social system designer http://aboutmako.makopool.com
mako yass
Karma: 3,383
On Gethen, is advice crisply distinguished from from criticism? Are there norms or language that allow unvarnished feedback or criticism without taking someone’s shifgrethor?
“if they don’t understand, they will ask”
A lot of people have to write for audiences with narcissism, who never ask, because asking constitutes an admission that there might be something important that they don’t understand. They’re always looking for any reason, however shallow, to dismiss any view that surprises them too much.
So these writers feel like they have to pre-empt every possible objection, even the stupid ones that don’t make any sense.It’s best if you can avoid having to write for audiences like that. But it’s difficult to avoid them.
You should be more curious about why, when you aim at a goal, you do not aim for the most effective way.
“Unconscious” is more about whether you (the part that I can talk to) can see it (or remember it) or not. Sometimes slow, deliberative reasoning occurs unconsciously. You might think it doesn’t, but that’s just because you can’t see it.
And sometimes snap judgements happen with a high degree of conscious awareness, they’re still difficult to unpack, to articulate or validate, but the subject knows what happened.
Important things often go the other way too. 2 comes before 1 when a person is consciously developing their being, consider athletes or actors, situations where a person has to alter the way they perceive or the automatic responses they have to situations.
Also, you can apply heuristics to ideas.
I reject and condemn the bland, unhelpful names “System 1” and “System 2″.
I just heard Micheal Morris, who was a friend of Kahneman and Tversky, saying in his econtalk interview that he just calls them “Intuition” and “Reason”.
Confound: I may also start eating a lot more collagen/gelatin, because it is delicious and afaict it does something.
My (34) skin has just now started to look aged. In response to that and migraines (linked to magnesium deficiency), I’ve started eating liver a lot. I’ll report back in a year.
That addresses the concern.
This can be quite a bad thing, since a person’s face often tells you whether what you’re saying is landing for them or whether you need to elaborate on certain points (unless they have a people pleaser complex, in which case they’ll just nod and smile always even when they’re confused and offended on the inside lmao). The worst I’ve seen it was this discussion with Avi Loeb where he was lecturing someone who he had a disagreement with and he actually closed his eyes while he was talking and although I’m sure it wasn’t fully self-aware about it, it was very arrogant. He was not talking to that person; he must waste a lot of time, in reckonings, retreading old ground without making progress towards reconciliation.
This is something that in my opinion would deserve a longer focused debate
I’m not sure I have much more to say (I could explain the ways those things are somewhat inevitable, but I don’t believe it’s really necessary, just like, look at humans.), since I don’t really know what to do about this, other than what I’m already doing, which is building social environments where people will no longer find it necessary to overconnect/where being intentional about how we structure the network is possible, and I would guess that once it is real and I can show it to people, there will be no disagreements about whether it’s better.
But in the meantime, we do not have such social environments, so I can’t really tell anyone to stop going to bars and connecting at random. You must love, and that is the love that there is to be had today.
Theory: The reason OpenAI seem to not care about getting AGI right any more is because they’ve privately received explicit signals from the government that they wont be allowed to build AGI. This is pretty likely a-priori, and also makes sense of what we are seeing.
There’d be an automatic conspiracy of reasons to avoid outwardly acknowledging this: 1) To keep the stock up, 2) To avoid accelerating the militarization (closing) of AI and the arms race (a very good reason. If I were Zvi, I would also consider avoiding acknowledging this for this reason, but I’m less famous than zvi, so I get to acknowledge it), 3) To protect other staff from the demotivating effects of knowing this thing, that OpenAI will be reduced to a normal company who will never be allowed to release a truly great iteration of the product.
So instead what you’d see is people in leadership, one by one (as they internalize this), suddenly dropping the safety mission or leaving the company without really explaining why.
So, again, you did guess that you’d be able to do that for everyone, and I disagree with that.
I think most of the people who have difficulty making eye contact and want to overcome themselves on it are not in a good place to judge whether they should.
I’m aware that you have a nuanced perspective on this which is part of the reason I’m raising this.
I think people will generally assume that when you’re doing a thing, that you think the thing is usually good to do, unless you say otherwise. Especially if it’s the premise of a party.
all I needed to do was help everyone safely untangle their blocks
The assumption that you could do this implies that you thought the blocks were usually unwarranted. I doubt this. I think in most cases you didn’t understand why the fence was there before tearing through it.
Why was it just assumed that “emotional blocks” are bad though? I would expect this to be more effective if you were… more inclined to unpack that assumption and explain it.
But of course, if you unpack the assumption, it might turn out that it was wrong.
Here are some bad things that often happen to people who over-connect: They become tribalized. They come to feel that they need the approval of an incoherent set of philosophies. They develop a news addiction, as well as substance addictions. They have difficulty sustaining interest in specialties and devoting themselves to original work, they find it lonely and they can’t separate their own sense of what is important from the already exhausted common sense of what is important. They’re unable to condemn mundane evils. They file down any of their burs and eccentricities that would make it challenging for another person to face them and to see into them.
You think you can overconnect without these sorts of things happening to you, but if that’s true, I’m not sure what kind of connection you’re even engaging in. Most of these things seem to me a fairly direct effect of love, of those systems that cultivate trust by verifiably tearing down protective psychosocial barriers.
Hot take: Prevalence of gender transition in male-majority fields is attempt to restore pronoun compression efficiency.
Communication efficiency is just that important.
You need just enough of them to distinguish subjects, but not so much that they lose their intuitive meaning. When cops are interviewing witnesses about a suspect, they’ll glom onto easily observable and distinguishing physical traits. Was the suspect a man or a woman? White or black? Tall or short?
Yeah.
Notably, basically all of the people I’ve known who have asked for neutral pronouns were also visibly of indeterminate gender (for instance, mid-transition), and over time their preferred/accepted pronouns always lined up with what a person would guess by looking at them.
This is generally the norm.
If you’ve encountered a lot of genderqueer people with non-obvious pronoun preferences, and they’re pushy about them, that’s probably a product of some kinda perverse selection process. In the least, whatever is causing those people to be annoying about that is not the queerness per se.
Yeah it sucks, search by free association is hillclimbing (gets stuck in local optima) and the contemporary media environment and political culture is an illustration of its problems.
The pattern itself is a local optimum, it’s a product of people walking into a group without knowing what the group is doing and joining in anyway, and so that pattern of low-context engagement becomes what we’re doing, and the anxiety that is supposed to protect us from bad patterns like this and help us to make a leap out to somewhere better is usually drowned in alcohol.
Instead of that, people should get to know each other before deciding what to talk about, and then intentionally decide to talk about what they find interesting or useful with that person. This gets better results every time.
But when we socialise as children, there isn’t much about our friends to get to know, no specialists to respectfully consult, no well processed life experiences to learn from, so none of us just organically find that technique of like, asking who we’re talking to, before talking, it has to be intentionally designed.