Great vegan recipes that other people want to copy are a form of effective altruism!
Viliam
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Hyperstitions are a powerful form of social technology.
Just like you have one-boxers and two-boxers in Newcomb’s dilemma, you will have people who support hyperstition as a technology, and people who oppose it “on principle”. To use the technology effectively, you may need to separate the former from the latter, and only believe (at least in version 1.0 of the belief) that the former will act accordingly. (With some luck, you may get a version 2.0 saying that when the latter see the success of version 1.0, many of them will join, too.)
Similarly, the benefits of actions mandated by religion first happen to the actual believers, and only later spread to the society around them.
In theory, everyone can read blogs… but in practice, the intellectual elites read blogs and everyone else reads bot spam on social networks.
Behaviorism says that people’s behaviors and thoughts are shaped by the rewards and punishments they receive. But when you think about it, a lot of rewards and punishments are delivered to us… by ourselves.
Most things that I do during the day are neither ecstatic nor painful. A more typical reward or punishment that I get is something like “feeling good about what happens” or “feeling bad about what happens”, which originates in my head. So my behavior is less shaped by the environment, and more… by myself, in a feedback loop.
There is some noise on a day to day scale, but in long term we will probably settle in some attractor—a set of behaviors and thoughts and feelings that reproduces itself over time. Self-fulfilling prophecies, behaviors that elicits predictable reactions from others, thoughts that rationalize the behaviors and in turn seem justified by the reactions we get, the skills we practice, the habits we train; that kind of stuff.
(This does not mean that anyone can choose any attractor. Biology matters, socioeconomic status matters; these are also inputs that determine the options you have and the reactions you get. But for given biology and status, there are multiple attractors available, and your situation today is mostly determined by your situation yesterday.)
Things like Enneagram can be understood as attempts to list the basic classes of attractors found around us.
When I think about Big5, my mental picture is of five different bell curves, five scales with independent sliders, where each of us gets a different setting, and that’s it. (Probably an oversimplification.) What is missing in this picture is why people sometimes change, but mostly don’t. I mean, either those five sliders are flexible, which doesn’t explain why people rarely change; or they are inflexible, which doesn’t explain why they sometimes do.
Yeah, I fully agree with that, and it’s great that you have the option to set up your schedule accordingly.
So, the conclusion is that a 2-day workweek is more productive than a 5-day one?
More seriously, I agree that intense work on some days, and freeing your mind to produce ideas on another day, is much better than trying to have a mix of intense work and planning and meetings and whatever every day. That way, each day has a different flavor, and you are not constantly interrupted by the clock.
Yeah, people already buy houses to rent them, and this seems like just a question of scale, where the scale gives you extra benefits, because a nice neighborhood is better than just a nice home in the average neighborhood.
Thinking about obstacles, building the entire neighborhood would require a lot of capital. And the investment is concentrated at one place, so the plan is fragile… imagine that a gang starts extorting you that either you pay them money, or they will do some shooting in your neighborhood which totally destroys your added value.
And it’s not just gangs. I don’t know how specific this is for Eastern Europe, but you basically cannot build anything without bribing many officials. If you start a project of this magnitude, the size of the bribes will skyrocket, because now any bureaucrat can hold your billion-dollar project hostage.
Buying a large continuous area of land is probably also difficult. Unless it is in the middle of nowhere, in which case the problem with your nice neighborhood is that people need to get to their jobs.
None of this seems like a problem in principle, but add too many problems like this, and suddenly there are better opportunities to spend the same capital elsewhere.
The vague idea is that if you have everything but papers themselves, then you get the readers; and when you have the readers, the idea of publishing at your place starts sounding much more acceptable.
For what degree of “want”? Computer games about killing people are popular, whether the context is waging a war as a general, shooting hundreds of opponents on the battlefield, or being an assassin. Obviously enough people find this interesting enough to produce/buy those games. We do not have a similar number of games about e.g. cooking broccoli. (“Because that’s not fun!” “My point exactly.”)
I connotationally disagree with the word “suppressed”, because to me it seems like something that requires a degree of constant self-violence, an active desire fighting an opposite active desire. Instead of that, I simply realized that violence in real world does not work the same as the violence on the screen, and that there are further consequences which the games conveniently ignore (e.g. the killed enemies disappear, and at no moment you meet their grieving families). That’s why the computer game violence is fun, and the real world violence is not. But the computer game is pulling on an instinct that I have, otherwise I might as well play games about cooking broccoli (which also would be technically different from cooking broccoli in real life).
In Jungians terms, I do have a shadow; I have met it, consumed it, and digested it. I am not tempted to go out and kill people, but I am not pretending that the “hardware support” is not there in my brain.
(Adding myself as another example of having a dark side.)
Indeed it’s the default as far as I know!
Could you provide some examples?
I don’t remember a situation like: “I am sorry!” “That’s okay, give me a chocolate.” “Sure, here you are!”
I remember situations where the person saying “I am sorry” also brings the chocolate. But in that situation, it is the person who caused the harm who estimates how many chocolates it was worth, not the person who was harmed. It would probably be socially awkward for the harmed person to say “one chocolate is not enough; seven would be appropriate”.
Just a few random ideas, most of them probably wrong:
As I see it (but I know almost nothing about this), currently the main competition to journals is websites like Arxiv. So the first obvious step would be to build a better version of Arxiv. Which should be quite possible for the people who created the new LessWrong! Make a copy first, then keep adding new functionality.
Some ideas for new functionality:
Placeholder articles for papers published in other journals. Does Elsevier hold a copyright for something? Sure, you can’t publish the specific text, but I think (better ask a lawyer first) that you can still publish all its metadata, and links whom the paper quotes and who quotes the paper. And reviews! The more reviews you read, the less important it becomes to read the original paper.
Add the possibility to write comments. Try to figure out a way how to do this without drowning in comment spam.
Provide links to replications. Add some kind of prediction market, where people will be allowed to bet on which research does not replicate.
Make it possible to write short summaries of the papers, or to rewrite them using your own words. Add some voting system to eliminate misleading summaries, but highlight the good ones. Making science easier to read is a good thing.
A few more variants of the Trolley problem:
1) Make the default option probabilistic.
A train is approaching the place where the tracks diverge, and the switch is in a probabilistic position, where with 50% chance it sends the train to the left, killing 5 people, and with 50% chance to the right, killing 1 person. For example, the switch oscillates between the positions. Would you hold the switch in the “kill 1” position?
2) Make the default option feel dirty.
You have spent the entire day reading LessWrong and Astral Codex Ten, and now you feel really tired. Suddenly you get a danger notification: A train is approaching the place where the tracks diverge; by default it will go to the left and kill 5 people, but if you pressed a button on remote control, it would go to the right and only kill 1 person.
Alas, the remote control is currently on a table, so you would have to stand up from your really comfortable chair and make three steps towards the table, so that you could push the button. You would definitely prefer to keep sitting and relaxing, it feels so good. And hey, you don’t owe those 5 strangers anything; what have they ever done for you? Would you keep sitting in your comfortable chair and let 5 strangers die, or stand up and walk to the table to push the button, thereby saving 5, but killing a different 1?
“currently people join and then never talk”.
This seems to me a like a default outcome; if you want something else, you need to take some specific steps.
One quick idea is to give all new members a questionnaire to fill—then there will be something to talk about.
Another idea is to have a volunteer who will actively approach the new members and ask questions.
Maybe ask them “what are three problems in your life that you would need some help with?” (However, this makes people vulnerable, and potentially exposed to a predator attack.)
I think it depends on what question are you trying to solve.
A person who is “kind and weak” is a nice neighbor when things are okay, but a bad ally when things go wrong and you need to fight against an external threat.
If you repeatedly experience situations where you need help against someone who hurts you, but you are only surrounded by the “kind and weak” people who express their sympathies but won’t help you, it is easy to become bitter about this type of kindness. (For example, imagine a child who is bullied at school, and has classmates who are nice to them in private, but refuse to confront the bully.)
EDIT:
Perhaps more importantly, sometimes we need to predict what will happen if circumstances change. If a person is “kind and strong”, making them stronger is probably a safe choice, seems like more of the same.
If a person is “kind and weak”, making them strong could come with an unpleasant surprise. (Even for the person themselves!) Exposed to new temptation, it might turn out that the person actually sucks at resisting them. Or they might turn out perfectly OK… the problem is, we don’t know, so it makes sense to remind ourselves that the “kind and weak” people were actually not tested by the fire of some temptations.
(This can happen by giving a weak person an official position of power, but probably way more often happens informally, e.g. when a weak man finally gets a girlfriend, or a weak woman has a child.)
A person might be kind to you because they do not have the option to be cruel, or because they are scared of the consequences from others if they behave as such, or because it simply has not occurred to them. But it is far more representative of someone’s character if they choose to be kind if they indeed have the capacity, are not scared of the consequences, and have considered it.
Person A has the capacity to be cruel, but has recently been kind to so many people that when they interacted with you, they just automatically were kind.
Person B enjoys being cruel to various people, and originally also intended to be cruel to you… but then realized that a much cleverer plan would be to be kind to you, and manipulate you to reveal some information that will allow them to be even more cruel towards a third party.
By this logic, B has better character than A.
Maybe we should have the current system school as a fallback, and the offer would be: “You can learn things on your own ahead of time and get paid for that, or failing that you will learn in the classroom and not get paid for that.”
A problem with “if I build the superhuman AI, I will rule the world” is that Trump may take it away from you at gunpoint at the last moment.
(Kinda reminds me of the “knowledge is power / no, power is power” scene from the Game of Thrones.)
Doesn’t “our culture is good” imply that you should keep all your current cultural memes, including the junk ones and the harmful ones?
The key point is these must be occasional. If I ordered takeaway for dinner every day for my family of 5, I’d be spending an extra 1000 dollars each month just on food.
Yeah, this is a very important thing. Buying an expensive computer once a year is cheaper than buying pizza every day, and yet many people are okay with the latter, but surprised about you “wasting money” if you do the former.
Even when you spend money to make your life easier or more pleasant, you can still consider how much easiness or pleasure you buy per dollar, and only take the good trades. There is a difference between “I will suffer in order to maximize my savings” and “I will spend some money to make myself happier”, but there is also a difference between “I will spend some money to make myself happier” and “I will waste money in a way that doesn’t even make me happier”.
Also, some people or companies will try to extract money from you. Even if you decide to spend more money, it doesn’t mean that you should do it exactly the way other people are nudging you to do. The companies will put some ads in front of your eyes, and you may go like “hm, yeah I guess I could spend some money on this, it seems nice”, but maybe it would be better to spend the same money in a completely different way. For example, you could spend money to have other people set up furniture for you… but you could also spend money to set up your own workshop where you can build your own furniture, and perhaps that would be more fun. Similarly, you could pay someone to cook your meals… but you could also pay someone to teach you how to cook new meals.
I imagine that an efficient way to impact wisdom would be getting a good model of you, and finding a realistic hypothetical situation where your current behavior and beliefs would lead into a disaster, and explaining why.
But that of course is much easier said than done.