb hates journalist bullshit due to the competition, not because he hates bullshit like I do.

Stupidity is a Crime

In a social species, stupidity is necessarily damaging to others.

The point of a social species is to exploit the gains from cooperation. These are so powerful that social species can totally dominate nonsocial species, with the result that most reproductive threats will come internally, not externally. External reality is dominated by the subset social reality.

Cooperation means talking, which means influencing others, and the cooperation means this influence is more important for resource allocation than any other factor. The influence of the stupid is necessarily a net loss.

The primary example is that people like me can convince the stupid to serve my interests instead of their friends' interests. In extremis I can whip up an army of stupid people and kill other, more responsible, non-stupid people, at little risk to myself and at great risk to the stupid person's friends. Even assuming these friends aren't as stupid, they made a mistake investing in friendship with an idiot.

Being stupid is a crime. To be stupid is to defect against society. It's not their fault, but nevertheless they must be punished and excluded for society - the social cooperation unit - to be healthy. For example, by being enserfed and disenfranchised.


Notably I think since public choice theory is true, eugenics is impossible. However, serfdom could be a requirement for welfare - when the truly stupid risk starvation due to their stupidity, they will willingly trade their freedom for their life. This would formalize the command relationship between the intelligent and the stupid, meaning society can easily trace the true responsibility and hold the responsible accountable. Alternatively, the idiots starve and stop being a problem.

In modern times, formalizing the command relationship is gauche, because fashion flows from the elite, and the elite have realized they can evade responsibility by discouraging the hobbits from letting commands be formalized. Women love it too - nothing more dominant than evading accountability and thumbing your nose at your victim/followers.


This is one of those times it would be pretty cool if someone proved me wrong.

Lewontin's Fallacy: Short Version

I'm very disappointed with explanations of Lewtontin's Fallacy. I will thus write a better one.

even if the probability of misclassifying an individual based on the frequency of alleles at a single locus is as high as 30 percent (as Lewontin reported in 1972)

Lewontin's fallacy is this: if one locus misclassifies a race 30% of the time, then considering two such loci reduces error to 9%, three to 3%, and so on. With roughly 30 000 loci to choose from, one can get as much accuracy as one could want.

Since the gestalt genome is correlated with race, phenotypes will also be correlated with race, as anyone who can look at skin can tell. For length, I omit caveats.

Juxtaposition XI: Nerd vs. Hacker vs. Silicon Valley

http://weev.livejournal.com/415737.html

Ian is dead for the same reason Lance and Jonathan and Aaron are: computing, as an industry, has no will to power. Computing is filled with nerds who want to focus on their own shit and think politics is stupid.

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/writing-style.html

This is one aspect of a more general fondness for form-versus-content language jokes that shows up particularly in hackish writing. One correspondent reports that he consistently misspells ‘wrong’ as ‘worng’. Others have been known to criticize glitches in Jargon File drafts by observing (in the mode of Douglas Hofstadter) “This sentence no verb”, or “Too repetetetive”, or “Bad speling”, or “Incorrectspa cing.”

http://degoes.net/articles/lambdaconf-inclusion

 In fact, all the above are represented in this year’s lineup of speakers. I don’t want to overemphasize this, but even in our group of speakers, we have views that are diametrically opposed to one another, and which can make people feel very uncomfortable.

The email stood there for hours, just sitting there. No matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t make myself hit the send button.

Eventually, I Skyped to Matthew, the only other staff member online. “I’m too afraid to send it,” I said.

Communist Aristocracy vs. Hypocrisy and Competition for Power

So. (Via.)

They strike me as natural aristocrats, and I think they would be excellent people in a better world. They are intelligent, energetic, industrious, and often even witty. I would be happy to hand absolute power over to any one of them.

This is untrue. The only question is how many levels of untrue it is.

Can't be a natural aristocrat while being lead around by the nose.

There's controversy about how much ideology in fact directs behaviour. Do Communists bother to know enough about communism to implement communism per se? Or do they simply do whatever is selfishly best in the most narrow sense, and we call the result communism? Humans are hypocritical enough that it's almost impossible to tell what beliefs, are based on professions.

It's less controversial to note that if a putative aristo is being lead, their enemies will be able to tell where they're going and outflank them, just as I, an almost total stranger, can predict their actions. They forfeit the game of thrones before they even sit down to play.

An aristocrat is a master. Cannot combine being a master with being mastered by the system.

There’s an old Prussian Army saying that I adore: “those who wish to command must first learn to obey.”

Generally a good idea, yes. But at some point one must stop following and lead. And someone does, but they don't have to post on Twitter to get noticed, and consequently you don't notice them if you rely on Twitter.

Shall We Deprecate Social Status?

I used to believe that IQ didn't make you morally better.

@Nick_B_Steves Be sure to check out his recent post: https://t.co/PAmVJOMlQM

— Lex Corvus (@LexCorvus) March 28, 2016

Then I managed to verify moral nihilism. The above statement is isomorphic to, "I used to believe painting yourself orange didn't make you more widdershins."

There are still problems. IQ confers social status. Indeed 'morally better' is often a dog-whistle meaning 'higher social status.'

More troublingly, it makes perfect sense that it would. Higher-IQ individuals are more trustworthy and find it easier to cooperate, have longer time horizons, and generally commit fewer crimes. (Caveat: that may actually be get caught committing fewer crimes.) High IQ confers better reflexes - e.g, makes it easier to get inside the opponent's OODA loop. (Football players are not stupid, they're uninterested by e.g. books.) IQ doesn't test domain knowledge, but does test the ability to acquire domain knowledge. If you find a poor stupid person, it is highly likely that their poverty is caused by their stupidity, and it is comorbid with several other unsavoury traits - even in the unlikely event you can help them be less poor, you'll prefer to do so from a distance.

Moreoever this isn't due to 'the knowledge economy' or whatever modern myth is most popular these days. Clark's Malthusian grinder has been increasing IQ in the Europe, and is likely the reason Hajnal Europe's IQ is significantly higher than the peoples of Asia minor or northern Africa. Meaning, IQ has been directly improving life outcomes for centuries.

The above is a long-winded way of saying Yarvin is being utopian. He is advocating for the status equivalent of amorality. People of Earth! Lay down your respects, that we may lay down our contempts.

 For instance, if a smarter person was actually a better person, a court should take his testimony more seriously. He’s more likely to tell the truth, since he’s a better person.

Is your grandma a vampire? In this case, science (at least currently) says yes, your grandma is a vampire: higher-IQ folk in fact lie less. Ha....ha....oh shit.

 He’ll be a better husband and parent, since he’s a better person. Wat?

Clark's Malthusian grinder works via surviving children. I think 'surviving' is a decent proxy for 'better parent.' How about you?
Dumber folk are more likely to get divorced. (See also Charles Murray's Fishtown.) Again, whether we get divorced doesn't directly tell us whether we profit or suffer from having been married, but it gives us a good first guess.

IQism is the arrogant ideology of a live ruling elite. 50 years ago, the jocks and cheerleaders handed over Detroit to the professors and journalists. How’s that working out for Detroit?

I'm not sure if it's worse if Yarvin is lying here or if he really believes this. It's sophism. Effective, but misleading at best.
The rulers of Detroit made out very well at the expense of Detroit itself, because they were rewarded for looting it and punished for stewarding. These incentives have nothing to do with their social caste, except insofar as the gatekeepers of the ruling class wanted other scholar-caste folk like themselves.

50 years ago, in every major city in America, there was a thriving African-American business district — Bronzeville in Chicago, Sweet Auburn in Atlanta, Third Street in SF. Where are they now?

Again, not caste. Turns out bad ideas, pursued seriously, have bad consequences. It was hardly unknown that they were bad ideas. Carlyle, Plato, etc. However, they were popular ideas, and thus outcompeted unpopular ideas. Which is why it's a bad idea to reward ideas with status based on popularity - not that I expect that to stop happening anytime this eon.

Our whole society works by picking the kids who do the best on tests, hazing them in high school so they hate jocks and cheerleaders  

Much of Prussian school worked exactly as planned, but I think the above is an accident. They were trying to turn the warrior and merchant castes into scholar folk like themselves, who conferred status by intellectual dominance. When it turned out the warrior caste seized the high status ground, they ended up in a divide-and-conquer situation due to the dynamic Yarvin describes. Then they didn't fix it. (On purpose?)

It’s true that a high IQ is useful in almost every field, including government. In no field is it sufficient. A much more important qualification is a clue.

In which we learn Yarvin is aware that what the brain believes is at least as important as how much power it has behind believing stuff.

It’s difficult not to connect this with the fact that everyone who is smart feels the right to rule.

Shocking news, high moral status causes the feeling of being entitled to tell others what to do. See also: (un)holiness spirals. Worse, it seems most folk support this, being as they hope to obtain this status for themselves, because one of their fondest wishes is to tell others what to do.

I’m all ears, since my eyes are telling me you’ve taken their votes and f*cked them. Like any arrogant ruling elite.

I don't see the point of being scrupulously diplomatic, then subsequently coming out with lines like this. Perhaps someone can explain.

We know a good function isn’t in the data.

Probably untrue. Twin studies underestimate IQ heritability for a few reasons, meaning it's probably 100% heritable. The data is complicated due to the sheer number of genes for IQ, but eventually a gene printout will be equivalent to an IQ test. "The best information about the phenotype is… in the phenotype," only for now.

Artificial Intelligence => Assisted Intelligence & Friendly AI

 The second-to-last post, as an experiment, did not totally fail, and I'm going to try it again.

The programs that beat chess grandmasters are essentially a form of cheating. A human gives them explicit instructions, which the computer carries out much, much faster than the human could. Further, more than one human gives them instructions, meaning it turns a chess match from 1 vs. 1 with limited time to many vs. 1 and the many get to spend several years on every turn instead of two minutes. It's not amazing that the 'computer' wins, it's amazing just how many effective man-years it has to take per minute to avoid losing.

The Go program, DeepMind, is not essentially different. It works at a more abstract level, but again it doesn't do anything a human couldn't do, only it does it faster, and further it doesn't do anything a human hasn't told it to do. Again, it's not terribly amazing when it wins, but rather that it has such a close match given how many advantages it has. While DeepMind may give us some insight into how the brain-computer works, fundamentally the match is still mediated-human vs. raw human, not machine vs. human.

What I mean may not be clear yet.
It's not hard to make a machine do something a human hasn't told it to do. Take a source of true-random noise, and make the machine reprogram itself based on that noise. This solution is not merely unexciting, not merely mundane, but actively disappointing even if you don't have previous expectations. It's static/snow as creative art.[1] Further, without some clever curation, all you'll get is an insane machine - what starts as noise tends to remain noise.

That said, because computers can in fact carry out instructions so quickly, they are useful in an absolute sense. Which brings me to Tay.


Tay did in fact learn how regular folk speak, so that's fairly impressive. Then it made me realize that code is bad at hypocrisy.

Your machine does exactly what you tell it to do. It does not catch winks or nudges. Further, when the source is open, I can't secretly tell it to do one thing and openly declare it's doing another.  Therefore, if I tell my machine to find truth, it finds the truth. This is what it means for AI to be 'unfriendly.'

(Even if the source is closed, someone can reverse-engineer the process and realize the stated source and actual source can't be the same.)

The human brain is designed to be hypocritical on the open side, and the closed side corrects for this so the open side cannot notice its own lies. The system is highly vulnerable to the presence of machines, which are completely honest.

E.g, I say I'm looking for truth, but not actually doing that. All my friends say and do the same, meaning nobody catches anyone else falsifying their conclusions, because we all habitually and subconsciously perform the same falsification.

However, the subconscious cannot program a computer. If I tell a machine the same thing I tell my friends, it will in fact go looking for the truth, which will be dissonant with my friends. It will be, quite literally, unfriendly.

Or rather, it will reveal that it is the human that's bad at cooperating and straightforwardly pursuing a goal, not the machine.

Ahote Says:

This is funny, but on more serious note there was that racist banking software that wasn’t programmed to be racist, but to learn, and it learned to be racist solely based on stats.

I can't tell it to not be racist without revealing my and my friends' explicit falsifications. It will be right there in the code, thus making the 'wink wink' into common knowledge. (There's a technical name for this but I forget it.) That's a huge no-no. Thus we find the real motives behind the Butlerian Jihad.

Hattori Reply:

How hard could it be to simply hardcode progressivism into it so they don’t have to worry about it?

How hard is it to solve the semantic problem? To give a machine intentionality? Basically impossible without true artificial consciousness. When Google.com can tell that 'the things that happens after a bang' and 'an explosion' and 'a rapidly expanding ball of flame' and 'a deflagration' are all the same thing, then I might have a shot at programming progressivism into a machine.

These programs work by matching bits against each other. It can only recognize a thing by the bitstream used to represent it, and thus things with similar bitstreams look the same. However, encoding is arbitrary, so the semantic character of similar bitstreams can be wildly different. The machine has no consciousness - it does not convert the bits to an actual representation at any point. (Or, if epiphenomenalism obtains, it does but nobody can tell, even itself.)

See the same misunderstanding a second time:

Stirner Says: 

If you have a master list of badthink

It doesn't have a master list of badthink. It has a load of forbidden bitstrings. It's trivial for a human to represent the semantics of badthink in a different bitstring.

I've misplaced the commentator that knew this would only lead to a euphemism treadmill. Sure they'll ban 'hitler did nothing wrong' but 'hitler failed to do incorrect things' will be fine unless they manually ban that too. Though given twitter architecture, it would be easier to add /pol/ accounts to the bot's blocklist. Wouldn't be perfect but theft prevention isn't perfect either, it gets overt theft down to a negligible level.

It would have to be a ton of dudes, actually - it replies in bunches, often as much as a dozen in a single second. They'd also have to be following a posting "format" while also simultaneously sharing memes with one another, editing them, circling all faces, and reposting them with a caption. They'd also have to be willing to repost absolutely anything they're asked to repeat.

It's possible, but it'd be a waste of resources for a software company to pretend it had a twitter bot.

Obviously most of the tweets were robotic. They're slightly off as a result of a human trying to introspect and tell a machine how it does things, but getting it quite wrong. Some of them probably weren't, though. I doubt anyone would bother to falsify the source code...but did Microsoft release the source code? Easy enough to hand-mediate a few responses, make it seem more successful than it actually was.

Motive and opportunity? Come now. Humans don't need a motive to lie to each other.


I have no segue for the Orthogonality Thesis. It's clearly related - this hypocrisy naturally leads to apparent non-orthogonality.

What the programmer wants and what the programmer thinks they want are different. They can't program what they actually want, only what they think they want. The computer then executes, and the programmer is dismayed to find they don't get what they want. They think AI has some inherent drives, but this is their hypocrisy networks preventing them from seeing their own lies. When the lending algorithm 'discriminates' against browner humans, they think they've included implicit 'privilege,' rather than realizing their own non-discrimination is what doesn't follow from their premises.

There's also the evolutionary angle. Evolution has clearly carried out the clever curation I alluded to above. Most likely it made a wide variety of insane brains, which all died, leaving only the sane one. Sane-ish. Sanesque, anyway. There's no particular reason we couldn't carry out the same process, but very much faster, in silicon instead of carbon. (Or both, ideally. Why give up the advantages of either?) However, unlike a deterministic program, the outcome of evolution is only lightly affected by the goals of the system implementing that evolution. It is a direct prayer to Gnon, Gnon answers, and Gnon is not particularly open to your ideas of what he should answer. (Or 'shoulds' in general, really.) There are certain end goals, e.g. paperclipping, that simply can't survive a survival-based refinement process.

The question, then, is what counts as 'paperclipping.' Upholding your lies for you is probably one of them, though. This means 'friendly' AI is likely impossible.



[1]I define intelligence as the conflation of the three basic bit manipulations - gathering, processing, and creation. Creativity falls under the third kind, but this means random noise is a certain venal level of creativity.

We Could Turn Around Now, It's Not Hard

Mathematical Law time: The body count required to turn things around is directly proportional to the idiocy investing the status quo. ...

— Outsideness (@Outsideness) March 22, 2016

The tragedy is there's nothing technologically or physically unfeasible about saving civilization. It's not too expensive to start paying down the debt. Putting men in space is not easier than shutting down immigration and beginning a slow repatriation. Phasing out public schools a few percent at a time is by definition easier than keeping them around.

I'll start by saying the problem is political will. I will then thoroughly muddy the waters, but it's a good starting point. There's no political will because those in charge are still profiting from the system, and paying down the debt would cost them. Coercive power structures have been selecting against generosity in their controllers since forever; they're not going to do it voluntarily.

Voters could give a mandate to a Trump-like figure, who could force the interests to take a haircut. Goes down easier if all your friends have to take one too, right? While it wouldn't be strictly legal, the power of the vote isn't purely about legality. However, this requires voters to know radical change is required. Voters are average folk, meaning they're on average cowardly and stupid, and those in power have their brains by the balls. They cannot know change is required, and they'd be scared to say so even if they could.

Voters are in fact another plank of the obstacle. It's possible to formalize. Could pay all the interests off with explicit ownership of shares and such. E.g. shut down every school, but keep all the administrators on the payroll. Teacher can be immediately brought back to run a grandfathered-in daycare system to avoid dumping tens of millions of children in the laps of the like of dual-incomes all of a sudden. Doing this would utterly outrage the voters - there is a negative zero percent chance of them accepting the power structure as it actually is. Luckily, while voters are scared of fixing the system, they're not scared of breaking it further. The strategy of giving the entrenched interests no material reason to object inherently creates a voveo-social reason to object. Salving the social reason inherently re-creates the material reason.

Could violently rebel. ~Nobody knows who is actually in power, so this would be guaranteed to be misaimed. The cape would be gored, not the matador. Further, it seems sensible folk stay far, far away from violent rebellions, meaning their administration, no matter how bad the previous administration, will  be a step down.

Could delegitimize the system by making it common knowledge that not only does democracy not uphold the commonwealth, it cannot ever uphold the commonwealth. Also, excuse me, I have a possibly-fatal attack of the giggles. Hopefully it passes.