Yepp, this is true. However, I believe that there are other strategies for avoiding such memes other than “being smart”. Two of these strategies broadly correspond to what we call “being virtuous” and “being emotionally healthy”. See my exchange with Wei Dai here, and this sequence, for more.
Similarly, it’s worth being careful of arguments that lean heavily into longtermism or support concentration of power, because those frames can be used to justify pretty much anything. It doesn’t mean we should dismiss them outright—arguments for accumulating power are and long term thinking are convincing for a reason—but you should double check whether the author has strong principles, the path to getting there, and what it’s explicitly trading off against.
i think these are similar to conservatism in the sense that if you do them too much, you stop getting pwned but you also stop doing entire categories of things that you should do. for example, if you are too virtuous, you become overly self-sacrificial/martyr-like and stop taking many actions that are actually net-positive (many activists suffer from this); if you are too emotionally integrated, you become one of those people who meditated too much and no longer have any desires for anything at all.
Yeah, I do feel confused about the extent to which the solution to this problem is just “selectively become dumber” (e.g. as discussed by Habryka here). However, I have faith that there are a bunch of Pareto improvements to be made—for example, I think that less neuroticism helps you get less pwned without making you dumber in general. (Though as a counterpoint, maybe neuroticism was useful for helping people identify AI risk?) I’d like to figure out theories of virtue and emotional health good enough to allow us to robustly identify other such Pareto improvements.
A related thought that I had recently: fertility decline seem like a rough proxy for “how pwned are you getting by memes”, and fertility is strongly anticorrelated with population-level intelligence. So you have east asians getting hit hardest by the fertility crisis, then white populations, then south asians, while african fertility is still very high. Obviously this is confounded by metrics like development and urbanization, though, so it’s hard to say if intelligence mediates the decline directly or primarily via creating wealth—but it does seem like e.g. east asians are getting hit disproportionately hard. (Plausibly there’s some way to figure this out more robustly by looking at subpopulations.)
More like, being smarter than average. If you are that exact level of smart but in population with mean higher than your smarts, then the memes will target you as a primary substrate. You can argue in that case there are less such memes, but I don’t know, it probably has less effect than positional smartness.
Yepp, this is true. However, I believe that there are other strategies for avoiding such memes other than “being smart”. Two of these strategies broadly correspond to what we call “being virtuous” and “being emotionally healthy”. See my exchange with Wei Dai here, and this sequence, for more.
Similarly, it’s worth being careful of arguments that lean heavily into longtermism or support concentration of power, because those frames can be used to justify pretty much anything. It doesn’t mean we should dismiss them outright—arguments for accumulating power are and long term thinking are convincing for a reason—but you should double check whether the author has strong principles, the path to getting there, and what it’s explicitly trading off against.
Re: Vitalik Buterin on galaxy brain resistance.
i think these are similar to conservatism in the sense that if you do them too much, you stop getting pwned but you also stop doing entire categories of things that you should do. for example, if you are too virtuous, you become overly self-sacrificial/martyr-like and stop taking many actions that are actually net-positive (many activists suffer from this); if you are too emotionally integrated, you become one of those people who meditated too much and no longer have any desires for anything at all.
Yeah, I do feel confused about the extent to which the solution to this problem is just “selectively become dumber” (e.g. as discussed by Habryka here). However, I have faith that there are a bunch of Pareto improvements to be made—for example, I think that less neuroticism helps you get less pwned without making you dumber in general. (Though as a counterpoint, maybe neuroticism was useful for helping people identify AI risk?) I’d like to figure out theories of virtue and emotional health good enough to allow us to robustly identify other such Pareto improvements.
A related thought that I had recently: fertility decline seem like a rough proxy for “how pwned are you getting by memes”, and fertility is strongly anticorrelated with population-level intelligence. So you have east asians getting hit hardest by the fertility crisis, then white populations, then south asians, while african fertility is still very high. Obviously this is confounded by metrics like development and urbanization, though, so it’s hard to say if intelligence mediates the decline directly or primarily via creating wealth—but it does seem like e.g. east asians are getting hit disproportionately hard. (Plausibly there’s some way to figure this out more robustly by looking at subpopulations.)
>other than “being smart”.
More like, being smarter than average. If you are that exact level of smart but in population with mean higher than your smarts, then the memes will target you as a primary substrate. You can argue in that case there are less such memes, but I don’t know, it probably has less effect than positional smartness.