I’m pretty happy with this piece. I often look back at things I wrote a year or more prior and find I’d like to approach the whole thing very differently. But I don’t feel that way at all here. I often want to point people to it as-is, usually without any caveats.
(The part I’d most rewrite is the section on how to use the framework to sometimes loosen Newcomblike self-deception. I’ve guided more people through that process since writing this article, and I’ve learned a few things about what’s helpful for folk to hear. But even that part doesn’t need substantial rewriting. I just suspect, without having given it a ton of thought, that it could be made slightly more effective for readers.)
The basic theory still seems quite solid to me. That there’s such a thing as a hostile telepath problem, and minds seek solutions to it when they encounter one, and that at least one of those solutions is a kind of self-deception, and therefore dissolving that kind of self-deception often (always?) requires having a different solution to the hostile telepath problem at hand.
I use this framework all the time in my personal debugging. It’s also a basic component in my analyses of strange mental behavior.[1] I hear people referencing the idea fairly often now in ways that make good sense to me. So I think it’s a pretty solid contribution.
I’ve also heard that this article inspired some folk to start running experiments and playing with novel psychotechnology schemes. I haven’t heard much about the results of such experiments. But it’s pretty exciting and delightful to know that the idea is of a sort that has spurred that sort of tinkering.
Today I made a few small edits to the post. I think they’re quite minor. They’re based on some comments from shortly after the post first went live that I found myself just agreeing with:
I agree with Ben Pace’s point. I think “gaining independence” is just a clearer way of pointing at that solution type than is “having power”. So I changed the name of that solution type throughout the piece.
Ninety-Three corrected me when I said in a footnote that psychopathy was a cluster B personality disorder. I’ve removed reference to “cluster B” or “personality disorder” from that footnote, instead replacing it with the clarification I gave in reply to the correcting comment.
I’m pretty confident that those edits don’t change anything meaningful about the post.
Overall: I’m very glad to have written this, and to have published it. It feels a bit odd to give my thoughts about whether it should be in the “Best of 2024”, for social reasons. But if I kind of ignore that and pretend this piece were written by someone else (to the extent that I can honestly do something like that), my sense is that it’s a very solid contender, and the main question I’d raise is how it compares to some of the other candidate posts that it would supplant.
Or rather, while that’s true, there’s a generalization I use all the time that the hostile telepath framework is an instantiation of. Hostile telepathy is one kind of social problem that can make a certain type of irrationality make sense to do if you don’t have a better solution. There are other social problems that can make some irrationality strategic too. See for instance “Social Control Disorders”. The generalization I use is something like: “If there were a social benefit to this pattern, what might it be? How might I goal-factor here once I see the possible social benefit?”
I’m pretty happy with this piece. I often look back at things I wrote a year or more prior and find I’d like to approach the whole thing very differently. But I don’t feel that way at all here. I often want to point people to it as-is, usually without any caveats.
(The part I’d most rewrite is the section on how to use the framework to sometimes loosen Newcomblike self-deception. I’ve guided more people through that process since writing this article, and I’ve learned a few things about what’s helpful for folk to hear. But even that part doesn’t need substantial rewriting. I just suspect, without having given it a ton of thought, that it could be made slightly more effective for readers.)
The basic theory still seems quite solid to me. That there’s such a thing as a hostile telepath problem, and minds seek solutions to it when they encounter one, and that at least one of those solutions is a kind of self-deception, and therefore dissolving that kind of self-deception often (always?) requires having a different solution to the hostile telepath problem at hand.
I use this framework all the time in my personal debugging. It’s also a basic component in my analyses of strange mental behavior.[1] I hear people referencing the idea fairly often now in ways that make good sense to me. So I think it’s a pretty solid contribution.
I’ve also heard that this article inspired some folk to start running experiments and playing with novel psychotechnology schemes. I haven’t heard much about the results of such experiments. But it’s pretty exciting and delightful to know that the idea is of a sort that has spurred that sort of tinkering.
Today I made a few small edits to the post. I think they’re quite minor. They’re based on some comments from shortly after the post first went live that I found myself just agreeing with:
I agree with Ben Pace’s point. I think “gaining independence” is just a clearer way of pointing at that solution type than is “having power”. So I changed the name of that solution type throughout the piece.
Ninety-Three corrected me when I said in a footnote that psychopathy was a cluster B personality disorder. I’ve removed reference to “cluster B” or “personality disorder” from that footnote, instead replacing it with the clarification I gave in reply to the correcting comment.
I’m pretty confident that those edits don’t change anything meaningful about the post.
Overall: I’m very glad to have written this, and to have published it. It feels a bit odd to give my thoughts about whether it should be in the “Best of 2024”, for social reasons. But if I kind of ignore that and pretend this piece were written by someone else (to the extent that I can honestly do something like that), my sense is that it’s a very solid contender, and the main question I’d raise is how it compares to some of the other candidate posts that it would supplant.
Or rather, while that’s true, there’s a generalization I use all the time that the hostile telepath framework is an instantiation of. Hostile telepathy is one kind of social problem that can make a certain type of irrationality make sense to do if you don’t have a better solution. There are other social problems that can make some irrationality strategic too. See for instance “Social Control Disorders”. The generalization I use is something like: “If there were a social benefit to this pattern, what might it be? How might I goal-factor here once I see the possible social benefit?”