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.
I think you still have it wrong, because being present isn’t a skill. It’s more like an anti-skill: you have stop doing all the stuff you’re doing that keeps you from just being.
There is, instead, a different skill that’s needed to make progress towards being present. It’s a compound skill around noticing what you do out of habit rather than in response to present conditions, figuring out why you have those habits, practice not engaging in those habits when you otherwise would, and thereby developing trust that you can safely drop those habits, thus retraining yourself to do less out of habit and be closer to just being and responding.
I can’t think of a time where such false negatives were a real problem. False positives, in this case, are much more costly, even if the only cost is reputation.
If you never promise anything that could be a problem. Same if you make promises but no one believes them. Being able to make commitments is sometimes really useful, so you need to at least keep live the ability to make and hit commitments so you can use them when needed.
As AI continues to accelerate, the central advice presented in this post to be at peace with doom will become incresingly important to help people stay sane in a world where it may seem like there is no hope. But really there is hope so long as we keep working to avert doom, even if it’s not clear how we do that, because we’ve only truly lost when we stop fighting.
I’d really like to see more follow up on the ideas made in this post. Our drive to care is arguably why we’re willing to cooperate, and making AI that cares the same way we do is a potentially viable path to AI aligned with human values, but I’ve not seen anyone take it up. Regardless, I think this is an important idea and think folks should look at it more closely.
This post makes an easy to digest and compelling case for getting serious about giving up flaws. Many people build their identity around various flaws, and having a post that crisply makes the case that doing so is net bad is helpful to be able to point people at when you see them suffering in this way.
I think this post is important because it brings old insights from cybernetics into a modern frame that relates to how folks are thinking about AI safety today. I strongly suspect that the big idea in this post, that ontology is shaped by usefulness, matters greatly to addressing fundamental problems in AI alignment.
I’m less confident than you are about your opening claim, but I do think it’s quite likely that we can figure out how to communicate with orcas. Kudos for just doing things.
I’m not sure how it would fit with their mission, but maybe there’s a way you could get funding from EA Funds. It doesn’t sound like you need a lot of money.
Completed
The Typical Mind Fallacy is the most important bias in human reasoning.
How do I know? Because it’s the one I struggle with the most!
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 to practically be about the limit of my ability to make accurate predictions, and it’s served me well.
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.
What would it mean for this advice to not generalize? Like what cases are you thinking of where what someone needs to do to be more present isn’t some version of resolving automatic predictions of bad outcomes?
I ask because this feels like a place where disagreeing with the broad form of the claim suggests you disagree with the model of what it means to be present rather than that you disagree with the operationalization of the theory, which is something that might not generalize.