Cross-posted from The Ginnungagap Foundation. This story contrasts the status quo of human politics with what I would expect rational politics to look like.
It is apparent to me that making human politics more constructive is a low-hanging fruit with enormous benefits for the human wellbeing and longevity, both individual and collective. I contend that we should be proactive and assertive about introducing humans to more constructive approaches on the problems and conflicts they face than the approaches their ideologies provide.
Thoughts? Questions? Criticisms?
The story begins:
If you guess how this story ends, humanity could use your help right now. (Well, you can help humanity regardless, so if you want to learn how, read on.)
Once upon a time, my people say, there lived a village of humans. The humans of this village had a desperate problem. They were always in short supply of a medicinal herb, which they regularly needed to treat illnesses and diseases. What little of the herb they found, they had to ration out sparingly. The herb was a vine that grew only on trees, and few trees grew near their village.
Well, to be more precise, many trees grew near the village–an entire forest, in fact. But the forest was separated from the village by a river, and in that river swam monsters that would, often as not, sink any boat they found and eat anyone on it. Only a few lucky villagers had ever returned from the forest to bring back the herb, so most of the time the village had to make do with searching the few trees on their side of the river.
After years of watching their friends and family pass away from illness when there was no medicine to be had, around half of the villagers decided that enough was enough, that the village should have a steady supply of medicine. They demanded that the village regularly hold a lottery and send a randomly chosen villager across the river by boat to bring back the herb from the forest.
The other half of the villagers opposed this idea. They did not want to be forced to risk their lives. They hated seeing their friends and family die as much as the others, but they had learned to live with it. They did not feel that being able to save more people from illness was worth living under the shadow of being chosen by lottery to cross the river and risk a violent death.
For eight days and nights the villagers argued.
The pro-crossing half of the village said that the status quo was unacceptable, that it was a moral obligation to replenish the medicinal herb to treat the sick, and that anyone who opposed the plan to randomly select villagers to cross the river was evil.
The anti-crossing half of the village said the proposed solution was unacceptable, that it was a moral obligation to allow people to refuse to cross the river if they wished, and that anyone who wanted to force people to cross the river against their will was evil.
On the ninth day, it appeared that the villagers were about to come to blows over the problem. Parents, children, siblings, and spouses shouted abuse at each other, their gazes colored by anger and disgust.
It was then that one of my people, a being who at the time was known simply as the Wanderer, stopped by the village looking for a place to rest and restock on her travels. Naturally, the Wanderer was curious about why the villagers seemed so angry and divided, so she asked them. The villagers took the Wanderer to the tavern, brought her food and drink, and (with much interruption and volleying insults) they told her about their problem. They explained the solution that one side embraced and the other side rejected, and why each side was right and good and the other side was wrong and selfish.
After hearing about the situation, the Wanderer slumped forward onto the table. The villagers were horrified, for they assumed she had fallen ill, and they were all out of medicine! However, the Wanderer soon sat up, and they could see that she was weeping and laughing.
“That’s it?” she asked. “You have a serious problem, and you’re about to go to war with each other because you disagree on whether the only solution you’ve thought of is worth it? Do you see the problem here?”
The human villagers were angered at their guest’s condescension, but they had heard legends of the wisdom of my people, so they swallowed their pride in the hopes that the Wanderer might somehow solve their dilemma. Each side expected that the Wanderer would convince the other side to change its mind.
“You may laugh, Wanderer,” a villager said, “but this problem torments us, and we seek to settle it. Now can you help us or not? Which side is right, and why is it ours?”
At this, the Wanderer scowled. “Of course I can help. I have heard and understood both sides’ values, and they have nothing to do with embracing or refusing boats or medicine. Those are just methods you use to try to fulfill your values. Values are simple, and yours are no exception: you all want to protect people from dying. You just disagree about whether some number of deaths of a certain kind is more or less acceptable than some other number of deaths of a different kind.”
Sipping her drink, the Wanderer continued, “This question has no right or wrong answer. Luckily for you, it is also the wrong question. The question you have chosen to ask turns those who seek medicine into those who feed the river monsters, and it turns those who fear the river monsters into those who shun medicine. To pick a side is to champion suffering and horror.”
The two factions of the village had been staring each other down from opposite sides of the Wanderer’s table. At this remark, their gazes started slowly turning down towards their own feet.
Shaking her head, the Wanderer took another sip. “No, you should not ask whether or not you should take boats across the river. You have each made very good cases and established that both these options are unacceptable. Those who reject the choice to remain without medicine are reasonable. Those who reject the choice to force people to cross the monster-infested river are also reasonable.”
She paused as a wry grin crossed her face. “If I were a fool I might recommend an arrangement whereby people may give up the right to receive medicine from the forest in exchange for being exempt from the river-crossing lottery, and call the matter settled. However, that would still be answering the wrong question. We can do much better than a compromise between two bad options.”
Holding up one finger solemnly, the Wanderer pronounced, “Always be suspicious of a question where the best answer you come up with involves death.”
At this the villagers were silent. Finally one spoke. “What is the right question, then?”
The Wander smiled, and responded, “Let us start closer to the beginning. How do you treat illness in your village?”
The village doctor stepped forward. “It depends on the illness, but often with medicine made from the herb.”
The Wanderer nodded. “A reasonable answer, for now. It may change in the future. For now, where do you get the herb?”
“From the forest across the river!” a villager replied.
“And from trees around the village, whenever we can find it there,” the doctor added.
“Another reasonable answer, for now,” said the Wanderer. “On my journey thus far I have not passed any other forests within a practical distance from here, or else I would suggest you travel to those forests instead. I may yet suggest it, if all else fails. In the meantime, how do you get to the forest across the river?”
“By, well, crossing the river,” another villager muttered.
The Wanderer leaned forward. “And how do you cross the river?”
“By boat,” came the nervous reply.
The Wanderer pounded the table, and the villagers jumped. “How else do you cross the river? Use your imagination! Speak any thought you think of, and pay no heed to how ridiculous your answer may be. Nobody will force you to use any idea spoken here, but any idea not spoken is a gift left unopened.”
At this, the villagers were silent. The Wanderer patiently sipped her drink.
Finally one person piped up, “Swim across!”
Another countered, “What about the river monsters?”
“Kill them!” a third chimed in.
“That’s impossible!”
“Deciding what’s possible and what’s not comes later,” the Wanderer interrupted. “If you get enough ideas, you may find you can put some impossible ones together to make one that’s possible after all.”
“Poison the river to kill the monsters, then swim across!”
“Promising start. Any more ideas?” said the Wanderer.
“Send a boat full of meat down the river as a distraction!”
“This is nonsense. Why swim when we could simply fly across?” asked a villager sarcastically.
“You jest,” said the Wanderer, “But a silly idea can often be a path to a brilliant one.”
The villagers were growing excited now.
“Jump across!”
“Catapult over!”
“Build a bridge!”
“Tunnel under the river!”
The Wanderer had been writing down the villagers’ ideas, and clapped. “Good, good! This is excellent brainstorming! I’m proud of all of these ideas! Even the ones that won’t work help us to think of ones that might–that’s how creativity works! Well done, everyone!”
The villagers and the Wanderer spent the rest of the evening drafting a plan from the ideas they had come up with. It would take hard work, and there would be some risk involved, but everyone was on board and ready to make it happen. Waking up fresh the next morning, they spent the whole day filling in the details, gathering materials, and going over the plan step by step to make sure they were prepared for the unexpected. The following day, early in the morning, they launched the plan.
The villagers sent a raft full of meat into the river, where it drifted downstream. Shortly afterward, they sent a second such raft. The first raft was soon attacked by the river monsters and devoured, but the second one drifted downstream in peace. The monsters had seemingly eaten their fill, but if they were still hungry, the first raft had proved that they could be distracted. The second raft would be that distraction.
“Go!” came the cry. A boat entered the river and pushed off. It carried the Wanderer and a handful of villagers: crafters and carpenters, all ones who had been in favor of the river-crossing lottery. They paddled across the river as quickly as possible, and arrived safely on the other side.
Once there, the forest team got to work immediately, chopping down trees and carving them up into smooth logs. They sent half of their logs over on a long rope that they had strung across the river as they crossed. The logs made it to the village side without incident.
Other builders on the village-side riverbank, ones who had opposed the river-crossing lottery, received the logs.
Now both sides of the river had logs, and builders on each side used them to construct the foundations of a bridge. By evening, the bridge was complete and connected the two sides. It was strong, with sturdy guardrails, and far out of the reach of the monsters. The builders from both sides met in the center of the bridge, above the river, and danced for joy and for reconciliation.
The Wanderer stayed in the village for a year as a teacher, sharing with the village the problem-solving tools of our people. The villagers learned to make these tools their own, for protecting and enriching their way of life.
These days the village is home to a prestigious research hospital, and the filming location of a popular television series exploring the life cycle of the river monsters, but I digress. The story has finished, but our journey has just begun.
Earth’s fatal flaw is fighting for unnecessary tradeoffs, instead of seeking ways everyone can be satisfied. One may not find an easy or perfect answer, but for those who bother to look there is usually at least one answer that’s good enough for almost everyone. That’s better than an answer that’s pleasing for some and intolerable for others.
When you fight with all your passion to make someone else pay a price for your cause, you make your cause evil and recruit your own enemies. All your passion should instead be put to seeking a win-win outcome, one that rewards each person who pays for it. Never stop negotiating for that win-win, even when things come to blows. Always search for what your opponent is willing to accept that you’re willing to offer as truce. For when you close the door to the win-win, you choose unending strife. A win-lose idea will always have opposition.
If you, esteemed reader or listener, meet a person who disagrees with you on policy, you should figure out a future you both want. Take note: that future may not be what either of you originally had in mind. Sometimes finding it requires a deeper understanding of the other person’s values, or of your own values, but that’s another story. Once you find that future, get creative about how to get there. Building that bridge might take more effort than your current plan, but it will be well worth it. Besides, instead of opponents who obstruct and interfere with the new plan, you will have allies to help. Such is how ethics reconciles conflict.
And if you get stuck, or you feel alone in your efforts, just call on me or someone like me. We’d be honored to be part of your success.
You do not seem to be addressing the misaligned incentives—such as politicians often being incentivised to exaggerate and perpetuate divisions, rather than address them. Observe how in controversial areas (e.g. gun rights vs gun control) common sense reforms that have broad public support still tend to not happen.
You raise a good point. This story does not contain politicians who profit from playing factions against one another and maintaining polarization. It might make the story a bit more applicable to our world if there were villagers who gained social influence from being the champions of each side while never engaging in negotiation or brainstorming, and who subsequently lost that power once the villagers learned how to do those things for themselves. I may go back and add that in; thanks for the suggestion!
As for our own world, I predict that as people see just how possible it is to find common ground and build on it, they will lose their susceptibility to the polarization efforts of politicians. By learning how to establish mutual understanding and trust instead of fearing each other, they will become more willing to vote their own faction’s politicians out of office and will therefore be able to hold their politicians accountable. The politicians will be forced to do their jobs effectively in order to keep their positions.
Does that make sense?
But to what extent the divisions are driven by genuine desire to address the issue(s) vs just a raw “us vs them” drives (think—divisions between fandoms of rival sports teams) where the actual issues are just an excuse to think “we are better then them”?
Think of a spectrum between a world with overabundant resources where trying to hoard them is stupid and “learn to be friends with everybody” is the right strategy vs a literal zombie apocalypse scenario where anybody even thinking of being friendly to the zombies endangers not only themselves, but their whole community, and hoarding is essential to survival. The reality of this world is that for quite a while resources tended to indeed become more abundant, resulting in “we are all in this together” mentality tending to win over “us vs them” one more often than not, but if somebody is truly in zombie apocalypse survival mode, there is fairly little you can do to convince them to embrace “zombies”.
That’s where the deconstruction method comes in:
Make them comfortable.
Make them think.
Make them choose.
The first step is most important. You don’t have to start by convincing someone there are no zombies. You just have to show them that you’re not going to let any zombies get them. Sometimes that means making small concessions by agreeing to contingencies against hypothetical zombies.
You can tell someone that there’s nothing in the dark basement, but to get them to make it five feet in to the light switch, sometimes it’s most effective to just hand them a crowbar for defense.
People need to feel safe before they can think. I consider this technique an Asymmetric Weapon version of empathy mindset: making people feel safe helps them feel comfortable suspending their assumptions and reevaluating them.
How does that sound?
Yes, unfortunately you have to figure out how to do all that when there are politicians they consider to be of their side screaming “look, zombies, zombies!!!” and the people you are trying to claim down suspect that you might also be a secret zombie...
Ah, that’s where the anti-zombie shibboleths come in handy. People who are afraid of zombies “know” that zombies can’t understand the values of regular, living people. (The zombies being a metaphor for a distorted view of one’s ideological opponents.)
All I have to do is describe why being alive is good and being a zombie is bad, and that proves I’m not a zombie. That calms people down, to the point where we can explore some possible advantages of zombiehood and disadvantages of having vital function, and what we can do about that without losing what we value about breathing, having a heartbeat, et cetera.
Any expert on conflict resolution can tell you that one of the first things to do is to paraphrase and validate someone’s concerns. I can tell you that if you dig deep enough existentially into someone’s values, there’s usually something to understand, and even agree with on some level, even if you don’t agree with the methods they use to pursue those values.
As for the politicians spreading panic, they aren’t literally standing around screaming at people all the time. There is plenty of opportunity to help people feel safe enough to think. The main problem that I occasionally run into is when a person just gets into a loop of regurgitating information, like they’re a one-person echo chamber. Those people tend to be on the older side, and I don’t think they’re prevalent enough or capable enough to try and shut down intelligent discussion.
Does that all make sense?
I ended up writing a satirical poem about politicians exaggerating and perpetuating divisions in order to profit from conflict. What do you think? https://ginnungagapfoundation.wordpress.com/2022/12/11/your-party-is-not-your-friend-or-the-new-library-and-the-old-baseball-diamond/
P.S. Granted, the poem doesn’t describe the process by which people are inspired to negotiate with each other and actually solve their problem. In real life I expect that process can be made easier by… having people read the poem. We’ll see if the satire is effective.
Great, now solve pro-choice vs pro-life.
Do you think there would be a problem with attempting to reconcile people’s values on abortion?
You jest, but abortion is actually on my list of future Midmorning Zone articles. The Midmorning Zone series follows discussions between two characters representing different sides of various issues. In doing so, it demonstrates how they can use the reconciliation method to figure out constructive approaches they can collaborate on.
Part of what makes it difficult for humans to discuss abortion is the need to detangle the cultural baggage around sex (which boils down to a false dichotomy between decadence and dogma) from the ethical questions about personhood.
Regarding the latter, people need to confront the question of why we ascribe rights to living humans, because that informs what criteria we want to use to decide what rights a living human organism has at what stages in its development. I strongly suspect that what makes the personhood question difficult for people to acknowledge is that they fear that a definition of “person” that isn’t “living human” will allow people with evil intentions to warp the definition of “person” to exclude people they don’t like. That’s why they resist considering scenarios where being a human is neither necessary nor sufficient for possessing a sapient mind, which is what I would consider a “person”. (“Sapient mind” is a rather slippery concept for most humans, because they don’t learn the concepts for defining one in school. They are understandably apprehensive about trying to define it in policy.)
The only reason I haven’t finished the abortion Midmorning Zone article yet is because I haven’t had much success with getting pro-life people to acknowledge the personhood question, even amongst pro-life secular intellectuals, and it would be intellectually dishonest of me to portray a pro-life character as accepting a paradigm when I haven’t yet seen that happen in real discussions.
So yes, I am applying the reconciliation method on the hardest problems, with gradual progress. No, I haven’t influenced humans to reconcile over every ideological conflict involving difficult fundamental abstract ethical questions. The scientific method hasn’t answered all of the questions of the physical universe yet, either, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth practicing.
If we can help people with more concrete political disputes and change how they approach conflict, we can work our way up from there. I always figured Effective Altruism was more comfortable with incremental improvement than I myself am, anyway.
With that in mind, do you have any suggestions for issues start using this approach with, or any concerns about potential negative consequences of trying?
I have to wonder how you conceive of the “personhood question” and how you are presenting it to them. Surely their answer will typically be that they ascribe full rights from conception. Intuition pumps about a foetus at various stages not being a “person” would be, to them, beside the point.
You don’t mention pro-choice people. Have you had more success with getting them to acknowledge the personhood question?
Good questions!
Most pro-choice people I have discussed the issue with are already on the same page about how personhood does not start at conception, and for similar reasons. I don’t usually run the the thought experiments by them to see if our reasoning processes are the same; I should do that. I do know that some pro-choice people do think that a zygote is a “person” but that its rights do not supersede its parent’s bodily autonomy, at least in the early stages.
When pro-life people brush the thought experiments and intuition pumps aside, I usually invite them to reflect on why we ascribe unique rights to the human species in the first place, compared to other life forms. The United States Declaration of Independence notwithstanding, I do not hold that rights are “self-evident”, but rather that society derives them from principles that result in a society that people actually want to live in, even if they don’t have a rigorous understanding of what they’re doing. This doesn’t work much better.
I think that the issue with abortion is not so much a lack of answers to be had, but rather that most people have mental blocks around the questions. I think most humans are afraid of asking the tough questions because they’re afraid they won’t like the answers, but I find the answers tend to be quite reassuring. Most other political issues are unlikely to run into the same problem, because they tend not to involve existential questions on the nature of consciousness. I welcome any insights or suggestions you have to offer, though.
I don’t think there’s many potential negative consequences in trying. My response wasn’t a joke so much as taking issue with
I think it really, really is not low hanging fruit. The rights and personhood line seems quite a reasonable course of discussion to go down, but you’re frequently talking to people who don’t want to apply reason, at least not at the level of conversation.
Religion is a “reasonable choice” in that you buy a package and it’s pretty solid and defended by a conglomerate with the intent that you defend and get some defense back. I don’t think you’re going to get far without dismantling institutions such as religions, and I don’t think your process is sufficient to dismantle those institutions.
Many people have effectively made the decision “you are not in my tribe, so I will not engage with you in a productive way, because I need to assume you are deceiving me.” I think amongst any parties that aren’t pre-opposed to one another, looking for win-wins is the default, sane thing that basically everyone does all the time. The problem is all coordination problems are downstream of effective communication, and there are many people with whom you will not communicate with effectively.
The real potential negative consequence that is likely is you waste your time, and frankly, I don’t think you’ll be the one to solve this, because I don’t think there are win-wins on this subject, and a good number of other subjects from politics.
Not all human politics is low-hanging fruit, to be sure. I was thinking of issues like the economy, healthcare, education, and the environment. It seems like there are some obvious win-win improvements we can make in those contexts if we just shift the discussion in a constructive direction. We can show people there are more ideas for solutions than just the ones they’ve been arguing about.
It is true that the process shown in this story is not sufficient to dismantle religion. Such an undertaking requires a constructive meta-culture with which to replace religion. As it happens, I’ve got a basis for one of those now, but humans will have to fill in the specifics to suit their own needs and styles. (A constructive meta-culture must address the fundamental liabilities of scarcity, disaster, stagnation, and conflict using the four constructive principles of investment, preparation, transcension, and ethics. How it does that depends on the physical and social context and on the choices of the society.)
The trick to effective communication is to start out by identifying what people care about. This step is easy enough with a toolbox of basic concepts for describing value. The next step is to find the early adopters, the first ones who are willing to listen. They can influence the people ideologically adjacent to them, who can influence the people adjacent to them, et cetera.
By contrast, if we don’t reach out to people and try to communicate with them, there are limitations on how much society can improve, especially if you are averse to conquest.
For this reason, I conclude that facilitating communication about values and solutions seems to be the single best use of my time. Whatever low-hanging fruit exists in other fields, it will all run into a limiting factor based on human stagnation and conflict. I don’t know if you have an extraordinary effort, but this one is mine. I make it so that the effort doesn’t have to be nearly so extraordinary for other people.
So far as I can tell, the tools I’ve accumulated for this endeavor appear to be helping the people around me a great deal. The more I learn about connecting with people across different paradigms, the easier it gets. It starts with expressing as simply as possible what matters most. It turns out there is a finite number of concepts that describe what people care about.
There’s a lot more I’ve been up to than what you see here; I just haven’t spent much time posting on LessWrong because most people here don’t seem to consider it important or feasible to introduce other people to new paradigms for solving problems.
Is there another approach to making the world a better place without changing how humans think, that I’m unaware of?
I disagree and will call any national or global political issues high-hanging fruit. I believe there is low-hanging fruit at the local level, but coordination problems of million or more people are hard.
In my experience, it’s not clear that there is really much “proper adjacency.” Sufficiently high dimensional spaces make any sort of clustering ambiguous and messy if even possible. Even more specifically, I haven’t seen much of any ideas in politics that spread quickly that wasn’t also coordinated from (near) the top, suggesting to me that information cascades in this domain are impractical.
I think that largely that’s what is even meant by hierarchical structures. Small/low elements have potentially rich, complicated inner lives, but have very little signal they can send upwards/outwards. High/large structures have potentially bureaucratically or legally constrained action space, but their actions have wide and potentially large influences.
Great. Keep on doing it, then.
My message for everyone else.
Say there are 100 fundamental desires, and all desires stem from these 100 fundamental desires. Each can still take on any number from −1 to 1, allowing a person to care about each of these things in different proportions. Even if we restrict the values to 0 to 1, you still get conflict because what is most important to one person is not what’s most important to another, causing real value divergences.
I can think of some that you didn’t explicitly mention.
You can make the world just a slightly better place by normal means, trying to be kind, etc.
You can have kids, and teach them a better way to think while they’re still especially pliable, and ignore trying to teach old dogs new tricks
Maximize your inclusive genetic fitness, live a long life, make sure your ideas are such good ones that your kids will teach their kids and eventually outlive and out-compete inferior ideas
You can change how humans think, but you can do it in not the domain of politics
For what it’s worth, I also largely agree with things you said and your original post. At the point where the Wanderer contributed, I guessed both how the story would end, and the worse compromise the Wanderer mentioned. I guess I especially agree with your target. It’s not clear to me that I agree with your methods after having spent a fair deal of time on this sort of problem myself. That said, it’s extremely likely that you have real skill advantages in this domain over me. That said, I think any premise that begins with “the economy, healthcare, education, and the environment are low-hanging fruit in politics” is one where you get burned and waste time.
As you say, the ability to coordinate large-scale action by decree requires a high place in a hierarchy. With the internet, though, it doesn’t take authority just to spread an idea, as long it’s one that people find valuable or otherwise really like. I’m not sure why adjacency has to be “proper”; I’m just talking about social networks, where people can be part of multiple groups and transmit ideas and opinions between them.
Regarding value divergence: Yes, there is conflict because of how people prioritize desires and values differently. However, it would be a huge step forward to get people to see that it is merely their priorities that are different, rather than their fundamental desires and values. It would be a further huge step forward for them to realize that if they work together and let go of some highly specific expectations of how those desires and values are to be fulfilled (which they will at least sometimes be willing to do), they can accomplish enormous mutual benefit. This approach is not going to be perfect, but it will be much better than what we have now because it will keep things moving forward instead of getting stuck.
Your suggestions are indeed ways to make the world a better place. They’re just not quite fast enough or high-impact enough for my standards. Being unimpressed with human philosophy, I figured that there could easily be some good answers that humans hadn’t found because they were too wrapped up in the ones they already had. Therefore, I decided to seek something faster and more effective, and over the years I’ve found some very useful approaches.
When I say a field is “low-hanging fruit”, it’s because I think that there are clear principles that humans can apply to make large improvements in that field, and that the only reason they haven’t done so is they are too confused and distracted (for various reasons) to see the simplicity of those principles underneath all the miscellaneous gimmicks and complex literature.
The approach I took was to construct a vocabulary of foundational building-block concepts, so that people can keep a focus on the critical aspects of a problem and, to borrow from Einstein, make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler.
There’s tremendous untapped potential in human society as a whole, and the reason it is untapped is because humans don’t know how to communicate with each other about what matters. All they need is a vocabulary for describing goals, the problems they face in reaching those goals, and the skills they need to overcome those problems. I’m not knowledgeable enough or skilled enough to solve all of humanity’s problems—but humanity is, once individual humans can work together effectively. My plan is simply to enable them to do that.
I understand that most people assume it’s not possible because they’ve never seen it done and are used to writing off humans (individually and collectively) as hopeless. Perhaps I should dig through the World Optimization topics to see if there’s anyone in this community who recognizes the potential of facilitating communication.
In any case, I appreciate your engagement on this topic, and I’m glad you enjoyed the story enough to comment. If you do decide to explore new options for communication, I’ll be around.
I agree with your comments mostly so far. There is low-hanging fruit even in complex areas, regardless of the prevailing cynicism.
There does seem to be a lot of folks who match that description.
But there are also folks who understand that the world can get better yet nonetheless act like crabs in a bucket due to their desires. The latter group, when they exist in numbers past a certain threshold, likely increase the height of the fruit.
I don’t think most people are consciously aware, but I think most people are unconsciously aware that “it is merely their priorities that are different, rather than their fundamental desires and values” and furthermore our society largely looks structured such that only the priorities are different, but that the priorities differ significantly enough because of the human-sparseness of value-space.
I approximately mean something as follows:
Take the vector-value model I described previously. Consider some distance metric (such as the L2 norm), D(a, b) where a and b are humans/points in value-space (or mind-space, where a mind can “reject” an idea by having it be insufficiently compatible). Let k be some threshold for communicability of a particular idea. Assume once an idea is communicated, it is communicated in full-fidelity (you can replace this with a probabilistic or imperfect communication model, but it’s not necessary to illustrate my point). If you create the graph amongst all humans in value-space, where an edge exists between a and b iff D(a,b) < k, it’s not clear to me that this graph is connected, or even has many edges at all. If this is true for a particular idea/k pair, then the idea is unlikely to undergo information cascade, because additional effort is needed in many locations to cross the inferential gap.
Somewhat related, somewhat tangential, I think the internet itself is organized hierarchically as nested “echo-chambers” or something similar where the smallest echo chambers are what we currently call echo-chambers. This means you can translate any idea/concept as existing somewhere on the hierarchy of internet communities, and only ideas high on the hierarchy can effectively spread messages/information cascades widely.
Is there anywhere you can concretely point to in my model(s) you would disagree with?
I agree this is (potentially) high leverage. My strategy has general been that expressing ideas with greater precision more greatly aids communication. An arbitrary conversation is unlikely to transmit the full precision of your idea, but it becomes less likely that you transmit something you don’t mean and that makes a huge difference. The domain of politics seems mostly littered with extremely low precision communication, and in particular, often deceptively precise communication, wherein wording is chosen between two concepts to allow any error correction of behalf of a listener to be in favor of the communicator. Is there any reason why you want to specifically target politics instead of generally trying to make the human race more sane, such as what Yudkowsky did with the sequences?
There’s almost certainly less than 100 fundamental desires, in fact almost certainly less than 10.
If there’s 10, and if there are 10 recognizable gradations for each desire. that’s only 10^10, 10 billion permutations.
More likely there’s only 3 or 4, but more gradations, say 50. so 50^3 to 50^4 permutations. Which is not a lot, it almost guarantees that more than a 1000 people on Earth have a nearly identical set of fundamental desires for any possible combination.
I count eight fundamental desires, but they can take countless forms based on context. For example, celebration might lead one person to seek out a certain type of food, while leading another person to regularly go jogging. It’s the same motivation, but manifesting for two different stimuli.
Here are the eight fundamental desires:
Celebration, the desire to bring more of something into one’s experience
Acquisition, the desire to bring more of something into one’s influence
Insulation, the desire to push something out of one’s experience
Relaxation, the desire to push something out of one’s influence
Curiosity, the desire for unpredictable experience
Boldness, the desire for unpredictable influence
Idealization, the desire for more predictable experience
Control, the desire for more predictable influence
The four fundamental liabilities can impede us from fulfilling our desires, so people often respond by developing instrumental values, which make it easier to fulfill desires. Some of these values are tradeoffs, but others are more constructive. Values inform a society’s public policy.
For the liability of scarcity, the tradeoffs are wastefulness and austerity, and the constructive value is investment.
For the liability of disaster, the tradeoffs are negligence and susceptibility, and the constructive value is preparation.
For the liability of stagnation, the tradeoffs are decadence and dogma, and the constructive value is transcension.
For the liability of conflict, the tradeoffs are turmoil and corruption, and the constructive value is ethics.
Identical desires would not automatically lead to harmony if people want the same thing and start fighting over it. Identical values might help, if it means people support the same policies for society.
Using ethics to reconcile conflict is not a trivial set of goals, but it makes it much more possible for people to establish mutual trust and cooperation even if they can’t all get everything they want. By working together, they will likely find they can get something just as satisfactory as what they originally had in mind. That’s a society that people can feel good about living in.
Does that all make sense?
Seems like your eight desires are 4 fundamental desires with the possibility of increase or decrease.
If there were 50 gradations, then 0 to −25 would signify desires for less, and 0 to +25 would signify desires for more.
That’s a valid way to look at it. I used to use three axes for them: increase versus decrease, experience versus influence, and average versus variance (or “quantity versus quality”).
I typically just go with the eight desires described above, which I call “motivations”. It’s partially for thematic reasons, but also to emphasize that they are not mutually exclusive, even within the same context.
It is perfectly possible to be both boldness-responsive and control-responsive: seeking to accomplish unprecedented things and expecting to achieve them without interference or difficulty. That’s simultaneously breaking and imposing limits through one’s influence.
Likewise, it’s possible to be both acquisition-responsive and relaxation-responsive: seeking power over a larger dominion without wanting to constantly work to maintain that power.
They’re not scalars, either—curiosity about one topic does not always carry over to other topics. There’s a lot of nuance in motivation, but having concepts that form a basis for motivation-space helps.
These motivations are not goals in and of themselves, but they help us describe what sorts of goals people are likely to adopt. You could call them meta-goals. It’s a vocabulary for talking about what people care about and what they want out of life. I suppose it’s part of the basis for my understanding of Fun Theory.
What do you think?
It’s certainly possible for people to have these conflicting desires in their mind. Though I don’t see how that translates to observed desires?
Since reality must obey physical principles. (Though purely internal desires are of course relevant to the person experiencing it, the desires must be demonstrable and observable for anyone else to take it into consideration, otherwise the presumption will be that it’s made up.)
For a real world example, no amount of effort or desire can make a river go uphill and downhill simultaneously.
Someone may ‘seek to accomplish the unprecedented’ of making the river do so and ‘expect to achieve this without interference or difficulty’ but it would be so unusual an activity that a prank would be the likely first guess.
Even if they spent real resources on the river, it will just look like how you would expect it flowing downhill, or flowing uphill with a pumping system if they’re really motivated, or stagnant if perfectly level.
They could rapidly change the flow direction back and forth to try to demonstrate their desires, and simultaneously verbally claim it’s effortless, easy-as-pie, etc., and that the river’s really going both ways at once.
But this would just look like a convoluted prank to a random observer.
I’m not even sure how such a conflicting desire could be credibly demonstrated.
Maybe if they are willing to take bets that the river will in fact go uphill and downhill simultaneously, and since so it’s so effortless they’re willing to bet their life savings, home, first born, and so on? (Though it would practically be reducing themselves to penury, since there’s a 100% chance of losing the bet.)
For a physically possible but very unlikely and completely impractical desire, maybe someone has the desire to build a triple decker train wagon since they’re a train enthusiast.
How could they credibly demonstrate ‘seeking to accomplish the unprecedented triple decker wagon and expecting to achieve the built wagon without interference or difficulty.’ ?
I am skeptical of psychology research in general, but my cursory exploration has suggested to me that it is potentially reasonable to think there are 16. My best estimates are probably that there literally are 100 or more, but that most of those dimension largely don’t have big variance/recognizable gradations/are lost in noise. I think humans are reasonably good at detecting 1 part in 20, and that the 16 estimate above is a reasonable ballpark, meaning I believe that 20^16=6.5E20 is a good approximation of the number of states in the discretized value space. With less than 1E10 humans, this would predict very few exact collisions.
I would be really dubious of any models that suggest there are less than 5. Do you have any candidates for systems of 3 or 4 fundamental desires?
Avoiding death
Reproduction
Social standing
Exploration
That covers all known activities directly, or with only one layer of abstraction in the case of ceremonies, fights, etc., for hunter-gatherers up until the invention of agriculture.
I see. I feel like honor/idealism/order/control/independence don’t cleanly decompose to these four even with a layer of abstraction, but your list was more plausible than I was expecting.
That said, I think an arbitrary inter-person interaction with respect to these desires is pretty much guaranteed to be zero or negative sum, as they all depend on limited resources. So I’m not sure what aligning on the values would mean in terms of helping cooperation.
Avoiding death and exploration are usually considered positive sum, at least intra-tribe.
Social standing relative to other tribe members is of course always zero sum by definition.
Reproduction is a mix usually, if babies are presumed to be literally born equal then it’s zero sum when the population is at the maximum limit of the local environment’s carrying capacity. Otherwise it can be positive or negative.
If I discover something first, our current culture doesn’t assign much value to the second person finding it, is why I mentioned exploration as not-positive sum. Avoiding death literally requires free energy, a limited resource, but I realize that’s an oversimplification at the scale we’re talking.
Less != zero, or negative