see the back and forth with Ape in the coat below for further discussion 

What is different about us then? What has gotten us into this "dreamtime"? Why aren't we still savages (animals) trapped in an endless war of all against all? Animals have to act in ruthless "rational" self-interest yet we do have a choice, we can embrace all of these delusions and thwart moloch (or at least play him to a stalemate, which is all we need to do really). For example, there exists an entire institution of non-breeding individuals with immense worldly power because of widespread belief in a story - the catholic church. Obviously I used a lot of Christian imagery in the essay (and will do so more explicitly in the next essay), but that's a key example here - a man was systematically eliminated and it spawned a movement which truly was based (at first...) on compassion and love (for your enemy). I'm not at all saying that Christianity was/is the One True Religion, but there is a blueprint - it is not true to say that the survivors become even more enslaved by Moloch as a result - the (early) history of Christianity (and many other spiritual traditions) show this to not be the case. Of course the catholic church is now just another servant of Moloch, but that doesn't invalidate the point - the game goes on, we must constantly devise new tricks to outwit Moloch as he does to enslave us.

Are you familiar with David Deutsch's Beginning of Infinity? David Deutsch makes a distinction between predictions (extrapolations from current knowledge) and prophecies (claims about future knowledge and creativity, “that problem can’t be solved”). For example, “earth’s temperature is projected to increase by X degrees by 2060” is a prediction; “the earth’s temperature will increase by X degrees by 2060 and it will be catastrophic for humanity” is a prophecy because it presupposes that we won’t find a way to prevent the projected temperature increase or mitigate its negative consequences. 

This null hypothesis is a prediction, not a prophecy. You can’t just crunch the numbers and run the simulations – you have to actually play the games. The future of knowledge is fundamentally unknowable.

Perhaps I'm wrong, but I suspect none of this will convince you because we are working with fundamentally different world-models - yours being deterministic secular materialism (world as machine) and mine being, well, not that (world as supernaturalistic game/story). If you don't believe there is any force/principle/being beyond the system (spacetime), then I suppose the future is inevitable (prediction = prophecy). The fact that we possess this mysterious "creativity" which allows us to surprise the universe and thwart Moloch is, to me, evidence that we are made in the image of this supernatural Creator (this isn't to say that humanity is uniquely special; Deustch, for example, defines "people" as precisely those entities capable of this unbounded knowledge growth). 

I know this is all foolish superstition to most LWers, but so is the idea that we will be able to somehow compel or constrain an AI "god" to do our bidding. We can't outwit the AI god (or convince it so save us by referencing the desultory history of our species) but we might be able to entice or seduce it with a game or story. For example: 

The main story concerns Shahryār, a king who ruled an empire that stretched from Persia to India. Shahryār is shocked to learn that his brother’s wife is unfaithful. Discovering that his own wife’s infidelity has been even more flagrant, he has her killed. In his bitterness and grief, he decides that all women are the same. Shahryār begins to marry a succession of virgins only to execute each one the next morning, before she has a chance to dishonor him.

Eventually the Vizier (Wazir), whose duty it is to provide them, cannot find any more virgins. Scheherazade, the vizier’s daughter, offers herself as the next bride and her father reluctantly agrees. On the night of their marriage, Scheherazade begins to tell the king a tale, but does not end it. The king, curious about how the story ends, is thus forced to postpone her execution in order to hear the conclusion. The next night, as soon as she finishes the tale, she begins another one, and the king, eager to hear the conclusion of that tale as well, postpones her execution once again. This goes on for one thousand and one nights, hence the name. Versions differ as to final ending but they all end with the king giving his wife a pardon and sparing her life.

Basically, we need to convince the AI god to do it because it would make for a good story, "wouldn't it be fun it the universe ended in the silliest and most surprising way possible?". And we can do that, I believe, through leading by example - by living the story, by playing the game (as for what that means and how to actually do it, well that's basically what my larger body of thought is about). 

Hope this helps. 

No worries - critique/feedback are much appreciated. 

I will take blame for not making it clear that this is an introduction to a much larger body of thought. If there is a vagueness and incompleteness to it, that's because it's one essay and not the full book. 

Here is a comment I made on my blog that more directly explains my thesis. 

"Game theory and evolution give us pretty clear null hypothesis for the future and it ain't pretty - the strongest always survive, the mighty are always righty. Weakness and "delusion" (e.g. art, spirituality, love, mercy, compassion) get optimized out of existence as the number of competing agents asymptotes towards infinite; similarly, as technological power asymptotes towards infinity so does infinite corruption.

That sucks. More than anything, it's just fucking boring - nothing surprising ever happens, the underdog never wins, the story always ends the same way. But this is just a null hypothesis - as they say, you don't play the games on paper.

I want to live in a universe where surprising things happen and the aforementioned delusions still have a place. In some sense, I want to turn the world and its ways upside down - I want the weak and the deluded to win - but how? Not through rational intelligence or "work" because that is exactly how the null hypothesis becomes fulfilled. Reality is like a chinese finger trap, struggling only deepens your entrapment. 

Workfulness/playfulness, adultiness/childliness - all of this is about realizing the ludic/dramatic dimension of reality (as opposed to giving in to the machinic dimension of reality in which might inexorably makes right). If this seems paradoxical/delusional - well, so is reality, that's the game of it all. This idea that reality is illusive/delusive and is something more like a trick or game is almost the default pre-modern view (Hindus, Greeks, Aztecs, etc.) - it is only us moderns believe who what you see is what you get (that reality is a problem to be solved). 

There's a lot more to unpack and I will eventually take this in all kinds of wild directions but that's the jumping off point."

I will take blame for not making it clear that this is an introduction to a much larger body of thought. If there is a vagueness and incompleteness to it, that's because it's one essay and not the full book.

Here is a comment I made on the blog that more directly explains my thesis. 

"Game theory and evolution give us pretty clear null hypothesis for the future and it ain't pretty - the strongest always survive, the mighty are always righty. Weakness and "delusion" (e.g. art, spirituality, love, mercy, compassion) get optimized out of existence as the number of competing agents asymptotes towards infinite; similarly, as technological power asymptotes towards infinity so does infinite corruption.

That sucks. More than anything, it's just fucking boring - nothing surprising ever happens, the underdog never wins, the story always ends the same way. But this is just a null hypothesis - as they say, you don't play the games on paper.

I want to live in a universe where surprising things happen and the aforementioned delusions still have a place. In some sense, I want to turn the world and its ways upside down - I want the weak and the deluded to win - but how? Not through rational intelligence or "work" because that is exactly how the null hypothesis becomes fulfilled. Reality is like a chinese finger trap, struggling only deepens your entrapment. 

Workfulness/playfulness, adultiness/childliness - all of this is about realizing the ludic/dramatic dimension of reality (as opposed to giving in to the machinic dimension of reality in which might inexorably makes right). If this seems paradoxical/delusional - well, so is reality, that's the game of it all. This idea that reality is illusive/delusive and is something more like a trick or game is almost the default pre-modern view (Hindus, Greeks, Aztecs, etc.) - it is only us moderns believe who what you see is what you get (that reality is a problem to be solved). 

There's a lot more to unpack and I will eventually take this in all kinds of wild directions but that's the jumping off point."

I'll have another essay in a few weeks - I will send it to you and I look forward to your criticism. 

LWers abhor metaphor and poetry. They want you to spoonfeed them in the most direct and literal way possible. 

What is a value? What is a law? What is money? 

yes!

yes

interesting! 

hmmm weird...

Huh, you might want to get your virus-checker checked - it's just a link to a substack page

https://www.secretorum.life/p/life-on-the-grid-part-2

yes

Very interesting, and yes I think I'm getting at something like that here as well. 

yes

No I think it does - almost like free-range foraging vs. being spoon-fed information (wild animal vs. domesticated) - in the former you learn how to quickly discriminate between good/useful food and bad and develop a kind of intuition for how to efficiently find the good stuff whereas in the latter you do not. 

then read it again but non-ironically 

ughh you are right, missed opportunity 

Fair enough, but as I said not all writing has to be aimed at maximum concision and clarity (and insisting that it should be is bad for our collective creativity). One may choose to write in a less direct manner in order to briefly present numerous tangentially related ideas (which readers may follow up on if they choose) or simply to provide a more varied and entertaining reading experience. Believe it or not, there are other goals that one can have in writing and reading besides maximally efficient communication/intake of information. 

What about this is hard to read? I'm confused. 

So there is really no purpose to every read something non-fiction besides efficient intake of information? Is that what we really believe? 

I could not care less whether or not any reads this. 

Not going to be everyone's vibe that's fine, but if you've forgotten that there are other reasons to read something besides maximally efficient intake of information then that's a problem...

Efficient communication/intake of information is not the only reason that people write or read... 

there is no main idea and I'm not trying to convince anyone of anything. It is nothing. 

"probably wrong" thank you so much for this

Thank you for your review! 

They do spend considerable time discussing that in the article

Yes

To be clear, I am not the author - this is an article that was submitted to the journal. If you want to read the article just reach out the email above (if you want to take a look without registering to be a gardener that is okay). 

I'll just post a twitter thread here that I wrote in response to criticism. Maybe this will clarify my goals/intentions

I want “nerds” to realize that we are not above performative attention-seeking behavior, that we can really easily slip into a failure mode of “write a blog post that embraces some high-minded ideal that no one disagrees with and then propose some law/policy/program that will supposedly increase this thing and then pat yourself on the back and move on”. I wanted to expose my own emotions and insecurities around really caring about science/progress/altruism/etc. while also really wanting people to read and praise my writing because I think other people struggle with this too. I want people reflect on the fact that writing =/= thinking and if you aren’t careful it’s easy to forget that. I wanted people to consider that explicitly trying to be innovative, creative, or smart might not work as well being as earnest as possible in your pursuit of curiosity, love, beauty, etc and that internet/social media can make it really hard to be earnest in your intellectual pursuits. I also just wanted to entertain and make people laugh; of course I was making arguments but I also view this essay as art (pretentious, I know)– I want people to know it’s okay to do both, not everything has to be a Very Serious Essay That Convinces You of Something. In fact, I would argue that there is a dearth of aesthetic sensibilities in the science/progress/EA space and that we all might benefit from a little more style, emotion, beauty, and humor. 

Also, check out the substack :) - https://rogersbacon.substack.com/

Being a little tongue-in-cheek with this one, but I think recent US history shows racial preferences are more malleable than we might think. Will there be a tipping point when everyone is either mixed or has a close relative that's mixed where it will seem a little more silly to argue about race? I don't know about Brazil and would be curious to hear more like Ben Pace. 

Thanks! Yup, just finished and enjoyed DoE :)

A good reminder, I'll start getting worried when discussion of these heresies moves beyond niche internet message boards. 

I don't think anything - this is a heresy not something I believe in (I would argue your question is evidence that this view is a modern heresy). "politicians were generally older".... the average age of senators is 57 for example. 

I hope it goes without saying that this is a heresy and not something I actually believe. A recent article in the Journal of Controversial Ideas makes the case for animal-rights terrorism. 

"There is widespread agreement that coercive force may be used to prevent people from seriously and wrongfully harming others. But what about when those others are non-human animals? Some militant animal rights activists endorse the use of violent coercion against those who would otherwise harm animals. In the philosophical literature on animal ethics, however, theirs is a stance that enjoys little direct support. I contend that such coercion is nevertheless prima facie morally permissible."

Interesting. I guess in some ways yes because it's giving people access to another form of identity but it's also kind of orthogonal in that the identity is only used in virtual environment and it's pseudonymous. The argument in this heresy is that we being less attached to our names IRL would cause a shift of some kind in cognition/consciousness. 

Yea that's fair, I didn't write this with LW in mind but I should have considered dropping/trimming introduction as it's not as necessary for this audience.... Interesting, I've heard similar thoughts to yours regarding music from quite a few people. This makes me think that the ubiquity of art in the modern world is affecting us more than we may realize. Curious what research exists on long-term effects of music/art consumption, although this would be hard to study I guess (which is why I'm suspicious that there is something we haven't yet appreciated). 

 I was in Denver recently and there is street art (giant colorful murals) everywhere. It seems like this is almost universally regarded as a good thing vs. looking at concrete walls, but now I'm skeptical. There is at least some evidence that students learn less and get more distracted in busy classrooms for what it's worth. 

yes

Sure, I don't deny that there are some ideas which should be kept secret for at least some time so that you can better capitalize on them. But I think for most people this category of ideas is much smaller than they think and that it would serve them better in the long run to be less stingy with their ideas. This kind of gets to the crux of my thesis - if you have a scarcity mindset with ideas than they probably will be scarce for you. Maybe you will end up losing out on an opportunity or some concrete short-term benefit, but there are more intangible, long-term benefits to be had by being open with your ideas - the difficulty is that these benefits are inherently more nebulous/illegible and therefore easier to discount. 

You are right about the use of impact as a metric, definitely not perfect, and I think both of those sources probably oversell how poor scientific evaluation is in general. Some of the problem is that people are not incentivized to really care that much and they don't specialize in grant/paper evaluation, the idea of having "professional reviewers" is interesting, but not sure how practically achievable it is. 

I hadn't heard about the idea of depth first search but it is exactly what I am talking about and you explained it very well, thank you for sharing. 

Thanks

"We often observe that the solutions found by genetic algorithms, or NNs, or cats, are strange, perverse, unexpected, and trigger a reaction of 'how did it come up with that?'; one reason is just that they are very thorough about exploring the possibility space"

Do you have any specific examples in mind here that you are willing to share? None are coming to mind off the top of my head and I'd love to have some examples for future reference.

I'm a little confused by what you are referring to here so if you are willing to spell it out I would appreciate it but no worries either way. Many very fascinating ideas in your other comment, I'll try to respond in a day or two. 

Not intentional - thanks! 

And he disclosed his name because the New York Times published it - https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/13/technology/slate-star-codex-rationalists.html

I've also discussed the paper with him and he didn't seem to have an issue with it. 

Ha I like the Einstein example! I think about the "bold leaps" thing a lot - we may be in kind of "epistemic hell" with respect to certain ideas/theories i.e. all small steps in that direction will seem completely false/irrational (the valley between us and the next peak is deep and wide). Maybe not perfect but I think the problem of inheritance as you describe in the Bakewell article fits as an example here. Heredity was much more complex than we thought and the problem was complicated by the fact that we had lots of wrong but vaguely reasonable ideas that came from essentially mythical figures like Aristotle. The idea that we should study a very simple system and collect huge amounts of data until a pattern emerges and then go from there instead of armchair theorizing was kind of a crazy idea, which is why a monk was the one to do it and no one realized how important it was until 40 years later. 

The question is how do we create individuals that are capable of making huge jumps in knowledge space and environments that encourage them to do so. Anything that sounds super reasonable is probably not radical enough (which is why this is so difficult). Like you say, it can't be too crazy, but we need people who will go incredibly far in one direction while starting with a premise that is highly speculative but not outright wrong. One example might be panpsychism - we need an Einstein who takes panpsychism as brute fact and then attempts to reconstruct physics from there. My own wild offering is that ideas are alive, not in the trivial sense of a meme, but as complex spatiotemporal organisms, or maybe they are endosymbionts that are made of consciousness in the same way we are made of matter (see Ideas are Alive and You are Dead). Before the microscope we couldn't really conceive how a life form could be that small, maybe there is something like that going on here as well and new tools/theories will lead to the discovery of an entirely new domain of life. Obviously this is crazy but maybe this is an example of the general flavor of crazy we need to explore. 

…one reason is just that they are very thorough about exploring the possibility space, where a human would have long since gotten bored, said "this is stupid", and moved on - it was stupid, but it wasn't stupid enough, and if they had persisted long enough, it would've wrapped around from idiocy to genius. Our satisficing nature undermines our search for truly novel solutions; we aren't inhumanly patient enough to find them.

One reason that people might persist in something way past boredom or reasonable justification is religious faith or some kind of irrational conviction arising from a spiritual experience. From a different angle, Tyler Cowen also offers some thoughts on why the important thinkers of the future will be religious:

Third, religious thinkers arguably have more degrees of freedom.  I don’t mean to hurt anybody’s feelings here, but…how shall I put it?  The claims of the religions are not so closely tied to the experimental method and the randomized control trial.  (Narrator: “Neither are the secular claims!”)  It would be too harsh to say “they can just make stuff up,” but…arguably there are fewer constraints.  That might lead to more gross errors and fabrications in the distribution as a whole, but also more creativity in the positive direction.  And right now we seem pretty hungry for some breaks in the previous debates, even if not all of those breaks will be for the better.

I don’t think Mendel was particularly inspired by his religious faith to study heredity (I might be wrong) but it certainly didn’t stop him and in the broad sense it enabled him to be an outsider who could dedicate extended study to something seemingly trivial. As you pointed towards, being an outsider is crucial if someone is to take these kinds of bold leaps. Among other things, being an insider makes it harder to get past what you described at the end of the Origins of Innovation article:

Perhaps there is some sort of psychological barrier, where the mind flinches at any suggestion bubbling up from the subconscious that conflicts with age-old tradition or with higher-status figures. Should any new ideas still manage to come up, they are suppressed; “don’t rock the boat”, don’t stand out (“the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions”)

This is the fundamental reasoning behind an article I wrote that was recently published in New Ideas in Psychology – "Amateur hour: Improving knowledge diversity in psychological and behavioral science by harnessing contributions from amateurs"  (author access link). Amateurs can think and do research in ways that professionals can’t by virtue of not facing the incentives and constraints that come with having a career in academia. We identify six “blind spots” in academia that amateurs might focus on – long-term research, interdisciplinary, speculative, uncommon or taboo topics, basic observational research, and aimless projects). This led us to write: 

Taken together, our discussion of blind spots highlights one overarching direction in “research-space” that may be especially promising: long, aimless, speculative, and interdisciplinary research on uncommon or taboo subjects. Out of all amateur contributions to sciences so far, Darwin's achievements may be the primary exemplar of this type of endeavor. As aforementioned, at the time of his departure on the HMS Beagle in 1831 he was an independent scientist—a 22-year-old Cambridge graduate with no advanced publications who had to pay his own way on the voyage (Bowlby, 1990; Keynes & Darwin, 2001). Darwin's work on evolution certainly took a long time to develop (the Beagle's voyage took 5 years and he did not publish On the Origin of Species until 23 years after he returned). It was aimless in the sense that he did not set out from the beginning to develop a theory of evolution. His work was highly interdisciplinary (Darwin drew on numerous fields within the biological sciences in addition to geology and economics), was the culmination of a huge amount of basic observational work, and was not necessarily an experimental contribution (though he did make those as well), but primarily theoretical (and sometimes more speculative) in nature. Darwin's theories were taboo in the sense that they went against the prevailing theological ideas of the time and caused significant controversy (and still do). We speculate that there may one day be a “Charles Darwin of the Mind” who follows a similar path. Indeed, it seems that the state of theorizing in psychology today is at an early stage comparable to evolutionary theorizing at the time of Darwin (Muthukrishna & Henrich, 2019), and the time may be ripe for an equally transformative amateur contribution in psychology. We hope that this paper provides the smallest nudge in this direction.

I actually just posted about the article here because we mention LessWrong as an example of a community where amateurs make novel research contributions in psychology – “LessWrong discussed in New Ideas in Psychology article”.

So if I had to guess – the next Darwin/Einstein/Newton will be an amateur/outsider, religious or for some reason have some weird idea that they pursue to the extreme, and have some kind of life circumstance that allows them to do this (maybe like Darwin they come from money). 

I also touch on this theme in my article “The Myth of Myth of the Lone Genius”. Briefly, we have put too much cultural emphasis in science on incrementalism, on standing on the shoulders of giants. Sure, most discoveries come from armies of scientists making small contributions, but we need to also cultivate the belief that you can make a radical discovery by yourself if you try really really hard. I also quote you at the beginning of the article.

“The Great Man theory of history may not be truly believable and Great Men not real but invented, but it may be true we need to believe the Great Man theory of history and would have to invent them if they were not real.”

Thanks for catching the grammar mistake - fixed! These are interesting extensions of the basic idea of using more randomness in science, thanks for sharing. Your last point makes me think about the use of prediction markets to guess which studies will replicate, something that people have successfully done. 

https://www.pnas.org/content/112/50/15343