Patrick Sensa LaVictoire

Patrick Sensa LaVictoire:
December 28, 2019

I said this in a thread but want to make it more visible:

The notion that "abusers tend to be high-status" has now been used by both Brent and Ziz to make others doubt whether their perceptions of awfulness might be mistaken.

The correct version is that *some* abusers are high-status people (think "pastors") who you wouldn't naturally suspect. Other abusers are clearly visible as low-status, broken, creepy (think "gross uncle"). (This isn't a full typology, of course.)

Don't altogether discount your intuition that something is very wrong with a person just because they claim persecution.

Also, global status is what we see (X is more or less respected by the community as a whole), but extremely local status (X demands subservience from this tiny subgroup) is all that's needed for dangerous abuse. Brent and Ziz used their lack of the former as a defense against people's worries, despite having staggering levels of the latter.

Alexander Gendel: i’ve never seen ziz say this, what is the actual kernel that this sense is being formed around?

Patrick Sensa LaVictoire: The original context was that Kaj had said it was a reason they were inclined not to dismiss Ziz's allegations against Anna. Maybe that wasn't from anything that Ziz wrote, though. If so, that takes some of the force out of my first paragraph- people have been hesitant to accuse Ziz because of the meme, but she may not have been specifically fanning those flames.

Alexander Gendel: i think there’s a big difference in terms of her behavior between her using the meme vs kaj thinking of it themselves - in the latter case, the model has much stronger bayesian evidence for actually being relevant

Alexander Gendel: and like i think “making misleading claims about social dynamics to direct people’s responses to you” is a big deal and it matters whether it happened

Kaj Sotala: I mentioned the "low-status" thing specifically in the context of what kind of an impression I formed from Ziz's "net negative" ( https://sinceriously.fyi/net-negative/ ). She never *uses* the term "low-status" there, but to me the whole text practically screams it.

The way it is written, Ziz went to a CFAR workshop and approached it from a frame of the instructors being authorities both on the topic of AI risk, and also authorities on the topic of whether Ziz herself will be able to make a positive contribution. This gets to the point of Ziz being prepared to consider suicide if they thought that she would be a net negative for the cause. She also repeatedly mentions being uncomfortable with particular lines of questioning, but suppressing that discomfort out of a sense of deference and obligation.

Relevant excerpts:

> I asked Person A if they expected me to be net negative. They said yes. After a moment, they asked me what I was feeling or something like that. I said something like, “dazed” and “sad”. They asked why sad. I said I might leave the field as a consequence and maybe something else. I said I needed time to process or think. I basically slept the rest of the day, way more than 9 hrs, and woke up the next day knowing what I’d do. [...]

> In the case that I’d be net negative like I feared, I was considering suicide in some sense preferable to all this, because it was better causal isolation. However, despite thinking I didn’t really believe in applications of timeless decision theory between humans, I was considering myself maybe timelessly obligated to not commit suicide afterward. Because of the possibility that I could prevent Person A and their peers from making the correct decision for sentimental reasons. [...]

> I was very uncomfortable sharing this stuff. But I saw it as a weighing on the scales of my personal privacy vs some impact on the fate of the world. So I did anyway. [...]

> I tried to inner sim and answer the question. But my simulated self sort of rebelled. Misuse of last judge powers. Like, I would be aware I was being “watched”, intruded upon. Like by turning that place into a test with dubious methodology of whether I was really a delusional man upon which my entire life depended, I was having the idea of Heaven taken from me. [...]

> I made myself come up with the answer in a split second. More accuracy that way. Part of me resisted answering. Something was seriously wrong with this. No. I already decided for reasons that are unaffected. that producing accurate information for person A was positive in expectation.

Kaj Sotala: So my model was that Ziz genuinely did feel strong psychological pressure to defer to the CFAR staff's opinion about whether she was "worthy", and to suppress any of her personal discomforts for the sake of providing the staff with accurate information for "judging" her - regardless of whether the staff *intended* that to happen or not. That's the kind of a mindset that seems accurately described by "low-status" to me.

I didn't think that the experience itself was rooted in any conscious attempt to deceive or manipulate, though I do assume that the parts of the narrative that she chose to highlight in that writeup were selected in part out of a desire to hurt the people she viewed as abusing her.