Re: Eliezer thread (category boundaries)
2019-09-19T21:00:42Z (to jessica.liu.taylor@gmail.com):
Thanks Jessica. Points that come to mind:
- As Sarah noted, it is to some extent deceptive to use language like
"Vice President of Sorting", but the world contains lots of big institutions that will coerce you into doing this kind of thing all the time. I don't have a moral rule against doing this, and I don't think it's practical to expect anyone to. I think the best thing we can do is create separate contexts that don't do this kind of thing (and that try to find and un-train any habits for doing it), and then kick people out if they won't follow the rules.
- It can be deceptive to use words if they technically apply, but where
the example is so non-central that people will predictably form false models based on that word. For example, suppose that my boss asks me if he should hire my friend Bob. Bob borrowed a $5 book from me twenty years ago and never returned it, so I tell him that "Bob is a thief". This is technically true, but by saying it I am subtracting rather than adding information value. This also applies to the word "deception" itself, so if I say that eg. "Best Western is deceiving its customers" when they advertise twelve types of breakfast cereal and only provide eleven, I am reliably causing whoever listens to me to form less accurate models.
- I think a lot of the bad emotions here could be resolved with better
communication, and I'd like to volunteer to help fix that if that's something everyone is interested in. In particular, I think the case for why this is so important that Eliezer should spend a lot of energy resolving it hasn't been made very convincingly.
- One commenter is right on this particular issue, but (based on various
other writings) his thoughts here are tangled up with a lot of other stuff I disagree with, and I'm not sure what to do about that.
On Wed, Sep 18, 2019 at 6:43 PM Jessica Taylor <[email redacted]> wrote:
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- Alyssa