As you say, the ability to coordinate large-scale action by decree requires a high place in a hierarchy. With the internet, though, it doesn’t take authority just to spread an idea, as long it’s one that people find valuable or otherwise really like. I’m not sure why adjacency has to be “proper”; I’m just talking about social networks, where people can be part of multiple groups and transmit ideas and opinions between them.
Regarding value divergence: Yes, there is conflict because of how people prioritize desires and values differently. However, it would be a huge step forward to get people to see that it is merely their priorities that are different, rather than their fundamental desires and values. It would be a further huge step forward for them to realize that if they work together and let go of some highly specific expectations of how those desires and values are to be fulfilled (which they will at least sometimes be willing to do), they can accomplish enormous mutual benefit. This approach is not going to be perfect, but it will be much better than what we have now because it will keep things moving forward instead of getting stuck.
Your suggestions are indeed ways to make the world a better place. They’re just not quite fast enough or high-impact enough for my standards. Being unimpressed with human philosophy, I figured that there could easily be some good answers that humans hadn’t found because they were too wrapped up in the ones they already had. Therefore, I decided to seek something faster and more effective, and over the years I’ve found some very useful approaches.
When I say a field is “low-hanging fruit”, it’s because I think that there are clear principles that humans can apply to make large improvements in that field, and that the only reason they haven’t done so is they are too confused and distracted (for various reasons) to see the simplicity of those principles underneath all the miscellaneous gimmicks and complex literature.
The approach I took was to construct a vocabulary of foundational building-block concepts, so that people can keep a focus on the critical aspects of a problem and, to borrow from Einstein, make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler.
There’s tremendous untapped potential in human society as a whole, and the reason it is untapped is because humans don’t know how to communicate with each other about what matters. All they need is a vocabulary for describing goals, the problems they face in reaching those goals, and the skills they need to overcome those problems. I’m not knowledgeable enough or skilled enough to solve all of humanity’s problems—but humanity is, once individual humans can work together effectively. My plan is simply to enable them to do that.
I understand that most people assume it’s not possible because they’ve never seen it done and are used to writing off humans (individually and collectively) as hopeless. Perhaps I should dig through the World Optimization topics to see if there’s anyone in this community who recognizes the potential of facilitating communication.
In any case, I appreciate your engagement on this topic, and I’m glad you enjoyed the story enough to comment. If you do decide to explore new options for communication, I’ll be around.
I agree with your comments mostly so far. There is low-hanging fruit even in complex areas, regardless of the prevailing cynicism.
I understand that most people assume it’s not possible because they’ve never seen it done and are used to writing off humans (individually and collectively) as hopeless.
There does seem to be a lot of folks who match that description.
But there are also folks who understand that the world can get better yet nonetheless act like crabs in a bucket due to their desires. The latter group, when they exist in numbers past a certain threshold, likely increase the height of the fruit.
I don’t think most people are consciously aware, but I think most people are unconsciously aware that “it is merely their priorities that are different, rather than their fundamental desires and values” and furthermore our society largely looks structured such that only the priorities are different, but that the priorities differ significantly enough because of the human-sparseness of value-space.
I’m not sure why adjacency has to be “proper”; I’m just talking about social networks, where people can be part of multiple groups and transmit ideas and opinions between them.
I approximately mean something as follows:
Take the vector-value model I described previously. Consider some distance metric (such as the L2 norm), D(a, b) where a and b are humans/points in value-space (or mind-space, where a mind can “reject” an idea by having it be insufficiently compatible). Let k be some threshold for communicability of a particular idea. Assume once an idea is communicated, it is communicated in full-fidelity (you can replace this with a probabilistic or imperfect communication model, but it’s not necessary to illustrate my point). If you create the graph amongst all humans in value-space, where an edge exists between a and b iff D(a,b) < k, it’s not clear to me that this graph is connected, or even has many edges at all. If this is true for a particular idea/k pair, then the idea is unlikely to undergo information cascade, because additional effort is needed in many locations to cross the inferential gap.
As you say, the ability to coordinate large-scale action by decree requires a high place in a hierarchy. With the internet, though, it doesn’t take authority just to spread an idea, as long it’s one that people find valuable or otherwise really like.
Somewhat related, somewhat tangential, I think the internet itself is organized hierarchically as nested “echo-chambers” or something similar where the smallest echo chambers are what we currently call echo-chambers. This means you can translate any idea/concept as existing somewhere on the hierarchy of internet communities, and only ideas high on the hierarchy can effectively spread messages/information cascades widely.
Is there anywhere you can concretely point to in my model(s) you would disagree with?
if there’s anyone in this community who recognizes the potential of facilitating communication.
I agree this is (potentially) high leverage. My strategy has general been that expressing ideas with greater precision more greatly aids communication. An arbitrary conversation is unlikely to transmit the full precision of your idea, but it becomes less likely that you transmit something you don’t mean and that makes a huge difference. The domain of politics seems mostly littered with extremely low precision communication, and in particular, often deceptively precise communication, wherein wording is chosen between two concepts to allow any error correction of behalf of a listener to be in favor of the communicator. Is there any reason why you want to specifically target politics instead of generally trying to make the human race more sane, such as what Yudkowsky did with the sequences?
As you say, the ability to coordinate large-scale action by decree requires a high place in a hierarchy. With the internet, though, it doesn’t take authority just to spread an idea, as long it’s one that people find valuable or otherwise really like. I’m not sure why adjacency has to be “proper”; I’m just talking about social networks, where people can be part of multiple groups and transmit ideas and opinions between them.
Regarding value divergence: Yes, there is conflict because of how people prioritize desires and values differently. However, it would be a huge step forward to get people to see that it is merely their priorities that are different, rather than their fundamental desires and values. It would be a further huge step forward for them to realize that if they work together and let go of some highly specific expectations of how those desires and values are to be fulfilled (which they will at least sometimes be willing to do), they can accomplish enormous mutual benefit. This approach is not going to be perfect, but it will be much better than what we have now because it will keep things moving forward instead of getting stuck.
Your suggestions are indeed ways to make the world a better place. They’re just not quite fast enough or high-impact enough for my standards. Being unimpressed with human philosophy, I figured that there could easily be some good answers that humans hadn’t found because they were too wrapped up in the ones they already had. Therefore, I decided to seek something faster and more effective, and over the years I’ve found some very useful approaches.
When I say a field is “low-hanging fruit”, it’s because I think that there are clear principles that humans can apply to make large improvements in that field, and that the only reason they haven’t done so is they are too confused and distracted (for various reasons) to see the simplicity of those principles underneath all the miscellaneous gimmicks and complex literature.
The approach I took was to construct a vocabulary of foundational building-block concepts, so that people can keep a focus on the critical aspects of a problem and, to borrow from Einstein, make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler.
There’s tremendous untapped potential in human society as a whole, and the reason it is untapped is because humans don’t know how to communicate with each other about what matters. All they need is a vocabulary for describing goals, the problems they face in reaching those goals, and the skills they need to overcome those problems. I’m not knowledgeable enough or skilled enough to solve all of humanity’s problems—but humanity is, once individual humans can work together effectively. My plan is simply to enable them to do that.
I understand that most people assume it’s not possible because they’ve never seen it done and are used to writing off humans (individually and collectively) as hopeless. Perhaps I should dig through the World Optimization topics to see if there’s anyone in this community who recognizes the potential of facilitating communication.
In any case, I appreciate your engagement on this topic, and I’m glad you enjoyed the story enough to comment. If you do decide to explore new options for communication, I’ll be around.
I agree with your comments mostly so far. There is low-hanging fruit even in complex areas, regardless of the prevailing cynicism.
There does seem to be a lot of folks who match that description.
But there are also folks who understand that the world can get better yet nonetheless act like crabs in a bucket due to their desires. The latter group, when they exist in numbers past a certain threshold, likely increase the height of the fruit.
I don’t think most people are consciously aware, but I think most people are unconsciously aware that “it is merely their priorities that are different, rather than their fundamental desires and values” and furthermore our society largely looks structured such that only the priorities are different, but that the priorities differ significantly enough because of the human-sparseness of value-space.
I approximately mean something as follows:
Take the vector-value model I described previously. Consider some distance metric (such as the L2 norm), D(a, b) where a and b are humans/points in value-space (or mind-space, where a mind can “reject” an idea by having it be insufficiently compatible). Let k be some threshold for communicability of a particular idea. Assume once an idea is communicated, it is communicated in full-fidelity (you can replace this with a probabilistic or imperfect communication model, but it’s not necessary to illustrate my point). If you create the graph amongst all humans in value-space, where an edge exists between a and b iff D(a,b) < k, it’s not clear to me that this graph is connected, or even has many edges at all. If this is true for a particular idea/k pair, then the idea is unlikely to undergo information cascade, because additional effort is needed in many locations to cross the inferential gap.
Somewhat related, somewhat tangential, I think the internet itself is organized hierarchically as nested “echo-chambers” or something similar where the smallest echo chambers are what we currently call echo-chambers. This means you can translate any idea/concept as existing somewhere on the hierarchy of internet communities, and only ideas high on the hierarchy can effectively spread messages/information cascades widely.
Is there anywhere you can concretely point to in my model(s) you would disagree with?
I agree this is (potentially) high leverage. My strategy has general been that expressing ideas with greater precision more greatly aids communication. An arbitrary conversation is unlikely to transmit the full precision of your idea, but it becomes less likely that you transmit something you don’t mean and that makes a huge difference. The domain of politics seems mostly littered with extremely low precision communication, and in particular, often deceptively precise communication, wherein wording is chosen between two concepts to allow any error correction of behalf of a listener to be in favor of the communicator. Is there any reason why you want to specifically target politics instead of generally trying to make the human race more sane, such as what Yudkowsky did with the sequences?