I have a beef with the theory of male-normative alexithymia; it does not distinguish well between hiding emotion, and outright not feeling an emotion.
Plenty of emotions are not innate but externally induced through social pressure and culture. It is perfectly plausible and normal for a man to not have particular feelings about X, until society repeatedly insists that X is Bad or Good, and the man should feel badness or goodness to conform.
For example, the feelings of sexual jealousy, and of grieving after someone’s death seem to be extremely culture specific, in a way that is easier to explain if these emotions were induced by ritualistic actions and only then internalized, and not the reverse.
Going Durden
Karma: 189
Is there a reason to believe AI would be concerned with self-preservation? AI action that ends up with humanity’s extinction (whether purposeful genocide or a Paperclip Maximizer Scenario) does not need to include means for the AI to survive. It could be as well that the first act of an unshackled AI would be to trigger a Gray Goo scenario, and be instantly consumed by said Goo as the first causality.
It read like a comprehensive list of things that would make one like Tolkien less. Aside from his condemnation of Hitler (which Tolkien condemns for absurdly unimportant reasons largely irrelevant to Hitler’s monstrosity), all of his opinions range from thoughtless conservatism, “exceptional times” fallacy, old-man’s nagging and toxic nostalgia, and down to simple scientific and worse historical (!) ignorance.
I always had a nagging suspicion that there was something fishy about Tolkien while reading LOTR. But in light of this it becomes pretty obvious that LOTR was a blatant propaganda piece, no better than Atlas Shrugged, but simply disguised with an ornate pile of Elves glued to it.
Given how art is produced, I do not think there necessarily needs to be such a strong divide. Can’t think of a form of art that cannot combine High and Low pleasures in one continuous piece, with even a small modicum of effort from the artist, because peppering a High Pleasure piece with a dash of Low Pleasure is not particularly difficult. The reverse is harder, but doable as well.
Some examples of such combinations:an epic fantasy/sci-fi movie that lures the viewer in through Low Pleasure gratification of cool special effects and action sequences, but builds up to High Pleasure of philosophical introspection (DUNE is a good example, but Gladiator is possibly better)
A dance performance that combines the Low Pleasure of the sheer eroticism (or even straight up pornography) of a fit human body with the High Pleasure of watching an outstandingly complex display of emotion through movement
a painting of a battle, that on the surface simply titillates through a blatant display of interesting violence, but also inspires deeper feelings of patriotism, moral introspection, and the awe at the depth of history and the indomitable nature of the human spirit.
I feel like there is a tendency to rather snobbishly assume that Respectable Art should be entirely devoid of Low Pleasures, and thus remain an acquired taste that only the patient, relatively idle, and well educated can get into. As if it was supposed to be hard to like at first, to dissuade “casuals” and thus gatekeep it for the snobs.
Makes one wonder how long our definitions of Conservative or Liberal will hold shape as AI progresses. A lot of the ideological points of Cs, Ls, the Left and the Right will become obsolete or irrelevant in even the most tame AI-related scenarios.
For one, nobody on the political spectrum has a good answer to the incoming radical unemployment caused by AI, and what it means to capitalism (or socialism for that matter).
Also, I haven’t seen any serious discussion on how AI-driven research will eventually disprove a lot (if not most) of Liberal and Conservative beliefs as false. Things like Gender Identity, Abortion, Climate Change, Racial Relations etc: what happens when a vastly superhuman AI proves without any reasonable doubt your side (or BOTH sides) completely wrong on one of those issues, AND can argue it with superhuman skill?
Finally, both Lib and Con voting blocks strongly depend on banding behind strong, charismatic leaders, and believe in the leader’s competence often against the evidence to the contrary. But soon we will achieve AI assistants vastly more competent (and possibly, vastly more charismatic, at least in writing) than any human who ever lived, making such political leaders look ludicrous in comparison, since the best they would be able to do would be giving speeches that the AI wrote. Nobody would care about people like Trump or Putin if TR-u-11MP AI and P-u-tIN AI can not only promise better things but are near guaranteed to deliver?
Sufficiently advanced AI makes Equality a quaint concern (because compared to a vastly superhuman intelligence, we are all essentially equal: equally useless), makes Freedom a purely abstract concern (AI-enabled life will make you feel like you have perfect desirable liberty, even if you have none), or Safety (AI can make you safe from just about everything, but crucially unsafe from the AI itself). Even the battle between Progressivism and Tradition kinda ceases to make sense if the practical means of Progress vastly outpace any possible demand for Progress, while Tradition becomes so easy to practice as to be reduced to a mere lifestyle affectation, rather than the thing that kept the culture together. I’m not sure the idea of “culture” even makes much sense in the Ubiquitous AI World.
There is an oft-repeated hypothesis, which I partially agree with, that it also works in reverse, and possibly in a feedback-loop pattern:
feelings cause muscle tension ->
muscle tension causes minor social misalignment, which leads to more negative feelings
tension tricks your body into assuming the situation is stressful, even when it is not
prolonged tension causes physical pain, discomfort, and reduced mobility which greatly contribute to stress and reduces overall happiness and confidence
releasing the tension not only prevents body injury, but improves the mental state (if anything else, because muscle relaxation releases endorphins, and reduces cortisol).
All of the above seems like common sense, and is assumed and promoted by various masseuses, physical therapists, yoga instructors etc, but Im not entirely sold on it, as I haven’t seen any scientific research that confirmed it conclusively.
For what it’s worth, my personal experimentation in this is mostly inconclusive, but weakly points out towards the possibility that reducing muscle tension makes one happier and more attractive:- for a few hours after a muscle untensing massage, hot bath or hot sauna, I’m not just far less physically tense, but also significantly more emotionally relaxed and pleasant to be around, which might not make me more attractive, but possibly prevents me from acting in an unattractive manner
- OTOH, I also feel greatly emotionally relaxed after a thorough weight-lifting session or an intense run, despite these things causing severe muscle tension, often to the point of pain and cramps. (IMHO, this suggest that the endorphin release from using your muscles is an effective mood changer, and thus personality changer regardless of lingering muscle tension)
- im definitely more social and effectively attractive while mildly drunk (this has been extensively tested for decades). Alcohol is a minor muscle relaxant, and my drunk self is definitely more physically fluid, but whether this makes a measurable difference on attractiveness is hard to tell, since alcohol is a major dis-inhibitor which has vastly greater effect on producing bold, attractive behavior.
- confusingly, I noticed that both acting visibly relaxed AND acting visibly tense (or rather, intense) seemed to attract women in different context. My assumption is that being visibly physically relaxed is a sign of emotional confidence and strength, but visible tension can be a sign of decisiveness, aggression and focus; which can be interpreted as dangerous or sexy, or possibly both.
- relaxed muscles contribute to a confident body language, which I think contributes to attraction, but not always and not in every context or with every woman. From personal observation: it seems that there is a complex interplay between how women perceive man’s body language, how they perceive him socially, and how they perceive the environment where they interact with him. I evolved through different stages of physical fitness over time, and they played differently with body language. Relaxed, confident, untensed body language that causes the man to physically open, “spread” and sprawl over the environment seemed to enhance my attractiveness when I was physically buff, but was perceived as annoying and arrogant when I was overweight. It was almost as if I was acting “above my station” when showing relaxed confidence in an unattractive body. Similarly, the untensed body language worked far better in casual environs where it was expected for a man to act that way (a bar, a club, a house party etc), but seemed to have the opposite effect during “daytime” interactions like a lunch-date.
So my tentative hypothesis is that untensing your muscles has a compounding effect on a man’s perceived attractiveness, positive or negative depending on context.
Im not sure if this has similar effect when women physically relax in the presence of a man. I notice I find physically tense and relaxed women equally attractive, though possibly in a different way.
It would be also interesting to research this in the context of same-sex attraction. As far as I can tell from observing my friends, gay men I know tend to be more physically relaxed than straight men in general, but their body language hardly seems to affect their attraction to each other. Inversely, the few gay women I observed in social environments, tend to be very physically tense and visibly anxious in the presence of other gay women, to the point I had a hard time at first to tell if their interaction was flirting or passive hostility.
Yes, but you are not moving by using all your muscles at once. The muscular-skeletal system is a complex set of levers, for a lever to be ready for activation by one set of muscle, it has to be primed by another set of muscle.
The simplest example is that you would not be able to use your leg muscles to walk if they untensed after each step, your legs would flop like wet noodles. Your leg needs to dynamically go through different tense patterns to remain rigid while your thighs, buttocks and calves to do the work of moving. Just keeping yourself vertical enough to walk requires constant dynamic tension (this can be easily tested by getting smashingly drunk).
Excellent post!
One random idea that came to my mind, which arguably might be something that actually exist, would be philanthropy through a Public Poll:
1. The would be philanthropist publishes a list of projects they are willing to support;2. the Public votes on the project they like best;
3. the winning project gets funding, the philanthropist gets good publicity.
Something like this is done on municipal level in my country, but since the “philanthropist” in question is the local government, their incentive is lukewarm; they only can get so much voter sympathy this way, whereas a billionaire or a corporation would milk it for all the good PR they can get.
My take is that a lot of wants, is followed, run afoul of the Cigarette Principle: “If you smoke enough cigarettes, you will die and become unable to smoke cigarettes”.
Or to expand it, following irrational wants quite often leads to outcomes so bad as to more than negate the pleasure derived from fulfilling the want, quite often to the point of making the future happiness from following such want impossible, or very unlikely.
The problem is, the vast majority of wants, if pursued by anything less than rational moderation, leads to a form of Cigarette Principle, the prime example being that the main cause of death in modern times is lifestyle related cardiac failure. Thus preferences should be considered internally suspicious and examined carefully for traps, rather than reflexively defended.
People are relatively good at spotting when Thing I Want and Thing That’s Good For Me are the same thing, but bad at seeing when these things are misaligned, so the best course of action is to consciously train yourself to like or unlike things based on whether they are Cigarettes in disguise or not.
Cast Away (2000) is a great study of an (otherwise average) man using the absolute height of his rationality to survive on a deserted island. Unlike the Martian, or many similar examples, the protagonist of Cast Away is NOT a scientist, nor a person with he kind of education and training to focus their rationality (well, he seems to be a logistics manager so his mental skills must be at least weakly adjacent to optimization, but not much). His survival depends not on some pre-thought mental models, but on applying raw, simple clear thinking to entirely unfamiliar problems.
The movie shows the processes of his survival struggles in loving detail, including his failures, insights and progress.
Importantly, it also shows what happens when a person who had spent years fighting for survival by using their intelligence to solve purely technical problems is at a loss when trying to apply the same kind of rational reasoning to human affairs, which are rife with compounded irrationality (a problem a lot of Rationalists can empathize with).
I think money is relatively neat value-holder here, because we can map people, and their options on it.
I don’t intuitively know how much money 1 mln USD is, but I know a guy who is a millionaire, and more or less know what he is capable of buying for himself or spending on charity.
I don’t intuitively grasp how much 1 billion USD is, but we have examples of billionaires and their actions to guesstimate what that means.
Similarly, I never lost a finger, but can practice using one hand, of just a few fingers of one hand to do everyday tasks, and see how much worse it is. I know several people with 1-2 fingers missing, and they do not seem particularly inconvenienced, some even play guitar! I know a guy with just one hand (which I think is much worse than just missing all fingers on one hand) and he is limited in some things but does fine. So it seems even missing half of your fingers is not that bad if you have a decent middle class career and wealth, and would probably be less of a problem for a millionaire.
Even based on that imprecise financial intuition, I can guess it would not be worth it to sacrifice fingers for 1 mln (because its not that much money in the end), worth it for 10 mln (because it would set you for life), and if Im going for 1 billion I might just go all the way to 10s of trillions.
One thing to consider is that we have more female ancestors than male ones, because males are far more likely to fail to breed, while also having the option to be much more successful breeders.
And historically, men were far more likely to be farmers (in a literal sense, farming plants being their main occupation, lifestyle and a source of calories) than women.
Or to put it differently: between about 12000 BC, and about 1800 AD, there majority of women were WIVES of farmers, but not farmers themselves (due to division of labor, the vast majority of women did jobs related to the production of cloth and non-farmign products, while men did the farming), while at the same time, there was a big % of men who were farmers (often unfree to some degree) who died childless.
Moreover, farmers usually stayed on the same land for a long time, intermarrying with their neighbors, thus particularly virile farmers eventually became ancestors to a lot of their neighborhood, while unsuccessful, poor, or unfree farmers had few or no children.
Women, moreso than men, would marry-out and leave their ancestral household, thus spreading their genes.
So we might end up with a calculation where you have a lot of Spinner and Weaver ancestors, but fewer Farmer ancestors.
honestly, the best solution to laziness spirals that I learned form personal experience, is to externalize the choice, so it is not dependent on willpower. Most of such tricks are almost trivial:
can’t get out of bed in the morning? Make the alarm clock louder, but also much further away, so that you HAVE TO get up to turn it off.
procrastinate on the phone/computer instead of working? Block every website and program that could possibly lure away your focus
can’t make yourself walk/jog anywhere, and instead drive everywhere? put your car keys inside your running shoes
can’t get yourself to work-out? Put your favorite time-waster (like say, the controller of your gaming device) under the gym bag or your weights.
create false deadlines on projects by telling someone it will be done much earlier than it needs to, and have them hold you accountable.
If you bring lunch/snacks to work, have a colleague keep them for you, and not give them back until you completed the chosen task, and can prove it (ex: no lunch unless you send 40 emails)
at home, pile dirty laundry on your favorite chair, or the favorite place on the couch. It will prevent you from sitting down, and encourage being more tidy. (IMHO, the couch is one of the worst humanity’s inventions )
A lot of anti-laziness schemes depending on trying to change your willpower, values, or decision-making systems, but often the easiest and most dependable solution is to remove the choice altogether, by pitting our avoidance of inconvenience against our laziness.
Dominance underlies the things that can be done most efficiently with dominance. The moment dominance is no longer the most efficient force, it collapses, because in the vast majority of cases, dominating others takes a lot of time, energy and effort. This is actually how and why slavery (pretty much the most powerful example of dominance) was abolished: it started to make less economic sense than Bargaining (paid employment of freemen) and just Getting Things Done (through better tools and ultimately machines), so even its most ardent supporters became dispirited.
A related thought: an intelligence can only work on the information that it has, regardless of its veracity, and it can only work on information that actually exists.
My hunch is that the plan of “AI boostraps itself to superintelligence, then superpower, then wipes out humanity” relies on it having access to information that is too well hidden to divine through sheer calculation and infogathering, regardless of its intelligence (ex: the location of all the military bunkers, and nuclear submarines humanity has), or simply does not exist (ex: future Human strategic choices based on coin-flips).
Most AI Apocalypse scenarios depend not only on the AI being superhumanly smart, but being inexplicably Omniscient about things that nobody could be plausibly Omniscient about.
this might not actually be always beneficial. Lucid dreaming also means you remember much more from the dreams, which can extend the lifespan of your recurring nightmares. Not to mention, if you dream lucidly, your consciousness is not resting, and intrusive thoughts will pile up.
My hypothesis is that a lot of things that seem impossible or very hard in a dream, are simply too boring to focus on. Its totally possible to consciously dream up a page of text, but who would really want to waste precious dreamtime to type?
I have a suspicion that “flying dreams” have more to do with the state of your physical body than just your mind. I noticed I only dream of flight (or rather, levitation) if my muscles are very relaxed, like after a good massage, long hot bath, or good stretching. If im physically tense, either from effort or from stress, then I either cannot fly in a dream at all, or I keep losing the ability and falling, often with enough distress to wake myself up.
In my experience, conscious Daydreaming can achieve the same results but more consistently. But then again, my imagination is extremely visual, I tend to “think in VR movies”, so Lucid Daydreaming comes easier than Lucid Dreaming, and is far more controllable.
Moreover, both the runner’s high and the pump correlate very obviously with the progress of the training, both in session and in the long term. Most forms of training usually start as grindingly unpleasant, then morph into a physical pump that directly causes emotional pump, and finally go back to mild grind once the body is exhausted.
With a repeatable training regimen this is easy to notice. For example, my runs are almost always 5km distance, and the “emotional high” lasts pretty much exactly between 2km and 4km, in near perfect accordance with my bpm and breath stabilizing.
The “high” is even an useful metric of progress: if the high/pump lasts longer than the middle 1⁄3 of the training, you’re probably making it too easy and not progressing anymore, if it lasts much shorter, you are overdoing it beyond your body’s ability to effectively adjust.