“There’s something odd about the experience of talking to [Singularity Institute researcher] Carl Shulman,” I said.
“He never blinks?” said my friend.
“No. I mean: Yes, but that’s not what I was thinking of.”
“He speaks only facts.”
I paused.
“Yes,” I said. “That is what I meant.”
Normally, when I ask someone “Do you think human-level AI will arrive in the next 30 years?” or “Should we encourage faster development of whole brain emulation?” I get answers like “Yes” or “No, I don’t think so.”
When I ask Carl a question like “Do you think human-level AI will arrive in the next 30 years?” he instead begins to state known facts relevant to answering the question, such as facts about the history of Moore’s law, progress in algorithms, trends in scientific progress, past examples of self-improving systems, and so on.
Maybe this is a bit rude. Carl didn’t answer my question about his opinion. He answered a different question instead, about facts.
But I never feel like it’s rude. Carl went out of his way to make his answer more useful to me. His testimony alone would have been helpful, but argument screens off authority, so Carl’s “flood of facts” way of answering questions gives me more evidence about what’s true than his mere opinion could.
Why isn’t this more common? For one thing, most people don’t know many facts. I’ve read a lot of facts, but do I remember most of them? Hell no. If I forced myself to respond to questions only by stating facts, I’d be worried that I have fewer facts available to me than I’d like to admit. I often have to tell people: “I can’t remember the details in that paper but I remember thinking his evidence was weak.”
But it's worth a try. I think I've noticed that when I try to answer with facts more often, my brain is primed to remember them better, as if it's thinking: "Oh, I might actually use this fact in conversation, so I should remember it." But I haven't measured this, so I could be fooling myself.
Thanks for this, as I was reading I thought of this: "I cannot remember the books I have read, anymore than the meals I have eaten; Even so, they have made me". I used to be very disturbed by not being able to remember all the facts and details I've read, and I found this quote quite soothing (I haven't fact-checked, but it was attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson).
I interpret questions like "Do you think X will happen?" as meaning something like "Please report your posterior on event X, after all the updates you've had so far". People can answer with just their posterior, or with their posterior and the things that caused updates (or informed the prior, I guess).
If they answer with just their posterior, it might be because the updates aren't easily verbalizable: e.g., "I spent most of my undergrad learning all the problems with various theories of psychology, and now I have a vague mistrust of social sciences, which I'm only dimly aware of and can't really defend on any particular point; therefore, I'm a little skeptical of this study but I can't exactly say why". Telling me just your posterior is still useful! Because it gives a summary statistic of all the experiences you had, which did update you on this point.
If someone answers with the posterior and their "update events", this is typically a filtered set of facts. This is because conversations are governed by relevance (speakers tend to cite things that are relevant to the question under discussion), and because the question under discussion is about opinion (in this example), the listed facts are assumed to be part of the opinion (how it came to be). This filtering is not on its own nefarious, because even honest/cooperative speech partners have to filter for relevance to conform to conversational conventions.
Finally, I want to offer an explanation for why this isn't perceived as rude: listeners still perceive it as an answer to the question about opinion. This is because of the same relevance dynamics mentioned in (2): You're still answering the question about the opinion. This is similar to why it's not rude to answer "I'm allergic" when someone asks "Do you like peanuts?": it's not technically a statement about preferences, but for all intents and purposes it does answer the question!
This means you can also construct situations where answering with facts would be rude, usually by changing what the conversation is "really" about. E.g. when someone makes a small gesture of 'social smoothing' by asking about the weather, and their conversation partner gives a small lecture on meteorological patterns. Sitcoms use this kind of pattern to depict a character as being "nerdy and rude", for example.
“There’s something odd about the experience of talking to [Singularity Institute researcher] Carl Shulman,” I said.
“He never blinks?” said my friend.
“No. I mean: Yes, but that’s not what I was thinking of.”
“He speaks only facts.”
I paused.
“Yes,” I said. “That is what I meant.”
Normally, when I ask someone “Do you think human-level AI will arrive in the next 30 years?” or “Should we encourage faster development of whole brain emulation?” I get answers like “Yes” or “No, I don’t think so.”
When I ask Carl a question like “Do you think human-level AI will arrive in the next 30 years?” he instead begins to state known facts relevant to answering the question, such as facts about the history of Moore’s law, progress in algorithms, trends in scientific progress, past examples of self-improving systems, and so on.
Maybe this is a bit rude. Carl didn’t answer my question about his opinion. He answered a different question instead, about facts.
But I never feel like it’s rude. Carl went out of his way to make his answer more useful to me. His testimony alone would have been helpful, but argument screens off authority, so Carl’s “flood of facts” way of answering questions gives me more evidence about what’s true than his mere opinion could.
Why isn’t this more common? For one thing, most people don’t know many facts. I’ve read a lot of facts, but do I remember most of them? Hell no. If I forced myself to respond to questions only by stating facts, I’d be worried that I have fewer facts available to me than I’d like to admit. I often have to tell people: “I can’t remember the details in that paper but I remember thinking his evidence was weak.”
But it's worth a try. I think I've noticed that when I try to answer with facts more often, my brain is primed to remember them better, as if it's thinking: "Oh, I might actually use this fact in conversation, so I should remember it." But I haven't measured this, so I could be fooling myself.
Also see: Share likelihood ratios, not posterior beliefs