Recent Ph.D. in physics from MIT, Complex Systems enthusiast, AI researcher, digital nomad. http://pchvykov.com
pchvykov
Karma: 130
hmm, with all this feedback I’m wondering if my framing of this story as “sex-ed to smooth out the impact of puberty” is not quite fitting. I definitely have a sense that this story can play some beneficial role in promoting a more healthy sexuality in our society—though perhaps my framing about puberty is misplaced?
huh, thanks for the engagement guys—I definitely didn’t anticipate this to be so triggering…
I’m hearing two separate points here: 1) magic creatures and fairy tails do more to confuse rather than clarify; 2) let’s be careful not to scare kids about sex nor make it a bigger deal than it already is. I think we could have a rich discourse about each of these, and I see many arguments to be made for both sides—with neither being a clearly resolved issue, imho. Just as an example, here are some possible counters I see to these:
1) What role do fairy tails and lore play in our education and building understanding? For one, “all models are wrong, some are useful”—so I don’t think that whether Santa exists or not is really the interesting question, I’d rather ask in what ways is it helpful / confusing? As far as story-telling is a good vehicle for humans to convey values and information, it serves its purpose. As far as lying to kids—I’d say we can keep Santa without claiming things about him that aren’t true. I think another important purpose of such lore is ritual—of which Christmas is an example. Ritual practices have a clear role and impact on people, that can be cognitively very beneficial if not abused.
2) Yes, sex may already “too big of a deal,” but not in ways that are constructive / helpful. The hormonal impact of sex on our mind itself is hard to overstate—it really is a huge deal, for some people more than others. Since this is a question of qualia, I can reliably talk only about personal experience—and in retrospect I see that it ran my life for a number of years, the more so the more I repressed it. Learning to sublimate that energy, and really enjoy it in areas of life outside of sex has been the single greatest shift I experienced in persistent personal happiness, energy, and productivity. And this is what I’m referring to in this story—to me, sex and its broader impact is the most magical thing I have experienced in life, and so if anything is worth calling magical, I’d say this is it.
Of course, both of these points are a biased side of the full story, and I wouldn’t personally 100% agree with these, as reality is always more subtle and balanced than such arguments. If you like, check out some other, perhaps more scientific discussions I wrote around related topics:
a rationalist perspective on “magic”: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uRiiNMCDdNnGo3Lqa/magic-tricks-and-high-dimensional-configuration-spaces
Is Santa Real—as an effective theory: https://www.pchvykov.com/post/is-santa-real
Sex Fairy Lore
oh yeah, I’ve seen that one before—really awesome stuff! I guess you could say the goalkeeper discovers a “mental” dimension whereby it can beat the attacker easier than if it uses the “physical” dimensions of directly blocking.
This all also feels related to Goodhart’s law—though subtly different...
Magic, tricks, and high-dimensional configuration spaces
Check out the follow up post on this
Designing environments to select designs
wow… I definitely did not know we were that intense with making things artificial..
and I like that argument to draw a parallel with horses—quite convincing.
I’m really interested in the question of what’s the difference between human systems and things like ecosystems? There are definitely some advantages biological systems have—antifragility, adaptability, sustainability. On the other hand, as you point out, human-designed systems are more efficient, but at a more narrow task.
So are there structural lessons we could adapt from biological system designs? Or are we good where we are?
Thanks for all the great comments! - I feel like the follow-up post I just published gets at some of them: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WNjKyFxNbhonBvhwz/building-cars-we-don-t-understand
Building cars we don’t understand
Can we grow cars instead of building them?
oooh, don’t get me started on expectation values… I have heated opinions here, sorry. The two easiest problems with expectations in this case is that to average something, you need to average over some known space, according to some chosen measure—neither of which will be by any means obvious in a real-world scenario. More subtly, with real-world distributions, expectation values can often be infinite or undefined, and median might be more representative—but then should you look at mean, median, or what else?
To me, the counter-argument to saving drowning children isn’t the admittedly unlikely “Hitler” one, but more the “let them learn on their own mistakes” one—some will learn to swim and grow up more resilient, and some won’t. The long-term impact of this approach on our species seems much harder to quantify.
wonderful—thanks so much for the references! “moral case against leaving the house” is a nice example to have in the back pocket :)
Just read a bit about rationalist understanding of “ritual”—seems that I’m sort of arguing that the value in donating is largely ritualistic :)
Doing “good”
Wow, wonderful analysis! I’m on-board mostly—except maybe I’d leave some room for doubt of some claims you’re making.
And your last paragraph seems to suggest that a “sufficiently good and developed” algorithm could produce large cultural change?
Also, you say “as human mediators (plus the problem of people framing it as ‘objective’), just cheaper and more scalable”—to me that would quite a huge win! And I sort of thought that “people framing it as objective” is a good thing—why do you think it’s a problem?
I could even go as far as saying that even if it was totally inaccurate, but unbiased—like a coin-flip—and if people trusted it as objectively true, that would already help a lot! Unbiased = no advantage to either side. Trusted = no debate about who’s right. Random = no way to game it.
Cool that you find this method so powerful! To me it’s a question of scaling: do you think personal mindfulness practices like Gendlin’s Focusing are as easy to scale to a population as a gadget that tell you some truth about you? I guess each of these face very different challenges—but so far experience seems to show that we’re better at building fancy tech than we are at learning to change ourselves.
What do you think is the most effective way to create such culture-shift?
Thanks for such thoughtful reply—I think I’m really on-board with most of what you’re saying.
I agree that analysis is the hard part of this tech—and I’m hoping that this is what is just now becoming possible to do well with AI, like check out https://www.chipbrain.com/
Another point I think is important: you say “Emotions aren’t exactly impossible to notice and introspect honestly on.”—having been doing some emotional-intelligence practice for the last few years, I’m very aware of how difficult it is to honestly introspect on my own emotions. It’s sort of like trying to objectively gauge my own attractiveness in photos—really tough to be objective! and I think this is one place that an AI could really help (they’re building one for attractiveness now too actually).
I see your point that the impact will likely be marginal, compared to what we already have now—and I’m wondering if there is some way we could imagine applying such technology to have a revolutionary impact, without falling into Orwellian dystopia. Something about creative inevitable self-awareness, emotion-based success metrics, or conscious governance.
Any ideas how this could be used save the world? Or do you think there isn’t any real edge it could give us?
I really appreciate your care in having a supportive tone here—it is a bit heart aching to read some of the more directly critical comments.
great point about the non-consentual nature of Ea’s actions—it does create a dark undertone to the story, and needs either correcting, or expanding (perhaps framing it as the source of the “shadow of sexuality”—so we might also remember the risks)
the heteronormative line I did notice, and I think could generalize straightforwardly—this was just the simplest place to start. I love your suggestion of “”sex” as acting on a body specifically to produce pleasure in that body.”
And yes, there are definitely many many aspects of sex that can then be addressed within this lore—like rape, consent, STD, procreation, sublimation, psychological impacts, gender, family, etc. Taking the Freudian approach, we could really frame all aspects of human life within this context—could be a fun exercise.
I guess the key hypothesis I’m suggesting here is that explaining the many varied aspects of sexuality in terms of a deity could help to clarify all its complexity—just as the pantheon of gods helped early pagan cultures make sense of the world and make some successful predictions / inventions. It could be nicer to have a science-like explanation, but people would have a harder time keeping that straight (and I believe we don’t yet have enough consensus in psychology as a science anyway).
yeah I don’t know how cultural myths like Santa form or where they start—now they are grounded in rituals, but I haven’t looked at how they were popularized in the first place.