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Acty
Karma: 289
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Ooh, yay, free knowledge and links! Thankyou, you’re awesome!
The linked study was a fun read. I was originally a bit skeptical—it feels like songs are sufficiently subjective that you’ll just like what your friends like or is ‘cool’, but what subjects you choose to study ought to be the topic of a little more research and numbers—but after further reflection the dynamics are probably the same, since often the reason you listen to a song at all is because your friend recommended it, and the reason you research a potential career in something is because your careers guidance counselor or your form tutor or someone told you to. And among people who’ve not encountered 80k hours or EA, career choice is often seen as a subjective thing. It’d be like with Asch’s conformity experiments where participants aren’t even aware that they’re conforming because it’s subconscious, except even worse because it’s subconscious and seen as subjective...
That seems like a very plausible explanation. There could easily be a kind of self-reinforcing loop, as well, like, “I didn’t learn fluid dynamics in school and there aren’t any fluid dynamics Nobel prize winners, therefore fluid dynamics isn’t very cool, therefore let’s not award it any prizes or put it into the curriculum...”
At its heart, this is starting to seem like a sanity-waterline problem like almost everything else. Decrease the amount that people irrationally go for novelty and specific prizes and “application is for peasants” type stuff, and increase the amount they go for saner things like the actual interest level and usefulness of the field, and prestige will start being allocated to fields in a more sensible way. Fluid dynamics sounds really really interesting, by the way.
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I do think that some kind of organisational cooperative structure would be needed even if everyone were friends—provided there are dragons left to slay. If people need to work together on dragonfighting, then just being friends won’t cut it—there will need to be some kind of team, and some people delegating different tasks to team members and coordinating efforts. Of course, if there aren’t dragons to slay, then there’s no need for us to work together and people can do whatever they like.
And yeah—the tradeoff would definitely need to be considered. If the AI told me, “Sorry, but I need to solve negentropy and if you try and help me you’re just going to slow me down to the point at which it becomes more likely that everyone dies”, I guess I would just have to deal with it. Making it more likely that everyone dies in the slow heat death of the universe is a terribly large price to pay for indulging my desire to fight things. It could be a tradeoff worth making, though, if it turns out that a significant number of people are aimless and unhappy unless they have a cause to fight for—we can explore the galaxy and fight negentropy and this will allow people like me to continue being motivated and fulfilled by our burning desire to fix things. It depends on whether people like me, with aforementioned burning desire, are a minority or a large majority. If a large majority of the human race feels listless and sad unless they have a quest to do, then it may be worthwhile letting us help even if it impedes the effort slightly.
And yeah—I’m not sure that just giving me more processor power and memory without changing my code counts as death, but simultaneously giving a human more processor power and more memory and not increasing their rationality sounds… silly and maybe not safe, so I guess it’ll have to be a gradual upgrade process in all of us. I quite like that idea though—it’s like having a second childhood, except this time you’re learning to remember every book in the library and fly with your jetpack-including robot feet, instead of just learning to walk and talk. I am totally up for that.
You make me suddenly, intensely curious to find out what a Reynolds number is and why it can make streamlining increase drag. I am also abruptly realising that I know less than I thought about STEM fields, given I just kind of assumed that astrophysicists were the official People Who Know About Space and therefore rocketry must be part of their domain. I don’t know whether I want to ask if you can recommend any good fluid dynamics introductions, or whether I don’t want to add to the several feet high pile of books next to my bed...
Okay—so why do you think quantum mechanics became more “cool” than fluid dynamics? Was there a time when fluid dynamics held the equivalent prestige and mystery that quantum mechanics has today? It clearly seems to be more useful, and something that you could easily become curious about just from everyday events like carrying a cup of tea upstairs and pondering how near-impossible it is not to spill a few drops if you’ve overfilled it.
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Yup, playing status with accounts would be kinda stupid. (That’s why you should stop doing it.)
You know what would be especially stupid? If we lived in a world that accorded me higher status than you because of my general level of aggression, and I could end this entire argument with “I’m high status, you’re low status, I’m right, you’re wrong, shut up now”.
Now, wouldn’t that be a really stupid world...?
So tell me again why giving status and prestige to aggressive people is a great idea?
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Um, how exactly do you want to preserve older things while I want to tear everything down and build it back up again? I don’t want to tear things down. I want the trends that are happening—everything gets fairer and more liberal over time—to continue. To accelerate them if I can. (To design a whole new State if and only if it seems like it will make most people much happier, and even then I kinda accept that I’d need to talk to a whole lot of other people and do a whole lot of small scale experiments first.) None of those trends are making society end in fire. They’re just nice things, like prejudiced views becoming less common, and violence happening less. I’m trying to optimise for making people happy; if you’re optimising for something else, then I’m afraid I’m just going to have to inform you that your ethics are dumb. Sorry.
The problem with “life experience” as an argument is that people use “life experience” as a fully general counterargument. If you’re older than me, any time I say something you don’t like, you can just yell “LIFE EXPERIENCE!” and nothing I can do—no book you can suggest, nothing I can go observe—will allow me to win the argument. I cannot become older than you. This would be fine as an argument if we observed that older people were consistently right and younger people were consistently wrong, but as you’ll know if you have a grandparent who tries to use computers, this just ain’t so.
Just because you have been made jaded and cynical by your experience of the world, that doesn’t mean that jaded and cynical positions are the correct ones. For one thing, most other people of your own age who also experienced the world ended up still disagreeing with you. There’s a very good chance that I get to the age you are now, and still disagree with you. And if you observe most other people your own age with similar experiences (unless you’re old enough that you’re part of the raised-very-conservative generation) most of them will disagree with you. What is magic and special about your own specific experience that makes yours better than all those people who are the same age as you? Why should I listen to your conclusions, backed up by your “life experience”, when I could also go and listen to a lefty who’s the same age as you and their lefty conclusions backed up by their “life experience”?
Life experience can often make people a lot less logical. Traumatised people often hold illogical views—like, some victims of abuse are terrified of all men. That doesn’t mean that, because they have life experience that I don’t, I should go, ‘oh, well, I actually think all men aren’t evil, but I guess their life experience outweighs what I think’. It means that they’ve had an experience that damaged them, and we should have sympathy and try and help them, and we should even consider constructing shelters so they don’t have to interact with the people they’re terrified of, but we certainly shouldn’t start deferring to them and adopting their beliefs just because we lack their experiences. The only things we should defer to should be logical arguments and evidence.
“Life experience”, as a magical quality which you accumulate more of the more negative things happen to you, is pretty worthless. Rationalists do not believe in magical qualities.
If there is a version of the “life experience” argument that can be steelmanned, it’s “I’ve lived a long time and have observed many things which caused me to make updates towards my beliefs, and you haven’t had a chance to observe that.” But that still makes no sense because you should be able to point out the things you observed to me, or show your observations on graphs, so I can observe them too. If you observed someone being a total idiot, and that makes you jaded about the possibility of a system that requires a lot of intelligence to function, then you should be able to make up for the fact that I haven’t observed that idiocy by pulling out IQ charts or studies or other evidence that most people are idiots. If you can’t produce evidence to convince someone else, consider that your experience may be anecdata that doesn’t generalise well.
Perhaps your argument is “I’ve lived a long time and have observed very many very small pieces of evidence, and all of those small pieces of evidence caused me to make lots of very small updates, such that I cannot give you a single piece of evidence which you can consider which will make you update to my beliefs, but I think mine are right anyway.” However, even if you can’t give me a single piece of evidence that I can observe and update on, you ought to be able to produce graphs or something. Graphs are good at showing lots-of-small-bits-of-evidence-over-time stuff. If you want me to change my beliefs, you still have to produce evidence, or at least a logical argument. Appeals to “life experience” are nothing more than appeals to elder prestige.
Now, to address your actual argument. It seems to be (correct me if I misunderstand): liberal views are correct and work, but there are many stupid people in the world and liberal views don’t work well for stupid people. Stupid people need clear rules that tell them in simple terms what to do and what not to do.
But if I were going to make up a set of really clear simple rules to tell a stupid person what to do and what not to do, they would be something like: 1. Be nice to people and try not to hurt people. 2. Don’t try and prevent clever people from doing things you don’t understand. Listen to the clever people. 3. Try and be productive and contribute what you can to society.
I cannot see any evidence that adding more rules beyond those three, like, “Defer to males because male-ness is loosely correlated with prestige-wanting and protectiveness” (even though male-ness isn’t correlated with prestige-deserving, that seems about equal between genders) would do any good whatsoever. Since there are just as many stupid males as stupid females—male average IQ is actually slightly lower than female average IQ—a rule like that wouldn’t do any good, would certainly not prevent people letting young kids have cigarettes or people beating one another or anything like that, and would in fact just lead to a lot of stupid people going “oh, it must be okay to hurt and disparage females and not let them have education then” and going around hurting lots of women.
And the view of mine, that liberal views don’t hurt people and sexist/racist views do hurt people… certainly seems to fit the evidence. Liberal views are increasing over time, and crime and violence are decreasing over time. I can’t find any studies, but I predict that if we do a study, we’ll find that holding the belief “women and men are equal” is strongly correlated with being non-violent and not hurting women, and almost all of the violence and abuse cases committed against women will be by people who don’t think they are equal. Similarly, doing stupid things like giving cigarettes to children and giving away products for free will be correlated with holding conservative views—though admittedly that could just be ’cause being uneducated is correlated with holding conservative views. And because men are on average more violent and more likely to hurt people. But then, that’s a very good argument against putting them in charge, isn’t it...?
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As a judoka, this really spoke to me and was a useful analogy—thankyou very much for it!
My own idea of what good mental posture looks like includes some idea of the way you model yourself. One of my biggest failure modes is when I slip into seeing myself as ‘random useless seventeen-year-old’ and therefore acting as I expect a random useless seventeen year old to act (ineffectively) or waiting to get permission before I do things. When I manage to change into seeing-myself-as-agent mode, my productivity and rationality gets supercharged compared to the aforementioned state. It has funny side effects—for instance, I notice I walk faster and tend to spin on my heels and clap my hands together when I’m being agenty, whereas I stroll and gesture vaguely when I’m being useless. I speak more precisely when I’m in agenty-mode, and replace ‘um/er/uh’ with silent pauses or ‘hmm’. This indicates to me that it’s not just a single mental action, but a whole different stance.
I think it’s similar to what is spoken about in HPMOR with most people just playing a role and doing what they think someone in that role should do, but others genuinely optimising—but I don’t think I’ve escaped the mode of playing a role, I just sometimes manage to play the role of an agenty person rather than the role of a useless person. It turns out that if you play the role of someone who optimises everything and Gets Stuff Done, you get stuff done. (Sometimes.)
This definitely feels like two very different mental postures. I’m not actually sure how I induce the agenty state from the ineffective state, but I have identified a number of things that might have to do with it, from social pressure, to bright lights, to having a solid idea of what agentyness looks like from observing good role models. The last idea (watching a role model and knowing what agentyness looks like) was reinforced in my mind when I heard a friend saying similar things recently, so to improve my mental posture I’m going to try and watch more awesome people work so I get an idea of what awesomeness looks like, and then try to play that role more and the ‘useless kid’ role less. I also really like your suggestions!