Ben Pace

I'm an admin of this site; I work full-time on trying to help people on LessWrong refine the art of human rationality. (Longer bio.)

I generally feel more hopeful about a situation when I understand it better.

Sequences

AI Alignment Writing Day 2019
Transcript of Eric Weinstein / Peter Thiel Conversation
AI Alignment Writing Day 2018
Share Models, Not Beliefs

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I’d say most people assume I want “the answer” rather than “some bits of information”.

I don’t think it applies to safety researchers at AI Labs though, I am shocked how much those folks can make.

A common experience I have is that it takes like 1-2 paragraphs of explanation for why I want this info (e.g. "Well I'm wondering if so-and-so should fly in a day earlier to travel with me but it requires going to a different airport and I'm trying to figure out whether the time it'd take to drive to me would add up to too much and also..."), but if they just gave me their ~70% confidence interval when I asked then we could cut the whole context-sharing.

Often I am annoyed when I ask someone (who I believe has more information than me) a question and they say "I don't know". I'm annoyed because I want them to give me some information. Such as:

"How long does it take to drive to the conference venue?" 

"I don't know." 

"But is it more like 10 minutes or more like 2 hours?" 

"Oh it's definitely longer than 2 hours."

But perhaps I am the one making a mistake. For instance, the question "How many countries are there?" can be answered "I'd say between 150 and 400" or it can be answered "195", and the former is called "an estimate" and the latter is called "knowing the answer". There is a folk distinction here and perhaps it is reasonable for people to want to preserve the distinction between "an estimate" and "knowing the answer".

So in the future, to get what I want, I should say "Please can you give me an estimate for how long it takes to drive to the conference venue?".

And personally I should strive, when people ask me a question to which I don't know the answer, to say "I don't know the answer, but I'd estimate between X and Y."

I think it is pretty obviously a joke :P

(And in case anyone was led astray: the Marx quote at the start is from Groucho, not Karl.)

K. I recommend that people include links for those of us who mostly do not read Twitter.

Curated! Very interesting to get a vivid sense of what goes on when people are facing strong pressures to lie, and how they go about doing this. Both their adamance that they were right and their transparency to you were both fascinating. And this was very engagingly written. Thanks for the post!

As someone who's spent a while designing charts for published books, I have generally been strongly against axis lines. One thing that has really influenced my approach to using lines is the section of Butterick's Practical Typography on tables.

Nowadays I remove all lines on tables and charts unless there's a strong argument in favor of one; implied lines are much easier on the eye.

This post overall moved me toward using gridlines a little bit more, for intuitively measuring distance when that's important.

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