Yeah, the world treats activists badly. I think the most effective activists are those who are aware of this and can calculate on it.
The best activist playbook is this phrase from the Bible: "Behold, I send you out as sheep among wolves, so be wise as serpents and gentle as doves". Translation: when you go out into the world to defend an ideal that the world doesn't share, you're going to be weak. So you have to be sincere about holding the ideal, like a dove, but be ruthlessly strategic about how you promote it, like a serpent. There is a complex balancing act of being naive and being strategic about being naive. This is why, when reading the biographies of Christian saints, you get the impression that they were trying to get killed as publicly as possible. They knew the world would treat them badly, and instead of getting discouraged by that, they used it strategically. This played a big role in how they ended up winning so much.
Of course I'm not saying that one should try to get killed as publicly as possible. What I'm saying is that when you step up a little bit, you sign up for the activist life a little bit. It's best to go into it with open eyes.
The one thing I consider of both those kinds of Alice's and Alex's, who are both aware of this dynamic, the futility of it, and the lack of personal payout to speaking up, are two qualifiers that I think are commonly derided and/or undervalued in the semantic landscape.
The first is brave. They are acting with courage. Not aesthetically, structurally. As to act against one's immediate best interest at the prospect of appealing to a higher order value system which may or not result in long term preference payout requires one to reject immediate comfort, and accept potential suffering, at the sheer prospect of updating the collective 'mind' in a way it would not regret retrospectively.
The other, less popular but equally appropriate qualifier is that this entails a degree of faithfulness. Not in god - but in the human condition, or condition of agents outside themselves, that something out there will share enough logical correlations with them that it too will be able to see the value of 'X' and relieve their isolation with solidarity.
I think on an emotional level we are primed to value courage as one of the primary virtues associated with any protagonist as this kind of courage is required for growth of the collective consciousness in a way that requires the outcome of personal reward to be undecidable. Though I think courage itself has largely fallen out of fashion in modernity's "value-lexicon", as its often conflated with naivety, idealism, and bad epistemics.
I can't really parse this post due to the lack of examples. Is it too much trouble to give some harmless ones?
I feel this way about animal rights. Look up footage from factory farms. Look up the statistics about how many animals are factory farmed. Look up the science on animal sentience. Look up how to eat a healthy diet without animal products. I won't get into the arguments beyond that but we're so terrible to animals that I think we should not do any animal agriculture at all, and I took the liberation pledge, so I don't eat at tables where people are eating animal products.
Probably not harmless, but: I see myself in Rae's post.
I actually have extremely passionate and direct things to say about the style of doomerism here. I think it's deeply destructive and harmful and keeps creating damage unnecessarily, and the refusal to hear that message is selfish and a sign of serious mental illness at a collective level. I think there's a better way, and it's both more pleasant and a moral imperative to go that way instead. I've tried to speak about all this here many times, but I keep hitting mechanisms that Rae's post extremely reminds me of.
E.g. I'm still not sorry for having written "Here's the exit". I suspect my saying so will cause this comment to get downvoted, and possibly have several people insisting I'm an Alex and not an Alice. And yet, as many haters as I've gotten for that post and for my lack of remorse for having written it, I've gotten roughly as many people DMing me or talking to me in person thanking me for it, some saying that it gave them their life back. I don't like the hate, it hurts, but I'll gladly take it if that's the price of standing for what's right.
If I were more skillful, I'd navigate the norms here in a respectful way that ma...
historical/fictional ones show the mechanism well enough, without actually pointing targets at anyone (I added some here)
Been thinking more about this claim:
Also, with rational agents silence is just as good as dishonesty.
I don't think this claim particularly matters to the thrust of your post, since I think we agree that you're not playing with perfectly rational agents, but I'm interested in the claim as a matter of game theory.
To be clear, I'm interpreting this as saying something at least as strong as: "In a game of Catan where there is common knowledge that all players are perfectly rational, speaking a falsehood is never more advantageous for the speaker than remaining silent."
After pondering this for about 20 minutes, I'm pretty convinced the claim is false, and I suspect you are over-generalizing from two-player games.
If Adam and Beth are playing a two-player zero-sum game, and Adam knows that Beth is perfectly rational, then:
- If Beth reacts in any way to anything Adam says, then that reaction must be beneficial to Beth (since she is assumed perfectly rational), which means it must be harmful to Adam (because the game is zero-sum), which means Adam shouldn't have said it.
- By similar reasoning, if Beth says anything (that's not required by the rules), then the fact that she said it can't be harm
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1The most salient example I've seen of an Alice in these circles was very publically banned not long ago.
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1I assume that too. I actually think Said is not really an example of an Alice as I mean it here, or at least is not a particularly interesting example in the context of the main thesis of my post. While he's maybe an example of an Early Stage Alice, he didn't particularly transition to a Late Stage Alice. He just sorta consistently did the exact same thing the whole time, in part by being ~completely impervious to any societal pressure to change.
I kinda don't want to get into the "was he an Alice or Alex?" question because I don't want to relitigate the whole thing. (seems at least like an understandable position to say 'Alice')
It is the case that there are (or have been) a few people on LW that seemed to go through the pattern I describe here. I did hesitate to post this because it was kinda opening myself up to a big ol' convo where people are trying to re-litigate all those conflicts at once (which isn't intrinsically bad, and I have some energy for it, but not unlimited).
I feel like I've implicitly opted into dedicating some budget to talking object level examples here, but, I wanna be judicious with it and only if it's actually helpful.
I don't really buy the Alice-Alex dichotomy. "Allie kinda has a good point here" often coexists with "Allie's thinking about this is pretty distorted and not an accurate description of reality". Often Allie has blind spots or tunnel vision around this topic, or their understanding of the principle at stake is idiosyncratic and not a good guide for others to be consistently following, or their application of the principle is pretty selective relative to its explicit meaning (e.g. they mainly apply it against people who they already oppose for other reasons)...
Then, when you notice in your heart that you’re not going to apply Principle X because it would be really annoying and inconvenient, just say “Yep, I am just not applying Principle X because it’s inconvenient or too costly or not worth the tradeoff”, instead of making up reasons that Principle X is wrong.
Yeah, for sure. And the tricky part is when this principle becomes annoying and inconvenient to apply :)
3Curated. This dynamic is real. I appreciate it being described in clear terms. I have at various times in my life been an Alice and a person who is tired of the Alice around me being annoying. I have also watched Alice's start going insane, and felt sorrow as I felt helpless to do anything about it. I wish we had a solution at all, but I am glad that we have a crisp description of the problem that does justice both to the annoyingly principled people who are slowly going insane, and to the people who are finding them costly to be around and sort of avoiding updating in a double-thinky, shadowy way.
All of this is based on the assumption that Alice is right, and everyone knows in their heart that Alice is right and just doesn't want to admit it.
And then, almost as a footnote, you bring in the figure of Alex, who is wrong, but of course everyone can see that he's wrong.
How do you handle the situation where people actually disagree with Alice or Alex, and have just as strong beliefs of their own? In the scenario as composed, you're escaping up to the meta-level in which you as the playwright have stipulated that Alice is right. The ones who are wrong mu...
2I'm leaving it up to y'all to decide who are Alexes and who are Alices. This post isn't meant to be opinionated about that.
My advice in this post is for people you personally believe are pushing for good norms, or directionally good norms. (You and I don't have to agree on which is which, for the advice to hold in the cases where you think the person is in-the-right).
This narrator's God's-eye view is not attainable. That is why you have no examples.
No? The reason I have no examples is because it'd dramatically increase how much work this post was to write, and I wouldn't have written it. And, the people I showed it to beforehand said "I bet most people will have experienced this and have a rough idea of what you're talking about it."
I like this post. A few thoughts:
- While doing PauseAI outreach one of the responses I really appreciated from people was "I agree this is an important issue" regardless of whether those people wanted to help build the social movement or try to help regulate AI or were focused on completely other things. Rationally it might be that their agreement implied that as things moved forward we could expect people to agree with and support the cause rather than fight it. It might also be that it is nice to hear agreement. So a good behaviour for Bobs who aren't ad
This is one class of instances among many other classes of instances of the general problem of desires not aggregating. In the good case, first desire paths form through natural aggregation; then the aggregated desire gets compiled into more permanent / designed / intentional / legible structures. There's plenty of opportunity to innovate norms, but many norms need participation to be worthwhile, and it's often not helpful to try to change them just by saying "let's all do X". Further, some norms are exclusive with other norms, so there are group decisions...
Alice decides Principle X is important enough to make a big deal about.
People don’t seem to understand the issue. Alice explains it more. Some people maybe get it but then next week they seem to have forgotten. Other people still don’t get it.
This reminds me of a line from Shaw:
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
I think one way to navigate the challenge this post points at, is to recognize, both privately and publicly...
Great essay. Some sentences tripped me up, however. So here's some things I found regarding spelling, grammar, or clarity.
They sort of systematically choosing to believe or say false things or bad arguments,
"they are choosing", or "they choose".
distort their shared map of reality in a way that let’s them ignore Alice’s arguments about X
Redundant apostrophe; it should be "lets", not "let's".
Making Alice feel like she's the one losing her group on reality.
I think "group" is supposed to be "grip".
...that results them to double down on more extreme version of the
Great post.
The gaslighting of Alice can go even further once conflict emerges between Alice and the embedded system. Aaron Hillel Swartz is an Alice archetype that cared deeply about open software and published research being accessible. He spent years on committees at top universities like Harvard to make progress. When he didn't get enough traction he ended up downloading a bunch of paywalled papers and making it free on the internet. This led to arrest and journal publishers winning a court case where he faced 35 years in prison and $1-million in fines....
As someone who identifies strongly as an Alice. I want to speak to both what I believe the tendencies of Alices are that distort their perception of the world, and the distortions that non-Alices have that cause them to discount her advocacy.
In the later case, the failure modes I regularly run into are social proof and normalcy bias. I claim that conformity is the primary operating method of humans in service of making sense of the world. When someone makes a claim counter to the consensus, without understanding the logical structure of the counter-claim, ...
I responded to this post through a video. There's a transcript.
But, Alices are also rare and precious – they are the ones who noticed something was wrong and worth calling out, and, who were willing to actually push past social awkwardness about it.
Some of the people who succeed at being Alices in an on-going manner are comedians or, in the old days, jesters. People who use humor, sometimes self-deprecation, to speak truth and provoke change. Pushing the inconvenient trust still sometimes gets them killed or cancelled or deeply depressed. But comedian/performer types of Alice seem to me to be more self-aware, often ch...
The cynical answer to this, presented for clarity, is that people who have incentives to subvert a neutral institution towards their tribal interests will eventually succeed in doing so, or turn it into a battlefield with their counterparts. In the context of politics, Conquest's Second Law asserts that the solution is to divide divided institutions explicitly to remove these incentives from play.
As an example of what this would look like in practice, suppose that the Sierra Club had been into pro- and anti- immigration organizations prior to David Gelbaum...
Obviously biased here because of my background, but I feel like in sociology this is such a well known thing that it spawned an entire school of thought[1] based on the idea that epistemics are socially constructed, and at least one political / philosophical programme[2] . Personally, this has affected me in a way where I just don't think I know anything ever, and am constantly in updating mode and paranoid about my political leanings affecting my reasoning.
Which is, incidentally, the only epistemically grounded position I wholeheartedly accept these days...
There's another second order effect here that is worth naming. Primarily, if we broadly point to people like Alice as noble and brave, many of those who want to be pointed at as noble and brave will act like Alice (Goodhart's Law). This creates a kind of perverse incentive, where people want to be activists first, and then think about what cause to fight for second. Furthermore, if one's identity is partially focused on activism, there's a sort of unconscious incentive that can arise in some people where they actually don't want their issue to be resolved...
I think the most annoying part of all of this is your point about "Alexes". People who fit the profile of caring about things that aren't actually important. This is kind of like "Genius" vs "Insanity", where the profile of devoting your life to something gets the label based on external rationalization, the drive is the same internally. E.g. General Relativity (real science) vs Orgone (not real science).
I've been thinking about this a lot from a "which label will I get?" perspective because I have some non-standard views of particle physics (which I won't...
How do we tell, from the inside, the difference between pushing our friends and our society to uphold norm X in a not-too-annoying way when we're right about the importance of norm X, and upholding a different norm Y where we're wrong about its importance? What differentiates an "Alice" from an "Alex" in the language of the post?
(motivating question that I am asking abstractly above because I think it'll be more helpful: suppose Dave has a norm X that he believes in. What about his situation will mean that if he pushes harder he turns into an Alice (and not an Alex)).
As a self-identified Alice, I felt very validated by this post, so thank you. It helps fill in my model of why I have often ended up in conflict in high-importance situations with people.
Something I'm missing here (not that I would've expected you to write it, just missing in the sense of "I wish I could have this") is what the Alices can do. A large problem of being on the Alice side of things is that there is very little feedback on what effective behaviour is. As the post mentioned, the opposing party does sometimes change their mind, albeit often much...
There's a related dynamic where someone is an Alice in at least one area (usually many), but then they over-update and think they're better at epistemology/insight/etc than they really are and become an Alex in other areas.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-dilbert-afterlife comes to mind as a case study of this (at least if I'm remembering one of the points Scott makes right), and in my opinion @Said Achmiz is an example of this (edit: albeit not a late stage one). They have noticed things/problems most people missed, then update to an overly strong pr...
Ha, I feel a little bit called out in this post. Behavior I've been displaying matches the profile, perhaps I should look a bit inward.
To add to the discussion: The most reliable solution to this problem from my point of view in dealing with others is to establish the exact subject and expected engagement points the annoyingly principled person is attempting to use. Understand that they may not actually know what those are, and direct a meta conversation that leads to defining these things. Finally, engage with them in the manner they attempted to initia...
Personal story. I was denied non-essential treatment by my insurer. I went home ready to write a screed about how the insurer was denying life-changing treatment and how they should change their position based purely on cost-benefits, etc. etc. Before I hit send, I inserted my argument into an LLM and asked it to take the opposing side. The LLM didn't convince me otherwise, but it did moderate my position enough that I didn't send my possibly embarrassing rant.
This is perhaps a relatively safe(r) application of LLMs and a way to address social blind spots....
"I’m not sure if this would actually help, but, it feels like a marginal improvement over the status quo."
Questions matter more than answers, they shape the thought-space. Being aware of alices and alexes, overlying your thought framework on such situations (even while being an alice) allows deeper understanding and caring of the other parties: thank you.
I am in an internet forum with an Alice. It's a science forum. There's scientists there, well-meaning ones. And people who are, I suppose, clients of that science. Patients. Of doctors who depend on science to treat patients.
I've been watching Alice engage with Bob (not his real name, which is Chris). Bob's got a new paper coming out, and Alice is extremely concerned that Bob has screwed up the method by which he has selected his control group.
Bob's colleagues are apparently cool with the process. But Bob is pretty senior so maybe his colleagues just don...
Here are two beliefs that are sort of haunting me right now:
And these both feel fairly important.
I’ve learned a lot from people who have some kind of hobbyhorse about how society is treating something as okay/fine, when it’s not okay/fine. When they first started complaining about it, I’d be like “why is X such a big deal to you?”. Then a few years later I’ve thought about it more and I’m like “okay, yep, yes X is a big deal”.
Some examples of X, including noticing that…
Society depends on having norms. Someone gotta uphold the norms. Someone gotta figure out where society is currently wrong and push for better norms.
But, it’s super uncomfortable to tell a bunch of comfortable people “hey, the behaviors you are currently doing are actually kinda bad, it’d be way better if you did this other thing.”
So, most people don’t.
The people that do, are people who are selected for a mix of “conflict-prone-ness” and “really really care about the hill that they are dying on, to an excessive degree.”
There’s a first order problem, where they are kinda more aggro than I/most-people think is worth putting up with about their pet issue. (Even if I’ve updated that “actually, that issue was quite important, I should internalize that principle”).
But there’s a second order problem that I’ve seen in at least a few cases, that goes something like:
Alice decides Principle X is important enough to make a big deal about.
People don’t seem to understand the issue. Alice explains it more. Some people maybe get it but then next week they seem to have forgotten. Other people still don’t get it.
A problem I’ve previously talked about is Norm Innovation and Theory of Mind where Alice is overestimating how easy it is to explain a new norm to someone, and kinda assuming logical omniscience of the people she’s talking to.
But, there’s another thing, which is: people… keep mysteriously not understanding why X is a big deal. Any given instance of it is maybe explained by “actually the reason for X was a fairly complicated idea, and maybe some people legitimately disagree.” But, something feels epistemically slippery. It feels like Bob and Charlie and everyone else keep… systematically missing the point, sliding off it.
One explanation is: it would be really inconvenient for Bob and Charlie and everyone to accept that X is important enough to change their behavior around. And Bob and Charlie etc end up sort of implicitly coordinating to downplay X, sometimes while paying lip service to it, or finding excuses not to care. A subtle social war is waged.
And Alice eventually begins to (correctly) pick up on the fact that people aren’t merely not getting it. They're sort of systematically choosing to believe or say false things or bad arguments, to avoid having to get it.
This gives Alice the (sometimes) correct sense that (many) people are gaslighting her – not merely disagreeing, but, disagreeing in a way that sure looks like people are implicitly colluding to distort their shared map of reality in a way that lets them ignore Alice’s arguments about X, which conveniently lets them not have to adopt weird new beliefs or risk upsetting their other friends. Making Alice feel like she's the one losing her grip on reality.
Each of these people contains
two wolvesmultiple motivations driving them. When I’ve been Bob, it’s often been the case that I both am executing some kind of good faith investigation into whether X is true and also, part of me was motivated to do something that let me feel important / in control or whatever.Society has a bunch of people in it. Some are more well-meaning than others. Some of the well-meaning people are more implicitly colluding than others. Some of them are actively colluding. Sometimes Alice accuses someone of acting in bad faith and it really is a false positive and then they get mad at Alice. And, sometimes the person is acting in bad faith, maybe even deliberately, and they get mad at Alice too, using the same arguments as the well-meaning person.
Alice ends up in a world where it looks like people are systematically trying to undermine her, and she starts engaging with the world more hostile-y, and then the world starts engaging more hostile-y back.
This… can end with Alice being kinda paranoid and/or traumatized and/or trying to argue her point more intensely. Sometimes this sort of radicalizes Alice.
This ends up in a feedback loop where… idk, I think “Alice has become a little crazy” is not that unreasonable a description about it.
But, Alice was right (at least about the broad points in the beginning).
Alices are often not fun to be around. Sometimes they end up conflict-prone and absolutist in a way that I think is actually kinda bad and I end up avoiding them because it’s not worth the cost of dealing with and they are dealing collateral damage.
Alices often start out caring about their issue a bit more than seems appropriate to me. Later, some (not all) Alices end up becoming absolutist about it, not being satisfied when people update towards their view but not completely adopting their frame.
But, Alices are also rare and precious – they are the ones who noticed something was wrong and worth calling out, and, who were willing to actually push past social awkwardness about it.
(But, but, also, the world contains Alexes, who are not right about their pet issue, they just have a pet issue that doesn’t really make much sense and they also go kinda crazy in the same way but they didn’t actually really have a good point that was worth listening too in the beginning. idk watch out)
…
This essay does not end with me particularly knowing what to do. But, at the very least, I think it’s appropriate to at least be sympathetic to Alices, when you’re pretty sure their core ideas were at least directionally right. I think the cost of civilizational maintenance and progress, for now, includes having some Alices.[1]
…
One move I wish people had was:
First, cultivate the skill of noticing when you’re (at least partially) politically motivated to believe or disbelieve something. Notice when you are being epistemically slippery. Especially if it seems to come alongside someone complaining about something you don’t really understand.
Then, when you notice in your heart that you’re not going to apply Principle X because it would be really annoying and inconvenient, just say “Yep, I am just not applying Principle X because it’s inconvenient or too costly or not worth the tradeoff”, instead of making up reasons that Principle X is wrong.
(This does require Alice to actually accept that graciously. It’s a bit awkward figuring out what the norms should be, because, well, Alice in fact does think Principle X is worth fighting for and Bob saying “cool, but no I’m not gonna do that” doesn’t really resolve that conflict. But, at least within that conversation, probably Alice should accept it from Bob and move on, at least if she values not getting subtly gaslit by Bob)
I’m not sure if this would actually help, but, it feels like a marginal improvement over the status quo.
...
A thing that I think most Alices would appreciate, is more people contributing to the norm enforcing project. Being willing to speak up and say "hey guys, this seems bad, actually." It spreads out the burden, makes it so Alice doesn't feel like they are one lone voice against the world, and society's norm enforcement is more robust.
This is most helpful (to Alice) earlier on, when they are less likely to have accumulated a layer of obfuscation/DARVO that results in them doubling down on a more extreme version of their position. When I've expressed to Alices "I'm worried you're making this a bigger deal than appropriate", some have said: "I would chill out so much if I didn't feel like everyone else was going to round Problem X to zero, and not take it seriously."
But, meanwhile, whatever you think of Alice's current models, you can focus on figuring out whatever is actually Right, and push for that.
There are hypothetical ways this could stop being true. But, they are nontrivial.