Over the last couple of years I’ve met some very agentic people and as a person who wasn’t that agentic I’ve spent a lot of time wrestling with the feeling of having to do things in a mode that wasn’t natural for me.
Also as someone who’s somewhat neurodivergent (I’m on LW after all!) I’ve also then of course built up an internal model that I can relate to RL and Active Inference on what agency looks like.
First we can imagine that there’s an energy budget that we spend to predict the world (e.g to minimize the chaos we experience in the future.) Part of this is creating a more accurate model of the world and another part of it is spending energy on changing the world to be more predictable. The first obvious thing for me is that agentic people spend a lot more of their energy budget on actions compared to planning. E.g “Just do it”, they instead of procrastinating on sending emails actually just send the emails and so on.
So how does this actually look like? Well for a chronic minimiser of free energy by understanding the world like myself it is quite hard to get out of the planning phase. This is partly due to it also being self-evidencing, e.g if I predict that the world will gradually become more AIs doing stuff and me becoming obsolete and that I’m not able to do anything about it due to me playing too much video games each day then I will likely continue doing that. Since there’s not much energy going into action, the future prediction of the causal effect of an action on the world will be low and voila, you get learnt helplessness and similar.
So what are the core mental moves to become more agentic?
For me they have been:
Pruning
Instrumentality
It’s all about removing doubt in your actions because you will second guess yourself all the time. Let me explain this in RL like terms:
You’re trying to prune part of the computation cost of the 2nd order consequences of taking actions. E.g if I send this email and it goes bad what are all the ways that it could go bad? If you spend time thinking about this you’re never going to actually get to work.
I can imagine that sending this shortform might lead to people thinking I’m stupid which might have all sorts of negative consequences. That is okay, I acknowledge that and then I move on because many iterated bets with unknown upside is one of the better ways to deal with the power laws and fat tailed distributions that exist in the world. E.g some of my writing will be shit and some will be good and I’m not a good enough planner to actually know so I should just take the action and see what happens.
At the same time you do not want to send random infohazards into the world or similar so you gotta have some sort of classifier for what universally useful actions are, e.g instrumentally/virtue.
If this classifier is set too low you get arrogant CEOs who will take a bunch of actions without looking at their consequences. So you have to calibrate towards a sweet spot which is different dependent on the domian that you’re talking about. I would for example not write this gung-ho about a particular part of AI safety research as precision seems more important there.
I also think this applies to organisational strategy and it is one of the main things that I find annoying about EAs focus on backchaining as if the domain is complex (non-linear interactions) then back-chaining just hides a bunch of complexity behind a linear model that you will likely have to change in the future anyway.
This is waterfall planning and it is highly dependent on the planning being plausible to do in the first place which is good for a certain set of predictable domains. When you get into weird shit like AI Safety Research or Progress Studies or more entrepreneurial complex domains it fails and it just seems like we don’t have that muscle built to the same extent yet?
Finally I think this is a good strategy to deal with highly complex times as it enables you to find hidden information faster as long as one of your instrumental sub-goals is to take the actions that yield the most amount of infomration.
On increasing your “agency”.
Over the last couple of years I’ve met some very agentic people and as a person who wasn’t that agentic I’ve spent a lot of time wrestling with the feeling of having to do things in a mode that wasn’t natural for me.
Also as someone who’s somewhat neurodivergent (I’m on LW after all!) I’ve also then of course built up an internal model that I can relate to RL and Active Inference on what agency looks like.
First we can imagine that there’s an energy budget that we spend to predict the world (e.g to minimize the chaos we experience in the future.) Part of this is creating a more accurate model of the world and another part of it is spending energy on changing the world to be more predictable. The first obvious thing for me is that agentic people spend a lot more of their energy budget on actions compared to planning. E.g “Just do it”, they instead of procrastinating on sending emails actually just send the emails and so on.
So how does this actually look like? Well for a chronic minimiser of free energy by understanding the world like myself it is quite hard to get out of the planning phase. This is partly due to it also being self-evidencing, e.g if I predict that the world will gradually become more AIs doing stuff and me becoming obsolete and that I’m not able to do anything about it due to me playing too much video games each day then I will likely continue doing that. Since there’s not much energy going into action, the future prediction of the causal effect of an action on the world will be low and voila, you get learnt helplessness and similar.
So what are the core mental moves to become more agentic?
For me they have been:
Pruning
Instrumentality
It’s all about removing doubt in your actions because you will second guess yourself all the time. Let me explain this in RL like terms:
You’re trying to prune part of the computation cost of the 2nd order consequences of taking actions. E.g if I send this email and it goes bad what are all the ways that it could go bad? If you spend time thinking about this you’re never going to actually get to work.
I can imagine that sending this shortform might lead to people thinking I’m stupid which might have all sorts of negative consequences. That is okay, I acknowledge that and then I move on because many iterated bets with unknown upside is one of the better ways to deal with the power laws and fat tailed distributions that exist in the world. E.g some of my writing will be shit and some will be good and I’m not a good enough planner to actually know so I should just take the action and see what happens.
At the same time you do not want to send random infohazards into the world or similar so you gotta have some sort of classifier for what universally useful actions are, e.g instrumentally/virtue.
If this classifier is set too low you get arrogant CEOs who will take a bunch of actions without looking at their consequences. So you have to calibrate towards a sweet spot which is different dependent on the domian that you’re talking about. I would for example not write this gung-ho about a particular part of AI safety research as precision seems more important there.
I also think this applies to organisational strategy and it is one of the main things that I find annoying about EAs focus on backchaining as if the domain is complex (non-linear interactions) then back-chaining just hides a bunch of complexity behind a linear model that you will likely have to change in the future anyway.
This is waterfall planning and it is highly dependent on the planning being plausible to do in the first place which is good for a certain set of predictable domains. When you get into weird shit like AI Safety Research or Progress Studies or more entrepreneurial complex domains it fails and it just seems like we don’t have that muscle built to the same extent yet?
Finally I think this is a good strategy to deal with highly complex times as it enables you to find hidden information faster as long as one of your instrumental sub-goals is to take the actions that yield the most amount of infomration.