The US is enough of a democracy that I expect this to be used for the obvious democratic applications, to publicly audit political candidates (it’ll give us much clearer signals than debates ever did) and expose corruption, which will lead to improvements in the US’s democracy, which is roughly equivalent to protection from harmful uses of mindreading. China is the real question here, and I think you’re probably wrong about it.
China once tried to ban private property. It made them uncompetitive. They remember that this happened, and they are now at least partly at peace with their dependence upon some amount of private property rights. Private thought is analogous to this. China’s leadership wouldn’t be able to hold together (I don’t think there’s a culture in the world today who could) under complete cognitive transparency unless they are, or became, tolerant of heresy. Giving them cognitive transparency, then, makes the sanctity of heresy public knowledge. This probably accelerates liberalisation in China.
(You can have a little bit of capitalism and then stop, but I think it’s hard to stop at just a little bit of heresy. Once you start saying “it’s okay to believe X” or “reasonable people often believe X”, you can’t prevent your culture from converging on “X is true”.)
You mention preference falsification cascades without seeming to notice its antithesis, a preference revelation cascade, the outbreak of a condition in which we’re all directly and abruptly forced to face and accept the strangeness of others, and the private beliefs of those we respect. Transparency would force cultural transitions which are protective against the cultural pathologies that you fear, here. (I don’t know whether these cultures of brazen heresy would be stable indefinitely, but we don’t need them to be.)
And you should expect this technology to propagate quickly enough through society to realise these cultural changes, because it’s extremely commercially valuable, imagine how much more, and how much sooner, a VC would be willing to fund someone who could prove that their claimed P(success) was genuinely a product of very careful study, rather than just a performance. They wouldn’t even need to read the business plan! They might not even need to know which sector they were investing in!
The US is enough of a democracy that I expect this to be used for the obvious democratic applications, to publicly audit political candidates
Lets review some of the events of just the most recent presidential election in the US. The leading Republican candidate refused to even participate in any of the Republican primary debates, and never the less went on to win both the Republican nomination and the election. Meanwhile, the leading Democratic candidate not only refused to participate in any Democratic primary debates, he also refused to submit to any cognitive testing, or even to stand in front of a camera long enough for anyone to get a sense of his mental competence, until he had the Democratic nomination, despite being in his 80s at the time. When he finally was forced to drop out, the Democratic nomination was given, without a primary election, to a person who had known of his cognitive incapacity, had had a constitutional duty to act to remove him from office based on that incapacity, and had instead chosen to lie to the public repeatedly about that incapacity. This is not a well functioning democracy, and it is not a system where I can imagine political candidates ever submitting to public mind reading even if the technology did exist.
VC would be willing to fund someone who could prove that their claimed P(success) was genuinely a product of very careful study, rather than just a performance.
How exactly would mind reading prove this? The belief produced by careful study and the belief produced by wishful thinking probably look the same in a human brain. Mind reading might reveal the blatant fraudsters, but not the ordinary founder with an honest but unrealistic belief in their P(success).
Don’t you think having a new technology that produces much more legible and predictable results that are more directly relevant to policy commitments would have made the situation less bad.
Like, I’m not sure how meaningful debate-avoidance is. This would probably be more comparable to taking a polygraph (if polygraphs were real and worked) than participating in a debate. Candidates get to choose the questions they’re asked. There are many statements they would like to make in provable ways. They will thereby have more of an incentive to pursue political advantage by being able to truthfully claim things.
How exactly would mind reading prove this? The belief produced by careful study and the belief produced by wishful thinking probably look the same in a human brain.
1: this discussion is premised on a mature version of mindreading for which we cannot answer questions like this yet. The OP probably couldn’t tell you how it would detect disloyalty either. 2: You can probably look at proxies like how long they’ve spent practising pitches vs how long they’ve spent investigating risks. Maybe checking for memories of meeting a critic then deciding to ignore what they said because it made them feel uncomfortable.
Even if candidates got to choose the questions they were asked (which is notably not how debates currently work), they would not get to control the thoughts that run through their heads when those questions are asked, and for that reason would be disinclined to submit themselves to such technology.
To make my more fundamental point explicit: voters did not punish Trump, or even Harris much, for refusing to submit to the technology we currently have (debates and primary elections), even when both were known to be liars. So voters almost certainly would not punish a future candidate who refuses to submit to mind reading technology. So why would a future candidate submit to mind reading technology? Political leaders are in the business of getting elected, and the people who are winning at that business now are not very transparent with voters. They aren’t going to become more transparent just because technology gives them an option to become super transparent.
Also, as discussed above, anyone who has ever read a classified document, which includes many of the people we might want in high political office, would probably be committing a crime if they put a mind reading headband on in public. (And if it would not be a crime under existing statutes, that is a failure of existing statues which should be rectified.)
1: this discussion is premised on a mature version of mindreading for which we cannot answer questions like this yet.
Just because we haven’t built mindreading yet doesn’t mean we don’t know anything about psychology or neuroscience. People have scanned brains processing different kinds of beliefs with different epistemic foundations, and found that the brains look the same.
> You can probably look at proxies like how long they’ve spent practising pitches vs how long they’ve spent investigating risks.
We can already do this without mindreading.
> Maybe checking for memories of meeting a critic then deciding to ignore what they said because it made them feel uncomfortable.
Scanning memories rather than active thoughts seems like a whole nother level of invasiveness that I would not expect anyone to voluntarily submit to.
To make my more fundamental point explicit: voters did not punish Trump, or even Harris much, for refusing to submit to the technology we currently have
I think both candidates were punished, and it balanced out. The past three elections seemed to involve some kind of bizarre armistice between the parties against bringing out really impressive candidates and I don’t know how long that can hold. Though the dice has rolled 1 three times in a row, and though there have been rumors about deep state dice fixing going on, I will continue to hold a relatively strong prior that this is still a mostly normal dice.
anyone who has ever read a classified document, which includes many of the people we might want in high political office, would probably be committing a crime if they put a mind reading headband on in public
This is a good point, though classified programs are often compartmented from each other, and would themselves have use for this technology, and would probably develop processes for using it without introducing much risk of off-target elicitations (see below).
We can already do this without mindreading.
It would be valuable if it made it easier.
Scanning memories rather than active thoughts seems like a whole nother level of invasiveness that I would not expect anyone to voluntarily submit to.
I think there’s an assumption that the memories are being interpreted by a machine. If so, audit machines would not retain memories, they would engage in specific queries and return statistics about the results.
The US is enough of a democracy that I expect this to be used for the obvious democratic applications, to publicly audit political candidates (it’ll give us much clearer signals than debates ever did) and expose corruption, which will lead to improvements in the US’s democracy, which is roughly equivalent to protection from harmful uses of mindreading.
China is the real question here, and I think you’re probably wrong about it.
China once tried to ban private property. It made them uncompetitive. They remember that this happened, and they are now at least partly at peace with their dependence upon some amount of private property rights. Private thought is analogous to this. China’s leadership wouldn’t be able to hold together (I don’t think there’s a culture in the world today who could) under complete cognitive transparency unless they are, or became, tolerant of heresy. Giving them cognitive transparency, then, makes the sanctity of heresy public knowledge. This probably accelerates liberalisation in China.
(You can have a little bit of capitalism and then stop, but I think it’s hard to stop at just a little bit of heresy. Once you start saying “it’s okay to believe X” or “reasonable people often believe X”, you can’t prevent your culture from converging on “X is true”.)
You mention preference falsification cascades without seeming to notice its antithesis, a preference revelation cascade, the outbreak of a condition in which we’re all directly and abruptly forced to face and accept the strangeness of others, and the private beliefs of those we respect. Transparency would force cultural transitions which are protective against the cultural pathologies that you fear, here. (I don’t know whether these cultures of brazen heresy would be stable indefinitely, but we don’t need them to be.)
And you should expect this technology to propagate quickly enough through society to realise these cultural changes, because it’s extremely commercially valuable, imagine how much more, and how much sooner, a VC would be willing to fund someone who could prove that their claimed P(success) was genuinely a product of very careful study, rather than just a performance. They wouldn’t even need to read the business plan! They might not even need to know which sector they were investing in!
Lets review some of the events of just the most recent presidential election in the US. The leading Republican candidate refused to even participate in any of the Republican primary debates, and never the less went on to win both the Republican nomination and the election. Meanwhile, the leading Democratic candidate not only refused to participate in any Democratic primary debates, he also refused to submit to any cognitive testing, or even to stand in front of a camera long enough for anyone to get a sense of his mental competence, until he had the Democratic nomination, despite being in his 80s at the time. When he finally was forced to drop out, the Democratic nomination was given, without a primary election, to a person who had known of his cognitive incapacity, had had a constitutional duty to act to remove him from office based on that incapacity, and had instead chosen to lie to the public repeatedly about that incapacity. This is not a well functioning democracy, and it is not a system where I can imagine political candidates ever submitting to public mind reading even if the technology did exist.
How exactly would mind reading prove this? The belief produced by careful study and the belief produced by wishful thinking probably look the same in a human brain. Mind reading might reveal the blatant fraudsters, but not the ordinary founder with an honest but unrealistic belief in their P(success).
Don’t you think having a new technology that produces much more legible and predictable results that are more directly relevant to policy commitments would have made the situation less bad.
Like, I’m not sure how meaningful debate-avoidance is. This would probably be more comparable to taking a polygraph (if polygraphs were real and worked) than participating in a debate. Candidates get to choose the questions they’re asked. There are many statements they would like to make in provable ways. They will thereby have more of an incentive to pursue political advantage by being able to truthfully claim things.
1: this discussion is premised on a mature version of mindreading for which we cannot answer questions like this yet. The OP probably couldn’t tell you how it would detect disloyalty either. 2: You can probably look at proxies like how long they’ve spent practising pitches vs how long they’ve spent investigating risks. Maybe checking for memories of meeting a critic then deciding to ignore what they said because it made them feel uncomfortable.
Even if candidates got to choose the questions they were asked (which is notably not how debates currently work), they would not get to control the thoughts that run through their heads when those questions are asked, and for that reason would be disinclined to submit themselves to such technology.
To make my more fundamental point explicit: voters did not punish Trump, or even Harris much, for refusing to submit to the technology we currently have (debates and primary elections), even when both were known to be liars. So voters almost certainly would not punish a future candidate who refuses to submit to mind reading technology. So why would a future candidate submit to mind reading technology? Political leaders are in the business of getting elected, and the people who are winning at that business now are not very transparent with voters. They aren’t going to become more transparent just because technology gives them an option to become super transparent.
Also, as discussed above, anyone who has ever read a classified document, which includes many of the people we might want in high political office, would probably be committing a crime if they put a mind reading headband on in public. (And if it would not be a crime under existing statutes, that is a failure of existing statues which should be rectified.)
Just because we haven’t built mindreading yet doesn’t mean we don’t know anything about psychology or neuroscience. People have scanned brains processing different kinds of beliefs with different epistemic foundations, and found that the brains look the same.
> You can probably look at proxies like how long they’ve spent practising pitches vs how long they’ve spent investigating risks.
We can already do this without mindreading.
> Maybe checking for memories of meeting a critic then deciding to ignore what they said because it made them feel uncomfortable.
Scanning memories rather than active thoughts seems like a whole nother level of invasiveness that I would not expect anyone to voluntarily submit to.
I think both candidates were punished, and it balanced out. The past three elections seemed to involve some kind of bizarre armistice between the parties against bringing out really impressive candidates and I don’t know how long that can hold. Though the dice has rolled 1 three times in a row, and though there have been rumors about deep state dice fixing going on, I will continue to hold a relatively strong prior that this is still a mostly normal dice.
This is a good point, though classified programs are often compartmented from each other, and would themselves have use for this technology, and would probably develop processes for using it without introducing much risk of off-target elicitations (see below).
It would be valuable if it made it easier.
I think there’s an assumption that the memories are being interpreted by a machine. If so, audit machines would not retain memories, they would engage in specific queries and return statistics about the results.