Yep, I think I understood. I thought your comment made sense and was worth saying.
I think my phrasing came across funny over text. Reading it back, it sounds more dismissive than I meant it to be.
I do suspect we disagree about a subtle point. I don’t think our evolved toolkit works against us here. The problem (as I see it) is upstream of that. We’re trying to treat things that last for more than days as “emergencies”, thus inappropriately applying the evolved emergency toolkit in situations it doesn’t work well for.
I mean, if I want to visit a friend who’s half a mile away, I might just walk. If I want to visit a friend who’s across the country, I’m not even tempted to think the answer is to start walking in their direction. This is a case where understanding the full context means that my evolved instincts (in this case for traveling everywhere via walking) help instead of creating a problem: I walk to my computer to buy a plane ticket, then to my car to drive to the airport, etc.
We haven’t worked out the same cultural machinery for long timescale emergencies yet.
And you’re quite right, given this situation our instincts are really terribly set up for handling it.
But that’s what psychotechnologies are for. Things like language and mathematics help to extend our instinctual basis so we can work with things way, way beyond the scope of what our evolved capacities ever had to handle.
We just haven’t developed adequate psychotech here just yet.
Yeah, that’s a crux for me. Essentially, evolution suffered an extremal Goodhart problem, where taking the naturally evolved mechanisms for emergencies out of it’s EEA distribution leads to weird and bad outcomes.
My point is genetics and evolution matter a lot, much more than a lot of self-help and blank slate views tend to give, which is why I give primacy to genetic issues. So psychotechnologies and new moral systems are facing up against a very powerful optimizer, genes and evolution and usually the latter wins.
Yep, I think I understood. I thought your comment made sense and was worth saying.
I think my phrasing came across funny over text. Reading it back, it sounds more dismissive than I meant it to be.
I do suspect we disagree about a subtle point. I don’t think our evolved toolkit works against us here. The problem (as I see it) is upstream of that. We’re trying to treat things that last for more than days as “emergencies”, thus inappropriately applying the evolved emergency toolkit in situations it doesn’t work well for.
I mean, if I want to visit a friend who’s half a mile away, I might just walk. If I want to visit a friend who’s across the country, I’m not even tempted to think the answer is to start walking in their direction. This is a case where understanding the full context means that my evolved instincts (in this case for traveling everywhere via walking) help instead of creating a problem: I walk to my computer to buy a plane ticket, then to my car to drive to the airport, etc.
We haven’t worked out the same cultural machinery for long timescale emergencies yet.
And you’re quite right, given this situation our instincts are really terribly set up for handling it.
But that’s what psychotechnologies are for. Things like language and mathematics help to extend our instinctual basis so we can work with things way, way beyond the scope of what our evolved capacities ever had to handle.
We just haven’t developed adequate psychotech here just yet.
(And in this particular case I think current unaligned superintelligences want us to stay scared and confused, so inventing that psychotech is currently an adversarial process — but that’s not a crux for my point here.)
Yeah, that’s a crux for me. Essentially, evolution suffered an extremal Goodhart problem, where taking the naturally evolved mechanisms for emergencies out of it’s EEA distribution leads to weird and bad outcomes.
My point is genetics and evolution matter a lot, much more than a lot of self-help and blank slate views tend to give, which is why I give primacy to genetic issues. So psychotechnologies and new moral systems are facing up against a very powerful optimizer, genes and evolution and usually the latter wins.