If you want to become more honest and less self-deceiving, acquire power
If you want to make other people more honest and less self-deceiving, provide them with power (including power to protect themselves from you)
If you know someone who is more powerful than you but cant guarantee an upper bound on their power (and future power), then occlumency no longer works
Unboundedness
If you want an unlimited amount of power (such as a utility maximiser), there will almost always be coalitions of people more powerful than you against whom self-deception works
As long as there exist (hostile) coalitions of people unboundedly more powerful than you, completely removing self-deception from yourself is impossible
More than just yourself
If you want more examples of honesty and lack of self-deception available to you, ask powerful people to speak about their life experience. If you want these examples to be public, make them public
If you want two agents hostile to each other to both simultaneously be honest and not self-deceiving, provide them defensive rather than offensive power
If you want to achieve world peace, consider building defensive but not offensive power for every level of self-organisation—individual, family, ideological group, geographic group, etc etc
Time
If you don’t want someone to learn skills of dishonesty and self-deception, provide them with power as early as possible
If you don’t want to learn skills of dishonesty and self-deception, acquire power as early as possible
Hiding
If you want to acquire power without dishonesty or self-deception, ensure that your mental state and all causally downstream changes to world state are indistinguishable from noise in the eyes of more powerful actors.
I’m sure you can find real world examples of most of these.
Also there might exist edge cases where some of the above corollaries don’t hold, those edge cases are worth exploring.
Also: this post is refreshing because it is not about AI and has the same vibes as Lesswrong 2008 (back when LW was actually good). I made an alt just to reply to it.
That’s a complicated question. At an individual level you have value alignment (people who agree with your values) and incentive alignment (people who disagree with your values but do what you want anyway because incentives).
Value alignment is mostly persuasion and having enough attention of people.
Incentive alignment is everything on Maslow hierarchy. You can reward or penalise others in terms of their physical safety, in terms of food and water, in terms of social approval of family and friends, in terms of providing them meaning in life, etc. (Which is basically the stuff you’re saying)
There’s another lens to look at this which is, how do you get a lot of leverage over reality. Naval Ravikant quotes three forms of leverage—labour, capital and anything that replicate at zero cost on the internet. There’s more nuance to this but at a high level I agree—having a lot of people who will listen to you is power, having a lot of money is power and publishing information/code/media/games/etc that affect millions of lives is power.
Corollaries:
Honesty
If you want to become more honest and less self-deceiving, acquire power
If you want to make other people more honest and less self-deceiving, provide them with power (including power to protect themselves from you)
If you know someone who is more powerful than you but cant guarantee an upper bound on their power (and future power), then occlumency no longer works
Unboundedness
If you want an unlimited amount of power (such as a utility maximiser), there will almost always be coalitions of people more powerful than you against whom self-deception works
As long as there exist (hostile) coalitions of people unboundedly more powerful than you, completely removing self-deception from yourself is impossible
More than just yourself
If you want more examples of honesty and lack of self-deception available to you, ask powerful people to speak about their life experience. If you want these examples to be public, make them public
If you want two agents hostile to each other to both simultaneously be honest and not self-deceiving, provide them defensive rather than offensive power
If you want to achieve world peace, consider building defensive but not offensive power for every level of self-organisation—individual, family, ideological group, geographic group, etc etc
Time
If you don’t want someone to learn skills of dishonesty and self-deception, provide them with power as early as possible
If you don’t want to learn skills of dishonesty and self-deception, acquire power as early as possible
Hiding
If you want to acquire power without dishonesty or self-deception, ensure that your mental state and all causally downstream changes to world state are indistinguishable from noise in the eyes of more powerful actors.
I’m sure you can find real world examples of most of these.
Also there might exist edge cases where some of the above corollaries don’t hold, those edge cases are worth exploring.
Also: this post is refreshing because it is not about AI and has the same vibes as Lesswrong 2008 (back when LW was actually good). I made an alt just to reply to it.
What would you say that the main types of power are?
My list (for humans): physical security, financial security, social security, emotional security (this one you can only give yourself though)
That’s a complicated question. At an individual level you have value alignment (people who agree with your values) and incentive alignment (people who disagree with your values but do what you want anyway because incentives).
Value alignment is mostly persuasion and having enough attention of people.
Incentive alignment is everything on Maslow hierarchy. You can reward or penalise others in terms of their physical safety, in terms of food and water, in terms of social approval of family and friends, in terms of providing them meaning in life, etc. (Which is basically the stuff you’re saying)
There’s another lens to look at this which is, how do you get a lot of leverage over reality. Naval Ravikant quotes three forms of leverage—labour, capital and anything that replicate at zero cost on the internet. There’s more nuance to this but at a high level I agree—having a lot of people who will listen to you is power, having a lot of money is power and publishing information/code/media/games/etc that affect millions of lives is power.