yes, this is basically what I’m referring to
Unreal
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Active Curiosity vs Open Curiosity
Oh yeah. I do think the nature of the task is an important factor. It’s not like you can willy-nilly choose policy-based or willpower-based. I did not mean to present it as though you had a choice between them.
I was more describing that there are (at least) two different ways to create intentions, and these are two that I’ve noticed.
But you said that you can’t use this on everything, so maybe the policies that I would need willpower to install just happen to be different from the policies that you would need willpower to install.
This seems likely true.
It’s not that I don’t have policies, it’s that this description sounds like you can just… decide to change a policy, and then have that happen automatically.
It is true that I can immediately change certain policies such that I don’t need to practice the new way. I just install the new way, and it works. But I can’t install large complex policies all in one go. I will explain.
the Lyft thing sounded complicated to memorize and I would probably need to consciously think about it on several times when I was actually doing the tipping before I had it committed into memory.
With zero experience of Lyft tipping, I would not just be able to think up a policy and then implement it. Policy-driven intentions are collaborations between my S1 and S2, so S2 can’t be doing all the work alone. But maybe after a few Lyft rides, I notice confusion about how much to tip. Then maybe I think about that for a while or do some reading. Eventually I notice I need a policy because deciding each time is tiring or effortful.
I notice I feel fine tipping a bit each time when I have a programming job. I feel I can afford it, and I feel better about it. So I create and install a policy to tip $1 each time and run with that; I make room for exceptions when I feel like it.
Later, I stop having a programming job, and now I feel bad about spending that money. So I create a new if-then clause. If I have good income, I will tip $1. If not, I will tip $0. That code gets rewritten.
Later, I notice my policy is inadequate for handling situations where I have heavy luggage (because I find myself in a situation where I’m not tipping people who help me with my bag, and it bothers me a little). I rewrite the code again to add a clause about adding $1 when that happens.
Policy re-writes are motivated by S1 emotions telling me they want something different. They knock on the door of S2. S2 is like, I can help with that! S2 suggests a policy. S1 is relieved and installs it. The change is immediate.
That’s interesting!
How do other people handle the tipping thing? Whether for a driver or at a restaurant? Are you kind of deciding each time?
How do you handle the question of “who pays for a meal” with acquaintances / new people / on dates? My policy in this area is to always offer to split.
How do you handle whether to give money to homeless people or if someone is trying to offer you something on the street? My policy here is to always say no.
I’m curious what other people are doing here because I assumed most people use policies to handle these things.
I have not much considered group intention-setting. This seems super interesting to explore too.
Phenomenologically, I feel it kind of as… the agreements or intentions of the group (in a circle) recede into the background, to form the water we’re all in together. Like it gets to relax in the VERY BACK of my mind and also I’m aware of it being in the back of other people’s minds.
And from that shared container / background, I “get to move around” but it’s like I am STARTING with a particular set of assumptions.
Other potential related examples:
I’m at a Magic tournament. I know basically what to expect—what people’s goals are, what people’s behaviors will be, what the rules of the game are and how to enforce them. It’s very easy for me to move here because a lot of the assumptions are set in place for me.
I’m in church as a kid. Similar to the above. But maybe less agreeable to me or more opaque to me. I get this weird SENSE that there are ways I’m supposed to behave, but I’m not totally sure what they are. I’m just trying to do what everyone else seems to be doing… This is not super comfortable. If I act out of line, a grownup scolds me, is one way I know where the lines are.
Potential examples of group policy-based intentions:
I have a friend I regularly get meals with. We agree to take turns paying for each other, explicitly.
I have a friend, and our implicit policy is to tell each other as soon as something big happens in our lives.
As soon as a third person is added to the dynamic, I think it gets trickier to ensure it’s a policy-based intention. (Technology might provide many exceptions?) As soon as one person feels a need to remind themselves of the thing, it stops being a policy-based intention.
Willpower-based intentions in groups feel they contain a bunch of things like rules, social norms, etc.
There is definitely this sense that exerting force or willpower feels like an EXTERNAL pressure even if that pressure does not have an external source that I could point to or even gesture at. But it /feels/ external or ‘not me’.
I have some trauma related to this. I could’ve gone into the trauma stuff more, but I think it would have made the post less accessible and also more confusing, rather than less. So I didn’t. :P
oh. I must have messed that up. I am OK with this being on the front page. I have definitely noticed some bugs here and there. Esp around the account settings page and trying to change my moderation guidelines. But I think I maybe just messed up the checkbox. Is it default checked to ‘not ok’? Because if so, I left it alone thinking it was checked to ‘is ok to promote’.
I enjoyed that article! Seems worth including the link in my article too. Thanks.
Your definition of intention seems different from my use of “willpower-based intention.” My ‘willpower-based intention’ always has a conscious element and cannot do things like “work in the background without my awareness at all.” It’s maybe quite related to the thing in your forehead.
My policy-based intentions feel kind of like pulling up my inner code guts, making a little rewrite or alteration, and putting them back into my guts. This is a conscious process (the installation), but then the change runs automatically, without holding conscious intentions.
I’m very bad at using these to create personal habits, like drinking water everyday or taking vitamins everyday. I don’t think these count. They require willpower after a while.
But maybe I one-time decide the best configuration of spices on the spice rack or how my kitchen is arranged. Then it is automatic for me to place things back where they belong after using it, and it is also automatic for me to want to organize things so they’re back where they belong when they get messed up.
These ‘desires’ for things to be a certain way live in my belly. And it feels like my belly carries motivations and behaviors that I can ride out.
It feels relaxing to have a policy I can lean on, and to carry out the policy. Like water running downhill.
You could maybe think of it as ‘intentions you already want to do anyway’. But with policies, your conscious mind can also make alterations / rewrite that code directly. Without any need for convincing, arguing, pushing. It is more of a collaboration I am in between elephant / rider—coming up with good policies makes us feel good and relaxed.
Policy-Based vs Willpower-Based Intentions
I was assuming the list comes out once → I learn enough to understand what types of posts get what voting patterns (or, I learn that the data doesn’t actually tell me very much, which might be more likely), but after that I don’t need any more lists of posts.
I don’t care if it has my own posts on it, really. I care more about ‘the general pattern’ or something, and I imagine I can either get that from one such list, or I’ll figure out I just won’t get it (because the data doesn’t have discernible patterns / it’s too noisy).
I prefer the one-time cost vs the many-time cost.
That makes sense.
But it’s really confusing for my models of the post.
Cause there is a real difference between (lots of 2-users voted on this vs. a few 5-users voted on this). Those feel very different to me, and I’d adjust my views accordingly as to whether the post was, in fact, successful.
I get that you’re trying to make “lots of 2-users” and “a few 5-users” basically amount to the same value, which is why you’re scaling it this way.
But if a post ACTUALLY only has 2-users upvoting it and almost no 5-users, and other posts have 5-users voting on it but very few 2-users, that seems … worth noting.
Although, you could prob achieve the same by publishing an analysis of upvote/downvote patterns.
You could, for instance, release a list of posts, ranked by various such metrics. (Ratio of low:high user votes. Ratio of high:low user votes. Etc. Etc.)
That would be interesting!
The book The Fine Print covers a lot of examples of “special privileges granted by the government” in a number of industries (rail, telecom, energy). I read it a long time ago, so don’t remember a ton from it. But in case anyone’s interested in more concrete examples of this.
Really glad you wrote this post. I think it’s trying to speak to something I’ve been concerned with for a while—a thing that feels (to me) like a crux for a lot of current social movements and social ills in the States (including the social justice movement, black lives matter, growing homelessness / decreasing standards of living for the poorest people). And of course, the whole shit-pile that is our health care system.
Some Questions / Further Comments:
(Please respond to each point as a separate thread, so that threads are segregated by topic / question.)
1) My guess is that under “Services and construction”, where you list “transportation”, you mean a different “transportation” than the one in the graph, which has “Transportation and Warehousing” as its own category? I’d appreciate clarification / disambiguation in the article.
2) I agree with your point RE: intangibles, that they correlate / go together with monopoly. But it’s difficult for me to tell HOW MUCH they ‘go together’. And whether it is strictly ‘a bad sign’. While I’m not a huge fan of how patents sometimes play out, I am a fan of branding. While you can’t just try to transfer the effect of Coca-Cola’s branding to your new product, I think you can, in fact, try to compete on branding.
(It would be terrible if someone tried to take exclusive rights over the use of the color red in logos or something, though. Hopefully that doesn’t ever happen.)
And, honestly, I think the ‘value’ of their branding might not be too inaccurately priced, in some sense? (Even if the product reduces in quality, I think the branding has value beyond trying to measure quality of product.) I also don’t whether ‘intangibles’ includes things like ‘excellent customer service’, but if it does, that seems like true value, not ‘fake value’. Even though it doesn’t directly cash out into more product.
Over time, I think more of what we consider valuable should be in intangibles? Seems like a sign of people having enough useful things that they can now afford to put money into “nice experiences.” And in many ways, people value having fewer choices because it cashes out into less effort.
3) Similarly, ‘company culture’—while it is ‘dark matter’ as Robin Hanson says—seems appropriate to value highly in some cases. I don’t think most ‘monopoly situations’ are a result of some company just having a really good, un-copyable company culture, but in general, I do expect it to be very difficult to transfer / copy really excellent company cultures. And as a result, I do expect something monopolistic-looking to emerge as a result of—not shady dealings or exclusive privileges facilitated by government—but as a natural consequence of very few companies, in fact, being really good places to work.
I would really like to be able to disambiguate between the situations where: There are only 3 main firms in this industry. Is it because those 3 firms are in fact providing outsized value in a way that’s hard to compete with? Or, is this happening because the government made some poor decisions that favored certain companies for not-very-good reasons, and they leveraged this into an effective monopoly?
That is too many numbers to parse! I only care about the # of ppl who’ve interacted with the post. Can I just have THAT number as a tooltip? That would mostly resolve my concern here.
Also, it’s kind of weird to me that I have 5 vote power given I’ve only really interacted with this site for… a few months? And you guys have, like, 6? 7? Are you sure your scaling is right here? :/
Would you still be sad if your strong vote was maxed at 5?
1:15 is a big difference! But 1:5 is a lot less. And 1:3 is even lot lot less!
some thoughts before i try this out:
I am worried about this thing where I both want to know: how many ppl liked a thing vs how strongly ppl liked a thing. More for posts than for comments. For posts, if I see a number like 100, I am very confused about how many ppl liked it. It seems to range between 20-50. But if… the vote power actually goes up to 15. Then… I will be confused about whether it’s like… 10-50. That’s… a big difference to me.
I’d almost would like it if for posts, 1 = normal 2 = strong for ppl with lower karma. And for people with more karma, it’s 1 = normal 3 = strong. ? Or something that reduces the possible range for “how many ppl liked the post.”
There’s also a clear dynamic where people with 4-6 karma tend to check LW more frequently / early, so … um… karma tends to go up more quickly at the beginning and then kind of tapers off, but it’s like…
I dunno, it’s kind of misleading to me.
Why do you top out at 16 instead of 5? I’m just … confused by this.
Kind of wish all ‘weak votes’ were 1, too, and karma scores only kick in if you strong vote.
that link seems broke
I am fascinated by this conversation/disagreement about Ender’s Game. I think it might be really important. I am upvoting both comments.
Some things it makes me consider:
a) When is violence / attacking the outgroup justified?
b) Would it have been abusive if the children hadn’t been lied to? (I lean no. But given that they were lied to, I lean yes.)
c) Is it OK to sometimes frame “the default ways of the universe” as a kind of outgroup, in order to motivate action ‘against’ them? Ender’s Game was about another sentient lifeform. But in ways, the universe has “something vaguely resembling” anthropomorphizable demons that tend to work against human interests. (We, as a community, have already solidified Moloch as one. And there are others.) In a way, we ARE trying to mobilize ourselves ‘against the outgroup’—with that outgroup being kind of nebulous and made-up, but still trying to point at real forces that threaten our existence/happiness.
Q for benquo:
How do you feel about sports (or laser tag leagues)?
Open curiosity does not actively seek to understand. Which is why I call the other one ‘active’.
I suspect concentrated and diffuse curiosity are both referring to types of active curiosity. Open curiosity is talking about something different.