Creator of the Intend app (formerly known as Complice) a system for orienting to each day with intentionality in service of long-term careabouts. It features coworking rooms, the longest-running of which is the Less Wrong Study Hall: https://intend.do/room/lesswrong
I’m working full-time on solving human coordination at the mindset & trust level. You can maybe get a sense of my thinking there via this 10min video.
[as our oldest sees it] Sentences are things we build together, rather than a way for different people to share their own perspectives with each other.
I’ve gone through a huge growth arc as an adult in recognizing the extent to which (especially in really good conversations) sentences are things we build together. Not that we don’t have different perspectives, but when conversation is really flowing, it makes way more sense to view it as “our collective mind is thinking” and not “I am transmitting information to you, then getting information back” etc.
(When we’re more at odds with someone, whether adversarial or just conflict with a loved one, it can be more like the transmit mode, and sometimes (tho not always) it seems to work best if we can get into the co-thinking mode again. Though there’s not a hack for that—it’s a deep trust-dancing puzzle!)
The 2nd half of this video is about this collective mind thing: https://youtu.be/G3vcXZPlsDc
Probably be grounded in more than one social group. Even being part of two different high-intensity groups seems like it should reduce the dynamics here a lot.
Worked well for me!
Eric Chisholm likes to phrase this principle as “the secret to cults is to be in at least two of them”.
My guess is that part of what’s going on here is that in certain ways attempting to optimize for coordination is at greater risk for goodhart than other things. To take an example from the post to its limit, the freelancer who invests 100% in selling their services and 0% in being skilled at them or providing them is a fraud. But also the freelancer who invests 100% in skills but 0% in selling is out of business.
So there’s a need for some sort of dynamic balance.
But my guess is that for whatever reasons (documented in Moral Mazes no doubt) certain kinds of organizations put pressure on the managers to go all the way in one direction, rather than finding that balance.
The “sometimes” bit here is key. It’s my impression that people who insist that “people are just like LLMs” are basically telling you that they spend most/all of their time in conversations that are on autopilot, rather than ones where someone actually means or intends something.
Great post. A few typos that weren’t worth commenting to mention (“LMM” instead of “LLM”) but I felt like it was worth noting that
In our ‘casual’ or ‘actually thinking’ mode
probably wants to be “causal”.
I overall like what you’re trying to point at here — you’re raising a real and important concern about what’s happening with the weakening of protection from random angry people in a wide range of places including tenure, due to cultural shifts and changes in media (eg social media).
At the same time, the Rainbowland example is a terrible example for making this point here. Or at least, making it in the way you describe. As jaspax and ChristianKI note, “it’s about accepting people” obfuscates the meaning of the song that was why it got banned, one that many people agree with.
It’s totally plausible to me, given what I’ve seen of people being afraid of children being exposed to trans ideology, that the school administrators themselves banned the song as part of doing their job to create a good learning environment for kids, no cowtowing to angry complainer required. I agree that banning kids wanting to sing the song is not useful and perhaps counterproductive, but if ordinary people getting upset about it seems absurd to you then I suspect you’re out of touch with what a substantial and growing fraction of people think, including many people “on the left” and some trans people: we need to keep trans ideology out of schools in order to keep kids safe & sane. Not because trans people aren’t real or deserve respect, but because kids are getting memed not just into accepting people but into positions like “it’s not cool to be straight” which is non-acceptance and a dumb reason for experimental medical treatments. From this perspective, Rainbowland looks like a song that’s ostensibly about motivation & discipline but is subtextually about how cool it is to be anorexic.
But most people who think this are being quiet because they don’t want to attract the very attacks you’re talking about here, from the small minority of hostile vindictive people! I only recently got enough clarity on the subject, sense of importance, and sense that I’m not alone with my sense of things, that I decided it was important to voice my relatively boring view that’s somehow controversial.
I resonate a lot with this, and it makes me feel slightly less alone.
I’ve started making some videos where I rant about products that fail to achieve the main thing they’re designed to do, and get worse with successive iterations and I’ve found a few appreciative commenters:
Rant successful, it made someone else feel like they weren’t alone
And part of my experience of the importance of ranting about it, even if nobody appreciates it, is that it keeps me from forgetting my homeland, to use your metaphor.
My most recent published blog post had in the 2nd paragraph “I bet there’s nobody reading this who has never used a phrase like...” and this article made me think it would be kind to change it.
Then I searched your facebook posts and you have indeed used the phrase, so in this case at least you aren’t nobody. But I’m still changing the post.
(The phrase is “part of me”, which if any of my friends were to somehow have never once used I wouldn’t have been surprised to discover it you.)
Right, yeah. And that (eventually) requires input of food into the person, but in principle they could be in a physically closed system that already has food & air in it… although that’s sort of beside the point. And isn’t that different from someone meditating for a few hours between meals. The energy is already in the system for now, and it can use that to untangle adaptive entropy.
Huh, reading this I noticed that counterintuitively, alignment requires letting go of the outcome. Like, what defines a non-aligned AI (not an enemy-aligned one but one that doesn’t align to any human value) is its tendency to keep forcing the thing it’s forcing rather than returning to some deeper sense of what matters.
Humans do the same thing when they pursue a goal while having lost touch with what matters, and depending on how it shows up we call it “goodharting” or “lost purposes”. The mere fact that we can identify the existence of goodharting and so on indicates that we have some ability to tell what’s important to us, that’s separate from whatever we’re “optimizing” for. It seems to me like this is the “listening” you’re talking about.
And so unalignment can refer both to a person who isn’t listening to all parts of themselves, and to eg corporations that aren’t listening to people who are trying to raise concerns about the ethics of the company’s behavior.
The question of where an AI would get its true source of “what matters” from seems like a bit of a puzzle. One answer would be to have it “listen to the humans” but that seems to miss the part where the AI needs to itself be able to tell the difference between actually listening to the humans and goodharting on “listen to the humans”.
Maybe instead of “shut up and do the impossible” we need “listen, and do the impossible” 😆
Sort of flips where the agency needs to point.
This “it gets worse if you try to deal with it” isn’t necessarily true in every case. In this way adaptive entropy is actually unlike thermodynamic entropy: it’s possible to reduce adaptive entropy within a closed system.
Actually naming whether this bolded part is true would require defining what “closed” means in the context of an adaptive system—it’s clearly different than a closed system in the physical sense, since all adaptive systems have to be open in order to live.
This is great and I’m looking forward to your book.
Some adjacent ideas:
I feel like I’ve been appreciating the nature of wisdom (as you describe it here) increasingly much over the past couple of years. One thing this has led me to is looking at tautologies, where the sentence in some sense makes no claim but directs your attention to something that’s self-evident once you look. For example, “the people you spend time with will end up being the people you’ve spent time with”.
In 2017, I wrote an article about transcending regret, and a few years later I shared it with a friend and said:
at the time I wrote this, I hadn’t gotten the insight as deep into my bones as I now have, & I still have much further to go
but the insight is still legit
& the articulation is good
& your integration will be yours anyway no matter how well I had it integrated when I wrote it
This feels like sort a dual of the sazen, and also maybe relates to the comment Kaj made about experiences that are hard to point at verbally even once you have experienced them.
Huh—it suddenly struck me that Peter Singer is doing the exact same thing in the drowning child thought experiment, by the way, as Tyler Alterman points out beautifully in Effective altruism in the garden of ends. He takes for granted that the frame of “moral obligation” is relevant to why someone might save the child, then uses our intuitions towards saving the child to suggest that we agree with him about this obligation being present and relevant, then he uses logic to argue that this obligation applies elsewhere too. All of that is totally explicit and rational within that frame, but he chose the frame.
In both cases, everyone agrees about what actually happens (a child dies, or doesn’t; you contribute, or you don’t).
In both cases, everyone agrees because within the frame that has been presented there is no difference! Meanwhile there is a difference in many other useful frames! And this choice of frame is NOT, as far as I can recall, explicit. Rather than recall, let me actually just go check… watching this video, he doesn’t use the phrase “moral obligation”, but asks “[if I walked past,] would I have done something wrong?”. This interactive version offers a forced choice “do you have a moral obligation to rescue the child?”
In both cases, the question assumes the frame, and is not explicit about the arbitrariness of doing so. So yes, he is explicit about setting the zero point, but focusing on that part of the move obscures the larger inexplicit move he’s making beforehand.
Ah this comment from facebook also feels relevant:
Sam Harris’ argument style reminds me very much of the man that trained me, and the example of fire smoke negatively affecting health is a great zero point to contest. Sam has slipped in a zero point of physical health being the only form of health which matters. Or at least the highest. One would have to argue against his zero point, that there are other values which can be measured in terms of health greater than mere physical health associated with fire. Psychological, familial, and social immediately come to mind. Further, in the case of Sam, famed for his epistemological intransigence, one would likely have to argue against his zero point of what constitutes rationality itself in order to further one’s position that physical health is very often a secondary value, as this sort of argument follows more a conversational arrangement of complex interdependent factors, than the straight rigorous logic Sam seemingly prefers
A lot of what’s going on here is primarily frame control—setting the relevant scale on which a particular zero is then made salient. And that is not being done in the nice explicit friendly way.
He’s not casting the sneaky dark-arts version of the spell
Sam Harris here is not casting a sneaky version of Tare Detrimens, but he’s maybe (intentionally or not, benevolently or malevolently) casting a sneaky version of Fenestra Imperium.
Broadly an overall point that makes sense and feels good to me.
Something feels off or at least oversimplified to me in some of the cases, particularly these two lines of thinking:
There’s no substantive disagreement between me and critics-of-my-blocking-policy about the difficulties that this imposes—the way it makes certain conversations tricky or impossible, the way it creates little gaps and blind spots in discussion and consensus.
&
As far as I could tell, both I and the admin team agreed about its absolute size; there were no disagreements about things like e.g. “broken links to previously written essays are a pain and a shame.”
I found myself not actually trusting that there was “no disagreement about” about the nature or size in these cases. Maybe I would if I had more data about each situation, but something about how it’s being written about raises suspicion for me. It’s not per se than I think there was disagreement, but that I think the apparent agreement was on the level of the objective details (broken links etc) but that you didn’t know how each other felt about it or what it meant to each other, and that if you’d more thoroughly seen the world through each others’ eyes, it wouldn’t seem like “zero point” is the relevant frame here.
One attempt to point at that:
It seems to me that without straightforward scales on which to measure things, or even getting clear on exactly what the units are, “setting the zero point” isn’t even a real move that’s available (intentionally or not) and I would expect people discussing in good faith to nonetheless end up with differences as a result of those.
Taking the latter case in particular, it seem likely to me (at least based on what you’ve written) that the LW admins were mostly tracking something like a sense of betrayal of expectations that people would have about LW as an ever-growing web of wisdom, and that feeling of betrayal is their units. And you’re measuring something more on the level of “how much wisdom is on LW?” And from those two scales, two different natural zero points emerge:
in removing the posts, LW goes from zero betrayal of the expectation of posts by default sticking around to more than zero betrayal of the expectation of posts sticking around
in removing the posts, LW goes from more-than-zero wisdom on it from everybody’s posts to less-than-before-but-still-more-than-zero wisdom on it with everybody’s posts minus the Conor Moreton series (and in the meantime there was some more-than-zero temporary wisdom from those posts having gone up at all)
I noticed I ended up flipping the scales here, such that both are just zero-to-more-than-zero, even though one is more-than-zero of an unwanted thing. Not sure if that’s incidental or relevant. Sometimes I’ve found in orienting to situations like this, one finds that there’s only ever presence of something, never absence.
I’m not totally satisfied with this articulation but maybe it’s a starting point for us to pick out whatever structure I’m noticing here.
No particular tips about Hamming Circles proper—I’ve run them a couple times but don’t feel like I grokked how to run them well—but I’ll put out that I’ve had some success with running longer events oriented towards Hamming Problems, shaped more like “here’s 5 hours, broken into 25min pomodoros where you focus on making actual tangible progress towards something that’s stuck, then during 5min breaks check in with a partner about how your focus is going”.
Which on reflection is actually very similar to how the online goal-crafting intensives I’ve been running for years are structured, except with coaches instead of a buddy.
They feel like different-but-related thing to me. I would say that colorblindness can be simply that you haven’t learned to differentiate some aspects of reality. A blindspot is not just something you can’t see but a way in which you’re actively hiding from yourself the fact that you can’t see it. That’s how I use the term “blindspot”, which is perhaps downstream of Val / Michael Smith’s “Metacognitive Blindspots” presentations (at eg the 2014 alumni reunion iirc, I forget where/when else). “Colorblindness” doesn’t cut it for that meaning, so it’s not the metaphor I want when I reach for “blindspot”.
Having said that, it’s a cool metaphor for this different thing, and I can see the temptation to stretch “blindspot” to cover it. Both look kinda similar from the outside if you try to give someone feedback about the thing they’re not seeing. I’d say that if someone just has a colorblindness and no blindspot, they would tend to respond more curiously and you’d be able to make some headway starting to point out the dimension and how things vary along it. If someone has a blindspot, trying to talk with them about the thing they’re not seeing will feel weird. You’ll keep saying things and the conversation will sort of circle around the thing you’re trying to point at, or it may feel hard to even put the thing into words while trying to translate it into the other person’s frame, or hard to even stay in touch with the thing yourself while talking with the other person.
The irony that you mention in the last paragraph reminds me of another LW post that was already on my mind while reading this one: Slack matters more than any outcome. It points at the funny way that systems fight back in predictable-yet-in-practice-unexpected ways, all the way up and all the way down, and is I think an attempt at a more precise expression of the kind of Green wisdom referred to around “harmony with the Way of Things”.