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Daniel Schmachtenberger has lots of great stuff. Two pieces I recommend:
- this article Higher Dimensional Thinking, the End of Paradox, and a More Adequate Understanding of Reality, which is about how just because two people disagree doesn't mean either is wrong
- this Stoa video Converting Moloch from Sith to Jedi w/ Daniel Schmachtenberger, which is about races-to-the-bottom eating themselves
Also hi, welcome Sage! I dig the energy you're coming from here.
An example of such a blindspot/confusion that I've been chewing on, that I haven't written up in full yet, is how reward is different from fruit, punishment is different from pain. Socially-mediated consequences are different from inherent consequences.
Note that behaviorists, and (probably downstream of the behaviorists) also ML researchers, tend to actively conflate the two and treat "reward" as fundamental and then use phrases like "intrinsic reward" to try to refer to the non-reward thing. But "reward" is not the fundamental one, it's built on fruit.
The difference:
- if you don't get caught, you don't get punished
- a tree will not reward you with fruit for effort or flattery—you have to actually water it
And many people fail to see the difference between the two of these—so they fixate on social consequences and project them onto everything. I suspect this is largely because so many of their critical consequences were social, at very young ages (<2yo, before they differentiated themselves, their parents, the world at large, such that they could tell the difference). So they learned to orient first and foremost to social consequences, and act so as to get reward and avoid punishment.
But we know from detailed investigation that the universe-as-a-whole does not reward or punish us the way other people do. (the judeo-christian one-God-who-sees-and-knows-all can be seen as groping towards the recognition of that distinction, but still fails to actually go all the way there, which then has the unfortunate effect of reifying the idea that reality-as-a-whole does punish you!)
Karmically this has the effect of them creating environments that have much more reward/punishment, and also leads to them self-punishing in the face of non-social consequences, such as beating themselves up for failing to do something they cared about, rather than simply feeling the pain of the failure.
For what it's worth, I found myself pretty compelled by a theory someone told me years ago, that alien abductions are flashbacks to birth and/or diaper changes:
- laid on a table, bare walls, bright lights you're staring up at (unnecessary, and unpleasant for a baby, but common in hospitals and some homes)
- one or more figures crowded around you (parents and/or doctors)
- these figures are empathetic & warm towards you (or are at worst kind of apathetic, not malevolent)
- communicating telepathically (in a way you can't make sense of, perhaps wearing masks if doctors)
- they examine your genitals (how dirty is the diaper? is there a rash?)
- butt probed (wipe, diaper cream, and/or rectal thermometer)
- weird equipment around (appropriate to a hospital where most babies born in 1900s when abduction stories started becoming popular)
- figures have big heads and eyes (very salient features to babies, also maybe the heads are spatially closer and babies' eyes are still doing a fisheye lens thing)
- and most bizarrely, the figures are grey (newborns have bad color perception!)
This is surprisingly underdiscussed; the only google result for "alien abduction as flashback to diaper change" was this which links to a forum post since gone offline (archive.org link). But it seems like an incredibly obvious explanation that should be the default. It also explains why the experiences are so similar around the world, even among people who hadn't heard the stories before!
Obviously not all alien abduction stories follow this pattern, but the fact that so many do seems to me very satisfyingly explained by this theory. The fact that this makes sense to me may be taking as part of its evidence my own experience doing emotional work and finding (among other things) surprisingly large pockets of emotion and meaning stored in apparently-boring memories (like standing in my kitchen around age six, looking at a shelf... but feeling terrifyingly alone). And helping other people do similar work, etc. But flashbacks are in general well-studied.
So it seems to me that the only culturally mediated part here is how people interpret the experience after it happens. You could imagine a culture where someone comes into work one day and says "hey guys, I had this trippy flashback last night to my nappy being changed! it was so weird seeing my parents all bulgy-eyed and grey".
I've actually come to the impression that the extensive use of contempt in the Sequences is one of the worst aspects of the whole piece of writing, because it encourages people to disown their own actual experience where it's (near) the target of such contempt, and to adopt a contemptuous stance when faced with perspectives they in fact don't get.
Contempt usually doesn't help people change their minds, and when it does it does so via undermining people's internal epistemic processes with social manipulation. If the argument in "section 2 above" turns out to have flaws or mistaken assumptions, then an attitude of contempt (particularly from a position of high status) about how it's embarrassing to not understand that will not help people understand it better. It might get them to spend more time with the argument in order to de-embarrass themselves, but it won't encourage them to take the arguments on its merits. Either the argument is good and addresses relevant concerns people have (factual and political) and if so you'll be able to tell because it will work! Shaming people for not getting it is at best a distraction, and at worst an attack on people's sensemaking. And generally a symmetric weapon.
Meanwhile, contempt as a stance in the holder it tend to block curiosity and ability to notice confusion. Even if some argument is clearly wrong, it somehow actually made sense to the person arguing it—at least as a thing to say, if not a way to actually view the world. What sense did it make? Why did they say this bizarre thing and not that bizarre thing? Just because energy-healing obviously doesn't work via [violating this particular law of physics], that doesn't mean it can't work via some other mechanism—after all, the body heals itself non-magically under many ordinary circumstances! And if interventions can make it harder for that to work, then they can probably make it easier. So how might it work? And what incentivized the energy healer to make up a bad model in the first place?
Contempt may be common among rationalists but from my perspective the main reason Rob didn't include it is probably because it's not actually very functional for good discourse.
Sure but ideally it would raise them an amount that's worth it. That's kind of the whole idea. People aren't infinitely incentivized by money and zero incentivized by anything else.
The bit about merging the casinos... in the limit, you've got an entire town/city in the desert that is completely owned by one owner, who pays nominally zero land value tax because the property itself isn't worth anything given there's nothing nearby. But it seems plausible to me that having an equation for tracking a multiplicity of independent improvements on a single nominal property and taxing the whole situation accordingly... would be relatively easy compared to the other LVT calculation problems. (I have not done the math here whatsoever.)
The splitting and merging thing is a great point. I sense that @Blog Alt is continuing to missing the point about the "everyone else's improvements" by how they frame it, but once you take splitting and merging into account...
...well, for people who actually live there, hopefully the presence of a new garbage dump would itself be more costly than the decrease in tax. And in principle, if it's NOT more costly, then it would then be correct to build it! (Maybe it's not a dump, maybe it's something else.) So there's a bringing back in of externalities.
But of course, if someone doesn't live there... maybe this can be solved by zoning? I'm normally suspicious of zoning but "you can't put a garbage dump next to a school in a neighborhood" seems pretty basic.
That still doesn't solve the simple notion of a factory toxic waste pool, but once again, maybe such things should be solved by directly addressing the reason why they're bad.
I've always been a bit confused by "low-income housing'. Is the plan to make the housing cheap via price capping? Won't that have the usual economic issues and cause demand to continue to outstrip supply forever and ever? Is the plan to make the houses ugly as fuck so that they will cost less than the pretty houses nearby? That won't really work; people will rent a closet for $1000/mo in SF sometimes.
The "land values are property values" section struck me as a weird strawman of LVT. A huge part of the point Georgists are making is that the value of a given property depends in most urban cases FAR MORE on what is built next to it, than what is built on it. And thus by making property taxes go up when you build things on a property, you disincentivize building, whereas by making them the same regardless of what is built, you incentivize building. Whether you accept any of the other arguments, this is straightforward math afaict. Thus when you say "Build more 1. houses", if you intend to achieve that by market means and not coercion, then you probably want to get your incentives aligned.
There are a bunch of buildings currently sitting empty in Berkeley, CA and my understanding of why is that if they were to rent them at market rates (which have declined) then the sale price would go down, but currently the sale price is still going up. So "build more houses"...
The irony that you mention in the last paragraph reminds me of another LW post that was already on my mind while reading this one: Slack matters more than any outcome. It points at the funny way that systems fight back in predictable-yet-in-practice-unexpected ways, all the way up and all the way down, and is I think an attempt at a more precise expression of the kind of Green wisdom referred to around "harmony with the Way of Things".
[as our oldest sees it] Sentences are things we build together, rather than a way for different people to share their own perspectives with each other.
I've gone through a huge growth arc as an adult in recognizing the extent to which (especially in really good conversations) sentences are things we build together. Not that we don't have different perspectives, but when conversation is really flowing, it makes way more sense to view it as "our collective mind is thinking" and not "I am transmitting information to you, then getting information back" etc.
(When we're more at odds with someone, whether adversarial or just conflict with a loved one, it can be more like the transmit mode, and sometimes (tho not always) it seems to work best if we can get into the co-thinking mode again. Though there's not a hack for that—it's a deep trust-dancing puzzle!)
The 2nd half of this video is about this collective mind thing: https://youtu.be/G3vcXZPlsDc
Probably be grounded in more than one social group. Even being part of two different high-intensity groups seems like it should reduce the dynamics here a lot.
Worked well for me!
Eric Chisholm likes to phrase this principle as "the secret to cults is to be in at least two of them".
My guess is that part of what's going on here is that in certain ways attempting to optimize for coordination is at greater risk for goodhart than other things. To take an example from the post to its limit, the freelancer who invests 100% in selling their services and 0% in being skilled at them or providing them is a fraud. But also the freelancer who invests 100% in skills but 0% in selling is out of business.
So there's a need for some sort of dynamic balance.
But my guess is that for whatever reasons (documented in Moral Mazes no doubt) certain kinds of organizations put pressure on the managers to go all the way in one direction, rather than finding that balance.
The "sometimes" bit here is key. It's my impression that people who insist that "people are just like LLMs" are basically telling you that they spend most/all of their time in conversations that are on autopilot, rather than ones where someone actually means or intends something.
Great post. A few typos that weren't worth commenting to mention ("LMM" instead of "LLM") but I felt like it was worth noting that
In our ‘casual’ or ‘actually thinking’ mode
probably wants to be "causal".
I overall like what you're trying to point at here — you're raising a real and important concern about what's happening with the weakening of protection from random angry people in a wide range of places including tenure, due to cultural shifts and changes in media (eg social media).
At the same time, the Rainbowland example is a terrible example for making this point here. Or at least, making it in the way you describe. As jaspax and ChristianKI note, "it's about accepting people" obfuscates the meaning of the song that was why it got banned, one that many people agree with.
It's totally plausible to me, given what I've seen of people being afraid of children being exposed to trans ideology, that the school administrators themselves banned the song as part of doing their job to create a good learning environment for kids, no cowtowing to angry complainer required. I agree that banning kids wanting to sing the song is not useful and perhaps counterproductive, but if ordinary people getting upset about it seems absurd to you then I suspect you're out of touch with what a substantial and growing fraction of people think, including many people "on the left" and some trans people: we need to keep trans ideology out of schools in order to keep kids safe & sane. Not because trans people aren't real or deserve respect, but because kids are getting memed not just into accepting people but into positions like "it's not cool to be straight" which is non-acceptance and a dumb reason for experimental medical treatments. From this perspective, Rainbowland looks like a song that's ostensibly about motivation & discipline but is subtextually about how cool it is to be anorexic.
But most people who think this are being quiet because they don't want to attract the very attacks you're talking about here, from the small minority of hostile vindictive people! I only recently got enough clarity on the subject, sense of importance, and sense that I'm not alone with my sense of things, that I decided it was important to voice my relatively boring view that's somehow controversial.
I resonate a lot with this, and it makes me feel slightly less alone.
I've started making some videos where I rant about products that fail to achieve the main thing they're designed to do, and get worse with successive iterations and I've found a few appreciative commenters:
Rant successful, it made someone else feel like they weren't alone
And part of my experience of the importance of ranting about it, even if nobody appreciates it, is that it keeps me from forgetting my homeland, to use your metaphor.
My most recent published blog post had in the 2nd paragraph "I bet there’s nobody reading this who has never used a phrase like..." and this article made me think it would be kind to change it.
Then I searched your facebook posts and you have indeed used the phrase, so in this case at least you aren't nobody. But I'm still changing the post.
(The phrase is "part of me", which if any of my friends were to somehow have never once used I wouldn't have been surprised to discover it you.)
Right, yeah. And that (eventually) requires input of food into the person, but in principle they could be in a physically closed system that already has food & air in it... although that's sort of beside the point. And isn't that different from someone meditating for a few hours between meals. The energy is already in the system for now, and it can use that to untangle adaptive entropy.
Huh, reading this I noticed that counterintuitively, alignment requires letting go of the outcome. Like, what defines a non-aligned AI (not an enemy-aligned one but one that doesn't align to any human value) is its tendency to keep forcing the thing it's forcing rather than returning to some deeper sense of what matters.
Humans do the same thing when they pursue a goal while having lost touch with what matters, and depending on how it shows up we call it "goodharting" or "lost purposes". The mere fact that we can identify the existence of goodharting and so on indicates that we have some ability to tell what's important to us, that's separate from whatever we're "optimizing" for. It seems to me like this is the "listening" you're talking about.
And so unalignment can refer both to a person who isn't listening to all parts of themselves, and to eg corporations that aren't listening to people who are trying to raise concerns about the ethics of the company's behavior.
The question of where an AI would get its true source of "what matters" from seems like a bit of a puzzle. One answer would be to have it "listen to the humans" but that seems to miss the part where the AI needs to itself be able to tell the difference between actually listening to the humans and goodharting on "listen to the humans".
Maybe instead of "shut up and do the impossible" we need "listen, and do the impossible" 😆
Sort of flips where the agency needs to point.
This "it gets worse if you try to deal with it" isn't necessarily true in every case. In this way adaptive entropy is actually unlike thermodynamic entropy: it's possible to reduce adaptive entropy within a closed system.
Actually naming whether this bolded part is true would require defining what "closed" means in the context of an adaptive system—it's clearly different than a closed system in the physical sense, since all adaptive systems have to be open in order to live.
This is great and I'm looking forward to your book.
Some adjacent ideas:
I feel like I've been appreciating the nature of wisdom (as you describe it here) increasingly much over the past couple of years. One thing this has led me to is looking at tautologies, where the sentence in some sense makes no claim but directs your attention to something that's self-evident once you look. For example, "the people you spend time with will end up being the people you've spent time with".
In 2017, I wrote an article about transcending regret, and a few years later I shared it with a friend and said:
at the time I wrote this, I hadn't gotten the insight as deep into my bones as I now have, & I still have much further to go
but the insight is still legit
& the articulation is good
& your integration will be yours anyway no matter how well I had it integrated when I wrote it
This feels like sort a dual of the sazen, and also maybe relates to the comment Kaj made about experiences that are hard to point at verbally even once you have experienced them.
Huh—it suddenly struck me that Peter Singer is doing the exact same thing in the drowning child thought experiment, by the way, as Tyler Alterman points out beautifully in Effective altruism in the garden of ends. He takes for granted that the frame of "moral obligation" is relevant to why someone might save the child, then uses our intuitions towards saving the child to suggest that we agree with him about this obligation being present and relevant, then he uses logic to argue that this obligation applies elsewhere too. All of that is totally explicit and rational within that frame, but he chose the frame.
In both cases, everyone agrees about what actually happens (a child dies, or doesn't; you contribute, or you don't).
In both cases, everyone agrees because within the frame that has been presented there is no difference! Meanwhile there is a difference in many other useful frames! And this choice of frame is NOT, as far as I can recall, explicit. Rather than recall, let me actually just go check... watching this video, he doesn't use the phrase "moral obligation", but asks "[if I walked past,] would I have done something wrong?". This interactive version offers a forced choice "do you have a moral obligation to rescue the child?"
In both cases, the question assumes the frame, and is not explicit about the arbitrariness of doing so. So yes, he is explicit about setting the zero point, but focusing on that part of the move obscures the larger inexplicit move he's making beforehand.
Ah this comment from facebook also feels relevant:
Sam Harris’ argument style reminds me very much of the man that trained me, and the example of fire smoke negatively affecting health is a great zero point to contest. Sam has slipped in a zero point of physical health being the only form of health which matters. Or at least the highest. One would have to argue against his zero point, that there are other values which can be measured in terms of health greater than mere physical health associated with fire. Psychological, familial, and social immediately come to mind. Further, in the case of Sam, famed for his epistemological intransigence, one would likely have to argue against his zero point of what constitutes rationality itself in order to further one’s position that physical health is very often a secondary value, as this sort of argument follows more a conversational arrangement of complex interdependent factors, than the straight rigorous logic Sam seemingly prefers
A lot of what's going on here is primarily frame control—setting the relevant scale on which a particular zero is then made salient. And that is not being done in the nice explicit friendly way.
He's not casting the sneaky dark-arts version of the spell
Sam Harris here is not casting a sneaky version of Tare Detrimens, but he's maybe (intentionally or not, benevolently or malevolently) casting a sneaky version of Fenestra Imperium.
Broadly an overall point that makes sense and feels good to me.
Something feels off or at least oversimplified to me in some of the cases, particularly these two lines of thinking:
There's no substantive disagreement between me and critics-of-my-blocking-policy about the difficulties that this imposes—the way it makes certain conversations tricky or impossible, the way it creates little gaps and blind spots in discussion and consensus.
&
As far as I could tell, both I and the admin team agreed about its absolute size; there were no disagreements about things like e.g. "broken links to previously written essays are a pain and a shame."
I found myself not actually trusting that there was "no disagreement about" about the nature or size in these cases. Maybe I would if I had more data about each situation, but something about how it's being written about raises suspicion for me. It's not per se than I think there was disagreement, but that I think the apparent agreement was on the level of the objective details (broken links etc) but that you didn't know how each other felt about it or what it meant to each other, and that if you'd more thoroughly seen the world through each others' eyes, it wouldn't seem like "zero point" is the relevant frame here.
One attempt to point at that:
It seems to me that without straightforward scales on which to measure things, or even getting clear on exactly what the units are, "setting the zero point" isn't even a real move that's available (intentionally or not) and I would expect people discussing in good faith to nonetheless end up with differences as a result of those.
Taking the latter case in particular, it seem likely to me (at least based on what you've written) that the LW admins were mostly tracking something like a sense of betrayal of expectations that people would have about LW as an ever-growing web of wisdom, and that feeling of betrayal is their units. And you're measuring something more on the level of "how much wisdom is on LW?" And from those two scales, two different natural zero points emerge:
- in removing the posts, LW goes from zero betrayal of the expectation of posts by default sticking around to more than zero betrayal of the expectation of posts sticking around
- in removing the posts, LW goes from more-than-zero wisdom on it from everybody's posts to less-than-before-but-still-more-than-zero wisdom on it with everybody's posts minus the Conor Moreton series (and in the meantime there was some more-than-zero temporary wisdom from those posts having gone up at all)
I noticed I ended up flipping the scales here, such that both are just zero-to-more-than-zero, even though one is more-than-zero of an unwanted thing. Not sure if that's incidental or relevant. Sometimes I've found in orienting to situations like this, one finds that there's only ever presence of something, never absence.
I'm not totally satisfied with this articulation but maybe it's a starting point for us to pick out whatever structure I'm noticing here.
No particular tips about Hamming Circles proper—I've run them a couple times but don't feel like I grokked how to run them well—but I'll put out that I've had some success with running longer events oriented towards Hamming Problems, shaped more like "here's 5 hours, broken into 25min pomodoros where you focus on making actual tangible progress towards something that's stuck, then during 5min breaks check in with a partner about how your focus is going".
Which on reflection is actually very similar to how the online goal-crafting intensives I've been running for years are structured, except with coaches instead of a buddy.
They feel like different-but-related thing to me. I would say that colorblindness can be simply that you haven't learned to differentiate some aspects of reality. A blindspot is not just something you can't see but a way in which you're actively hiding from yourself the fact that you can't see it. That's how I use the term "blindspot", which is perhaps downstream of Val / Michael Smith's "Metacognitive Blindspots" presentations (at eg the 2014 alumni reunion iirc, I forget where/when else). "Colorblindness" doesn't cut it for that meaning, so it's not the metaphor I want when I reach for "blindspot".
Having said that, it's a cool metaphor for this different thing, and I can see the temptation to stretch "blindspot" to cover it. Both look kinda similar from the outside if you try to give someone feedback about the thing they're not seeing. I'd say that if someone just has a colorblindness and no blindspot, they would tend to respond more curiously and you'd be able to make some headway starting to point out the dimension and how things vary along it. If someone has a blindspot, trying to talk with them about the thing they're not seeing will feel weird. You'll keep saying things and the conversation will sort of circle around the thing you're trying to point at, or it may feel hard to even put the thing into words while trying to translate it into the other person's frame, or hard to even stay in touch with the thing yourself while talking with the other person.
A lot of what you're pointing at here reminds me of an idea I had for illustrating how the brain hemispheres work (based on Iain McGilchrist's new model, not the old debunked models from the 60s). I had an image of a comic or something depicting the two hemispheres as hiking partners, the left hemisphere (LH) with its face buried in the map and the right hemisphere (RH) looking around at the territory. And there could be a series of short stories showing how if they're not able to talk to each other they can get in various confusions, but how if they are able to coordinate effectively then the RH can help the LH update the map, and the LH's map can help make sense of the fully-detailed reality of the territory.
"Pre-conceptual intimacy" seems to point very much at the RH's way of attending to the world in general. A quote from a twitter thread of mine, paraphrasing McGilchrist: "whatever we experience comes to us first – it “presences” to us in unpreconceived freshness – in the RHem"
I've found understanding the nature of the brain hemispheres to be one of the most useful models I've taken in over the last few years, particularly for improving my relationship between map & territory and noticing how my attention affects what I experience. So I'd highly recommend it to you Logan and anyone who's interested in these questions you're exploring.
Ways Of Attending is a great short intro but costs $20 which is silly given that it's basically a long essay, like 30 pages. I've written a thorough summary of it (about half the length of the whole book) in this twitter thread. (I've also written a bit about it in this LW comment about how people are confused when they're saying "system 1" & "system 2") Then there's also The Master and his Emissary, his longer book with a couple thousand citations.
Awesome, let me know what you think of it!
I've just updated Complice to give it primitive support for FVP directly!
A user sent me this article and asked about some changes to Complice that would make it easier to use FVP. I took a different approach than he suggested (creating a filter to only show starred actions) but I came up with something that I think works substantially better.
First I added a new hotkey (d) to mark a dot next to an intention in your list, which is sort of the bare minimum needed to implement FVP or Mark Forster's other systems, which people have tried using the star ★ feature for. So select an intention with the arrow keys or j/k, then press d to dot it. Pressing d again clears the dot.
Then it became clear that the usual assumption Complice makes about your "next action" (that it's the top item on today's list that you haven't yet done) is completely backwards for Forster mode. So I changed it so that if you've put dots next to any intentions, it'll treat the lowest dotted item on the list (that you haven't done yet) as your next action.
Then I made sure that that algorithm worked on the backend too so that this same next action is used for the new tab page extension as well.
I've added some styles to visually diminish the items between the dotted ones, since those sort of aren't in consideration. I'm intending to make a mode where it hides those altogether, but that's a larger project at this point.
There are still a few other improvements to make, like clearly disambiguating between "do" mode and "prioritize" mode, and at the moment the UI doesn't guide you through the process whatsoever so you need to already know how you're using the dots, by eg reading this guide above.
If anyone has used other systems by Mark Forster and can comment on which are compatible or incompatible with what I've done so far, that would be great. I know he has dozens but I've barely dabbled with them at all. And of course I'm also interested in hearing other ways that this system could be improved.
If you're new to Complice, know that it's very opinionated about a few things, and one of them is that you start with a fresh list every day. That's not likely to change anytime soon, which technically goes against FVP but ultimately seems compatible with what Will describes above where he starts fresh about daily. And it has tons of other people features for tracking progress towards specific goals, and doing daily-weekly-monthly reviews based on what you've worked on in those periods.
I've been asked to self-review this post as part of the 2020 review. I pretty clearly still stand by it given that I was willing to crosspost it from my own blog 5 years after I originally wrote it. But having said that, I've had some new insights since mid-2020, so let me take a moment and re-read the post and make sure it doesn't now strike me as fatally confused...
...yeah, no, it's good! I made a couple of small formatting and phrasing edits just now but it's otherwise ready to go from my perspective.
The post is sort of weirdly contextual in that it's partially attempting to clarify something someone else wrote and respond to critiques of how that thing was received. I'd want to have it reviewed for editing by someone who didn't read any of the original posts to make sure it stands on its own (which the post itself notes it was intended to do!)
(We also may want to check in with Logan-formally-known-as-Brienne whether they want to be renamed and repronouned; I'll leave that to the editors.)
The first section prompted me to want to share this piece by David Chapman, "The Court of Values and the Bureau of Boringness", which semi-satirically suggests splitting democracy into two types of vote, of which each citizen must pick one in any given election. One actually makes policy for roads and industry and so on, the other makes claims about some cultural issue. The idea is that this would allow the crazy to not get in the way of getting enough attention on the decisions that are settled enough to be non-controversial but not actually precisely answered. Not likely to work as described, but I've found it inspirational for thinking about how we might be more sane collectively while having pockets of crazy.
Appreciating you pointing out via those first two quotes that some of these dimensions are pointing at someone being submissive rather than sovereign+respectful (not attached to these words).
Feels weird that I missed that when I was reading the draft, actually. Bullet points 2-5 of the "someone isn't doing frame control" list still seem solid to me. On reflection, I actually think bullet 1 is actually completely misleading, because someone frame controlling can also do a bunch of these things, particularly if they have a victim energy as in Raemon's comment.
This also feels off:
They don’t laugh nervously, don’t give tiny signals that they are malleable and interested in conforming to your opinion or worldview.
I might try to steelman it as:
They can't laugh at themselves, and don't seem to give signals that they are interested in learning from you and seeing the world through your eyes.
Yes. (Likewise in Malcolm culture!)
My main approach to this is to focus on honoring distrust:
"I can't personally trust that this is not frame control, so to honor myself, I need to [get out of the situation / let you know that's my experience / etc]".
As with anything, this can also get weaponized depending on the tone & implicature with which it's said, but the precise meaning here points at encouraging a given person to really honor their own frame and their own experience and distrust, while not making any claims that anyone else can agree or disagree with.
Like, if I can't trust that something isn't functioning as frame control, then I can't trust that. You might be able to trust that it's fine, but that doesn't contradict my not being able to trust that, since we're coming from different backgrounds (this itself is pointing at respecting others frames). Then maybe you can share some evidence that will allow me to relax as well, but if you share your evidence and I'm still tense, then I'm still tense and that's okay.
I'd edit "victims" to "weak" in the second header, since I think that expresses your point way clearer. You're not just pointing at the common-ish (& true!) refrains of "abusers are traumatized" or "abusers were once victims" but more specifically "abusers may be doing a bunch of frame control from the role of weak & vulnerable person".
Glad to have helped your blergness snap into place—not taking it personally. I share your concerns here in the specific case and in the general case re the word "knowledge"! And that people understanding the difference between "common knowledge" and other things is important.
More accurately maybe I could say "this matches what I understand to be the widespread model of Leverage known by dozens of people to be held among those dozens"
Some of it I observed directly or was told it by Leverage folks myself though, so "rumor" doesn't feel like an adequate descriptor from my vantage point.
I like this a lot, both the videos as a demonstration and the articulation & examples of unique and idiosyncratic skills like this. Have noticed this more the last few years, and my impression is they're remarkably common if you allow for very subtle ones.
I will say though that I'm a bit confused about "cup-stacking" as a metaphor (or name) only insofar as it seems like exactly the opposite of the thing you're trying to point at, with respect to both:
- "unconsciously/accidentally developed"
- "can't control when to use it / notice when one is using it"
Would also add that the compulsion to use the skills in certain ways may be separate from the skill! Unlocking the Emotional Brain suggests that what's going on is the person has both a skill and a compulsion to use it in a particular way (in order to feel safe) and the compulsion may be miscalibrated to their current situation, and that it's possible to recalibrate and ease off the compulsion while retaining the non-naivety that the skill (including the perceptiveness involved) grants.
facts that are more-or-less "common knowledge" among people who spent time socially adjacent to Leverage
Yup, sounds right. As someone who visited the rationality community in the bay a bunch in 2013-2018, almost nothing listed in the bullet points was a surprise to me, and off-hand I can think of dozens of other people who I would assume also know almost everything written above. (I'm sure there are more such people, that I haven't met or wouldn't remember.)
I don't have anything in particular to say about the implications of these facts, just seemed worth mentioning this thing re common knowledge.
(The main thing I hadn't heard about was the sexual relationships bullet point.)
The flu did mutate and stick around mightily, but annual flu deaths are an order of magnitude lower than COVID.
Maybe this is what you're already saying, but I want to highlight something specific:
My understanding is this isn't about the virus mutating to become less deadly, but more because endemic viruses encounter non-naive immune systems, which is true for flus but not for sars-ncov-2 (so far). T-cells have basically lifetime memory I think (longer than antibodies?). This is similar to how european diseases were so devastating to indigenous folk (and I think vice versa in one case?) because of naive immune systems.
And this prepared defense effect might be stronger for people who actually got sick than folks who got the vaccine (I feel like I saw this somewhere but am very unsure) but in either case the odds of this being worse than the flu are now pretty low and it seems to me vaccinated folks should at this point treat covid roughly like the flu—get a shot now and then, and don't visit your grandparents if you think you might have it, but otherwise don't worry about it.
I'm getting much of this from this source, which bases its reasoning on various claims I'm not qualified to assess. Would love to hear others thoughts: Why COVID-19 Is Here to Stay, and Why You Shouldn’t Worry About It
Oh huh I completely skimmed past that on first read & didn't even notice it, but revisiting it after seeing this comment, I also find it off-putting. Could capture most of the good and none of the bad with something more like "Buckle up, you have no idea what you're in for!" which feels (appropriately) like an invitation to a wild tour, rather than a "you fucked up."
Feels weird being told to shut up when I hadn't said anything.
I appreciate you trying to write this up, but as other commenters have noted, there's no contradiction here in the first place and you appear to have missed the point.
As far as I can tell, if you understand Yudkowsky's point, Zvi's follows directly. {No evidence of X} = {evidence of not-X}, but the speech act of claiming "There is no evidence of X" only occurs when there is some evidence worth claiming doesn't count as evidence.
And Yudkowsky's point also points out that essentially "no evidence" is not just vague but in virtually all cases just completely misleading. It would be better to say "the absence of any photographs or eyewitness accounts is evidence that this story was fabricated."
There is evidence for and evidence against but there is no "no evidence".
Well, apparently I decided to write this up as its own post.
Yeah not quite Australia but closer to Australia than to what we've had. The border has been nearly closed to all except citizens and close partners. Canada has forced 14-day quarantines for everyone entering, and fined a guy $500k for stopping to sightsee on his way to Alaska. One weird thing is that while the land border basically only lets citizens go into their country (with rare exceptions), I gather that Canadians can fly to the US, but not the reverse. So returning Canadians would be a major source of infections.
I think sane policy would have increased returning quarantine to 3 weeks to be safe, and enforced it quite strictly. Then pour tons of resources into contact tracing as well.
🇨🇦 Tiny Canada update: we've now vaccinated 10 doses per 100 people, and since we're officially doing first doses first in most cases, that's nearly 10% of the population vaccinated. The territories, that have almost nobody in them, are like half-vaccinated already.
Interestingly, while we're way behind the USA on administering vaccine doses (they're at 37 doses per 100 people), we've already soared way past the "more people vaccinated than ever tested positive" figure because we had fewer people test positive in the first place. From a timeline perspective though, that unfortunately means we're even further from herd immunity than being so behind on vaccines would imply.
Nevermind, this update became not-tiny and I made it its own post:
🇨🇦 Canada Covid Update: thinking out loud
This is a good point, and suggests that the bigger issue was whatever caused anyone to publish anything saying there seemed to be an association between the vaccines and blood clots in the first place.
Guessing that that varies by location—I've heard of online classrooms where you're not allowed to have your video off nearly all day.
But even if it's all as you describe, one answer for how virtual classes might still be worse is that for kids whose home situations are abusive or neglectful, it makes a meaningful positive difference to get to be around teachers and other kids outside their home.
🇨🇦 Canada update: we are WAY behind on vaccines (2.7% of population) and the bottleneck is very clear: we don't have the doses.
The "why" is also becoming a bit more clear: we never even tried to create a big manufacturing plant for it last year and instead just tried to partner with everybody, including a deal with China that was announced last May and started going sideways 3 days later but we're just finding out now that it completely fell through and is a nonstarter! Wtf.
A couple articles to read on that front:
- Canada-China vaccine collaboration began to fall apart days after Ottawa announced clinical trials (Globe & Mail)
- LILLEY: Britain's vaccine success the path Canada should have followed (Toronto Sun)
Not sure what we can do about any of that now though, unlike the USA where Zvi points at many obvious mistakes being made in the present, or choice points around approvals.
Meanwhile cases continue to trend downward (restrictions are mostly working) but there's no reason I'm aware of to think we aren't still going to gradually see growth of the UK strains and others.
Here's a longer update I wrote awhile ago: Covid Canada Jan25: low & slow
News: This article lays out roughly why Canada is way behind on vaccines—no attempt was even made last year to ramp up manufacturing capacity in Canada, instead just a bunch of partnerships, including one with China that completely fell through (other sources (eg globe & mail) have speculated that it may have fallen through in part because China is still grumpy at Canada for arresting the Huawei exec 2 years ago, but that's unclear).
LILLEY: Britain's vaccine success the path Canada should have followed
Something missing from the top-level post: why stagnation.
I'll just put out that one of the tiny things that most gave me a sense of "fuck" in relation to stagnation was reading an essay written in 1972 that was lamenting the "publish or perish" phenomenon. I had previously assumed that that term was way more recent, and that people were trying to fix it but it would just take a few years. To realize it was 50 years old was kinda crushing honestly.
Here's google ngrams showing how common the phrase "publish or perish" was in books through the last 200 years. It was coined in the 30s and took off in the 60s, peaking in 1968. Interesting & relevant timing!
I don't have the detailed knowledge needed to flesh this out, but it occurred to me that there might be a structure of an argument someone could make that would be shaped something like "we got a lot of meaningful changes in the last 70 years, but they didn't create as many nonlinear tipping points as in the previous industrial revolutions."
Fwiw, flying cars probably wouldn't hit any such tipping point, though self-driving cars probably would.
Widespread nuclear energy might've meant little concern about global warming at this point, but solar & wind have been trucking along slowly enough that there's tons of concern.
I think the internet is doing something important for the possibility of running your own 1-2 person business, which is a meaningful tipping point. There are various other tipping points happening as a result of computers and the internet, which is why I think it stands out as @jasoncrawford's only named revolutionary technologies.
Anyway, hoping someone can steelman this for me, considering the nonlinear cascades in each era & from each technology, and seeing whether there's indeed something different about pre-1970 and after. I'm not confident there is, to be clear, but I have some intuition that says this might be part of what people are seeing.