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It's an interesting framework, I can see it being useful.
I think it's more useful when you consider both high-decoupling and low-decoupling to be failure modes, more specifically: when one is dominant and the other is neglected, you reliably end up with inacccurate beliefs.
You went over the mistakes of low-decouplers in your post, and provided a wonderful example of a high-decoupler mistake too!
High decouplers will notice that, holding preferences constant, offering people an additional choice cannot make them worse off. People will only take the choice if its better than any of their current options
Aside from https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/08/12/choices-are-really-bad/ there's also the consideration of what choice I offer you, or how I frame the choice (see Kahneman's stuff).
And that's just considering it from the individual psychological level, but there are social/cultural levers and threads to pull here too.
I think the optimal functioning of this process is cyclical with both high decoupling phases and highly integrated phases, and the measure of balance is something like 'this isn't obviously wrong in either context'.
I think future technology all has AI as a pre-requisite?
My high conviction hot take goes further: I think all positive future timelines have AI as a pre-requisite. I expect that, sans AI, our future - our immediate future: decades, not centuries - is going to be the ugliest, and last, chapter in our civilization's history.
I have been in the position of trying to moderate a large and growing community - it was at 500k users last I checked, although I threw in the towel around 300k - and I know what a thankless, sisyphean task it is.
I know what it is to have to explain the same - perfectly reasonable - rule/norm again and again and again.
I know what it is to try to cultivate and nurture a garden while hordes of barbarians trample all over the place.
But...
If it aint broke, don't fix it.
I would argue that the majority of the listed people penalized are net contributors to lesswrong, including some who are strongly net positive.
I've noticed y'all have been tinkering in this space for a while, I think you're trying super hard to protect lesswrong from the eternal september and you actually seem to be succeeding, which is no small feat, buuut...
I do wonder if the team needs a break.
I think there's a thing that happens to gardeners (and here I'm using that as a very broad archetype), where we become attached to and identify with the work of weeding - of maintaining, of day after day holding back entropy - and cease to take pleasure in the garden itself.
As that sets in, even new growth begins to seem like a weed.
Fine. You win. Take your upvote.
Big fan of both of your writings, this dialogue was a real treat for me.
I've been trying to find a satisfying answer to the seeming inverse correlation of 'wellbeing' and 'agency' (these are very loose labels).
You briefly allude to a potential mechanism for this[1]
You also briefly allude to another mechanism with explanatory power for the inverse[2] - i.e. that while it might seem an individual is highly agentic, they are in fact little more than a host for a highly agentic egregore
I'm engaged in that most quixotic endeavour of actually trying to save the world[3] [4], and thus I'm constantly playing with my world model and looking for levers to pull, dominos to push over, that might plausibly -and quickly- shift probability mass towards pleasant timelines.
I think germ theory is exactly the kind of intervention that works here - it's a simple map that even a child can understand, yet it's a 100x impact.
I think there's some kind of 'germ theory for minds', and I think we already have all the pieces - we just need to put them together in the right way. I think it's plausible that this is easy, rapidly scaleable and instrumentally valuable to other efforts in the 'save the world' space.
But... I don't want to end up net negative on agency. In fact my primary objective is to end up strongly net positive. I need more people trying to change the world, not less.
Yet... that scale of ambition seems largely the preserve of people you'd be highly unlikey to describe as 'enlightened', 'balanced' or 'well adjusted'; it seems to require a certain amount of delusion to even (want to) try, and benefit from unbalanced schema that are willing to sacrifice everything on the altar of success.
Most of the people who seem to succcessfully change the world are the people I least want to; whereas the people I most want to change the world seem the least likely to.
- ^
Since the schools that removed social conditioning and also empowered practitioners to upend the social order, tended to get targeted for destruction. (Or at least so I suspect and some people on Twitter said "yes this did happen" when I speculated this out loud.)
- ^
In the Buddhist model of human psychology, we are by default colonized by parasitic thought patterns, though I guess in some cases, like the aforementioned fertility increasing religious memes, they should be thought of as symbiotes with a tradeoff, such as degrading the hosts' episteme.
- ^
I don't expect to succeed, I don't expect to even matter, but it's a fun hobby.
- ^
Also the world does actually seem to be in rather urgent need of saving; short of a miracle or two it seems like I'm unlikely to live to enjoy my midlife crisis.
I don't think there's anything wrong with cultivating a warrior archetype; I strive to cultivate one myself.
Would love to read more on this.
+1 for the 14/24 club.
Hmmm, where to start. Something of a mishmash of thought here.
Actually a manager, not yet clear if I'm particularly successful at it. I certainly enjoy it and I've learned a lot in the past year.
Noticing Panic is a great Step 0, and I really like how you contrast it to noticing confusion.
I used to experience 'Analysis Paralysis' - too much planning, overthinking, and zero doing. This is a form of perfectionism, and is usually rooted in fear of failure.
I expect most academics have been taught entirely the wrong (in the sense of https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a7n8GdKiAZRX86T5A/making-beliefs-pay-rent-in-anticipated-experiences) heuristics around failure.
My life rapidly became more agentic the more I updated toward the following beliefs:
- Failure is cheap
- You have an abundance of chances to get it right
- Plans are maps, reality is terrain. Doing happens in reality. Thus you can offload a bunch of cognitive work to reality simply by trying stuff; failing is one of the most efficient ways of updating your map, and can sometimes reward you with unexpected success (take a look around at all the 'stupid' stuff that actually works/succeeded).
Thus my management strategy is something like:
- Have a goal
- Build a model of the factors that contribute to that goal
- Determine my constraints (e.g. do I have a rigid deadline)
- Notice my affordances (most people always underestimate this)
- What resources do I have, e.g.
- Who can I ask for help?
- What work has already been done that I can use (don't reinvent the wheel)
- What actions are available to me
- What is the smallest meaningful step I can take toward my goal?
- What is the dumbest thing I can do that might actually work?
- What resources do I have, e.g.
- Prioritize my time
- What needs to be done today vs this week vs this month vs actually doesn't need to be done
So I've reduced a combinatorially explosive long term goal into a decent heuristic for prioritizing actions, and then I apply it to the actions I can actually take at different timescales... which is usually an easy choice between a handful of options.
Then I do stuff, and then I update/iterate based on the results.
And sometimes stuff just happens that moves me towards my goal (or my goal towards me) - life is chaotic, and if you're rigidly following a plan then that chaos is always working against you. Whereas if you're adaptable and opportunistic - that chaos can work for you.
I guess all of this boils down to: invest in your world model, not your plan.
Re: average age of authors/laureates and average team size
Are these data adjusted for demographic changes? i.e. Aging populations in most western countries, and general population growth.
I think this is a mistake to import "democracy" at the vision level. Vision is essentially a very high-level plan, a creative engineering task. These are not decided by averaging opinions. "If you want to kill any idea in the world, get a committee working on it." Also, Deutsch was writing about this in "The Beginning of Infinity" in the chapter about democracy.
We should aggregate desiderata and preferences (see "Preference Aggregation as Bayesian Inference"), but not decisions (plans, engineering designs, visions). These should be created by a coherent creative entity. The same idea is evident in the design of Open Agency Architecture.
Democracy is a mistake, for all of the obvious reasons.
As is the belief amongst engineers that every problem is an engineering problem :P
We have a whole bunch of tools going mostly unused and unnoticed that could, plausibly, enable a great deal more trust and collaboration than is currently possible.
We have a whole bunch of people both thinking about and working on the polycrisis already.
My proposal is that we're far more likely to achieve our ultimate goal - a future we'd like to live in - if we simply do our best to empower, rather than direct, others.
I expect attempts to direct, no matter how brilliant the plan or the mind(s) behind it, are likely to fail. For all the obvious reasons.
(caveat: yes AGI changes this, but it changes everything. My whole point is that we need to keep the ship from sinking long enough for AGI to take the wheel)
Joshua Williams created an initial version of a metacrisis map
It's a good presentation, but it isn't a map.
A literal map of the polycrisis[1] can show:
- The various key facets (pollution, climate, biorisk, energy, ecology, resource constraints, globalization, economy, demography etc etc)
- Relative degrees of fragility / timelines (e.g. climate change being one of the areas where we have the most slack)
- Many of the significant orgs/projects working on these facets, with special emphasis placed on those that are aware of the wider polycrisis
- Many of the significant communities
- Many of the significant funders
Do you mean that it's possible to earn by betting long against the current market sentiment?
- ^
I mildly prefer polycrisis because it's less abstract. The metacrisis points toward a systems dynamic for which we have no adequate levers, whereas the polycrisis points toward the effects in the real world that we need to deal with.
I am assuming we live in a world that is going to be reshaped (or ended) by technology (probably AGI) within a few decades, and that if this fails to occur the inevitable result of the metacrisis is collapse.
I think the most impact I can have is to kick the can down the road far enough that the accelerationistas get their shot. I don't pretend this is the world I would choose to be living in, or the horse I'd want to be betting on. It is simply my current understanding of reality.Hence: polycrisis. Deal with the symptoms. Keep the patient alive.
The polycrisis has been my primary source of novelty/intellectual stimulation for a good long while now. Excited to see people explicitly talking about it here.
With regard to the central proposition:
I think if there were A Plan to make the world visibly less broken, made out of many components which are themselves made out of components that people could join and take responsibility for, this would increase the amount of world-fixing work being done and would meaningfully decrease the brokenness of the world. Further, I think there's a lot of Common Cause of Many Causes stuff going on here, where people active in this project are likely to passively or actively support other parts of this project / there could be an active consulting / experience transfer / etc. scene built around it.
I think this is largely sensible and true, but consider top-down implementation of such to be a pipe dream.
Instead there is a kind of grassroots version where you do some combination of:
1.) Clearly state the problems that need to be worked on, and provide reasonable guidance as to where and how they might be worked on
2.) Notice what work is already being done on the problems, and who is doing it (avoid reinventing the wheel/not invented here syndrome; EA is especially guilty of this)
3.) Actively develop useful connections between 2.)
4.) Measure engagement (resource flows) and progress
And from that process I expect something like a plan to emerge - it won't be the best possible plan, but it will be far from the worst plan, more adequate than not, and importantly it will survive contact with reality because reality was a key driver in the development of the plan.
The platform for generating the plan would need to be more-open-than-not, and should be fairly bleeding edge - incorporating prediction markets, consensus seeking (polis), eigenkarma etc
It should be a design goal that high value contributions should be noticed, no matter the source. An example of this actually happening is where Taiwan was able to respond rapidly to Covid thanks to a moderator noticing and doing due diligence on a post in the .g0v forums re: covid, and having a process in place where that information could be escalated to government.
It should also be subject to a serious amount of adversarial testing - such a platform, if successful, will influence $ flows, and thus will be a target for capture/gaming etc etc.
As it stands, we're lacking all 4. We're lacking a coherent map of the polycrisis[1], we're lacking in useful+discoverable communication channels, we're lacking meaningful 3rd party measurement.
As it stands, the barriers to entry for those wishing to engage in meaningful work in this space are absurd.
If you lack the credentials and/or wealth to self-fund, then you're effectively excluded - a problem which was created by an increasingly specialized world (And the worldview, cultural dynamics and behaviours it engenders) has gatekeepers from that same world, enforcing the same bottlenecks/selective pressures of that world on those who would try to solve the problem.
The neighbourhood is on fire, and the only people allowed to join the bucket chain are those most likely to be ignoring the fire - so very catch-22.
P.S.
I think there's a ton of funding available in this space, specifically I think speculating on the markets informed by the kind of worldview that allows one to perceive the polycrisis has significant alpha. I think we can make much better predictions about the next 5-10 years than the market, and I don't think most of the market is even trying to make good predictions on those timescales.
I'd be interested in talking/collaborating with anyone who either strongly agrees or disagrees with this logic.
- ^
On this note, if anyone wants to do and/or fund a version of aisafety.world for the polycrisis, I'm interested in contributing.
There's a guy called Rafe Kelley on youtube who has a fairly good answer to this, which I'm going to attempt to summarize from memory because I can't point you toward any reasonable sources (I heard him talking about it in a 1h+ conversation with everyone's favourite boogeyman, Jordan Peterson).
His reasoning goes thus:
1.) We need play in order to develop: play teaches us how to navigate Agent - Arena relationships
This speaks to the result of playground injuries increasing despite increased supervision - kids aren't actually getting to spend enough time playing in the physical Arena, their capability to navigate it is underdeveloped because of excess indoor time and excess supervision.
2.) We need rough play (e.g. play fighting), specifically, to teach us a whole bunch of capabilities around Agent - Agent - Arena relationships; conflict, boundaries, emotional regulation are all, Rafe argues, rooted in rough play.
Through rough and tumble play, we learn the physical boundaries between agents. We learn that it hurts them, or us, when boundaries are crossed. We learn where those boundaries are. We learn to regulate our emotions with respect to those boundaries.
These are highly transferable, core skills, without which human development is significantly stunted.
Depending on the kind of support they're looking for https://ceealar.org could be an option. At any one time there are a handful of people staying there working independently on AI Safety stuff.
Wholely agree with the 'if it works it works' perspective.
Two minor niggles are worth mentioning:
- As I understand it, eating any amount will signal the body to stop fasting. The overnight fast is the only one most people have and it seems to be quite important for long term metabolic health.
- Your body has several inputs to its internal clock, and the two most significant ones are light and food. So there's a pathway where this 'solution' might also be reinforcing the problem.
Niggles aside, if it works it works. And nothing is more important than sleep for health. If you are currently chronically sleep deprived and the usual things aren't helping - absolutely try this.
Thanks Elizabeth for sharing another potential tool for helping people.
So I'm basically the target audience for the OP - I read a lot, of all kinds of stuff, and almost zero papers. I'm an autodidact with no academic background.
I appreciated the post. I usually need a few reminders that 'this thing has value' before I finally get around to exploring it :)
I would say, as the target audience, I'm probably representative when I say that a big part of the reason we don't read papers is a lack of access, and a lack of discovery tools. I signed up for Elicit a while back, but as above - haven't gotten around to using it yet :D
In my experience the highest epistemic standard is achieved in the context of 'nerds arguing on the internet'. If everyone is agreeing, all you have is an echo chamber.
I would argue that good faith, high effort contributions to any debate are something we should always be grateful for if we are seeking the truth.
I think the people who would be most concerned with 'anti-doom' arguments are those who believe it is existentially important to 'win the argument/support the narrative/spread the meme' - that truthseeking isn't as important as trying to embed a cultural norm of deep deep precaution around AI.
To those people, I would say: I appreciate you, but there are better strategies to pursue in the game you're trying to play. Collective Intelligence has the potential to completely change the game you're trying to play and you're pretty well positioned to leverage that.
Re: EMH is false, long GOOG
I wish you'd picked a better example.
tl;dr LLMs make search cost more, much more, and thus significantly threaten GOOG's bottom line.
MSFT knows this, and is explicitly using Bing Sydney as an attack on GOOG.
I'm not questioning the capabilities of GOOG's AI department, I'm sure Deepmind have the shiniest toys.
But it's hardly bullish for their share price if their core revenue stream is about to be decapitated or perhaps even entirely destroyed - ad based revenue has been on shaky ground for a while now, I don't think it's inconceivable that one day the bottom will fall out.
re: EMH in general
EMH gets weaker the less attention an asset has, the further out in time relevant information is (with significant drops around 1yr, 2yr, 5yr), and the more antimemetic that relevant information is (i.e. Sin is consistently undervalued because it makes people feel bad to think about. Most recently we saw this in coal, and I'm kicking myself for not getting in on that trade.).
Will GOOG go up? Maybe.
Is GOOG undervalued? Extremely unlikely.
Have you read Mark Solms Hidden Spring?
AI Therapy isn't the first domino to fall, AI Customer Service is (it's already falling).
95% of customer service humans can be replaced by a combination of Whisper+GPT; they (the humans) are already barely agentic, just following complex scripts. It's likely that the AI customer service will provide a superior experience most of the time (less wait times, better audio quality at a minimum, often more competent and knowledgeable too, plausibly capable of supporting many languages).
Obviously huge cost savings so massive incentive for companies to replace humans (and why it's already started with even weak chatbots).
Investing in it is tricky, same problem you mentioned at the start - picking which horse is going to win this race, most probably either don't exist or aren't publicly tradeable.
Zoom is a potential frontrunner, they acquired Solvvy last year which suggests some strategic awareness of this trend/potential market.
Thanks for your post, just wanted to contribute by deconfusing ADHD a little (hopefully). I agree that you and OP seem to be agreeing more than disagreeing.
So speaking from a pretty thorough ignorance of the topic itself, my guess based on my priors is that the problem-ness of ADHD has more to do with the combo of (a) taking in the culture's demand that you be functional in a very particular way combined with (b) a built-in incapability of functioning that way.
Correct. However that problem-ness is often a matter of survival/highly non-optional. ADHD can be an economic (and thus kinda literal) death sentence - if it wasn't for the support of my family I'd be homeless.
I think what the OP is referring to, why they raised ADHD specifically in this context, is because this habitualized conscious forcing/manipulation of our internal state (i.e. dopamine) is a crutch we can't afford to relinquish - without it we fall down, and we don't get back up.
I'm speaking as someone only recently (last year) diagnosed with (and medicated for) ADHD. I am easily twice as functional now as I was before I had medication (and I am still nowhere near as functional as the average person, let alone most of this crowd xD)
And, quite tidily, ADHD is one of the primary reasons I learned to develop slack - why I'm capable of grokking your position. ADHD is a neverending lesson in the necessity of slack, in learning to let go.
ADHD is basically an extreme version of slack philosophy hardwired into your brain - it's great from a certain perspective, but it kinda gives us a healthy appreciation for the value of being able to force outcomes - in a 'you don't know what you've got til its gone' sense.
Thanks for this post, it was insightful and perfectly timed; I've been intermittently returning to the problem of trust for a while now and it was on my mind this morning when I found your post.
I think shared reality isn't just a 'warm fuzzies' thing, it's a vital component of cooperation.
I think it's connected with the trust problem; your ability to trust someone is dependent to some degree on a shared reality.
I think that these problems have been severely exacerbated by our current technologies and the social landscape they've shaped, but I'm also highly intrigued by the possibility that we can throw this in reverse - that there is an achievable engineering solution to this problem; that this is something we can not only 'fix' with the right technologies, but also empower far beyond 'baseline'.
I'm interested in talking with anyone who's exploring the trust problem in some way. I think even a 20% effective solution to this problem would be world changing; the trust problem is at (or near) the root of many of the dysfunctional aspects of our civilization.
I'm especially interested in anyone who strongly disagrees with me - about either the importance of the problem or the feasibility of finding a solution.
To start with, I agree.
I really agree: about timescales, about the risks of misalignment, about the risks of alignment. In fact I think I'll go further and say that in a hypothetical world where an aligned AGI is controlled by a 99th percentile Awesome Human Being, it'll still end in disaster; homo sapiens just isn't capable of handling this kind of power.[1]
That's why the only kind of alignment I'm interested in is the kind that results in the AGI in control; that we 'align' an AGI with some minimum values that anchor it in a vaguely anthropocentric meme-space (e.g. paperclips boring, unicorns exciting) and ensures some kind of attachment/bond to us (e.g. like how babies/dogs get their hooks into us) and then just let it fly; GPT-Jesus take the wheel.
(So yes, the Minds from the Culture)
No other solution works. No other path has a happy ending.[2]
This is why I support alignment research - I don't believe the odds are good, I don't believe the odds are good even if they solve the technical problem, but I don't see a future in which homo sapiens flourishes without benevolent GPT-Jesus watching over us.
Because the human alignment problem you correctly identify as the root of our wider problems - that isn't going away by itself.
- ^
Not a 'power corrupts' argument, just stating the obvious: godlike power directed by monkeylike intelligence doesn't end well, no matter how awesome the individual monkey.
- ^
Maaaaaybe genetic engineering; if we somehow figured out how to create Homo Sapiens 2.0, and they figured out 3.0 etc etc.
This pathway has a greater margin for error, and far fewer dead ends where we accidentally destroy everything. It can go slow, we can do it incrementally, we can try multiple approaches in parralel; we can have redundancy, backups etc.
I think if we could somehow nuke AI capabilities, this path would be preferable. But as it is AI capabilities is going to get to the finish line before genetics has even left the lab.
At the outset, I'll say that the answer to 'should you have kids?' in general, is probably not. I'll also say that I've seen/had this discussion dozens of times now and the result is always the same: you're gonna do what you want to do and rationalize it however you need to. The genes win this fight 9 times out of 10.
If you're rich (if you reasonably expect to own multiple properties and afford all of lifes luxuries for the rest of your life), it's probably okay - you won't face financial ruin and your children will be insulated from the worst of what's to come, probably.
(It's still insanely bad for the environment though.)
AI is just one of a long long long long list of horrible things we have to look forward to in the coming decades. Not even mentioning all the horrible things that are already here - being a kid is no picnic nowadays.
One of the podcasts I listen to, The Great Simplification by Nate Hagens, has interviewed dozens of people whos focus is on understanding the world and anticipating the future, and toward the end of each episode he asks each of them the same few questions - one of which is something like 'what would you say to children today? What advice would you give?' - and almost without exception the people he's interviewing express remorse about the legacy they've left for their children and grandchildren: we're sorry, we tried, we failed, we're so so sorry.
If you have kids, which I expect you will, the one piece of advice I'd give you is to whole-ass it, maximum effort. Keep them away from the internet, teach them yourself, give them every opportunity to discover and create the relationships and passions that they will need to flourish, nurture them at every opportunity.
So, two ideas:
- The language we use shapes how and what we think
- We believe what we write. From this book describing the indoctrination of American POWs in Korea:
Our best evidence of what people truly feel and believe comes less from their words than from their deeds. Observers trying to decide what a man is like look closely at his actions... the man himself uses this same evidence to decide what he is like. His behavior tells him about himself; it is a primary source of information about his beliefs and values and attitudes.
Writing was one sort of confirming action... It was never enough for the prisoners to listen quietly or even to agree verbally with the Chinese line; they were always pushed to write it down as well... if a prisoner was not willing to write a desired response freely, he was prevailed upon to copy it.
To bring this back to your idea of AI-augmented human posts:
To rely on AI to suggest/choose words for you is to have your thoughts and beliefs shaped by the output of that AI.
Yes, that seems like a bad idea to me.
Yep, big fan of Watts and will +1 this recommendation to any other readers.
Curious if you've read much of Schroeder's stuff? Lady of Mazes in particular explores, among many other things, an implementation of this tech that might-not-suck.
The quick version is a society in which everyone owns their GPT-Me, controls distribution of it, and has access to all of its outputs. They use them as a social interface - can't talk to someone? Send your GPT-Me to talk to them. They can't talk to you? Your GPT-Me can talk to GPT-Them and you both get the results fed back to you. etc etc.
>Well, first, there are such things as energy technologies. The steam engine is a technology. Processes to create coke from coal, or to refine crude oil, are technologies. These technologies are what make all of that energy accessible and usable.
To quote my post:
>Certainly technology is involved in capture/extraction/utilisation. But... hmm there's a quote 'Labour without energy is a corpse, capital (substitute technology here) without energy is a sculpture'.
And back to you (emphasis mine):
>I don't think this does answer the question, because technological/industrial progress is what made that surplus energy available. It didn't just become available for some other reason. The surplus was created by progress itself. So it can't be used to explain progress.
I agree that technologies increased our access to surplus energy. I strongly disagree that they 'created' it.
Fossil fuels are exogenous to tech, right? They're an energy store that was created long before homo sapiens turned up. And the quality/quantity of this energy store is huge, gargantuan... it's the greatest treasure trove in the history of our planet.
But without such a dense & economical energy source available... you don't get an industrial revolution. Technological progress plateaus.
This is what I mean by a fundamental input - the energy store has to exist in the first place, in order to be harnessed by technology. The surplus is not being 'created', it is being 'harvested'.
I think I'm derailing your topic somewhat, as we discuss more I think I understand more about your thought and I don't think this 'nuance' of energy is very relevant within this framework.
Outside of it though, hugely important. The belief that we can 'invent energy' has fairly disastrous consequences for our civilization.
So in your specific example of the threshing machine:
Surplus energy is required such that enough of the population are freed from subsistence and agriculture to specialize in other things.
Even more surplus energy is required for the creation/upkeep of cities, which are a prerequisite for technological innovation/growth (high density of different specialists living alongside eachother, as well as a labour force for factories/mass production).
And the railroads that enabled the widespread distribution of threshing machines - obviously highly energy intensive, and coincided with massive growth in coal use (steam engines originally invented for pumping water out of coal mines)
You seem to be labelling energy as a technology? If so, I think this is wrong. Energy is a fundamental input. Certainly technology is involved in capture/extraction/utilisation. But... hmm there's a quote 'Labour without energy is a corpse, capital (substitute technology here) without energy is a sculpture'.
My position is that all technological growth is dependent on sufficient surplus energy. That certain levels of technological and social complexity have minimum surplus energy requirements.
So to answer the question in your title directly: because there wasn't enough surplus energy available. This was the single most important bottleneck at every stage in our development. It remains the single most important bottleneck today.
Vaclav Smil is one of the better people to read on this subject. And if I remember correctly he has an interesting example about the plough (in Energy and Civilization) - an even more headscratching example of 'why wasn't this invented waaaay earlier?'
Why doesn't your analysis account for energy at all?
(Apologies in advance if any/all of this is obvious to you)
Too much sleep is bad, too little sleep is bad. Sleep needs vary per person and throughout life but generally >6 hours, <9 hours is the range.
You don't really sleep in 'hours', you sleep in cycles (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_cycle) so measuring based on hours doesn't work so much.
If you wake up naturally sometime in that 6-9 hour window, and you sleep deeply through the night (smartwatches are good at measuring this), you're probably getting enough sleep.
If you have reason to be concerned about your sleep, consider getting a sleep study done.
The benefits of more sleep are less relevant than the downsides of not enough sleep - chronic sleep deprivation is very, very bad.
If your mattress is noticeably uncomfortable, it sounds like you need a new mattress :)
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/534755.A_Technique_for_Producing_Ideas?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=FeFvMKus2k&rank=1
+ Incorporating understanding of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)
+ Drugs
If you're willing to accept 'on command' as, 'something I spend days/weeks intentionally preparing/cultivating' then it seems like you're in luck.
Sorry if this is all old news; not what you were looking for.
Feel free to delete because this is highly tangential but are you aware of Mark Solms work (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53642061-the-hidden-spring) on consciousness, and the subsequent work he's undertaking on artificial consciousness?
I'm an idiot, but it seems like this is a different-enough path to artificial cognition that it could represent a new piece of the puzzle, or a new puzzle entirely - a new problem/solution space. As I understand it, AI capabilities research is building intelligence from the outside-in, whereas the consciousness model would be capable of building it from the inside-out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhan_zhuang
Both meditation and exercise. A daily (1hr a day is the sweet spot), lifelong practice without end. Easy to learn, probably impossible for most of us to master but that's okay because mastery isn't the point.
The point is to strengthen and broaden the connection between mind and body, and the connections within your body itself - to relearn how to move with the whole body.
To learn how to be still, and yet relaxed instead of stiff.
The point is also, at least for me, to do something impossibly slow and hard every day. To fail with a smile on my face. To appreciate the journey, knowing I will never reach the destination.
I disagree, strongly. Not only do I believe this line of reasoning to be wrong, I believe it to be dangerously wrong. I believe downplaying and/or underestimating the role of energy in our economic system is part of why we find ourselves in the mess we're in today.
To reference Nate Hagens (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xr9rIQxwj4)
We use the equivalent of 100 billion barrels of oil a year. Each barrel of oil can do the amount of work it would take 5 humans to do. There are 500 billion 'ghost' labourers in our society today.
(Back to me)
You cannot eat ideas. You cannot treat sewage with them. You cannot heat your home with them. You cannot build your home with them. You cannot travel across an ocean on them.
1000x0 is 0. Technology is a powerful multiplier, but 0 is 0.
You cannot build cold fusion power plants with ideas. You cannot conjure up the material resources or the skilled labour and energy inputs necessary to build them with ideas. (once again Nate Hagens - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0pt3ioQuNc)
.... aaaand then there's the whole topic of renewables and the hidden costs and limitations thereof.
The only idea I have encountered that nullifies this reality is a superintelligent AI. The thing we're all so scared of, but simultaneously the only technology powerful enough to both harvest and utilize energy on scales beyond human ability. And also powerful enough to coordinate human activity such that Jeavons Paradox doesn't nullify the benefits (and, more generally, such that we don't waste such an insane amount of energy on stupid things).
And finally, re population:
Demographics, read about them - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40697556-the-human-tide
tl;dr Yes, Malthus was 'wrong'. He was wrong because it turned out that women with access to education and opportunity choose to have less children (there are exceptions, but not too many). Technology/ideas didn't save us from exponential population growth, it was a natural (i.e. not consciously considered, organized, enacted) change in behaviour.
The more powerful a tool is, the more important it is that the tool behaves predictably.
A chainsaw that behaves unpredictably is very, very, dangerous.
AI is, conservatively, thousands of times more powerful than a chainsaw.
And unlike an unpredictable chainsaw, there is no guarantee we will be able to turn an unpredictable AI off and fix it or replace it.
It is plausible that the danger of failing to align AI safely - to make it predictable - is such that we only have one chance to get it right.
Finally, it is absurdly cheap to make massive progress in AI safety.
This was wonderful; the post that finally got me to create an account here. I got quite a few sensible chuckles and a few hearty laughs out of your list. I think we've been reading similar books recently (Graeber's Dawn of Everything? :) )
My contribution is to remind the participants that a somewhat recurring theme (something of an original in western philosophy - i.e. Socrates) in history is of wise people enjoying themselves too much and getting murdered by the people who'd grown increasingly scared/estranged/horrified by them.
Heretical thinking is fun, but in the real world there are people who would harm you for exposing them to it.
Practice safe heresy kids :)