Laterally through the chronophone

In “Archimedes’s Chronophone”, Yudkowsky asks: What would you say to Archimedes——what important message would you want to send back in time, to set the world on a hopeworthy course from then on——if you’re barred from saying anything that’s too anachronistic? That is: What would you say, if the message Archimedes receives is not literally what you said, but rather is whatever would be the output of the timeless principles that you used to generate your message, as applied in Archimedes’s mind in his context? He then explains that the question points at advice we can give to ourselves for original thinking. More generally, he writes:

The point of the chronophone dilemma is to make us think about what kind of cognitive policies are good to follow when you don’t know your destination in advance.

Lateral anachronism

This question doesn’t only address what to say to Archimedes through the chronophone, or what to say to ourselves. It also addresses what advice we can give to our contemporaries, when our contemporaries are separated from us by a chasm that’s like the chasm that separates us from Archimedes.

This sort of “lateral anachronism” shows up across major differences in mindset, such as between people living in different cultures, countries, or ideologies. (People going along parallel but separate timecourses, you could say.) Someone’s context——their education, communities, language, and so on——will determine what {concepts, ways of thinking, ways of being, coordination points, values, possibilities} they’ll understand and give weight to. If someone comes from a world different enough from your world, and they try to communicate something important to you, you’re prone to, one way or another, not really take on board what they wanted to communicate to you. You’ll misunderstand, overtranslate, dismiss, ignore, round off, pigeonhole, be defensive about, or fearfully avoid what they’re saying.

Lateral anachronism also shows up in situations of conflict. Every motion the other person makes——every statement, every argument, every proposed conversational procedure, every negotiation, every plea, every supposed common ground——may be a lie, a ploy to mislead you about their beliefs or intentions, trolling bait, a performance to rally their troops or to garner third-party support or maintain their egoic delusion, an exploitation of your good will, a distraction from their hidden malevolent activity, interference with your line of thinking, or an attempt to propagandistically disrupt your own internal political will and motivation. Conflict is a hell of a drug. Any action can be rationalized as deeply nefarious with a bit of effort, and taking that interpretive stance towards another person is perhaps nearly a hardwired instinctive pattern that can trigger and self-sustainingly stay triggered.

Examples of lateral anachronism

You have a detailed argument for why cryonics is high expected value and I should sign up? That just tells me to use weird status moves to push people into ignoring AGI risk and being excited about the upside, because that’s me using my accustomed [way to apply social pressure] to get people to buy into my preferred [coordination-point to make my sector of society behave optimistically, regardless of whether or not the “belief” involved actually makes sense].

You demand that people making factual claims relevant to public policy must put explicit probabilities on observable correlates of their statements? That just tells me to demand that people making policy claims must have a PhD and run a major AI lab, because that’s [the externally verifiable standard that I’m already prepared to meet and that my ideological opponents are not already prepared to meet]. You double down, saying that explicit probabilities and updates can be mathematically shown to enable truth tracking in the long run? I double down, saying that the community of certified researchers is the only group qualified to discern useful and prudent research from useless and imprudent research, because that’s [the underlying judgement criterion that I already like and expect to put me in power].

But it’s actually true that you really are trying to be truth-seeking, not power-seeking, you object? And, you go on, you’re truth-seeking about truth-seeking, and you’d truth-seekingly update about what you advocate as truth-seeking if there were truth-seekingly-relevant evidence that shows in what direction you truth-seekingly-should update your beliefs about what cognitive policies are truth-seeking? So when my chronophone interprets your underlying cognitive policy as being about power-seeking, the chronophone is being unfair and denying your existence as a truth-seeker, and objectively I should be translating what you say as being truth-seeking? Well, just as you have denied the existence of me, a power-seeker, by asserting, at this meta-level of our discourse, that what’s “actually true” or “objective” should be our politically shared criterion, rather than what is the power-seekingly expedient thing to do, so too will I deny the existence of you, a truth-seeker, and discount your claims as just more power-seeking moves intended to gain the upper hand in who gets to adjudicate which cognitive policies will be followed. Because apparently that’s what we’re doing, denying other people’s ways of being. Because that’s my [locally-reflectively-stable object-and-meta-level cognitive policy for relating to other people].

Answer?: Rationality

The question is:

What kind of cognitive policies are good to follow when you don’t know your destination in advance?

Which also answers the question:

What kind of cognitive policies can be recommended in good faith across the chasm yawning between different destinations?

Rationality is one class of answers. But that answer doesn’t cross all chasms——sometimes it doesn’t easily translate to other mindsets, it isn’t picked up, it can’t be argued into someone who doesn’t accept the sort of justifications that come naturally to someone in a Rational mindset. A Rationalist might argue that, by its nature, Rationality can be eventually argued into more or less any person who hasn’t completely closed themselves off from noticing new ways of thinking, because Rationality is soooo gewd in such great generality. But even if that’s true, the “eventually” might be only after a long time or under specific circumstances. So Rationality doesn’t exhaust the practical need for chasm-crossing policies.

What are some answers that more easily cross some chasms that Rationality doesn’t easily cross?

Rationality can rightly claim to contain all other virtues——the nameless virtue, the virtue of the void, regenerates all other virtues, even including virtues that describe a self-consciously bounded-compute, boundedly-plastic agent. But we’re created alrady in motion, so that there are fairly low-compute, low-exploration default fallback cognitive policies that are familiar and often okay. These fallbacks often contain core parts of our values, and often don’t come already explicit, already in a form that’s ready to cleanly update on evidence. There are Chesterton’s fences, and crossing these fences sometimes leads into valleys of bad rationality before leading back out into winning.

We are cognitive misers. By strong default, we don’t do anything that’s resource intensive (i.e. using up energy, computation, attention, brainware, or plasticity), such as exploring, computing implications, updating our beliefs, or refactoring our goals. Hopping a fence and crossing a valley take resources. The winning Rationality, or wherever else you find yourself, is one destination after some choice of fences and valleys crossed, among many possible destinations (even if they’re all on their way to a single more distant destination). Behind, under, or before your current destination, there are fallbacks, original intuitions, primordial instincts.

So: Even if someone doesn’t go in for this whole “rationality” business, there are still shards of winning-behavior and shards of value in them. Those shards of winning and shards of value are enough to be powerful, and will have their own local reflective stability and local coherence. They may be enough to embed cognitive policies that are transmissible across chasms of lateral anachronism, more fluently than some more complete Rationality, and that would robustly lead to goodness.

Answer?: Wisdom

One conjectural answer to the dilemma: Wisdom. It would be wise to step back from the Precipice. It would be wise to step out of races and conflicts. It would be wise to back off from posturing. It would be wise to deeply consider the risk of changing everything. It would be wise to relinquish a grasping, clawing need to be the One who brings fire down from heaven. It would be wise to put the sweep of humanity and humaneness above personal ambition and interested looks.

Wisdom is appealing to some, maybe even sometimes where Rationality isn’t. Rationality is demanding, hygienic, IQ-dependent, compute-hungry. Wisdom is esteemed. Wisdom makes you someone that others can look to. Wisdom makes life rich and creates the context needed for flourishing. Wisdom dances around suffering. Wisdom maintains balance across the narrow bridge.

How could wisdom be spoken through a chronophone? First we have to see what wisdom is.

What wisdom is

A very partial list:

A wise person might say something simple but deep. They might say it at the right moment, when others wouldn’t have said it just then, even though others have heard it said, and are familiar enough with its meaning. Wisdom reminds.
Wisdom sits in paradox, and is even at home there.
- Hope conflicts with truth. A hope is fragile, and depends on consensus. A hope can be destroyed by truth. A truth can lead to despair. Wisdom doesn’t despair, but it also doesn’t turn away from truth. It sits circumspectly with the truth. It doesn’t cling to false hope, but it doesn’t dash the primordial hope——it holds tight to the primordial hopes, and holds open the way for the primordial hopes to become immediate hopes.
- Openness conflicts with integrity. Integrity resists distortive forces on judgement, and upholds roles needed for core integrative processes such as justice systems (impartiality), coordination (reliability, preference nonfalsification), and truth-seeking (honesty). Openness dissolves boundaries, tweaks and combines, explores, manifests novelty. Wisdom upholds roles, upholds shared intentions. But wisdom is ready, cautiously, to yield to restructuring. Wisdom dimly but resolutely sees what was the core of what was being upheld, and so can dimly discern what is an erosion of the core, from what is a shedding of cruft and a flowering of the core of what was being upheld. Wisdom carries [what there was to be integritous about] into [the novelty that is inevitable and thoroughgoing], and holds it up for interpretation, though wisdom may be at a loss to do the interpretation.
- Transcendence conflicts with groundedness. The ground is what can bear weight. Transcendence is climbing across and beyond. To stick to the ground, or to transcend? Wisdom trusts the ground to put weight on it, and distrusts what no longer bears weight. The distrust points to scaffolding——the distrust says to transcend, yes, but only when the rungs bear weight——but leaves open the possibility of something else that could bear weight, a radical, ladder-kicking transcendence.
- Righteousness conflicts with harmony. Harmony means fitting together. Righteousness opposes the right to the wrong, creating disharmony. What does wisdom do here?
Wisdom orients to what matters most, and holds it firmly in mind, even to the neglect of other things.
Wisdom integrates.
- Wisdom expands the moral circle. It considers the needs of each.
- Wisdom remembers. Wisdom may be tactful, private; it may keep quiet to preserve dignity or keep the innocent from horror; but wisdom doesn’t discard memory.
- Wisdom brings in considerations, so that no crucial ones are left out. It gives voice and weight to them.
- Wisdom tries on viewpoints, empathizes, and even sometimes takes on the values of others.
- Wisdom symmetrizes. It finds the way to see conflict as twins hitting each other. It looks to the golden rule.
Wisdom tends selfless.
Wisdom favors peace and is peaceful. Wisdom favors calm and levelness.
Wisdom dwells in what is revealed at pivotal points in lives——death, birth, marriage, the great work.
Wisdom balances. It walks on a balance beam, which takes attention and skill, but doesn’t require too much given talent.
Wisdom is wholeness, like the quality without a name. Forces exert themselves freely, maybe pressing against each other but in a supportive local-equilibrium, without degrading or stymieing each other.
Wisdom is life-oriented. It looks to play infinite games.
Wisdom protects and holds tight to what matters most, but doesn’t cling to what doesn’t matter.
Wisdom does not lead or own. Wisdom is a steward. A steward is humble, and stewardship is not about the steward. Wisdom doesn’t make anything be about itself or its image.
Wisdom does not make others dependent on it. It may point them toward the open sea, it may keep them from a premature drowning before they know to keep watch, but it lets them make mistakes.
Wisdom distrusts actions taken out of {fear, urgency, exhortation, pride, anger, clinging, haste}, though it trusts the sources of those states.
Wisdom distrusts actions taken from a low-information perspective.
Wisdom is wary of the Coalescence of Political Will.
Wisdom, at the meta level, trusts itself. It may or may not get things right, and it knows this. It may or may not figure things out, and it knows this. But it trusts that it will orient appropriately to figuring out what needs to be figured out——that it will be pointed in the right direction——or that if it’s not pointed in the right direction, it will be pointed in the right direction on the meta-level, meaning that it will go on correcting the direction that it’s pointed in. This appears as an unbreakable hope: Not a false belief that things will work out, but an eternal orientation to orienting rightly, and whatever justified confidence comes from the success that results from this eternal orientation to orienting rightly.
Wisdom doesn’t drop important things even when there are dramatic, loud distractions, or when everyone else’s attention has flown away.
Wisdom listens to hints, listens to whoever others are turning away from. It looks out for the invisible directions that ought to be followed.
Wisdom undecides, always undecides. It considers more possibilities, and doubts more, and backs down from stances, and leaves conflicts it had been conscripted into since the beginning. It relinquishes assumptions that have been assumed since the beginning. It learns words in order to express what is to be newly doubted.
Wisdom notices what works, whether or not there is a theory to say why it works.
Wisdom respects Chesterton’s fences.
Wisdom doesn’t spin its wheels, or pour good money after bad. It sees strifeful mental loops and backs off from them, disinvesting in them.
Wisdom doesn’t hold others in contempt. Wisdom doesn’t participate in shared contempt or pride.
Wisdom knows, in a rough and ready way, that it isn’t behind a Cartesian boundary.
- It knows that it, and others, know things without knowing that they know them.
- It knows that its actions have effects other than through the intended channels
- It knows that when it decides, it decides timelessly, as though for everyone who eternally returns to this situation.
- It knows that its bearing——its thoughts and stances——will radiate out, through modeling and ritual symbolism.
If something can’t be approached——if something can’t be said, felt, looked at, done——wisdom stays nearby, speaking about something nearby, looking out of the corner of the eye, speaking about a similar thing or an abstract version, or addressing the meta-level of why the something can’t be approached. Wisdom doesn’t drop what can’t be said, it holds it firmly, and if it matters, then wisdom speaks it anyway.
Wisdom takes the wide view, looking at things overall.
Wisdom knows that play and curiosity give life.
Wisdom loves life writ large.
Wisdom knows to say oops, and knows to ask whether a big idea or policy will later be an Oops.
Wisdom listens but doesn’t believe——wisdom looks for the truth in someone’s words, but doesn’t accept the words as already true.
Wisdom values stories.
Wisdom knows that it doesn’t know.
Wisdom uses simple tools, rules, and ideas.
Wisdom is oriented in history. Wisdom views itself as part of a process (ecosystem, market, mind) distributed across people and time.
It’s unwise to seek to harm others for the sake of harm.
It’s unwise to destroy what had been the preconditions for your existence.
Wisdom takes realizations and propagates them, so that when the realization is relevant it will raise its hand and volunteer its services.
Wisdom allows tensions and contradictions. Wisdom doesn’t discard one or another of the forces in tension, and doesn’t discard one or another of the propositions in contradiction. Wisdom waits and looks to see the truth in each force or proposition, and to see the world that has both true elements.
Wisdom inclines away from goodharting.
Wisdom attends to the derivative. It wants change to be pointed in the right direction. It attends to higher-order derivatives. Whether the second derivative is positive, that’s more important than whether the first derivative is positive. It wants change, though it is patient. It is very concerned when the highest-order visible derivative is negative.
Wisdom is cautious. It doesn’t rush in to overinvest.
Wisdom comes from experience.
Wisdom tries the simple thing first.
Wisdom says “god forbid” when discussing hypotheticals, if the discussion of those hypotheticals could be taken as a joking-not-joking way to test the waters to build political will to do something heinous.
Wisdom knows that one person’s bad arguments can’t speak for an idea.
Wisdom doubts.
Wisdom thinks long-term.
Wisdom works to prevent [cognitive policies appropriate to agents in conflicts] from being installed more deeply than absolutely necessary.

This list is a blind man touching the elephant’s ear. What else would you say about wisdom? Especially things that aren’t just Good, Rational, Desirable, Competent.

What wisdom is not

Delimitations

Some things that are nearby wisdom but aren’t wisdom:

Cleverness. Being able to find surprising solutions that are surprising because they are complicated, or required creative thinking.
Good judgement. Though wisdom is sometimes defined as good judgement, good judgement can require domain knowledge, hidden information, and a lot of calculation. It would be wise to sometimes try to gain those things, but if wisdom is to be anything other than Good, then wisdom is not by itself sufficient for good judgement.
Courage.
Compassion.
Equanimity.
Competence.
Good leadership.

Where wisdom fails

Wisdom doesn’t stick its neck out enough.
Wisdom lacks Yang——innovation, hard work, making change, building, preventing evil.
Wisdom dies in excess pacifism. Wisdom can’t sustain peace that requires might.
Wisdom doesn’t know that time passes——irreversible events happen.
Wisdom doesn’t calculate, and misses answers that need calculation, except by deference.
Wisdom may put so much weight on saying what the other needs to hear, that it forgets the truth and makes itself unworkable-with.

Perversions of wisdom

The singular core inversion of wisdom is the acceptance of the inevitability of death.
More generally, “acceptance” is often code for nihilism or complicity. Wisdom shades into cynicism, which shades into a stance that discards hope.
Complicity, apologism, and conservatism masquerade as wisdom, maybe sanctimoniously. The best way out is always through. If the wisdom says not to describe things, or says not to assert property rights, or distracts from corruption, then it’s not wisdom.
Buddhism advocates decompiling desire in order to avoid suffering, which is tantamount to nihilism.
Pretending to be wise; treating any fraught definite judgement as immature, hasty, overconfident, undignified; ignoring that time passes and any way of being is a fraught definite judgement.
If people with some wisdom are esteemed, that’s a kind of power, so wisdom corrupts like any other kind of power. People with wisdom are especially prone to gaslight others, because I esteem your wisdom as judgement that knows when my judgement is fundamentally wrong. People with some wisdom may hoard hope around themselves.
Wisdom may shade into blind optimism, which is inappropriate in world beyond the reach of god.
Being sensitive to the underlying sweep of humanity, wisdom may slip into siding with collectives, and cut down the tall poppies.
Being sensitive to higher order derivatives and to the danger of false hope, wisdom may disinvest from and mock innovation and solutionism.
Being sensitive to higher order derivatives and to the underlying sweep and size of humanity, wisdom may think that everything is inevitable and fated. It may falsely deny people’s agency and be defeatist about large-scale processes.

Hypothesis

What, if anything, is wisdom? Is it different from sanity?

A hypothesis: Wisdom is getting the first-order bits right.

This definition breaks down when what’s needed is calculation, energy, new ideas. (But it would be wise to invest in calculating, directing energy, and creating new ideas, and unwise not to do so.) So the definition should be refined:

Wisdom is getting right the first-order bits that are natural——that are expressed naturally in the familiar internal language of living.

So for example, wisdom might get the wrong answer, but wisdom will pause and take its time to think, because pausing and taking the time to think is a familiar way of being. Wisdom doesn’t avoid fear, or pretend that there’s nothing to fear, but wisdom will track that acute fear compromises judgement——fear is a major fact about a mental state.

The “familiar internal language of living” means the mental elements that we’re intimately familiar with, because they are us. It doesn’t mean mental elements that we have words for. For example, wisdom will notice when thoughts have been [repeating themselves without going any of the branching paths that would build up a better understanding] and back off from doing that, even if there’s not a short word for that. It’s something that can be noticed, in the course of familiarly reflecting on familiar mental events, and is sometimes a first-order bit.

Whereas rationality (and sanity?) goes along with competence, it’s not so strange to be wise and incompetent. That means you have the important things pointed in the right direction, even if you can’t go very far in a direction on your own. We could say:

Wisdom is being pointed in the right direction, along all the important dimensions.

Questions

A wise person is a person who does things in a way that is not horribly wrong, along all salient dimensions, including reflectively. Is this something that supports an induction? Is someone who gets most first-order bits right likely to also get almost all first-order bits right, and to go on correcting the very wrong first-order bits? Is wisdom a form of correlated coverage? Or no?

Is it something that can be {taught, induced, evoked}? Is it something that spreads? Is there a basin of attraction around it? Do people find wisdom appealing? Should they? Can wisdom be truthfully made more appealing?

Who has been wise? Who has been unwise? When has wisdom mattered? When has wisdom not mattered?

Would a wise person destroy the world with their own hands?

What is wisdom?