I’m writing a book about epistemology. It’s about The Problem of the Criterion, why it’s important, and what it has to tell us about how we approach knowing the truth.
I’ve also written a lot about AI safety. Some of the more interesting stuff can be found at the site of my currently-dormant AI safety org, PAISRI.
What does this mean?
I like this question a lot, but I’m more interested in its opposite, so I asked it!
Yes, this is why I like the movie better than the short story. PKD did more of what Total Recall did in other stories, like Ubik and A Scanner Darkly and The Man Who Japed, but never sends it fully the way Total Recall does.
Quest (1984)
This movie was written by Ray Bradbury.
It’s about people who have 8 day lifespans, and follows the story of a boy who grows up to fulfill a great quest. I like it from a rationalist standpoint because it has themes similar to those we have around AI, life extension, and more: we have a limited to achieve something, and if we don’t pull it off we are at least personally doomed, and maybe societally, too.
PT Barnum (1999)
This is a made for TV movie that can easily be found for free on YouTube.
I like it because it tells a somewhat fictionalized account of PT Barnum’s life that shows him as an expert in understanding the psychology of people and figuring out how to give them products they’ll love. Some might say what he does is exploitative, but the movie presents him as not much different than modern social media algorithms that give us exactly what we want, even if we regret it in hindsight.
The rationalist angle is coming away with a sense of what’s it’s like to be a live player who is focused on achieving something and in deep contact with reality to achieve it, willing to ignore social scripts in order to get there.
Total Recall (1990)
Based on the Phillip K. Dick short story “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale”. The movie is better than the short story.
I can’t tell you why this is a rationality movie without spoilers...
The movie masterfully sucks you into a story where you don’t know if you’re watching what’s really happening, or if you’re watching the false memories inserted into the protagonists mind at the start of the film. Much of the fun for rationalists would be trying to figure out if the film was reality or implanted memory.
It’s not quite like the dot com bust. Bottom of the market is very soft, with new grads basically having no options, but the top of the market is extremely tight, with the middle doing about like normal. Employers feel they can be more choosy right now for all roles, though, so they are being. That will change if roles sit unfilled for longer.
How would you compare your ideas here to Asimov’s fictional science of psychohistory? I ask because while reading this post I kept getting flashbacks to Foundation.
Yes, red is perhaps the most useful to color to be able to see! That’s why I chose to use it in this example.
I don’t know, but I can say that after a lot of hours of Alexander lessons my posture and movement improved in ways that would be described as “having less muscle tension” and this having less tension happened in conjunction with various sorts of opening and being more awake and moving closer to PNSE.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts, and sorry for your losses. It’s often hard to talk about death, especially about the deaths of those we love. I don’t really have anything other to say than that I found this moving to read, and I’m glad you shared it with us.
Here’s more answer than you probably wanted.
First up, the word “epistemic” solves a limitation of the word “knowledge” in that it doesn’t easily turn into an adjective. Yes, like all nouns in English it can be used like an adjective in the creation of noun phrases, but “knowledge state” and “knowledge status” don’t sound as good.
But more importantly there’s a strong etymological reason to prefer the word “epistemic” in these cases. “Epistemic” comes from “episteme”, one of Greek’s words for knowledge[1]. Episteme is knowledge that is justified by observation and reason, and importantly is known because the knower was personally convinced of the justification, as opposed to gnosis, where the only justification is experience, or doxa, which is second-hand knowledge[2].
Thus “epistemic” carries with it the connotation of being related to justified beliefs. An “epistemic state” or “epistemic status” implies a state or status related to how justified one’s beliefs are.
“Knowledge” is cognate with another Greek word for knowledge, “gnosis”, but the two words evolved along different paths from PIE *gno-, meaning “know”.
We call doxa “hearsay” in English, but because of that word’s use in legal contexts, it carries some pejorative baggage related to how hearsay is treated in trials. To get around this we often avoid the word “hearsay” and instead focus on our level of trust in the person we learned something from, but won’t make a clear distinction between hearsay and personally justified knowledge.
I’m sure my allegiance to these United States was not created just by reciting the Pledge thousands of times. In fact, I resented the Pledge for a lot of my life, especially once I learned more about its history.
But if I’m honest with myself, I do feel something like strong support for the ideals of the United States, much stronger than would make sense if someone had convinced me as an adult that its founding principals were a good idea. The United States isn’t just my home. I yearn for it to be great, to embody its values, and to persist, even as I disagree with many of the details of how we’re implementing the dream of the founders today.
Why do I think the Pledge mattered? It helped me get the feeling right. Once I had positive feelings about the US, of course I wanted to actually like the US. I latched onto the part of it that resonates with me: the founding principals. Someone else might be attracted to something else, or maybe would even find they don’t like the United States, but stay loyal to it because they have to.
I’m also drawing on my experience with other fake-it-until-you-make-it rituals. For example, I and many people really have come to feel more grateful for the things we have in life by explicitly acknowledge that gratitude. At the start it’s fake: you’re just saying words. But eventually those words start to carry meaning, and before long it’s not fake. You find the gratitude that was already inside you and learn how to express it.
In the opening example, I bet something similar could work for getting kids to appologize. No need to check if they are really sorry, just make them say sorry. Eventually the sadness at having caused harm will become real and flow into the expression of it. It’s like a kind of reverse training, where you create handles for latent behaviors to crystalize around, and by creating the right conditions when the ritual is performed, you stand a better-than-chance possibility of getting the desired association.
Some cultures used to, and maybe still do, have a solution to the hostile telepaths problem you didn’t list: perform rituals even if you don’t mean them.
If a child breaks their mom’s glasses, the mom doesn’t care if they are really sorry or not. All she cares about is if they perform the sorry-I-broke-your-glasses ritual, whatever that looks like. That’s all that’s required.
The idea is that the meaning comes later. We have some non-central instances of this in Western culture. For example, most US school children recite the Pledge of Allegiance every day (or at least they used to). I can remember not fully understanding what the words meant until I was in middle school, but I just went along with it. And wouldn’t you know it, it worked! I do have an allegiance to the United States as a concept.
The world used to be more full of these rituals and strategies for appeasing hostile telepaths, who just chose not to use their telepathy because everyone agreed it didn’t matter so long as the rituals were performed. But the spread of Christianity and Islam has brought a demand for internalized control of behaviors to much of the world, and with it we get problems like shame and guilt.
Now I’m not saying that performing rituals even if you don’t mean them is a good solution. There are a lot of tradeoffs to consider, and guilt and shame offer some societal benefits that enable higher trust between strangers. But it is an alternative solution, and one that, as my Pledge of Allegiance example suggests, does sometimes work.
Many ideas are hard to fully express in words. Maybe no idea can be precisely and accurately captured. Something is always left out when we use our words.
What I think makes some people faster (and arguably better) writers is that they natively think in terms of communication with others, whereas I natively think in terms of world modeling, and then try to come up with words that explain the word model. They don’t have to go through a complex thought process to figure out how to transmit their world model to others, because they just say thing that convey the messages that exist in their head, and those messages are generated based on their model of the world.
Yep! In fact, an earlier draft of this post included a mention of Paul Graham, because he’s a popular and well-liked example of someone who has a similar process to the one I use (though I don’t know if he does it for the same reasons).
In that earlier draft, I contrasted Graham with Scott Alexander, who I vaguely recall mentioning that he basically sits down at his computer and a couple hours later a finish piece of writing has appeared. But I couldn’t find a good reference of this being Scott’s process, so maybe it’s just a thing I talked with him about in person one time.
In the end I decided this was an unnecessary tangent for the body of the text, but I’m very glad to have a chance to talk about it in the comments! Thanks!
Back when I tried playing some calibration games, I found I was not able to get successfully calibrated above 95%. At that point I start making errors from things like “misinterpreting the question” or “randomly hit the wrong button” and things like that.
The math is not quite right on this, but from this I’ve adopted a personal 5% error margin policy, this seems ot practically be about the limit of my ability to make accurate predictions, and it’s served me well.