2023-09-09

• I am reading this book on Rationality, Rationality: From AI to Zombies. It’s written by a guy, Eliezer Yudkowski, who is supposedly the founding person of rationality, and also a prominent “AI will kill everyone” person (which has become a popular discussion topic recently). I find his writing to be very interesting. Here’s something I read that I found to be fun to chew on: many disagreements between people stem from using the same label in different ways. Classically, this looks like a “definitions” problem. Yudkowski uses the example of two people who disagree about the answer to the classic riddle “if a tree falls in a forest, does it make a sound.” Disagreements here usually stem from different meanings associated with the word “sound.” If one person takes “sound” to mean “vibrations in the air,” and another takes sound to mean “auditory experiences in the brain,” they will disagree about whether the falling tree creates a sound. If you ask them to define the word “sound” in a non-circular way, and can get the parties to step back from the ego challenge of winning an argument, the disagreement will often evaporate when the definitions are made clear. The thing to note is that, in this case and many others, there’s not much reason to prefer one definition over the other. In fact, if there was a reason to prefer one over the other, that would likely decrease the odds that an argument would even come up, since it would be easier for both sides to agree on definitions implicitly before the conversation. It’s primarily in areas where multiple definitions are actually worthwhile/interesting/valid that disagreements can form. Of course, by the time an argument starts, people will attach their identity/ego to an outcome and then mostly be unwilling to acknowledge the validity of other definitions. I find that recognizing that this kind of thing is a pattern that has been repeated by people for ages helps break the ego attachment: it’s not just me that does this, we can all just let it go and move on. One more thing to note. When people start using the words “by definition,” it is often a sort of “appeal to authority” argument. It is more often used to “win” an argument than to actually develop a more accurate model of the world. If you find yourself or others pulling out the phrase “by definition,” that’s a good time to stop and check whether the discussion is more about identity/ego questions or actually learning about the supposed question at hand. It’s nice to have a catalogue of these kinds of terms as trigger points to help avoid/head off unproductive/unpleasant discussions.

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