Superrational
skunkledger.substack.com
skunkledger.substack.com
[1]: https://skunkledger.substack.com/p/my-opening-speech-at-the-...
Great line. Modelo is the most popular beer in America, but I doubt most people would realize that. It’s like… a Normie inside joke. Is that possible?
I've found the techniques and concepts most useful at work, where they've been amazingly helpful.
I have always formulated this for myself as follows: Any sufficiently strategic self-interest is indistinguishable from altruism. Empathy is just evolution's way of encoding millions of years of this observation into our emotional response system.
This "sufficiently strategic self-interest" is the same kind of non-existing unicorn as the "sufficiently smart compiler".
>Empathy is just evolution's way of encoding millions of years of this observation into our emotional response system.
Evolution (if we abstract it as a thing with intentions) is satisfied with the survival of the species. If the individual perishes, it's fine as long as they either protected their offspring or helped the others in their species survive, there will be more of them (because this actions help the species survive more and make more copies of itself, so species with members who will sacrifices themselves for the species get an advantage). Individual ants and bees for example will sacrifice themselves for the collective.
So, empathy that drives altruistic acts is not the same as "strategic self-interest". If we are to see it in a reductionary way, let's do it properly: usually it's the interest of the species (or the offspring) driving it.
I'm sorry for that bug in the system, sir; we were short of time while designing this whole shebang. The happiness of the individual and a bunch of other things were not really a goal but, as you have cleverly noted, a biochemical feedback to get them to play. But now you have outgrown natural evolution--our sloppy design strategy--and you can fix this bug on your own. Off the top of my head, you could add a magic mushroom that makes people immortal and infertile. But surely you can come up with something better. Now back to enjoying my retirement. God.
But "bad people" or aholes also have usefulness. You sometimes need people to challenge things that only an unreasonable person would challenge. And you need the occasional Steve Jobs too.
But unlike altruistic people, we generally don't give the aholes as much credit. So, ironically, perhaps altruism is the better self serving strategy.
Some degree of assholes and psychopaths make for robust systems that protect against abuse, intentional or accidental.
And the failure modes and pathologies you describe are external: an exploiter is by definition not part of the group of altruists and that makes them a perfect example of how few assholes it takes to ruin things.
The fact that the problems I pointed out are external is because those were just the most obvious failure modes, do not take it as an exhaustive list.
You mean like back when it was kind people and not warlords, and rich scum, and Genghis Khan being the winers?
Meaning "this is the case only on recent history? What about those examples from thousands of years ago".
(I think it's notable Steve Jobs's largest business successes happened after he got married.)
Satire / parody doesn't necessarily have to be a merciless polemic against the target - and as a matter of fact, it would be pretty hard to read HPMOR and not come away with the feeling that the author was a pretty big Harry Potter fan.
Another thing that comes to mind is the horror movie Cabin in the Woods, which sends up lots of horror tropes but is still fun and enjoyable for fans of the genre.
[0]: Though carrying 4 combat application tourniquets in your clothing at all times is probably a good idea. The part about time pressure and disregarding time-wasting social activities in emergency situations is also reasonable[1], but the characters should have come up with contingency plans and gone over checklists and emergency conditions with the authority figures beforehand to prevent them getting in the way.
[1]: i.e. if you got stabbed and are bleeding out, don't tell someone "it's fine" (it's not fine at all) and let them go first because it's "polite".
The first few chapters of HPMoR are fine, I suppose. It's pretty lighthearted. But it rapidly devolves into unhinged ranting at extreme length. The last five hundred thousand pages are a vehicle for the "wisdom" of one of the most insufferable, unjustifiably arrogant, and misinformed people to ever draw breath.
Just go read Elon Musk's Twitter feed. Same experience, whole lot shorter.
https://danluu.com/su3su2u1/hpmor
tl;dr the science is bad, the writing is bad, the pedagogy/didactics is atrocious.
(interesting tangent https://shatterzone.substack.com/p/rationalist-harry-potter-... )
It's not "easy to miss". The author beats you 'bout the head with his ideology. It's heavy-handed even for something explicitly didactic.
Would that actually work on someone in that situation in real life though? I know the author is going for "anchoring" from Kahneman 1974, but the incentive to not insult someone you want to be cooperative in the future in that scenario is so strong, and the person would probably think longer to avoid an infoleak.
/hears none
/looks up
“Oh. You are still here and obviously don’t agree.”
/listens to a hint of an argument
“Fine. Prove me wrong. You’d like to use a sophisticated data model to prove your dateability? By all means.”
—- “And that friends, is how the Data Science disciple came to be. It naturally evolved from this simple state of social study to include other quality of life enhancing topics like optimizing ad delivery networks, SharePoint page utilization estimates, and developing ML prompts for generative adult genre fiction.”
(Hugs to my brilliantly nerdy data science friends)
/s
Marvelous.
[0]: see My Immortal if you want to witness Harry Potter and Twilight get butchered at the same time.
Before reacting to what might seem like flame bait, I tried to stay in style to the article and would like to point out that the ‘gag worthiness’ is intended and part of the joke.
Perhaps a subset of HN is just excited to take the "rationalist" movement down a peg, which I suppose is a positive development.
But it's a lot like the vitriol I see towards effective altruism. There's a good idea there (i.e. wanting to train oneself to think rationally, or wanting to do charity in a way that achieves the most good for the amount of money given). It's a bit sad to me that because the representatives of these ideas are flawed (rationality, LessWrong, Eliezer), or because they've been used as cover for shitty behavior (effective altruism, Sam Bankman-Fried) that the consensus becomes "there's nothing good here and it's all bullshit".
This pattern of throwing out the baby with the bathwater seems absolutely pervasive in modern discourse, you can see variations of it in people's thinking on vaccines, racism, democracy, journalism, freedom of speech, and global warming, to think of just a few examples.
Sorry, this became kind of a rant, but I really wish our internet discourse could do a better job of filtering babies from bathwater than it currently does.
There’s something about that line that captures the essence of the whole story for me.
https://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~schaller/Psyc590Readings/TverskyK...
This beautiful story has made me realize the same thing happens when using "intellectual" jargon.
Does this writer know my deepest thoughts while I'm at the mall!
…I’ll be in my bunk.
> "...Here, we’d gone on and on, in a dream logic that knew nothing of pollution, the finite bounds of fossil fuel, or foreign wars it was possible to lose. They were smug, happy, and utterly content with themselves and their world. And in the Dream, it was their world. Behind me, the illuminated city: Searchlights swept the sky for the sheer joy of it. I imagined them thronging the plazas of white marble, orderly and alert, their bright eyes shining with enthusiasm for their floodlit avenues and silver cars. It had all the sinister fruitiness of Hitler Youth propaganda."