Stop Making Sense

post by JenniferRM · 2024-12-23T05:16:12.428Z · LW · GW · 0 comments

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Epistemic Status: Seven years and one day ago, I wrote this. In 2017 we faced years of Trump and couldn't imagine covid. Here in 2024 we face years of Trump and I'm trying to "imagine what we can't imagine". I dislike the title (except for the part where it might introduce people to music from a previous century) but sort of ONLY the title. The title suggests that "sense-making" is "bad", but what I dislike are strong takes on things so abstract as to lose their connection to concrete concerns [LW · GW]. I consider ideas here friendly with Sarah shining her flashlight of curiosity upon the slipperiness of words in and out of their various contexts and David trying to name the virtue of handling what he calls systems or rationalities, but which I'm calling microtheories below (following the CYC team who noticed the necessity but never seems to have thought to ask where the necessity came from). The reason to publish now is discussed in the post script.

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It seems unlikely to me that a mass sharing of world models from everyone to everyone is a good idea, especially the sharing of low resolution globally applicable models.

Globally applicable updates are often "too much" to behaviorally integrate, so restricting to local relevance makes things more manageable. Cruxes can be found more easily, and so on.

It is OK to be somewhat inconsistent from one local context to another, so long as you don't get too crazy with it. Tolerating cognitive dissonance is a virtue.

Fix your retirement planning. Separately fix your health stuff. Separately fix your career-related skill acquisition. Separately fix your media exposure habits.

Like, it is probably OK to have subtly but pervasively different micro-theories about "memetics" when thinking about (1) finance marketing, (2) diet advice, (3) implicit skill transfer, and (4) the economics of ad-supported news organizations.

The actual key thing is that each micro-theory helps you get your working theory in each context helps you (1) actually retire, (2) with health, (3) by making money with efficiently acquired skills, (4) while... uh... yeah I'd rather not talk about mass media just now ;-)

If you want to retire, ask people about their retirement models. If someone asks you for retirement advice, share your micro-theories freely. Crux away! But don't go spreading the models around until someone asks, and if someone's retirement planning turns into a theory of everything that indicates that you should give them money... be suspicious.

There will be a lot of noise if everyone spreads memes profligately and feels virtuous by doing so. Also, this noise will make it easier for bad actors to blend into the larger chaos in predatory ways, and second order spreaders of ill-intended memes (that are optimized to be viral) might do this with full good faith with net bad effects. (Also, the "share this for great virtue" hook is a classic component of a lot of weaponized memes.)

Personally I've always avoided Facebook because it is basically a cesspool where the opposite of this kind of thinking is the de facto driver of Zuckerberg's money making scheme.

I try to stick to conversations with people I know F2F, preferably for years.

For me personally, my parents are always in my model sharing loop to at least some degree, as a "sanity release valve".

However, I've found that recommending this tactic to other people my age often elicits strong aversions to parental trust that are decently well founded. Based on this I've updated moderately in the direction of my parents being unusually sane. Still, the advice to share models with your parents is likely to still work for anyone who bothers to care about sanity and who suspects that their parents are at or above the 90th percentile of "parental sanity".

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Post Script: I publish now because my mother died ~2 weeks ago. She was causally upstream of the existence of at least one LW post [LW · GW] because she helped me understand (n=1) that "an agent" could be absolutely supportive of some other agent with some other utility function to the best of their ability, and it could just work. And there were coherent evolutionary arguments for why that would be, but also I could simply look and see [LW · GW] that this sort of "way for an agent to be" exists coherently, despite examples being rare in any other part of nature or human experience other than in the active care of wise mammalian parents.

The theory and the praxis were unified here, if anywhere, in ways that were vivid to me, based on my fair share of the benevolence built into mammalian biology. And so on the second shortest day of the year, with nights that are long, but getting shorter now, I found an old draft of an essay that reminds me of parents in general, and my mother's unique goodness as a parent in particular, and what has been lost 🕯️

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