Appreciated: both footnote [corrected] and bluntness-wise. The whole post came out of somewhat of a hydraulic press for me, so that statement [among others] seems quite fitting. Might end up rewriting or heavily editing a few portions here and there in the future, though. For now, I definitely need a break and some time to recharge. One week of back and forth in order to compile and structure it all was enough.
HNX
Karma: 5
Levels of Thought: from Points to Fields
It’s at times like these that I absolutely love the distinction between “karma” and “agreement” around here. +1 for the former, as per the overall sentiment. −1 for the latter, as per the sheer nonsensical-ity of the scale of the matter.
The “world” doesn’t need “saving”. Never did. Never will. If for no other reason than there is no “one” world, to begin with. What you think about when mentioning the “world” itself will drastically different from what I have in mind, from what Eliezer has in mind, from what anyone else around here has in mind.
Our brains can only ever hold such a tiny amount of information in our short-term storage, that to even hope it ever represents any significant portion of the “world” itself is laughable. Even your long-term storage / episodic + semantic memory only ever came in contact with such a tiny portion of the “world”.
You can’t “save” what you barely “know” to begin with.
Yet there’s a deeper rabbit hole still.
When you say “save the world” you likely mean either “saving our local ecosystem” (as in: all the biological forms of self-organizing matter, as you know it), “saving our species” (Homo Sapiens, first and foremost), or “saving your world” (as in: the part of reality you have personally grown up in, conditioned yourself to, assimilated with, and currently project onto the rest of real world as the likely only world, to begin with—a.k.a. Typical Mind Fallacy).
The “world” doesn’t need “saving”, though. It came before you. It will persist after you. Probably. Physics. Anyhow.
What may need some “help” is society. Not “the” abstract, ephemeral, all-encompassing, thus absolutely void of any and all meaning to begin, “society”. But the society, made out of “people”. As in: “individuals”. Living in their own “world”. Only ever coming in contact with <1% of information you’ve likely come into contact with, so far.
They don’t need your attempts at “saving” them, either. What they need is specific solutions to specific problems within specific domains of specific kind of relationship to the domains, closely/farther adjacent to it.
You will never solve any of them. Unless you stop throwing around phrases like “saving the world”, in the first place. The world came into being via a specific kind of process. It is now maintained by specific kind of feedback loops, recurrent cycles, incentive structures, reward/punishment mechanisms driving mostly unconscious decision making processes, and individual habits of each and every individual operating within their sphere of influence.
You want to help? Figure out what kind of incremental changes you can begin to introduce in any of them, in order to begin extinguishing the sort of problems you’ve now elevated to the rank of “saving-worthy” in your own head. Note that, in all likelihood, by extinguishing one you will merrily introduce a whole bunch of others—something you won’t get to discover until much later one. Yet that is, realistically, what you can actually go on to accomplish.
“Saving the world”? Please. Do you even know what’s exactly going on in the opposite side of the globe today?
Great sentiment. Horrible phrasing. Nothing personal. “Helping people” is a team’s sport.
Side note: are these quick takes turning into a new Twitter/X feed? Gosh, please don’t. Please!
Fair point. Didn’t think it through that much when I first drafted it. Still, multiplication has its time and place—at least for a portion of them.
You can categorize an “idea”, broadly speaking, into one of the two: a one-off change in state (e.g. any project), or a repeated execution of a particular behavior (e.g. building a new habit).
For a project, addition may be more suitable. Could you say the same about habits, though?
Semantics. What do we, or they, or you, or me, mean when we talk about “happiness”?
For some (hedonists), it is the same as “pleasure”. Perhaps, a bit drawn out in time: as in the process of performing bed gymnastics with a sufficiently attractive member of the opposite sex—not a moment after eating a single candy.
For others, it’s the “thrill” of the chase, of the hunt, of the “win”.
For others still: a sense of meaningful progress.
The way you’ve phrased the question, seems to me, disregards a handful of all the possible interpretations in favor of a much more defined—albeit still rather vague, in virtue of how each individual may choose to narrow it down—“fulfillment”. Thus “why do people solipsistically optimizing for hedonism are actually less happy?” turns into “why do people who only ever prioritize their pleasure and short-term gratification are less fulfilled?” The answer is obvious: pleasure is a sensory stimulation, and whatever its source, sooner or later we get desensitized to it.
In order to continue reaching ever new heights, or even to maintain the same level of satisfaction, then—a typical hedonistically wired solipsist will have to constantly look for a new “hit” elsewhere, elsewhere, elsewhere again. Unlike the thrill of the “chase” however—there is no clear vision, or goal, or target, or objective. There’s only increasingly fuzzier “just like that” or “just like that time back then, or better!” How happy could that be?
[Question] I = W/T?
[1] Can’t they both be not objective? Why make it a point of one or the other? A bit of a false dichotomy, there.
[2] There is no single “Internet”—there are specific spaces, forums, communities, blogs, you name it; comprising it. Each has its own, subjective, irrational, moderated (whether by a single individual, a team, or an overall sentiment of the community: promoting/exalting/hyping one subset of topics while ignoring others) mini/sub-culture.
This last one, furthermore, necessarily only happens to care about its own specific niche; happily ignoring most of everything else. LessWrong used to be mostly about, well—being less wrong—back when it started out. Thus, the “rationality” philosophy. Then it has slowly shifted towards a broader, all-encompassing EA. Now it’s mostly AI.
Compare the 3k+ results for the former against the 8k+ results for the latter.
Every space is focused on its own topic, within whatever mini/sub-cultural norms are encouraged/rewarded or punished/denigrated by the people within it. That creates (virtually) unavoidable blind spots, as every group of people within each space only shares information about [A] its chief topic of interest, within [B] the “appropriate” sentiment for the time, while [C] contrasting itself against the enemy/out-group/non-rationalists, you name it.
In addition to that, different groups have vastly different [I] amount of time on their hands, [II] social, emotional, ethical, moral “charge” with regards to the importance they assign to their topic of choice, and emergent from it come out [III] vastly different amounts of information, produced by the people within that particular space.
When you compile the data set for your LLM, you’re not compiling a proportionately biased take on different topics. If that was the case, I’d happily agree with you. But you are clearly not. What you are compiling is a bunch of biased, blindsided in their own way, overly leaning towards one social, semantic, political, epistemological position; sets of averaged sentiments. Each will have their own memes, quirks, “hot takes”. Each will have massively over-represented discussions of one topic, at the expense of the other. That’s the web of today.
When you “train” your GPT on the resulting data set then, who is to say whether it is “averaging” the biases in between different groups? Can you open up any LLM to see its exact logic, reasoning, argumentation steps? Should there be any averaging going on, after all—how is it going to account for disproportionately represented takes of people, who simply have too much time and/or rage to spare? What of the people, who simply don’t spend too much on the web to begin with? Is your GPT going to “average in” those as well, somehow?
What would prevent the resulting transformer from simply picking up on the likelihood of any given incoming prompt matching the overall “culture” of any single community, thus promptly completing it as if it was a part of an “average” discussion within that particular community there? Isn’t it plain wishful, if not outright naive*, to imagine the algo will do what you hope it will do—instead of what is the easiest possible thing for it to do?
* the fact a given thought pattern is wishful/naive doesn’t make you wishful/naive; don’t take it personally, plz
AI: The Philosopher’s Stone of the 21st Century
Not from the US either. I’d be far too biased if I were to express my personal stance, as well. Yet as far as irrationality goes, a few things stand out:
To quote Eliezer himself: politics is the mind killer. Even more so, when the general population doesn’t seem to be either aware of, or particularly concerned with, the ease it is swept by the tidal waves of their respective tribal call to arms with.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9weLK2AJ9JEt2Tt8f/politics-is-the-mind-killer
For a rather substantial portion of it (at least, to an outsider’s perspective—which very well may be as distorted as it can possibly be), the question seems to have less to do with Harris or Trump as candidates, or their policies. Much more: with what they claim to stand for.
Harris represents the system. She’s been part of the establishment for as long as she’s been on the radar of the public. She’s a woman. She’s Hispanic. She’s a Democrat. She’s pro all the minorities. Thrilling start for any PR team!
Trump is the embodiment of the exact opposite. He’s the anti-system, anti-bureaucracy, anti-spending, anti-NATO. Pro back-in-the-day.
“Make all things great again”.
Harris is riding a wave of (rather questionable, accountability-avoidant, no-interviews-please?) trust by the most progressive portion of the population in that their voices have been heard, and the changes they (alongside the minorities they are allegedly protecting) expect are just around the corner. As long as Harris wins.
Trump is riding a wave of discontent. Of the dissatisfaction with the status quo, with the establishment, with the MIC, with politicians—everything a typical, down-to-earth, quid-pro-quo American has likely grown to despise.
Harris = trust us, we are going to change. Trump = trust me, they are lying to you again.
The growing gap in between concerns of the left and the centrists/right certainly doesn’t help. Yet a more fundamental belief in one’s ability to actively influence to one’s benefit, on one side; and ever increasing distrust towards, the system as a whole, on the other one; doesn’t seems to be the least significant of a factor here.
Trump has certainly contributed to the amount of distrust the latter are now feeling, of course. Though I’m personally struggling to say whether this was due to his positioning alone, or (at least in part) thanks to an increasingly larger portions of the “machine” actively weaponizing more and more of its metaphorical antibodies against the threat of his highly unwarranted “invasion”.
Lastly, differences in acting styles. I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to take a US politician’s self-expression at a face value given all that’s transpired over the last decade, so forgive me that particular term.
Trump is a celebrity. He’s honed his skills as a public figure quite well while running his empire. He’s also lived through enough controversies and humiliations to develop his own style, which he’s likely only refined further with “The Apprentice”.
To stay a celebrity, you have to continue supplying people with what they expect from you. Here, you can either choose to passively play into trendy people’s whims. Or to craft an image, conditioning people to expect a certain “shtick”.
What has he conditioned people to expect, over the decades in real estate and later—show-biz?
One, larger-than-life, Trump-Tower-’esque show.
To create one, you need a central theme. You can’t orchestrate it around 6-hours long debates on contentious issues without an immediate, visceral, instant response from the public.
What about a catchy slogan? Yes, please.
“Make America Great Again”, it is.
What about a Big Brother as an enemy? Done.
A fascinating side effect / self-fulfilling prophecy here, in particular. The more he’s baiting / provoking / exposing / calling out the establishment, the more compelled this last one feels to adopt increasingly Big-Brother’esque tactics in direct response to his shenanigans.
Those, who have originally anchored him as a “threat to democracy” would then get even more polarized towards the “he’s the next Hitler” part of the spectrum. The ones who already resonate with his MAGA performance grow to support him even more, as more and more of their own doubts, concerns, and suspicions come to life.
Combine all three points with a more traditional, conservative, occasionally: God-fearing perspective; concern about Biden’s cognitive decline supported by Harris & Co enthusiastic conviction in him still being as sharp as ever, (virtually completely?) unattended border situation—and you’ll probably get yourself a rather coherent picture of a Trumpist.
How much of it is pro-MAGA and “Trump will save us all” vs “Biden and Harris just have to go”?
No idea, to be completely honest.
Completely open to having all of my “arguments” torn to shreds, of course. The sole fact there is such a perfectly civil, patient, non-hostile discussion taking place on topic of this sort has already been an incredible sight to witness.
A bit of a pushback, if I may: confirmation bias/motivated reasoning themselves only arise because of an inherent, deep-seated, [fairly likely] genetically conditioned, if not unconscious sense that:
A. there is, in fact, a single source of ground truth even, if not especially, outside of regular, axiomatic, bottom-up, abstract, formalized representation: be it math [+] or politics [-]
B. it is, in fact, both viable and desirable, to affiliate yourself with any one/number of groups, whose culture/perspective/approach/outlook must fully represent the A: instead of an arbitrarily small, blind-sided to everything else, part of the underlying portion it is most familiar with itself
C. any single point/choice/decision/conclusion/action reached must, in itself, be inherently sensible enough to hold for an arbitrarily significant period of time, without any revision or consideration of the opposite/orthogonal perspective; this one, in turn, might itself stem from an assumption that:
D. the world must be either a [1] static entity, fully representable with an arbitrarily large set of beliefs, attitudes, and considerations; or a [2] dynamic, yet inherently mechanical, following the exact same static laws/rules/patterns in each and every aspect of itself: be it physics or society; these last ones can be safely assumed to be never-changing and, once “understood”, always reinterpreted within the exact same light as in the original interpretation of the time
E. whatever the kind of entity it is, any particular snapshot of the linguistic and/or symbolic representation of it is, at every moment, fully capable of describing it, without coming up short within any single aspect of it: an assumption, if you will, that there no “3x+1 Conjectures” the limitations of our cognitive/representative tools in the present would not be able to figure out
Biology-wise, the B might be strong enough to easily overpower, without any of our conscious awareness, the rest of them. Yet even discounting that: the motivated reasoning and the desire to adhere to whatever stance has been reached already themselves stem, fundamentally, from the sheer human arrogance in regarding whatever was [conceived/perceived/assimilated/concluded] as fully sufficient both for what is in the present, as well for what will be yet, going forward.
That arrogance, in turn, anchors our cognition; which promptly short-circuits itself into whatever Weltanschauung our general A-E’sque attitude of the day lines up to, in attempt to save energy on rather costly and, given A to E, completely wasteful brain cycles. MR/CB is merely an effect of it all.
P.S. Two upticks from me, regardless. The links were much appreciated. Would gladly hear any of your additional thoughts on the matter in a fully-sized post/article/whatever you call it here.