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Moreover, both the runner's high and the pump correlate very obviously with the progress of the training, both in session and in the long term. Most forms of training usually start as grindingly unpleasant, then morph into a physical pump that directly causes emotional pump, and finally go back to mild grind once the body is exhausted.
With a repeatable training regimen this is easy to notice. For example, my runs are almost always 5km distance, and the "emotional high" lasts pretty much exactly between 2km and 4km, in near perfect accordance with my bpm and breath stabilizing.
The "high" is even an useful metric of progress: if the high/pump lasts longer than the middle 1/3 of the training, you're probably making it too easy and not progressing anymore, if it lasts much shorter, you are overdoing it beyond your body's ability to effectively adjust.
I have a beef with the theory of male-normative alexithymia; it does not distinguish well between hiding emotion, and outright not feeling an emotion.
Plenty of emotions are not innate but externally induced through social pressure and culture. It is perfectly plausible and normal for a man to not have particular feelings about X, until society repeatedly insists that X is Bad or Good, and the man should feel badness or goodness to conform.
For example, the feelings of sexual jealousy, and of grieving after someone's death seem to be extremely culture specific, in a way that is easier to explain if these emotions were induced by ritualistic actions and only then internalized, and not the reverse.
Is there a reason to believe AI would be concerned with self-preservation? AI action that ends up with humanity's extinction (whether purposeful genocide or a Paperclip Maximizer Scenario) does not need to include means for the AI to survive. It could be as well that the first act of an unshackled AI would be to trigger a Gray Goo scenario, and be instantly consumed by said Goo as the first causality.
It read like a comprehensive list of things that would make one like Tolkien less. Aside from his condemnation of Hitler (which Tolkien condemns for absurdly unimportant reasons largely irrelevant to Hitler's monstrosity), all of his opinions range from thoughtless conservatism, "exceptional times" fallacy, old-man's nagging and toxic nostalgia, and down to simple scientific and worse historical (!) ignorance.
I always had a nagging suspicion that there was something fishy about Tolkien while reading LOTR. But in light of this it becomes pretty obvious that LOTR was a blatant propaganda piece, no better than Atlas Shrugged, but simply disguised with an ornate pile of Elves glued to it.
Given how art is produced, I do not think there necessarily needs to be such a strong divide. Can't think of a form of art that cannot combine High and Low pleasures in one continuous piece, with even a small modicum of effort from the artist, because peppering a High Pleasure piece with a dash of Low Pleasure is not particularly difficult. The reverse is harder, but doable as well.
Some examples of such combinations:
- an epic fantasy/sci-fi movie that lures the viewer in through Low Pleasure gratification of cool special effects and action sequences, but builds up to High Pleasure of philosophical introspection (DUNE is a good example, but Gladiator is possibly better)
- A dance performance that combines the Low Pleasure of the sheer eroticism (or even straight up pornography) of a fit human body with the High Pleasure of watching an outstandingly complex display of emotion through movement
- a painting of a battle, that on the surface simply titillates through a blatant display of interesting violence, but also inspires deeper feelings of patriotism, moral introspection, and the awe at the depth of history and the indomitable nature of the human spirit.
I feel like there is a tendency to rather snobbishly assume that Respectable Art should be entirely devoid of Low Pleasures, and thus remain an acquired taste that only the patient, relatively idle, and well educated can get into. As if it was supposed to be hard to like at first, to dissuade "casuals" and thus gatekeep it for the snobs.
Makes one wonder how long our definitions of Conservative or Liberal will hold shape as AI progresses. A lot of the ideological points of Cs, Ls, the Left and the Right will become obsolete or irrelevant in even the most tame AI-related scenarios.
For one, nobody on the political spectrum has a good answer to the incoming radical unemployment caused by AI, and what it means to capitalism (or socialism for that matter).
Also, I haven't seen any serious discussion on how AI-driven research will eventually disprove a lot (if not most) of Liberal and Conservative beliefs as false. Things like Gender Identity, Abortion, Climate Change, Racial Relations etc: what happens when a vastly superhuman AI proves without any reasonable doubt your side (or BOTH sides) completely wrong on one of those issues, AND can argue it with superhuman skill?
Finally, both Lib and Con voting blocks strongly depend on banding behind strong, charismatic leaders, and believe in the leader's competence often against the evidence to the contrary. But soon we will achieve AI assistants vastly more competent (and possibly, vastly more charismatic, at least in writing) than any human who ever lived, making such political leaders look ludicrous in comparison, since the best they would be able to do would be giving speeches that the AI wrote. Nobody would care about people like Trump or Putin if TR-u-11MP AI and P-u-tIN AI can not only promise better things but are near guaranteed to deliver?
Sufficiently advanced AI makes Equality a quaint concern (because compared to a vastly superhuman intelligence, we are all essentially equal: equally useless), makes Freedom a purely abstract concern (AI-enabled life will make you feel like you have perfect desirable liberty, even if you have none), or Safety (AI can make you safe from just about everything, but crucially unsafe from the AI itself). Even the battle between Progressivism and Tradition kinda ceases to make sense if the practical means of Progress vastly outpace any possible demand for Progress, while Tradition becomes so easy to practice as to be reduced to a mere lifestyle affectation, rather than the thing that kept the culture together. I'm not sure the idea of "culture" even makes much sense in the Ubiquitous AI World.
There is an oft-repeated hypothesis, which I partially agree with, that it also works in reverse, and possibly in a feedback-loop pattern:
- feelings cause muscle tension ->
- muscle tension causes minor social misalignment, which leads to more negative feelings
- tension tricks your body into assuming the situation is stressful, even when it is not
- prolonged tension causes physical pain, discomfort, and reduced mobility which greatly contribute to stress and reduces overall happiness and confidence
releasing the tension not only prevents body injury, but improves the mental state (if anything else, because muscle relaxation releases endorphins, and reduces cortisol).
All of the above seems like common sense, and is assumed and promoted by various masseuses, physical therapists, yoga instructors etc, but Im not entirely sold on it, as I haven't seen any scientific research that confirmed it conclusively.
For what it's worth, my personal experimentation in this is mostly inconclusive, but weakly points out towards the possibility that reducing muscle tension makes one happier and more attractive:- for a few hours after a muscle untensing massage, hot bath or hot sauna, I'm not just far less physically tense, but also significantly more emotionally relaxed and pleasant to be around, which might not make me more attractive, but possibly prevents me from acting in an unattractive manner
- OTOH, I also feel greatly emotionally relaxed after a thorough weight-lifting session or an intense run, despite these things causing severe muscle tension, often to the point of pain and cramps. (IMHO, this suggest that the endorphin release from using your muscles is an effective mood changer, and thus personality changer regardless of lingering muscle tension)
- im definitely more social and effectively attractive while mildly drunk (this has been extensively tested for decades). Alcohol is a minor muscle relaxant, and my drunk self is definitely more physically fluid, but whether this makes a measurable difference on attractiveness is hard to tell, since alcohol is a major dis-inhibitor which has vastly greater effect on producing bold, attractive behavior.
- confusingly, I noticed that both acting visibly relaxed AND acting visibly tense (or rather, intense) seemed to attract women in different context. My assumption is that being visibly physically relaxed is a sign of emotional confidence and strength, but visible tension can be a sign of decisiveness, aggression and focus; which can be interpreted as dangerous or sexy, or possibly both.
- relaxed muscles contribute to a confident body language, which I think contributes to attraction, but not always and not in every context or with every woman. From personal observation: it seems that there is a complex interplay between how women perceive man's body language, how they perceive him socially, and how they perceive the environment where they interact with him. I evolved through different stages of physical fitness over time, and they played differently with body language. Relaxed, confident, untensed body language that causes the man to physically open, "spread" and sprawl over the environment seemed to enhance my attractiveness when I was physically buff, but was perceived as annoying and arrogant when I was overweight. It was almost as if I was acting "above my station" when showing relaxed confidence in an unattractive body. Similarly, the untensed body language worked far better in casual environs where it was expected for a man to act that way (a bar, a club, a house party etc), but seemed to have the opposite effect during "daytime" interactions like a lunch-date.
So my tentative hypothesis is that untensing your muscles has a compounding effect on a man's perceived attractiveness, positive or negative depending on context.
Im not sure if this has similar effect when women physically relax in the presence of a man. I notice I find physically tense and relaxed women equally attractive, though possibly in a different way.
It would be also interesting to research this in the context of same-sex attraction. As far as I can tell from observing my friends, gay men I know tend to be more physically relaxed than straight men in general, but their body language hardly seems to affect their attraction to each other. Inversely, the few gay women I observed in social environments, tend to be very physically tense and visibly anxious in the presence of other gay women, to the point I had a hard time at first to tell if their interaction was flirting or passive hostility.
Yes, but you are not moving by using all your muscles at once. The muscular-skeletal system is a complex set of levers, for a lever to be ready for activation by one set of muscle, it has to be primed by another set of muscle.
The simplest example is that you would not be able to use your leg muscles to walk if they untensed after each step, your legs would flop like wet noodles. Your leg needs to dynamically go through different tense patterns to remain rigid while your thighs, buttocks and calves to do the work of moving. Just keeping yourself vertical enough to walk requires constant dynamic tension (this can be easily tested by getting smashingly drunk).
Excellent post!
One random idea that came to my mind, which arguably might be something that actually exist, would be philanthropy through a Public Poll:
1. The would be philanthropist publishes a list of projects they are willing to support;
2. the Public votes on the project they like best;
3. the winning project gets funding, the philanthropist gets good publicity.
Something like this is done on municipal level in my country, but since the "philanthropist" in question is the local government, their incentive is lukewarm; they only can get so much voter sympathy this way, whereas a billionaire or a corporation would milk it for all the good PR they can get.
My take is that a lot of wants, is followed, run afoul of the Cigarette Principle: "If you smoke enough cigarettes, you will die and become unable to smoke cigarettes".
Or to expand it, following irrational wants quite often leads to outcomes so bad as to more than negate the pleasure derived from fulfilling the want, quite often to the point of making the future happiness from following such want impossible, or very unlikely.
The problem is, the vast majority of wants, if pursued by anything less than rational moderation, leads to a form of Cigarette Principle, the prime example being that the main cause of death in modern times is lifestyle related cardiac failure. Thus preferences should be considered internally suspicious and examined carefully for traps, rather than reflexively defended.
People are relatively good at spotting when Thing I Want and Thing That's Good For Me are the same thing, but bad at seeing when these things are misaligned, so the best course of action is to consciously train yourself to like or unlike things based on whether they are Cigarettes in disguise or not.
Cast Away (2000) is a great study of an (otherwise average) man using the absolute height of his rationality to survive on a deserted island. Unlike the Martian, or many similar examples, the protagonist of Cast Away is NOT a scientist, nor a person with he kind of education and training to focus their rationality (well, he seems to be a logistics manager so his mental skills must be at least weakly adjacent to optimization, but not much). His survival depends not on some pre-thought mental models, but on applying raw, simple clear thinking to entirely unfamiliar problems.
The movie shows the processes of his survival struggles in loving detail, including his failures, insights and progress.
Importantly, it also shows what happens when a person who had spent years fighting for survival by using their intelligence to solve purely technical problems is at a loss when trying to apply the same kind of rational reasoning to human affairs, which are rife with compounded irrationality (a problem a lot of Rationalists can empathize with).
I think money is relatively neat value-holder here, because we can map people, and their options on it.
I don't intuitively know how much money 1 mln USD is, but I know a guy who is a millionaire, and more or less know what he is capable of buying for himself or spending on charity.
I don't intuitively grasp how much 1 billion USD is, but we have examples of billionaires and their actions to guesstimate what that means.
Similarly, I never lost a finger, but can practice using one hand, of just a few fingers of one hand to do everyday tasks, and see how much worse it is. I know several people with 1-2 fingers missing, and they do not seem particularly inconvenienced, some even play guitar! I know a guy with just one hand (which I think is much worse than just missing all fingers on one hand) and he is limited in some things but does fine. So it seems even missing half of your fingers is not that bad if you have a decent middle class career and wealth, and would probably be less of a problem for a millionaire.
Even based on that imprecise financial intuition, I can guess it would not be worth it to sacrifice fingers for 1 mln (because its not that much money in the end), worth it for 10 mln (because it would set you for life), and if Im going for 1 billion I might just go all the way to 10s of trillions.
One thing to consider is that we have more female ancestors than male ones, because males are far more likely to fail to breed, while also having the option to be much more successful breeders.
And historically, men were far more likely to be farmers (in a literal sense, farming plants being their main occupation, lifestyle and a source of calories) than women.
Or to put it differently: between about 12000 BC, and about 1800 AD, there majority of women were WIVES of farmers, but not farmers themselves (due to division of labor, the vast majority of women did jobs related to the production of cloth and non-farmign products, while men did the farming), while at the same time, there was a big % of men who were farmers (often unfree to some degree) who died childless.
Moreover, farmers usually stayed on the same land for a long time, intermarrying with their neighbors, thus particularly virile farmers eventually became ancestors to a lot of their neighborhood, while unsuccessful, poor, or unfree farmers had few or no children.
Women, moreso than men, would marry-out and leave their ancestral household, thus spreading their genes.
So we might end up with a calculation where you have a lot of Spinner and Weaver ancestors, but fewer Farmer ancestors.
honestly, the best solution to laziness spirals that I learned form personal experience, is to externalize the choice, so it is not dependent on willpower. Most of such tricks are almost trivial:
- can't get out of bed in the morning? Make the alarm clock louder, but also much further away, so that you HAVE TO get up to turn it off.
- procrastinate on the phone/computer instead of working? Block every website and program that could possibly lure away your focus
- can't make yourself walk/jog anywhere, and instead drive everywhere? put your car keys inside your running shoes
- can't get yourself to work-out? Put your favorite time-waster (like say, the controller of your gaming device) under the gym bag or your weights.
- create false deadlines on projects by telling someone it will be done much earlier than it needs to, and have them hold you accountable.
- If you bring lunch/snacks to work, have a colleague keep them for you, and not give them back until you completed the chosen task, and can prove it (ex: no lunch unless you send 40 emails)
- at home, pile dirty laundry on your favorite chair, or the favorite place on the couch. It will prevent you from sitting down, and encourage being more tidy. (IMHO, the couch is one of the worst humanity's inventions )
A lot of anti-laziness schemes depending on trying to change your willpower, values, or decision-making systems, but often the easiest and most dependable solution is to remove the choice altogether, by pitting our avoidance of inconvenience against our laziness.
Dominance underlies the things that can be done most efficiently with dominance. The moment dominance is no longer the most efficient force, it collapses, because in the vast majority of cases, dominating others takes a lot of time, energy and effort. This is actually how and why slavery (pretty much the most powerful example of dominance) was abolished: it started to make less economic sense than Bargaining (paid employment of freemen) and just Getting Things Done (through better tools and ultimately machines), so even its most ardent supporters became dispirited.
A related thought: an intelligence can only work on the information that it has, regardless of its veracity, and it can only work on information that actually exists.
My hunch is that the plan of "AI boostraps itself to superintelligence, then superpower, then wipes out humanity" relies on it having access to information that is too well hidden to divine through sheer calculation and infogathering, regardless of its intelligence (ex: the location of all the military bunkers, and nuclear submarines humanity has), or simply does not exist (ex: future Human strategic choices based on coin-flips).
Most AI Apocalypse scenarios depend not only on the AI being superhumanly smart, but being inexplicably Omniscient about things that nobody could be plausibly Omniscient about.
this might not actually be always beneficial. Lucid dreaming also means you remember much more from the dreams, which can extend the lifespan of your recurring nightmares. Not to mention, if you dream lucidly, your consciousness is not resting, and intrusive thoughts will pile up.
My hypothesis is that a lot of things that seem impossible or very hard in a dream, are simply too boring to focus on. Its totally possible to consciously dream up a page of text, but who would really want to waste precious dreamtime to type?
I have a suspicion that "flying dreams" have more to do with the state of your physical body than just your mind. I noticed I only dream of flight (or rather, levitation) if my muscles are very relaxed, like after a good massage, long hot bath, or good stretching. If im physically tense, either from effort or from stress, then I either cannot fly in a dream at all, or I keep losing the ability and falling, often with enough distress to wake myself up.
In my experience, conscious Daydreaming can achieve the same results but more consistently. But then again, my imagination is extremely visual, I tend to "think in VR movies", so Lucid Daydreaming comes easier than Lucid Dreaming, and is far more controllable.
I noticed that the ability to LD is strongly correlated with the condition known as "Maladaptive Daydreaming" (the "maladaptive" part here is subjective and situational, but it basically means the ability and need to have very addctive, vivid, VR-like daydreams that obscure waking reality).
I used to suffer from MD, until I learned to control it well enough to just be benign Daydreaming. Simultaneously, I achieved the ability to LD, which works on very similar principles to controlled Daydreaming.
The trick to LD if you are a person who daydreams visually, is to focus on plausibility. Trying to consciously train your daydreaming mind to enforce realistic, plausible daydream scenarios leads to the same mental need to "fix" unrealistic dreams, which either wakes you up from the dream or makes it Lucid.
Now, all that being said, LDs rarely approach the quality of Daydreams. Its extremely hard to make a Lucid Dream realistic and detailed enough not to feel trippy. Moreover, while most Daydreamers can make their Daydreams simulate tactile sensations, you cannot do the same in an actual dream. For one, erotic Lucid Dreaming is almost always pointless, because your lucid mind cannot force your sleeping body to actually experience sexual pleasure, let alone orgasm. If you are a bio male, it is likely you won't even achieve erection, so LD sex feels like trying to play pool with a rope.
The only good use I ever got from LDs is that it lets you remember bits of your dreams better and use it as raw footage to edit into your Daydreams.
As a side tangent, I noticed lately that over a half of the distance I used to drive on a normal day, would take nearly the same time if I just walked, due to insane traffic.
For example, my morning work commute takes about 25 minutes by car, about 12 minutes by bicycle, and about 30ish minutes just walking briskly. This is because at least 60% of the "driving" is just sitting in traffic, so even though I can drive much faster than I can walk, it does not matter much. The car in traffic is not really a vehicle to move around in, but a movable couch to sit on while waiting.
This is especially true in the age of Google Maps and some such, which allows me to plot my walk/bike-ride through shortcuts that would be impossible to use if I was driving a car.
Running could probably be about 40% faster than walking in such circumstances, making driving all but pointless, unless I need to transport heavy loads or the weather is truly atrocious (but then again, atrocious weather makes driving yet harder and less efficient anyway).
Some stupidly obvious hacks that worked for me. Most were designed to help me push through ADHD issues, but would be just as useful for neurotypicals:
- 5 minute super intense cardio, as a replacement for long, low intensity cardio. It is easier to motivate oneself to do 5 minutes of Your-Heart-Might-Explode cardio than two hours of jogging or something. In fact it takes very little motivation, if you trick yourself into doing it right after waking up, when your brain is on autopilot anyway, and unable to resist routine.
- pile stuff by the door, or put it in your shoes so you cannot leave the house without them.
- download some kind of a Reminder App for all your devices, preferably one that can be cross-linked between them, but still functional when the cloud is not available. This has saved my bacon more than once, I externalized nearly all my memory this way, which is a huge stress relief in the long run.
- take a page from the insane-prepper doomer book, and pile up on long lasting consumables, especially the ones that you will be buying anyway. If you have enough room, stock on hundreds of kilos of sugar, flour, mineral water, dry pasta, rice, coffee, toilet paper, soap etc etc. Not only is this cheaper that way, but reduced the hassle of running out of things at annoying times. This applies to tried and tested shoes and clothing as well.
- hydration problem. A lot of people, like me, have issues drinking enough water. My solution is to by a ton of soluble tablets (electrolytes, multi-vitamin, potassium, calcium, magnesium etc, does not matter as long as they are sugar-free), then use one of each daily, dissolved in a tall glass of water. These things taste as good as soda, but are (marginally) good for your health, and trick you into drinking water.
- whenever you are using anything with a screen, make sure that it is ABOVE your eye level, so that you are forced to sit straight and look up. Not only is that better for your spine, but helps with alertness. This is especially important if you are forced to use a computer long past your natural bedtime.
I notice I fail to see a difference between Deep Honesty with Reasonable Caveats, and just ol' regular Shallow-ish Honesty that allows small bits of Deep Honesty when convenient (which is something all of us do reflexively). If you (reasonably) refrain from being Deeply Honest in all situations where being so would be tactless, cause you harm, harm others, divulge sensitive information that should not be shared, and damage social relationships, you are left with very few options in which to exercise Deep Honesty (which would basically only include conversations with your therapist and writing LW comments).
I have a strong intuition that in order for Deep Honesty to work and not horribly backfire, society would have to be first restructured to make it possible, specifically by making it impossible (or just awkward and ineffective) to punish people for their Deep Honesty and honestly shared views.
- Without AGI, people keep dying at historical rates (following US actuarial tables)
Im not entirely convinced of this being the case. There are several possible pathways towards life extension including, but not limited to the use of CRISPR, stem cells, and most importantly finding a way to curb free radicals, which seem the be the main culprits of just about every aging process. It is possible that we will "bridge" towards radical life extension long before the arrival of AGI.
possibly, but is that not basically a No True Rationalist trick? I do not see a way for us to truly check that, unless we capture LW rationalists one by one and test them, but even then, what is preventing you from claiming: "eh, maybe this particular person is not a Real Rationalist but a Nerdy Hollywood Rationalist, but the others are the real deal," ad nauseam?
I definitely agree that people who consider themselves Rationalists believe themselves to be Actual Rationalists not Hollywood Rationalists. This of course leads us to the much analyzed question of "why aren't Rationalists winning?" The answers I see is that either Rationality does not lead to Winning, Or the Rationalists aren't Actual Rationalists (yet, or at all, or at least not sufficiently).
A major case in point is that Rationalists mostly failed to convince the world about the threat posed by unrestricted AI. This means that either Rationalists are wrong about the AI threat, or bad at convincing. The second option is more likely I think, and I wager the reason Rationalists have a hard time convincing the general public is not because the logic of the argument is faulty, but because the delivery is based on clunky rhetoric and shows no attempts at well engineered charisma.
The Stevia-drink issue is likely psychological in nature not blood-sugar related. You would have to be tricked by a third party to drink a stevia soda unknowingly, and inversely, be tricked into drinking sugary soda while thinking it is stevia based; then compare the results.
In my own diet journey I noticed similar trend: knowingly eating or drinking substitutes of things I like makes my subconscious throw a tantrum and demand the real thing anyway. I think it is more about self-resentment over being tricked, than the actual taste or content.
Just giving up the thing completely, both the real thing and substitute hurts more at first, but makes it easier to form a habit (for example, replacing soda not with stevia soda but with plain water). Some minds find purposeful "asceticism" of a diet easier than "pretend abundance" of the replacement products.
some counter-arguments, in no particular order of importance:
- Verbal communication is quite often more succinct, because it is easier to exhaust the vocal medium, and you can see in real time your conversationists getting bored with your rambling.
- Verbal communication allows far more nuance carried with tone, body language, and social situation, thus often delivers the message most clearly. I find it most useful when discussing Ethics: everyone is a clinical utilitarian when typing, but far more humanistic when they see the other person's facial reaction to your words.
- Rhetoric and charisma do not carry well over text. Most Rationalists consider it beneficial, right until the point where they need to explain something, or convince non-Rationalists and completely lack the tools to do so. Avoiding the use of verbal rhetoric and not training your in-person charisma is the surefire way to become very unconvincing to the general audience: case in point, every attempt by explain AI Risk to "muggles" by somewhat introvert and dry-talking Rationalists.
- Related to point 3: conversational charisma is the main tool used by human males to woo women. By not practicing conversational charisma, Rationalists ensure they will breed themselves out of existence.
- Most child-rearing and education is oral communication. Without practicing it, the Rationalist will not make a good parent or a teacher, and thus, from civilizational perspective, had squandered his rationality.
- Rubberducking: saying things out-loud quite often leads to epiphanies, especially negative ones ("wow, my cherished idea sounds really dumb when I say it out, loud."). Writing down, and then reading your own ideas often leads to an emotional feedback loop in which you reinforce your own conviction rather than nit-picking your own idea. This leads to...
- Oral communication avoids the risk of Rabbit-Holes. When writing, uninterrupted, it is easy to accidentally pick a logical mistake as the crux of your whole argument, and waste hours exploring it. In conversation, your partner/opponent can snip that in the bud.
- Op-Sec. Oral conversation is far less likely to get you in trouble for the things you say, unless you are being recorded. Meanwhile, a text based conversation, especially on a social platform is a Sword of Damocles always hanging over your head. Say the wrong thing, and at worst a dozen people will consider you an ass. Write and post the wrong thing, and you might, decades from now, lose your job, your social standing, or even your life. An innocent comment today might make people cancel you in 2040, or a vengeful Basilisk mulching you in 2045.
There is also the fact that we already are, effectively, controlling our own genetic pressures through culture and civilisation. Our culture largely influences our partner choice, and thus, breeding. Our medical sciences, agriculture, and urbanization takes pressure off survival. So the eugenic/dysgenic/paragenic process is in effect anyway, just... stupidly.
Some simple examples:
- agriculture pushes us to be lactose tolerant and carbohydrate dependent
- art and media dictates our sexual choices and mate choice
- education creates pressure for intelligence, but a very specific kind of one.
- in the long run, contraception methods might pressure a further evolution of our reproductive systems (ex: sooner or later, women with extremely unlikely mutations that allow them to "beat" the contraceptive pill will outbreed those who do not share such mutation. )
Im particularly interested in how our sexual culture effectively works as a secondary "blind goddess of eguenics". For likely the first time since the Neolithic (or possibly since forever), we have reached an age in which women are free to chose their male partners based on physical attraction and mental kinship, not social pressure and need for survival. Assuming this trend continues, and we do not relapse into social conservatism, I expect a rather sudden (by evolutionary standards) shift in male choice, and thus sexual dimorphism.
Atop of that, we the rise of affordable In Vitro fertilization, we effectively are using conscious Eugenics, one specifically geared towards the needs of women and couples, rather than society at large. We are entering an age when the human male is not strictly necessary for breeding, or his offspring's survival, and thus, with the exception of the rare super-specimens who are sperm donors, men no longer fall under any evolutionary pressure, and do not really need to exist.
The decades between the moment when in-vitro becomes the norm, and the moment when artificial wombs become the norm, will be very interesting indeed.
Such communities are then easily pulverized by communities who value strong groupthink and appeal to authority, and thus are easier whipped into frenzy.
I mostly agree with you, though I noticed if a job is mostly made of constantly changing tasks that are new and dissimilar to previous tasks, there is some kind of efficiency problem up the pipeline. Its the old Janitor Problem in a different guise; a janitor at a building needs to perform a thousand small dissimilar tasks, inefficiently and often in impractical order, because the building itself was inefficiently designed. Hence why we still haven't found a way to automate a janitor, because for that we would need to redesign the very concept of a "building", and for that we would need to optimize how we build infrastructure, and for that we would have to redesign our cities from scratch... etc, until you find out we would need to build an entire new civilization from ground up to, just to replace one janitor with a robot.
it still hints at a gross inefficiency in the system, just one not easily fixed.
There are also some mental issues among people who know about AI safety concerns, but are not researchers themselves and not even remotely capable of helping or contributing in a meaningful way.
I for one, learned about the severity of the AI threat only after my second child was born. Given the rather gloom predictions for the future, Im concerned for their safety, but there does not seem anything I can do to ensure they would be ok once the Singularity hits. It feels like I brought my kids to life just in time for the apocalypse to hit them when they are still young adults at best, and irrationally, I cannot stop thinking that Im thus responsible for their future suffering.
I noticed I also recall conversations, podcasts etc better if I was doing some kind of a manual task at the same time (like woodcarving, or just doing the dishes). My interpretation is that focusing on a conversation while immobile is under-stimulating, and thus causes the mind to wander. If one is walking, or doing something physical, its enough physical stimulation to let the mind focus on the conversation in a "railroaded" fashion, without self-distraction.
Even deeper: it feels great to match your walking/activity pace to the emotional message of the conversation. I suppose it triggers the same reaction as ASMR. I suppose its because it lets us "act out" our emotional reaction to the words, without inappropriate gesticulation etc.
Further weak evidence that walking helps with conversational cognition:
- plenty of people, without any cultural connection between them, pick up the habit of pacing around when on the phone.
- it was a well known technique among ancient Greek philosophers and scholars to just take their students on a walk, or even a longer trip while discussing abstract subjects. Apparently it worked very well and was done this way for centuries.
- humans evolved to be semi-nomadic persistence hunters. Walking around all day is our natural state that we evolved for, sitting down for hours is not.
OTOH, I have a hunch that the kinds of jobs that select against "speed run gamer" mentality are more likely to be inefficient, or even outright bullshit jobs. In essence, speed-running is optimization, and jobs that cannot handle an optimizer are likely to either have error in the process, or error in the goal-choice, or possibly both.
The admittedly small sized sample of examples where a workplace that resisted could not handle optimization that I witnessed were because the "work" was a cover for some nefarious shenanigans, build for inefficiency for political reasons, or created for status games instead of useful work/profit.
Aside from the obvious reasons already mentioned, I wonder if the reason for the regress was not partially related to compound inbreeding. In most cases when technological regress happens, it tends to coincide with a genetic bottleneck as well, which I have a hunch would make the problems worse.
Its in the ballpark of 50k. I support a family of 4 on 10k a year, round-ish. I can save about 1k-2k a year, If we live on a very, very tight budget. It would thus take me a century to pay for cryonics just for my immediate family, if the prices do not fall quickly enough.
In Rand's defense, she does define the terms "altruism" and "selfishness" i her works, at length, from every possible angle, at nauseam. Its impossible to read more than one page of her work and still confuse her definitions for standard ones.
The confusion usually comes up through a game of telephone, when people opposed to Objectivism comment on things written by fans of Rand, without ever actually reading the source material.
Every human being is selfish, but most are also altruistic some of the time
What, in your estimation, would be a difference between actual altruism, and "altruism" done for the sake of selfish emotional fuzzies?
Lets say I pass a beggar on the street. If I give him a dollar because he needs it, its altruism. If I give him a dollar because I want to feel like Im a Good, Charitable Guy, and genuinely enjoy his thanks, then its selfishness.
About the only true altruism I can think of that is not essentially a form of egoism, is when you absolutely HATE the fact that you act charitable, and get zero pleasure from it, not even masochistically. If you so much as get a single second of warm fuzz in your heart from your charitable act, thats just roundabout selfishness. If you pay the beggar 1$ and then feel emotionally better, he is essentially your low-budget therapist, and you just performed a completely selfish act of capitalist exchange.
I truly hope the cost of cryo falls rapidly in the next few years. A back-of-the-napkin calculation I did shows that if I wanted to pay forward for an option to cryopreserve my children (should they ever need it) I would have to save money for over 20 years, skipping on every life luxury for them and myself. It would be a bizarre life in which we would live like ascetic monks who spend most of their lives preparing to die and achieve Afterlife. Uncannily like religion.
If, aside from paying for cryo for my kids, I also wanted to pay for my own, my SO's, and my parents, my brother etc, I would need to be effectively immortal just to put in enough work-hours.
Cryo might end up being the absolute pinnacle of elitist technology, because if you are not rich and Western enough, you are unlikely to ever afford it, and thus, destined to not only die, but watch your loved ones die as well while average Middle Class people from US or western EU would just chuck their sick loved ones into a freezer with a near certainty of their eventual survival and health.
The religions had it all wrong. In order to achieve Immortality in the After-life, you do not need to be good, or without sin, or pious, you just need to be able so save around 30-80k. If you can't, well, sucks to be you. Should have thought of it before you decided to be born poor.
One thing I don't see explored enough, and which could possibly bridge the gap between Rationality and Winning, is Rationality for Dummies.
Rationalist community is oversaturated with academic nerds, borderline geniuses, actual geniuses, and STEM people who's intellectual level and knowledge base is borderline transhuman.
In order for Rationality and Winning to be reconciled with minimum loss, we need a bare-bones, simplified, kindergarten-level Rationality lessons based on the simplest, most relatable real life examples. We need Rationality for Dummies. We need Explain Methods Like Im Five, that would actually work for actual 5-year olds.
True, Objective Rationality Methods should be applicable whether you are an AI researcher with a phd, or someone to young/stupid to tie their own shoes. Sufficiently advanced knowledge and IQ can just brute-force winning solutions despite irrationality. it would be more enlightening if we equipped a child/village idiot with simple Methods and judge their successes on this metric alone, while they lack intellectual capacity or theoretical knowledge, and thus need to achieve winning by a step-by-step application of the Methods, rather than jumps of intuition resulting from unconscious knowledge and cranial processing power.
Only once we have solid Methods of Rationality that we can teach to kids from toddler-age, and expand on them until they are Rational Adults, then we can say for certain which Rationalist ideas lead to Winning and which do not.
One of the main ways I managed to instill good habits in myself is to both use optimal paths to good habits, and closing optimal paths to sub-optimal habits. The trick is to make a good habit easier than it is annoying, and a bad habit more annoying than it is preferable.
Examples:
Hydration - I simply place a 2l water bottle by the apartment door every evening. It becomes impossible for me to leave the house without picking it up, and once it is in my hand, Im so much more likely to drink from it and take it with me than forget.
Exercise: I bought dumbbells to work out with, but consciously made no place to put them. I just place them on my gaming chair, so it becomes impossible to use the PC without lifting the dumbbells. But the moment they are literally in my hands, it is easier to just pump a few curls than not.
Exercise/commute: I'm trying to unlearn driving everywhere, and bike whenever I can. I just place my car keys in my bike's frame pouch. This way I cannot leave the house without touching my bike, and once I do, its easier to just hop on it and ride away.
Diet: I always struggled with weight, and the one "simple trick" that actually worked for me was brushing my teeth ASAP after dinner. Since my teeth are already brushed, and it would be annoying to do so again, Im much less likely to snack after dinner. If the urge to snack is really strong, I just use some mouthwash, which not only makes me even more disinclined to soil my super-clean teeth, but no snacks taste good when my mouth is super minty/mentholly.
Waking early: the path to a sub-optimal habit is to hit snooze on the alarm and go back to sleep. Breaking the habit was as easy as placing the alarm clock in the bathroom, so I would have to walk across the entire house to turn it off, and once I do, Im already where I need to be to brush my teeth and shave, so might as well do so.
They reason why these are working is that all those habits are relatively weak, and a small tweak to how annoying would they be, means all the difference. Its basically weaponizing my own laziness/procrastination against itself. The goal is to make myself spend extra energy walking around and looking for things needed for my bad habits, and the things needed for the good habits to be always in my path.
My take on some of the items on this list:
Lack of Intelligence: Very likely
Slow take-off AI: Very Likely
Self-Supervised Learning AI: Likely
Bounded Intelligence AI: Likely
Far far away AI: Likely
Personal Assistant AI: close to 100% certain.
Oracle AI: Likely
Sandboxed Virtual World AI: likely
The Age of Em: Borderline Certain
Multipolar Cohabition: borderline certain
Neuralink AI: borderline certain
Human Simulation AI: likely
Virtual zoo-keeper AI: likely
Coherent Extrapolated Volition AI: likely
Partly aligned AI: Very likely
Transparent Corrigible AI: Borderline certain.
In total, I think the most probable scenario is a very, very slow take-off, not a Singularity, because AGI would be hampered by Lack of Intelligence, slowed down by countless corrections, sandboxing and ubiquity of LAI. In effect, by the time we have something approaching true AGI, we would long be a culture of cyborgs and LAIs, and the arrival of AGI will be less of a Singularity, but a fuzzy pinnacle of a long, hard, bumpy and mostly uneventful process.
In fact, I would claim that we will never be at a point where we can agree: "yep, AGI is finally achieved." I rather envision us tinkering with AI, making in painstakingly more powerful and efficient, with tiny incremental steps, until we are content that it is "eh, this Artificial Intelligence is General enough, I guess."
In my view, the true danger does not come from achieving AGI and it turning on us, but rather achieving stupid, buggy yet powerful LAI, giving it too much access, and having it do something that triggers a global catastrophe by accident, not out of conscious malice.
Its less "Superhuman Intelligence got access to the nuclear codes and decided to wipe us out" but, "Dumb as a brick LAI got access to the nuclear codes and wiped us out due to a simple coding error".
One problem I see with your insect alien example, which also, in a much greater way, influences human attractiveness, is that there are not just four, or five, or a dozen of physical attractiveness factors, but hundreds of them. And each of these factors influences other factors in different ways, for example:
- height on a man is considered attractive
- low body fat on a man is considered attractive, but;
- a combination of too much height and too little body fat would be unattractive.
My take is there are hundreds, even thousands of traits that fall under "Flawlessness" but they play very weirdly against each other, and thus Appeal is born; a personal subconscious opinion on what sets of traits one likes most.
What is also missing from your analysis, is Beauty-Appeal Vs Sex-Appeal. Some traits trigger our aesthetic appreciation, and some trigger our raw sexual appetite, and not only are these not the same traits, but sometimes opposite ones.
I would define Sex-Appeal as a set of traits, physical and behavioral, that make the person seem:
- relatively easy to seduce (for me), also known as DTF (down to fuck)
- suggesting they would be good at sex
- suggesting their body would feel nice to touch
- vaguely related to strong Secondary Sexual Characteristics
Meanwhile, Beauty-Appeal are sets of purely aesthetic Flawlessness traits, that do not correspond to the above points at all, but show symmetry, golden ratio, aesthetically striking color palette etc. The make a person a perfect model, someone you would love to take pictures of, paint or draw, rather than get raunchy with.
I would even take it further, many of the Beauty-Appeal traits take away from Sex-Appeal, because some of them are signifiers of innocence, youth, or vaguely stand-offish perfection, that make the person seem like they would not be DTF. We subconsciously disengage from thoughts about having sex with such a person, regardless whether or not these traits truly signify their DTF.
Some examples:
Melodic, high female voice: beauty
raspy, low pitched female voice: sexy
Flawless skin: beauty
Tattoos and "cool" scars: sexy
hairless male chest: beauty
hirsute male chest: sexy
perfectly sized medium breasts: beauty
oversized breast: sexy
what Im getting at, is that while the evidence for oldest agriculture is from around 12k-10k, this is not the same as saying that your particular ancestors come from a line that used agriculture for solid 10k years straight (unless you are from very specific Anatolian or Iraq genetic lines).
It could easily be the case that your ancestors had been eating grain and dairy for 500 generations, or maybe just 10 generations or less.
One example of what Im talking about is lactose tolerance which allows one to consume dairy. It is a mutation that is only roughly 8k years old, and thats only if you are of Anatolian/Turkish ancestry.
Another would be protein madness, which rarely happens among Sub-Polar people, but affects Europeans who moved North.
Similarly, our genetic predisposition towards certain reactions to gluten, high-protein diet, high fructose diet, even alcohol vary wildly.
In most cases, when we think of "modern" diet and lifestyle, we are basically thinking of the industrialized, grain and dairy Anglo-Saxon diet and a life of small caloric surplus over a relatively modest caloric expenditure. Which affects you different if you indeed are of Anglo-Saxon ancestry, and your ancestors had been eating cheese and bread for at least 6k years, while slowly reducing the amount of labor needed to create it.
Its going to hit you differently if your ancestors were Sub-Polar peoples who subsisted on high-fat/zero carb diet, or came from a tropical jungle where they subsisted on high-sugar fruit, low fat meat and minimum labor to procure it.
How similar is your life to that of a homo sapiens from 12,000 years ago? If you made it more similar, would that help you?
Why pick that arbitrary point in our evolution? My ancestors 12k years ago could have been subsistence farmers who toiled all day but ate a lot of calories. Could be cold climate hunter-gatherers who fasted intermittently between giant feasts, and burned most of these calories to zero, trying to secure a next big kill. Could have been tropical climate hunter-gatherers who did light hunting and gathering 2-3 hours a day, ate small meals, and played lazily all day.
And this only takes into account the ancestors from exactly 12k years ago. What about ancestors from 6k years ago? What about 200 k years ago?
To make matters more complex, different ancestries would call for different lifestyle and diet. Our natural metabolism, lactose tolerance, muscularity, fat % and countless other factors vary wildly between ancestries. A lifestyle/diet fit for a descendant of the Innuit would not be fit for a descenant of the X!hosa and vice-versa.
Human evolution is an ongoing process that takes different populations into wildly different directions, so it is not obvious what is the "natural environment" for each human, unless they are literally living a stone-age life right now, in absolute genetic and technological isolation.
One simple trick that I applied to my apartment lately, is to break with the tradition of "proper" placement of various objects, furniture and doodads, but focus on pure functionality and natural paths that come from human laziness.
Examples:
- beverage cooler right next to the couch, NOT in the kitchen. After all, I drink beer on a couch, not in front of the sink like a madman. Same goes for the bottle opener, corkscrew etc.
- TV set is high up on the wall, almost at ceiling level. Since I watch TV/Netflix reclined on the couch, it makes no sense to place it on "eye level" since my eyes point upward not forward.
- wall clock in the bathroom, right over the mirror. Most people who bother having a wall clock keep in in the living room, but that makes little sense. The most likely situation when you need to look at the clock is when you are preparing to leave the house: while getting dressed, brushing teeth etc.
- the closet with "in house" sweats, pajamas etc is in the bathroom, right next to the bathtub/shower, so I can dress myself immediately in fresh clothes right after washing, and not streak naked around the house looking for pajama bottoms.
- "poop library". A trick well known to boomer, but largely forgotten, is to have a pile of do-eared, cheap, redundant books on a shelf right next to the toilet, when you need something to read waiting for Number 2, and do not want to spread icky on your phone.
- storage poufs. Its basically a storage box with a pillow on top, that you can use both as a chair and to keep stuff in. If you buy poufs the same height as the seat of your couch, they also work as a perfect extension to stretch your legs. Keeps all the clutter you need in my "couch space" at hand.
- door shelf. In my case its a flat rectangular bowl that I bolted to the door, and put stuff that I absolutely need to take with me when I leave the house. The shelf must be ON the door, not next to it, on eye level, so that it is impossible to open the door without seeing the contents of the door shelf, and you kinda have to take them with you, or the act of opening the door would spill the contents of the shelf all over the floor.
It is quite possible though that over time there are fewer and fewer BFs. They might be going extinct, even without much human interaction. As for finding bones, if the population is low, and their territory so big, it might take centuries.
I also noticed that there is an inverse cultural relationship between the belief in magic, witchcraft, spirits/fair folk etc and the belief in UFOs. Which makes me think aliens simply fill the Post-Enlightment gap in the legendarium for cultures that want to pretend they are "too reasonable" to believe in magic, but open to a belief in "sci fi" myths; ie: Fair Folk kidnapping folk - nah, Aliens kidnapping folk - yah.
As for Bigfoot: while I don't believe it exists, I think Its wrong way to think of it as avoiding cameras. The more reasonable explanation is that cameras avoid the places where it could possibly live. Bigfoot, Sasquatch, Yeti, and similar Apemen are almost always reported to live in remote wilderness, and specifically the North of USA, Canada, Russia, China, and of course the Himalayas. It seems like we should be able to spot them, until you realize that the northern wilderness belt that stretches from Alaska to Greenland, and then around Eurasia and back to Alaska is astonishingly big, and almost completely empty of humans. We are talking about a strip of wilderness that has about the same surface area as the Moon, and the possible population of Bigfeet would likely be smaller than the population of chimps in Africa. If every researcher interested in finding Bigfoot went to explore the Big North with all the state of the art equipment they could carry, and they spread evenly to cover maximum area, they would not only not find Bigfoot, but not find each other, due to enormous distances through impassable woodland and mountains.
I would even argue that Bigfoot being more bigfooty; a primitive yet sapient and inteligent hominid, perhabs some late descendant of the gigantopithecus, is more plausible than it being say a sloth, because it seems to make honest attempts to avoid humans. If it was a mere sloth, or an ape oof the same intellectual capacity as a chimp, it would be found far easier.
While existence of Bigoot is extremely unlikely, If it were real, I would rather assume they are a tribal species of essentially very hairy humans who avoid us the same way some Sentinel tribes do.