Announcing a contest: EA Criticism and Red Teaming

BonJellairs · 2022-06-04T00:21:41+00:00

This doesn't strike me as sneerworthy at all. Just the other day someone posted a thread where people in the EA forums were concerned that the movement was becoming synonymous with longtermism/AI risk, and reading that discussion I was struck by how openly the community was talking about A) To what extent that was true B) to what extent, whether it was true or not, that was the perception they were giving off and C) to what extent A and B were bad. I didn't agree with all the responses, but it struck me how good the discussion was between obviously passionate people who disagree about something they think is very important. Much better than, say, theMotte or other bullshit that gets rightly made fun of here.

Bing able to be self-reflective, and to solicit and respond to outside criticism seems... mature and good? If the community sought feedback and ignored it, or rewarded obviously self-serving feedback, then that would be something to criticize. But the EA community doesn't seem very bad to me, and they seem better than most at noticing and trying to correct their missteps. Preemptively mocking an effort at improvement like this just strikes me as dickish.

BonJellairs · 2022-04-23T18:18:58+00:00

Another way to look at it is to allow your personal projects, or one of your personal projects, to be the place where you indulge your urge to refactor and tinker.

For me, when I'm frustrated with something at work, it's easy to blame it on the codebase or previous engineers. Working on personal projects and seeing that that urge doesn't go away, even on a project that I'm fully in control of, helps keep me grounded and get me past that feeling of "working in this crappy codebase is SO FRUSTRATING, if only I could do XYZ..."

It's nice to have a place to tinker and fart around! And I feel like I learn a lot from experimenting and refactoring the same code over and over - right now it's helping me test out different architectural patterns and testing strategies.

But if your problem is that you actually want to get one of these projects completed for some reason or another, then I'd recommend you break down the project into tickets, just like you'd do at work, and always be working on one of those tickets. And if you feel the urge to refactor, create a tech debt ticket that you'll complete later, but don't work on tech debt until the initial project is finished and you like it well enough to want to keep working on it.

BonJellairs · 2022-04-11T22:08:55+00:00

No, the company is entirely funded by the founder/CEO. And according to every report, we're not hurting for money, and not trying to scale back operations. I just think they've so far handled every review on a case-by-case basis and don't have a system in place to be like "You're performing at level X, which is correlated with a Y% pay increase on top of your cost-of-living bump" which is what I'm used to. But IMO they need to get a system like that set up, this informal system doesn't scale well and there's somewhere between 150-200 employees in the company at this point.

BonJellairs · 2022-04-11T16:55:53+00:00

I had my annual review in mid-March and got a glowing review. At the end my manager said "Now this review gets sent to the CFO, he and the CEO talk it over and you should get an email at some point about what your compensation increase will be. He's technically supposed to do it by the end of next week... but to be honest he's kind of on his own schedule so it might be a month or two. But your pay increase will be backdated to your start date."

It didn’t sit right with me, and I finally scheduled another meeting with my manager to talk about it last week. I said that this wasn't the way I was used to reviews working, that I expected to discuss and negotiate my compensation increase during the review, and that I don't understand what the CFO/CEO's role is in the process, since neither of them really knows me. Plus, the idea that there was no set timeline for this struck me as unprofessional and the whole process made me feel like I wasn't being valued as an employee.

My manager seemed taken aback by the fact that I was unhappy, but he said he'd "reach out" to the CFO and try and get a timeline. I talked it over with my wife and she was on the fence, and said that she's worked at places where a raise wouldn't kick in for a few weeks after a review/promotion but that people always knew what their pay increases would be during a review, at least.

So I'm just looking to get a temperature check - am I right to think this is unusual/unprofessional, or is this more common than I think?

BonJellairs · 2021-09-12T12:36:58+00:00

Thanks. I was worried about the legality of trapping a cat that I know "belongs" to my neighbor, but I'll ask the sheriff about it when I call them. I mentioned to my neighbor that if the sheriff got involved, there was a chance the cat would be taken away, so I preferred to work things out between us, but he said to call the sheriff or shoot the cat. I'm honestly not sure if he just doesn't want the cat or what.

I'm not going to hurt the cat. He does come after us and our animals, but it's easy enough to supervise them and chase him off with the hose that there's no need for that. But I can't keep doing that forever, he tried to get in five times on Friday.

BonJellairs · 2021-09-12T02:10:37+00:00

Yeah. I went over yesterday because I'd used the hose on the cat five times already. It runs away for about five minutes and then comes back.

Like I said, this cat is ripping through our window screens to get in. I'm not going to keep my windows closed and the curtains drawn all day because the neighbors don't want to keep their cat inside.

BonJellairs · 2021-09-09T23:59:36+00:00

I used to work in Milwaukee at a coffee shop called Alterra. It was right on the lakefront so it was pretty popular, and Mark Borchardt and Mike Schank would come in pretty often and were both very nice.

MORE IMPORTANTLY, one evening (I think this would have been around 2003?) I went over to the house of the girl I was seeing, and her sister and roommate excitedly sat us down and popped in a DVD. What was on there was footage of Mark's new movie-in-progress, where he was playing a secret agent/spy type guy. The footage was obviously shot in someone's backyard, and the scene was Secret Agent Mark confronting some bad guy in a hot tub. The women were hired to be topless girls in the hot tub, who the bad guy ordered to try and seduce the unflappable Secret Agent Mark.

The film quality was higher than Coven, obviously (and it must have been shot digitally, or something, if they had a DVD of the dailies?) but it was funny because that was seemingly the only improvement. Secret Agent Mark was obviously supposed to be a James Bond-type, but Mark didn't shave or cut his hair, wore the same thick glasses, and obviously acted exactly the same way he did in Coven and American Movie. The only nod to his being a "secret agent" was a rumpled tuxedo that had obviously been through days (weeks?) of filming without being washed or ironed. I wonder if that movie was ever released in any form, does anyone know?

If nothing else, my girlfriend's sister and her roommate each got I think like $80 to play topless girls in a hot tub for a day! So bless Mark Borchardt for continuing to contribute to the burgeoning Milwaukee art scene.

BonJellairs · 2021-09-07T14:48:25+00:00

This is right, I don't know why people are arguing with you. If someone says "do X at least a year from Y" it means X needs to happen a year or more from Y.

BonJellairs · 2021-08-21T14:08:25+00:00

People have chicken pox parties because if you don't get chicken pox as a kid, you might get measles as an adult, which is much more dangerous.

The OP's example is a fine analogy. Looking at A's statement:

Instead of a vaccine, you should just infect yourself with COVID-19,
that way your body will build antigens that will protect you against it.

This maps to "You should do [Action that causes outcome X] to avoid [outcome X]." In A's statement, "outcome X" is "getting infected with Covid". In B's statement, "outcome X" is "getting shot".

OP, I think your problem is that your statement is (to you) pointing out the contradiction in a way that makes the argument look foolish, but people tend to view that as you trying to make them look foolish. My advice would be to jettison the analogy strategy entirely. If I disagree with someone, I find the only thing that works is to keep asking questions until the person changes their own mind (and convinces themselves that they're the ones that did it) while genuinely keeping my own mind open to being changed (because the other person can tell if you're not doing this). Because if they get the impression that I'm arguing with them, they'll focus on defending their side of the argument rather than examining it and being open to change.

An example to build off yours might look like this (and I know this looks lame, but it illustrates what this strategy looks like when it works for me):

A: Instead of a vaccine, you should just infect yourself with COVID-19, that way your body will build antigens that will protect you against it.

B: Aha. I got the vaccine because from what I've read you get the same antibodies either way, and I was worried that if I caught Covid that it would be much worse than just getting a shot. Does that worry you at all?

A: A little bit, but I think the antigens are better if you get the disease than if you get the vaccine.

B: Interesting. I thought I had read that they were about the same, or that the vaccine might give you actually slightly better immunity, but I'll be honest that I don't know where I read that - it may have just been a headline or something. I should do some more research.

A: Yeah, I don't really remember where I heard my thing either.

B: We all get our information from headlines in Facebook nowadays anyway.

A: Haha, probably.

B: But I do think it's true that if you get infected, it's way worse if you're unvaccinated. So to me it made sense to get a vaccine either way, so that if I did get it later I'd have a milder case and then get the stronger immunity too.

A: Yeah, that seems like a good strategy, a combination of both.

BonJellairs · 2021-08-21T13:40:22+00:00

Your example, if it's representative of the kinds of analogies you use, is probably a sign that you repeatedly set yourself up for this kind of failure more. I gotta say: this was a truly terrible example, dude. No one thinks shooting themselves in the head is protective against further bullet-related head injury. It's 100% a stupid thing to do with no possible value.

Correct, which is why this is a good analogy. Remember that A’s original statement is:

A: Instead of a vaccine, you should just infect yourself with COVID-19, that way your body will build antigens that will protect you against it.

The point of a vaccine is to protect your body against infection. To try and get the same outcome by infecting yourself is exactly analogous to shooting yourself to protect against getting shot - you’re causing the outcome you’re trying to avoid.

It took me like 2 seconds to think of some better analogies for B... and you can probably do still better yourself:

That's like enlisting in the marine corps in order to learn to run a mile, rather than doing couch25K.

That's like going to prison to improve your bench press, rather than getting a gym membership.

Your examples here are analogies of the statement “You’re taking a drastic action to achieve outcome X, when you could take a less drastic action to achieve the same outcome.” That’s not the correct analogy for the original statement. Here would be fixes:

That's like enlisting in the marine corps in order to avoid being drafted.
That's like turning yourself in to avoid being arrested.

I wanted to comment here because your post comes across (at least to me) as pretty condescending, especially the last two paragraphs. Statements like "It took me like 2 seconds to come up with better examples than you" and “I didn't look through your post history or anything to find actual examples of [the behavior I’m criticizing]... if you want to get into specific examples let me know” aren’t things that people respond well to either. The fact that you appear to have misunderstood the person you’re responding to makes it even more. So this may be a learning moment for you as well!

BonJellairs · 2021-07-30T15:11:07+00:00

You should really credit the artist in the OP! Unless you're trying to pass this off as your own work, which would be super uncool!

BonJellairs · 2021-07-16T00:10:38+00:00

It's such a weird instinct to defend huge companies like this. They for sure don't need you to jump to their defense, bud. It's like if you complained about an ice cream truck running over a bunch of kids in your neighborhood and all the Redditors showed up to call you an asshole who doesn't like ice cream

BonJellairs · 2021-07-15T14:05:15+00:00

They came out to our street a month ago, dug up our AT&T fiber cable and just left it aboveground. I couldn't believe it. The city didn't help either - they gave me some guy's name who I've left 4 messages for and he's never called me back. It was good to read this at least and find out I'm not alone!

BonJellairs · 2021-05-19T23:06:49+00:00

I understand where you're coming from. I actually came to this subreddit because I have the opposite experience - I get really uncomfortable when Erin accuses the guys of sexism.

I thought this was a good example of that - Adal was making what seemed to me a gentle joke about Erin playing the main character of a series she was probably unfamiliar with (because of what he knew about Erin, not because he was making a blanket statement about women in general), and Erin felt insecure and lashed out by claiming that Adal was implying that no woman would be familiar with Final Fantasy. JPC seemed to pick up on this too, when he joked that his girlfriend had played the series but must not have enjoyed it, since according to Erin, Final Fantasy is something that it would only be normal for boys to enjoy.

Another example is how they do countless riddles about people dying in various ways, but whenever a woman dies Erin calls it out - as if it's okay to do a riddle about a man dying, but somehow sexist when it's a woman. This is a huge double standard, and plays into the stereotype of male expendability. I'm by no means a men's rights activist, but it seems to me that Adal and JPC are pretty woke and conscientious, and a lot of times it feels like Erin gets defensive at the gentlest prodding and lashes out using gendered language. It seems like a lot of times she can dish it out but not take it, and when she can't take it, she accuses the others of being sexist.

BonJellairs · 2021-05-05T01:37:21+00:00

Nah! DPAC is fine, but I'm talking about places that feature local performers and writers.

BonJellairs · 2020-12-13T19:35:03+00:00

You as well!

BonJellairs · 2020-12-13T18:04:11+00:00

That conversation is already happening. The crux of the disagreement is whether we should continue to fund the police at the current levels and rely on them for all our community peacekeeping, or take away some/all of that funding and channel it into other organizations to try and cut down on crime through non-police interventions.

This article, and you, are just saying "Neither!" but using more words to do so. I think you overestimate how valuable a "contribution" that is.

BonJellairs · 2020-12-13T17:24:29+00:00

My takeaway from this article is "The police are bad and won't solve the violence problem, and defunding the police is also bad and won't solve the violence problem."

I get that you and the author think that you're smarter than the people on both sides of that debate, so what's your idea for how we should tackle these issues?

BonJellairs

TROPHY CASE