This all seems like a true model of (part of) the world to me.
The thing that this post doesn’t really do, which I do think is important, is actually work some (metaphorical) math on “does this actually add up to ‘stop trying to directly accomplish things’?” in aggregate?
But I can say with a great deal of conviction that creating ease in the world as a whole is mostly a matter of orienting to adaptive entropy. That things that lift the entropic burden will help, and things that increase the burden will hurt, basically regardless of what material effects they have.
I could definitely see this being the case. But, also, I could (metaphorically and literally) build a kludgy inefficient steam engine with tons of waste heat and tons of hacky solutions to pump that waste heat around and dump pollution into the air… and this might still, in fact, gets people faster from one city to the next, which enables tons of global trade, which eventually gives us the surplus resources to build more efficient trains and find less polluting solutions and engines that work without hacky workaround.
It definitely makes sense to me that for some people “stop trying to try to do a particular thing” is the right mental motion, and I’d pretty strongly agree that “at least notice what your ‘addicted from’ and what patterns it’s creating” is something most LessWrong readers (and probably most modern humans) should be attending to.
It’s plausible to me that “the amount of metaphorical pollution we’re generating here outweighs the material effects, and really all things considered, the thing everyone would do if they were attending the right things is stop/slow-down/re-oreient or whatever the best handle for the thing you’re trying to point at is. I got some sense of what Benquo was pointing at when (I think) he was trying to say a similar thing. But, man, it matters a lot how the math actually checks out here.
The thing that this post doesn’t really do, which I do think is important, is actually work some (metaphorical) math on “does this actually add up to ‘stop trying to directly accomplish things’?” in aggregate?
I like your inquiry.
A nitpick: I’m not saying to stop trying to directly accomplish things (in highly adaptive-entropic domains). I’m saying that trying to directly accomplish things instead of orienting to adaptive entropy is a fool’s errand. It’ll at best leave the net problem-ness unaffected.
I have very little idea how someone would orient to system-wide adaptive entropy without doing things.
My suggestion is more like, back off on trying to accomplish things directly, and instead focus on what pathway increases slack. It’s about removing the “instead of” via prioritizing slack over any predetermined outcome.
But that aside:
I like your point. I don’t know how someone would even begin to answer it, honestly. It seems so… overwhelming to me? Like it’s crushingly overdetermined. Kind of like asking whether heterosexual interest is actually widespread rather than just a cultural meme: I haven’t gone and done the empirical work, but it sure seems absurd to need to before taking it as a premise.
And my mind draws a blank when I ask how to “count” it up vs. some alternative pathway. The scale of counterfactual that seems to ask for looks computational insurmountable to me.
But those are descriptions of my limitations here. If someone can figure out how to do the “math” here, I’d be interested to see what they do.
I could definitely see this being the case. But, also, I could (metaphorically and literally) build a kludgy inefficient steam engine with tons of waste heat and tons of hacky solutions to pump that waste heat around and dump pollution into the air… and this might still, in fact, gets people faster from one city to the next, which enables tons of global trade, which eventually gives us the surplus resources to build more efficient trains and find less polluting solutions and engines that work without hacky workaround.
Yep. And there’s an analog in adaptive entropy: it’s sometimes possible to apply a lot of force in a predetermined direction that gives you the leverage needed to end up net lower-entropic.
Signing up for monastic meditative training can be an example.
But that “can” is pretty important. In a highly adaptive-entropic system, the thinking process that justifies the application of force is usually part of the entropy. I think we see this with folk who try to get “really serious” about meditation and end up doing a mix of (a) failing to keep up with the habit and kicking themselves and (b) incorporating their meditative accomplishments into what they were entropically doing before.
I suspect the world is in practice too highly entropic for just about any force-based move to get us to a better slack equilibrium. I think this is why Eliezer and some others keep painting pictures of doom: If your only available moves all feel made of force, and you’re in a highly entropic system, then nothing you can see to do can solve the problem-ness.
But yes, this is an empirical claim. Maybe there’s some heroic push somewhere that’d make a difference. And maybe being aware of adaptive entropy will make a difference in terms of what heroic moves to make!
But… well, it sure looks obvious to me that the roots of all this problem-ness are the same ones that bias people toward wanting heroic action to happen. The actions aren’t a problem, but the bias will keep sneaking in and nibbling the slack.
So I’m standing for the voice of “Sure, we can look. And maybe it’ll be worthwhile in some sense. Just notice where in you the drive to look is coming from. I think that matters more in the long run.”
This all seems like a true model of (part of) the world to me.
The thing that this post doesn’t really do, which I do think is important, is actually work some (metaphorical) math on “does this actually add up to ‘stop trying to directly accomplish things’?” in aggregate?
I could definitely see this being the case. But, also, I could (metaphorically and literally) build a kludgy inefficient steam engine with tons of waste heat and tons of hacky solutions to pump that waste heat around and dump pollution into the air… and this might still, in fact, gets people faster from one city to the next, which enables tons of global trade, which eventually gives us the surplus resources to build more efficient trains and find less polluting solutions and engines that work without hacky workaround.
It definitely makes sense to me that for some people “stop trying to try to do a particular thing” is the right mental motion, and I’d pretty strongly agree that “at least notice what your ‘addicted from’ and what patterns it’s creating” is something most LessWrong readers (and probably most modern humans) should be attending to.
It’s plausible to me that “the amount of metaphorical pollution we’re generating here outweighs the material effects, and really all things considered, the thing everyone would do if they were attending the right things is stop/slow-down/re-oreient or whatever the best handle for the thing you’re trying to point at is. I got some sense of what Benquo was pointing at when (I think) he was trying to say a similar thing. But, man, it matters a lot how the math actually checks out here.
I like your inquiry.
A nitpick: I’m not saying to stop trying to directly accomplish things (in highly adaptive-entropic domains). I’m saying that trying to directly accomplish things instead of orienting to adaptive entropy is a fool’s errand. It’ll at best leave the net problem-ness unaffected.
I have very little idea how someone would orient to system-wide adaptive entropy without doing things.
My suggestion is more like, back off on trying to accomplish things directly, and instead focus on what pathway increases slack. It’s about removing the “instead of” via prioritizing slack over any predetermined outcome.
But that aside:
I like your point. I don’t know how someone would even begin to answer it, honestly. It seems so… overwhelming to me? Like it’s crushingly overdetermined. Kind of like asking whether heterosexual interest is actually widespread rather than just a cultural meme: I haven’t gone and done the empirical work, but it sure seems absurd to need to before taking it as a premise.
And my mind draws a blank when I ask how to “count” it up vs. some alternative pathway. The scale of counterfactual that seems to ask for looks computational insurmountable to me.
But those are descriptions of my limitations here. If someone can figure out how to do the “math” here, I’d be interested to see what they do.
Yep. And there’s an analog in adaptive entropy: it’s sometimes possible to apply a lot of force in a predetermined direction that gives you the leverage needed to end up net lower-entropic.
Signing up for monastic meditative training can be an example.
But that “can” is pretty important. In a highly adaptive-entropic system, the thinking process that justifies the application of force is usually part of the entropy. I think we see this with folk who try to get “really serious” about meditation and end up doing a mix of (a) failing to keep up with the habit and kicking themselves and (b) incorporating their meditative accomplishments into what they were entropically doing before.
I suspect the world is in practice too highly entropic for just about any force-based move to get us to a better slack equilibrium. I think this is why Eliezer and some others keep painting pictures of doom: If your only available moves all feel made of force, and you’re in a highly entropic system, then nothing you can see to do can solve the problem-ness.
But yes, this is an empirical claim. Maybe there’s some heroic push somewhere that’d make a difference. And maybe being aware of adaptive entropy will make a difference in terms of what heroic moves to make!
But… well, it sure looks obvious to me that the roots of all this problem-ness are the same ones that bias people toward wanting heroic action to happen. The actions aren’t a problem, but the bias will keep sneaking in and nibbling the slack.
So I’m standing for the voice of “Sure, we can look. And maybe it’ll be worthwhile in some sense. Just notice where in you the drive to look is coming from. I think that matters more in the long run.”