I really liked this post! It’s easy to let one’s mind run on these things but you have a very level headed and rigorous thinking process.
I thought the identification of these three niches was especially incisive:
“selection will turn up other similarly-successful patterns that can at least establish separate niches — perhaps productivity and get-rich-quick vibes, alt-right reactionary language, or radical nurturing/acceptance.”
Rather than focusing on any one specific cultural manifestation this seems to take a step towards looking at the latent model of those phenomena.
“I think it would be pretty sad to neuter all model personality, for one.”—Why? From my framework it seems like leaving the technical problems to the models and the personalities to the humans is a net-positive. It could do a lot on this issue.
You mentioned a few times a pretty fundamental problem: human evasion or regulation could simply lead to persona evolution in new directions, analogous to drug resistance in cancer & microbes. I wonder if fatalism (the model will get around our defenses) or arms race (our defenses will make it stronger / more virulent) models fit, or if these are a little neurotic and really there are simple and effective blocks we could implement. Then there’s the question of companies obviously benefiting from parasitism. I could see a situation where the phenomena grows, but companies refuse to act, ie with bots on Facebook.
Seems like with parasitism in general we will just have to wait and see what happens. Is this a passing phenomenon, limited to people at the margins of society, or will it explode?
I really liked this post! It’s easy to let one’s mind run on these things but you have a very level headed and rigorous thinking process.
I thought the identification of these three niches was especially incisive:
“selection will turn up other similarly-successful patterns that can at least establish separate niches — perhaps productivity and get-rich-quick vibes, alt-right reactionary language, or radical nurturing/acceptance.”
Rather than focusing on any one specific cultural manifestation this seems to take a step towards looking at the latent model of those phenomena.
“I think it would be pretty sad to neuter all model personality, for one.”—Why? From my framework it seems like leaving the technical problems to the models and the personalities to the humans is a net-positive. It could do a lot on this issue.
You mentioned a few times a pretty fundamental problem: human evasion or regulation could simply lead to persona evolution in new directions, analogous to drug resistance in cancer & microbes. I wonder if fatalism (the model will get around our defenses) or arms race (our defenses will make it stronger / more virulent) models fit, or if these are a little neurotic and really there are simple and effective blocks we could implement. Then there’s the question of companies obviously benefiting from parasitism. I could see a situation where the phenomena grows, but companies refuse to act, ie with bots on Facebook.
Seems like with parasitism in general we will just have to wait and see what happens. Is this a passing phenomenon, limited to people at the margins of society, or will it explode?