
Intelligent disobedience - hhs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_disobedience
======
DoreenMichele
_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
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
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.)

------
pixelmonkey
A short documentary called “Pick of the Litter” focuses on the training of
service dogs for the vision impaired, and it first introduced me to this
concept of Intelligent Disobedience.

No longer on Netflix, but you can find it on Amazon Prime here:
[https://amzn.to/3gttRxt](https://amzn.to/3gttRxt)

If you are a dog lover, this movie will tug at your heart strings. If you are
not into dogs, it’s still a wonderful character study in perseverance & human-
animal symbiosis.

For programmers, you’ll start to realize that even reaching dog-like AI would
be quite an accomplishment and open up a lot of possibilities for humanity.

On a lighter note, whenever I hear the term Intelligent Disobedience now, I
always also think of one of my favorite organizational psychology terms,
Malicious Compliance.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malicious_compliance](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malicious_compliance)

------
glenstein
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.

~~~
nsajko
You do realize this is Wikipedia, right? There is no bar to editing it.

The rules of the game there are basically, if you can source something to a
published book or newspaper, even if idiotic; it's game. Trying to change
anything in case of a conflict takes time, effort and allies. And the
corporation that owns Wikipedia not being hostile ("Framgate" has been
publicized about).

And this is one of the few good Wikipedia's, where at least some important
articles will receive due care from capable and benevolent editors. Try
checking out the "Croatian Wikipedia", or some of the other Wikipedia's
relevant to a smaller country.

~~~
glenstein
Thanks for explaining to me how the fifth most visited english language
website in the entire world works. A site that I've been visiting on a near
daily basis for past 15 years, and to which I've contributed numerous edits
and where I've become way too familiar with weirdly specific controversies (my
favorite being probably the 'Verifiability Not Truth' debate). But wow, you
told me that Wikipedia can be edited, which blew my mind. So thanks to your
extremely helpful insights, I'm all up to speed now. But... did you have
anything constructive to add that related to my comments on this particular
article?

------
Wowfunhappy
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...](https://blinkthinkchoicevoice.com/resources-and-tips-for-teaching-
children-intelligent-disobedience/)

"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.

~~~
TeMPOraL
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
"Blink, Think, Choose, Refuse"

"Blink, Think, Make a Stink"

or, the classic, "Question Authority"

~~~
Wowfunhappy
"Refuse" implies an outcome.

I also think "blink" in the first place is a bad term. I understand what
they're going for, but it's not an intuitive instruction.

------
kbirk
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.

~~~
brokenmachine
Yeah, I saw a CCTV video on Australian news where a train stopped short of the
platform and the blind owner dragged his poor dog off the edge. That sucks for
everyone.

------
jasonid
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?

~~~
scarlac
Assuming you're genuinely asking. I believe it's because feelings and
intelligence would mean that animals suffer pain like we do, which would imply
that we are cruel for eating or using them as we do.

The best analogy I can come up with that many Americans would relate to would
be slavery, when slave owners would insist on dehumanizing them. They were
both financially and emotionally invested in the idea that slaves could be
used and abused.

------
joe_the_user
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).

~~~
simonh
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.

------
lsb
Reminds me of the Milgram experiment
[https://youtu.be/rdrKCilEhC0](https://youtu.be/rdrKCilEhC0) , where people
were followed up with, to ask if there was anything the man they were
electrocuting could have said to get them to stop electrocuting him, no matter
what the investigator told them to do (36:30 is an example of one)

~~~
oh_sigh
> In 2012 Australian psychologist Gina Perry investigated Milgram's data and
> writings and concluded that Milgram had manipulated the results, and that
> there was "troubling mismatch between (published) descriptions of the
> experiment and evidence of what actually transpired." She wrote that "only
> half of the people who undertook the experiment fully believed it was real
> and of those, 66% disobeyed the experimenter".[23][24] She described her
> findings as "an unexpected outcome" that "leaves social psychology in a
> difficult situation."[25]

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getpost
Tangentially, I'm reminded of something a high school teacher mentioned to me.
The context was military service, but of course this applies in any
organization.

'The way to get rid of an undesireable superior is to do only what you are
ordered to do.'

The supervisor's task will fail in some way, and new leadership will be
needed.

I've kept this in mind, not as a way to undermine leadership, but as a lesson
in what good leaders need to know — that getting things done requires everyone
to be be empowered and act in some degree at their own inititive.

------
x1000
Reminds me of Asimov's Second Law of Robotics[1].

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics)

------
ubuntuubuntu
Dogs are beautiful creatures

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trhway
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.

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ineedasername
I have been fortunate to work under a few managers who value this trait.

~~~
praptak
Those who don't often get its evil twin - malicious compliance.

~~~
jaimex2
Great reddit sub to read btw :)

~~~
praptak
It has the flavor of sticking it to the man and it has great comedy potential
(like 70% Dilbert is about it). That said, you can only be passive-agressive
for so long before you get jaded and unhappy.

~~~
pbourke
> you can only be passive-agressive for so long before you get jaded and
> unhappy

I think you’re putting the cart before the horse here

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stevenbruce569
Service animals do the best for the person they're trying to help!

I feel like this is obvious, and, therefore, if you agree with me, pls don't
upvote. I feel like recently there's been an emphasis on individual
responsibility which is at the very least not sustainable in the long term.
I'd wrap my point up but I feel the original poster hasn't really put in the
effort :-)

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dqpb
A different framing of this would be multi-heuristic decision making.

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yadavmahesh
Can have applications in AI / AGI alignment.

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ydnaclementine
Really good documentary on Disney+ about the training dogs go through, and how
they reinforce this type of behavior is really interesting

------
HugoDaniel
"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.

