To what degree do you model people as agents?

In the past year or two, I've spent a lot of time explicitly trying to taboo "agenty" modelling of people from my thoughts. I didn't have a word for it before, and I'm still not sure agenty is the right word, but it's the right idea. One interesting consequence is that I very rarely get angry any more. It just doesn't make sense to be angry when you think of everyone (including yourself) mechanically. Frustration still happens, but it lacks the sense of blame that comes with anger, and it's much easier to control. In fact, I often find others' anger confusing now.

At this point, my efforts to taboo agenty thinking have been successful enough that I misinterpreted the first two paragraphs of this post. I thought it was about the distinction between people I model as full game-theoretic agents (I account for them accounting for my actions) versus people who will execute a fixed script without any reflective reasoning. To me, that's the difference between PCs and NPCs.

More recently, following this same trajectory, I've experimented with tabooing moral value assignments from my thoughts. Whenever I catch myself thinking of what one "should" do, I taboo "should" and replace it with something else. Originally, this amorality-via-taboo was just an experiment, but I was so pleased with it that I kept it around. It really helps you notice what you actually want, and things like "ugh" reactions become more obvious. I highly recommend it, at least as an experiment for a week or two.

One of my habits while driving is to attempt to model the minds of many of the drivers around me (in situations of light traffic). One result is that when someone does something unexpected, my first reaction is typically "what does he know that I don't?" rather than "what is that idiot doing?". From talking to other drivers, this part of my driving seem abnormal.

In this sense, I model my parents strongly as agents–I have close to 100% confidence that they will do whatever it takes to solve a problem for me.

One of the frequent complaints about the 'agent' concept space, and the "heroic responsibility" concept in particular, is that it rarely seems to take into account people's spheres of responsibility. Are your parents the sort of people who would be able to solve anyone's problem, or are they especially responsible for you? Are other people that seem to be NPCs to you just people that don't care enough about you to spend limited cognitive (and other) resources on you and your problems?

With people who I model as agents, I'm more likely to invoke phrases like "it was your fault that X happened" or "you said you would do Y, why didn't you?" The degree to which I feel blame or judgement towards people for not doing things they said they would do is almost directly proportional to how much I model them as agents. For people who I consider less agenty, whom I model more as complex systems, I'm more likely to skip the blaming step and jump right to "what are the things that made it hard for you to do Y? Can we fix them?"

Do you get more of what you want by blaming people or assigning fault?

I propose a theme song for this comment section.

One of my fond memories of high school is being a little snot and posing a math problem to a "dumb kid". I proceeded to think up the wrong answer, and he got the right one (order of operations :D ). This memory is a big roadblock to me modeling other people as different "types" - differences are mostly of degree, not kind. A smart person can do math? Well, a dumb person has math that they can do well. A smart person plans their life? Dumb people make plans too. A dumb person uses bad reasoning? Smart people use bad reasoning.

I consistently, predictably get mad at her for things like saying she'll do the dishes and then not doing them

This doesn't sound like a lack of agentiness. This sounds like a communication problem. Do you think that you're more likely to think of someone as "agenty" if their planning processes are (seemingly) transparent to you (e.g. "this person said they wanted a cookie, then they took actions to get a cookie") vs. non-transparent (e.g. "that person said they wanted a salad, then they took actions to get a cookie")?

The above is a troll fake account (see "Eliezar" instead of "Eliezer", and "Yudkowky" instead of Yudkowsky), please delete and ban him.

#1 grates for me. If a friend goes to me in tears more than a couple of times demanding that I fix their bicycle/grades/relationship/emotional problems, I will no longer consider them a friend. If you ask politely I'll try to get you on the right track (here's the tool you need and here's how to use it/this is how to sign up for tutoring/whatever), but doing much more than that is treating the asker as less than an agent themself. Going to your friend in tears before even trying to come up with a solution yourself is not a good behavior to encourage (I've been on both sides of this, and it's not good for anyone).

Don't confuse reliability and responsibility with being a sucker.

PCs are also systems; they're just systems with a stronger heroic responsibility drive. On the other hand, when you successfully do things and I couldn't predict exactly how you would do them, I have no choice but to model you as an 'intelligence'. But that's, well... really rare.

The OP here raises a very interesting question, but I can't help but be distracted by the phrasing. Humans are both decision-making agents and complex biochemical systems so my poor pedantic brain is spinning it's wheels trying to turn that into a dichotomy. If it were me I would have said Subject v Object, especially since this ties into objectification, but that's a nitpick too minor for me not to upvote it. Anyway...

Personally I lean towards a "complex systems" model of other humans. People can surprise you, pleasantly or unpleasantly, in how they react to things, but then again you could say the same about any sufficiently complex process. And it's not very hard to learn patterns to predict how people (or groups of people) react to a given class of stimulus if you're empathetic and observant, just like with animals and computers. I consider it one of my better qualities that I can usually guess the inputs people are looking for when they talk to me and subtly work them into the conversation; it sounds somewhat artificial when put in those words but its actually a really intuitive process once you get the hang of it.

I model basically everyone I interact with as an agent. This is useful when trying to get help from people who don't want to help you, such as customer service or bureaucrats. By giving the agent agency, it's easy to identify the problem: the agent in question wants to get rid of you with the least amount of effort so they can go back to chatting with their coworkers/browsing the internet/listening to the radio. The solution is generally to make it seem like less effort to get rid of you by helping you with your problem (which is their job after all) than something else. This can be done by simply insisting on being helped, making a ruckus, or asking for a manager, depending on the situation.

This post reminded me of a conversation I was having the other day, where I noted that I commit the planning fallacy far less than average because I rarely even model myself as an agent.

Good article!

One of my hobbyhorses is that you can gain a good deal of insight into someone's political worldview by observing whom they blame versus absolve for bad acts, since blame implies agency and absolution tends to minimize it. Often you find this pattern to be the reverse of stated sympathies. Examples left as an exercise to the reader.

Almost everyone at the table immediately recognized what we were talking about and agreed that modelling some people as agents and some people as complex systems was a thing they did.

Wow. I did not realize that so many other people felt aware of this dichotomy.

So, usually when I'm in a good mood, there isn't any dichotomy. I model everyone in exactly the same way that I model myself - as individuals with certain strengths and weaknesses. You might say that I even model myself as a complex system, to a degree. The model is complete enough that the complex system feels like an agent - things like personal responsibility and ability to do stuff are parts of the model.

However, when I am in a depressed mood, things start to change. I start modelling everyone as complex systems and the models are pessimistic and I do it in such a way that somehow makes me perceive them like objects, or perhaps like non-human animals or the senile. As a result of not feeling like they are people, I am overcome by a feeling of intense loneliness.

As with your roommate, much of the frustration is that I expect them to behave the way that you describe "agents", but they keep failing to meet expectations- and some of this frustration is self directed as well, when I see myself making the same mistakes despite knowing that they are mistakes and knowing the neurological reasons behind why I keep making the mistakes. The is-aught dichotomy is the cause of the frustration - it's the sort of frustration you might direct at a broken computer tinged with a sense of disappointment, a sense that it could be so much more.

But when I'm in a good mood, this all fades away. I'm able to model people as agenty-complex systems while retaining normal emotional attachment and still feeling like they are people. When I'm in a good mood, awareness of my own limitations and other's limitations actually makes it easier to accept when we make mistakes.

I want to model her as an agent... she's one of the least agenty people I know...So I consistently, predictably get mad at her

So I think you may be like bad-mood-me in this respect: You might have difficulty simultaneously modeling people as complex systems while relating to them emotionally as people.

Even though there isn't actually an IQ-depression correlation (or at least, I haven't found one in the literature) I think this whole "most people are NPCs" complex might strike at the heart of why there is a perception that smart people feel lonely and depressed - or at least misanthropic.

Other than positive affect, one thing that somewhat cures this misanthropy problem for me is compassion meditation. I start with people who are closest to me, and think about the love that they feel for me. Then I imagine people who are further for me, and imagine the love that they feel for each other. Basically, I re-affirm that even if people don't always act the correct way, they share fundamental values with me. I try to extent the thoughts as far as I can, making sure to identify the people who frustrate me the most and identifying the points at which we share fundamental values. This practice doesn't necessarily increase positive affect, but it does make the sense of loneliness go away.

Basically, instead of modelling people as complex systems in a way that deagentizes them, it's better to model people as complex systems who are also agent-like and who are trying to be a certain way, but failing because of x,y, z complex system flaws.

I aspire to model myself as the only "agent" in the system, kind of like Harry does in HPMOR (with the possible exception of Professor Quirrell). I'm the one whose behavior I can change most directly, so it is unhelpful (at least for me) to model circumstances (which can cause a dangerous victim mentality) or other people as agents. Even if I know I can make an argument to try to change another person's mind, and estimate I have a 50/50 chance of success, it is still me who is making the choice to use Argument A rather than Argument B.

In terms of an NPC/PC distinction, anyone whom I have the ability to reliably model accurately is an NPC to me, and the PC's are everyone else. Both have moral value to me, though people I consider PC's are obviously more interesting for me to hang out with. (Almost) Everyone's a PC to someone, though, so I definitely don't hold it against the people I consider NPCs.

For an example, I consider all three members of my immediate family (my younger sister, my father, and my mother) NPCs. They are all fervent evangelical Christians and that constrains their behaviors significantly. Nonetheless, spending time with them (well, sometimes) evokes positive emotions from me, and I happily do chores for them.

Hmm. I seem to very much, very purely, model myself as an NPC by these definitions. By extension, since I can't use empathic modelling to differentiate like you describe doing, so I model exactly everyone as NPCs. It's also the case that I've never had to model a PC in detail; I know about some people who are, probably including you, but I've never really had the opportunity to interact with such a rare creature for long enough to develop a new way of modelling and seem to be just wining it b just assigning a probability bending magic black box power called "rationality".

I suspect all people, including me, are NPC meat-computers running firmware/software that provides the persistent, conscious illusion of PC-ness (or agenty-ness). Some people are more advanced computers and, therefore, seem more agenty... but all are computers nontheless.

Modeling people this way (as very complex NPCs), as some have pointed out in the comments, seems to be a rather effective means of limiting the experience of anger and frustration... or at least making anger and frustration seem irrational, thereby causing it (at least in my experience) to lose it's appeal (catharsis, or whatever) over time. It has worked that way for me.

...

I'm curious... and perhaps someone (smarter than I) can help enlighten me...

How is a discussion of free will different (or similar to) PC vs. NPC?

Any mind that I can model sufficiently well to be accurate ceases to be an agent at that point.

If I can predict what you are going to do with 100% certainty, then it doesn't matter what internal processes lead you to take that action. I don't need to see into the black box to predict the action of the machine.

People I know well maintain their agenthood by virtue of the fact that they are sufficiently complex to think in ways I do not.

For these reasons, I rarely attempt to model the mental processes of minds I consider to be stronger than mine (in the rational sense.) Attempting to ask myself what a powerful rationalist would do is not a useful heuristic, as my model of a strong rationalist is not, in itself, stronger than my own understanding of rationalism.

Schelling's Strategy of Conflict says that in some cases, advertising non-agency can be useful, something like "If you cross this threshold, that will trigger punitive retaliation, regardless of cost-benefit, I have no choice in the matter."

Hm, interesting. I have some terminological confusion to battle through here.

My mind associates "agent" with either Bond/MiB creatures or game theory and economics. The distinction you're drawing I would describe as active and passive. "Agenty"/PC people are the active ones, they make things happen, they shape the narrative, they are internally driven to change their environment. By contrast the "complex-system"/NPC people are the passive ones, they react to events, they go with the flow, the circumstances around them drive their behavior.

I don't think of active and passive as two kinds of people. I think of them as two endpoints on an axis with most people being somewhere in the middle. It's a characteristic of a person, a dimension of her personality.

I thought #3 was the definition of "agent", which I suppose is why it got that label. #1 sounds a little like birds confronted by cuckoo parasitism, which Eliezer might call "sphexish" rather than agenty.

I've used "agentness" in at least one LessWrong post to mean the amount of information you need to predict their behavior, given their environment, though I don't think I defined it that way. A person whose actions can always be predicted from existing social conventions, or from the content of the Bible, is not a moral agent. You might call them a moral person, but they've surrendered their agency.

Perhaps I first got this notion of agency from the Foundation Trilogy: Agenthood is the degree to which you mess up Hari Seldon's equations.

My preference in cases like this is not to puzzle over what the word "agent" means, but to try to come up with a related concept that is useful and (theoretically) measurable. Here I'd suggest measuring the number of bits that a person requires you to add to your model of the world. This has the advantage that a complex person who you're able to predict through long association with them still has a large number, while a random process is impossible to predict yet adds few bits to your model.

This kind of distinction is one of the reasons I say that the difference between highly-intelligent people and people of average intelligence is greater than the difference between people of average intelligence and dogs.

(bits of surprise provided by a highly-intelligent person - bits of surprise provided by a human of average intelligence) > (bits of surprise provided by a human of average intelligence - bits of surprise provided by a dog).

Though my greater experience with humans, their greater homogeneity owing to language and culture, and whatever rationality they possess, biases each human to require adding fewer bits, so that bits of surprise provided by a dog may on average be greater than bits of surprise provided by an average person. There's something wrong with this measure if it penalizes rationality and language use.

The degree to which I feel blame or judgement towards people for not doing things they said they would do is almost directly proportional to how much I model them as agents.

I've noticed that people are angrier at behaviors they can't explain. The anger subdues when they learn about the motives and circumstances that led to the behavior. If non-agents are suppose to be less predictable, I'd guess we're more inclined to judge/blame them.

Here's my answer to the title question, before reading the post*:

I understand the word "agent" to refer to model I created specifically for modeling humans. The agree to such a degree that any discrepancy is almost entirely due to the ambiguity of these words.

After reading the post: I don't notice myself making the distinction you describe. Under your distinction, the way I model people seems more like treating everyone (including myself) as a complex system than treating everyone (including myself) as an agent, but I'm not sure of this.

*Well, I peeked at the first few sentences.

Upon reflection, I think I consider people whose behavior I have trouble modeling/predicting (roughly those smarter than I am) as PCs and the rest (including myself, unfortunately) as NPCs. However, sometimes I get surprised by NPCs behaving in an agenty way, and sometimes I get surprised by PCs behaving predictably, including predictably wrong.

This seems to me to be a conversation about semantics. Ie.

IF

You and I both view John to have the same:

1) Reliability and responsibility 2) Intellectual formidability 3) Conventional "agentiness"

BUT

You think that intellectual formidability is part of what makes someone "agenty" and I don't.

THEN

We agree about everything that's "real", and only are choosing to define the word "agent" differently.

I anticipate a reasonable chance that something in this conversation just went right over my head, and that it's about something much deeper than semantics.

For what it's worth, when I think of the word "agenty" I think almost exclusively about property 3. Another way to put it might be the extent to which your behavior is a result of your impulses.

I imagine some sort of spectrum from "I act based on my impulses and I believe things based on the immediate feelings they provoke in me" to "I stop and think about the costs and benefits before acting, I explore multiple hypotheses, and I do the same for my beliefs".

There's no natural grouping to your examples. Some of them are just people who care about you. Others are people who do things you find impressive.

Frankly, this whole discussion comes across as arrogant and callous. I know we're ostensibly talking about "degree of models" or whatever, but there are clear implicit descriptive claims being made, based on value judgments.

I model people constantly, but agency and the "PC vs. NPC" distinction don't even come into it. There are classes of models, but they're more like classes of computational automata: less or more complex, roughly scaling with the scope of my interactions with a person. For instance, it's usually fine to model a grocery store cashier as a nondeterministic finite state machine; handing over groceries and paying are simple enough interactions that an NFSM suffices. Of course the cashier has just as much agency and free will as I do -- but there's a point of diminishing returns on how much effort I invest into forming a more comprehensive model, and since my time and willpower are limited, I prefer to spend that effort on people I spend more time with. Agency is always present in every model, but whether it affects the predictions a given model outputs depends on the complexity of the model.

I was thinking about this recently in the context of the game Diplomacy. One way top play is to model your opponents as rational self interested actors making the optimal move for them at a particular time. This can seperate off your attitudes to people in the game from your normal emotional reactions (e.g. move from "he stabbed me in the back" to "He acted in his self interest as I should have expected").

[An interesting exercise would be to write down each turn what you predict the other players will do and compare that to their actions.]

There are at best seven people in the world that are actually modelled as agents in my own head. My algorithm for predicting behaviour of an individual generally follows 1) Find out what someone of their social class normally does 2) Assume they will continue to do that plus or minus some hobbies and quirks 3) If they deviate really strangely, check how they have reacted to past crises and whether they have any interests which make them likely to deviate again. If this fails, then begin modelling them to increase prediction accuracy.

This works reasonably well, but likely betrays a rather weak theory of mind. It would probably be more easy to make close friends and communicate if I could at least temporarily assign agency to people around me, but doing so is difficult. Most social interactions can be spoofed with little or no personal attachment to an individual, model the map between someones environment and goals to their actions, and you have to troubleshoot all kinds of errors, such as when someones goals are self defeating.

I'd personally name the ability to change opinions and behaviour as the most important difference between PC and NPC.

So, you (Swimmer963) think of agenty people as being those who:

1. Are reliable
2. Are skilled (in areas you are less familiar with)
3. Act deliberately, especially for their own interest

It is interesting that all three of these behaviors seem to be high status behaviors. So, my question is this: does high status make someone seem more agenty to you? Could sufficiently high status be a sufficient condition for someone being "agenty"?

After I read the question "do you model people as agents versus complex systems?", I started to wonder which of the two options is more "sophisticated". Is an agent more sophisticated than a complex system, or vice versa? I don't really have an opinion here.

Something I like to tell myself is that people are animals first and foremost. Whenever anyone does anything I find strange, unusual, or irrational, my instinct is to speculate about the cause of the behavior. If person A is rude towards person B, I don't think, "person A is being a bad person"; I think something like, "person A is frustrated with person B and believes person B is misbehaving, and believes that rudeness is justified in this situation".

So I guess that when I ask myself what's the difference between an agent and a complex system, my first thought is to say that an agent is not composed of parts, whereas a complex system is. Under this definition, it's a fact that humans are complex systems, not agents.

My older brother is the type of person who is "conventionally agenty": he has goals, and he attempts to achieve them by applying problem-solving skills, usually with great success. A certain other person I know (call him P), on the other hand, is the opposite: he has goals, but he makes no apparent effort to achieve them, and so he doesn't. (He's definitely getting better, though—just not very quickly.) The difference between my brother and P seems to come down to one single difference in attitude. My brother's attitude toward goals is to think about how they could be achieved, and to try to figure out how to achieve the achievable ones. P's attitude toward goals is to go ahead and achieve them if he already knows how to, and just ignore them otherwise.

"Agent-like" definitely isn't the way I'd describe my brother; I'd call him proactive.

For what it's worth, my attitude toward goals is less my-brother-like than seems ideal. Given a goal other than overcoming procrastination, I think about it and try to determine whether it's a good use of my time or not. If it is, I add it to my to-do list; otherwise, I forget about it. The goal of overcoming procrastination is something I think about carefully many times every day. This goal seems to be extremely difficult for me to achieve, which makes me wonder why everyone else seems to have it so easy.