There’s also something like “just the right amount of friction” which enables true love to happen without being sabotaged by existing factors. There are things which cause relationship-breaking kind of issues, such as permanent long distance, disagreement on how many kids to have and when and how to raise them, how to earn and spend money, religion and morals, work/life balance stuff, and physical attraction. Then there’s the fun kind of friction where you can grow from each other or enjoy your differences—things would be bland without these. There’s also something “true” about intent to grow together and trust each other to change each others’ values, so that you start converging over time and becoming more similar. Something like access to my core which I intentionally share trusting that the other person will use it for good. Yeah, many pointers to the underlying concept, good luck in the dating market.
DusanDNesic
Announcing the PIBBSS Symposium ’24!
Thank you for the great write-up. It’s the kind of thing I believe and act upon but said in a much clearer way than I could, and that to me has enormous value. I especially appreciate the nuance in the downsides of the view, not too strong nor too weak in my view. And I also love the point of “yeah, maybe it doesn’t work for perfect agents with infinite compute in a vacuum, but maybe that’s not what’ll happen, and it works great for regular bounded agents such as myself n=1 and that’s maybe enough?” Anyhow, thank you for writing up what feels like an important piece of wisdom.
I had no idea, thanks for sharing! My mother in law was GP in public hospital in Kamchatka and she’s super against homeopathy so I assumed things there are like things here on Serbia (some private “doctors” deal with homeopathy but no one else). Your comment does explain a thing which I didn’t understand which is why in Russia I saw so much homeopathy sold in packaging very similar to regular medicine.
To answer things which Raymond did not, it is hard for me to say who has the agenda which you think has good chances for solving alignment. I’d encourage you to reaching out to people who pass your bar perhaps more frequently than you do and establish those connections. Your limits on no audio or video do make it hard to participate in something like the PIBBSS Fellowship, but perhaps worth taking a shot at it or others. See if people whose ideas you like are mentoring in some programs—getting to work with them in structured ways may be easier than otherwise.
Love it! As a DM and parent (albeit of a 1 years old) reading this really made me smile and think through all the things I have in the house that I can design games around :) Thank you for the write-up!
This sounds a bit like davidad’s agenda in ARIA, except you also limit the AI to only writing provable mathematical solutions to mathematical questions to begin with. In general, I would say that you need possibly better feedback loops than that, possibly by writing more on LW, or consulting with more people, or joining a fellowship or other programs.
To add to the anecdata, I’ve heard it advised (like Raemon below) and started using it occasionally. It has been good for me, although not transformative—possibly I come from different baseline of how important the change is, I don’t apologise constantly, but as I’ve learned, it used to be more than I should.
Hmm, but that has trade-off with not showing up as suspect to X-ray. So maybe a mix of approaches makes it quite expensive to smuggle drugs and thus limit supply/raise price/drop consumption
If all that is lost could be defined, it would, by definition, not be lost once definition is expanded that much.
There is this video: https://youtu.be/OfgVQKy0lIQ on why Asian parents don’t say “I love you” to their kids, and it analyzes how the same word in different languages has different meaning. I would also add—to different people as well. So whatever you classify is always missing something in the gaps. It’s the issue of legibilizing (in Seeing Like a State terms) - in trying to define it, you restrict it to only those things.
A lot of the meaning of the word Love is contained within me, with my emotions, with my messy mind thinking fuzzy thoughts. If I restricted it to only defined categories I am bound to lose something. Instead, I enjoy the fullness of it by keeping it ill defined and exploring it’s multitudes.
Perhaps it’s simply the case that the answer is “you are missing a human universal” to the question in the topic. If you tried to define humour, analyze jokes, divide them in categories, and extract the hormones triggered in response to some stimuli caused by a certain joke, I would say you did not (on a certain level) understand humour better than a child who made a good joke and enjoy a good laugh.
Finale example I heard recently brought up again is Mary’s room knowledge argument—no amount of classification of blue, understanding of light spectrum data etc replaces the experience of seeing blue. Likewise with love.
To bring it back to your original question about understanding it in order to communicate to others—this is less found in books and more in self exploration through relationships with others. (I speak from perspective of someone in a happy long term romantic relationship with 0 issues and best communication I can imagine, none of which came from books on either of our sides).
I’m not sure—in dissecting the Frog something is lost while knowledge is gained. If you do not see how analysis of things can sometimes (not always!) diminish them, then that may be the crux. I agree with Wbrom above—some things in human experience are irreducible, and sometimes trying to get to a more atomic level means that you lose a lot in the process, in the gaps between the categories.
This sounds like a case of the Rule of Equal and Opposite Advice: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/24/should-you-reverse-any-advice-you-hear/ I’m sure for some people more honesty would be harmful, but it does sound like the caveats here make it clear when not to use it. I more agree with questions Tsvi raises in the other thread than with “this is awful advice”. I can imagine that you are a person for whom more honesty is bad, although if you followed the caveats above it would be imo quite rare to do it wrong. I think the authors do a good job of outlining many cases where it goes wrong.
Is a lot of the effect not “people who read ACX trust Scott Alexander”? Like, the survey selects for most “passionate” readers, those willing to donate their free time to Scott for research with ~nothing in return. Him publicly stating on his platform “I am now much less certain of X” is likely to make that group of people be less certain of X?
[Closed] PIBBSS is hiring in a variety of roles (alignment research and incubation program)
Retrospective: PIBBSS Fellowship 2023
Great post Anna, thanks for writing—it makes for good thinking.
It reminds me of The Use and Abuse of Witchdoctors for Life by Sam[]zdat, in the Uruk Series (which I highly recommend). To summarize, our modern way of thinking denies us the benefits of being able to rally around ideas that would get us to better equilibria. By looking at the priest calling for spending time in devoted prayer with other community members and asking, “What for?” we end up losing the benefits of community, quiet time, and meditation. While we are closer to truth (in territory sense), we lost something, and it takes conscious effort to realize it is missing and replace it. It is describing the community version of the local problem of a LessWronger not committing to a friendship because it is not “true”—in marginal cases, believing in it can make it true!
(I recommend reading the whole series, or at least the article above, but the example it gives is “Gri-gri.” “In 2012, the recipe for gri-gri was revealed to an elder in a dream. If you ingest it and follow certain ritual commandments, then bullets cannot harm you.”—before reading the article, think about how belief in elders helps with fighting neighboring well-armed villages)
PIBBSS Speaker events comings up in February
Apply to the 2024 PIBBSS Summer Research Fellowship
I assume Jan 1st 2025 is the natural day for a sequel :D
A “Short-term Honesty Sacrifice”, “Hypocrisy Gambit”, something like that?