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.

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 :)

Curated. 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.

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 adopting X might be to acknowledge that they agree it is important, but at that time it feels too costly to engage with.
• The "you're either with us or against us" mentality is interesting and problematic. I once heard a version "if you don't support the oppressed you are supporting the oppressors", or more poignant, Martin Niemöller's poem ending with "Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me". I refer to it in 3 quotes to show different facets and how it isn't easy to simply accept or oppose the concept. I think the concept does cause a lot of coordination difficulty, but there is validity to it. Perhaps factoring the useful and harmful aspects from the idea would be beneficial, like, polarized dehumanizing thinking is bad, but focusing on coordination and solidarity between social groups is good.
  • One problem with the "with us or against us" mentality is that people only have so much ability to focus on and understand things. It is bad if people are ignoring ALL issues, but it is also bad if people are spreading themselves too thin and becoming ineffective by trying to focus on ALL issues. Most people should focus on ONE or a small cluster of SOME issues. People who focus on systems/networks/communication/logistics kind of things are a special case. They are in some sense trying to focus on ALL issues, but not by becoming familiar with all the details of all issues, but instead by understanding abstracted views of issues and how they interrelate. This is valuable and is not the same thing as trying to simultaneously become an expert in all issues.
• I like the idea of ombudspeople. (Is it a contraction of omni-buddy?) I wonder if it would be possible to have something like a guild of ombudspeople for social change somehow.
• I like thinking of language and memes as a kind of technology. It would be nice if there was better linguistic technology for dealing with this kind of thing.
  • One tool that might help is making softer forms of support easier and more visible, like being able to easily sign a sentiment saying "yeah I heard a paragraph about this issue and based on that paragraph I agree some people should think about it some more but I don't think I should specifically be one of those people".
  • More ambitiously, I want better maps of the different worldviews people are living in and better jargon for talking about worldviews abstractly and communicating productively with people who can mutually understand and acknowledge that they are operating from within different worldviews.

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, that it's hard to be perfect all the time, we all falter, and sometimes we must choose our battles.

I think it's important both to enable the sort of self-forgiveness that's most needed by those prone to self-flagellation, and also to lower the overall temperature.

So I strive (sometimes even successfully!) to recognize that the things of great import to another person may, in fact, be truly important... while also remembering that the things of great import to me may not, in fact, be truly important.

I think this aligns with your willingness to own "yes, I'm not applying that because it's too much tradeoff for me". Because yes, sometimes that person's unreasonableness is correct... and sometimes I can't stomach the battle for it, even though I know that. But acknowledging "well, I need a mulligan on this, and I'll try to give one elsewhere" makes the whole world slightly better off.

This makes me think of the "Anti-Anti-Normativity Alliance."

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, non-Alices default to the consensus. This is an extremely efficient heuristic. Most counter-claims are incorrect, and even if that isn't the case, you are punished materially for acting on them because conformity is a serious driver of social support and status. Acting upon counter-claims has a material cost that only becomes worth it in cases where believing the counter-claim has disproportionate benefits.

This is where we start to blend into Alice's distortions: So, even among the true counter-claims, a rational actor is disincentivized to act upon many counter-claims which are true, because they do not recoup that cost in benefits for acting upon them. In addition, biology is lazy, and evaluating counter-claims is costly in terms of both skill and time. Human nature and societal structures conspire against evaluating counter-claims on the basis of truth, rather than the basis of social cost.

Alices are born many ways. For one type of Alice, your insight that many are kind of crazy is supported by the above framework, in that they sacrifice their material condition in favor of advocating for a true counter-claim. This is only a rational act in within the context that truth, rather than survival is their driving motivation. This Alice will become fixated on one counter-claim local to their experience. A second type of Alice, is for one reason or another, predisposed to non-conformity as a general principle. This is highly disadvantageous in material conditions, but highly advantageous when paired with certain high-functioning, in finding and advocating for true counter-claims. The above possibility space of true counter-claims that do not recoup their material cost that we identified in the previous paragraph, are more likely to be found and advocated for by this second type of Alice.

Thus, we have a structural failure in the way we currently evaluate counter-claims that, if we are to address it, demands institutions that evaluate counter-claims first on their basis of truth, then secondly on the basis for the advantage of allocation of material resources. Academia, investment portfolios, and philanthropic organizations, are all flawed institutions that have this positive effect along with different serious failure modes.

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's infamous $200 million donation^[1], which led to a series of purges that ultimately produced one very partisan organization and many politically homeless breakaways.

• Rather than being alienated from the environmentalist movement, the half of membership that preferred the old stance could have continued to work towards environmentalist aims.
• Rather than devoting energy towards internal power struggles, members of both organizations could have devoted all of their time and resources towards environmental activism.
• Rather than necessarily being enemies at all times, members of the two divided organizations could have collaborated on areas of mutual interest. This is not without precedent - alliances between the Democrats and the Constitution Party to mutually endorse each others' candidates have famously taken place in New York, facilitated by the fact that these organizations are open about where their interests are opposed.
• Finally, people who are neutral about environmentalism but broadly right-leaning would not be permanently lost to environmentalist overtures, and right-leaning movements would have had a substantial, organized internal movement opposing anti-environmentalist policies.

Alas, the above is counterfactual. Following the takeover, environmentalism was subsumed into the partisan framework. Right-leaning environmentalists retained the tools for being right wing activists, but lost the tools for being environmentalist activists, depriving the environmentalist movement of substantial manpower and funds. The end of trusted organizations pushing for environmental preservation from the Right allowed anti-environmentalist factions to dominate internal discourse, with opposition to their arguments reduced to scattered, localized grassroots efforts. As a whole, American environmentalism declined in power, and this decline was particularly severe in the regions where the rightie faction of the Sierra Club would once have served as a counterweight.

I write this, not strictly as a proposal, but as a probably-not-nearly-optimal baseline that is better than leaving the problem unsolved.

1. ^{^}

   Right-leaning source. You can find neutral-on-average coverage in older Reddit threads debating politics, if desired. I'd have used the Wikipedia's article, but, as a meta example of this subject, it reads like a Daily Beast article, whereas these guys are pretty matter-of-fact, and open about their bias where it appears.

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, and in relation to AI in particular, I think the AI community could learn a lot from a discipline whose study topic is mechanistically intractable and opaque but has real world action / behavioural consequences; rather than treating it as an engineering problem.


[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_School
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_theory

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, so they can be an eternal martyr. If an Alice's identity depends on an unresolved fight, you'd predict that she will develop strategies to fight hard but ineffectively to maintain her identity, which leads to much of the distracting "performative activism" that we see from people who care more about signaling than outcome.

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 get into here). The one thing that I think both Alices and Alexes should have in common are the friends that stick around to explain the social aspect. The people who can sit with them and say, "Yeah, let's look at your position on its merits" and spend the couple days in deep introspection to find out if it's valid, and if valid to explain how to approach it with others. And if it's not valid, to explain how to let go of it and express that it is in the past with others affected by it.

If the Orgone guy (Wilhelm Reich) had someone to explain the actual processes he was seeing when he was in pitch blackness, he wouldn't have believed what he did (essentially magic). His beliefs got mixed up because he misunderstood a phenomenon he experienced, and nobody was around to gently nudge him before he wrote about it. After he wrote about it, a gentle nudge became impossible. If you did it in public, you would be picking a fight. If you tried in person, you're fighting reputation as much as misunderstanding. Einstein had Marcel Grossmann who introduced him to Riemannian geometry. This led to a series of lectures and the publication of General Relativity, instead of a manifesto about elevators and acceleration. Initial isolation and uncommon belief lead to radicalization, which leads to sustained isolation, which leads to further radicalization and ultimately "unfortunate events" (Wilhelm Reich's books got banned. It was a government overreach that led to a song about "Cloudbusting").

There's a modern problem with this that's playing out in real time, because the ground is shifting faster than the arguments. Artificial Intelligence. Up until the last year or so, LLMs were clearly just stochastic parrots. To this day, the transformer architecture is still "just math". But if you go deep enough, the same basic arguments work against humans which are assumed to be conscious (by other humans, who may have some bias, possibly...). With the scale of the 10T parameter LLM models and the documented features and behaviors being exhibited now, who's to say subjective experience isn't happening? However, because of the inertia of "stochastic parrots" from smaller models early on, beliefs got established in the industry. Some people question it, but they also get attacked with "no proof" (which again, we don't have for humans), and their argument sounds like the guy talking about LaMDA being sentient (probably not, model was too small). The main difference here is that the scale changed, but the absolutist beliefs and pre-categorization of argument happened before the scale made the sentience argument plausible. But do the AI researchers have the friend on the outside to update their perspective to fit the current landscape?

I don't have an answer, I just see your post playing out everywhere all the time. It brings form to a nagging feeling I've had no words to express. Thank you for sharing it.

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 later. I have often had conversations with people on a topic years after having an Alice-Bob-Charlie interaction with them where it transpired that I had changed their mind. Sometimes by planting a seed, sometimes they needed more time to think about it, sometimes they needed someone else to say the same thing in a different way after me.

So the Alice struggle becomes: if you give just a little pushback, it might be too little, and things might not change even though it is very important that they do. If you give too much pushback, the sense of hostility might prevent the opposing party from changing their mind, or the cost to the Alice might be too great. Because there is a very real possibility of having impact, it's important to do something (at least to me). Especially if I am dependent on that person in some way, and I need a sign of them being able to take into account my concerns. Also, my 'principled' nature will have me up at night if I don't do anything, so there's also that cost.

Here are two examples of personal situations where I have experienced the Alice-Bob-Charlie dynamic as a self-proclaimed Alice:

• I once had a psychiatrist at a specialised mental-health clinic who acted very unprofessionally in our appointments. Feeling uncomfortable, I asked for a new psychiatrist and brought up what had happened in the appointments with several different people at the clinic. I got responses like "It sounds like you felt uncomfortable" and "I'm sure it was not that bad". I felt it was very important that it was clear what was going on. Partly for the person who would inevitably take the slot that was now opened up at my old psychiatrist, partly for myself because I had lost significant trust in the clinic. After a few months I tried again with a new person, explaining the issues and receiving much the same response. Upon more pushback, I heard: "well, I'm not supposed to share this, but she has actually been let go after we received more complaints."
• I once had major surgery, after which I quickly started getting major complications. I was pingponged between the operating clinic and urgent care, with neither party taking responsibility and the former saying it was probably just "stress" when I tried to push back (but was definitely stressed because no one was listening to me). l Upon a later appointment with the surgeon, I tried to explain what had gone wrong, and what was still wrong with my body. She said "that doesn't happen as a result of surgery". I kept pushing back and ended up getting very upset. I have requested my medical records. There is no record of any of the complications of my surgery. The only reference to them is that I got "very upset at the surgeon" during my appointment, but that my "partner stayed calm". As a result of the complications of this surgery, I still have severe chronic pain that often prevents me from being able to walk.

I felt crazy in both of these situations and in many others. Could I have communicated things better so that I would have been taken more seriously? Probably. But no one is giving feedback. Aside from that, there is a classic conundrum that an Alice has to traverse: if you get upset, people often take you less seriously ("she's just stressed", "I can see you're upset"); if you don't show any emotion, people often don't take you seriously at all ("I didn't realise this mattered so much to you", people being swayed more by emotions than by arguments).

I know that these are highly personal situations, whereas the author was potentially referring to more general "moral" discussions, but I think that life is often a blending of the two.

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 prior on "I don't understand this thing"->"something is actually wrong here" or "I think X even though others don't"->"X is true". Which to be fair, most people have an overly strong prior on "I don't understand this thing"->"I'm just going to accept it and assume it's for good reason and maybe even perpetuate/enforce it" or "I think X even though others don't"->"X must be wrong", and the art is figuring out how to gracefuly notice and then navigate confusion

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. He eventually committed suicide.

Your post covered the passive and lazy resistance to change in-depth and did mention the collusion and malice to maintain status quo. However, I think the paranoia that emerges from Alice types is not entirely irrational given how much current parties may rely on a norm not changing to maintain current influence.

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. LLMs are (currently) non-judgmental; we need to be careful when they flatter us, but the flip side is that it also gives us a judgment-free tool to receive critical feedback. Speaking as someone who is deeply uncomfortable with normal social interactions, having this tool has been ... helpful. Additionally, since in this application, the user is not looking for affirmation from the LLM (in fact, it's the opposite -- the user argues the opposing viewpoint), there is some systematic mitigation of LLM sycophancy.

So I wonder if, should this become a more widely adopted technique, the Alices and other annoying peoples of the world might use it to shield them from some of their psychological trauma. Perhaps there is a risk of compromising their principles, but I'd personally rather have fewer unhappy people in the world.

"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't complain. Alice's complaints look kinda reasonable to me. But she's being pretty aggressive, Bob isn't moving an inch, and I haven't backed her up.

Do I want to annoy Bob? He doesn't have to be part of this group. he chose to pop up in the forum and chat about science. He doesn't even have to study this condiiton. he could pivot to a better-funded domain of science.

Alice has very high standards and that's cool in theory, but in practice ... it is awkward.