″...What do you do with this impossible challenge?
First, we assume that you don’t actually say “That’s impossible!” and give up a la Luke Skywalker. You haven’t run away.
Why not? Maybe you’ve learned to override the reflex of running away. Or maybe they’re going to shoot your daughter if you fail. We suppose that you want to win, not try—that something is at stake that matters to you, even if it’s just your own pride. (Pride is an underrated sin.)
Will you call upon the virtue of tsuyoku naritai? But even if you become stronger day by day, growing instead of fading, you may not be strong enough to do the impossible. You could go into the AI Box experiment once, and then do it again, and try to do better the second time. Will that get you to the point of winning? Not for a long time, maybe; and sometimes a single failure isn’t acceptable.
(Though even to say this much—to visualize yourself doing better on a second try—is to begin to bind yourself to the problem, to do more than just stand in awe of it. How, specifically, could you do better on one AI-Box Experiment than the previous?—and not by luck, but by skill?)
Will you call upon the virtue isshokenmei? But a desperate effort may not be enough to win. Especially if that desperation is only putting more effort into the avenues you already know, the modes of trying you can already imagine. A problem looks impossible when your brain’s query returns no lines of solution leading to it. What good is a desperate effort along any of those lines?
Make an extraordinary effort? Leave your comfort zone—try non-default ways of doing things—even, try to think creatively? But you can imagine the one coming back and saying, “I tried to leave my comfort zone, and I think I succeeded at that! I brainstormed for five minutes—and came up with all sorts of wacky creative ideas! But I don’t think any of them are good enough. The other guy can just keep saying ‘No’, no matter what I do.”
And now we finally reply: “Shut up and do the impossible!”
As we recall from Trying to Try, setting out to make an effort is distinct from setting out to win. That’s the problem with saying, “Make an extraordinary effort.” You can succeed at the goal of “making an extraordinary effort” without succeeding at the goal of getting out of the Box.
“But!” says the one. “But, SUCCEED is not a primitive action! Not all challenges are fair—sometimes you just can’t win! How am I supposed to choose to be out of the Box? The other guy can just keep on saying ‘No’!”
True. Now shut up and do the impossible.
Your goal is not to do better, to try desperately, or even to try extraordinarily. Your goal is to get out of the box.”
Pee Doom
Announcing the Center for Applied Postrationality
A Few Terrifying Facts About The Russo-Ukrainian War
Center for Applied Postrationality: An Update
[Question] What are questions?
[Question] What would 10x or 100x better than CFAR look like?
[Question] What are good practices for using Google Scholar to research answers to LessWrong Questions?
[Question] Who’s an unusual thinker that you recommend following?
[Question] How to make plans?
I’m really noticing how the best life improvements come from purchasing or building better infrastructure, rather than trying permutations of the same set of things and expecting different results. (Much of this results from having more money, granting an expanded sense of possibility to buying useful things.)
The guiding question is, “What upgrades would make my life easier?” In contrast with the question that is more typically asked: “How do I achieve this hard thing?”
It seems like part of what makes this not just immediately obvious is that I feel a sense of resistance (that I don’t really identify with). Part of that is a sense of… naughtiness? Like we’re supposed to signal how hardworking we are. For me this relates to this fear I have that if I get too powerful, I will break away from others (e.g. skipping restaurants for a Soylent Guzzler Helmet, metaphorically) as I re-engineer my life and thereby invite conflict. There’s something like a fear that buying or engaging in nicer things would be an affront to my internalized model of my parents?
The infrastructure guideline relates closely to the observation that to a first approximation we are stimulus-response machines reacting to our environment, and that the best way to improve is to actually change your environment, rather than continuing to throw resources past the point of diminishing marginal returns in adaptation to the current environment. And for the same reasons, the implications can scare me, for it may imply leaving the old environment behind, and it may even imply that the larger the environmental change you make, the more variance you have for a good or bad update to your life. That would mean we should strive for large positive environmental shifts, while minimizing the risk of bad ones.
(This also gives me a small update towards going to Mars being more useful for x-risk, although I may need to still propagate a larger update in the other direction away from space marketing. )
Of course, most of one’s upgrades should be tiny and within one’s comfort zone. What the portfolio of small vs huge changes one should make in one’s life is an open question to me, because while it makes sense to be mostly conservative with one’s allocation of one’s life resources, I suspect that fear brings people to justify the static zone of safety they’ve created with their current structure, preventing them from seeking out better states of being that involve jettisoning sunk costs that they identify with. Better coordination infrastructure could make such changes easier if people don’t have to risk as much social conflict.
[Question] If you wrote a letter to your future self every day, what would you put in it?
[Question] If a nuke is coming towards SF Bay can people bunker in BART tunnels?
I find the question, “What would change my mind?”, to be quite powerful, psychotherapeutic even. AKA “singlecruxing”. It cuts right through to seeking disconfirmation of one’s model, and can make the model more explicit, legible, object. It’s proactively seeking out the data rather than trying to reduce the feeling of avoidant deflection associated with shielding a beloved notion from assault. Seems like it comports well with the OODA loop as well. Taken from Raemon’s “Keeping Beliefs Cruxy”.
I am curious how others ask this question of themselves. What follows is me practicing the question.
What would change my mind about the existence of the moon? Here are some hypotheses:
I would look up in the sky every few hours for several days and nights and see that it’s not there.
I see over a dozen posts on my Facebook feed talking about how it turns out it was just a cardboard cutout and SpaceX accidentally tore a hole in it. They show convincing video of the accident and footage of people reacting such as leaders of the world convening to discuss it.
Multiple friends are very concerned about my belief in this luminous, reflective rocky body. They suggest I go see a doctor or the government will throw me in the lunatics’ asylum. The doctor prescribes me a pill and I no longer believe.
It turns out I was deluded and now I’m relieved to be sane.
It turns out they have brainwashed me and now I’m relieved to be sane.
I am hit over the head with a rock which permanently damages my ability to form lunar concepts. Or it outright kills me. I think this Goodharts (is that the closest term I’m looking for?) the question but it’s interesting to know what are bad/nonepistemic/out-of-context reasons I would stop believing in a thing.
These anticipations were System 2 generated and I’m still uncertain to what extent I can imagine them actually happening and changing my mind. It’s probably sane and functional that the mind doesn’t just let you update on anything you imagine, though I also hear the apocryphal saying that the mind 80% believes whatever you imagine is real.
Russia’s state faces an existential threat.
The implication is that attacks on the territories it is annexing are interpretable as an existential threat.
How do we do this without falling into the Crab Bucket problem AKA Heckler’s Veto, which is definitely a thing that exists and is exacerbated by these concerns in EA-land? “Don’t do risky things” equivocates into “don’t do things”.
[Question] How would a person go about starting a geoengineering startup?
[Question] What is learning?
The wifi hacking also immediately struck me as reminiscent of paranoid psychosis. Though a significant amount of psychosis-like things are apparently downstream of childhood trauma, including sexual abuse, but I forget the numbers on this.
Interesting summary and interpretation of a speech outlining Putin’s intentions, “The End of Western Hegemony is INEVITABLE”: