I liked the post. Some random thoughts I had while reading some of your random thoughts
You can have agency along the dimensions of both plans and goals. An employee can be very agenty within an organization but not think about whether climbing the organization makes sense. Someone can spend months trying to make sure the path they choose is one that will make them happy, and then simply follow the prescribed script on that path. This screams for a 2 by 2 grid.
On goals—You can be agenty with very big “save/conquer the world” goals, but it’s also possible to be agenty with much smaller goals around personal happiness/hedonism. In Venkatesh Rao’s Loser/Clueless/Sociopath framework, the sociopaths at the top are very agenty—they’ve used their own understanding to climb the ladder and shape the politics such that they win. However, the losers at the bottom are also very agenty—they’ve taken a look at the prizes, and decided the game is not worth playing, so instead just grab their paycheck and look through personal fulfillment in their hobbies and extracurricular activities. This seems to be a clear plan/goal agentiic split.
On status—How you view status depends very much on your goals. If you have large goals, status seems to be pretty instrumental to achieving most large goals, and so pursuing it makes sense. Even for small goals around personal fulfillment, status seems useful. However, the difference seems to be that more agenty people can take status as object, rather than subject. That is, the less agentic way to view status is to internalize shame, embarrassment, contempt, and other status based feelings as ends in themselves, whereas a more agenty person would view the way other people react to status as a means to an end.
I find the second one useful. At the same time, I think the third one is less useful and less likely to be useful as a discussion framework (it’d have a nice name, and the name gets less weird and useful if it’s backed up with a bunch of highly-voted posts from past LW articles). It might be useful to try to define ‘agenty’ for this post.
The problem with the first version of this post was that it was a poor, implicit post; the second version is more likely to get a lot of downvotes, because the post is clearly aimed at newcomers and not as a discussion forum.
I’m confused. Are you saying that highly-upvoted posts make a name nicer and therefore less useful? If so, can you describe the mechanisms behind this?
I think the most common response to ‘community’ should have been a post to LessWrong and its founding sequences. We wanted to create a place for rationalists that can discuss the Art and Science, at least this year.
A place to discuss an important topic which might otherwise not be discussed, is CFAR.
To paraphrase two of the core themes on this site:
In humans, the world is an incredible fabric of complex, entangled, self-reinforcing processes. (Many of us can be made aware of this fact, though usually it isn’t necessary.)
Rather than trying to collect information from each person, we use a series of simpler, more useful shared models, based on our conversations and experiences.
One of the CFAR concepts is the “agent-agent distinction”, where the AI agent is the AI agent, and so also tries to understand its own goals and limitations. One of the main motivations for the new Center for Applied Rationality is to build a sense of understanding and understanding of its own motivations, and these are attempts to make the AI general intelligent agents reflect humanity’s goals.
CFAR has a whole overarching mission of raising the sanity waterline. That is, it is attempting to create people who can benefit from thinking clearly, and help each other reach its goals while also being more effective. As a nonprofit, CFAR is close to being a place where we can help people overcome their irrational biases, and to do so as best they can.
CFAR is building a whole new rationality curriculum that will hopefully help people become more effective.
We are reviving this November and November again. Like the rest of the January 2008 Singularity Summits, we tweaking the curriculum and organization of CFAR alumni. The new thinking tools workshop will give us specific ways to apply the principles of rationality to the behavior of different groups or individuals, as opposed to mere human “capital” and organizational stuff.
In past years, we’ve moved from “organizational inadequacy” to “additional common denominator” posts and to “additional organizational capital” posts, where I’d like there to be funding for doing high-impact good. Emphasizing and organizing such an organization allows us to step outside of the academic and organizational space that would normally be reserved for highly technical people.
In a more practical sense, the oxen-back infrastructure in Berkeley is existing, but we’
The paper doesn’t show up until 4:30, even if the book is intended very specifically to convince a significant fraction of the population that cryonics is plausible for humanity.
For those that don’t understand, see here.
For the first chapter, you basically make the case that the scientific method is wrong, or at least that is not a strawman. The rest of what I’ve read is the most mainstream-seeming and obvious the scientific method seems to be no doubt wrong.
For the second chapter, you basically show the science in a book that is primarily about the ability of human minds to generalize from one another, where it is based on:
The basic Bayes-related questions of personal identity—i.e., how much should it be enough to have a psychological effect?
How much should one’s society be prioritised that one can be in this position?
In particular, it doesn’t fit in the Bostrom model of personal identity.
It’s not entirely clear that the subject matter of writing about the relationship between personal identity and mental identity is exactly the sort of information-theoretic question that could lead us to a useful answer, and the kind of information that would be better in the context of the question you will find yourself in the future.
You probably see this phrasing and the objections about science, and I think you’ve taken them too far. Yes, it’s hard to argue about the degree of overlap with the scientific method, and yes, the two are relevant. But if it’s going to work in such extreme cases for a long time, then there should be an additional thing called “substrategic knowledge”.
One of the things that I think is really important is to figure out how to think about personal identity under the “internal locus of control”. Here’s my attempt to begin that.
The “internal locus of control” seems like it would be quite a different subject in this context, I think from where I’ve heading and here.
If this doesn’t work, then there could be some fundamental difference between myself and a rationalist.
A few of my observations:
I’ve been a slow reader for a while now. I was probably under-remembering a lot about LW when I was a teenager, so I didn’t really get anything.
I liked the post. Some random thoughts I had while reading some of your random thoughts
You can have agency along the dimensions of both plans and goals. An employee can be very agenty within an organization but not think about whether climbing the organization makes sense. Someone can spend months trying to make sure the path they choose is one that will make them happy, and then simply follow the prescribed script on that path. This screams for a 2 by 2 grid.
On goals—You can be agenty with very big “save/conquer the world” goals, but it’s also possible to be agenty with much smaller goals around personal happiness/hedonism. In Venkatesh Rao’s Loser/Clueless/Sociopath framework, the sociopaths at the top are very agenty—they’ve used their own understanding to climb the ladder and shape the politics such that they win. However, the losers at the bottom are also very agenty—they’ve taken a look at the prizes, and decided the game is not worth playing, so instead just grab their paycheck and look through personal fulfillment in their hobbies and extracurricular activities. This seems to be a clear plan/goal agentiic split.
On status—How you view status depends very much on your goals. If you have large goals, status seems to be pretty instrumental to achieving most large goals, and so pursuing it makes sense. Even for small goals around personal fulfillment, status seems useful. However, the difference seems to be that more agenty people can take status as object, rather than subject. That is, the less agentic way to view status is to internalize shame, embarrassment, contempt, and other status based feelings as ends in themselves, whereas a more agenty person would view the way other people react to status as a means to an end.
I find the second one useful. At the same time, I think the third one is less useful and less likely to be useful as a discussion framework (it’d have a nice name, and the name gets less weird and useful if it’s backed up with a bunch of highly-voted posts from past LW articles). It might be useful to try to define ‘agenty’ for this post.
The problem with the first version of this post was that it was a poor, implicit post; the second version is more likely to get a lot of downvotes, because the post is clearly aimed at newcomers and not as a discussion forum.
I’m confused. Are you saying that highly-upvoted posts make a name nicer and therefore less useful? If so, can you describe the mechanisms behind this?
I think the most common response to ‘community’ should have been a post to LessWrong and its founding sequences. We wanted to create a place for rationalists that can discuss the Art and Science, at least this year.
A place to discuss an important topic which might otherwise not be discussed, is CFAR.
To paraphrase two of the core themes on this site:
In humans, the world is an incredible fabric of complex, entangled, self-reinforcing processes. (Many of us can be made aware of this fact, though usually it isn’t necessary.)
Rather than trying to collect information from each person, we use a series of simpler, more useful shared models, based on our conversations and experiences.
One of the CFAR concepts is the “agent-agent distinction”, where the AI agent is the AI agent, and so also tries to understand its own goals and limitations. One of the main motivations for the new Center for Applied Rationality is to build a sense of understanding and understanding of its own motivations, and these are attempts to make the AI general intelligent agents reflect humanity’s goals.
CFAR has a whole overarching mission of raising the sanity waterline. That is, it is attempting to create people who can benefit from thinking clearly, and help each other reach its goals while also being more effective. As a nonprofit, CFAR is close to being a place where we can help people overcome their irrational biases, and to do so as best they can.
CFAR is building a whole new rationality curriculum that will hopefully help people become more effective.
We are reviving this November and November again. Like the rest of the January 2008 Singularity Summits, we tweaking the curriculum and organization of CFAR alumni. The new thinking tools workshop will give us specific ways to apply the principles of rationality to the behavior of different groups or individuals, as opposed to mere human “capital” and organizational stuff. In past years, we’ve moved from “organizational inadequacy” to “additional common denominator” posts and to “additional organizational capital” posts, where I’d like there to be funding for doing high-impact good. Emphasizing and organizing such an organization allows us to step outside of the academic and organizational space that would normally be reserved for highly technical people.
In a more practical sense, the oxen-back infrastructure in Berkeley is existing, but we’
Ah. It’s a bot. I suppose the name should have tipped me off. At least I get Being More Confused By Fiction Than Reality points.
You’ve covered a lot of things in my writing and I enjoy this. Thanks for what you’ve done.
How did you write that in less than a minute?
Thanks for writing this!
The paper doesn’t show up until 4:30, even if the book is intended very specifically to convince a significant fraction of the population that cryonics is plausible for humanity.
For those that don’t understand, see here.
For the first chapter, you basically make the case that the scientific method is wrong, or at least that is not a strawman. The rest of what I’ve read is the most mainstream-seeming and obvious the scientific method seems to be no doubt wrong.
For the second chapter, you basically show the science in a book that is primarily about the ability of human minds to generalize from one another, where it is based on:
The basic Bayes-related questions of personal identity—i.e., how much should it be enough to have a psychological effect?
How much should one’s society be prioritised that one can be in this position?
In particular, it doesn’t fit in the Bostrom model of personal identity.
It’s not entirely clear that the subject matter of writing about the relationship between personal identity and mental identity is exactly the sort of information-theoretic question that could lead us to a useful answer, and the kind of information that would be better in the context of the question you will find yourself in the future.
You probably see this phrasing and the objections about science, and I think you’ve taken them too far. Yes, it’s hard to argue about the degree of overlap with the scientific method, and yes, the two are relevant. But if it’s going to work in such extreme cases for a long time, then there should be an additional thing called “substrategic knowledge”.
One of the things that I think is really important is to figure out how to think about personal identity under the “internal locus of control”. Here’s my attempt to begin that.
The “internal locus of control” seems like it would be quite a different subject in this context, I think from where I’ve heading and here.
If this doesn’t work, then there could be some fundamental difference between myself and a rationalist.
A few of my observations:
I’ve been a slow reader for a while now. I was probably under-remembering a lot about LW when I was a teenager, so I didn’t really get anything.
I was