Lol, thanks. :)
David Althaus
Karma: 1,517
Thanks for this post, I thought this was useful.
I needed a writing buddy to pick up the momentum to actually write it
I’d be interested in knowing more how this worked in practice (no worries if you don’t feel like elaborating/don’t have the time!).
I think mostly I expect us to continue to overestimate the sanity and integrity of most of the world, then get fucked over like we got fucked over by OpenAI or FTX. I think there are ways to relating to the rest of the world that would be much better, but a naive update in the direction of “just trust other people more” would likely make things worse.
[...]
Again, I think the question you are raising is crucial, and I have giant warning flags about a bunch of the things that are going on (the foremost one is that it sure really is a time to reflect on your relation to the world when a very prominent member of your community just stole 8 billion dollars of innocent people’s money and committed the largest fraud since Enron), [...]I very much agree with the sentiment of the second paragraph.
Regarding the first paragraph, my own take is that (many) EAs and rationalists might be wise to trust themselves and their allies less.[1]
The main update of the FTX fiasco (and other events I’ll describe later) I’d make is that perhaps many/most EAs and rationalists aren’t very good at character judgment. They probably trust other EAs and rationalists too readily because they are part of the same tribe and automatically assume that agreeing with noble ideas in the abstract translates to noble behavior in practice.
(To clarify, you personally seem to be good at character judgment, so this message is not directed at you. (I base that mostly on your comments I read about the SBF situation, big kudos for that, btw!)
It seems like a non-trivial fraction of people that joined the EA and rationalist community very early turned out to be of questionable character, and this wasn’t noticed for years by large parts of the community. I have in mind people like Anissimov, Helm, Dill, SBF, Geoff Anders, arguably Vassar—these are just the known ones. Most of them were not just part of the movement, they were allowed to occupy highly influential positions. I don’t know what the base rate for such people is in other movements—it’s plausibly even higher—but as a whole our movements don’t seem to be fantastic at spotting sketchy people quickly. (FWIW, my personal experiences with a sketchy, early EA (not on the above list) inspired this post.)
My own takeaway is that perhaps EAs and rationalists aren’t that much better in terms of integrity than the outside world and—given that we probably have to coordinate with some people to get anything done—I’m now more willing to coordinate with “outsiders” than I was, say, eight years ago.
- ^
Though I would be hesitant to spread this message; the kinds of people who should trust themselves and their character judgment less are more likely the ones who will not take this message to heart, and vice versa.
- ^
This is mentioned in the introduction.
I’m biased, of course, but it seems fine to write a post like this. (Similarly, it’s fine for CFAR staff members to write a post about CFAR techniques. In fact, I prefer if precisely these people write such posts because they have the relevant expertise.)
Would you like us to add a more prominent disclaimer somewhere? (We worried that this might look like advertising.)
A quick look through https://www.goodtherapy.org/learn-about-therapy/types/compassion-focused-therapy gives an impression of yet another mix of CBT, DBT and ACT, nothing revolutionary or especially new, though maybe I missed something.
In my experience, ~nothing in this area is downright revolutionary. Most therapies are heavily influenced by previous concepts and techniques. (Personally, I’d still say that CFT brings something new to the table.)
I guess what matters if it works for you or not.Is this assertion borne out by twin studies? Or is believing it a test for CFT suitability only?
To some extent. Most human traits have a genetic component, including (Big-Five) personality traits, depressive tendencies, anxiety disorders, conduct disorders, personality disorders, and so on. (e.g., Polderman et al., 2015). This is also true for (self-)destructive tendencies like malevolent personality traits (citing my own summary of some studies here because I’m lazy, sorry).
(Also agree with Kaj’s warning about misinterpreting heritability.)
More generally speaking, I’d say this belief is borne out of understanding evolutionary psychology/history. Basically, all of our motivations and fears have an evolutionary basis. We fear death, because the ancestors who didn’t were eaten by lions. We fear being ostracized and care about being respected because in the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness our survival and reproductive success was dependent on our social status. Therefore, it’s to be expected that most humans, at some point or another, worry about death or health problems or feel emotions like jealousy or envy. They don’t have to be rooted in some trauma or early life experience—though they are usually exacerbated by them. In most cases, it’s not realistic to eliminate such emotions entirely. This doesn’t mean that one is an “abnormal” or “defective” person that experienced irreversible harm inflicted by another human sometime in one’s development. (Just to be clear, as mentioned in the main text, no one believes that life experiences don’t matter. Of course, they matter a great deal!)
But yeah, if you are skeptical of the above, it’s a good reason to not seek a CFT therapist.
From studying and using all of the above my conclusion is that IFS offers the most tractable approach to this issue of competing ‘parts’. And in many ways the most powerful.
In our experience, different people respond to different therapies. I know several people for whom, say, CFT worked better than IFS. Glad to hear that IFS worked for you!
When you read about modern therapies, they all borrow from one another in a way that did not occur say 50 years ago where there were very entrenched schools of thought.
Yes, that’s definitely the case. My sense is that many people overestimate how revolutionary various therapies are because their founders downplay how many concepts and techniques they took from other modalities. (Though this can be advantageous because the “hype” increases motivation and probably fuels various self-fulfilling prophecies.)
Many therapy schools work with inner multiplicity (not just IFS)
For what it’s worth, I read/skimmed all of the listed IDA explanations and found this post to be the best explanation of IDA and Debate (and how they relate to each other). So thanks a lot for writing this!
Thanks a lot for this post (and the whole sequence), Kaj! I found it very helpful already.
Below a question I first wanted to ask you via PM but others might also benefit from an elaboration on this.
You describe the second step of the erasure sequence as follows (emphasis mine):
>Activating, at the same time, the contradictory belief and having the experience of simultaneously believing in two different things which cannot both be true.
When I try this myself, I feel like I cannot actually experience two things simultaneously. There seems to be at least half a second or so between trying to hold the target schema in consciousness and focusing my attention on disconfirming knowledge or experiences.
(Generally, I’d guess it’s not actually possible to hold two distinct things in consciousness simultaneously, at least that’s what I heard various meditation teachers (and perhaps also neuroscientists) claim; you might have even mentioned this in this sequence yourself, if I remember correctly. Relatedly, I heard the claim that multitasking actually involves rapid cycling of one’s attention between various tasks, even though it feels from the inside like one is doing several things simultaneously.)
So should I try to minimize the duration between holding the target schema and disconfirming knowledge in consciousness (potentially aiming to literally feel as though I experience both things at once) or is it enough to just keep cycling back and forth between the two every few seconds? (If yes, what about, say, 30 seconds?)
One issue I suspect I have is that there is a tradeoff between how vividly I can experience the target schema and how rapidly I’m cycling back to the disconfirming knowledge.
Or maybe I’m doing something wrong here? Admittedly, I haven’t tried this for more than a minute or so before immediately proceeding to spending 5 minutes on formulating this question. :)
The post Reducing long-term risks from malevolent actors is somewhat related and might be of interest to you.
Incentivizing forecasting via social media
Cool post! Daniel Kokotajlo and I have been exploring somewhat similar ideas.
In a nutshell, our idea was that a major social media company (such as Twitter) could develop a feature that incentivizes forecasting in two ways. First, the feature would automatically suggest questions of interest to the user, e.g., questions thematically related to the user’s current tweet or currently trending issues. Second, users who make more accurate forecasts than the community will be rewarded with increased visibility.
Our idea is different in two major ways:
I.
First, you suggest to directly bet on Tweets whereas as we envisioned that people would bet/forecast on questions that are related to Tweets.
This seems to have some advantages: There would only be one question related to many thousands of Tweets. Rather than resolving thousands of Tweets, one would only have to resolve one question. Most Tweets are also very imprecise. In contrast, these questions (and their resolution criteria) could be formulated very precisely (partly because one could spend much more time refining them because they are much fewer in number). The drawback is that this might feel less “direct” and “fun” in some ways.
II.
Second, contrary to your idea, we had in mind that the questions would be resolved by employees and not voted on by the public. Our worry is that the public voting would dissolve in easily manipulated popularity contest that might also lead to increased polarization and/or distrust of the whole platform. But it is true that users might not trust employees of Twitter—potentially for good reason!
Maybe one could combine these two ideas. Maybe the resolution of questions could be done by a committee or court that consists of employees and members of the public (and maybe other people that enjoy a high level of trust such as maybe popular judges or scientists?). Members of this committee could even undergo a selection and training process, maybe somewhat similar to the selection and training process of US juries which seem to be widely trusted to make reasonable decisions.
Regarding how melatonin might cause more vivid dreams. I found the theory put forward here quite plausible:
There are user reports that melatonin causes vivid dreams. Actually, all sleep aids appear to some users to produce more vivid dreams.
What is most likely happening is that the drug modifies the sleep cycle so the person emerges from REM sleep (when dreams are most vivid) to waking quickly – more quickly that when no drug is used. The user subjectively reports the drug as producing vivid dreams.
Great that you’re thinking about this issue! A few sketchy thoughts below:
I) As you say, autistic people seem to be more resilient with regards to tribalism. And autistic tendencies and following rationality communities arguably correlates as well. So intuitively, it seems that something like higher rationality and awareness of biases could be useful for reducing tribalism. Or is there another way of making people “more autistic”?
Given this and other observations (e.g., autistic people seem to have lower mental health, on average), it seems a bit hasty to focus on increasing general mental health as the most effective intervention for reducing tribalism.
II) Given our high uncertainty of what causes tribalism and how to most effectively reduce it, it seems that more research in this area could be one of the most effective cause areas.
I see at least two avenues for such research:
A) More “historical” and correlational research. First, we might want to operationalize ‘tribalism’ or identify some proxies for it (any ideas?). Then we could do some historical studies and find potential correlates. It would be interesting to study to what extent increasing economic inequality, the advent of social media, and other forces have historically correlated with the extent of tribalism.
B) Potentially more promising would be experimental psychological research aimed to identify causal factors and mediators of tribalism. For example, one could present subjects with various interventions and then see which intervention reduce (or increase!) tribalism. Potential interventions include i) changing people’s mood (e.g., presenting them with happy videos), ii) increasing the engagement of controlled cognitive processes (system 2) (e.g. by priming them with the CRT), iii) or decreases the engagement of such processes (e.g. via cognitive load), iv) using de-biasing techniques, v) decreasing or increasing their sense of general security (by e.g. presenting them with threatening or scary images or scenarios). There are many more possible interventions.
C) Another method would be correlational psychological research. Roughly, one could give subjects a variety of personality tests and other psychological scales (e.g. Big Five, CRT, etc.) and examine what correlates with tribalistic tendencies.
D) Another idea would be to develop some sort of “tribalism scale” which could lay the groundwork for further psychological research.
Of course, first one should do a more thorough literature review on this topic. It seems likely that there already exists some good work in this area.
--------
Even more sketchy thoughts:
III) Could it be that some forms of higher mental health actually increase tribalism? Tribalism also goes along with a feeling of belonging to a “good” group/tribe that fights against the bad tribe. Although at times frustrating this might contribute to a sense of certainty and “having a mission or purpose”. Personally, I feel quite depressed and frustrated by not being able to wholeheartedly identify with any major political force because they currently all seem pretty irrational in many areas. Of course, higher mental health will probably reduce your need to belong to a group and thus might still reduce tribalism.
IV) Studies (there was another one which I can’t find at the moment) seem to indicate that social media posts (e.g. on Twitter or Facebook) involving anger or outrage spread more easily than posts involving all other emotions like sadness, joy, etc. So maybe altering the architecture of Facebook or twitter would be particularly effective (e.g. tweaking the news feed algorithm such that posts with a lot of anger reactions get less traction). Of course, this is pretty unlikely to be implemented. It also has disadvantages in the case of justified outrage. Maybe encouraging people to create new social networking sites that somehow alleviate those problems would be useful but that seems pretty far-fetched.
Can one use the service reflect also if one is not located in the Bay Area? Or do you happen to know of similar services for outside the Bay Area or US? Thanks a lot in advance.
The open beta will end with a vote of users with over a thousand karma on whether we should switch the lesswrong.com URL to point to the new code and database
How will you alert these users? (I’m asking because I have over 1000 karma but I don’t know where I should vote.)
One of the more crucial points, I think, is that positive utility is – for most humans – complex and its creation is conjunctive. Disutility, in contrast, is disjunctive. Consequently, the probability of creating the former is smaller than the latter – all else being equal (of course, all else is not equal).
In other words, the scenarios leading towards the creation of (large amounts of) positive human value are conjunctive: to create a highly positive future, we have to eliminate (or at least substantially reduce) physical pain and boredom and injustice and loneliness and inequality (at least certain forms of it) and death, etc. etc. etc. (You might argue that getting “FAI” and “CEV” right would accomplish all those things at once (true) but getting FAI and CEV right is, of course, a highly conjunctive task in itself.)
In contrast, disutility is much more easily created and essentially disjunctive. Many roads lead towards dystopia: sadistic programmers or failing AI safety wholesale (or “only” value-loading or extrapolating, or stable self-modification), or some totalitarian regime takes over, etc. etc.
It’s also not a coincidence that even the most untalented writer with the most limited imagination can conjure up a convincing dystopian society. Envisioning a true utopia in concrete detail, on the other hand, is nigh impossible for most human minds.
Footnote 10 of the above mentioned s-risk-static makes a related point (emphasis mine):
“[...] human intuitions about what is valuable are often complex and fragile (Yudkowsky, 2011), taking up only a small area in the space of all possible values. In other words, the number of possible configurations of matter constituting anything we would value highly (under reflection) is arguably smaller than the number of possible configurations that constitute some sort of strong suffering or disvalue, making the incidental creation of the latter ceteris paribus more likely.”
Consequently, UFAIs such as paperclippers are more likely to create large amounts of disutility than utility (factoring out acausal considerations) incidentally (e.g. because creating simulations is instrumentally useful for them).
Generally, I like how you put it in your comment here:
In terms of utility, the landscape of possible human-built superintelligences might look like a big flat plain (paperclippers and other things that kill everyone without fuss), with a tall sharp peak (FAI) surrounded by a pit that’s astronomically deeper (many almost-FAIs and other designs that sound natural to humans). The pit needs to be compared to the peak, not the plain. If the pit is more likely, I’d rather have the plain.
Yeah. In a nutshell, supporting generic x-risk-reduction (which also reduces extinction risks) is in one’s best interest, if and only if one’s own normative trade-ratio of suffering vs. happiness is less suffering-focused than one’s estimate of the ratio of expected future happiness to suffering (feel free to replace “happiness” with utility and “suffering” with disutility). If one is more pessimistic about the future or if one needs large amounts of happiness to trade-off small amounts of suffering, one should rather focus on s-risk-reduction instead. Of course, this simplistic analysis leaves out issues like cooperation with others, neglectedness, tractability, moral uncertainty, acausal considerations, etc.
Do you think that makes sense?
The article that introduced the term “s-risk” was shared on LessWrong in October 2016. The content of the article and the talk seem similar.
Did you simply not come across it or did the article just (catastrophically) fail to explain the concept of s-risks and its relevance?
Here is another question that would be very interesting, IMO:
“For what value of X would you be indifferent about the choice between A) creating a utopia that lasts for one-hundred years and whose X inhabitants are all extremely happy, cultured, intelligent, fair, just, benevolent, etc. and lead rich, meaningful lives, and B) preventing one average human from being horribly tortured for one month?”
Great post, thanks for writing!
Most of this matches my experience pretty well. I think I had my best ideas during phases (others seem to agree) when I was unusually low on guilt- and obligation-driven EA/impact-focused motivation and was just playfully exploring ideas for fun and out of curiosity.
One problem with letting your research/ideas be guided by impact-focused thinking is that you basically train your mind to immediately ask yourself after entertaining a certain idea for a few seconds “well, is that actually impactful?”. And basically all of the time, the answer is “well, probably not”. This makes you disinclined to further explore the neighboring idea space.
However, even really useful ideas / research angles start out being somewhat unpromising and full of hurdles and problems and need a lot of refinement. If you allow yourself to just explore idea space for fun, you might overcome these problems and stumble on something truly promising. But if you had been in an “obsessing about maximizing impact” mindset you would have given up too soon because, in this mindset, spending hours or even days without having any impact feels too terrible to keep going.