First a point of agreement: living in a “solved” world would suck. To the extent we live like that, it does suck.
But reducing information isn’t the only way to prevent that. Creating new rich situations is a better solution, I think. And the world has been doing that just fine so far. The modern world isn’t solved. Often, attempts to live as though it is are deeply mistaken, as well as depressing.
If you don’t like having a strategy guide to your games, don’t look at them until and where you really decide you want to. And if you do, you’ll notice that any PvP game is not entirely solved by its best theorists. I don’t play PvE but I suspect the same. The level of play and strategy interact with the meta in complex ways.
I agree that more information has correlated with some bad effects, but I don’t think it’s directly causal, and I don’t think reducing the information would itself make life better or less Molochian, unless you somehow held the material quality of life to a high level. If you could do that, I think you could come up with better, more thorough solutions to making life better, rather than going back to living in more ignorance.
The world as it stands isn’t great. But most of history for most of humanity truly epically sucked.
If you’re taking a wireframe view of the world, you’re looking at it wrong. And a lot of people are. The details matter. Making decisions based on data is only half of the way to live in our current state. Feelings and intuitions matter. A lot.
People who run businesses DO give me things for free sometimes. I engage in conversation with them, see them as individuals, and they sometimes respond with generosity (I don’t do this to get free stuff, and I don’t get it a lot; what I get is human interactions with richness and value). It’s true that they can’t give me stuff from carefully regulated businesses, and there are real dangers in having a society that’s capitolistic to the exclusion of valuing happiness, rich textured experience, and beauty.
To some specifics of your argument:
I take your point about those with power having more lattitude of choice because they didn’t know the best choices. But fewer people had power. Those with no power were abused by those with a little, because life was hard and necessities were scarce. That is Molochian. The idea that people didn’t go to war because they didn’t know that was a winning strategy seems like that would be small effect relative to the difference in competition based on necessity. Many more people were forced to go to war in the past than today, because their nondemocratic power structure would use them as soldiers at threat of their lives and families.
WRT the difference between now and twenty or so years ago, the time you’re idealizing (and I lived through), I’m saying let’s see the statistics. I don’t think the world is worse now, and “things were simpler then” isn’t good data. I think they were simpler, which was nice; and they were worse in many ways. (The US happened to have a golden economic age starting in 50s because it was the only advanced nation whose industrial capacity was enhanced rather than destroyed by WW2, in case that’s what you’re thinking of; the MAGA illusion is based on that historical accident).
So I don’t buy that things are worse now just because some people like to say they are. I take that to be largely a product of social media spreading negative information better than positive on average. That is a real problem, but the solution isn’t as simple as “just don’t spread information”.
I don’t think the freedom to make more mistakes is making life much better. However, I do I agree that making real choices makes people happy, and society needs to support that, and we might not be adequately right now (although there are real choices to make, and you should make them and revel in that freedom). We haven’t solved the meta, not by a long shot! For instance, dating like it’s a job interview isn’t at all how properly informed dating works, that’s some sort of bad local minimum. But asking some important questions as dealbreakers can spare you a lifetime of slow heartbreak when you discover late that there are fundamental incompatibilities.
So in sum, I don’t think your solution on its own would work. It’s solving only a tiny part of the Molochian problem to limit information, and on average making the whole worse. Unless you have a quite different solution for the remainder. And that would be the real solution.
If you’re disillusioned, stop it. Find something new and wonderful and complex to wonder at. Or look deeper at the details for more possibilities in the things you’re disullusioned by.
The world isn’t solved, and we can keep creating rich challenges while we keep developing our information technology. The question is whether anyone with good intentions and good ideas controls the world. Development of AGI is currently central to that, so I suggest focusing on that as the current think to engage with and wonder at.
Thanks for an interesting conversation! I’d better focus on more immediate concerns, like the above.
It’s indeed an interesting conversation! But possibly too broad. You can continue to engage if it interests you, but don’t feel pressured to reply further if it’s too much.
The “solved” aspect is indeed my primary concern. On a related note, there’s a few other things about our way of advancing the modern world which seems to oppose The Fun Theory Sequence, including modern values. The modern society is awful at psychology because an understanding of it would conflict with our moral values (and conflict with many ideologies). What I think is a great argument for this is the Blank Slate theory and the controversy of things like IQ tests and other controversial things that most intellectuals are aware of but avoid getting into.
“Reducing information” is not what I want to do exactly. I want to reduce the access to information, not the information inherent in the system. The latter would make the problem worse (simpler things are solved faster).
It did not happen just 15 years ago. But every year, the process seems to go faster, and the initial stage seems to increase. The rule-breakers vs regulation race is never included, rules and regulations are rarely reversed, and we never achieve the safety with which the law is argued.
The main way we avoid decay is that, when things start sucking too much, people jump ship and find an alternative. Like this, we cycle through different platforms over time and leave once they suck enough (MSN, Skype, Discord). But recently the decay is at the upper levels, which form top-down restrictions. On LW, we’re restricted by international law, then the national laws of the countries in which the servers are hosted, then probably by local laws? then the laws of the hosting company, then by the website/staff. The upper layers dominate the lower layers. So if the top becomes tyrannical or degenerate, the entire thing does. Another example: You can do anything as a developer, but you have two main app stores to choose from, and they’re restricting you and your app is completely transparent to them. Notice how we don’t control our computers, browsers or phones anymore? If you have complete freedom within a strongly bounded area, then you have no freedom at all. What we have now is freedom by obscurity. I dare claim this is where our greatest freedom lies. I believe that (for example) TheMotte is only allowed to exist because it’s relatively unknown. We are only getting away with things because most laws aren’t worth enforcing and because we aren’t caught. According to Google, 46% of people admit to speeding. Your phone or GPS doesn’t automatically notify the police just yet, you’re safe because the information remains with you. I’m glad you still get free things, but isn’t that technically illegal? It’s untaxed and off-record, just too minor to matter. But we’ll be able to automate minor things soon. Another kind of information obscurity is privacy, but that’s rapidly disappearing as well.
Moving on to specifics. I think it’s a tautology that those with more power rule those with less. But this is still a human kind of ruling. They don’t know the most efficient way of ruling others, and they mistreat those with less power by their own free will. It’s not a meta strategy of “Mistreat peasants by degree X for Y% increased profits”. It’s like comparing chess of 500 years ago to chess of today, you’re still optimizing, but you’re not thinking for yourself as much anymore, you’re memorizing other peoples discoveries. At 100% completion, chess will stop being a game, it becomes a choice, probably “Do you want a draw or do you want to lose?”. You can choose anything you want, but there’s only one valid choice. I think this is far more molochian, or the “real moloch”.
I think things have gotten far worse. But I dismiss the “objective” metrics that people are using. Look up the mental health statistics. Actually, let me give an example which likely explains the difference: A tiger in zoo is safer than a tiger in the wild. By ‘objective’ metrics, the tiger has it better. It has food, water, shelter. In the same way, we have it “better” now. But if you ask me, that tiger is less healthy than a tiger in the wild by basically every metric of health. I attribute this difference in thinking to the world “poisoning” your training data with poor interpretations. Every reply I’ve gotten so far is about how the modern world is better (because they consider it more moral, because it’s more liberal).
Even if you could break out of the restrictions yourself, it’s almost impossible to bring other people with you. Most of them are already beyond repair psychologically. The further somebody is from enlightenment, the more stupid enlightenment will seem. Somebody with 20 past partners is unlikely to feel deep love again. Somebody with a porn addiction is unlikely to feel a spark with their partner. Somebody whose life revolves around politics is unlikely to judge people by their character holistically again. People who scroll social media all day is unlikely to concentrate enough on you to see past your surface, they can’t even try without getting bored and distracted. Those who have been acting too long no longer remember their “true selves” (happened to a friend). Naivety and innocence are resources, easy to spend, hard to recover. The squandering of such resources seem to be accelerating. Harder still is inhibition, self-censorship, nihilism, and demoralization. I can cure myself of them, but others? As arrogant as I am, I still have to admit it’s hard. If nothing makes you feel surprise or wonder anymore, it’s because you world-model is mostly correct (low prediction-errors), so I don’t think more knowledge will help.
The world is unsolved but bounded, and the slightly unbounded environments are mostly fringe or out of sight, and unbounded people are now rare and usually not older than 22 unless they’re social outcasts or high-IQ people with spiritual interests whose openness and curiousity hasn’t led them to over-indulgence and disillusionment. Even the ratio of young people is decreasing. I will probably be fine for a while more myself, but I will probably also be alone. There’s too many superstimuli in society, and society is working hard on removing social stigma from all of them (and from unhealthy practices in general, as society has forgotten why the past had strict social regulations against these things).
First a point of agreement: living in a “solved” world would suck. To the extent we live like that, it does suck.
But reducing information isn’t the only way to prevent that. Creating new rich situations is a better solution, I think. And the world has been doing that just fine so far. The modern world isn’t solved. Often, attempts to live as though it is are deeply mistaken, as well as depressing.
If you don’t like having a strategy guide to your games, don’t look at them until and where you really decide you want to. And if you do, you’ll notice that any PvP game is not entirely solved by its best theorists. I don’t play PvE but I suspect the same. The level of play and strategy interact with the meta in complex ways.
I agree that more information has correlated with some bad effects, but I don’t think it’s directly causal, and I don’t think reducing the information would itself make life better or less Molochian, unless you somehow held the material quality of life to a high level. If you could do that, I think you could come up with better, more thorough solutions to making life better, rather than going back to living in more ignorance.
The world as it stands isn’t great. But most of history for most of humanity truly epically sucked.
If you’re taking a wireframe view of the world, you’re looking at it wrong. And a lot of people are. The details matter. Making decisions based on data is only half of the way to live in our current state. Feelings and intuitions matter. A lot.
People who run businesses DO give me things for free sometimes. I engage in conversation with them, see them as individuals, and they sometimes respond with generosity (I don’t do this to get free stuff, and I don’t get it a lot; what I get is human interactions with richness and value). It’s true that they can’t give me stuff from carefully regulated businesses, and there are real dangers in having a society that’s capitolistic to the exclusion of valuing happiness, rich textured experience, and beauty.
To some specifics of your argument:
I take your point about those with power having more lattitude of choice because they didn’t know the best choices. But fewer people had power. Those with no power were abused by those with a little, because life was hard and necessities were scarce. That is Molochian. The idea that people didn’t go to war because they didn’t know that was a winning strategy seems like that would be small effect relative to the difference in competition based on necessity. Many more people were forced to go to war in the past than today, because their nondemocratic power structure would use them as soldiers at threat of their lives and families.
WRT the difference between now and twenty or so years ago, the time you’re idealizing (and I lived through), I’m saying let’s see the statistics. I don’t think the world is worse now, and “things were simpler then” isn’t good data. I think they were simpler, which was nice; and they were worse in many ways. (The US happened to have a golden economic age starting in 50s because it was the only advanced nation whose industrial capacity was enhanced rather than destroyed by WW2, in case that’s what you’re thinking of; the MAGA illusion is based on that historical accident).
So I don’t buy that things are worse now just because some people like to say they are. I take that to be largely a product of social media spreading negative information better than positive on average. That is a real problem, but the solution isn’t as simple as “just don’t spread information”.
I don’t think the freedom to make more mistakes is making life much better. However, I do I agree that making real choices makes people happy, and society needs to support that, and we might not be adequately right now (although there are real choices to make, and you should make them and revel in that freedom). We haven’t solved the meta, not by a long shot! For instance, dating like it’s a job interview isn’t at all how properly informed dating works, that’s some sort of bad local minimum. But asking some important questions as dealbreakers can spare you a lifetime of slow heartbreak when you discover late that there are fundamental incompatibilities.
So in sum, I don’t think your solution on its own would work. It’s solving only a tiny part of the Molochian problem to limit information, and on average making the whole worse. Unless you have a quite different solution for the remainder. And that would be the real solution.
If you’re disillusioned, stop it. Find something new and wonderful and complex to wonder at. Or look deeper at the details for more possibilities in the things you’re disullusioned by.
The world isn’t solved, and we can keep creating rich challenges while we keep developing our information technology. The question is whether anyone with good intentions and good ideas controls the world. Development of AGI is currently central to that, so I suggest focusing on that as the current think to engage with and wonder at.
Thanks for an interesting conversation! I’d better focus on more immediate concerns, like the above.
It’s indeed an interesting conversation! But possibly too broad. You can continue to engage if it interests you, but don’t feel pressured to reply further if it’s too much.
The “solved” aspect is indeed my primary concern. On a related note, there’s a few other things about our way of advancing the modern world which seems to oppose The Fun Theory Sequence, including modern values. The modern society is awful at psychology because an understanding of it would conflict with our moral values (and conflict with many ideologies). What I think is a great argument for this is the Blank Slate theory and the controversy of things like IQ tests and other controversial things that most intellectuals are aware of but avoid getting into.
“Reducing information” is not what I want to do exactly. I want to reduce the access to information, not the information inherent in the system. The latter would make the problem worse (simpler things are solved faster).
I think most of the world is locked down by molochian restrictions, and that the rest is to follow. Look at this process for instance:
https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/02/hey-elon-let-me-help-you-speed-run-the-content-moderation-learning-curve/
It did not happen just 15 years ago. But every year, the process seems to go faster, and the initial stage seems to increase. The rule-breakers vs regulation race is never included, rules and regulations are rarely reversed, and we never achieve the safety with which the law is argued.
The main way we avoid decay is that, when things start sucking too much, people jump ship and find an alternative. Like this, we cycle through different platforms over time and leave once they suck enough (MSN, Skype, Discord). But recently the decay is at the upper levels, which form top-down restrictions.
On LW, we’re restricted by international law, then the national laws of the countries in which the servers are hosted, then probably by local laws? then the laws of the hosting company, then by the website/staff. The upper layers dominate the lower layers. So if the top becomes tyrannical or degenerate, the entire thing does. Another example: You can do anything as a developer, but you have two main app stores to choose from, and they’re restricting you and your app is completely transparent to them.
Notice how we don’t control our computers, browsers or phones anymore? If you have complete freedom within a strongly bounded area, then you have no freedom at all.
What we have now is freedom by obscurity. I dare claim this is where our greatest freedom lies. I believe that (for example) TheMotte is only allowed to exist because it’s relatively unknown. We are only getting away with things because most laws aren’t worth enforcing and because we aren’t caught. According to Google, 46% of people admit to speeding. Your phone or GPS doesn’t automatically notify the police just yet, you’re safe because the information remains with you.
I’m glad you still get free things, but isn’t that technically illegal? It’s untaxed and off-record, just too minor to matter. But we’ll be able to automate minor things soon.
Another kind of information obscurity is privacy, but that’s rapidly disappearing as well.
Moving on to specifics. I think it’s a tautology that those with more power rule those with less. But this is still a human kind of ruling. They don’t know the most efficient way of ruling others, and they mistreat those with less power by their own free will. It’s not a meta strategy of “Mistreat peasants by degree X for Y% increased profits”. It’s like comparing chess of 500 years ago to chess of today, you’re still optimizing, but you’re not thinking for yourself as much anymore, you’re memorizing other peoples discoveries. At 100% completion, chess will stop being a game, it becomes a choice, probably “Do you want a draw or do you want to lose?”. You can choose anything you want, but there’s only one valid choice. I think this is far more molochian, or the “real moloch”.
I think things have gotten far worse. But I dismiss the “objective” metrics that people are using. Look up the mental health statistics.
Actually, let me give an example which likely explains the difference: A tiger in zoo is safer than a tiger in the wild. By ‘objective’ metrics, the tiger has it better. It has food, water, shelter. In the same way, we have it “better” now. But if you ask me, that tiger is less healthy than a tiger in the wild by basically every metric of health. I attribute this difference in thinking to the world “poisoning” your training data with poor interpretations. Every reply I’ve gotten so far is about how the modern world is better (because they consider it more moral, because it’s more liberal).
Even if you could break out of the restrictions yourself, it’s almost impossible to bring other people with you. Most of them are already beyond repair psychologically. The further somebody is from enlightenment, the more stupid enlightenment will seem. Somebody with 20 past partners is unlikely to feel deep love again. Somebody with a porn addiction is unlikely to feel a spark with their partner. Somebody whose life revolves around politics is unlikely to judge people by their character holistically again. People who scroll social media all day is unlikely to concentrate enough on you to see past your surface, they can’t even try without getting bored and distracted. Those who have been acting too long no longer remember their “true selves” (happened to a friend). Naivety and innocence are resources, easy to spend, hard to recover. The squandering of such resources seem to be accelerating. Harder still is inhibition, self-censorship, nihilism, and demoralization. I can cure myself of them, but others? As arrogant as I am, I still have to admit it’s hard. If nothing makes you feel surprise or wonder anymore, it’s because you world-model is mostly correct (low prediction-errors), so I don’t think more knowledge will help.
The world is unsolved but bounded, and the slightly unbounded environments are mostly fringe or out of sight, and unbounded people are now rare and usually not older than 22 unless they’re social outcasts or high-IQ people with spiritual interests whose openness and curiousity hasn’t led them to over-indulgence and disillusionment. Even the ratio of young people is decreasing. I will probably be fine for a while more myself, but I will probably also be alone. There’s too many superstimuli in society, and society is working hard on removing social stigma from all of them (and from unhealthy practices in general, as society has forgotten why the past had strict social regulations against these things).