you can reflect on what’s happening—is it good or bad, how could it be done better or worse, should it be combatted, etc.
you can support it or combat it effectively if needed.
Further, there’s presumably healthy, humanity-aligned ways of participating in egregores (I mean the name is a bit scary, but like, some companies, governments, religious strains, traditions, norms, grand plans, etc., are good to participate in), or in other words effective, epistemic, Good shared-intentionality-weaving. This is an entire huge and fundamental missing sector of our philosophy. We might have to understand this better to make progress on hard things. Decoding obvious egregores would be a way in. As an example, I suspect there is some sequence of words, humanly producible, maybe with prerequisites (such as having a community backing you up, or similar), that would persuade most AGI researchers to just stop—but you might need more theory to produce those words.
That’s a very new-to-me take on getting AGI efforts to stop: understand and intervene directly on the egregore, rather than like, trying to influence individuals.
I’ll have to think about this.
It’s a pet cause of mine, to get as many people as I can off of the harmful social media platforms (which in my view is nearly all of them, weighted by readership). Possibly [considering “social media use” as an egregore, and considering how to interact with the egregore] might be more effective than my past efforts.
Your list of coded movements really rings-relevant to me—“second-order norm enforcement” made me immediately think of how people will vocally remark that you’re strange or ask why, if they learn you’re not on any social media that they’ve heard of. I suspect this mostly does not influence social-media-nonusers, but rather affects bystanders, erecting an additional barrier to exiting the egregore.
Thanks for the new mental model. Even if I end up not adopting it wholesale, it seems obviously full of useful parts!
Though to be clear, it seems very very difficult to me, like it might be at a vaguely comparable level of difficulty as “solving biology”. Which is part of why I’m not working on that directly, but instead aiming at technological human intelligence amplification.
Yeah, feels like it’s at a similar difficulty level as I’ve been experiencing trying to transcribe my own thought process as pseudocode. And I get the impression that few insights would be readily transferrable across different egregores, in which case each and every one might need its own individual effort.
Reminds me of the work that was done which caused the decline of the Ku Klux Klan: someone infiltrated, learned all the rituals and coded language used, then published that information—and that was all it took to cripple their power.
Yes, that’s basically what I mean. There’s a lot of coded movements. Examples of classes of examples:
dogwhistles
microaggressions
signaling, shibboleths
second- and higher-order norm enforcement (mocking non-enforcers of norms, etc.)
quorum sensing
performativity (playing dumb, performative lying, preference falsification, etc.)
hype / hyperstitioning
enthymemes
envisioning futures
anti-inductivity (e.g. cryptolects)
So you’d first of all want to decode this stuff so that
you can understand what’s even happening
you can reflect on what’s happening—is it good or bad, how could it be done better or worse, should it be combatted, etc.
you can support it or combat it effectively if needed.
Further, there’s presumably healthy, humanity-aligned ways of participating in egregores (I mean the name is a bit scary, but like, some companies, governments, religious strains, traditions, norms, grand plans, etc., are good to participate in), or in other words effective, epistemic, Good shared-intentionality-weaving. This is an entire huge and fundamental missing sector of our philosophy. We might have to understand this better to make progress on hard things. Decoding obvious egregores would be a way in. As an example, I suspect there is some sequence of words, humanly producible, maybe with prerequisites (such as having a community backing you up, or similar), that would persuade most AGI researchers to just stop—but you might need more theory to produce those words.
Interesting, and thanks for taking the time!
That’s a very new-to-me take on getting AGI efforts to stop: understand and intervene directly on the egregore, rather than like, trying to influence individuals.
I’ll have to think about this.
It’s a pet cause of mine, to get as many people as I can off of the harmful social media platforms (which in my view is nearly all of them, weighted by readership). Possibly [considering “social media use” as an egregore, and considering how to interact with the egregore] might be more effective than my past efforts.
Your list of coded movements really rings-relevant to me—“second-order norm enforcement” made me immediately think of how people will vocally remark that you’re strange or ask why, if they learn you’re not on any social media that they’ve heard of. I suspect this mostly does not influence social-media-nonusers, but rather affects bystanders, erecting an additional barrier to exiting the egregore.
Thanks for the new mental model. Even if I end up not adopting it wholesale, it seems obviously full of useful parts!
Though to be clear, it seems very very difficult to me, like it might be at a vaguely comparable level of difficulty as “solving biology”. Which is part of why I’m not working on that directly, but instead aiming at technological human intelligence amplification.
Yeah, feels like it’s at a similar difficulty level as I’ve been experiencing trying to transcribe my own thought process as pseudocode. And I get the impression that few insights would be readily transferrable across different egregores, in which case each and every one might need its own individual effort.
Reminds me of the work that was done which caused the decline of the Ku Klux Klan: someone infiltrated, learned all the rituals and coded language used, then published that information—and that was all it took to cripple their power.
I wish you all the luck re: human enhancement.