Ah, I had seen that. And bounced off yet again, because it started out with repetition that the levels are progressive and exclusive, and it seemed to continue the implication that each level is the primary belief of the proponents/victims of that level.
It also uses an example where higher levels are strictly worse in the author’s opinion, and I’ve seen so few examples of the other direction (where higher levels allow one to predict the future better, and we’re better off ignoring Level 1 and 2 to get level 3 and 4 working well (perhaps in the context of societal equilibria), that I honestly don’t know whether the theory is positive or normative.
Note: I should probably acknowledge that I may be The Nihilist in this system. Communication is an act, which sometimes conveys trivial factual information, and almost always conveys illegible status and connotative information.
Can you speak more to how higher levels would allow predicting the future better?
I might be mistaken—my understanding of this is that the act of knowing and understanding that other people are on levels 3 and 4 is itself still a level-1 act: it’s an object-level belief about the states of human minds in the universe. And therefore you can be aware of the level-3 and level-4 effects of your own actions (and choose them accordingly), without being on 3 or 4 yourself. To be on level-3 or level-4 involves actually missing information (or at least risking missing it). As I’ve understood it.
And that’s why Zvi put the “Pragmatist” at only level 2, even though he “balances impact at all levels they are aware of slash care about.” He can lie, or he can tell the truth, and he does whatever will bring his net preferred effect across all levels. I think rationalists are the Pragmatist.
I do personally disagree with Zvi about the right framing of the levels (with Mr Hire’s comments on this post being an example of a disagreement in frame that I share)
Ah, I had seen that. And bounced off yet again, because it started out with repetition that the levels are progressive and exclusive, and it seemed to continue the implication that each level is the primary belief of the proponents/victims of that level.
It also uses an example where higher levels are strictly worse in the author’s opinion, and I’ve seen so few examples of the other direction (where higher levels allow one to predict the future better, and we’re better off ignoring Level 1 and 2 to get level 3 and 4 working well (perhaps in the context of societal equilibria), that I honestly don’t know whether the theory is positive or normative.
Note: I should probably acknowledge that I may be The Nihilist in this system. Communication is an act, which sometimes conveys trivial factual information, and almost always conveys illegible status and connotative information.
Can you speak more to how higher levels would allow predicting the future better?
I might be mistaken—my understanding of this is that the act of knowing and understanding that other people are on levels 3 and 4 is itself still a level-1 act: it’s an object-level belief about the states of human minds in the universe. And therefore you can be aware of the level-3 and level-4 effects of your own actions (and choose them accordingly), without being on 3 or 4 yourself. To be on level-3 or level-4 involves actually missing information (or at least risking missing it). As I’ve understood it.
And that’s why Zvi put the “Pragmatist” at only level 2, even though he “balances impact at all levels they are aware of slash care about.” He can lie, or he can tell the truth, and he does whatever will bring his net preferred effect across all levels. I think rationalists are the Pragmatist.
I do personally disagree with Zvi about the right framing of the levels (with Mr Hire’s comments on this post being an example of a disagreement in frame that I share)