Henrik Karlsson
The first is a point we think a lot about. What is the correlation between what people upvote and what they trust? How does that change when the mechanism changes? And how do you properly signal what it is you trust? And how should that transfer over to other things? Hopefully, the mechanism can be kept simple—but there are ways to tweak it and to introduce more nuance, if that turns out to make it more powerful for users.
On the second point, I’m not sure gaming something like EigenKarma would in most cases be a bad thing. If you want to game the trust graph in such a way that I trust you more—then you have to do things that are trustworthy and valuable, as judged by me or whoever you are trying to game. There is a risk of course that you would try to fool me into trusting you and then exploit me—but I’m not sure EigenKarma significantly increases the risk of that, nor do I have the imagination to figure out what it would mean in practice on the forum here for example.
I like your rigor—I feel too time-contained to be this systematic when I think about how to raise my kids. I would love to know how you would approach that decision—what data you would look at. And if you have kids, or know how you would raise them, I would love to know how you approach it, too. Especially the parts that contradict the patterns I noted in the sample in my essay.
My impression of the annexation is that it is a way to move the mobilized troops to the front without having to internally declare war, or break Russian law (which only allows mobilization to protect Russia, as I understand it).
Hi, my name his Henrik. I’ve been lurking here for a long time, and today finally dared write something myself. I have been looking for a community like this for a long time, and I’m so grateful for being able to listen in to all the conversations happening. Emerging oneself in a better culture can really bring out good things in oneself. The last few months, after hanging out here, it feels like my thoughts are moving in new, orthogonal and fruitful directions. I just want to say my thanks to all the people working to make sure that this bubble can exist.
This post reminds me of Bachtin’s work on dialogue. I keep rereading his Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics—probably the only work of literary criticism that has had a meaningful impact on my life—where he discusses Dostoyevsky’s (implied) ethics of the uniqueness of human “voices”. I especially like the idea that your voice only can come forth truly in an open dialogue; this has been super useful for me personally, and professionally working with autistic children.
A really fascinating expansion of the idea of voices is Internal Family Systems Therapy (IFS), where you approach parts of your own psyche as if they also have unique voices, that can only be accessed through open dialogue. Kaj Sotala has a highly cerebral sequence on that topic.
What is a pedestrian dilettante waffle? It sounds delicious.
There are a bunch of things in the post I would never do. But I doubt highly that most of the things are of a sort that is likely to lead many to be miserable. The two who are the most miserable in the sample are Russell and Woolf who were very constrained by their guardians; Mill also seems to have taken some toll by being pushed too hard. But apart from that? Curious: what do you find most high-risk apart from that?
This is a great point that I had overlooked. I have similar bad experiences now that I think about it, mainly from starting a company with a friend, whom I should have questioned more on technical skills, but didn’t because of our high trust. That was a nightmare.
I need to think a bit more deeply about why relying more on trust has worked so well this time, because as you say, it is not a given. Your bullets are a good starting point for a more nuanced understanding of the comparative costs of markets and trust networks. Thanks!
Thanks for sharing this! That’s a beautiful anecdote. When I worked as a teacher, I would let the 6-year-olds give me questions and we’d investigate them together; we covered some pretty advanced topics: evolutionary theory, the basics of Newtonian mechanics, electricity, the atomic theory etc. The kids and parents loved it but I ended up on collision course with the some of the other teachers.
Also, I’ve taught my five year old a second langauge through immersion—which feels like a free lunch. Just show films in the other language, and speak it at home every other day, then get some friends in the language, and voila, you never have to struggle with that. She now does this on her own, trying to learn English this way by restructuring her environment.
You can use EigenKarma in several ways. If it is important to make clear what a specific community pays attention to, when thing to do is this:
Have the feed of a forum be what the founder (or moderators) of the forum sees from the point of view of their trust graph.
This way the moderators get control over who is considered core to the community, and what are the sort of bounderies of the community.
In this set up the public karma is how valuable a member is to the community as judged by the core members of the community and the people they trust weighted by degree of trust
This gives a more fluid way of assigning priviliges and roles within the forum, and reduces the risk that a sudden influx will rapidly alter the culture of the forum. We run a sister version of the system that works like this in at least one Discord.
There are probably better sources on dialogue than Bachtin, but that’s the one that got me. I’ve also read a few books by a Finnish psychiatrist that, Jakko Seikkula, that has developed a very dialogue centered—and Dostoevsky inspired—treatment for schizophrenia. But I think you can only find that in Swedish or Finnish.
On IFS, I’d probably recommend some book by Barry Schwartz, who started that school. Sotala’s post is more focused on explaining why the model—which is a bit nuts and hand-wavy—actually makes sense. But for actually getting stuff done and working on your psyche, the more hand-wavy approach is better.
Trust often not being transitive is an important point that I had overlooked. Thanks a lot for that.
And I am fascinated with the pros and cons of N:N networks and 1:N networks at the moment. My model for thinking about them have been networks with a common border vs boundryless networks. (I say boundryless networks because 1:N networks will overlap with other 1:N networks creating a sort of diffuse bounryless whole). An upside of N:N is coordination. You can get a lot more done by forging a more definite community—say union, that negotiates on your behalf. But there is a lot of administrative overhead, and a higher risk that the network gets coopted by someone with a hunger for power. 1:N networks are more flexible, and it is easier to shed sociopaths even when large parts of N are fooled by them. And as long as trust is slightly transitive they might scale better, thanks to not having to deal with increasing coordination problems and consensus processes etc.
And yes, my description of companies is highly idealized (sort of based on Lazslo Bock’s descriptions of how they do recruiting at Google). I don’t think most companies fit the description. But compared to individuals, they at least has a mental framework for deliberately thinking about who to grant trust.
Good points.
Can I double click on: “I don’t think it’s game-theoretically sound”?
And I don’t know enough about the Islamic merchants to answer that question. I guess the notes where countersigned along the way and so on. But true, it does sound a bit outlandish to modern ears (which is why I thought it’d make a cute opening).
So here’s my attempt at the find-more-hippies-question: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dktESGGtYJwwdTjeo/scaling-networks-of-trust-1
Thanks for your non-market essay feedback!
I don’t know exactly why shipping companies are so expensive in Scandinavia. Part of it is of course high tax and insurance cost, but that can’t explain the entire difference in cost compared to doing it your self. Maybe shipping is unattractive as a job for various reasons, so we have an undersupply of shipping companies?
And you’re definitly right that my post is cherry picking galore. I should have underlied that it was more of a hunch! I don’t have data to answer the question whether people in general could gain by moving more of their consumption of the market (or vice versa: gain by moving things they now do with in their network unto the market). What I do have is my single data point, and I’ve been finding a lot of ways to reduce how much I need to labor to be able to satisfy my needs by growing my network at the expense of my salaried career. (After having the realisation I share in the post, I’ve also expanded my network to supply me with food, and I’ve set up so I can loan a car instead of buying it.)
So the point I’m trying to make is a slightly different one than “trust is massively more effective than markets”. Its that one can have a higher marginal return on ones time if one consciously explore if what one wants to consume can best be served by the market or by one’s network. For me, I’ve been able to get higher returns by investing more in growing my network. (Though there are some things that I now do outside of markets that might be better served by the market!) But again, that’s one data point, and one has to go case by case. My intuition though is that since that more people could gain, given that for example the shipping companies operate though one can easily beat them by a wide margin by having (cultivating) good friends. And I thought that could be useful to share.
Good points! I agree with everything, and the way you puts it is clearer.
You’re definietly right that markets do not reduce trust. That was a bad turn of phrase: what I tried to say, and what I think you are saying, is that markets enables transactions with lower levels of personal trust.
And it is very true that markets are great enablers when they allow you to do things not possiblie within your network. Expanding my network to include someone with a truck might (or might not) be an efficient investment for me, for example. I don’t think it would be rational to exit the market. But it is important to remember that there is another direction one can look in, and that sometimes investing in growing your network is more efficient than raising your salary.
Re: Europe. This fits with my understanding of the wealth elite in Sweden. Sweden, surprisingly, has a very high wealth concentration, with a few dynasties controlling a large part of the banking and industry sector. However, most wildly successful individual companies—HM, IKEA, Ericsson, etc—where started by ppl in middle or lower classes. HM founders father owned a store in a small Swedish town. IKEA and Ericsson both grew up poor. Ericsson worked building railways starting age 12.
That is not the same setup. That purposal has a global karma score, ours is personal. The system we evolved EigenKarma from worked like that, and EigenKarma can be used like that if you want to. I don’t see why decoupling the scores on your posts from your karma is a particularly big problem. I’m not particularly interested in the sum of upvotes: it is whatever information can be wrangled out of that which is interesting.
I agree. It doesn’t really matter the medium you use to curate your milieu. Some used letters. Most did in person. Today the internet will be a crucial tool, especially since it greatly scales the avaliability of good milieus.
Where I live, for example, there are few interesting people around. But I have been able to cultivate a strong network online, and I can give my children access to that—much like how Woolf’s father would invite his friends to dinner and talk with and in front of the kids.
Also, since a few people somewhere else in the comments have pointed out that some of the tricks they did seem stupid, for example talking latin—I must say that I find that to be an obviously good idea. Today, it would be English, rather than latin, but making sure that your kids are fluent in the lingua franca greatly increases the number of interesting people they can observe and interact with.
This post was one of several nudges that made me change my note-taking system. Definitely the best thing that has happened me since, I don’t know, having my daughter. So thanks a ton.
I do it digitally, with Obsidian, so I have to be principled to keep the notes atomic. What I like about having the notes digitally is that I can use them like functions. I make their titles statements, instead of numbers, and so I can “call” them from other notes if I want to use a certain statement in a syllogism for example.
The really cool thing happens when I read something that makes me go update a note: sometimes that makes me change the title because I refined or changed my understanding, and then that is cascaded out into all the notes that reference it. That helps me with the mental mountains problem: notes in other domains get updated, even if I don’t realize that the new piece of information is relevant there when I make the update. Later, when I return to those notes, I can see that the syllogism no longer adds up to what I thought before and I can update there, instead of keep my old belief unaffected by the changes in other parts of my network, they way I did before changing note-taking system.
There is also something very generative about refactoring notes that grow to big, or merging notes from different parts of the network if they repeat similar thoughts. Often that helps me generalize and go more abstract so my notes can function in several different networks. That has improved my thinking. And I don’t think I could do that with paper notes.
I’m only 4 months in, so it will be interesting to see how it scales, and if my old notes will go stale the way you experienced.