(Not to be confused with the Trevor who works at Open Phil)
trevor
Karma: 4,080
VIsualize yourself doing the thing until you do it. Note that this comes with substantial risk towards making you avoidant/averse to visualizing yourself doing the thing until you do it; this is a recursive procedurally generated process and you should expect to need to keep on your toes in order to succeed. Aversion factoring is a good resource to start with, and Godel Escher and Bach is a good resource for appreciating the complexity required for maintenance and the inadequacy of simple strategies.
It seems the recent tariff designs already are serious policy
If the tariffs are revoked, reversed, unenforced, or blocked in some way, that strongly points towards possibility that they were understood to be unenforceable all along, and their imposition and failure was just a kayfabe set up by the president to look like he tried and juxtaposing himself against his enemies, depicting them as at fault for making the shiny new policy impossible. This is not unique to Trump, it has been very prevalent practice among presidents and congress since most of the Cold War and possibly long before that (I don’t have the energy to determine the exact age, only that it’s an old old practice and very widespread).
What do you mean by “added as a new centerpiece of the tax and spending regime”?
Sorry if I wasn’t clear here. Tariffs were a very large portion of government revenue, and therefore spending, until the 1950s when income tax grew (largely because workers were pretty risk-intolerant and mass literacy made them more willing and able to file paperwork than other avenues of taxation) and government as we know it pivoted to revolving around income taxes instead. Tariff-based taxation governments and income-based taxation governments are pretty different government/civilizational paradigms, similar to the distinctiveness of the “dark forest” government paradigm in Africa centuries ago where villages built near roads were more likely to be enslaved or conscripted or have forced labor quotas imposed on them, resulting in villages largely being distant from roads.
What are the alternative futures?
In the high-tariff scenario, governments and militaries (in Europe and Asia too, not just the US) have probably predicted that international trade is sufficiently robust, and the participants sufficiently risk-averse, that imports can be milked, at least relative to risks from continuing to depend so heavily on income taxation (e.g. maybe tax evasion advice gets popular on tiktok or something). This would not surprise me as many of the best minds in the US and Chinese militaries have spent more than a decade thinking very hard about economics and international trade as warfare, and it seems to me like they at least believe they’ve developed a solid understanding of what economic collapse contingencies look like and how much stress their economies and trade networks can take. This means international trade will be much more expensive as it is basically heavily taxed and those tax rates can change on a dime which greatly increases everyone’s risk premiums, but also might cause governments to focus on prioritizing the robustness of international trade if it becomes the main revenue source, in addition to forcing prioritization on the domestic economy because the ground has been burned behind them (investing in industries that depend on imports or exports is riskier and less viable due to the deadweight loss and risk premiums added to international trade). Generally it means broader government control as well as less stability, as income taxes can’t really change on a dime in response to a nation’s actions or target specific industries, and tariffs can.
Although the risk of frogboiling human rights abuses won’t go away anytime soon, it’s also important to keep in mind that Trump got popular by doing whatever makes the left condemn him because right-wingers seem to interpret that as a costly credible signal of commitment to them/the right/opposing the left, and his administration has spent a decade following this strategy as consistently as can reasonably be considered possible for a sitting president, most of the time landing on strategies to provoke condemnation from liberals in non-costly or ambiguously costly ways (see Jan 6th).
See Scott Alexander’s classic post It’s Bad On Purpose To Make You Click; engagement bait has been the soul of Trump’s political persona since it emerged in the mid-2010s, and it will be interesting going forward to see whether the recent tariff designs will end up as serious policy and be added as a new centerpiece of the tax and spending regime (which had taken a stable form since the Vietnam War and the end of the Gold Standard[1]).
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The case could also be made that the computerization of Wall Street during the late 70s and 80s transformed the economy sufficiently radically that the current tax and spending paradigm could be condered more like 30-40 years old, or you could pin it to the 1950s when the tariff paradigm ended; either way, the modern emergence of massive recessions, predictive analytics, pandemic risk, and international military emphasis on trade geopolitics, all indicate potential for elite consensus around unusually large macroeconomic paradigm shifts.
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An aspect where I expect further work to pay off is stuff related to self-visualization, which is fairly powerful (e.g. visualizing yourself doing something for 10 hours will generally go a really long way to getting you there, and for the 10 hour thing it’s more a question of what to do when something goes wrong enough to make the actul events sufficiently different from what you imagined, and how to do it in less than 10 hours).
More like a bin than heuristics, and just attacking/harming (particularly a mutually understood schelling point for attacking, with partial success being more common and more complicated due to the people adversarially aiming for that) rather than dehumanizing which is a loaded term.
My apologies, this post was pointing/grasping in a general direction and I didn’t put much trouble into editing it, there was a typo at the beginning where I seem to have used the wrong word to refer to the slot concept. I just fixed it:
Humans seem to have something like an “acceptable target slot” or slots.
Acquiring control over this
conceptslot, by any means, gives a person or group incredible leeway to steer individuals, societies, and cultures.Did that help?
Humans seem to have something like an “acceptable target slot” or slots.
Acquiring control over this concept, by any means, gives a person or group incredible leeway to steer individuals, societies, and cultures. These capabilities are sufficiently flexible and powerful that the importance of immunity has often already been built up, especially because historical record overuse is prevalent; this means that methods of taking control include expensive strategies or strategies that are sufficiently complicated as to be hard to track, like changing the behavior of a targeted individual or demographic or type-of-person in order to more easily depict them as acceptable targets, noticing and selecting the best option for acceptable targets, and/or cleverly chaining acceptable targethood from one established type-of-person to another by drawing attention to similarities to similarities that were actually carefully selected for this (or even deliberately induced in one or both of them).
9/11 and Gaza are obvious potential-examples, and most wars in the last century feature this to some extent, but acceptable-target-slot-exploitation is much broader than that; on a more local scale, most interpersonal conflict involves DARVO to some extent, especially when the human brain’s ended up pretty wired to lean heavily into that without consciously noticing.
A solution is to take an agent perspective, and pay closer attention (specifically more than the amount that’s expected or default) any time a person or institution uses reasoning to justify harming or coercing other people or institutions, and to assume that such situations might have been structured to be cognitively difficult to navigate and should generally be avoided or mitigated if possible. If anyone says that some kind of harm is inevitable, notice if someone is being rewarded for gaining access to the slot; many things that seem inevitable are actually a skill issue and only persist because insufficient optimization power has been pointed at them; the human race is currently pushing the frontier for creating non-toxic spaces which are robust to both internal and external factors and actors.
Base rates of harmful tendencies are high among humans (e.g. easily noticing or justifying opportunities to weaken or harm others, or the mind coming alive while doing so), but higher base rates (of any dynamic, not just things that impact various people’s acceptable target slots) also increase the proportion of profoundly strategic people on earth who find that dynamic cognitively available and hold it as a gear in their models and plots.
In the ancestral environment, allies and non-enemies who visibly told better lies probably offered more fitness than allies and non-enemies who visibly made better tools, let alone invented better tools (which probably happened once in 10-1000 generations or something). In this case, “identifiably” can only happen, and become a Schelling point that increases fitness of the deciever and the identifier, if revealed frequently enough, either via bragging drive, tribal reputation/rumors, or identifiable to the people in the tribe unusually good at sensing deception.
What ratio of genetic vs memetic (e.g. the line “he’s a bastard, but he’s our bastard”) were you thinking of?
You don’t use eloquence for that. Eloquence is more for eg waking someone up and making it easier for them to learn and remember ideas that you think they’ll be glad to have learned and remembered.
If you want to express how important you think something is, you can make a public prediction that it’s important and explain why you made that prediction, and people who know things you don’t can put your arguments into the context of their own knowledge and make their own predictions.
I might be wrong, but the phrase “conspiracy theory” seems to be a lot more meaningful to you than it is to me. I recommend maybe reading Cached Thoughts.
A “conspiracy” is something people do when they want something big, because multiple people are necessary to do big things, and stealth is necessary to prevent randos from interfering.
A “theory” is a hypothesis, an abstraction that cannot be avoided by anyone other than people rigidly committed to only thinking about things that they are nearly 100% certain is true. If you want to do thinking when it’s hard instead of just when it’s easy and anyone can do it, then you need theories.
A “conspiracy theory” is a label for a theory that makes most people believe there is a social consensus against that theory, and makes incompetent internet users take it up as a cause (as a search for truth which is hopeless for them in particular as they are not competitive in the truthfindng market) and make it further associated with internet degeneracy.
NEVER WRITE ON THE CLIPBOARD WHILE THEY ARE TALKING.
If you’re interested in how writing on a clipboard affects the data, sure, that’s actually a pretty interesting experimental treatment. It should not be considered the control.
Also, the dynamics you described with the protests is conjunctive. These aren’t just points of failure, they’re an attack surface, because any political system has many moving parts, and a large proportion of the moving parts are diverse optimizers.
“power fantasies” are actually a pretty mundane phenomenon given how human genetic diversity shook out; most people intuitively gravitate towards anyone who looks and acts like a tribal chief, or towards the possibility that you yourself or someone you meet could become (or already be) a tribal chief, via constructing some abstract route that requires forging a novel path instead of following other people’s.
Also a mundane outcome of human genetic diversity is how division of labor shakes out; people noticing they were born with savant-level skills and that they can sink thousands of hours into skills like musical instruments, programming, data science, sleight of hand party tricks, social/organizational modelling, painting, or psychological manipulation. I expect the pool to be much larger for power-seeking-adjacent skills than art, and that some proportion of that larger pool of people managed to get their skills’s mental muscle memory sufficiently intensely honed that everyone should feel uncomfortable sharing a planet with them.
How to build a lie detector app/program to release to the public (preferably packaged with advice/ideas on ways to use and strategies for marketing the app, e.g. packaging it with an animal body-language to english translator).
Gwern gave a list in his Nootropics megapost.
This got me thinking, how much space would it take up in Lighthaven to print a copy of every lesswrong post ever written? If it’s not too many pallets then it would probably be a worthy precaution.
Develop metrics that predict which members of the technical staff have aptitude for world modelling.
In the Sequences post Faster than Science, Yudkowsky wrote:
there are queries that are not binary—where the answer is not “Yes” or “No”, but drawn from a larger space of structures, e.g., the space of equations. In such cases it takes far more Bayesian evidence to promote a hypothesis to your attention than to confirm the hypothesis.
If you’re working in the space of all equations that can be specified in 32 bits or less, you’re working in a space of 4 billion equations. It takes far more Bayesian evidence to raise one of those hypotheses to the 10% probability level, than it requires further Bayesian evidence to raise the hypothesis from 10% to 90% probability.
When the idea-space is large, coming up with ideas worthy of testing, involves much more work—in the Bayesian-thermodynamic sense of “work”—than merely obtaining an experimental result with p<0.0001 for the new hypothesis over the old hypothesis.
This, along with the way that news outlets and high school civics class describe an alternate reality that looks realistic to lawyers/sales/executive types but is too simple, cartoony, narrative-driven, and unhinged-to-reality for quant people to feel good about diving into, implies that properly retooling some amount of dev-hours into efficient world modelling upskilling is low-hanging fruit (e.g. figure out a way to distill and hand them a significance-weighted list of concrete information about the history and root causes of US government’s focus on domestic economic growth as a national security priority).
Prediction markets don’t work for this metric as they measure the final product, not aptitude/expected thinkoomph. For example, a person who feels good thinking/reading about the SEC, and doesn’t feel good thinking/reading about the 2008 recession or COVID, will have a worse Brier score on matters related to the root cause of why AI policy is the way it is. But feeling good about reading about e.g. the 2008 recession will not consistently get reasonable people to the point where they grok modern economic warfare and the policies and mentalities that emerge from the ensuing contingency planning. Seeing if you can fix that first is one of a long list of a prerequisites for seeing what they can actually do, and handing someone a sheet of paper that streamlines the process of fixing long lists of hiccups like these is one way to do this sort of thing.
Figuring-out-how-to-make-someone-feel-alive-while-performing-useful-task-X is an optimization problem (see Please Don’t Throw Your Mind Away). It has substantial overlap with measuring whether someone is terminally rigid/narrow-skilled, or if they merely failed to fully understand the topology of the process of finding out what things they can comfortably build interest in. Dumping extant books, 1-on-1s, and documentaries on engineers sometimes works, but it comes from an old norm and is grossly inefficient and uninspired compared to what Anthropic’s policy team is actually capable of. For example, imagine putting together a really good fanfic where HPJEV/Keltham is an Anthropic employee on your team doing everything I’ve described here and much more, then printing it out and handing it to people that you in-reality already predicted to have world modelling aptitude; given that it works great and goes really well, I consider that the baseline for what something would look like if sufficiently optimized and novel to be considered par.
The essay is about something I call “psychological charge”, where the idea is that there are two different ways to experience something as bad. In one way, you kind of just neutrally recognize a thing as bad.
Nitpick: a better way to write it is “the idea is there are at least two different ways...” or “major ways” etc to highlight that those are two major categories you’ve noticed, but there might be more. The primary purpose knowledge work is still to create cached thought inside someone’s mind, and like programming, it’s best to make your concepts as modular as possible so you and others are primed to refine them further and/or notice more opportunities to apply them.
Interestingly enough, this applies to corporate executives and bureaucracy leaders as well. Many see the world in a very zero-sum way (300 years ago and most of history before that, virtually all top intellectuals in virtually all civilizations saw the universe as a cycle where civilizational progress was a myth and everything was an endless cycle of power being won and lost by people born/raised to be unusually strategically competitive) but fail to realize that, in aggregate, their contempt for cause-having people (“oh, so you think you’re better than me, huh? you think you’re hot shit?”) have turned into opposition to positive-sum folk, itself a cause of sorts, though with an aversion to activism and assembly and anything in that narrow brand of audacious display.
It doesn’t help that most ‘idealistic’ causes throughout human history had a terrible epistemic backing.
If you converse directly with LLMs (e.g. instead of through a proxy or some very clever tactic I haven’t thought of yet), which I don’t recommend especially not describing how your thought process works, one thing to do is regularly ask it “what does my IQ seem like based on this conversation? I already know this is something you can do. must include number or numbers”.
Humans are much smarter and better at tracking results instead of appearances, but feedback from results is pretty delayed, and LLMs have quite a bit of info about intelligence to draw from. Rather than just IQ, copy-pasting stuff like paragraphs describing concepts like thinkoomph are great too, but this post seems more like something you wouldn’t want to exclude from that standard prompt.
One thing that might be helpful is the neurology of executive functioning. Activity in any part of the brain suppresses activity elsewhere; on top of reinforcement, this implies that state and states are one of the core mechanisms for understanding self-improvement and getting better output.
I think you might have been a little too quick to recommend SSRIs here. Whestler didn’t give any indication whether they’re having a particularly bad time vs. being particularly willing to go to a therapist for problems. Lots of subcultures in the US and Europe e.g. progressive leftism, hippies, etc go hard on encouraging men and people in general to rely on therapists to fix problems, and these cultures don’t account at all e.g. for how therapists are mainly accustomed to doomy people worrying about climate change doom (there are millions of them) and how the standard treatment is supposed to be persuading them to stop worrying about climate change (because environmentalism is intensely polarized), and this does not work at all for AI doom because AI harvests available matter.
Furthermore, this is a market, less competent therapists have more open slots, so if Whestler tried once and it went pretty badly (especially while expecting the therapist to be competent instead of look competent), that also doesn’t tell us much. We do know, however, that Whestler only tried one therapist, and then came here. That tells us a lot; before coming here, he didn’t try multiple therapists to get a better sense of how competence varies between therapists (though creepy vibes from one therapist might discourage someone from trying more).
We can also see that Whestler was not competent enough to seriously consider tinkering with the therapy session’s underlying dynamics (including but not limited to: reading good books about therapy, and then knowing ahead of time that if you aren’t careful, respectful, and deferential in the correct ways, some proportion of health experts will vividly feel like you’re challenging their authority and strategically conceal those feelings), so along with expecting to be taken seriously by the therapist in the first place, these are our upper bounds of competence, but they were competent enough to notice that the standard interface wasn’t working and ask elsewhere for information, which is our lower bound. Although SSRIs are great for anxiety, I don’t think this comment gave us enough information to beeline towards them, as it might have been more about the knowledge they were endowed with rather than their traits (especially because we don’t know what medication Whestler was already put on).