I think I see where you are coming from. The repeated experience that “this can be done much better” can turn into a constant suspicion that whatever you are doing is still a few such iterations away from optimal. The more we can go meta, the more impatient we become with not doing so.
I am also afraid that this feeling is related to AI psychosis. I consider myself psychologically stable, and yet recently the AI experience is quite addictive for me. It gives the feeling of unlimited possibilities. And the outcome is mixed: sometimes new possibilities open, sometimes it was all a hallucination.
Today I decided to take a one-day break from the AI, to breathe deeply and let my brain relax. Also, I think it is okay to go forward at not the maximum speed—if further improvements are possible, we will get there tomorrow. This is just an intuition, but I think that there is a cycle of: “invent an improvement, test the improvement, get experience, based on the experience propose a new improvements” and if we advance too fast, we don’t get time to do the “get experience” part properly.
And now that I think about it, this could be related to why AIs hallucinate so much. They actually “exist” only during the dialog, when we usually ask them to invent and build new things; they rarely get an opportunity to experience them. Not sure what such experience would even look like. For humans, it’s like “you have this new idea that you think is cool… keep applying it in random different situations, and then let’s see if you still approve of it afterwards, or if you came to some more nuanced understanding”. But the AI typically only applies its idea once, to the problem at hand. We usually do not even have random different situations for the AI to train on.
So maybe a better approach is “make a small progress, then stabilize your approach, and test the results”. In the spirit of “minimum viable product” that companies use, what is the “minimum viable improvement” you would propose? What is the smallest change that would clearly improve the status quo? Like in software we build version 1.0 and leave the other cool ideas for version 2.0 and later, what would be the version 1.0 of the improved education? Perhaps try to get this somehow implemented and tested first. Basically what I am trying to avoid is keeping the situation in constant motion, where everything is possible, but nothing is working out of the box. I mean, yeah, in long term, the constant motion is the source of progress. But along the way, we need some stable milestones. Or, to use a different analogy, mountain climbers sometimes make anchors, even if that slows them down, but it saves them when they lose the balance.
Also, smaller increments are easier to communicate. The best vision will be useless if no one actually tries it, and people need to understand it first.
To answer your question, I am not really afraid of not using our abilities to go meta to the fullest. The AIs are here, and they are going to stay. Everything we didn’t do today, we can still do tomorrow. Whatever limitations our attempts to generalize things meet.… when things calm down, when today’s “exciting new idea” becomes tomorrow “boring normal”, I think tomorrow we will notice the limitations and try to exceed them.
(This makes me suspect that I may have an instinctive fear that AIs are scarce and someone is going to take them away soon. A natural response to “we didn’t have them in the past, so it makes sense to see them instinctively as a rare thing”. But they will be here the next year, only more.)
So I would suggest to make a 1.0 proposal of the improvement, and try to communicate that. (Even if you already have versions 2.0 and 3.0 in your mind.)
Thank you for the truly useful point—one that I probably would not have noticed if I had consulted AI about it.
I came to understand firsthand what this blog had warned about. I thought I had been careful, but at some point I may have developed something close to AI psychosis. I do not usually ask AI for its opinions very much, but even when I was only trying to draw out knowledge, I may have been guiding it in a way that implied that this idea was excellent and useful.
Normally, I feel that I also have a way of thinking close to:
“Come up with an improvement, try the improvement, gain experience, and based on that experience, propose a new improvement.”
But this time, because of my desire to try new ideas with AI, I ended up disrupting the form that this feedback loop should originally have taken.
What I should have done was first try doing something, observe what happened, and then ask other people for their opinions together with those results. Otherwise, it is difficult for people to give concrete suggestions or impressions, and I feel that it was somewhat insincere of me to ask only for opinions without first taking that action.
This was also my first time posting on LW. Until now, I had only been reading articles, but I realized how valuable it is to actually have other people point things out to me.
Also, the phrase:
“a state where everything seems possible, but nothing works as-is, and the situation is constantly moving”
really resonated with me. For the past few days, I had had the feeling that I did not actually understand anything concrete about this idea, despite my expectations for it. Perhaps I had been refusing to observe the possibility that the idea I considered grand might not actually be as substantial as I expected.
However, I am still interested in this idea, so I plan to spend a few days making and thinking through an even smaller first step toward version 1.0, and then publish it.
“Smaller increments are also easier to communicate to other people. No matter how good the vision is, it is useless if nobody actually tries it. And for people to try it, they first need to understand it.”
These words of yours may become something I continue to value as an insight about communicating ideas to other people.
“If today’s ‘exciting new idea’ becomes tomorrow’s ‘boring obvious thing,’ then I think tomorrow’s version of us will notice its limitations and try to go beyond them.”
I especially strongly agree with this.
I also realized, more calmly, that as versions 1, 2, and 3 continue to develop, if this idea is genuinely useful and if the way I approach it is sincere in how I present it to other people, then perhaps people will naturally start giving their opinions.
I think I see where you are coming from. The repeated experience that “this can be done much better” can turn into a constant suspicion that whatever you are doing is still a few such iterations away from optimal. The more we can go meta, the more impatient we become with not doing so.
I am also afraid that this feeling is related to AI psychosis. I consider myself psychologically stable, and yet recently the AI experience is quite addictive for me. It gives the feeling of unlimited possibilities. And the outcome is mixed: sometimes new possibilities open, sometimes it was all a hallucination.
Today I decided to take a one-day break from the AI, to breathe deeply and let my brain relax. Also, I think it is okay to go forward at not the maximum speed—if further improvements are possible, we will get there tomorrow. This is just an intuition, but I think that there is a cycle of: “invent an improvement, test the improvement, get experience, based on the experience propose a new improvements” and if we advance too fast, we don’t get time to do the “get experience” part properly.
And now that I think about it, this could be related to why AIs hallucinate so much. They actually “exist” only during the dialog, when we usually ask them to invent and build new things; they rarely get an opportunity to experience them. Not sure what such experience would even look like. For humans, it’s like “you have this new idea that you think is cool… keep applying it in random different situations, and then let’s see if you still approve of it afterwards, or if you came to some more nuanced understanding”. But the AI typically only applies its idea once, to the problem at hand. We usually do not even have random different situations for the AI to train on.
So maybe a better approach is “make a small progress, then stabilize your approach, and test the results”. In the spirit of “minimum viable product” that companies use, what is the “minimum viable improvement” you would propose? What is the smallest change that would clearly improve the status quo? Like in software we build version 1.0 and leave the other cool ideas for version 2.0 and later, what would be the version 1.0 of the improved education? Perhaps try to get this somehow implemented and tested first. Basically what I am trying to avoid is keeping the situation in constant motion, where everything is possible, but nothing is working out of the box. I mean, yeah, in long term, the constant motion is the source of progress. But along the way, we need some stable milestones. Or, to use a different analogy, mountain climbers sometimes make anchors, even if that slows them down, but it saves them when they lose the balance.
Also, smaller increments are easier to communicate. The best vision will be useless if no one actually tries it, and people need to understand it first.
To answer your question, I am not really afraid of not using our abilities to go meta to the fullest. The AIs are here, and they are going to stay. Everything we didn’t do today, we can still do tomorrow. Whatever limitations our attempts to generalize things meet.… when things calm down, when today’s “exciting new idea” becomes tomorrow “boring normal”, I think tomorrow we will notice the limitations and try to exceed them.
(This makes me suspect that I may have an instinctive fear that AIs are scarce and someone is going to take them away soon. A natural response to “we didn’t have them in the past, so it makes sense to see them instinctively as a rare thing”. But they will be here the next year, only more.)
So I would suggest to make a 1.0 proposal of the improvement, and try to communicate that. (Even if you already have versions 2.0 and 3.0 in your mind.)
Thank you for the truly useful point—one that I probably would not have noticed if I had consulted AI about it.
I came to understand firsthand what this blog had warned about. I thought I had been careful, but at some point I may have developed something close to AI psychosis. I do not usually ask AI for its opinions very much, but even when I was only trying to draw out knowledge, I may have been guiding it in a way that implied that this idea was excellent and useful.
Normally, I feel that I also have a way of thinking close to:
“Come up with an improvement, try the improvement, gain experience, and based on that experience, propose a new improvement.”
But this time, because of my desire to try new ideas with AI, I ended up disrupting the form that this feedback loop should originally have taken.
What I should have done was first try doing something, observe what happened, and then ask other people for their opinions together with those results. Otherwise, it is difficult for people to give concrete suggestions or impressions, and I feel that it was somewhat insincere of me to ask only for opinions without first taking that action.
This was also my first time posting on LW. Until now, I had only been reading articles, but I realized how valuable it is to actually have other people point things out to me.
Also, the phrase:
“a state where everything seems possible, but nothing works as-is, and the situation is constantly moving”
really resonated with me. For the past few days, I had had the feeling that I did not actually understand anything concrete about this idea, despite my expectations for it. Perhaps I had been refusing to observe the possibility that the idea I considered grand might not actually be as substantial as I expected.
However, I am still interested in this idea, so I plan to spend a few days making and thinking through an even smaller first step toward version 1.0, and then publish it.
“Smaller increments are also easier to communicate to other people. No matter how good the vision is, it is useless if nobody actually tries it. And for people to try it, they first need to understand it.”
These words of yours may become something I continue to value as an insight about communicating ideas to other people.
“If today’s ‘exciting new idea’ becomes tomorrow’s ‘boring obvious thing,’ then I think tomorrow’s version of us will notice its limitations and try to go beyond them.”
I especially strongly agree with this.
I also realized, more calmly, that as versions 1, 2, and 3 continue to develop, if this idea is genuinely useful and if the way I approach it is sincere in how I present it to other people, then perhaps people will naturally start giving their opinions.
Thank you for the advice.