I’ve been reading lesswrong on and off for about 7 years (hpmor is great). I realized today that I’ve never had Agency (My life has been a haphazard mess, but I’m lucky to be in an okay place). It’s funny to see this question pop up today of all days.
A guess to an answer to your question: They’d need to realize that intelligence is a thing, they’d need to see from outside of themselves that the brain is this thing that thinks and does and is weird. Theeeen they would need some values or goals to pursue. Values like “self improvement” and goals like “I want to be able to afford the best food in the world 24/7″
How do people end up having plans (which they realistically expect to achieve) that affect at least thousands, and preferably millions of people?
The first thing is to realize that society makes this very difficult for very good reasons. If it was easy to affect thousands or millions of lives, then thousands or millions of people would constantly be affecting your life. This would be undesirable; without stability there can be no successful planning.
So I’d say Step 1 is: Realize that you are going to have to spend an incredible amount of effort to make even very modest changes to society, and that you are very likely to fail, and that that’s as it should be.
I’ve been reading lesswrong on and off for about 7 years (hpmor is great). I realized today that I’ve never had Agency (My life has been a haphazard mess, but I’m lucky to be in an okay place). It’s funny to see this question pop up today of all days.
A guess to an answer to your question: They’d need to realize that intelligence is a thing, they’d need to see from outside of themselves that the brain is this thing that thinks and does and is weird. Theeeen they would need some values or goals to pursue. Values like “self improvement” and goals like “I want to be able to afford the best food in the world 24/7″
How do people end up having plans (which they realistically expect to achieve) that affect at least thousands, and preferably millions of people?
The first thing is to realize that society makes this very difficult for very good reasons. If it was easy to affect thousands or millions of lives, then thousands or millions of people would constantly be affecting your life. This would be undesirable; without stability there can be no successful planning.
So I’d say Step 1 is: Realize that you are going to have to spend an incredible amount of effort to make even very modest changes to society, and that you are very likely to fail, and that that’s as it should be.