Being tied to your childhood narrative of what a good upper-middle-class person does is not necessary for making intellectual progress, making money, or contributing to the world.
Seems right to me, as I was never tied to such a narrative in the first place.
Most people (esp. affluent ones) are way too afraid of risking their social position through social disapproval. You can succeed where others fail just by being braver even if you’re not any smarter.
What kind of risks is he talking about here? Also does he mean that people value their social positions too much, or that they’re not taking enough risks even given their current values?
Fiddly puttering with something that fascinates you is the source of most genuine productivity. (Anything from hardware tinkering, to messing about with cost spreadsheets until you find an efficiency, to writing poetry until it “comes out right”.) Sometimes the best work of this kind doesn’t look grandiose or prestigious at the time you’re doing it.
Hmm, I use to spend quite a bit of time fiddling with assembly language implementations of encryption code to try to squeeze out a few more percent of speed. Pretty sure that is not as productive as more “grandiose” or “prestigious” activities like thinking about philosophy or AI safety, at least for me… I think overall I’m more afraid that someone who could be doing productive “grandiose” work chooses not to in favor of “fiddly puttering”, than the reverse.
The mind and the body are connected. Really. Your mind affects your body and your body affects your mind. The better kinds of yoga, meditation, massage, acupuncture, etc, actually do real things to the body and mind.
That seems almost certain to be true, but I don’t see evidence that there a big enough effect for me to bother spending the time to investigate further. (I seem to be doing fine without doing any of these things and I’m not sure who is deriving large benefits from them.) Do you want to try to change my mind about this?
Science had higher efficiency in the past (late 19th-to-mid-20th centuries).
Couldn’t this just be that we’ve picked most of the low-hanging fruit, plus the fact that picking the higher fruits require more coordination among larger groups of humans and that is very costly? Or am I just agreeing with Michael here?
Examples of potentially valuable medical innovation that never see wide application are abundant.
This seems quite plausible to me, as I used to lament that a lot of innovations in cryptography never got deployed.
A major problem in the world is a ‘hope deficit’ or ‘trust deficit’; otherwise feasible good projects are left undone because people are so mistrustful that it doesn’t occur to them that they might not be scams.
“Doesn’t occur to them” seems too strong but I think I know what you mean. Can you give some examples of what these projects are?
A good deal of human behavior is explained by evolutionary game theory; coalitional strategies, not just individual strategies.
Agreed, and I think this is a big problem as far as advancing human rationality because we currently have a very poor theoretical understanding of coalitional strategies.
Evil exists; in less freighted, more game-theoretic terms, there exist strategies which rapidly expand, wipe out other strategies, and then wipe themselves out. Not all conflicts are merely misunderstandings.
This seems plausible but what are some examples of such “evil”? What happened to Enron, perhaps?
How intersubjectivity works; “objective” reality refers to the conserved patterns or relationships between different perspectives.
It would make more sense to me to say that objective reality refers to whatever explains the conserved patterns or relationships between different perspectives, rather than the patterns/relationships themselves. I’m not sure if I’m just missing the point here.
People who have coherent philosophies—even opposing ones—have more in common in the way they think, and are more likely to get meaningful stuff done together, than they can with “moderates” who take unprincipled but middle-of-the-road positions. Two “bullet-swallowers” can disagree on some things and agree on others; a “bullet-dodger” and a “bullet-swallower” will not even be able to disagree, they’ll just not be saying commensurate things.
I think I prefer to hold a probability distribution over coherent philosophies, plus a lot of weight on “something we’ll figure out in the future”.
Also a meta question: Why haven’t these been written up or discussed online more? In any case, please don’t feel obligated to answer my comments/questions in this thread. You (or others who are familiar with these ideas) can just keep them in mind for when you do want to discuss them online.
I think in part these could be “lessons relevant to Sarah”, a sort of a philosophical therapy that can’t be completely taken out of context. Which is why some of these might seem of low relevance or obvious.
>> Fiddly puttering with something that fascinates you is the source of most genuine productivity. (Anything from hardware tinkering, to messing about with cost spreadsheets until you find an efficiency, to writing poetry until it “comes out right”.) Sometimes the best work of this kind doesn’t look grandiose or prestigious at the time you’re doing it.
Hmm, I use to spend quite a bit of time fiddling with assembly language implementations of encryption code to try to squeeze out a few more percent of speed. Pretty sure that is not as productive as more “grandiose” or “prestigious” activities like thinking about philosophy or AI safety, at least for me… I think overall I’m more afraid that someone who could be doing productive “grandiose” work chooses not to in favor of “fiddly puttering”, than the reverse.
suggests really valuable contributions are more bottlenecked on obsession rather than being good at directing attention in a “valuable” direction
For example, for the very ambitious, the bus ticket theory suggests that the way to do great work is to relax a little. Instead of gritting your teeth and diligently pursuing what all your peers agree is the most promising line of research, maybe you should try doing something just for fun. And if you’re stuck, that may be the vector along which to break out.
This seems plausible but what are some examples of such “evil”? What happened to Enron, perhaps?
According to the official narrative, the Enron scandal is mostly about people engaging in actions that benefit themselves. I don’t know whether that’s true as I don’t have much insight into it. If it’s true that’s not what is meant.
It’s not about actions that are actually self benefitial.
Let’s say I’m at a lunch with a friend. I draw benefit most benefit from my lunch when I have a conversation as intellectual equals. At the same time there’s sometimes an impulse to say something to put my friend down and to demostrate that I’m higher then him in the social pecking order. If I follow that instinct and say something to put my friend down, I’m engaging in evil in the sense Vassar talks about.
The instinct has some value in a tribal context where it’s important to fight about the social pecking order but I’m drawing no value from it in the lunch with my friend.
I’m a person who has some self awareness and I try not to go down such roads when those evolutionary instincts come up. On the other hand you have people in middle management of immoral mazes who spent a lot of their time following such instincts and being evil.
Thanks! Here are my reactions/questions:
Seems right to me, as I was never tied to such a narrative in the first place.
What kind of risks is he talking about here? Also does he mean that people value their social positions too much, or that they’re not taking enough risks even given their current values?
Hmm, I use to spend quite a bit of time fiddling with assembly language implementations of encryption code to try to squeeze out a few more percent of speed. Pretty sure that is not as productive as more “grandiose” or “prestigious” activities like thinking about philosophy or AI safety, at least for me… I think overall I’m more afraid that someone who could be doing productive “grandiose” work chooses not to in favor of “fiddly puttering”, than the reverse.
That seems almost certain to be true, but I don’t see evidence that there a big enough effect for me to bother spending the time to investigate further. (I seem to be doing fine without doing any of these things and I’m not sure who is deriving large benefits from them.) Do you want to try to change my mind about this?
Couldn’t this just be that we’ve picked most of the low-hanging fruit, plus the fact that picking the higher fruits require more coordination among larger groups of humans and that is very costly? Or am I just agreeing with Michael here?
This seems quite plausible to me, as I used to lament that a lot of innovations in cryptography never got deployed.
“Doesn’t occur to them” seems too strong but I think I know what you mean. Can you give some examples of what these projects are?
Agreed, and I think this is a big problem as far as advancing human rationality because we currently have a very poor theoretical understanding of coalitional strategies.
This seems plausible but what are some examples of such “evil”? What happened to Enron, perhaps?
It would make more sense to me to say that objective reality refers to whatever explains the conserved patterns or relationships between different perspectives, rather than the patterns/relationships themselves. I’m not sure if I’m just missing the point here.
I think I prefer to hold a probability distribution over coherent philosophies, plus a lot of weight on “something we’ll figure out in the future”.
Also a meta question: Why haven’t these been written up or discussed online more? In any case, please don’t feel obligated to answer my comments/questions in this thread. You (or others who are familiar with these ideas) can just keep them in mind for when you do want to discuss them online.
I think in part these could be “lessons relevant to Sarah”, a sort of a philosophical therapy that can’t be completely taken out of context. Which is why some of these might seem of low relevance or obvious.
I suspect this might be a subtler point?
http://paulgraham.com/genius.html
suggests really valuable contributions are more bottlenecked on obsession rather than being good at directing attention in a “valuable” direction
According to the official narrative, the Enron scandal is mostly about people engaging in actions that benefit themselves. I don’t know whether that’s true as I don’t have much insight into it. If it’s true that’s not what is meant.
It’s not about actions that are actually self benefitial.
Let’s say I’m at a lunch with a friend. I draw benefit most benefit from my lunch when I have a conversation as intellectual equals. At the same time there’s sometimes an impulse to say something to put my friend down and to demostrate that I’m higher then him in the social pecking order. If I follow that instinct and say something to put my friend down, I’m engaging in evil in the sense Vassar talks about.
The instinct has some value in a tribal context where it’s important to fight about the social pecking order but I’m drawing no value from it in the lunch with my friend.
I’m a person who has some self awareness and I try not to go down such roads when those evolutionary instincts come up. On the other hand you have people in middle management of immoral mazes who spent a lot of their time following such instincts and being evil.