PatrickDFarley
I like this, thanks for posting. I’ve noticed there’s a contrarian thrill in declaring, “Actually there’s no evidence for that” / “Actually that doesn’t count as evidence.”
Academics love it when some application of math/statistics allows them to say the opposite of what people expect. There’s this sense that anything that contradicts “common sense” must be the enlightened way of thinking, rising above the “common,” “ignorant” thinking of the masses (aka non-coastal America).
Note that just because “God” is one word in English, doesn’t mean it’s one single claim. It’s thousands.
Do there exist any beings more intelligent than humans? We could imagine conclusive evidence for that. Do there exist any beings that can transcend time and space? We could imagine ways to test that. Do there exist beings that can create non-consuming fire? Again we could easily test that. We’d have to do thousands of these tests to verify something as complex as the Judeo-Christian God.
Do remember that three theories “equally consistent with the data” are not therefore equally likely to be true.
I almost hope it is a false flag though, as you’re hinting. If you believe people outside of cancel culture have a better understand of it than those who perpetrate it, then it’s the outsiders who are better positioned to manipulate it to their advantage.
Isn’t this what the Montessori program is about?
I don’t recognize the connection you’re drawing between good storytelling and identity politics. I would’ve said good storytelling touches people regardless of their identity group.
If Eliezer’s stories only matter to people who are Jewish, millennial, and male, then I’d say he’s not telling very good stories (or at least not very useful ones).
I see what you’re saying now. There is a Motte & Bailey of identity politics where:
Motte = identity is just your particular circumstances and personality
Bailey = The most important ways of understanding people and their ideas are along the lines of race/sex/orientation/(other unalterable traits).
Sounds like you didn’t actually mean to use that bailey. I’ve seen it used a lot elsewhere, so that’s what I read here (I even wrote about it here).
“for what metric does this goal score well on?”
Pleasure, or the absence of pain (and the relative importances of these two drives depends on your personality). Pleasure and pain are the bedrock you’re looking for. They’re unmistakable experiences that are motivating in and of themselves. They are motivation itself.
Every course of action you can take will give you a different net return (in pleasure or the absence of pain) over the course of your life. If you’re conscientious about long-term planning and making good predictions, you can come closer to maximizing this ultimate metric.
It sounds like for OP, some “values talk” is due. OP seems to be wondering how to weigh multiple values, and I’m saying weigh them according to how much pleasure can be derived from their indulgence. I don’t really see “multiple dimensions of pleasure,” I see many different paths to pleasure that are all commensurable.
I’d argue that they inevitably are the ultimate metric, and all we can do about it is become more conscious of that and pursue them more intentionally.
It means we’ll get better at predicting the net return in pleasure of different choices. And especially, we’ll become more aware of long-term consequences (because our system 1 is often biased toward short-term pleasures, which is liable to reduce total net lifetime pleasure).
We verify this process by taking stock of the amount and degree of regret we feel. By “regret” here I mean whenever you wish you could go back in time and choose differently.
This rings true. And most of us who realize that status is in our utility function can usually just say “Yeah but if I have higher status I’ll get XYZ, so it’s worth its place in my utility function, if only as a means to get XYZ.”
And you’ve called out some situations where there is no XYZ. In those cases, would we be able to reject status for its own sake? Or is it so embedded in our utility functions that we can’t help but feel driven toward it?
Love this; I like seeing rationalists rise above the meek ineffectual I’m-right-but-no-one-cares quokka stereotype. Rationalists should win.
I’m loving this content. I wish more LWers wrote about money. Maybe I will someday
Lol that was a bloodbath
This was fascinating.
I guess this was the intuition pump that finally did it for me. I can’t believe this sentence is what got me comfortably understanding the simulacra levels:
The wicked understand, acknowledge and value the Wise—they depend on the Wise for their own cynical gain. The simple don’t see the point of wisdom. Those who do not know how to ask don’t even know wisdom is a thing.
But Zvi, what do we do to prevent the initial progression to the Wicked? Does it actually work to “blunt his teeth / speak harshly to him”? That sounds like the analog of leveling an accusation of dishonesty / bad faith, with all the connoted shame. Does that work, or does it just confirm to them, “Yes, we’re making declarative statements only to gain selfish advantage now”? The alternative would be to speak to him as if he’s Wise but mistaken—pretending not to see the deception. Any feeling about which approach actually works more often?
Can you speak more to how higher levels would allow predicting the future better?
I might be mistaken—my understanding of this is that the act of knowing and understanding that other people are on levels 3 and 4 is itself still a level-1 act: it’s an object-level belief about the states of human minds in the universe. And therefore you can be aware of the level-3 and level-4 effects of your own actions (and choose them accordingly), without being on 3 or 4 yourself. To be on level-3 or level-4 involves actually missing information (or at least risking missing it). As I’ve understood it.
And that’s why Zvi put the “Pragmatist” at only level 2, even though he “balances impact at all levels they are aware of slash care about.” He can lie, or he can tell the truth, and he does whatever will bring his net preferred effect across all levels. I think rationalists are the Pragmatist.
It’s hard to judge the level of my audience.
Fwiw your posts are exactly appropriate to my level and are motivating me to go and learn more about some of these strategies.
Because the markets are so efficient, the market doesn’t punish you much for being wrong
Could you explain this cause-effect a bit more? My intuition says if I make the wrong choice where the vast majority is making the right choice, my losses will quickly get snapped up into everyone else’s gains
Thank you! I and two other players landed on this strategy independently within like 20 minutes. And then the group’s performance obviously improved, but it was no longer a game, it was “count accurately.”
I got largely the same takeaway from the original Conflict vs Mistake Theory post. Mistake theorists can be modeled with mistake theory; conflict theorists can be modeled with conflict theory. Maybe sometimes you can convert people from one to the other, but once you realize that both kinds of people actually exist, you cannot be a hard conflict theorist or a hard mistake theorist anymore.