Epistemic status: I read the entire post slowly, taking careful sentence-by-sentence notes. I felt I understood the author’s ideas and that something like the general dynamic they describe is real and important. I notice this post is part of a larger conversation, at least on the internet and possibly in person as well, and I’m not reading the linked background posts. I’ve spent quite a few years reading a substantial portion of LessWrong and LW-adjacent online literature and I used to write regularly for this website.
This post is long and complex. Here are my loose definitions for some of the key concepts:
Outcome fixation: Striving for a particular outcome, regardless of what your true goals are and no matter the costs.
Addiction: Reacting to discomfort with a soothing distraction, typically in ways that cause the problem to reoccur, rather than addressing its root causes.
Adaptive entropy: An arms race between two opposing, mutually distrusting forces, potentially arriving at a stable but costly equilibrium.
Earning trust: A process that can dissolve the arms race of adaptive entropy with listening, learning how not to apply force and tolerate discomfort, prioritizing understanding the other side, and ending outcome fixation.
I can find these dynamics in my own life in certain ways. Trying to explain my research to polite but disinterested family members. Trying to push ahead with the next stage in the experiment when I’m not sure if the previous data really holds up. Reading linearly through a boring textbook even though I’m not really understanding it anymore, because I just want to be able to honestly say I read chapter 1. Arguing with almost anybody online. Refusing to schedule my holiday visits home with the idea that visits to the people I want to see will “just happen naturally.”
And broadly, I agree with Valentine’s prescription for how to escape the cycle. Wait for them to ask me about my research, keep my reply short, and focus my scientific energy on the work itself and my relationships with my colleagues. RTFM, plan carefully, review your results carefully, and base your reputation on conscientiousness rather than getting the desired result. Take detailed, handwritten notes, draw pictures, skim the chapter while searching for the key points you really need to know, lurk more and write what you know to a receptive audience. Plan your vacations home after consulting with friends and family on how much time they hope to spend with you, and build in time to rest and recharge.
I think Valentine’s post is a bit overstated in its rejection of force as a solution to problems. There are plenty of situations where you’re being resisted by an adaptive intelligence that’s much weaker and less strategic than you, and you can win the contest by force. In global terms, the Leviathan, or the state and its monopoly on violence, is an example. It’s a case where the ultimate victory of a superior force over all weaker powers is the one thing that finally allows everybody to relax, put down the weapons, and gain slack. Maintaining the slack from the monopoly on violence requires continuously paying the cost of maintaining a military and police force, but the theory is that it’s a cost that pays for itself. Of course, if the state tries to exert power over a weaker force and fails, you get the drug war. Just because you can plausibly achieve lasting victory and reap huge benefits doesn’t mean it will always work out that way.
Signaling is a second counterpoint. You might want to drop the arms race, but you might be faced with a situation where a costly signal that you’re willing and able to use force, or even run a real risk a vicious cycle of adaptive entropy, is what’s required to elicit cooperation. You need to make a show of strength. You need to show that you’re not fixated on the outcome of inner harmony or of maintaining slack. You’re showing you can drive a hard bargain, and your potential future employer needs to see that so they’ll trust that you’ll drive a hard bargain on their behalf if they hire you. The fact that those future negotiations are themselves a form of adaptive entropy is their problem, not yours: you are just a hired gun, a professional.
Or on the other hand, consider How to Win Friends and Influence People. This is a book about striving, about negotiating, about getting what you want out of life. It’s about listening, but every story in the book is about how to use listening and personal warmth to achieve a specific outcome. It’s not a book about taking stock of your goals. It’s about sweetening the deal to make the deal go down.
And sometimes you’re just dealing with problems of physics, information management, skill-building, and resource acquisition. Digging a ditch, finding a restaurant, learning to cook, paying the bills. These often have straightforward, “forcing” solutions and can be dealt with one by one as they arise. There is not always a need to figure out all your goals, constraints, and resources, and go through some sort of optimization algorithm in order to make decisions. You’re a human, you typically navigate the world with heuristics, and fighting against your nature by avoiding outcome fixation and not forcing things is (sometimes, but not always), itself a recipe for vicious cycles of adaptive entropy.
Sometimes, vicious cycles of competition have side benefits. Sometimes, these side benefits can outweigh the costs of the competition. Workers and companies do all sorts of stupid, zero-to-negative sum behaviors in their efforts to compete in the short run. But the fact that they have to compete, that there is only so much demand to satisfy at any given time, is what motivates them to outperform. We all reap the benefit of that pressure to excel, applied over the long term.
What I find valuable in this post is searching for a more general, less violent and anthropomorphized name for this concept than “arms race.” I’m not convinced “adaptive entropy” is the right one either, but that’s OK. What concerns me is that it feels like the author is encouraging readers to interpret all their attempts to problem-solve through deliberate, forcing action as futile. Knowing this *may* be the case, being honest about why we might be engaged in futile behavior despite being cognizant of that, and offering alternatives all seem good. I would add that this isn’t *always* the case, and it’s important to have ways of exploring and testing different ways to conceptualize the problems you face in your life until you come to enough clarity on their root causes to address them productively.
I also think the attitude expressed in this post is probably underrated on LessWrong and the rationalist-adjacent world. I think that my arc as a rationalist was of increasing levels of agency, belief in my ability to bend the world to my will, willingness to define goals as outcomes and pursue them in straightforward ways, create a definition of success and then pursue that definition in order to get 70% of what I really want instead of 10%. That’s a part of my nature now. Many of the problems in my daily life—navigating living with my partner, operating in an institutional setting, making smart choices on an analytical approach in collaboration with colleagues, exploring the risks and benefits associated with a potential project—generate conflicts that aren’t particularly helped by trying to force things. The conflict itself points out that my true goals aren’t the same thing as the outcome I was striving for when I contributed to the conflict, so conflict itself can serve an information-gathering purpose.
I’m doing something dangerous here, which is making objections to seeming implications of this post that the author didn’t always directly state. The reason it’s dangerous is that it can appear to the author and to others that you’re making an implied claim that the author hasn’t considered those implications. So I’ll just conclude by saying that I don’t really have any assumptions about what Valentine thinks about these points I’m making. These are just the thoughts that this post provoked in me.
Epistemic status: I read the entire post slowly, taking careful sentence-by-sentence notes. I felt I understood the author’s ideas and that something like the general dynamic they describe is real and important. I notice this post is part of a larger conversation, at least on the internet and possibly in person as well, and I’m not reading the linked background posts. I’ve spent quite a few years reading a substantial portion of LessWrong and LW-adjacent online literature and I used to write regularly for this website.
This post is long and complex. Here are my loose definitions for some of the key concepts:
Outcome fixation: Striving for a particular outcome, regardless of what your true goals are and no matter the costs.
Addiction: Reacting to discomfort with a soothing distraction, typically in ways that cause the problem to reoccur, rather than addressing its root causes.
Adaptive entropy: An arms race between two opposing, mutually distrusting forces, potentially arriving at a stable but costly equilibrium.
Earning trust: A process that can dissolve the arms race of adaptive entropy with listening, learning how not to apply force and tolerate discomfort, prioritizing understanding the other side, and ending outcome fixation.
I can find these dynamics in my own life in certain ways. Trying to explain my research to polite but disinterested family members. Trying to push ahead with the next stage in the experiment when I’m not sure if the previous data really holds up. Reading linearly through a boring textbook even though I’m not really understanding it anymore, because I just want to be able to honestly say I read chapter 1. Arguing with almost anybody online. Refusing to schedule my holiday visits home with the idea that visits to the people I want to see will “just happen naturally.”
And broadly, I agree with Valentine’s prescription for how to escape the cycle. Wait for them to ask me about my research, keep my reply short, and focus my scientific energy on the work itself and my relationships with my colleagues. RTFM, plan carefully, review your results carefully, and base your reputation on conscientiousness rather than getting the desired result. Take detailed, handwritten notes, draw pictures, skim the chapter while searching for the key points you really need to know, lurk more and write what you know to a receptive audience. Plan your vacations home after consulting with friends and family on how much time they hope to spend with you, and build in time to rest and recharge.
I think Valentine’s post is a bit overstated in its rejection of force as a solution to problems. There are plenty of situations where you’re being resisted by an adaptive intelligence that’s much weaker and less strategic than you, and you can win the contest by force. In global terms, the Leviathan, or the state and its monopoly on violence, is an example. It’s a case where the ultimate victory of a superior force over all weaker powers is the one thing that finally allows everybody to relax, put down the weapons, and gain slack. Maintaining the slack from the monopoly on violence requires continuously paying the cost of maintaining a military and police force, but the theory is that it’s a cost that pays for itself. Of course, if the state tries to exert power over a weaker force and fails, you get the drug war. Just because you can plausibly achieve lasting victory and reap huge benefits doesn’t mean it will always work out that way.
Signaling is a second counterpoint. You might want to drop the arms race, but you might be faced with a situation where a costly signal that you’re willing and able to use force, or even run a real risk a vicious cycle of adaptive entropy, is what’s required to elicit cooperation. You need to make a show of strength. You need to show that you’re not fixated on the outcome of inner harmony or of maintaining slack. You’re showing you can drive a hard bargain, and your potential future employer needs to see that so they’ll trust that you’ll drive a hard bargain on their behalf if they hire you. The fact that those future negotiations are themselves a form of adaptive entropy is their problem, not yours: you are just a hired gun, a professional.
Or on the other hand, consider How to Win Friends and Influence People. This is a book about striving, about negotiating, about getting what you want out of life. It’s about listening, but every story in the book is about how to use listening and personal warmth to achieve a specific outcome. It’s not a book about taking stock of your goals. It’s about sweetening the deal to make the deal go down.
And sometimes you’re just dealing with problems of physics, information management, skill-building, and resource acquisition. Digging a ditch, finding a restaurant, learning to cook, paying the bills. These often have straightforward, “forcing” solutions and can be dealt with one by one as they arise. There is not always a need to figure out all your goals, constraints, and resources, and go through some sort of optimization algorithm in order to make decisions. You’re a human, you typically navigate the world with heuristics, and fighting against your nature by avoiding outcome fixation and not forcing things is (sometimes, but not always), itself a recipe for vicious cycles of adaptive entropy.
Sometimes, vicious cycles of competition have side benefits. Sometimes, these side benefits can outweigh the costs of the competition. Workers and companies do all sorts of stupid, zero-to-negative sum behaviors in their efforts to compete in the short run. But the fact that they have to compete, that there is only so much demand to satisfy at any given time, is what motivates them to outperform. We all reap the benefit of that pressure to excel, applied over the long term.
What I find valuable in this post is searching for a more general, less violent and anthropomorphized name for this concept than “arms race.” I’m not convinced “adaptive entropy” is the right one either, but that’s OK. What concerns me is that it feels like the author is encouraging readers to interpret all their attempts to problem-solve through deliberate, forcing action as futile. Knowing this *may* be the case, being honest about why we might be engaged in futile behavior despite being cognizant of that, and offering alternatives all seem good. I would add that this isn’t *always* the case, and it’s important to have ways of exploring and testing different ways to conceptualize the problems you face in your life until you come to enough clarity on their root causes to address them productively.
I also think the attitude expressed in this post is probably underrated on LessWrong and the rationalist-adjacent world. I think that my arc as a rationalist was of increasing levels of agency, belief in my ability to bend the world to my will, willingness to define goals as outcomes and pursue them in straightforward ways, create a definition of success and then pursue that definition in order to get 70% of what I really want instead of 10%. That’s a part of my nature now. Many of the problems in my daily life—navigating living with my partner, operating in an institutional setting, making smart choices on an analytical approach in collaboration with colleagues, exploring the risks and benefits associated with a potential project—generate conflicts that aren’t particularly helped by trying to force things. The conflict itself points out that my true goals aren’t the same thing as the outcome I was striving for when I contributed to the conflict, so conflict itself can serve an information-gathering purpose.
I’m doing something dangerous here, which is making objections to seeming implications of this post that the author didn’t always directly state. The reason it’s dangerous is that it can appear to the author and to others that you’re making an implied claim that the author hasn’t considered those implications. So I’ll just conclude by saying that I don’t really have any assumptions about what Valentine thinks about these points I’m making. These are just the thoughts that this post provoked in me.