Shun offensive things: always, never, sometimes?
Suppose that taking offense is something that you do in response to something that you think lowers the status of either you, your group, or something that you hold dear. Now there are two extremes as to how to respond to possibly offensive things, both of them wrong:
1. Shun anything that could cause offense to anyone. This is wrong because it would unreasonably restrict communication, because people can perceive something to lower their status when it doesn’t, and it would allow status grabs where groups decide what you’re allowed to say by arbitrarily defining things they don’t like as “offensive”.
2. Say that being offended is your own fault, and maintain that anyone should be free to say anything they like, regardless of whether it offends someone. This is wrong because some words or expressions, when used in certain contexts, do genuinely attack people or groups by lowering their perceived status. Social norms that were offense-blind would strenghten existing status differences.
The challenge is finding social norms that are balanced between these two. E.g. slurs against a genuinely high-status group are more acceptable than slurs against a low-status group, but the status of a social group is constantly changing and different people have different ideas of a social group’s status.
Suppose that person X says something that offends person Y, but X thinks what she said was fine. This could be because of two reasons:
A. X does think that her words might lower the status of Y’s group, but Y’s group does deserve to be taken down a notch.
B. X genuinely did not intend her words to lower the status of Y’s group, and thinks that most listeners wouldn’t think that she did.
In the case of e.g. offensive drawings of Mohammed, either or both reasons could be true. X might think that all religions should be mocked because religion is for idiots (A). Alternatively, X might think that all religions get mocked but that doesn’t make them less valuable and important (B). Or X might think that yes, this does take lower a religion’s status, but only because that religion’s adherents have given it such a high status to start with. If they didn’t (in X’s mind) unreasonably privilege their own beliefs, they’d have no reason to be offended by an assertion that their religion is of no higher status than any other belief (A&B).
Online, it often seems to be the case that people fall prey to the illusion of transparency. If you’re with a group of friends who know you well, then it can be safe to say potentially offensive things, since your friends either share your opinion of the other group’s status, or know that you don’t mean any harm. But if you speak online, where not everybody does know you or your friends, then they cannot know what your intentions were.
People who go with the general strategy of shunning anything offensive tend to presume that reason A is always (or most often) the only right one, while people who think everyone should be free to say anything tend to presume that reason B is always (or most often) the only right one. I don’t think either assumption is right.
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Google+ Posts
Kaj Sotala:
> The field is small, but it is growing. As OpenAI and DeepMind build teams dedicated to A.I. safety, so too is Google’s stateside lab, Google Brain. Meanwhile, researchers at universities like the U.C. Berkeley and Stanford University are working on similar problems, often in collaboration with the big corporate labs.
> In some cases, researchers are working to ensure that [AI] systems don’t make mistakes on their own, as the Coast Runners boat did. They’re also working to ensure that hackers and other bad actors can’t exploit hidden holes in these systems. Researchers like Google’s Ian Goodfellow, for example, are exploring ways that hackers could fool A.I. systems into seeing things that aren’t there. [...]
> Another big worry is that A.I. systems will learn to prevent humans from turning them off. If the machine is designed to chase a reward, the thinking goes, it may find that it can chase that reward only if it stays on. This oft-described threat is much further off, but researchers are already working to address it.
> Mr. Hadfield-Menell and others at U.C. Berkeley recently published a paper that takes a mathematical approach to the problem. A machine will seek to preserve its off switch, they showed, if it is specifically designed to be uncertain about its reward function. This gives it an incentive to accept or even seek out human oversight.
> Much of this work is still theoretical. But given the rapid progress of A.I. techniques and their growing importance across so many industries, researchers believe that starting early is the best policy.
Teaching A.I. Systems to Behave Themselves
Kaj Sotala:
This seems potentially valuable:
> Events that happen on a regular schedule lower the energy it takes to be social. Things like church every Sunday, a dance that's every 1st Saturday, or a dinner with friends on 2nd and 4th Wednesdays. In general, I think people would probably be happier if they had more things like this in their lives. [1] To help with this, I made a site
> The site lets you create an event, and then invite people [...] Or you can send them the link and they can join themselves. Everyone who is a member of the event will get an email reminder prompting them to RSVP, a few days before each event [...]
> The overall goal is to be very light-weight, just something to handle reminding people about the recurring event and collecting RSVPs. Kind of like Doodle is for scheduling one-off events.
Regularly Scheduled
Kaj Sotala:
> Here’s how I think about free speech. I see four levels of “wrongness” of speech, each of which merits a different reaction — none, individual social consequences, official social consequences, and legal consequences. [...]
> The most common disagreement that I have with people over free speech tends to involve them putting speech in category 3 [official social consequences] that I think should be in category 2 [individual social consequences]. Think of Twitter mobs calling for a CEO to be fired because he voted for Trump.
How I think about free speech: Four categories
Kaj Sotala:
<3
Idiot Guy Treats His Date Horribly But Then This Off Duty Cop Overhears Their Conversation
Kaj Sotala:
In the last couple of years, I've been pondering the question of whether I would like to one day have children or not.
A definite trend that I've noticed is that when I imagine them being really small (baby/toddler age), the thought feels unequivocally good and warm. But then the older that I imagine them getting, the more my attention shifts to how I won't always be able to keep them safe, and how cold and cruel the world can be. And then my emotional reaction to the thought of bringing new fragile things into this world - because ultimately we're all fragile - starts getting more and more ambivalent.