I’ve been a LessWrong organizer since 2011, with roughly equal focus on the cultural, practical and intellectual aspects of the community. My first project was creating the Secular Solstice and helping groups across the world run their own version of it. More recently I’ve been interested in improving my own epistemic standards and helping others to do so as well.
Raemon(Raymond Arnold)
Karma: 29,901
A thing I am legit confused about:
What exactly is up with it feeling so awful to be the person to apologize first, when you think the other person has aggrieved you more (but you realize you also aggrieved them).
I do get some naive implementation of “I don’t want to be a doormat”, or “I want to make sure that the Thing I’m Protecting gets protected.” But… even so, in most situations, the amount of resistance people have about this feels often out-of-proportion.
Hmm, I mostly see the nuance as rich/positive. (there might be some sort of meta-aesthetic-preference here that could also be updated based on facts).
Anecdote: when I went to university studying Computer Animation, one of the things I studied was how to render images with realistic lighting. In the process of doing that, I came to be able to notice lots of things about lighting and surface-texture in my environment, which made them both more beautiful, and beautiful in a wider variety of ways.
There are some cases where I add nuance to something, and the nuance mostly comes in the form of “I need to grieve over a particular type of beauty I thought I had.” (For example, I think the sort of person who wants a hufflepuff aesthetic that doesn’t require them to have backbone and to have to watch out / protect themselves, will have to grieve over something precious being lost). But, in this case I think I mostly saw it as deepening my understanding of something, rather than giving something up.
Well actually I just use meta All The Goddamn Time and sometimes it’s advisable and sometimes it’s not.
But, I guess my answer is: going meta tends to be seen as more annoying when your partner isn’t invested in the conversation. And ITK is disproportionately useful when your partner isn’t invested in the conversation. So it benefits disproportionately from already being in the water.
For example saying: “Let’s try trust-kickstarters” and linking to this post. Using the meta-level may disrupt the object-level process and should probably be avoided.
That’s particularly why I’m hoping to get this into the groundwater so it’s seen as something that you might just do without it being a big deal that distracts everyone. (similarly, I think having the concept of “Guess/Ask/Tell culture” or “wait vs interrupt culture” as easy handles has been useful to me for navigating tricky conversations)
But, also: In the contexts where I have used this with some success, both parties were already invested enough and the conversation was tricky enough that stopping to say “okay, it looks like by default, this conversation won’t work, so we need to do something weird to make it work, and I think “Iterated Trust Kickstarter” is a frame that has a chance of actually working.”
(part of it is that I think Iterated Trust Kickstarters are a thing people already do intuitively, just putting a name to it, and the point of the name is more as a pointer to a concept people already had vaguely defined, than illustrating a whole new thing)
I use PredictionBook, which is not obviously better than a spreadsheet if you’ve already done the initial setup, but which did most of the things I wanted it to.
Nod. I was in the process of noticing that the math didn’t check out here but got distracted and then YOLO posted it.
I think the implied situation I was half remembering when I wrote it was something like a business deal, where you both have to invest, and also the payoff isn’t guaranteed. I think either “Stag hunt without guaranteed payoff” or “Prisoner Dilemma” would each be a reasonable example. Agreed that in the current one, defecting is just… stupid.
I updated the OP to use your suggestion, which seems like a nicer, simpler version.
It occurs to me that there’s a class of person for whom this entire line of thinking is a subtle trap, and the wrong approach.
I included one paragraph in the OP:
I’m currently related it through the lens of game-theory. I can imagine the best advice for most people is to not overthink it, don’t stress about game theory. Maybe you should just be letting your hearts and bodies be talking to each other, elephant to elephant.
I think, perhaps for a large fraction of LessWrongers, this class of advice is more useful than all the rest of the coordination theory here. (unfortunately, as an overly cerebral rationalist I am not very good at giving the elephant advice)
I think the coordination theory here is, like, the true-mechanics that will be going on under-the-hood in a healthy relationship (interested in arguments to the contrary), but much of the time it’s the wrong thing to focus on. Like, knowing how all your muscles fit together might hypothetically be relevant to dancing, but it is not the thing to preoccupy yourself with while actually dancing.
I just wanted to say thanks for writing and thinking about this. I’m not yet sure if I actually want this, or if I’m in a position to lead an instance of this, but it’s a good thing for people to reflect on, I think.
I like how you lay out a bunch of ideas without being particular prescriptive about it.
Iterated Trust Kickstarters
One thing that strikes me here is you seem to be talking more about “angry people” (i.e. people who are somehow persistently tending towards “angry”), as opposed to “anger, a transient state that an otherwise healthy person is in.”
One purpose of anger AFAICT is to build game theory into the psychology of social organisms, without them having to have a fully idealized game theoretically sound approach.
It’s useful to have punishment and threats as a tool in our coordination toolkit. Punishing someone generally requires you to burn resources of some kind. Sometimes it’s locally worth it to punish someone, because even though you will burn resources, you’ll almost immediately start reaping rewards from the next steps in an iterated PD or Stag hunt. Other times, the payoff is extremely diffuse, and it’s honestly just worse for you to spend resources of tit-for-tatting. BUT, it’s still overall better for defectors to know that they risk the possibility of someone “disproportionately, ‘irrationally’ punishing them”, so they don’t bother defecting in the first place
At least one of anger’s roles, I think, is to facilitate that.
I think a downside of anger is that our native implementation of it isn’t designed to handle complex coordination problems of the modern world. So I think there are reasons to be dissatisfied with that native implementation, and to want to change it in some way. But I wouldn’t try to remove anger from your arsenal, or encourage others to do so, unless you/they have actually fully “replaced” the job that anger was doing. (and honestly I’m not sure I know anyone who is at this level, I think anger is doing lots of subtle things, and trying to replace native emotional software is pretty likely to go wrong in various ways).
The problem of “the guy who yells at you for digging the hole and then yells at you for filling it back” isn’t that he’s angry, it’s that he has miscalibrated anger and some maladaptive patterns with it.
I attempted to record this but accidentally did so in a way that didn’t capture audio.
This feels like it is strawmanning anger pretty bad (and focusing on places where anger has particularly gone-wrong). I’ll have more stuff to say later but wanted to flag that for now.
Alex Flint on “A software engineer’s perspective on logical induction”
Note: for the next month or so as various vaccine rollout and “turn to normal??” questions need answering, I’ll be frontpaging most coronavirus related posts.
Curated.
I love lots of individually clever things here, and I love the consistent worldbuilding across multiple AMA answers. I previously found Eliezer’s movable housing post valuable for bringing some much needed techno-optimism, and I find this post valuable for something like socio-optimism. (Upon reflection the Movable Housing concept was first published AFAICT in another post about Dath Ilan, so I guess there’s a common thread between them)
I think coordination is one of our biggest bottlenecks, and getting to see a detailed sketch of a world where children are taught basic coordinacy feels compelling and valuable to me.
I am fairly excited about this, even though I think it’s likelihood of working out is low.
Some folk on Astral Codex Ten are noting some previous failed attempts at things kinda-like-this. But, a) this seems to have a fairly different starting goal that other weird projects in this reference class, b) well, the normal odds for a startup succeeding is less than 10%, so the fact that we’ve tried this less than 10 times and it hasn’t worked out yet isn’t much to update on. I think trying things that look superficially similar to this is a big source of expected value.
Nod. “positive vs disagreement citation” is an important angle I wasn’t thinking about.
I think I mostly have a deep disagreement with Ben here, which is important but not urgent to resolve and would take a bunch of time. (I think I might separately have different deep disagreements with you, but I haven’t evaluated that)
(I have some disagreements with this. I think there’s a virtue Ben is pointing at (and which Zvi and others are pointing at), which is important, but I don’t think we have the luxury of living in the world where you get to execute that virtue without also worrying about the failure modes Richard is worried about)
Fwiw I basically expected the book to be more in the Malcolm Gladwell genre (and I don’t say that pejoratively – it’s generally seemed to me that Julia’s strength and area of focus is in communicating concepts to a wider audience).