Oh yeah, this. I used to think that “argh” or “it hurts” were just hyperbolic compliments for an excellent pun. Turns out, puns actually are painful to some people.
Kaj_Sotala
Karma: 47,665
Annoyingly I have the recollection of having thought “oh, that’s not a metaphor?” several times in my life, but I don’t seem to have saved what the things in question actually were.
I guess I don’t really understand what you’re asking. I meant my comment as an answer to this bit in the OP:
I think it’s common on LessWrong to think of evolution’s selection target as inclusive genetic fitness—that evolution tries to create organisms which make as many organisms with similar DNA to themselves as possible. But what exactly does this select for?
In that evolution selecting for “inclusive genetic fitness” doesn’t really mean selecting for anything in particular; what exactly that ends up selecting for is completely dependent on the environment (where “the environment” also includes the species itself, which is relevant for things like sexual selection or frequency-dependent selection).
If you fix the environment, assuming for the sake of argument that it’s possible to do that, then the exact thing it selects for are just the traits that are useful in that environment.
Do humans have high inclusive genetic fitness?
I think it’s a bit of a category mistake to ask about the inclusive fitness of a species. You could calculate the average fitness of an individual within the species, but at least to my knowledge (caveat: I’m not a biologist) that’s not very useful. Usually it’s individual genotypes or phenotypes within the species that are assigned a fitness.
I’ve previously argued that genetic fitness is a measure of selection strength, not the selection target. What evolution selects for are traits that happen to be useful in the organism’s current environment. The extent to which a trait is useful in the organism’s current environment can be quantified as fitness, but fitness is specific to a particular environment and the same trait might have a very different fitness in some other environment.
I think if you have access to a group interested in doing social events with plausible deniability, that group is probably already a place where you should be able to be honest about your beliefs without fear of “cancellation.”
You may not know exactly who belongs to that group before going to the event and seeing who shows up.
Somehow people who are in good physical health wake up each day with a certain amount of restored willpower. (This is inconsistent with the toy model in the OP, but is still my real / more-complicated model.)
This fits in with opportunity cost-centered and exploration-exploitation -based views of willpower. Excessive focus on any one task implies that you are probably hitting diminishing returns while accumulating opportunity costs for not doing anything else. It also implies that you are probably strongly in “exploit” mode and not doing much exploring. Under those models, accumulating mental fatigue acts to force some of your focus to go to tasks that feel more intrinsically enjoyable rather than duty-based, which tends to correlate with things like exploration and e.g. social resource-building. And your willpower gets reset during the night so that you could then go back to working on those high-opportunity cost exploit tasks again.
I think those models fit together with yours.
(I believe @Kaj_Sotala has written about this somewhere wrt Global Workspace Theory? I found this tweet in the meantime.)
There’s at least this bit from “Subagents, akrasia, and coherence in humans”:
One model (e.g. Redgrave 2007, McHaffie 2005) is that the basal ganglia receives inputs from many different brain systems; each of those systems can send different “bids” supporting or opposing a specific course of action to the basal ganglia. A bid submitted by one subsystem may, through looped connections going back from the basal ganglia, inhibit other subsystems, until one of the proposed actions becomes sufficiently dominant to be taken.
The above image from Redgrave 2007 has a conceptual image of the model, with two example subsystems shown. Suppose that you are eating at a restaurant in Jurassic Park when two velociraptors charge in through the window. Previously, your hunger system was submitting successful bids for the “let’s keep eating” action, which then caused inhibitory impulses to be sent to the threat system. This inhibition prevented the threat system from making bids for silly things like jumping up from the table and running away in a panic. However, as your brain registers the new situation, the threat system gets significantly more strongly activated, sending a strong bid for the “let’s run away” action. As a result of the basal ganglia receiving that bid, an inhibitory impulse is routed from the basal ganglia to the subsystem which was previously submitting bids for the “let’s keep eating” actions. This makes the threat system’s bids even stronger relative to the (inhibited) eating system’s bids.
Soon the basal ganglia, which was previously inhibiting the threat subsystem’s access to the motor system while allowing the eating system access, withdraws that inhibition and starts inhibiting the eating system’s access instead. The result is that you jump up from your chair and begin to run away. Unfortunately, this is hopeless since the velociraptor is faster than you. A few moments later, the velociraptor’s basal ganglia gives the raptor’s “eating” subsystem access to the raptor’s motor system, letting it happily munch down its latest meal.
But let’s leave velociraptors behind and go back to our original example with the phone. Suppose that you have been trying to replace the habit of looking at your phone when bored, to instead smiling and directing your attention to pleasant sensations in your body, and then letting your mind wander.
Until the new habit establishes itself, the two habits will compete for control. Frequently, the old habit will be stronger, and you will just automatically check your phone without even remembering that you were supposed to do something different. For this reason, behavioral change programs may first spend several weeks just practicing noticing the situations in which you engage in the old habit. When you do notice what you are about to do, then more goal-directed subsystems may send bids towards the “smile and look for nice sensations” action. If this happens and you pay attention to your experience, you may notice that long-term it actually feels more pleasant than looking at the phone, reinforcing the new habit until it becomes prevalent.
To put this in terms of the subagent model, we might drastically simplify things by saying that the neural pattern corresponding to the old habit is a subagent reacting to a specific sensation (boredom) in the consciousness workspace: its reaction is to generate an intention to look at the phone. At first, you might train the subagent responsible for monitoring the contents of your consciousness, to output moments of introspective awareness highlighting when that intention appears. That introspective awareness helps alert a goal-directed subagent to try to trigger the new habit instead. Gradually, a neural circuit corresponding to the new habit gets trained up, which starts sending its own bids when it detects boredom. Over time, reinforcement learning in the basal ganglia starts giving that subagent’s bids more weight relative to the old habit’s, until it no longer needs the goal-directed subagent’s support in order to win.
Now this model helps incorporate things like the role of having a vivid emotional motivation, a sense of hope, or psyching yourself up when trying to achieve habit change. Doing things like imagining an outcome that you wish the habit to lead to, may activate additional subsystems which care about those kinds of outcomes, causing them to submit additional bids in favor of the new habit. The extent to which you succeed at doing so, depends on the extent to which your mind-system considers it plausible that the new habit leads to the new outcome. For instance, if you imagine your exercise habit making you strong and healthy, then subagents which care about strength and health might activate to the extent that you believe this to be a likely outcome, sending bids in favor of the exercise action.
On this view, one way for the mind to maintain coherence and readjust its behaviors, is its ability to re-evaluate old habits in light of which subsystems get activated when reflecting on the possible consequences of new habits. An old habit having been strongly reinforced reflects that a great deal of evidence has accumulated in favor of it being beneficial, but the behavior in question can still be overridden if enough influential subsystems weigh in with their evaluation that a new behavior would be more beneficial in expectation.
Some subsystems having concerns (e.g. immediate survival) which are ranked more highly than others (e.g. creative exploration) means that the decision-making process ends up carrying out an implicit expected utility calculation. The strengths of bids submitted by different systems do not just reflect the probability that those subsystems put on an action being the most beneficial. There are also different mechanisms giving the bids from different subsystems varying amounts of weight, depending on how important the concerns represented by that subsystem happen to be in that situation. This ends up doing something like weighting the probabilities by utility, with the kinds of utility calculations that are chosen by evolution and culture in a way to maximize genetic fitness on average. Protectors, of course, are subsystems whose bids are weighted particularly strongly, since the system puts high utility on avoiding the kinds of outcomes they are trying to avoid.
The original question which motivated this section was: why are we sometimes incapable of adopting a new habit or abandoning an old one, despite knowing that to be a good idea? And the answer is: because we don’t know that such a change would be a good idea. Rather, some subsystems think that it would be a good idea, but other subsystems remain unconvinced. Thus the system’s overall judgment is that the old behavior should be maintained.
your psyche’s conscious verbal planner “earns” willpower
This seems to assume that there’s 1) exactly one planner and 2) it’s verbal. I think there are probably different parts that enforce top-down control, some verbal and some maybe not.
For example, exerting willpower to study boring academic material seems like a very different process than exerting willpower to lift weights at the gym.
I think that there is something like:
Local beliefs about the usefulness of exerting willpower in a particular context (e.g. someone might not believe that willpower is useful in school but does believe that it’s useful in the gym, or vice versa, and correspondingly have more willpower available in one context than the other)
To the extent that one has internalized a concept about “willpower” being a single thing, broader beliefs about willpower being useful in general
Various neurological and biological variables that determine how strong one’s top-down processes are in general, relative to their bottom-up processes (e.g. someone with ADHD will have their bottom-up processes be innately stronger than the top-down ones; medication may then strengthen the amount of top-down control they have).
Various neurological and biological variables that determine which of one’s processes get priority in any given situation (e.g. top-down control tends to be inhibited when hungry or tired; various emotional states may either reduce or increase the strength of top-down control)
My model of burnout roughly agrees with both your and @Matt Goldenberg . To add to Matt’s “burnout as revolt” model, my hunch is that burnout often involves not only a loss of belief that top-down control is beneficial. I think it also involves more biological changes to the neural variables that determine the effectiveness of top-down versus bottom-up control. Something in the physical ability of the top-down processes to control the bottom-up ones is damaged, possibly permanently.
Metaphorically, it’s like the revolting parts don’t just refuse to collaborate anymore; they also blow up some of the infrastructure that was previously used to control them.
Sounds plausible to me. Alternatively, telling you that they didn’t over-apologize still communicates that they would have over-apologized in different circumstances, so it can be a covert way of still delivering that apology.
A crucial part of every IFS session is to ask the protector what age they think you are (often, at least in examples, it would say something like 5-12) and then you could reveal to it that actually you’re 30 (or whatever).
I wouldn’t put it as strongly as to say that it’s a crucial part of every IFS session. It can sometimes be a very useful question and approach, sure, but I’ve had/facilitated plenty of great sessions that didn’t use that question at all. And there are people who that question just doesn’t resonate with.
As far as I know, the latest representative expert survey on the topic is “Thousands of AI Authors on the Future of AI”, in which the median time for a 50% chance of AGI was either in 23 or 92 years, depending on how the question was phrased:
If science continues undisrupted, the chance of unaided machines outperforming humans in every possible task was estimated at 10% by 2027, and 50% by 2047. [...] However, the chance of all human occupations becoming fully automatable was forecast to reach 10% by 2037, and 50% as late as 2116 (compared to 2164 in the 2022 survey).
Not that these numbers would mean much because AI experts aren’t experts on forecasting, but it still suggests a substantial possibility for AGI to take quite a while yet.
Hmm… let me rephrase: it doesn’t seem to me like we would actually have a clear community norm for this, at least not one strong enough to ensure that the median community member would actually be familiar with stats and econ.
community norms which require basically everyone to be familiar with statistics and economics,
I think this is too strong. There are quite a few posts that don’t require knowledge of either one to write, read, or comment on. I’m certain that one could easily accumulate lots of karma and become a well-respected poster without knowing either.
I had the thought while reading the original post that I recall speaking to at least one researcher who, pre-replication crisis, was like “my work is built on a pretty shaky foundation as is most of the research in this field, but what can you do, this is the way the game is played”. So that suggested to me that plenty of median researchers might have recognized the issue but not been incentivized to change it.
Lab leaders aren’t necessarily in a much better position. If they feel responsibility toward their staff, they might feel even more pressured to keep gaming the metrics so that the lab can keep getting grants and its researchers good CVs.
I’ve seen one paper arguing against Planck’s claim:
Unquestionably, there are scientists in every generation who tenaciously cling to knowledge they learned in their youth, and who refuse to consider new theories that challenge fundamental beliefs. The life-long resistance of Joseph Priestley to oxygen theory, Louis Agassiz to evolutionary theory, and Harold Jeffreys to continental drift are among the notable cases. It is virtually a truism that the last adherents to a fading scientific tradition will be elderly scientists. Yet documented episodes where resistance of isolated individuals crystallizes into generational disputes, or where an ageing scientific elite actually delays community-wide adoption of a new idea, are exceedingly rare. A review of the historical record suggests, on the contrary, that the period of active dissemination and adoption of scientific innovations—even those of revolutionary proportion—is typically shorter than that required for one generation of scientists to replace another. [...]
Curiously, the episode which prompted Planck’s observation—the ‘controversy’ surrounding his youthful reformulation of the second law of thermodynamics—seems a poor illustration of the ‘fact’ Planck claims to have learned. According to Planck’s own sketchy chronology (he provides few dates), not much more than ten years seems to have elapsed between his first unsuccessful attempts at gaining recognition, and the ‘universal acceptance’ of his dissertation thesis on the irreversible process of heat conduction. Nor does it appear that age was an important factor influencing adoption of the theory. Wilhelm Ostwald, one of the leaders of the opposition ‘Energetics’ school prominently mentioned by Planck, was only five years older than Planck, whereas Ludwig Boltzmann, whose theoretical work on entropy, in no small measure (as Planck grudgingly concedes) helped bring the scientific community around to Planck’s view, was fourteen years Planck’s senior.
Some quantitative data permit more systematic examination of age differences in receptivity, for both Lavoisier’s and Darwin’s landmark contributions. In a study of the Chemical Revolution, McCann reports a negative correlation between author’s age and the use of the oxygen paradigm in scientific papers written between 1760 and 1795. On closer inspection of the data, he finds that the earliest group of converts to the oxygen paradigm (between 1772 and 1777) were middle-aged men with close ties to Lavoisier; the inverse age effect became manifest only after 1785, during the ten-year period of ‘major conversion and consolidation’. McCann also contends that the age structure of the British community during the latter half of the eighteenth century impeded acceptance of the new theory. In contrast to the declining age of French scientists during this period, the increasing average age of British scientists held back the pace of acceptance of oxygen theory among British scientists of all age strata.
As for evolutionary theory, Hull and his colleagues find weak support for ‘Planck’s Principle’ among nineteenth-century British scientists. The small minority of scientists who held out against the theory after 1869 were, on average, almost ten years older than earlier adopters. Age in 1859 (the year the Origin of Species was published) was unrelated, however, to speed of acceptance for the great majority of those converting to evolutionary theory by 1869. [...]
… we can distinguish high- risk and low-risk contexts for theory choices of individual scientists. A high-risk context is one in which there is substantial resistance to the new theory. Prevailing scientific opinion views it as controversial, a heretical assault on existing knowledge, or even being beyond the pale of serious scientific discourse. Adoption of a new theory in a high-risk context presumably exacts some perceived or actual professional costs. Given such a social setting, structural constraints of life-course position would be hypothesized to be more important than motivational factors in determining theory-choice behaviour. This implies, for example, that the earliest adopters of controversial theories should be disproportionately composed of middle-career and senior scientists and a corresponding deficit of young scientists.
In a low-risk context, a new theory is generally regarded as a legitimate claimant to knowledge, or one which has already attracted a sizeable following; consequently its adoption exposes one to only minimal professional costs. The social patterning of theory-choice behaviour in this context is hypothesized to be dominated by motivational factors, tending to reinforce more rapid adoption by younger scientists. [...]
During the early stages in the adoption of a new theory, age differences between supporters of the new theory and defenders of the status quo are expected to be either relatively small or (particularly if the new idea is perceived as being unusually controversial) tending toward older age for the first supporters. With the passage of time and greater acceptance of the new theory, we expect the influx of new converts to be increasingly drawn from the ranks of younger scientists. Such a correspondence between changes in the context of appraisal and age-based differences in theory choice is evident in McCann’s data on French scientists’ reception of the oxygen paradigm during the different subperiods of his study. It will be recalled that the earliest followers of oxygen theory were middle-aged scientists, and the greater propensity of younger scientists only became manifest several years later, at the point when community-wide conversion was well under way.
In the remainder of this paper, I present a rigorous test of the expanded age hypothesis proposed above. It is based upon new findings from a study of the reception of plate tectonics in the earth sciences during the 1960s. Compared with earlier studies, it permits a more precise delineation of the historical stages in prevailing scientific opinion, and introduces into the analysis controls on possible confounding factors correlated with age, such as foci of research interest and professional eminence. [...]
Development of the theory of plate tectonics ranks among the stellar scientific achievements of this century. General acceptance of this conceptual framework necessitated the abandonment of a communal belief in the horizontal immobility of the earth’s crust which had guided geological research since the middle of the nineteenth century. Plate tectonics theory substituted the diametrically opposed premise that the earth’s crus is divided into large crustal plates which move slowly over the upper mantle.
The swift adoption of plate tectonics during the late 1960s stands in stark contrast to the extremely bitter controversy encountered by earlier proponents of a ‘mobile’ earth. Alfred Wegener’s continental drift theory, the forerunner of present-day mobilist theory, was subjected to extremely hostile attacks during the 1920s and fell into nearly universal disrepute. British geophysicists working on reconstruction of the ancient configurations of the earth’s magnetic field rekindled interest in continental drift during the middle 1950s. [...] Despite the advocacy by Hess and a few other distinguished earth scientists, large-scale horizontal displacement of the crust remained an anathema for most earth scientists well into the 1960s. Then, in 1966-67, a confluence of empirical discoveries in marine geology, geomagnetic studies and seismology provided for many geologists incontrovertible proof favouring the seafloor spreading model, and the mobilist perspective more generally. [...] By the early 1970s, the great majority of earth scientists had adopted plate tectonics, and the theory was well on its way to becoming the dominant theoretical orientation in many fields of the earth sciences. [...]
To obtain data on the dynamics of individual theory choice that under earth scientists’ shifts from the stabilist to the mobilist programme research, I examined the publications of ninety-six North American eart scientists actively engaged in pertinent research during the 1960s a early 1970s. I also gathered biographical information for each scientis including their training, research interests and career histories. [...]
The dependent variable for this study is the year in which a scientist decided to adopt the mobilist programme of research rather than to continue working within a stabilist programme. [...] Before 1966, when prevailing scientific opinion still ran strongly against the mobilist perspective, the small number of scientists adopting the programme were considerably older (in terms of career age) than other scientists active during this early period. Thus, scientists adopting the programme through 1963 were on average nineteen years ‘older’ than non-adopters. [...] Adopters in 1964 were twenty-three years older than non-adopters. [...] Only with the shift in scientific opinion favourable to mobilist concepts beginning in 1966, do we start to see a progressive narrowing, and then reversal, in the age differentials between adopters and non-adopters.
True, though I think that judgment tends to be hard to effectively mask in this kind of context (though maybe psychopaths would be able to fake it; I don’t know). At least my own experience inclines me to agree with this person:
I’ve worked with and/or done swaps with a lot of different practitioners (IFS, aletheia, VIEW, regular talk therapy, bodywork, voice work etc), and what I found to be the most effective element of their skill set (for me) is: non-judgmental, loving presence…
many times I have explored the same topic with two different practitioners within a few days of each other; and it’s in those cases that the impact of the difference in the quality of non-judgmental loving presence is most noticeable.
the degree to which the quality of the presence is non-judgmental can be VERY subtle, but the system can pick up on it. it might not even be a strong enough signal to notice it consciously, but it will greatly impact how the session unfolds.
On Windows the font feels actively unpleasant right away, on Android it’s not quite as bad but feels like I might develop eyestrain if I read comments for a longer time.
Seeing strange artifacts on some of the article titles on Chrome for Android (but not on desktop)
Yeah it feels uncomfortably small to read to me now
I have a friend with eidetic imagination who says that for her, there is literally no difference between seeing something and imagining it. Sometimes she’s worried about losing track of reality if she were to imagine too much.