Check out “The Culture Map” by Erin Meyer. It’s a book about how to work with people from different cultures—different expectations of bosses, different ways to give positive and negative feedback, different balance of work and personal relationships, etc.
cousin_it
Karma: 26,584 (LW), 36 (AF)
Thanks, great post! And good comments too. Not sure how I missed it at the time.
There’s a common view that a researcher’s output should look like a bunch of results: “A, B, C therefore X, Y, Z”. But we also feel, subconsciously and correctly, that such output has an air of finality and won’t attract many comments. Look at musical subreddits for example—people posting their music get few comments, people asking for help get more. So when I post a finished result on LW and get few comments, the problem is on me. There must be a better way to write posts, less focused on answering questions and more on making questions as interesting as possible. But that’s easier said than done—I don’t think I have that skill.
Yeah. Usually the centipede game is used to teach this lesson, but your game is also very nice :-)
Can you give some examples of where human cooperation is mainly being stopped by difficulty with bargaining?
Two kids fighting over a toy; a married couple arguing about who should do the dishes; war.
But now I think I can answer my own question. War only happens if two agents don’t have common knowledge about who would win (otherwise they’d agree to skip the costs of war). So if AIs are better than humans at establishing that kind of common knowledge, that makes bargaining failure less likely.
A big obstacle to human cooperation is bargaining: deciding how to split the benefit from cooperation. If it didn’t exist, I think humans would cooperate more. But the same obstacle also applies to AIs. Sure, there’s a general argument that AIs will outperform humans at all tasks and bargaining too, but I’d like to understand it more specifically. Do you have any mechanisms in mind that would make bargaining easier for AIs?
I didn’t know “street epistemology” was a thing, but over the years I’ve run into a few people who thought asking incisive questions was a good way to make conversation with me. I usually start ignoring them after the second or third question, because to me that’s just not what conversation is about! If someone consistently fails to tell me anything new or surprising (even when directly prompted), what’s the point of talking? Thankfully, LW has many people who, upon joining a conversation, openly state their beliefs and give interesting arguments for them instead of trying to snipe others. Scott is maybe the brightest example, I try to imitate him whenever I can.
Yeah, fair enough. I’m just thinking that individualism has already done quite a lot in that direction. We’re much more isolated than people in past societies: many of us barely know our neighbors, can go months without talking to parents, and have few friends outside of work. So if we’re discussing further individualist proposals, like basic income, maybe it’s worth spending some time thinking about the consequences to the social fabric (never thought I’d use that phrase...)
This mathoverflow question seems to have many nice answers.
Yeah, there are tons of associative functions. For example, f(x,y)=(x^k+y^k)^(1/k) is associative for any k, but linear only for k=1.
Yeah, that’d probably work.
Ah I see, I misread your comment. Yeah, if my plan were implemented, people wouldn’t be able to make a living on youtube. But that seems like a small effect, because very few people make a living on youtube.
Is the idea here that the internet becomes a place only for people who are intrinsically motivated to do whatever they’re doing?
No, why? I think it’s fine if people waste time online. The harm from that is self-limiting, as long as there are no companies trying to escalate, manipulate & profit from that harm.
Here’s a radical solution: we could try outlawing or taxing away most kinds of profit-making on the internet, except for online stores (with clear criteria on what counts as a store). That could deal with most “attention economy” websites that profit from making users spend more time online, compete with each other on popularity, etc.
It seems to me that removing privacy would mostly help religions, political movements and other movements that feed on conformity of their members. That doesn’t seem like a small thing—I’m not sure what benefit could counterbalance that.
In our simplest modes of information, people are better off when they have more information
In what simple model of information are people never worse off when others have more information about them?
This makes me curious—have you found that terminological debates often lead to interesting ideas? Can you give an example?
Ah, I see. Your post drew a distinction between “repairing buildings” vs “creating new roads, machines and buildings”, but you meant something more subtle—do we build the new building to replace the old one, or because we need two buildings? That makes sense and I see that my comment was a bit off base.
In most macroeconomic models, new capital accumulates until it reaches an equilibrium level, where all investment goes toward repairing/replacing depreciated capital—resurfacing roads, replacing machines, repairing buildings rather than creating new roads, machines and buildings.
Must be something wrong with the models then, because that doesn’t sound like any place I’ve ever been. People don’t prioritize maintenance above any and all new stuff; it’s human nature to invest in new stuff even while old stuff crumbles.
The same is true for software. I wish there was a natural law limiting software bloat, but look around—do you think there’s such a law? Can you name any large project that reached equilibrium and stopped growing? I can’t. Sure, as the project grows it gets harder to maintain at the same quality, but people don’t let that stop them! They just relax the standard of quality, let older and less important features go unmaintained, and keep piling on new features anyway.
Yeah, I think that works. Nice!