This machine resists Moloch
Jarred Filmer
Karma: 744
Love it! I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the role of hedonics in generally intelligent systems. afaik we don’t currently try to induce reward or punishment in any artifically intelligent system we try to build, we simply re-jig it until it produces the output we want. It might be that “re-jigging” does induce a hedonic state, but I see no reason assume it.
I can’t imagine how a meta optimiser might “create from scratch” a state which is intrinsically rewarding or adversive. In our own case I feel evolution must have recruited some property of the universe that was already lying around, something that is just axiomatically motivating to anything concious in the same way that the speed of light is just what is it.
At what age did you start trusting them do things like only crossing at approved intersections?
Out of curiosity, does all of the difference between the value of a child drowning in front of you and a child drowning far away come from uncertainty?
I enjoyed this take https://www.roote.co/wisdom-age
Agree or disagree: “There may be a pattern wherein rationalist types form an insular group to create and apply novel theories of cognition to themselves, and it gets really weird and intense leading to a rash of psychological breaks.”
I empathise with the feeling of slipperyness in the OP, I feel comfortable attributing that to the subject matter rather than malice.
If I had an experience that matched zoe’s to the degree jessicata’s did (superficially or otherwise) I’d feel compelled to post it. I found it helpful in the question of whether “insular rationalist group gets weird and experiences rash of psychotic breaks” is a community problem, or just a problem with stray dude.
Thanks for sharing, I’m about to move into a season of more time for hobby code and this seems like good advice to keep in mind
I’ve never seen that feeling described quite that way, I like it!
Out of curiousity, how do you feel about the proclaimed self evidence of “the cognito”, “I think therefore I am”?
You’re quite welcome 🙂
For existence it’s “I think therefore I am”, just seems like an unavoidable axiom of experience. It feels like wherever I look I’m staring at it.
For conciousness I listened to an 80k hours podcast with David Chalmers on The Hard Problem and ever since then it’s been self evident there’s something that it’s like to be me. It felt like something that had to be factored out of my experience and pointed at for me to see. But it seems as self evident as existing.
For wellbeing and suffering it took some extreme moments for me to start thinking about the fact that some things feel good and bad and that might be like, quite important actually. Also with the realisation that I never decided to find wellbeing good and suffering bad they just are.
For causality I admit it’s not as clear cut, and I only really thought about it yesterday reading this article. But in this moment I’m running an operating system shaped by the past. In that past I experienced the phenomena of prediction and causality. This moment seems no different to that moment so it feels natural to unambiguous act as though this moment will effect the next.
Hmm that last explanation feels much more unwieldy than existence, conciousness, and valence. Perhaps it doesn’t quite deserve the category of self evident, and is more like n+1 induction.
I greatly enjoyed this, thanks for writing it. I matched it to one of the questions in my own personal pantheon of mysteries.
What does it mean for a belief to be self-evident?
It seems self evidently true that I exist, that I am conscious, suffering is bad, wellbeing is good, and the next moment of experience will be the nesesary consequence of this moment.
I can point to the raw justification for these facts in my experience, and I just assume that other people have similar justifications embedded within their subjective perspective. But it’s still an intellectual mystery to me why “it’s self evident” feels like a satisfying justification. As you say maybe that too is self evident ad infinitum
Are the cross overs with the book “The Mind Illuminated” here coincidence? If not very excited to see a mash up of two of my favorite texts!!
Thank you for taking the time to write this, I enjoyed reading it and it made me think some interesting thoughts :)
I’m very open to the idea that I’ve seen something that wasn’t there and or wasn’t intended 😄, let me see if I can spesifically find what made me feel that way.
Okay, so I have that reaction to paragraphs like this:
White fragility is a sort of defensiveness that takes the form of a variety of strategies that white people deploy when we are confronted with how we participate in and perpetuate racismS. Whites use these strategies to deflect or avoid such a confrontation and to defend a comfortable, privileged vantage point from which race is “not an issue” (at least to us who benefit from it).
and
So if a white person should not pretend to be racially blank, and yet as DiAngelo reminds us “white identity is inherently racist,” what is a white person to do? DiAngelo’s way to thread the needle is this: “I strive to be ‘less white.’ ”
What I hear when I read this is “you are inherently white, and to be white is inheriently bad” thought it’s possible I’m pattern matching this to ideas of being and judgement that I grew up with in Church i.e “you are inherently a sinner”. Do you think this reading is totally unmerited?
And those first two points I’m on board with, but it’s the flavour of the third point that I react to because if I gave someone a bundle of ideas that I reasonably expected to be painful to process I’d try to deliver that message with as much overt kindness and recognition of their pain as I could.
And I’d expect flat statements like “try to drop your defensiveness” or “don’t take it so personally” to just make it harder to process and cause pain I guess 😅. Expecially when the receipients are disposed to think you already don’t like them.
(edited to tone down a little)
This was quite painful to read, and I see the dynamic of these ideas as problematic.
First, possibly the most painful idea for any human to entertain: “A large part of your core identity is inherently very bad in ways you can’t see”
and then second: “The pain and fear you feel in response to this news is a sign of inherent weakness (fragility) and further proves your guilt”
and lastly: “I’m not *trying* to make you feel bad, suppress that pain and take off your silly sack cloth and ashes”“You are inherently bad” → “Your pain on hearing that is weakness and proof of guilt” → “This dynamic is not problematic you’re being weird for over-reacting”
That’s very harsh thing to say to someone and then act like they are weird for having an adverse reaction.
I share your frustration at the book because I’m really sympathetic to the ideas that:
systemic racism is an issue
confusing racismF for racismS is a problem worth exploring
it’s encumbant upon me to look for unjust ways society has been set up that benifit me
the inherent pain majority groups face in grappling with these complex issues is a blocker to progress.
But I feel such sorrow at the idea that the solution to this dynamic is to position that pain itself as an insidious and problematic weakness. And to try and crop dust a generation of young people with that memeplex? That will lead to trouble.
If you want people to hold a painful and nuanced set of complex ideas and grapple with them they need to be held, seen, and supported.
The problem your trying to solve is not how to change your mother’s beliefs. Your problem is how to communicate that she’s making you feel negatively and if the two of you are going to have a relationship she needs to change her behaviour.
Trying to have a system 2 scientific discussion with your mother in this scenario is playing water polo with a lead ball. You may go in with a clear head and a scientific argument and manage to throw the ball. But 3 sentences in and you’re both going to be below water, having an emotional system 1 conversation.
What is an emotional conversation? It’s a conversation in which:
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The goals of the participants are not actually to present facts or reasoning about the world (e.g “homeopathy does not do the things you claim and here’s why”), but to communicate how the actions of another makes them feel (“when I say that homeopathy is not for me but you push it on me it makes me feel disrespected and frustrated”)
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The skills needed to facilitate the conversation are less reasoning and language skills, and more being able to express how your feeling in realtime, communicate you boundaries, being sensitive to how the other person is feeling without taking responsibility for it, and be vulnerable if that’s appropriate.
This is all easier said than done, especially when it comes to family. Some things you can do to practice a conversation like this:
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Have it in your head, and imagine your mother saying whatever would maximally trigger you and how you might respond with emotion communication and boundry setting. (“I feel disrespected” → “it’s not my fault you won’t see the light of homeopathy” → “now I’m feeling like you don’t care that you’re making me feel this way”)
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Role play with a therapist or trusted friend. Some universities or work places offer free therapists that could help you if you’re insurance won’t cover it.
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Read books on the subject like “non violent communication”
Good luck my friend!
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That tweet on Australia might be a little misleading. The vaccination board’s official statement as far as I read is that an under 40 year old is more likley to die of an AZ vaccine than covid given the current covid prevalance and death rate in Australia, which is virtually non-existant. They released a pdf to this effect weighting the risks and their plan is to have everyone under 40 vaccinated on pfizer by the end of the year.
Betting that there won’t be an outbreak before then is still likley the wrong risk to be taking, but it’s less dumb than just saying AZ is more dangerous than covid full stop 😄. Indeed the Prime Minister has drawn the ire of the vacination board by opening up AZ to all ages rather than just over 40ies (apparently older people have half the risk of blood clots and obviously more risk of dying from covid).
If I was in charge of the country I’d do the same, and if I was being the game theory I wanted to see in the world I’d get the AZ now. But living in a city that has no covid and just does a 3 day lockdown until it’s gone every time there’s community transmission (4 or so times since march 2020 pretty evenly distributed) I’m weighing up whether to wait until either another outbreak or pfizer becomes available in a couple months.
This is my great hope also.
There is a compelling narrative to be told around coordination as the super power of humanity that uses the examples of language, printed word and the internet (which are really bundles of smaller technological steps analogous to say zero knowledge proofs in crypto) as positive examples of social technology making things better.
As an enterprising EA in my 20ies I feel the pull of this narrative when thinking about how I might spend my professional efforts, but it remains to be seen if it will survive deeper thought whatever cheap tests I can think to run.
I see landmark as entering into a symbiotic relationship with a parasitic set of memes. It’s a life changing experience for a lot of people, but Landmark wants to grow and it’ll attempt to drain your resources (money, volunteering time, and social capital) to do so.
I had a coworker who was obsessed with landmark, and eventually wore some of us down to attend the intro night. I too was impressed at how psychoactive the environment was, and it seemed to be really helping people! But I felt concerned for many of the same reasons as OP.
There’s a lot of parallels here with psychedelic therapy. One, it’s cheaper and faster than years of CBT. And two you are in essence letting someone really heat up your mind (especially your self conception) to allow you to anneal out of sticky maladaptive local maximas. As OP says, they induce this open state with:
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Exhaustion from long hours and homework
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Putting you on stage in front of a crowd and then manipulating the crowd’s response to you. (i.e. manipulating social reality)
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Installing active memes with good concept handles. Whether or not these memes reflect reality the mind responds to them in powerful and predictable ways if delivered in the right context (as in Christianity)
Unfortunately while you’re in this state landmark also tries to install a powerful evangelical perogative to sign-up everyone you know, and a belief that if you really cared about your continued development you would take the subsequent (also really expensive) courses.
This makes sense, as organisations who find this technology and don’t do this will be out competed by ones that do. But you’re still giving root access to your mind over to an organisation that wants to use your resources to grow.
My coworker is in a lot of tax debt and yet has spent tens of thousands on landmark courses. I took this as a warning and just did therapy and acid instead.
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Thank you very much for taking the time to write this. Scott Alexander and Glen Wyel are two of my intellectual hero’s, they’ve both done a lot for my thinking in economics, coordination, and just how to go about a dialectic intellectual life in general.
So I was also dismayed (to an extent I honestly found surprising) when they couldn’t seem to find a good faith generative dialogue. If these two can’t then what hope is there for the average Red vs Blue tribe member?
This post have me a lot of context though, so thanks again 😊
Thanks for your reply :) as in many things, QRI lays out my position on this better than I’m able to 😅
https://www.qualiaresearchinstitute.org/blog/a-primer-on-the-symmetry-theory-of-valence