One substantive issue I didn’t manage to work into the OP, but am interested in, is a set of questions about memetics and whether memetics is one of the causes of how urgent so many people seem to find so many causes.
A section I cut from the OP, basically because it’s lower-epistemic-quality and I’m not sure how relevant it is or isn’t to the dynamics I kept in the OP, but that I’d like to throw into the comments section for discussion: --
Memetics sometimes leads to the amplification of false “emergencies”
Once upon a time, my former housemate Steve Rayhawk answered the door, found a Jehovah’s witness there to proselytize, and attempted to explain to the Jehovah’s witness about memetics. (“Okay, so, you know how internet chain letters often promise all kinds of goods? Well, suppose you find yourself going door-to-door with a message….”)
I’d like to make a similar point.
Basically: it seems to me that when I venture into less-filtered portions of Twitter, or ask my Lyft drivers what they think is up in the world, or otherwise encounter things from some portions of memes-at-large… I encounter a rather high proportion of “there is currently an Emergency” overtones (about all sorts of things, mostly not AI). I suspect these messages get passed on partly because the structure of “Emergency! Fighting this thing now is worth giving up some of your leisure time today, taxing your friends a bit if they’re annoyed by your passing it on, etc.” gets messages replicated some in our current context. I suspect they cause a fair amount of dead weight loss in aggregate, with a fair amount of people choosing to try to respond to “emergencies” that are not really emergencies, with actions that don’t make much sense, instead of boosting their and others’ long-term capacities to understand and to act well from deep within.
An added point here is that people are often worse at decisions when rushed, which means that bad arguments can sometimes get forwarded if they keep their passers-on from taking full stock of them. (At least, I’m told this is a classic trick of con artists, and that the heuristics and biases literature found people are extra subject to most biases when rushed.) So it may be useful to ask whether the fact of a particular claim-to-urgency reaching you is based in significant part on people passing on the message without full digestion under the influence of fear/urgency, or whether it is mostly reaching you via the slow conscious actions of people at their best.
Memetic arguments do not mean that any particular claim about a thing being an emergency is false. If you’re trying to figure out what’s true, there’s no substitute for hugging the query, remembering that argument screens off authority, and plunging into object-level questions about what the world is like. Direct engagement with the object-level questions is also often far more interesting/productive.
But IMO, memetic arguments probably do mean you should be a bit on guard when evaluating arguments about emergencies, should be more hesitant to take a person’s or group’s word for what the “emergency” is (especially where the message claims that you should burn yourself out, or deplete your long-term resources, in such a way as to boost that message or its wielders), and should more insist on having an inside-view that makes sense. I.e., it seems to me that one should approach messages of the form “X is an emergency, requiring specific action Y from you” a bit more like the way most of us already approach messages of the form “you should give me money.
Also, it does not hurt to remember that “X is in a bad way” is higher-prior than “X is in a bad way, and you should burn out some of your long-term resources taking action A that allegedly helps with X.”
A different main heuristic I’d like to recommend here, is trying to boot all the way to slow, reflective consciousness as a way to check the substance of any claim that seems to be trying to get you into an urgent state of mind, or a state of mind from which it is less natural to allow things to evaluate slowly. I really like and agree with Raemon’s post about slack as a context in which you can actually notice what your mind should/shouldn’t be on. I really hope we all get this at least several times a year, if not all the time. (One could also try to use slow consciousness to “spot check” claimed urgencies after the fact, even if acting more-rapidly temporarily.)
One substantive issue I didn’t manage to work into the OP, but am interested in, is a set of questions about memetics and whether memetics is one of the causes of how urgent so many people seem to find so many causes.
A section I cut from the OP, basically because it’s lower-epistemic-quality and I’m not sure how relevant it is or isn’t to the dynamics I kept in the OP, but that I’d like to throw into the comments section for discussion:
--
Memetics sometimes leads to the amplification of false “emergencies”
Once upon a time, my former housemate Steve Rayhawk answered the door, found a Jehovah’s witness there to proselytize, and attempted to explain to the Jehovah’s witness about memetics. (“Okay, so, you know how internet chain letters often promise all kinds of goods? Well, suppose you find yourself going door-to-door with a message….”)
I’d like to make a similar point.
Basically: it seems to me that when I venture into less-filtered portions of Twitter, or ask my Lyft drivers what they think is up in the world, or otherwise encounter things from some portions of memes-at-large… I encounter a rather high proportion of “there is currently an Emergency” overtones (about all sorts of things, mostly not AI). I suspect these messages get passed on partly because the structure of “Emergency! Fighting this thing now is worth giving up some of your leisure time today, taxing your friends a bit if they’re annoyed by your passing it on, etc.” gets messages replicated some in our current context. I suspect they cause a fair amount of dead weight loss in aggregate, with a fair amount of people choosing to try to respond to “emergencies” that are not really emergencies, with actions that don’t make much sense, instead of boosting their and others’ long-term capacities to understand and to act well from deep within.
An added point here is that people are often worse at decisions when rushed, which means that bad arguments can sometimes get forwarded if they keep their passers-on from taking full stock of them. (At least, I’m told this is a classic trick of con artists, and that the heuristics and biases literature found people are extra subject to most biases when rushed.) So it may be useful to ask whether the fact of a particular claim-to-urgency reaching you is based in significant part on people passing on the message without full digestion under the influence of fear/urgency, or whether it is mostly reaching you via the slow conscious actions of people at their best.
Memetic arguments do not mean that any particular claim about a thing being an emergency is false. If you’re trying to figure out what’s true, there’s no substitute for hugging the query, remembering that argument screens off authority, and plunging into object-level questions about what the world is like. Direct engagement with the object-level questions is also often far more interesting/productive.
But IMO, memetic arguments probably do mean you should be a bit on guard when evaluating arguments about emergencies, should be more hesitant to take a person’s or group’s word for what the “emergency” is (especially where the message claims that you should burn yourself out, or deplete your long-term resources, in such a way as to boost that message or its wielders), and should more insist on having an inside-view that makes sense. I.e., it seems to me that one should approach messages of the form “X is an emergency, requiring specific action Y from you” a bit more like the way most of us already approach messages of the form “you should give me money.
Also, it does not hurt to remember that “X is in a bad way” is higher-prior than “X is in a bad way, and you should burn out some of your long-term resources taking action A that allegedly helps with X.”
A different main heuristic I’d like to recommend here, is trying to boot all the way to slow, reflective consciousness as a way to check the substance of any claim that seems to be trying to get you into an urgent state of mind, or a state of mind from which it is less natural to allow things to evaluate slowly. I really like and agree with Raemon’s post about slack as a context in which you can actually notice what your mind should/shouldn’t be on. I really hope we all get this at least several times a year, if not all the time. (One could also try to use slow consciousness to “spot check” claimed urgencies after the fact, even if acting more-rapidly temporarily.)
You managed to cut precisely the part of the post that was most useful for me to read :)
(To be clear, putting it in this comment was just as helpful, maybe even more-so.)