bgold's Shortform

• Why do I not always have conscious access to my inner parts? Why, when speaking with authority figures, might I have a sudden sense of blankness.
• Recently I've been thinking about this reaction in the frame of 'legibility', ala Seeing like a State. State's would impose organizational structures on societies that were easy to see and control - they made the society more legible - to the actors who ran the state, but these organizational structure were bad for the people in the society.
• For example, census data, standardized weights and measures, and uniform languages make it easier to tax and control the population. [Wikipedia]
• I'm toying with applying this concept across the stack.
• If you have an existing model of people being made up of parts [Kaj's articles], I think there's a similar thing happening. I notice I'm angry but can't quite tell why or get a conceptual handle on it - if it were fully legible and accessible to conscious mind, then it would be much easier to apply pressure and control that 'part', regardless if the control I am exerting is good. So instead, it remains illegible.
• A level up, in a small group conversation, I notice I feel missed, like I'm not being heard in fullness, but someone else directly asks me about my model and I draw a blank, like I can't access this model or share it. If my model were legible, someone else would get more access to it and be able to control it/point out its flaws. That might be good or it might be bad, but if it's illegible it can't be "coerced"/"mistaken" by others.
• One more level up, I initially went down this track of thinking for a few reasons, one of which was wondering why prediction forecasting systems are so hard to adopt within organizations. Operationalization of terms is difficult and it's hard to get a precise enough question that everyone can agree on, but it's very 'unfun' to have uncertain terms (people are much more likely to not predict then predict with huge uncertainty). I think the legibility concept comes into play - I am reluctant to put a term out that is part of my model of the world and attach real points/weight to it because now there's this "legible leverage point" on me.
• I hold this pretty loosely, but there's something here that rings true and is similar to an observation Robin Hanson made around why people seem to trust human decision makers more than hard standards.
• This concept of personal legibility seems associated with the concept of bucket errors, in that theoretically sharing a model and acting on the model are distinct actions, except I expect often legibility concerns are highly warranted (things might be out to get you)

• Yes And is an improv technique where you keep the energy in a scene alive by going w/ the other persons suggestion and adding more to it. "A: Wow is that your pet monkey? B: Yes and he's also my doctor!"
• Yes And is generative (creates a lot of output), as opposed to Hmm No which is critical (distills output)
• A lot of the Sequences is Hmm No
• It's not that Hmm No is wrong, it's that it cuts off future paths down the Yes And thought-stream.
• If there's a critical error at the beginning of a thought that will undermine everything else then it makes sense to Hmm No (we don't want to spend a bunch of energy on something that will be fundamentally unsound). But if the later parts of the thought stream are not closely dependent on the beginning, or if it's only part of the stream that gets cut off, then you've lost a lot of potential value that could've been generated by the Yes And.
• In conversation yes and is much more fun, which might be why the Sequences are important as a corrective (yeah look it's not fun to remember about biases, but they exist and you should model/include them)
• Write drunk, edit sober. Yes And drunk, Hmm No in the morning.

I have a cold, which reminded me that I want fashionable face masks to catch on so that I can wear them all the time in cold-and-flu season without accruing weirdness points.

Depression as a concept doesn't make sense to me. Why on earth would it be fitness enhancing to have a state of withdrawal, retreat, collapse where a lack of energy prevents you from trying new things? I've brainstormed a number of explanations:

• depression as chemical imbalance: a hardware level failure has occurred, maybe randomly maybe because of an "overload" of sensation
• depression as signaling: withdrawal and retreat from the world indicates a credible signal that I need help
• depression as retreat: the environment has become dangerous and bad and I should withdraw from it until it changes.

I'm partial to the explanation offered by the Predictive Processing Model, that depression is an extreme form of low confidence. As SSC write:

imagine the world’s most unsuccessful entrepreneur. Every company they make flounders and dies. Every stock they pick crashes the next day. Their vacations always get rained-out, their dates always end up with the other person leaving halfway through and sticking them with the bill.

What if your job is advising this guy? If they’re thinking of starting a new company, your advice is “Be really careful – you should know it’ll probably go badly”.

if sadness were a way of saying “Things are going pretty badly, maybe be less confidence and don’t start any new projects”, that would be useful...

Depression isn’t normal sadness. But if normal sadness lowers neural confidence a little, maybe depression is the pathological result of biological processes that lower neural confidence.

But I still don't understand why the behaviors we often see with depression - isolation, lack of energy - are 'longterm adaptive'. If a particular policy isn't working, I'd expect to see more energy going into experimentation.

[TK. Unfinished because I accidentally clicked submit and haven't finished editing the full comment]

Is the clearest "win" of a LW meme the rise of the term "virtue signaling"? On the one hand I'm impressed w/ how dominant it has become in the discourse, on the other... maybe our comparative advantage is creating really sharp symmetric weapons...