Creator of the Intend app (formerly known as Complice) a system for orienting to each day with intentionality in service of long-term careabouts. It features coworking rooms, the longest-running of which is the Less Wrong Study Hall: https://intend.do/room/lesswrong
I’m working full-time on solving human coordination at the mindset & trust level. You can maybe get a sense of my thinking there via this 10min video.
An example of such a blindspot/confusion that I’ve been chewing on, that I haven’t written up in full yet, is how reward is different from fruit, punishment is different from pain. Socially-mediated consequences are different from inherent consequences.
Note that behaviorists, and (probably downstream of the behaviorists) also ML researchers, tend to actively conflate the two and treat “reward” as fundamental and then use phrases like “intrinsic reward” to try to refer to the non-reward thing. But “reward” is not the fundamental one, it’s built on fruit.
The difference:
if you don’t get caught, you don’t get punished
a tree will not reward you with fruit for effort or flattery—you have to actually water it
And many people fail to see the difference between the two of these—so they fixate on social consequences and project them onto everything. I suspect this is largely because so many of their critical consequences were social, at very young ages (<2yo, before they differentiated themselves, their parents, the world at large, such that they could tell the difference). So they learned to orient first and foremost to social consequences, and act so as to get reward and avoid punishment.
But we know from detailed investigation that the universe-as-a-whole does not reward or punish us the way other people do. (the judeo-christian one-God-who-sees-and-knows-all can be seen as groping towards the recognition of that distinction, but still fails to actually go all the way there, which then has the unfortunate effect of reifying the idea that reality-as-a-whole does punish you!)
Karmically this has the effect of them creating environments that have much more reward/punishment, and also leads to them self-punishing in the face of non-social consequences, such as beating themselves up for failing to do something they cared about, rather than simply feeling the pain of the failure.
For what it’s worth, I found myself pretty compelled by a theory someone told me years ago, that alien abductions are flashbacks to birth and/or diaper changes:
laid on a table, bare walls, bright lights you’re staring up at (unnecessary, and unpleasant for a baby, but common in hospitals and some homes)
one or more figures crowded around you (parents and/or doctors)
these figures are empathetic & warm towards you (or are at worst kind of apathetic, not malevolent)
communicating telepathically (in a way you can’t make sense of, perhaps wearing masks if doctors)
they examine your genitals (how dirty is the diaper? is there a rash?)
butt probed (wipe, diaper cream, and/or rectal thermometer)
weird equipment around (appropriate to a hospital where most babies born in 1900s when abduction stories started becoming popular)
figures have big heads and eyes (very salient features to babies, also maybe the heads are spatially closer and babies’ eyes are still doing a fisheye lens thing)
and most bizarrely, the figures are grey (newborns have bad color perception!)
This is surprisingly underdiscussed; the only google result for “alien abduction as flashback to diaper change” was this which links to a forum post since gone offline (archive.org link). But it seems like an incredibly obvious explanation that should be the default. It also explains why the experiences are so similar around the world, even among people who hadn’t heard the stories before!
Obviously not all alien abduction stories follow this pattern, but the fact that so many do seems to me very satisfyingly explained by this theory. The fact that this makes sense to me may be taking as part of its evidence my own experience doing emotional work and finding (among other things) surprisingly large pockets of emotion and meaning stored in apparently-boring memories (like standing in my kitchen around age six, looking at a shelf… but feeling terrifyingly alone). And helping other people do similar work, etc. But flashbacks are in general well-studied.
So it seems to me that the only culturally mediated part here is how people interpret the experience after it happens. You could imagine a culture where someone comes into work one day and says “hey guys, I had this trippy flashback last night to my nappy being changed! it was so weird seeing my parents all bulgy-eyed and grey”.
I’ve actually come to the impression that the extensive use of contempt in the Sequences is one of the worst aspects of the whole piece of writing, because it encourages people to disown their own actual experience where it’s (near) the target of such contempt, and to adopt a contemptuous stance when faced with perspectives they in fact don’t get.
Contempt usually doesn’t help people change their minds, and when it does it does so via undermining people’s internal epistemic processes with social manipulation. If the argument in “section 2 above” turns out to have flaws or mistaken assumptions, then an attitude of contempt (particularly from a position of high status) about how it’s embarrassing to not understand that will not help people understand it better. It might get them to spend more time with the argument in order to de-embarrass themselves, but it won’t encourage them to take the arguments on its merits. Either the argument is good and addresses relevant concerns people have (factual and political) and if so you’ll be able to tell because it will work! Shaming people for not getting it is at best a distraction, and at worst an attack on people’s sensemaking. And generally a symmetric weapon.
Meanwhile, contempt as a stance in the holder it tend to block curiosity and ability to notice confusion. Even if some argument is clearly wrong, it somehow actually made sense to the person arguing it—at least as a thing to say, if not a way to actually view the world. What sense did it make? Why did they say this bizarre thing and not that bizarre thing? Just because energy-healing obviously doesn’t work via [violating this particular law of physics], that doesn’t mean it can’t work via some other mechanism—after all, the body heals itself non-magically under many ordinary circumstances! And if interventions can make it harder for that to work, then they can probably make it easier. So how might it work? And what incentivized the energy healer to make up a bad model in the first place?
Contempt may be common among rationalists but from my perspective the main reason Rob didn’t include it is probably because it’s not actually very functional for good discourse.
Sure but ideally it would raise them an amount that’s worth it. That’s kind of the whole idea. People aren’t infinitely incentivized by money and zero incentivized by anything else.
The bit about merging the casinos… in the limit, you’ve got an entire town/city in the desert that is completely owned by one owner, who pays nominally zero land value tax because the property itself isn’t worth anything given there’s nothing nearby. But it seems plausible to me that having an equation for tracking a multiplicity of independent improvements on a single nominal property and taxing the whole situation accordingly… would be relatively easy compared to the other LVT calculation problems. (I have not done the math here whatsoever.)
The splitting and merging thing is a great point. I sense that @Blog Alt is continuing to missing the point about the “everyone else’s improvements” by how they frame it, but once you take splitting and merging into account...
...well, for people who actually live there, hopefully the presence of a new garbage dump would itself be more costly than the decrease in tax. And in principle, if it’s NOT more costly, then it would then be correct to build it! (Maybe it’s not a dump, maybe it’s something else.) So there’s a bringing back in of externalities.
But of course, if someone doesn’t live there… maybe this can be solved by zoning? I’m normally suspicious of zoning but “you can’t put a garbage dump next to a school in a neighborhood” seems pretty basic.
That still doesn’t solve the simple notion of a factory toxic waste pool, but once again, maybe such things should be solved by directly addressing the reason why they’re bad.
I’ve always been a bit confused by “low-income housing’. Is the plan to make the housing cheap via price capping? Won’t that have the usual economic issues and cause demand to continue to outstrip supply forever and ever? Is the plan to make the houses ugly as fuck so that they will cost less than the pretty houses nearby? That won’t really work; people will rent a closet for $1000/mo in SF sometimes.
The “land values are property values” section struck me as a weird strawman of LVT. A huge part of the point Georgists are making is that the value of a given property depends in most urban cases FAR MORE on what is built next to it, than what is built on it. And thus by making property taxes go up when you build things on a property, you disincentivize building, whereas by making them the same regardless of what is built, you incentivize building. Whether you accept any of the other arguments, this is straightforward math afaict. Thus when you say “Build more 1. houses”, if you intend to achieve that by market means and not coercion, then you probably want to get your incentives aligned.
There are a bunch of buildings currently sitting empty in Berkeley, CA and my understanding of why is that if they were to rent them at market rates (which have declined) then the sale price would go down, but currently the sale price is still going up. So “build more houses”...
The irony that you mention in the last paragraph reminds me of another LW post that was already on my mind while reading this one: Slack matters more than any outcome. It points at the funny way that systems fight back in predictable-yet-in-practice-unexpected ways, all the way up and all the way down, and is I think an attempt at a more precise expression of the kind of Green wisdom referred to around “harmony with the Way of Things”.
[as our oldest sees it] Sentences are things we build together, rather than a way for different people to share their own perspectives with each other.
I’ve gone through a huge growth arc as an adult in recognizing the extent to which (especially in really good conversations) sentences are things we build together. Not that we don’t have different perspectives, but when conversation is really flowing, it makes way more sense to view it as “our collective mind is thinking” and not “I am transmitting information to you, then getting information back” etc.
(When we’re more at odds with someone, whether adversarial or just conflict with a loved one, it can be more like the transmit mode, and sometimes (tho not always) it seems to work best if we can get into the co-thinking mode again. Though there’s not a hack for that—it’s a deep trust-dancing puzzle!)
The 2nd half of this video is about this collective mind thing: https://youtu.be/G3vcXZPlsDc
Probably be grounded in more than one social group. Even being part of two different high-intensity groups seems like it should reduce the dynamics here a lot.
Worked well for me!
Eric Chisholm likes to phrase this principle as “the secret to cults is to be in at least two of them”.
My guess is that part of what’s going on here is that in certain ways attempting to optimize for coordination is at greater risk for goodhart than other things. To take an example from the post to its limit, the freelancer who invests 100% in selling their services and 0% in being skilled at them or providing them is a fraud. But also the freelancer who invests 100% in skills but 0% in selling is out of business.
So there’s a need for some sort of dynamic balance.
But my guess is that for whatever reasons (documented in Moral Mazes no doubt) certain kinds of organizations put pressure on the managers to go all the way in one direction, rather than finding that balance.
The “sometimes” bit here is key. It’s my impression that people who insist that “people are just like LLMs” are basically telling you that they spend most/all of their time in conversations that are on autopilot, rather than ones where someone actually means or intends something.
Great post. A few typos that weren’t worth commenting to mention (“LMM” instead of “LLM”) but I felt like it was worth noting that
In our ‘casual’ or ‘actually thinking’ mode
probably wants to be “causal”.
I overall like what you’re trying to point at here — you’re raising a real and important concern about what’s happening with the weakening of protection from random angry people in a wide range of places including tenure, due to cultural shifts and changes in media (eg social media).
At the same time, the Rainbowland example is a terrible example for making this point here. Or at least, making it in the way you describe. As jaspax and ChristianKI note, “it’s about accepting people” obfuscates the meaning of the song that was why it got banned, one that many people agree with.
It’s totally plausible to me, given what I’ve seen of people being afraid of children being exposed to trans ideology, that the school administrators themselves banned the song as part of doing their job to create a good learning environment for kids, no cowtowing to angry complainer required. I agree that banning kids wanting to sing the song is not useful and perhaps counterproductive, but if ordinary people getting upset about it seems absurd to you then I suspect you’re out of touch with what a substantial and growing fraction of people think, including many people “on the left” and some trans people: we need to keep trans ideology out of schools in order to keep kids safe & sane. Not because trans people aren’t real or deserve respect, but because kids are getting memed not just into accepting people but into positions like “it’s not cool to be straight” which is non-acceptance and a dumb reason for experimental medical treatments. From this perspective, Rainbowland looks like a song that’s ostensibly about motivation & discipline but is subtextually about how cool it is to be anorexic.
But most people who think this are being quiet because they don’t want to attract the very attacks you’re talking about here, from the small minority of hostile vindictive people! I only recently got enough clarity on the subject, sense of importance, and sense that I’m not alone with my sense of things, that I decided it was important to voice my relatively boring view that’s somehow controversial.
I resonate a lot with this, and it makes me feel slightly less alone.
I’ve started making some videos where I rant about products that fail to achieve the main thing they’re designed to do, and get worse with successive iterations and I’ve found a few appreciative commenters:
Rant successful, it made someone else feel like they weren’t alone
And part of my experience of the importance of ranting about it, even if nobody appreciates it, is that it keeps me from forgetting my homeland, to use your metaphor.
My most recent published blog post had in the 2nd paragraph “I bet there’s nobody reading this who has never used a phrase like...” and this article made me think it would be kind to change it.
Then I searched your facebook posts and you have indeed used the phrase, so in this case at least you aren’t nobody. But I’m still changing the post.
(The phrase is “part of me”, which if any of my friends were to somehow have never once used I wouldn’t have been surprised to discover it you.)
Right, yeah. And that (eventually) requires input of food into the person, but in principle they could be in a physically closed system that already has food & air in it… although that’s sort of beside the point. And isn’t that different from someone meditating for a few hours between meals. The energy is already in the system for now, and it can use that to untangle adaptive entropy.
Huh, reading this I noticed that counterintuitively, alignment requires letting go of the outcome. Like, what defines a non-aligned AI (not an enemy-aligned one but one that doesn’t align to any human value) is its tendency to keep forcing the thing it’s forcing rather than returning to some deeper sense of what matters.
Humans do the same thing when they pursue a goal while having lost touch with what matters, and depending on how it shows up we call it “goodharting” or “lost purposes”. The mere fact that we can identify the existence of goodharting and so on indicates that we have some ability to tell what’s important to us, that’s separate from whatever we’re “optimizing” for. It seems to me like this is the “listening” you’re talking about.
And so unalignment can refer both to a person who isn’t listening to all parts of themselves, and to eg corporations that aren’t listening to people who are trying to raise concerns about the ethics of the company’s behavior.
The question of where an AI would get its true source of “what matters” from seems like a bit of a puzzle. One answer would be to have it “listen to the humans” but that seems to miss the part where the AI needs to itself be able to tell the difference between actually listening to the humans and goodharting on “listen to the humans”.
Daniel Schmachtenberger has lots of great stuff. Two pieces I recommend:
this article Higher Dimensional Thinking, the End of Paradox, and a More Adequate Understanding of Reality, which is about how just because two people disagree doesn’t mean either is wrong
this Stoa video Converting Moloch from Sith to Jedi w/ Daniel Schmachtenberger, which is about races-to-the-bottom eating themselves
Also hi, welcome Sage! I dig the energy you’re coming from here.