These are good examples that drive the point home.
Most people never read the bible.
They don’t coordinate based on the nuanced information in it, either. Mostly they coordinate on a few very short statements, like:
Say you are Christian.
Go to church.
A much smaller group of people coordinates on a few more:
Give money to the church.
Run a food drive OR help build houses OR staff a soup kitchen OR …
The Walmart example seems a little different, because it isn’t as though working at Walmart is that different from any other kind of hourly employment. Mostly all employers try to get people to coordinate on a few crucial things:
Show up on time.
Count the money correctly.
Stock the shelves.
Sweep the floor.
And it seems to me there is never a shortage of preachers or employers complaining about people’s inability to do even these basic things.
It looks to me like successful coordination on the scale of millions largely amounts to iterating four-word actions.
Agree, and I’d roll in the incentives more closely. It feels more like:
you have at most space for a few feedback loops
you can improve this by making one of the feedback loops a checklist that makes calls out to other feedback loops
the tighter and more directly incentivized the feedback loop, the more you can pack in
every employer/organization is trying to hire/recruit people who can hold more feedback loops at once and do some unsupervised load balancing between them
you can make some of people’s feedback loops managing another person’s feedback loops
another frame is that instead of thinking about how many bits you can successfully transmit, think about whether the behaviors implied by the bits you transmit can run in loops, whether the loops are supervised or unsupervised and what range of noise they remain stable under.
I didn’t make the leap from bits of information to feedback loops but it makes intuitive sense. Transmiting information that compresses by giving you the tools to figure out the information yourself seems useful.
In the original context this means Eliezer’s posts from 2007 to 2009 (which got compiled as The Sequences and later recompiled into the half-as-long Rationality A-Z)
These are good examples that drive the point home.
They don’t coordinate based on the nuanced information in it, either. Mostly they coordinate on a few very short statements, like:
Say you are Christian.
Go to church.
A much smaller group of people coordinates on a few more:
Give money to the church.
Run a food drive OR help build houses OR staff a soup kitchen OR …
The Walmart example seems a little different, because it isn’t as though working at Walmart is that different from any other kind of hourly employment. Mostly all employers try to get people to coordinate on a few crucial things:
Show up on time.
Count the money correctly.
Stock the shelves.
Sweep the floor.
And it seems to me there is never a shortage of preachers or employers complaining about people’s inability to do even these basic things.
It looks to me like successful coordination on the scale of millions largely amounts to iterating four-word actions.
Agree, and I’d roll in the incentives more closely. It feels more like:
you have at most space for a few feedback loops
you can improve this by making one of the feedback loops a checklist that makes calls out to other feedback loops
the tighter and more directly incentivized the feedback loop, the more you can pack in
every employer/organization is trying to hire/recruit people who can hold more feedback loops at once and do some unsupervised load balancing between them
you can make some of people’s feedback loops managing another person’s feedback loops
Now jump to this post https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/09/ars-longa-vita-brevis/
another frame is that instead of thinking about how many bits you can successfully transmit, think about whether the behaviors implied by the bits you transmit can run in loops, whether the loops are supervised or unsupervised and what range of noise they remain stable under.
I didn’t make the leap from bits of information to feedback loops but it makes intuitive sense. Transmiting information that compresses by giving you the tools to figure out the information yourself seems useful.
Heh, “read the sequences” clocks in at 3 words.
Doesn’t include which sequences.
In the original context this means Eliezer’s posts from 2007 to 2009 (which got compiled as The Sequences and later recompiled into the half-as-long Rationality A-Z)