What is malevolence? On the nature, measurement, and distribution of dark traits was posted two weeks ago (and i recommend it). there was a questionnaire discussed in that post which tries to measure the levels of 'dark traits' in the respondent.

i'm curious about the results^[1] of EAs^[2] on that questionnaire, if anyone wants to volunteer theirs. there are short and long versions (16 and 70 questions).

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   (or responses to the questions themselves)

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   i also posted the same quick take to LessWrong, asking about rationalists

i'm not bothered by your comments.

your first reply seemed to be about how i worded the point (you wrote "obnoxiously posed", and reworded it) rather than pedanticness/irrelevance. i mentally replaced "this is obnoxious" with "this makes me feel annoyed", which i think is okay to say. i also considered letting you know i'm autistic, which makes me word things differently or more literally^[1] or in ways that can seem to have unintended emotional content. (i wonder if that's what made it feel like "marking it up in red pen")

onto object-level: what i wrote actually seemed substantive to me, i.e. it really did seem to me that the quote in point 2 was strongly misrepresenting the position the post intended to argue against, so i wouldn't consider it pedantic. (it could separately be false, of course)

If quila really cares about where the scout mindset metaphor falls apart they could have probed that instead of just dinging me as they are the referee

it did not occur to me that you might endorse the scout/soldier metaphor, and just be using the existence of scout/soldier in 'scout/soldier mindset' to bring it up; so yes, if that's actually the case, it would have been better to notice that and then either not comment on it or probe it as you say. using a metaphor is not invalid.

here's how i perceived it at the time: 'scout mindset' and 'soldier mindset' have particular meanings, so whether traditional soldiers are necessary for traditional scouts is a different topic. writing about them instead seemed 'opportunistic' in some sense, as if the text was using the terminological overlap to sneak through an argument about one as about the other. 

i wonder if this thread could have been mitigated if i were more clear about that in my initial comment. if anyone has advice it is welcome.

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   maybe 'more structured like the thought is structured internally'

I think we have all the info we need to contradict the fear of not being a scout in her metaphor. Scouts are important for success in battle because accurate information is important to draw up a good battle plan. But those battle plans are worthless without soldiers to fight the battle! “Everyone Should be a Mapmaker and Fear that Using the Map to Actually Do Something Could Make Them a Worse Mapmaker” would be a much less rousing title, but this is how many EAs and rationalists have chosen to interpret the book.

seems locally invalid.^[1]

• argues from the meaning of terms in a metaphor
• "Everyone Should be a Mapmaker and Fear that Using the Map to Actually Do Something Could Make Them a Worse Mapmaker" is not a description of the position you want to argue against, because you can do things with information other than optimizing what you say to persuade people.

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   'locally invalid' means 'this is not a valid argument', separate from the truth of the premises or conclusion

in a thread there i mentioned that even for a described 'ultimate neartermist', the best action is actually to cause acausal trade (i.e. by causing aligned ASI) with an ASI at an earlier point in time. for a hypothetical value which only cares about near-term beings, this would also be true, because most near-term beings are not on earth.

also, if i consider a hypothetical value which just cares about near-term beings on earth, it may prefer to destroy earth instead of slowly reducing animal suffering. 'would want to destroy earth' is a classical response to the idea of pure negative utilitarianism, but it would apply to standard utilitarianism too if the things valued (in this hypothetical case, just near-term beings on earth) experienced more bad than good which could not be mitigated enough in the near-term.

(disclaimer: the 'neartermism' of actual humans is probably importantly different to these, probably more reliant on moral intuition than these literal interpretations. i'm a longtermist myself.)

maybe wacky anthropics stuff?

this comes to mind

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/jGoExJpGgLnsNPKD8/does-ultimate-neartermism-via-eternal-inflation-dominate?commentId=oQf9RDLqjkLjobmne

[strong upvoted for being well-formed criticism]

Almost any form of maximization as a lifestyle is likely to be neutral at best, unhealthy at worst, with maximization of any rational endeavor skewing towards predictably unhealthy and harmful. Maximization is fundamentally incompatible with good mental health. You can't "just have a little bit of maximization"; it's all or nothing.

how would you respond to the idea that good mental health is instrumental to maximization? that's a standard position in my impression.

(Commenting as I read)

In light of the conflicting research cited above, it would be overly simplistic to assume that those with high levels of malevolence are consistently aware of and endorse their traits, with an internal monologue^[9] that goes something like this: "I'm so evil and just want to maximize my own power and gratify my own desires, no matter how much suffering this causes for everyone else, hahaha."^[10] Although some people may think like that, it would be wrong to assume that everyone with high levels of malevolence thinks in this way.

I think the reason that inner monologue feels implausible is that the statement is explicit. If someone really held that attitude/goal, I'd expect it to be implicit: where their inner monologue wouldn't directly say, "I just want to gratify my own desires at the expense of others", but it would contain object-level reasoning about how to do that, and judgements of others that strongly correlate with whether they advance or are barriers to the goal, where the goal is an implicit background factor.

And as you note, most people do have some non-negligible level of this:

Everyday experience suggests, for example, that most people care a lot more about their self-interest than is remotely justified by impartial benevolence

a few pieces of this advice seem to be about how to manipulate others in subtle ways.

You can talk about specific things while being pleasant, I dare say, agreeable [...] pragmatically, people will be much likely more susceptible to help you if they associate you with someone who is fun/agreeable [...] try to be as agreeable as possible

i interpret 'try to be agreeable' to mean 'try to appear to agree more than you would if you were being fully honest' - because, given this is advice i.e. meant to be actionable, it's not just saying that people who (by coincidence) genuinely agree have a natural advantage. it's saying, actually intentionally try to seem agreeable, to cause them to associate you with a positive feeling, to make them 'more susceptible to help you'.

Adapt/mirror people's behaviour. If someone has a very focused way of talking about things, speaking fast, being curt and concise, mirror this. If someone likes to expand on personal anecdotes, shows a slower pacing, comments on the food, do that too. They will feel more comfortable. [...] If the vibe is good, it means that you'll be able to reach out later for more content.

i don't know if others may not mind this, but at least personally, i would not want people to do this with me. if someone is trying to influence my mind in ways i am not aware of, i want to know they are doing this so i can try to account for the effect (or, realistically, ask them not to, or not befriend them if they seemed to practice a wide range of such techniques - i've unfortunately met people who do).

i'd guess that mirroring behavior causes the one being mirrored to subtly intuit that they are more similar than they really are, leading to feeling more comfortable around that person.

i think {the net effects we'd observe on how friendships/allyships form in worlds where all EAs try to subtly manipulate each other} are not net good. i imagine it would lead to friendships/allyships being determined more (relative to before) by who's good at applying these (and other) tactics, and so less by the substantive factors which should matter.

also, i think there is possibility for nuance about where the line is between {being kind and trying to create a positive environment} and manipulation. some forms of trying to influence how someone feels seem okay to me, like if someone is sad, and you want to make them feel less sad, (and they know you'll be doing this and that's why they're talking to you). i guess the relevant line to me is whether it's intended to help the person, like in that case, or whether it's intended to influence how they perceive you to gain some sort of advantage from them. the two pieces of advice i quoted seem to be the latter kind.

(to be clear, this criticism doesn't apply to most of the points, which are probably good advice; i write this because i know criticism can feel bad, and i don't want to cause that.)

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   if someone told me they were doing it, i would actually ask them not to.

   if it seemed like they were someone for whom this was just one thing in a wide arsenal of other such subtle tactics, i'd also probably want to not become friends with them.

i agree with some other comments, just sharing some thoughts that haven't been posted here yet.

i think that, purely consequentially, you can say that you personally do more good by continuing to purchase products derived from animal suffering (or continuing to do any other deontologically bad thing to others), because doing so makes you happier, or is more convenient, and this lets you be more effective - and that might really be true. to that extent, this isn't even an objection.

that said, when i consider situations involving the use of animal products, i tend to imagine what i would prefer, and how i would feel -- if i were still me, with my current values and mind -- but the roles were swapped; if it was me in a factory farm, and some alien altruist in the equivelant position to the one i am in, in an alien civilization similar to humans'. i ask myself, would i be okay with them doing <whatever> with <thing derived from my suffering>? 

and sometimes the answer is yes. if they're cold at night and they're in a situation where the only blanket is made of material derived from my suffering (analogy to wool), and they're feeling conflicted, then okay, they can use it. they're on my side.

if the request was, "can i eat your flesh because i think i derive personal enjoyment from it and i think that lets me be more effective, given i don't feel particularly disturbed by this situation?" then i would (metaphorically) conclude that i am in hell. that this is the altruist angel who is supposedly going to save us. that this is their moral character.^[1]

again, this is not an objection per se - it's separate from whether the consequential argument is true, and if it is i guess i prefer you to follow it - it's just some related thoughts about the moral status of the world in which it is true. i am not saying you are wrong, but that if you are not wrong it is wrong for the world to be this way.

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   to be clear, i'm not saying you are evil and i don't want you to feel bad from reading this.

5. the value of something like, how EA looks to outsiders? that seems to be the thing behind multiple points (2, 4, 7, and 8) in this which was upvoted, and i saw it other times this debate week (for example here) as a reason against the animal welfare option.

(i personally think that compromising epistemics for optics is one way movements ... if not die, at least become incrementally more of a simulacrum, no longer the thing they were meant to be. and i'm not sure if such claims are always honest, or if they can secretly function to enforce the relevance of public attitudes one shares without needing to argue for them.)