You have, I think, come upon the essence of modern political speeches.

Alas, for most audiences I think you would find no one laughing even after an entire applause light speech.

I'm pretty sure that many people and organizations routinely DO argue that "we shouldn't balance the risks and opportunities of X". In ethics, deontological systems claim this. In policy, environmentalists are the first example that spring to mind, though they have been getting substantially better in the last few years. Radical pacifists like Gandhi have often been praised for asserting that people should not balance the risks and opportunities of war. More broadly, display of this attitude seems to me to be necessary for anyone who is attempting to portray that they are extraordinarily "virtuous" as virtue is normally understood, at least in our broadly Christian derived civilization. I actually think that it would be a good idea to try presenting all applause lights, but I think that it has been done. "The Gentle Art of Verbal Self Defense" claims in the appendix that such a speech has been written and presented to applause on a variety of topics. It seems to me though that the speech you were proposing above was actually an endorsement of a reasonable set of meta-policies which are in fact generally not engaged in, and was thus substantive, not empty, so I'm not sure it counts.

Eliezer's nothing-but-applause-lights speech sounds strangely like every State of the Union address I've ever heard...

Hum.

When I hear the sort of thing you would call "applause lights", I don't always think of that as an obvious fact that everyone in their right mind would agree on. Rather, I get the impression the speaker is implying that someone they strongly disagree with does believe this obvious fact is not true, or that this ridiculous notion is.

If for example I hear someone say "we shouldn't be hugging criminals, we should be locking them up", I interpret that as a very one-sided opposition to a grossly misrepresented opponent who goes a bit easier on convicts. Of course this person wouldn't literally believe the reverse that "we should be hugging criminals instead of locking them up", but she might believe something that a bigot could paraphrase as such with a straight face.

I think this is also the reason why the speaker's supporters applaud to statements like that - it implies the issue is very simple and clear-cut, only one side (ours) is remotely sensible, and you'd have to be insane to disagree. One-sidedness feels good. Very blatant one-sidedness feels even better.

(Excuse me if this has been said already.)

When I first read this, I imagined a favorite politician (I won't mention who) giving this mock speech.

To my embarrassment, I found myself nodding in completely genuine enthusiasm. This guy clearly knows what he's talking about!

(This in turn made me consider just how much of this politician's speeches was similarly composed. I came to the conclusion that quite a significant amount of it was)

...Nobody ever told me cognitive bias would be this annoying!

C'mon, Eliezar, be fair: identify who the speaker was that you "probed" in this way, so that people can find the recordings of the talk and exchange at singinst.org to decide for themselves how it went.

As you have it above, aside from the paraphrasing, you omit a couple of important parts of my replies. With regards to the Reason/Hollywood comparison, I go on to say:

"That is, they're both caricatures, and neither one is terribly plausible or complete. There would be some critical benefits to the messy process of the first scenario, and some important drawbacks to the second."

With regards to the "I don't know," I then say:

"This is a point I've tried to make a couple of times here: this is not a solved problem, but it's an important problem, and we need to figure out how to address it."

I certainly did not talk about democracy with any intent of it serving as "applause lights" for my talk -- in fact, given the audience, I expected a semi-hostile response, given my argument against the kind of "rebel nerd" heroism self-image a lot of the AGI community seems to have.

BTW, if anyone wants to go to singinst.org and download the audio, you'll note that the actual event did not occur the exact way I remembered it, which should surprise no one here who knows anything about human memory. In particular, Cascio spontaneously provided the Genome Project example, rather than needing to be asked for it.

Generally, the reason I avoid identifying the characters in my examples is that it feels to me like I'm dumping all the sins of humankind upon their undeserving heads - I'm presenting one error, out of context, as exemplar for all the errors of this kind that have ever been committed, and showing none of the good qualities of the speaker - it would be like caricaturing them, if I called them by name.

That said, the reason why I picked this example is that, in fact, I was thinking of Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" while writing this post. And as Orwell said:

In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning.

If you simply issue a call for "democracy", why, no one can disagree with that - it would be like disagreeing with a call for apple pie. As soon as you propose a specific mechanism of democracy, whether it is Congress passing a law, or an AI polling people by phone, or government funding of a large research project whose final authority belongs to an appointed committee of eminent scientists, et cetera, people can disagree with that, because they can actually visualize the probable consequences.

So there is a tremendous motive to avoid criticism, to keep to the safely vague areas where people will applaud you, and not to make the concrete proposals where people might - gasp! - disagree.

Now I do not accuse you too much of this, because you did say "Genome Project" when challenged instead of squirting out an immense cloud of ink. But it is why I challenged you to define "democracy". I think that the real value in these discussions comes from people willing to make concrete proposals and expose themselves to criticism.

I remember at the AGIRI workshop in DC last year, Alexei Samsonovich talked about sorting a list of English words along two dimensions - "valence" and "arousal," indicating some component of the emotional response which words evoke.

Maybe audiences respond to speeches by summing the emotion vectors of each word in the speech, rather than parsing sentences.

Quick test: who here is excited by the prospects of anthropic quantum computing?

(Hi everyone; this is my first time posting here.)

If someone delivered that 100%-applause-light paragraph to me in a speech, my first impulse would be to interpret it as an honest attempt to remind the audience of obvious but not necessarily currently-in-context ideas. For example, this statement from the middle:

"To achieve these goals, we must plan wisely and rationally. We should not act in fear and panic, or give in to technophobia; but neither should we act in blind enthusiasm."

Taken literally as a set of assertions, this really is quite empty of novel or unexpected content. However, directed at an audience of humans, aware of but still vulnerable to cognitive bias, the statement above implies another statement which is more useful: "We should be careful to not act like who, despite intending not to, panicked rather than thinking productively. We should also be careful to not act like whose enthusiasm overwhelmed their necessary sense of caution, even though they knew the value of that caution."

People who agree with the part of the 1st virtue that says "A burning itch to know is higher than a solemn vow to pursue truth" may still sometimes need to be reminded to check themselves and make sure they're doing the former rather than the latter.

I know where your quote came from: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,954853,00.html?promoid

It's from "President Roberto Eduardo Viola, formerly Argentina's army commander in chief".

It's an answer to the first question in the interview:

"Q. How soon do you expect Argentina to be returned to democratic government?

A. We believe we are already within a democratic system. Some factors are still missing, like the expression of the people's will, but nevertheless we still think we are within a democracy. We say so because we believe these two fundamental values of democracy, freedom and justice, are in force in our country. There are, it is true, several conditioning aspects as regards political or union activity, but individual freedom is nowhere infringed in an outstanding manner."

BTW, I googled it. Apparently my Google-fu is better than yours ;) (But I do applaud your excellent memory, or ele I wouldn't be able to find it).

And keep up with the great posts. I'm a daly reader of this blog.

• Miguel

link to 1981 Time magazine interview with the president of Argentina - source of Eliezer's quote about democracy absent the people's will.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,954853,00.html?promoid=googlep

That applause-light speech at the end just needs some variation, and I'm pretty sure it would fly. I'd replace about half of the "we should" with something else, like "it is important that we", and "it would be dangerous to neglect" and so on, because right now it's so repetitive that surely a lot of people would notice and realize what's being done.

Or maybe i'm yet again overestimating my fellow human beings, as past experience says I am prone to do...

Oy, now that you've said it, I hear speeches like that at the end all the time. Whole discussion between opposing sides even. Perhaps that's why I haven't been able to stand cable news for a while now?

The substance of a democracy is the specific mechanism that resolves policy conflicts. ... What does it mean to call for a "democratic" solution if you don't have a conflict-resolution mechanism in mind?

I think that for many people the "substance" of democracy is not the specific mechanism, but rather the general mechanism, and the nature of the output. The mechanism must include at least some formal representation of every member. The details of this don't matter so much: it might be direct voting (strictly equal power), or it might be a representative system (so long as the reps for each voter are more or less equal in power). And the general nature of the output is that it should be fair. Exactly what fair is, is a good question, and probably varies a lot. But at least this: conflicts should not always be resolved in favor of the same person or group or class.

This is not a particularly well-defined notion; clearly it does not resonate with you, who want a stricter definition. But it is hardly a meaningless notion, either. It is not an applause sign.

It is also, I think, a much more useful concept than you seem to have in mind. You are hung up on specifics: "the resolution process can be a direct majority vote, or an elected legislature, or even a voter-sensitive behavior of an AI, but it has to be something." Yes, in any actual project for developing AI, it would have to be something, and something specific. But specifically which of these methods (or an infinity of other specific implementations of "democracy") did not matter to the speaker you refer to.

The democracy booster probably meant that people with little political power should not be ignored. And that's not an empty statement; people with little political power are ignored all the time.

"I am here to propose to you today that we need to balance the risks and opportunities of advanced Artificial Intelligence..."

Seven years later, this open letter was signed by leaders of the field. It's amusing how similar it is to the above speech, especially considering how it actually marked a major milestone in the advancement of the field of AI safety.

Applause Lights also have more sinister, dark artsy application: they can be used to bait people into agreeing with seemingly trivial propositions, which nevertheless cause the target to modify their self image, rendering them more likely to agree with less trivial propositions in the future. For example, Cialdini's Influence reports on a study that found that households that had been visited by a volunteer collecting signatures in favor of the vague statement "keep California beautiful" (without ever specifying how this was to be accomplished) were much more likely to agree to prominently display a large, ugly sign reading "prevent drunk driving" on their yards than households that hadn't been so visited.

This sounds similar to the idea of a "motherhood statement" as defined here.

This post reminds me of George Orwell's essay "Politics and The English Language".

Rather than just "applause lights", sloganeering often is a cue to group-identification. Cf. postmodern text generators.

David's comment that we shouldn't ignore people with little political power is a bit problematic. People who are not ignored in a political process have by definition some political power; whoever is ignored lacks power. So the meaning becomes "people who are ignored are ignored all the time". The only way to handle it is to never ignore anybody on anything. So please tell me your views on whether Solna muncipality in Sweden should spend more money on the stairs above the station, or a traffic light - otherwise the decision will not be fully democratic.

I wonder if the sensitivity for applause lights is different in different cultures. When I lectured in Madrid I found mine and several friend's speeches fall relatively flat, despite being our normally successful "standard speeches". But a few others got roaring responses at the applause lights - we were simply not turning them on brighly enough. The reward of a roaring applause is of course enough to bias a speaker to start pouring on more applause lights.

Hmm, was my use of "bias" above just an applause light for Overcoming Bias?

Such speech could theoretically perform "bringing to attention" function. Chunks of "bringing to attention" are equivalent to any kind of knowledge, it's just an inefficient form, and abnormality of that speech in its utter inefficiency, not lack of content. People can bear such talk as similar inefficiency can be present in other talks in different form. Inefficiency makes it much simpler to obfuscate eluding certain topics.

You'll often see feminists on the Internet pointing out how just about everyone seems to be in favor of "gender equality" and yet hardly anyone of either gender self-identifies as feminist anymore, even though gender equality is what feminism claims to be all about.

This article explains that disconnect. "Equality" is an applause light. It's something we can all agree is great in the abstract, but as soon as someone starts talking specifics, the applause thins and we all go back to being polarized again because everyone's idea of what equality, especially social and economic equality, actually entails is different.

How would different interest groups resolve their conflicts in a structure like the Human Genome Project?

Oh, my, the unintentional humor of that speaker's comment. There's an entire book written on how groups resolved their conflicts in the Human Genome Project, The Genome War: They didn't. The outcome was a horrific case study of how science really "works" today.

I don't think these statements are entirely vacuous. Even when their content is little more than a tautology, their actual meaning is something else entirely, at least in politics; they represent that the speaker is aware of the jargon, willing to use it, essentially moderate/"pragmatic" and prone to maintaining the status quo.