What are some research directions for “improving coordination?”
In light of a recent post and comment, and several months of thinking, I have come to the position that one of our (humanity’s) biggest problems is that we suck at precise coordination at every level.
This is not very specifically defined but I am trying to gesture at a problem area I think is super important. Some thoughts to convey my intuition here:
If the extreme risk of the AI development trajectory is as true and obvious as many believe (everyone’s life at risk), humanity’s thinking about it should appear a lot more sophisticated than it does now.
For the last few years Eliezer has basically been throwing his hands up in exasperation at the incompetence of the world and many have shifted to public-facing communication, presumably believing that trying to convince AI insiders is hopeless.
Broadly, I think there are two cases of problems with coordination:
Two people/groups genuinely agree to honest, rigorous exchange of information, but can’t effectively coordinate.
Someone is withholding information or doesn’t really want to coordinate in the first place.
I think the first problem is workable, and if improved sufficiently, makes progress on the second problem by clearly exposing parties that are avoiding productive exchange.
Specifically, I think there is a lot of progress to be made with augmenting the exchange of information between people. I think LessWrong, the knowledge commons arguably at the frontier of ensuring humanity’s survival, is lacking in features for this purpose. Maybe because most users here are already conscientious and strongly value truth-seeking, which makes improvement seem less necessary.
Hopefully I’m making this line of thought clear enough. Key points:
Trustworthy, robust, and future-proof governance is the ultimate problem for humanity and anything else is a band-aid on a bullet hole.
Highly effective coordination is part of that problem, and better information exchange/clarity is a subset of that.
I think LessWrong can become an exceptionally effective prototype of this, and this could be very high leverage because of how proximate it is to the frontier of AI. Happy to expand more here.
I am interested in situating my thinking better here. Who is working on this sort of thing? I know TsviBT has explored improvements to debate, Richard Ngo / Samo Burja are exploring broader political manifestations, Forethought has published adjacent work. Is there anything I’m missing? Very interested in contributing here and think it’s a clear place where the ball is being dropped.
Here’s a bunch of stuff off the top of my head, in no particular order, including people who aren’t thinking much about the issue in full generality, but are addressing aspects:[1]
there are groups trying to reform the US voting system
various groups are trying to get money out of politics, eg trying to get Citizens United v. FEC overturned. there are various anti-corruption groups and pro-transparency groups
there have been various attempts to establish a world government
the legal system is one of the main instruments society has for acting on its values and determining facts in specific cases. there’s a lot of work on what it should be like
i think a bunch of sociologists are studying polarization and social media echo chamber stuff
there’s a bunch of work on how to inform people / how to get people to pay attention / how to get people to believe something. eg advertising research, work on how to run propaganda campaigns, theory of journalism
there’s a bunch of work on how to make people able to understand stuff: education theory, designing curricula, teaching
metascience and in particular replication crisis stuff. people trying to improve academic publishing, peer review, academic credit assignment
the field of social epistemology. also just epistemology
there’s a bunch of work on the social and bioevolutionary development of cooperation and trust and trustworthiness. there’s psychology research and self-help stuff on developing into a trustworthy person
there’s a lot of work on how to reduce crime
probably many other directions in sociology and social theory
So, there’s a huge amount of work broadly on coordination. Maybe there should be a more systematic body of understanding here. Maybe there should be an academic field. My personal term for this is “weltgeistbehandlung”. Copying a note I wrote on this for myself:
“In a broad sense, “weltgeistbehandlung” just means improving the world. In a stricter sense, it’s about improving the more living parts over the inert parts (like, improving the academic credit assignment system, not making buildings more beautiful), the more procedural/meta parts over the more object-level parts (like, reducing dysfunction in democratic systems over reducing animal suffering). Even more strictly, it is about improving the more think-y parts of the world: about making the world more truth-tracking, about making the world generate new ideas faster when a need arises, about making decision-making more guided by the best thinking, about making it so our values are worked out more fully, about making it so our values are better heard when decisions are made.
it is somewhat less a science and more an engineering discipline. it’s like medicine / medical science, but we’re healing the world-spirit
a central theme is setting up incentives, setting up hyperparameters, pushing the world toward goodness, with the heavy lifting being done by blind local mess incentives (even by stuff like greed and status-seeking), as opposed to being done by some pure correct judgments of goodness operating locally. like, if we’re setting up incentives with goodness in mind, ultimately the good stuff that happens is (to the extent that we’re successful) caused by a judgment of goodness, but this is happening indirectly. it’s about nudging a mad weltgeist subtly so it propels itself toward goodness. it’s about making goodness rewarded, comfortable, easy. it’s about making good processes/institutions/agents/etc outcompete others. it’s about preserving and expanding the niche/purpose of each good thing. it’s about making goodness win.
i think it should set out to be looking mostly for pareto improvements. despite being sort of about organizing our polis, it could still be kinda apolitical. that said, sometimes some groups just have to lose (eg people who explicitly want to make AIs even if they cause human extinction, eg paid lobbyists or companies effectively buying policies)
important components of weltgeistbehandlung:
coming up with general components for schemes. like patent auctions, prediction markets, accountability mechanisms
analyzing decisions between options (like, which voting scheme should we have?)
implementing these proposals (like what a doctor does)
identifying issues: like, noticing that there is a lot of lying in US business and politics, noticing that one isn’t sufficiently incentivized to provide some certain public good, noticing that academia is goodharting in various ways, etc”
Broadly, I think there are two cases of problems with coordination:
Two people/groups genuinely agree to honest, rigorous exchange of information, but can’t effectively coordinate.
Someone is withholding information or doesn’t really want to coordinate in the first place.
This does not comprehensively cover all coordination problems. I wouldn’t actually call “doesn’t want to coordinate in the first place” a coordination problem, but given that you have called it that, you would probably also call a coordination problem a situation where two people are communicating in a very incompetent/non-reflective/non-self-conscious manner, constantly getting annoyed/retaliating that the other is not doing what they think they should be doing but they’ve never taken time to communicate it clearly. They want to coordinate, they’re not (intentionally[1]) withholding information, but there is no mutual agreement to “honest, rigorous exchange of information”, because they have a skill issue.
¿Did you mean to partition it into something like: (1) coordination-relevant information flows properly between the parties, but the parties cannot properly act upon that information (for whatever reason: skill issues, intelligence issues, [the situation sucks and we realistically can’t do much] issues); (2) coordination-relevant information doesn’t flow properly, so even if they are in a position to coordinate if informed, they can’t, because they’re not informed.
I should note that the post was somewhat hastily written – I agree that my categorization was not comprehensive, and yours is probably better.
I was mainly trying to point at a dynamic I see often online where influential voices present arguments regarding AI risk that completely ignore years of back-and-forth discussion on similar topics, but whose positions are interpreted as the “forefront” of the debate – leading to offshoot discussions that again, miss years of relevant literature and discourse. I think this leads to, among other things, Eliezer frequently “losing it” on X/Twitter over people apparently misunderstanding something he wrote about in detail 20 years ago.
Community Notes on X/Twitter are sometimes regarded as a major improvement to collective epistemics, but I think there is a lot of room for improvement with tools that “situate” current discussions within previous ones.
But yes, I am describing a somewhat vague and imprecise problem here, so it may be difficult to categorize or pin it down with certainty.
There are different subproblems when it comes to coordination. One is a general problem of media. If the average effective altruist would spend a good chunk of their donation budget for Substack subscription of journalists that they believe to be very valuable for the public conversation, this might be better than them donating to big causes that billionaires can finance effectively without corrupting the cause.
As a society we do need some people to spend a lot of intellectual effort into doing research and thinking, and it would be great if that would be a higher priority for those who want to engage in Effective Altruism.
When it comes to your analysis of two groups, you miss the dynamic of scout and soldier mindset that Julia Galef describes. For the issues that are really important to us we are usually in the soldier mindset even if make a decision to agree to honest, rigorous exchange of information.
Maybe because most users here are already conscientious and strongly value truth-seeking, which makes improvement seem less necessary.
That’s not the case. CFAR was funded to help people to reason better and largely failed at that. It’s a problem that matter but it’s not an easy problem to solve.
Certainly agree with your point about donating to Substacks / journalists. Could be very impactful to have a writeup of that somewhere here or on the EA forum.
I’m familiar with Galef’s ideas; I would place “soldiers” in category 2. But yes, the distinction is very subtle and I did not specify it well enough.
I believe that sufficiently well designed UI for navigating debates/arguments/discussions can make it very difficult for people to disguise soldier mindsets via obfuscated (intentional or unintentional) communication and reasoning.
Imagine, for example:
User creates a strongly worded post that features a clear strawman and/or blatantly skips over serious, in-depth prior discussion on the same topic.
An LLM categorizes the argument to properly situate it within prior discussion and notifies the user that they A) do not appear to have an accurate understanding of the original source—specifically pointing out why B) have not yet explored the X counterarguments coming after that line of reasoning, and the Y that come after that.
This could be seen as an enhanced version of “community notes” aimed at situating shallow, under-researched takes within a larger “map of human thought.”
Whether this can scale and outcompete current systems is unknown, but it does truly seem promising for the enhancement of public discourse and like a step in the right direction.
Appreciate the comment, was helpful in clarifying my thoughts.
I’m familiar with Galef’s ideas; I would place “soldiers” in category 2.
And you would be wrong about that. Soldier mindset comes from caring about the outcome going a certain way. You can agree to be honest and rigorous but that doesn’t mean that you leave the soldier mindset because of that.
Probably, you are in soldier mindset yourself about this very issue. You have an idea of how debate should work and then have a motivation to have the details fit neatly and be able to be resolved just by specifying it better.
I think the disagreement stems from a lack of specificity on my part; ignore the specific description of the categories.
Probably, you are in soldier mindset yourself about this very issue.
I hold beliefs on it, sure. I am now interested in seeing if they reflect reality, and learning why/why not. Is this mindset inadequate, and what would make it more rational?
Separately—do you think there is promise in tools of the type I describe to combat soldier mindset at scale? I will definitely be reading into some of the CFAR resources, just curious to hear from you.
Cf. https://tsvibt.blogspot.com/2023/01/hyperphone.html
Could be nearby to some key software for interfacing deeply between minds. Someone might be able to code up a reasonable version in a few weeks using gippities, though that could fall prey to lock-in to wrong architecture choices. (I imagine, in particular, that handling audio in nonstandard ways might be an important early architectural choice. But maybe it’s fine.)
Hmm, this does look interesting but I hadn’t really considered depth of 1-on-1 communication as a significant bottleneck. I also think the concept slightly falls apart when the users are not already knowledgeable / quick thinking / good at rigorous communication, as I’d guess there would be a steep learning curve.
Software wise, I think I’m aiming closer to better debates and debate tools, mainly because these things could be made public-facing and seem like an obvious use case for even present-day LLMs.
If you have any further thoughts regarding implementation of those things, I’d be eager to know. I’ll be trying to make my plans more specific.
I think it’s one of the bottlenecks inter alia. What happens with two people with strong opinions / lots of knowledge / different backgrounds is that they fail to converge at all, often even on reference / ontology / communication, let alone actual facts / propositions / principles / plans. Because of this, there’s often no “ultimate recourse”; there’s ~no amount of research and thinking and problem solving that you can do in your head, such that you can then go out and spread the truth by just saying “take me to your leader” and then convincing the leader with facts and logic.
I also think the concept slightly falls apart when the users are not already knowledgeable / quick thinking / good at rigorous communication
Plausible, though I’m genuinely unsure, and would guess not. That is, I’d guess there are several kinds of uses for a hyperphone, and some of them would work across various gaps. For example, it’s plausible to me that speaking through a hyperphone would be my preferred way both of teaching and of learning something.
I’d guess there would be a steep learning curve.
There’d be a very steep learning curve at the beginning of development. It’s plausible that you could work things out so that there’s not that much learning curve after development. E.g. async text conversations are quite confusing if you’re stuck in the framework of normal live speech, and they do add some important kinds of friction, but mostly people get along.
Software wise, I think I’m aiming closer to better debates and debate tools, mainly because these things could be made public-facing and seem like an obvious use case for even present-day LLMs.
Possibly. One issue would be that debates are a bit more tense / higher stakes / constrained on average, I think, compared to 1 on 1 collaborative convos. For that reason, specifically for iterating on software, hyperphone convos might be easier to develop.
If you have any further thoughts regarding implementation of those things, I’d be eager to know. I’ll be trying to make my plans more specific.
If someone gets deep into this, I’d be happy to be one volunteer consultant among others about directions / ideas / considerations.
One strong recommendation I’d make is that, if you’re somewhat serious about it, GET DATA ASAP. E.g. set up some debates. About anything, between anyone who wants to debate. See what happens and see if there’s something truly hopeful there for you / the world, and then try to nourish that hopeworthy something. I wouldn’t begrudge anyone the a priori dreaming, which is more fun and can also be a very important ingredient in making cool stuff, but my guess would be that it wouldn’t go anywhere unless you feel hungry for data. You have to ask Thinking what it needs, not tell Thinking what it needs.
Lately I’ve been most concerned about coordination for governance, and having the ability to nicely merge values from lots of people to determine what policies a democratic government should take. I think current methods of voting leave a lot to be desired, and it should be possible to use AI to help people build personal models of their preferences that can be diffed/merged with other preferences, enabling easy creation of coalitions or identifying points of agreement. I think Andrey Tang’s post on Pluralityis pretty useful for getting an idea of how similar things could work.
There are a lot of other dimensions for coordination though, getting accurate information from distorted sources, figuring out how to align representatives, better voting, etc. Mechanism design and social choice theory are good places to look for academic research on this stuff.
What are some research directions for “improving coordination?”
In light of a recent post and comment, and several months of thinking, I have come to the position that one of our (humanity’s) biggest problems is that we suck at precise coordination at every level.
This is not very specifically defined but I am trying to gesture at a problem area I think is super important. Some thoughts to convey my intuition here:
If the extreme risk of the AI development trajectory is as true and obvious as many believe (everyone’s life at risk), humanity’s thinking about it should appear a lot more sophisticated than it does now.
For the last few years Eliezer has basically been throwing his hands up in exasperation at the incompetence of the world and many have shifted to public-facing communication, presumably believing that trying to convince AI insiders is hopeless.
Broadly, I think there are two cases of problems with coordination:
Two people/groups genuinely agree to honest, rigorous exchange of information, but can’t effectively coordinate.
Someone is withholding information or doesn’t really want to coordinate in the first place.
I think the first problem is workable, and if improved sufficiently, makes progress on the second problem by clearly exposing parties that are avoiding productive exchange.
Specifically, I think there is a lot of progress to be made with augmenting the exchange of information between people. I think LessWrong, the knowledge commons arguably at the frontier of ensuring humanity’s survival, is lacking in features for this purpose. Maybe because most users here are already conscientious and strongly value truth-seeking, which makes improvement seem less necessary.
Hopefully I’m making this line of thought clear enough. Key points:
Trustworthy, robust, and future-proof governance is the ultimate problem for humanity and anything else is a band-aid on a bullet hole.
Highly effective coordination is part of that problem, and better information exchange/clarity is a subset of that.
I think LessWrong can become an exceptionally effective prototype of this, and this could be very high leverage because of how proximate it is to the frontier of AI. Happy to expand more here.
I am interested in situating my thinking better here. Who is working on this sort of thing? I know TsviBT has explored improvements to debate, Richard Ngo / Samo Burja are exploring broader political manifestations, Forethought has published adjacent work. Is there anything I’m missing? Very interested in contributing here and think it’s a clear place where the ball is being dropped.
Here’s a bunch of stuff off the top of my head, in no particular order, including people who aren’t thinking much about the issue in full generality, but are addressing aspects: [1]
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Michael Vassar
ACS
economics has the subfields of social choice theory and mechanism/incentive/institution design. public economics is also relevant. internalizing externalities
there’s a bunch of econ stuff on people coordinating in/as a firm
there is a lot of political philosophy/theory/science on what sorts of political institutions we ought to have. eg see here for a bunch of pointers to
there are groups trying to reform the US voting system
various groups are trying to get money out of politics, eg trying to get Citizens United v. FEC overturned. there are various anti-corruption groups and pro-transparency groups
there have been various attempts to establish a world government
the legal system is one of the main instruments society has for acting on its values and determining facts in specific cases. there’s a lot of work on what it should be like
i think a bunch of sociologists are studying polarization and social media echo chamber stuff
there’s a bunch of work on how to inform people / how to get people to pay attention / how to get people to believe something. eg advertising research, work on how to run propaganda campaigns, theory of journalism
there’s a bunch of work on how to make people able to understand stuff: education theory, designing curricula, teaching
retroactive funding, impact markets
there are various forecasting and (specifically) prediction market initiatives, eg metaculus and manifold
people who created and run twitter community notes, fact-checking in general
people running wikipedia
people running the alignment forum and lesswrong
work on reputation systems
metascience and in particular replication crisis stuff. people trying to improve academic publishing, peer review, academic credit assignment
the field of social epistemology. also just epistemology
there’s a bunch of work on the social and bioevolutionary development of cooperation and trust and trustworthiness. there’s psychology research and self-help stuff on developing into a trustworthy person
there’s a lot of work on how to reduce crime
probably many other directions in sociology and social theory
So, there’s a huge amount of work broadly on coordination. Maybe there should be a more systematic body of understanding here. Maybe there should be an academic field. My personal term for this is “weltgeistbehandlung”. Copying a note I wrote on this for myself:
“In a broad sense, “weltgeistbehandlung” just means improving the world. In a stricter sense, it’s about improving the more living parts over the inert parts (like, improving the academic credit assignment system, not making buildings more beautiful), the more procedural/meta parts over the more object-level parts (like, reducing dysfunction in democratic systems over reducing animal suffering). Even more strictly, it is about improving the more think-y parts of the world: about making the world more truth-tracking, about making the world generate new ideas faster when a need arises, about making decision-making more guided by the best thinking, about making it so our values are worked out more fully, about making it so our values are better heard when decisions are made.
related but clearly non-synonymous: social epistemology, metascience, incentive design, institutional design. i think tikkun olam is somewhat similar. LATER EDIT: Daniel Schmachtenberger’s The Consilience Project seems very similar
characterizing weltgeistbehandlung:
it is somewhat less a science and more an engineering discipline. it’s like medicine / medical science, but we’re healing the world-spirit
a central theme is setting up incentives, setting up hyperparameters, pushing the world toward goodness, with the heavy lifting being done by blind local mess incentives (even by stuff like greed and status-seeking), as opposed to being done by some pure correct judgments of goodness operating locally. like, if we’re setting up incentives with goodness in mind, ultimately the good stuff that happens is (to the extent that we’re successful) caused by a judgment of goodness, but this is happening indirectly. it’s about nudging a mad weltgeist subtly so it propels itself toward goodness. it’s about making goodness rewarded, comfortable, easy. it’s about making good processes/institutions/agents/etc outcompete others. it’s about preserving and expanding the niche/purpose of each good thing. it’s about making goodness win.
i think it should set out to be looking mostly for pareto improvements. despite being sort of about organizing our polis, it could still be kinda apolitical. that said, sometimes some groups just have to lose (eg people who explicitly want to make AIs even if they cause human extinction, eg paid lobbyists or companies effectively buying policies)
important components of weltgeistbehandlung:
coming up with general components for schemes. like patent auctions, prediction markets, accountability mechanisms
constructing particular incentive-fixing/goodness-promoting proposals
analyzing decisions between options (like, which voting scheme should we have?)
implementing these proposals (like what a doctor does)
identifying issues: like, noticing that there is a lot of lying in US business and politics, noticing that one isn’t sufficiently incentivized to provide some certain public good, noticing that academia is goodharting in various ways, etc”
I’ll be taking a somewhat broad view on what counts as a “coordination failure”, as you seem to be taking.
Also Game-B.
I think Jan Kulveit also thinks about this as a part of the theory of change of FABRIC (?).
This does not comprehensively cover all coordination problems. I wouldn’t actually call “doesn’t want to coordinate in the first place” a coordination problem, but given that you have called it that, you would probably also call a coordination problem a situation where two people are communicating in a very incompetent/non-reflective/non-self-conscious manner, constantly getting annoyed/retaliating that the other is not doing what they think they should be doing but they’ve never taken time to communicate it clearly. They want to coordinate, they’re not (intentionally[1]) withholding information, but there is no mutual agreement to “honest, rigorous exchange of information”, because they have a skill issue.
¿Did you mean to partition it into something like: (1) coordination-relevant information flows properly between the parties, but the parties cannot properly act upon that information (for whatever reason: skill issues, intelligence issues, [the situation sucks and we realistically can’t do much] issues); (2) coordination-relevant information doesn’t flow properly, so even if they are in a position to coordinate if informed, they can’t, because they’re not informed.
but I think the word “withhold” connotes some significant amount of intention regardless
Apologies for the delayed response.
I should note that the post was somewhat hastily written – I agree that my categorization was not comprehensive, and yours is probably better.
I was mainly trying to point at a dynamic I see often online where influential voices present arguments regarding AI risk that completely ignore years of back-and-forth discussion on similar topics, but whose positions are interpreted as the “forefront” of the debate – leading to offshoot discussions that again, miss years of relevant literature and discourse. I think this leads to, among other things, Eliezer frequently “losing it” on X/Twitter over people apparently misunderstanding something he wrote about in detail 20 years ago.
Community Notes on X/Twitter are sometimes regarded as a major improvement to collective epistemics, but I think there is a lot of room for improvement with tools that “situate” current discussions within previous ones.
But yes, I am describing a somewhat vague and imprecise problem here, so it may be difficult to categorize or pin it down with certainty.
There are different subproblems when it comes to coordination. One is a general problem of media. If the average effective altruist would spend a good chunk of their donation budget for Substack subscription of journalists that they believe to be very valuable for the public conversation, this might be better than them donating to big causes that billionaires can finance effectively without corrupting the cause.
As a society we do need some people to spend a lot of intellectual effort into doing research and thinking, and it would be great if that would be a higher priority for those who want to engage in Effective Altruism.
When it comes to your analysis of two groups, you miss the dynamic of scout and soldier mindset that Julia Galef describes. For the issues that are really important to us we are usually in the soldier mindset even if make a decision to agree to honest, rigorous exchange of information.
That’s not the case. CFAR was funded to help people to reason better and largely failed at that. It’s a problem that matter but it’s not an easy problem to solve.
Certainly agree with your point about donating to Substacks / journalists. Could be very impactful to have a writeup of that somewhere here or on the EA forum.
I’m familiar with Galef’s ideas; I would place “soldiers” in category 2. But yes, the distinction is very subtle and I did not specify it well enough.
I believe that sufficiently well designed UI for navigating debates/arguments/discussions can make it very difficult for people to disguise soldier mindsets via obfuscated (intentional or unintentional) communication and reasoning.
Imagine, for example:
User creates a strongly worded post that features a clear strawman and/or blatantly skips over serious, in-depth prior discussion on the same topic.
An LLM categorizes the argument to properly situate it within prior discussion and notifies the user that they A) do not appear to have an accurate understanding of the original source—specifically pointing out why B) have not yet explored the X counterarguments coming after that line of reasoning, and the Y that come after that.
This could be seen as an enhanced version of “community notes” aimed at situating shallow, under-researched takes within a larger “map of human thought.”
Whether this can scale and outcompete current systems is unknown, but it does truly seem promising for the enhancement of public discourse and like a step in the right direction.
Appreciate the comment, was helpful in clarifying my thoughts.
And you would be wrong about that. Soldier mindset comes from caring about the outcome going a certain way. You can agree to be honest and rigorous but that doesn’t mean that you leave the soldier mindset because of that.
Probably, you are in soldier mindset yourself about this very issue. You have an idea of how debate should work and then have a motivation to have the details fit neatly and be able to be resolved just by specifying it better.
I think the disagreement stems from a lack of specificity on my part; ignore the specific description of the categories.
I hold beliefs on it, sure. I am now interested in seeing if they reflect reality, and learning why/why not. Is this mindset inadequate, and what would make it more rational?
Separately—do you think there is promise in tools of the type I describe to combat soldier mindset at scale? I will definitely be reading into some of the CFAR resources, just curious to hear from you.
Cf. https://tsvibt.blogspot.com/2023/01/hyperphone.html Could be nearby to some key software for interfacing deeply between minds. Someone might be able to code up a reasonable version in a few weeks using gippities, though that could fall prey to lock-in to wrong architecture choices. (I imagine, in particular, that handling audio in nonstandard ways might be an important early architectural choice. But maybe it’s fine.)
Hmm, this does look interesting but I hadn’t really considered depth of 1-on-1 communication as a significant bottleneck. I also think the concept slightly falls apart when the users are not already knowledgeable / quick thinking / good at rigorous communication, as I’d guess there would be a steep learning curve.
Software wise, I think I’m aiming closer to better debates and debate tools, mainly because these things could be made public-facing and seem like an obvious use case for even present-day LLMs.
If you have any further thoughts regarding implementation of those things, I’d be eager to know. I’ll be trying to make my plans more specific.
I think it’s one of the bottlenecks inter alia. What happens with two people with strong opinions / lots of knowledge / different backgrounds is that they fail to converge at all, often even on reference / ontology / communication, let alone actual facts / propositions / principles / plans. Because of this, there’s often no “ultimate recourse”; there’s ~no amount of research and thinking and problem solving that you can do in your head, such that you can then go out and spread the truth by just saying “take me to your leader” and then convincing the leader with facts and logic.
Plausible, though I’m genuinely unsure, and would guess not. That is, I’d guess there are several kinds of uses for a hyperphone, and some of them would work across various gaps. For example, it’s plausible to me that speaking through a hyperphone would be my preferred way both of teaching and of learning something.
There’d be a very steep learning curve at the beginning of development. It’s plausible that you could work things out so that there’s not that much learning curve after development. E.g. async text conversations are quite confusing if you’re stuck in the framework of normal live speech, and they do add some important kinds of friction, but mostly people get along.
Possibly. One issue would be that debates are a bit more tense / higher stakes / constrained on average, I think, compared to 1 on 1 collaborative convos. For that reason, specifically for iterating on software, hyperphone convos might be easier to develop.
If someone gets deep into this, I’d be happy to be one volunteer consultant among others about directions / ideas / considerations.
One strong recommendation I’d make is that, if you’re somewhat serious about it, GET DATA ASAP. E.g. set up some debates. About anything, between anyone who wants to debate. See what happens and see if there’s something truly hopeful there for you / the world, and then try to nourish that hopeworthy something. I wouldn’t begrudge anyone the a priori dreaming, which is more fun and can also be a very important ingredient in making cool stuff, but my guess would be that it wouldn’t go anywhere unless you feel hungry for data. You have to ask Thinking what it needs, not tell Thinking what it needs.
Lately I’ve been most concerned about coordination for governance, and having the ability to nicely merge values from lots of people to determine what policies a democratic government should take. I think current methods of voting leave a lot to be desired, and it should be possible to use AI to help people build personal models of their preferences that can be diffed/merged with other preferences, enabling easy creation of coalitions or identifying points of agreement. I think Andrey Tang’s post on Plurality is pretty useful for getting an idea of how similar things could work.
There are a lot of other dimensions for coordination though, getting accurate information from distorted sources, figuring out how to align representatives, better voting, etc. Mechanism design and social choice theory are good places to look for academic research on this stuff.