Have you read Cixin Liu’s Dark Forest, the sequel to Three Body Problem? The situation on the ground might be several iterations more complicated than you’re predicting.
Strong upvoted! That’s the way to think about this.
I read Three-body problem, not the rest yet (you’ve guessed my password, I’ll go buy a copy).
My understanding of the situation here on the real, not-fake Earth, is that having the social graph be this visible and manipulable by invisible hackers, does not improve the situation.
I tried clean and quiet solutions and they straight-up did not work at all. Social reality is a mean mother fucker, especially when it is self-reinforcing, so it’s not surprising to see somewhat messy solutions become necessary.
I think I was correct to spend several years (since early 2020) trying various clean and quiet solutions, and watching them not work, until I started to get a sense of why they might not be working.
Of course, maybe the later stages of my failures were just one more person falling through the cracks of the post-FTX Malthusian environment, twisting EA and AI safety culture out of shape. This made it difficult for a lot of people to process information about X-risk, even in cases like mine where the price tag was exactly $0.
I could have waited longer and made more tries, but that would have meant sitting quietly through more years of slow takeoff with the situation probably not being fixed.
Could transparency/openness of information be a major factor?
I’ve noticed that video games become much worse as a result of visibility of data. With wikis, build-in search, automatic markets, and other such things, metas (as in meta-gaming) start to form quickly. The optimal strategies become rather easy to find, and people start exploiting them as a matter of course.
Another example is dating. Compare modern dating apps to the 1980s. Dating used to be much less algorithmic, you didn’t run people through a red-flag checklist, you just spent time with them and evaluated how enjoyable that was.
I think the closed-information trait is extremely valuable as it can actually defeat Moloch. Or more accurately, the world seems to be descending into an unfavorable nash’s equilibrium as a result of optimal strategies being visible.
By the way, the closed-information vs open-information duality can be compared to ribbonfarm’s Warrens vs. Plazas view of social spaces (not sure if you know about that article)
So you read Three Body Problem but not Dark Forest. Now that I think about it, that actually goes quite a long way to put the rest into context. I’m going to go read about conflict/mistake theory and see if I can get into a better headspace to make sense of this.
Have you read Cixin Liu’s Dark Forest, the sequel to Three Body Problem? The situation on the ground might be several iterations more complicated than you’re predicting.
Strong upvoted! That’s the way to think about this.
I read Three-body problem, not the rest yet (you’ve guessed my password, I’ll go buy a copy).
My understanding of the situation here on the real, not-fake Earth, is that having the social graph be this visible and manipulable by invisible hackers, does not improve the situation.
I tried clean and quiet solutions and they straight-up did not work at all. Social reality is a mean mother fucker, especially when it is self-reinforcing, so it’s not surprising to see somewhat messy solutions become necessary.
I think I was correct to spend several years (since early 2020) trying various clean and quiet solutions, and watching them not work, until I started to get a sense of why they might not be working.
Of course, maybe the later stages of my failures were just one more person falling through the cracks of the post-FTX Malthusian environment, twisting EA and AI safety culture out of shape. This made it difficult for a lot of people to process information about X-risk, even in cases like mine where the price tag was exactly $0.
I could have waited longer and made more tries, but that would have meant sitting quietly through more years of slow takeoff with the situation probably not being fixed.
Could transparency/openness of information be a major factor?
I’ve noticed that video games become much worse as a result of visibility of data. With wikis, build-in search, automatic markets, and other such things, metas (as in meta-gaming) start to form quickly. The optimal strategies become rather easy to find, and people start exploiting them as a matter of course.
Another example is dating. Compare modern dating apps to the 1980s. Dating used to be much less algorithmic, you didn’t run people through a red-flag checklist, you just spent time with them and evaluated how enjoyable that was.
I think the closed-information trait is extremely valuable as it can actually defeat Moloch. Or more accurately, the world seems to be descending into an unfavorable nash’s equilibrium as a result of optimal strategies being visible.
By the way, the closed-information vs open-information duality can be compared to ribbonfarm’s Warrens vs. Plazas view of social spaces (not sure if you know about that article)
So you read Three Body Problem but not Dark Forest. Now that I think about it, that actually goes quite a long way to put the rest into context. I’m going to go read about conflict/mistake theory and see if I can get into a better headspace to make sense of this.