From: M. Taylor Saotome-Westlake Date: Mon, 13 Jun 2022 02:42:11 +0000 (-0700) Subject: tweaks to "Comment on a Scene" in reaction to Ilzo's comments X-Git-Url: http://534655.efjtl6rk.asia/source?a=commitdiff_plain;h=e72ab0a10ba5723a0365dc656949763704c8e407;p=Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git tweaks to "Comment on a Scene" in reaction to Ilzo's comments --- diff --git a/content/drafts/comment-on-a-scene-from-planecrash-crisis-of-faith.md b/content/drafts/comment-on-a-scene-from-planecrash-crisis-of-faith.md index d2aad5e..d116ecd 100644 --- a/content/drafts/comment-on-a-scene-from-planecrash-crisis-of-faith.md +++ b/content/drafts/comment-on-a-scene-from-planecrash-crisis-of-faith.md @@ -1,14 +1,14 @@ Title: Comment on a Scene from Planecrash: "Crisis of Faith" -Date: 2021-01-01 +Date: 2022-06-12 23:00 Category: commentary Tags: Eliezer Yudkowsky, worldbuilding Status: draft Realistic worldbuilding is a difficult art: unable to model what someone else would do except by the ["empathic inference"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9fpWoXpNv83BAHJdc/the-comedy-of-behaviorism) of imagining oneself in that position, authors tend to embarrass themselves writing [alleged aliens or AIs that _just happen_ act like humans](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Zkzzjg3h7hW5Z36hK/humans-in-funny-suits), or allegedly foreign cultures that _just happen_ to share all of the idiosyncratic taboos of the author's own culture. The manifestations of this can be very subtle, even to authors who know about the trap. -In [_Planecrash_](https://www.glowfic.com/boards/215), a collaborative roleplaying fiction principally by Iarwain (a pen name of Eliezer Yudkowsky) and Lintamande, our protagonist, Keltham, hails from [dath ilan](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/dath-ilan), a more smarter, more rational, and better-coordinated alternate version of Earth. Keltham has somehow survived his apparent death and woken up in the fantasy world of [Golarion](https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Golarion), and sets about uplifting the natives using knowledge from his more advanced civilization. +In [_Planecrash_](https://www.projectlawful.com/board_sections/703), a collaborative roleplaying fiction principally by Iarwain (a pen name of Eliezer Yudkowsky) and Lintamande, our protagonist, Keltham, hails from [dath ilan](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/dath-ilan), a more smarter, more rational, and better-coordinated alternate version of Earth. Keltham has somehow survived his apparent death and woken up in the fantasy world of [Golarion](https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Golarion), and sets about uplifting the natives using knowledge from his more advanced civilization. -In [the "Crisis of Faith" thread](https://www.glowfic.com/posts/5977), Keltham has just arrived in the country of Osirion. While much better than his last host nation (don't ask), Keltham is dismayed at its patriarchal culture in which women typically are not educated and cannot own property, and is considering his options for reforming the culture in conjunction with sharing his civilization's knowledge. Having been advised to survey what native women think of their plight _before_ seeking to upend their social order, [Keltham asks an old woman](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1817402#reply-1817402): +In [the "Crisis of Faith" thread](https://www.projectlawful.com/posts/5977), Keltham has just arrived in the country of Osirion. While much better than his last host nation (don't ask), Keltham is dismayed at its patriarchal culture in which women typically are not educated and cannot own property, and is considering his options for reforming the culture in conjunction with sharing his civilization's knowledge. Having been advised to survey what native women think of their plight _before_ seeking to upend their social order, [Keltham asks an old woman](https://www.projectlawful.com/replies/1817402#reply-1817402): > Suppose some dreadful meddling foreigner came in and told Osirion that its laws had to be _the same for men and women_, and halflings and tieflings and elves too, but men and women are the main focus here. You can make a law that the person with higher Wisdom gets to be in charge of the household; you can make a law about asking people under truthspell if they've ever gotten drunk and hurt somebody; you can't make any law that talks about whether or not somebody has a penis. You can talk about whether somebody has a child, but not whether that person was mother or father, the child girl or boy. @@ -22,9 +22,11 @@ But the _specific_ way in which he's formulating the problem—that the law shou Keltham is, of course, correct that if you have specific information about an individual's traits, that [screens off](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5yFRd3cjLpm3Nd6Di/argument-screens-off-authority) any probabilistic guesses you might have made about those traits knowing only the person's demographic category. Once you measure someone's height, the fact that men are taller than women on average with an effect size of about 1.5 standard deviations is no longer relevant to the question of that person's height. (As the saying goes out of dath ilan, [hug the query](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2jp98zdLo898qExrr/hug-the-query)!) In very many situations, if there's a cost associated with acquiring more specific individuating information that renders information from demographic base rates irrelevant, you should pay that cost in order to get the more specific information and therefore make better decisions. -But crucially, getting individuating information is an [instrumental rather than a terminal value](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/n5ucT5ZbPdhfGNLtP/terminal-values-and-instrumental-values); you should do it _when and because_ it improves your decisions, not because of some alleged principle that you're not allowed to make probabilistic inferences off someone's race or sex. Probability theory doesn't have any built-in concept of "protected classes." On pain of paradox, Bayesians _must_ condition on all available information. If groups differ in decision-relevant traits, _of course_ you should treat members of those groups differently! What we call "discrimination" in America on Earth is actually just Bayesian reasoning; P(H|E) = P(E|H)P(H)/P(E) doesn't _stop being true_ when H happens to be "I should hire this candidate" and E happens to be "The candidate is a halfling". Furthermore, there's no reason for the law to behave differently in this respect than a private individual: is Governance supposed to be _less_ Bayesian _because it's Governance_?! +But crucially, getting individuating information is an [instrumental rather than a terminal value](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/n5ucT5ZbPdhfGNLtP/terminal-values-and-instrumental-values); you should do it _when and because_ it improves your decisions, not because of some alleged principle that you're not allowed to make probabilistic inferences off someone's race or sex. Probability theory doesn't have any built-in concept of "protected classes." On pain of paradox, Bayesians _must_ condition on all available information. If groups differ in decision-relevant traits, _of course_ you should treat members of those groups differently! What we call "discrimination" in America on Earth is actually just Bayesian reasoning; P(H|E) = P(E|H)P(H)/P(E) doesn't _stop being true_ when H happens to be "I should hire this candidate" and E happens to be "The candidate is a halfling". -Thus, if there's a _cost_ associated with taking individual measurements, and the cost exceeds the amount you would save by making better decisions, then you shouldn't take the measurements. If your measurements have _error_, then your estimate of the true value of the trait being measured [regresses to the group mean](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean) to some quantitative extent. Again, all this just falls out of _ordinary_ Bayesian decision theory, which continues to work even when some of the hypotheses are about groups of people. +Furthermore, it's not obvious that the law should behave any differently in this respect than a private individual: is Governance supposed to be _less_ Bayesian _because it's Governance_?! (Although, perhaps there's a distinction between the "law" and "public policy" functions of Governance, with the former laying out timeless rights and principles, whereas day-to-days decisions about the empirical world are farmed out to the latter?) + +Some implications: if there's a _cost_ associated with taking individual measurements, and the cost exceeds the amount you would save by making better decisions, then you shouldn't take the measurements. If your measurements have _error_, then your estimate of the true value of the trait being measured [regresses to the group mean](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean) to some quantitative extent. Again, all this just falls out of _ordinary_ Bayesian decision theory, which continues to work even when some of the hypotheses are about groups of people. If this still seems counterintuitive, it may help to consider that from the standpoint of Just Doing Bayesian Decision Theory, the distinction between "information from demographic group membership" and "information from individual measurements" isn't fundamental. The reason it seems unjust to notice race when you can just look at an individual's Strength, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma scores, is because the relationship between race and any actual decision you might care about is merely statistical: it's not fair to always look to the orc if you need someone in your party to lift a fallen tree, just because orcs are stronger than other races _on average_, because it could easily be the case that this _particular_ orc is less suited to the task than other party members. @@ -44,9 +46,9 @@ It's an empirical issue—but sure, very often, yes. For most jobs—especially But then it's _bizarre_ that Keltham persists in his no-legal-sex-discrimination stance when his interlocutor brings up _military conscription_ as a potential counterexample. Because, well, as unpleasant as it is for modern folk to think about ... there _was_ war in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness. Men's bodies are built for war. [Men's _emotions_ are built for war.](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3260849/) [(Males have more reproductive fitness to gain and less to lose by the prospect of risking death in a war where the victors gain mating opportunities.)](https://www.cep.ucsb.edu/papers/EvolutionofWar.pdf) The sex difference in muscle mass is [_2.6 standard deviations_](/papers/janssen_et_al-skeletal_muscle_mass_and_distribution.pdf). That means a woman as strong as the average man is at _the 99.5th percentile_ for women. That means if you just select everyone whose strength is greater than one standard deviation _below_ the male mean, you end up excluding _94.5%_ of women. -Notwithstanding that Keltham grew up in a peaceful Society that [screened off its history](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1612939#reply-1612939) (such that he wouldn't have read histories of some analogue of Genghis Khan), it seems like Keltham should know this stuff? We're told that dath ilan [has very advanced evolutionary psychology](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1801140#reply-1801140), and there's no apparent reason for them to have spent any of their eugenics bandwidth selecting for reduced sexual dimorphism (which is [slower to evolve than monomorphic traits, anyway](/papers/rogers-mukherjee-quantitative_genetics_of_sexual_dimorphism.pdf)). We're told that [ordinary dath ilani are good at reasoning about effect sizes](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1783037#reply-1783037). +Notwithstanding that Keltham grew up in a peaceful industrialized Society that [screened off its history](https://www.projectlawful.com/replies/1612939#reply-1612939) (such that he wouldn't have read histories of some analogue of Genghis Khan), it seems like Keltham should know this stuff? We're told that dath ilan [has very advanced evolutionary psychology](https://www.projectlawful.com/replies/1801140#reply-1801140), and there's no apparent reason for them to have spent any of their eugenics bandwidth selecting for reduced sexual dimorphism. (Although given the [Purely Aesthetic Gender](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PurelyAestheticGender) [in _Pathfinder_](https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder_RPG/comments/2abhlr/its_normal_for_race_to_play_a_roll_in_ones/), it seems reasonable to posit reduced sexual dimorphism in Golarion?) If dath ilan doesn't have enough (non-counterfactual) violence to make strength differences salient, do they have _sports_? (In the peaceful industrialized Society where _I_ grew up, it was salient my mediocre cross-country times were often better than the _best_ girls' times.) We're told that [ordinary dath ilani are good at reasoning about effect sizes](https://www.projectlawful.com/replies/1783037#reply-1783037). -But if Keltham _does_ know this stuff, why is he talking like a UC Berkeley graduate? ["Strength is an _externally visible and measurable_ quality that determines who you want in your army; you don't need to go by the presence of penises,"](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1817422#reply-1817422) he says. When his interlocutor objects that strong women would get drafted, which would be terrible, Keltham asks how it would be _more_ terrible than men getting drafted. When the interlocutor replies that the woman's marriage prospects would be damaged by a history living in close quarters with men in the army, Keltham muses that it sounds like she's implying that ["the army would need strong enough internal governance to prevent women in it from being raped, but you could do that with cheaper truthspells?"](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1817432#reply-1817432) +But if Keltham _does_ know this stuff, why is he talking like a UC Berkeley graduate? ["Strength is an _externally visible and measurable_ quality that determines who you want in your army; you don't need to go by the presence of penises,"](https://www.projectlawful.com/replies/1817422#reply-1817422) he says. When his interlocutor objects that strong women would get drafted, which would be terrible, Keltham asks how it would be _more_ terrible than men getting drafted. When the interlocutor replies that the woman's marriage prospects would be damaged by a history living in close quarters with men in the army, Keltham muses that it sounds like she's implying that ["the army would need strong enough internal governance to prevent women in it from being raped, but you could do that with cheaper truthspells?"](https://www.projectlawful.com/replies/1817432#reply-1817432) There's just _so much_ wrong with this exchange from the perspective of anyone who knows anything about humans and isn't playing dumb for a religious American audience. @@ -64,7 +66,7 @@ And if they _could_ turn it off, such that you could order your male soldiers no Keltham expresses doubt whether it's worse for a woman to be conscripted than a man, and when his interlocutor gestures at harms to a woman from living among men (not trusted family members, but men unselected from the general public), Keltham understands that she's talking about the possibility of intercourse, including rape (!), and he immediately generates "cheap truthspells" as a way to mitigate that problem while maintaining sex-integrated military units. -And, sure, I agree that truthspells would help, given the assumption that you need to have sex-integrated military units. But—why is that a desideratum, at all? We're told that dath ilan's beliefs about evolutionary psychology [include the idea that](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1591440#reply-1591440): +And, sure, I agree that truthspells would help, given the assumption that you need to have sex-integrated military units. But—why is that a desideratum, at all? We're told that dath ilan's beliefs about evolutionary psychology [include the idea that](https://www.projectlawful.com/replies/1591440#reply-1591440): > The untrained male has an instinct to seize and guard a woman's reproductive capacity, instinctively using violence to stop her from interacting with other men at the same that he instinctively displays other forms of commitment to try to earn her acquiescence. The untrained female has adaptations that assume an environment in which men will try to pressure her into more sex than is optimal for her own reproductive fitness, so her adaptations push her to instinctively resist that pressure while also instinctively trying to increase the number and quality of men who'll be interested in her. @@ -72,6 +74,8 @@ And just—if you _actually believe that_, it seems like there's this very obvio I mean, it's not worse _with [Probability One](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QGkYCwyC7wTDyt3yT/0-and-1-are-not-probabilities)_. Like any dath ilani or religiously devout American, I cherish diversity and exceptions, and want to treat people who are unusual for their demographic with the same care and respect as anyone else! (More, actually.) It's just—it seems like it should be possible to do that _without_ trashing our ability to have conventions that perform well in the average case?? To the extent that there _is_ a minority of women who want nothing more than to die gloriously in battle in service to their country, then you'd expect the country to be able to make use of that—and whether you want to induct them into the regular army, or have a [special women's corps](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_Army_Corps) is a complicated policy question that you'd want to make after appropriately weighing all of the trade-offs (like the unit-cohesion objection _vs._ less skill transfer due to not having cross-sex mentorships). -It's just—wasn't dath ilan's _whole thing_ supposed to be about coordinating to find the optimal policy using evidence and quantitative reasoning?! And suddenly Keltham is casually proposing ["stopp[ing] being able to measure people's sex and treat them differently based on that"](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1817422#reply-1817422) without noticing that this is _excluding huge swathes of policyspace_ (such as "Conscript males, but accept female volunteers") for ideological reasons!? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills!! +It's just—wasn't dath ilan's _whole thing_ supposed to be about coordinating to find the optimal policy using evidence and quantitative reasoning?! And suddenly Keltham is casually proposing ["stopp[ing] being able to measure people's sex and treat them differently based on that"](https://www.projectlawful.com/replies/1817422#reply-1817422) without noticing that this is _excluding huge swathes of policyspace_ (such as "Conscript males, but accept female volunteers") for ideological reasons!? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills!! Maybe there's just no way to explain this in a way that makes sense to American ears? I _still_ feel guilty writing this stuff. It's just—[I was trained, long ago back in the 'aughts](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/), in a certain Art, and I'm _pretty sure_ we were taught that being able to measure things and make different decisions based on the measurements was a good thing _in full generality_, without there being any special exception that specific cluster-membership measurements are actually bad?! + +_(Thanks for Ilzo for feedback.)_ diff --git a/notes/consilent_cultural_worldbuilding-notes.md b/notes/consilent_cultural_worldbuilding-notes.md index f0b6230..acf48b9 100644 --- a/notes/consilent_cultural_worldbuilding-notes.md +++ b/notes/consilent_cultural_worldbuilding-notes.md @@ -50,7 +50,9 @@ I fixed this, eventually this, too -Anyway, the occasion for messaging you today is that you might be a good test audience for this one: is this draft falling into the "allying with terrible positions out of contrarianism" failure mode? +Anyway, the occasion for messaging you today is that you might be a good test audience for this one: + +is this draft falling into the "allying with terrible positions out of contrarianism" failure mode I'm arguing that you being drafted into the army actually _would_ be worse (for you, and for the army) from our englighted Bayesian transhumanist perspective than it would be for a male who was otherwise personality-matched and strength-matched—for real, and not just as edgy right-wing anti-virtue signaling @@ -58,4 +60,4 @@ but you might know reasons my guess is wrong (I really appreciate the pushback earlier) -I wrote a 4000-word post about how the "just test combat ability; you don't have to go by the presence of penises" conversation broke my suspension of disbelief in the cultural worldbuilding: [URL here] (Briefly: "the government isn't allowed to notice race or sex" is Earth-craziness that only makes sense as a reaction to other Earth-craziness—specifically, refusing to admit group differences into decision calculations is a Schelling point for preventing group conflicts when you don't trust people not to lie about the specific differences in a way that advantages their group. It's not something you would spontaneously invent or think was a good idea if you _actually_ grew up in a world with 140 average IQ that trained everyone in probability theory as normative reasoning.) +I wrote a 4000-word post about how the "just test combat ability; you don't have to go by the presence of penises" conversation broke my suspension of disbelief in the cultural worldbuilding: [URL here] (Briefly: "the government isn't allowed to notice race or sex" is Earth-craziness that only makes sense as a reaction to other Earth-craziness—specifically, refusing to admit group differences into decision calculations is a Schelling point for preventing group conflicts when you don't trust people not to lie about the specific differences in a way that advantages their group; it's not something you would spontaneously invent or think was a good idea if you _actually_ grew up in a world with 140 average IQ that trained everyone in probability theory as normative reasoning.)