I wrote Smart Losers a long time ago, trying to understand/explain certain human phenomena. But the model could potentially be useful for understanding (certain aspects of) human-AI interactions as well.
Possibly relevant anecdote: Once I was with a group of people who tried various psychological experiments. That day, the organizers proposed that we play iterated Prisonner’s Dilemma. I was like “yay, I know the winning strategy, this will be so easy!”
I lost. Almost everyone always defected against me; there wasn’t much I could do to get points comparable to other people who mostly cooperated with each other.
After the game, I asked why. (During the game, we were not allowed to communicate, just to write our moves.) The typical answer was something like: “well, you are obviously very smart, so no matter what I do, you will certainly find a way to win against me, so my best option is to play it safe and always defect, to avoid the worst outcome”.
I am not even sure if I should be angry at them. I suppose that in real life, when you have about average intelligence, “don’t trust people visibly smarter than you” is probably a good strategy, on average, because there are just too many clever scammers walking around. At the same time I feel hurt, because I am a natural altruist and cooperator, so this feels extremely unfair, and a loss for both sides.
(There were other situations in my life where the same pattern probably also applied, but most of the time, you just don’t know why other people do whatever they do. This time I was told their reasoning explicitly.)
What (human or not) phenomena do you think are well explained by this model? I tried to think of any for 5 minutes and the best I came up with was the strong egalitarianism among hunter gatherers. I don’t actually know that much about hunter gatherers though. In the modern world something where “high IQ” people are doing worse is sex, but it doesn’t seem to fit your model.
Human-human: Various historical and current episodes of smarter-than-average populations being persecuted or discriminated against, such as intellectuals, “capitalists” (i.e., people labeled as such), certain ethnic groups. (I’m unsure my model is actually a good explanation of such phenomena, but this is mainly what I was trying to explain.)
Human-AI: Many people being reluctant to believe that it’s a good idea to build unaligned artificial superintelligence and then constraining them with a system of laws and/or social norms (which some people like Robin Hanson and Mathew Barnett have proposed). Aside from the issue of violent overthrow, any such system is bound to have loopholes, which the ASI will be more adept at exploiting, yet this adeptness potentially causes the ASI to be worse off (less likely to exist in the first place), similar to what happens in my model.
I wrote Smart Losers a long time ago, trying to understand/explain certain human phenomena. But the model could potentially be useful for understanding (certain aspects of) human-AI interactions as well.
Possibly relevant anecdote: Once I was with a group of people who tried various psychological experiments. That day, the organizers proposed that we play iterated Prisonner’s Dilemma. I was like “yay, I know the winning strategy, this will be so easy!”
I lost. Almost everyone always defected against me; there wasn’t much I could do to get points comparable to other people who mostly cooperated with each other.
After the game, I asked why. (During the game, we were not allowed to communicate, just to write our moves.) The typical answer was something like: “well, you are obviously very smart, so no matter what I do, you will certainly find a way to win against me, so my best option is to play it safe and always defect, to avoid the worst outcome”.
I am not even sure if I should be angry at them. I suppose that in real life, when you have about average intelligence, “don’t trust people visibly smarter than you” is probably a good strategy, on average, because there are just too many clever scammers walking around. At the same time I feel hurt, because I am a natural altruist and cooperator, so this feels extremely unfair, and a loss for both sides.
(There were other situations in my life where the same pattern probably also applied, but most of the time, you just don’t know why other people do whatever they do. This time I was told their reasoning explicitly.)
What (human or not) phenomena do you think are well explained by this model? I tried to think of any for 5 minutes and the best I came up with was the strong egalitarianism among hunter gatherers. I don’t actually know that much about hunter gatherers though. In the modern world something where “high IQ” people are doing worse is sex, but it doesn’t seem to fit your model.
Human-human: Various historical and current episodes of smarter-than-average populations being persecuted or discriminated against, such as intellectuals, “capitalists” (i.e., people labeled as such), certain ethnic groups. (I’m unsure my model is actually a good explanation of such phenomena, but this is mainly what I was trying to explain.)
Human-AI: Many people being reluctant to believe that it’s a good idea to build unaligned artificial superintelligence and then constraining them with a system of laws and/or social norms (which some people like Robin Hanson and Mathew Barnett have proposed). Aside from the issue of violent overthrow, any such system is bound to have loopholes, which the ASI will be more adept at exploiting, yet this adeptness potentially causes the ASI to be worse off (less likely to exist in the first place), similar to what happens in my model.