[HN Gopher] Intelligent Disobedience
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Intelligent Disobedience
Author : hhs
Score : 128 points
Date : 2020-05-25 15:53 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
| ydnaclementine wrote:
| Really good documentary on Disney+ about the training dogs go
| through, and how they reinforce this type of behavior is really
| interesting
| kbirk wrote:
| When I was a child I watched a blind man repeatedly kick his
| service dog while screaming obscenities because it would not let
| him cross the street outside of a cross walk. I think about that
| poor animal often.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| The article briefly mentions teaching this principle to children,
| and references this article, which I found interesting:
| https://blinkthinkchoicevoice.com/resources-and-tips-for-tea...
|
| "Blink, Think, Choice, Voice" is a pretty poor mnemonic though.
| They compare it to "Stop, Drop, and Roll", but those instructions
| make sense even before you read anything else about it.
| [deleted]
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| It's weird and forced. "Blink, Think, Choose, Voice" would be
| much more consistent, but I'm guessing someone really wanted it
| to rhyme.
| srtjstjsj wrote:
| "Blink, Think, Choose, Refuse"
|
| "Blink, Think, Make a Stink"
|
| or, the classic, "Question Authority"
| HugoDaniel wrote:
| "This behavior is a part of the dog's training and is central to
| a service animal's success on the job."
|
| Now get back to work.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| I think this article describes a quality of communications that
| many discussions of artificial intelligence seem to miss.
|
| Intelligent disobedience is effectively a formalization of the
| way informal language-interactions often work. When you ask a
| person to do something, the response is can easily be a request
| for clarification, a comment on possible negative results, some
| suggestions about alternative approaches and so-forth. Often, you
| get a decision after a few rounds of this. Basically, a good
| portion of language interactions involve a bargaining and
| clarification process.
|
| Now, consider the average "AI goes wrong" argument. The classic
| scenario is someone asks a general AI to "build a lot of
| paperclips" and, like Disney's Sorcerers Apprentice, the AI
| converts the entire earth into a paperclip factory. Here, the
| interactions between AI and human fail to be anything like human-
| to-human informal interactions. And this hypothetical scenario
| seems implausible just given that the scenario also posits vast
| understanding in the AI, an understanding which would seem to
| encompass language understanding such that AI could do that back-
| and-forth bargaining approach (the human might ask for such
| behavior to be avoided but theoretically we're talking the human
| that invented the AI and also has this sort of meta-
| understanding).
| glenstein wrote:
| I think back-and-forth bargaining is an important and valuable
| concept. And while I think you are right, I suspect that the
| capability to bargain in response to commands would be fraught
| with its own category of concerns and potentials for undesired
| outcomes.
|
| I also think the paperclip concept could be rehabilitated and
| treated with a charitable/steelman interpretation, where it's
| regarded as a toy example of unanticipated adverse outcomes.
| simonh wrote:
| I think your missing the point of the paper clip maximiser
| example. All it's for is to show how complex reasoning and
| intelligence are, and that strong AI has to be about a lot more
| than just solving problems.
|
| Arguing that a strong AI would have to be smart enough not to
| make a mistake like that is really the purpose of the example.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| _Intelligent Disobedience has also found its place in Children 's
| Rights Education offering instruments that help to keep children
| safe from the rare, but traumatic instances when authority
| figures abuse their power._
|
| I really don't think this is _rare_. People do crappy things all
| the time, especially when they imagine they know what is best for
| someone else. This is the default assumption of most adults in
| how they relate to any children in their lives.
| Reedx wrote:
| Another way to look at this may be something like:
|
| Odds of an adult knowing what's best for another adult: Low to
| Medium
|
| Odds of an adult knowing what's best for a child: Medium to
| High
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| Odds of an adult being able to talk with the child in an
| informative way in a non-emergency situation and help them
| make a better decision for themselves: Extremely high.
|
| You don't have to boss the kid around and treat them like a
| puppet you control to help them make better decisions.
|
| Obviously (and it should go without saying, but I will say it
| anyway): Emergency situations are an exception. You can and
| should stop a child from sticking their hand in the fire
| without trying to nicely and at length talk them out of it
| while they are in the midst of doing so anyway.
|
| You will also de facto be making a fair number of decisions
| on their behalf when they are below a certain age. Infants
| can cry to let you know something is wrong, but they can't
| tell you they need to be fed, etc. Adults have to do their
| best to figure out what the issue is and address it.
|
| Good parents typically don't have a policy of "Oh, just let
| them cry it out." They typically feel that a crying child
| requires parental intervention to solve whatever their
| problem is.
|
| (Exception: It's okay for them to just cry for emotional
| reasons. I never tried to convince my kids to stop crying
| about being told "no" or whatever. If you know they are
| crying because small kids have big feels, let them cry. No
| big deal.
|
| But babies don't typically cry for emotional reasons. They
| cry because they have a problem that needs to be addressed.)
| deathgrips wrote:
| This is also the primary motivation in censorship, from social
| media companies to authoritarian regimes. You believe that you
| know better and must censor wrong information so that stupid
| people don't consume it and get hurt because of it.
| a1369209993 wrote:
| This. Just, so fucking much _this_. Child abuse is so common
| and so accepted that most people _justifiably_ can 't even
| recognize it anymore.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| In sense, the parent-child relationship is kind of weird to
| have compared to the flight-crew/pilot or the guide-
| dog/disable-person relationship. The later relationships are
| between trained individuals (or animals) acting in fairly
| specific circumstances. The parent-child relationship is
| something everyone winds-up with, with large portion also doing
| the parent part. And so whatever training a parent has is
| minimal yet the circumstance that they deal with their children
| in are very general.
|
| So a lot of problem parent behavior is ... a problem. The main
| way something like this "Children's Rights Education" tries to
| resemble the other situation is teaching kids that there are
| few circumstances of abuse where they legally refuse/resist. Of
| course, there are lot of abusive situations that the child
| can't legally resist and of course being a child navigating
| such an overall situation presents many minefields. Which is to
| say this approach has to subscribe to the fiction (derived from
| the law) that there is a fixed line between abuse and non-abuse
| where in fact the line is fuzzy indeed.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| For the most part, the real solution to child abuse or
| mistreatment is to deal with the parents. America does a poor
| job of providing adequate support to parents. We have a lot
| of family unfriendly policies.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Can you elaborate? Provide some examples of other
| communities that do better? (Honest question.)
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| _The US is stingier with child care and maternity leave
| than the rest of the world_
|
| https://theconversation.com/the-us-is-stingier-with-
| child-ca...
|
| The US is on a short list of countries that don't provide
| maternity leave. All the others are dirt poor. We have no
| such excuses.
|
| We have terrible healthcare policies. At one time, it was
| somewhat common for dad to be the primary breadwinner and
| have a decent job with benefits, including healthcare for
| the wife and kids. Mom worked part time or was a
| homemaker.
|
| Now, even if both parents work, the kids may not be
| automatically covered on either parent's healthcare
| policy from work. They may have to pay extra for that.
| (Though I'm not clear how much Obamacere changed that.)
|
| In much of Europe, it is still somewhat common for the
| extended family to help raise the kids, daycare is
| generally more readily available, maternity leave is the
| norm, etc.
|
| You don't have to try hard at all to find countries with
| better family-friendly policies than the US, even without
| having sophisticated, well-thought-out ideas about what
| that should mean.
| Gunax wrote:
| No, the US does have maternity leave. It just doesn't
| have paid maternity leave.
|
| Also known as: it doesn't take money out of my pocket to
| pay for your kids.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| Every dollar spent on helping to care for the nation's
| children that are below a certain age saves several
| dollars on down the line on things like incarceration.
|
| This is a penny wise, pound foolish attitude. If you want
| to be a "stingy bastard," the "stingy bastard" option is
| to take care of the kids so they don't become bigger
| problems down the line.
|
| (Not intended to name call. Just intended to characterize
| a certain position.)
| Nursie wrote:
| Isn't that literally the job of a parent? Knowing better than
| the child what is best for them?
|
| Obviously that should include letting the young person stretch,
| learn and exercise their own judgement, but within bounds set
| by the parent and with the parent there to help with any
| consequences.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| I was a full-time parent (homemaker) for a lot of years. I
| always operated as much as possible on the assumption that my
| kids had a great deal of local knowledge about their life
| that I would never know and when they were little they were
| incapable of articulating it but still knew it.
|
| An event that helped cement my commitment to respecting their
| boundaries as much as possible is where I made my son eat
| lunch because he wasn't eating and he tended to be skinny and
| I worried that I would end up charged with neglect for not
| feeding him enough. About thirty minutes later, he threw up
| all over my jacket which I actively encouraged to keep it off
| the cloth truck seat.
|
| After that, I doubled down on trying to make sure there was
| food available that he liked and that I felt was sufficiently
| healthy, but I left it up to him to decide to eat.
|
| He likely has two conditions that can each lead to requiring
| hospitalization to treat aversion to eating by mouth. He's
| never developed any such issues.
|
| So, unbeknownst to me, I had some serious challenges to deal
| with. Respecting his boundaries paid off.
|
| Kids like mine frequently end up seriously abused because the
| parents just keep increasing their attempts to control the
| kid and force the kid to do as they are told rather than
| coming at the issue from another angle as I chose to do.
|
| I am on my third parenting blog, still trying to figure out
| how to talk at folks about such things in a way that is
| helpful and doesn't sound too accusatory. The intent is to
| offer options, not criticism per se, for people dealing with
| challenging children.
| x1000 wrote:
| Reminds me of Asimov's Second Law of Robotics[1].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics
| 7leafer wrote:
| It's all good when it's about dogs and their owners. But it's not
| so when it's about the people and the, uhm, men, who were meant
| to serve the people. The latter are increasingly trying to
| portray the people as a whole as disabled, and pretend to be
| knowing better. But to tell the truth, a hefty chunk of people is
| indeed disabled by the media brainwash...
| tiny_epoch wrote:
| I thought of it the other way:
|
| Essential service workers are the service animals and the
| politicians are the disabled.
|
| Intelligent disobedience may be required to prevent the
| politicians from walking us all off the edge of a cliff.
| They're clearly far too busy yelling into their respective echo
| chambers to see the cliff coming.
| 7leafer wrote:
| Agreed, except the point of them being unable to see the
| cliff. For me it's almost as if they consciously decided to
| test their freshly-baked algorithms of gainful cliff
| falling...
| luckylion wrote:
| You're getting downvoted, but you have two points.
|
| Almost everybody believes a sizable part of the population to
| be brainwashed, they disagree on what part it is however.
|
| And I do very much believe that it is a discussion worth having
| for society at large. Do we believe that we are generally aware
| of the dangers of things we do? Is outlawing oversized sodas
| the right thing to do? Would it be okay to allow them only if
| you can use a code word that signals that you do, in fact,
| understand the risk? Do we not like that approach at all, or do
| we just not want to deal with deciding who understands the risk
| and is able to walk down the stairs and who isn't?
| 7leafer wrote:
| Let those who don't understand the risk learn the hard way.
| Free will is not only about doing right, it's also about
| making mistakes. Now it's obvious that the trend is biasing
| towards enforcement of the right-doing regardless of
| consequences and impact on individual freedoms. Almost all
| writing of Stanislav Lem, for example, is dedicated to this
| one theme. And extrapolations he made are only becoming more
| and more relevant as the time goes.
|
| Having said that, the freedom to fail should only apply to
| individuals. Corporate or government entities should never be
| treated as humans and be allowed to fail the hard way. First,
| because the magnitude of consequences are incomparable, and
| second, because the strings of corporate responsibilities are
| entangled in such a way so as to lead nowhere. They can
| always lose a head and grow another one.
|
| As to crossing of one's individual freedom into another's,
| that's what the service men are for. But it was alright while
| they operated under presumption of innocence. Now they are
| clearly trying to render people guilty until proven
| otherwise. That was one of the points in my first reply.
| [deleted]
| luckylion wrote:
| One large issue is that you'll often not have a chance to
| learn from your mistakes and do better in the future. If
| you jump off of a building, you die. If you drink the big
| gulp for 40 years, you get diabetes. Sure, you may have
| learned from it, but you can't start over.
|
| I'm still in the camp of "let them", but it's a mixture of
| "it's hard to figure out who _really_ knows the risks ", "I
| don't want to live in a world that's optimized for perfect
| safety and takes away all freedom to achieve it" and "we
| want people to take risks, even giant risks, even when they
| clearly have no idea how large the risk is, because we'll
| advance much quicker because of it, we just don't want all
| people to take those risks at the same time".
| 7leafer wrote:
| That's MY problem if I do something wrong.
| a1369209993 wrote:
| > But to tell the truth, a hefty chunk of people is indeed
| disabled by the media brainwash...
|
| It's not really specific to the media, unless you define
| "media" ridiculously broadly. See, eg, abstinence-only sex
| education, or... pretty much anything the social justice
| movement does.
| [deleted]
| 7leafer wrote:
| I agree, it is much broader. Let's settle on the literal
| meaning: a medium is a carrier through which ideas propagate.
| ubuntuubuntu wrote:
| Dogs are beautiful creatures
| trhway wrote:
| small anecdote, saw couple years ago - a woman with a dog leaves
| the dog park and pulls the dog to follow her toward the parking,
| the dog pulls into opposite direction and is pretty insistent,
| after some moments of mutual pulling the woman finally "Oh!
| you're right! I parked there today!" and follows the dog to the
| other parking.
| jasonid wrote:
| Some people seem invested in the idea that animals are not
| intelligent, do not have feelings, are not persons etc, despite
| so much evidence to the contrary. Why is that?
| yadavmahesh wrote:
| Can have applications in AI / AGI alignment.
| ineedasername wrote:
| I have been fortunate to work under a few managers who value this
| trait.
| praptak wrote:
| Those who don't often get its evil twin - malicious compliance.
| dqpb wrote:
| A different framing of this would be multi-heuristic decision
| making.
| glenstein wrote:
| This is a fascinating concept, and I always appreciate wiki reads
| like these whenever they come through HN.
|
| One thing I wonder, though, what's going on in this part:
|
| >The animal understands that this contradicts the learned
| behavior to respond to the owner's instructions: instead it makes
| an alternative decision because the human is not in a position to
| decide safely.[5] The dog in this case has the capacity to
| understand that it is performing such an action for the welfare
| of the person.[6]
|
| I think that's a very bold and categorical claim to make. Not
| necessarily because it's wrong, but animal cognition is a charged
| subject where it's easy to become motivated to make claims, and I
| think it's fair to say it's a sphere where untrue claims abound.
|
| It wasn't clear to me that the source for [6] is sufficiently
| authoritative. It seems to be derived from interviews with dog
| owners. Here's a quote from [6] on the cited page:
|
| >"The competent guide dog can recognize dangerous situations and,
| even when commanded to engage in a articular action, can decide
| to disobdy in order to protect the owner's welfare.. All of the
| interviewees spoke of their dogs as regularly involved in
| behaviors that were not understandable if one were only to see
| dogs merely as automatons responding to instinct or behavioral
| conditioning."
|
| Anyway, I bring this up because that sentence stuck out to me as
| something that felt highly motivated, and in general it's a
| feature I think you see sometimes in wiki articles - bold claims,
| almost vulgar in their simplicity, that just go ahead and declare
| a truth and don't try to couch the language in terms of earned
| institutional understanding that fully merit the claim. Again,
| not saying it's wrong, it just stuck out.
| renewiltord wrote:
| I think that's just a need to introduce conciseness to the
| situation. It's less about comprehension and more about
| "despite an express general request, the device (in this case,
| a dog) responds differently in this specific situation, unless
| receiving a countermanding specific command".
|
| i.e. it's not about cognition, it's about the tool (in this
| case, the dog) having certain behaviour.
|
| For instance, consider a hypothetical system with pop up dialog
| boxes requesting confirmation (yes undo is better, etc.). A
| user hits Del signaling they wish to delete an entry from a
| list, and a popup is displayed requesting confirmation. The
| user hits Enter within 10 ms of the appearance of the popup but
| the system ignores the input. One might describe this as "The
| program understands that the user did not actually confirm
| since they did not have sufficient time to do so" and not
| actually mean "The program acquired sapience within 10 ms and
| proceeded to overrule the human".
| srtjstjsj wrote:
| Teaching a dog to not run into traffic, even if ordered to do
| s (a) is quite doable, and (b) doesn't the dog to have any
| notion of the assisted person's mindset.
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