[epistemic status: think I think is at least partially true, this week.]

[This is one of the fragments of thought that is leading up to some posts on “the Psychology and Phenomenology of Productivity” that I have bubbling inside of me.]

I sometimes find myself feeling “cravy.” I’ll semi-compulsively seek instant gratification, from food, from stimulation from youtube or webcomics, from mastrabation. My attention will flit from object to object, instead of stabilizing on anything. None of that frantic activity is very satisfying, but it’s hard to break the pattern in the moment.

I think this state is the result of two highly related situations.

1. I have some need (a social need, a literal nutrient, a sexual desire, etc.) that is going unfullfilled, and I’m flailing, trying to get it. I don’t know what I’m missing or wanting so I’m just scrabbling after anything that has given me a dopamine hit in the past.
2. Some relevant part of me currently alives that one of my core goals (not necessarily and IG, but a core component of my path) is impossible, and is panicing. I’m seeing short term gratification because, that part of me (thinks that short term gratification is the only kind that’s possible or is trying to distract itself from the pain of the impossibility.)

(Eli’s notes to himself: Notably, both of these hypothesis sugest that Focusing would likely be effective… – Ah. Right. But I don’t usually do the “clearing a space” step.)

[epistemic status: A malformed thought which turned into something else I had a couple of weeks ago, which seems important to me right now. As I was writing it became more for me and less for public consumption. ]

Some inspiration: I’m reading (well, listening to the audiobook of) Consciousness Explained. I’m also thinking about this Slate Star Codex post.

What does it mean for a thought to be conscious vs. unconscious? Taking for granted that there’s something like a chamber of of Guf: there are a bunch of competing thoughts or thought fragments or associations or plans or plan fragment or whatever, occurring “under the surface”?

There’s a typical view of consciousness which is that it is discreet and boolean: you have a bunch of unconscious thoughts and some of them become conscious. You have a working memory, and you can manipulate the objects in working memory. (Working memory isn’t quite the same thing, though. You don’t have to be aware of the object in working memory, you just need to be able to recall them, when needed).

But a lot of sources (Gendlin, the authors of the Mind Illuminated, Shenzhen Young, (indirectly) Yudkowsky, and my own phenomenological experience) sugest that it’s more like a scalar gradient: some thoughts are more conscious, but there are also less conscious thoughts on the edges of awareness, that you can become more aware of with training.

Something like this metaphor:

Thoughts are like grains of sand piled into a hill or pyramid. The gains at the top are the most conscious, the easiest to see. The ones a bit further down are peripherally conscious.  The further down you go the less conscious it is.

Conscious awareness itself is like a blanket that you throw over the top of the hill. Most people’s blankets are pretty small: they only cover the very top of the hill. But with training, you can stretch out your blanket, so that it can cover more of the hill. You can become aware of more “unconscious” phenomena. (I need a different word for how high on the hill a thought is is, something like it’s “absolute accessibility”, and how far the blanket reaches. Whether a thing is conscious depends on both the height on the hill and the size of the blanket.)

And to complicate the metaphor, thoughts are not really grains of sand. They’re more like ants, each trying to get to the top of the hill (I think? Maybe not all thoughts “want to be conscious”. In fact I think many don’t. ok. Scratch that.)

…They’re more like ants, many of which are struggling to get to the top of the hill, by climbing over their brethren.  And also, some of the ants are attached to some of the other ants with strings, so that if one of them get’s pull up it pulls up the other one.

[epistemic status: incomplete thought, perhaps to be followed up on in later posts]

I just read most of this article in the Atlantic, which points out that despite increasing investment (of both money and manpower) in science, the rate of scientific discovery is, at best commiserate with scientific progress in the 1930s, and may not even be meeting that bar.

(This basic idea is something that I’ve been familiar with for several years. Furthermore, this essay reminds me of something I read a few months ago: that the number of scientific discoveries named after their discovers (a baseline metric for importance?) is about the same decade to decade, despite vastly more scientists. [I know the source, but I can’t be bothered to cite it right now. Drop a message in the comments if you want it.]

When I read the headline of this article, my initial hypothesis was this:

Very few people in the world can do excellent groundbreaking science. Doing excellent scientific research requires both a very high intrinsic intelligence, and additionally, some other cognitive propensities and dispositions which are harder to pin down. In earlier decades science was a niche enterprise that attracted only these unusual people.

Today, science is a gigantic network of institutions that includes many times as many people. It still attracts the few individuals capable of being excellent scientists, but it also includes 10 to 1000 times as many people who don’t have the critical properties.

My posit: The great scientists do good work. Any additional manpower put into the scientific institutions is approximately useless. So the progress of science is constant.

(There’s probably a second order factor that all those extra people, and especially the bureaucracy that is required to manage and organize them all, get in way, and make it harder for the best scientists to do their work. (And in particular, it might dilute the attention of the best scientists in training their successors, which weakens the transmission of the cognitive-but-non-biological factors that contribute to “great-scientist-ness.”)

But I would guess that this is mostly a minor factor.)

But…

Between 1900 and 2015, the world population increased by close to 5 times. It seems like if my model was correct, the number of “great scientists” today would be higher than it was in 1930, if only because of population growth (ignoring things like the Flynn effect).

Why aren’t there 5 x as many great scientists? Maybe the bureaucracies getting in the way thing was bigger than I thought?

Maybe the “adjacent possible” of scientific discoveries increases linearly, for some reason, instead of exponentially, as one would expect?

Or maybe “discoveries named after their creators” is not a good proxy for “important discoveries”, because it’s a status symbol. And the number of people at the top of a status hierarchy is constant, even if the status hierarchy is much bigger.

[This is an essay that I’ve had bopping around in my head for a long time. I’m not sure if this says anything usefully new-but it might click with some folks. I think this is pretty bad and needs to be rewritten and maybe expanded substantially, but this blog is called “musings and rough drafts.”]

In this post, I’m going to outline how I think about status. In particular, I want to give a mechanistic account of how status necessarily arises, given some set of axioms, in much the same way one can show that evolution by natural selection must necessarily occur given the axioms of 1) inheritance of traits 2) variance in reproductive success based on variance in traits and 3) mutation.

(I am not claiming any particular skill at navigating status relationships, any more than a student of sports-biology is necessarily a skilled basketball player.)

By “status” I mean prestige-status.

Axiom 1: People have goals.

That is, for any given human, there are some things that they want. This can include just about anything. You might want more money, more sex, a ninja-turtles lunchbox, a new car, to have interesting conversations, to become an expert tennis player, to move to New York etc.

Axiom 2: There are people who control resources relevant to other people achieving their goals.

The kinds of resources are as varied as the goals one can have.

Thinking about status dynamics and the like, people often focus on the particularly convergent resources, like money. But resources that are only relevant to a specific goal are just as much a part of the dynamics I’m about to describe.

Knowing a bunch about late 16th century Swedish architecture is controlling a goal relevant-resource, if someone has the goal of learning more about 16th century Swedish architecture.

Just being a fun person to spend time with (due to being particularly attractive, or funny, or interesting to talk to, or whatever) is a resource relevant to other people’s goals.

Axiom 3: People are more willing to help (offer favors to) a person who can help them achieve their goals.

Simply stated, you’re apt to offer to help a person with their goals if it seems like they can help you with yours, because you hope they’ll reciprocate. You’re willing to make a trade with, or ally with such people, because it seems likely to be beneficial to you. At minimum, you don’t want to get on their bad side.

(Notably, there are two factors that go into one’s assessment of another person’s usefulness: if they control a resource relevant to one of your goals, and if you expect them to reciprocate.

This produces a dynamic where by A’s willingness to ally with B is determined by something like the product of

• A’s assessment of B’s power (as relevant to A’s goals), and
• A’s assessment of B’s probability of helping (which might translate into integrity, niceness, etc.)

If a person is a jerk, they need to be very powerful-relative-to-your-goals to make allying with them worthwhile.)

All of this seems good so far, but notice that we have up to this point only described individual pairwise transactions and pairwise relationships. People speak about “status” as a attribute that someone can possess or lack. How does the dynamic of a person being “high status” arise from the flux of individual transactions?

Lemma 1: One of the resources that a person can control is other people’s willingness to offer them favors

With this lemma, the system folds in on itself, and the individual transactions cohere into a mostly-stable status hierarchy.

Given lemma 1, a person doesn’t need to personally control resources relevant to your goals, they just need to be in a position such that someone who is relevant to your goals will privilege them.

As an example, suppose that you’re introduced to someone who is very well respected in your local social group: Wendy. Your assessment might be that Wendy, directly, doesn’t have anything that you need. But because Wendy is well-respected by others in your social group, they are likely to offer favors to her. Therefore, it’s useful for Wendy to like you, because then they are more apt to call on other people’s favors on your behalf.

(All the usual caveats about has this is subconscious, and humans are adaption-executors and don’t do explicit verbal assessments of how useful a person will be to them, but rely on emotional heuristics that approximate explicit assessment.)

This causes the mess of status transactions to reinforce and stabilize into a mostly-static hierarchy. The mass of individual A-privileges-B-on-the-basis-of-A’s-goals flattens out, into each person having a single “score” which determines to what degree each other person privileges them.

(It’s a little more complicated than that because people who have access to their own resources have less need of help from other. So a person’s effective status (the status-level at which you treat them is closer to their status minus your status. But this is complicated again because people are motivated not to be dicks (that’s bad for business), and respecting other people’s status is important to not being a dick.)

https://docs.google.com/document/d/11aavdPvDYFn-cZDe8rX5acaBhNw8ptuGep64WApAT4g/edit?usp=sharing

[This post is about me.]

Relating to a brief interaction between Mark, Andrew, and Eli, yesterday.

Over the past few months, my sense of myself and my oddities has gone through some significant changes and sophistication.

I’ve long known that my internal processes differed in many respects from those of most people, and while there are clear drawbacks to my cognitive style, there are also clear advantages. It wasn’t necessarily clear that the advantages outweighed the drawbacks in the abstract, but I happened to like my cognitive style, and it seemed useful for reasons of variety is nothing else. In any case there was a sense of “that’s just the way Eli is.”

In my interactions with the cooler people of rationalist community, my oddities started to “come into focus” more. Instead of being black boxes of “the ways Eli is weird” I began developing much deeper causal models of what I was doing differently and why. It wasn’t an either-or-proposition: I could figure out how to refine the things that I was doing to avoid the drawbacks without blunting the advantages.

Then more recently, largely as a result of my interactions with this group, I’ve gotten a fuller sense of what my mind is doing, moment-to-moment, on a phenomenological level, and I’m excited because I think I have (or am close to having) the tools, the phenomenology, and the community to flatly resolve issues that have plagued me for my whole life, and which pretty much everyone assumed were un-fixable and would just need to be accommodated.

An anecdote: When I was in second grade, in the winter, I would wear long-sleeved shirts. I would also wash my hands a lot (due to OCD-like tendencies). However, I wouldn’t roll up my sleeves, so I would walk around with damp sleeves and even if I dried my hands, it was as if they were  constantly being submerged in water. This was in Arizona, a desert. My hands would get so dry, that they had the texture of sandpaper and they were constantly cracked to the point of bleeding. This was uncomfortable, to say the least.

My mom asked me, with exasperation, “why don’t you just roll up your sleeves?” and I responded, “because no one told me too.”

I said that a lot growing up. It was (and is) a common pattern for me. There have been many things that most kids just pick up, that most people find obvious, that I had to be told or taught explicitly.

There are a lot of things going wrong in the story above. There’s the thing that I felt like I needed to keep washing my hands. There’s clearly some sort of loop missing that does error-correction or automatic hypothesis generation or something.

If I needed to be told to roll up my sleeves, how much more am I missing subtle and implicit processes that most people don’t even have the words to describe. If that wasn’t wasn’t clear to me, how much worse am I at all the other things that people do automatically without even realizing that they are doing it?

But, this anecdote makes me optimistic. Because when someone finally told me to roll up my sleeves before washing my hands, I did. The hard part was the figuring out what to do, not the doing it. There may be (there likely are) simple things that I could be taught to do, explicitly, that are not actually much harder for me to do than for everyone else (but which I just don’t come to do automatically), which would close-to solve the cognitive bottlenecks. I suspect that there is enormously low-hanging fruit, if someone can just figure out how to point it out to me in a way I can understand.

I’m tinkering a lot, moving towards fuller abstract models and finding phenomenological levers. I’m figuring out what the pieces are. I’m trying stuff. And you guys are the best people in the world to help me figure out what those processes are.

Now, I shouldn’t be too excited. There may be thousands of implicit micro-protocols that I’m missing. I’m not sure that there are, but it seems possible. But even if that’s the case, if I can fill the most important holes that I’m missing, maybe I can bootstrap. If I can learn the process that others use to learn implicitly, explicitly, I can solve the rest myself and go FOOM.

This is super interesting to me, because 1) It would help me a bunch practically, 2) because I’m super curious about what my mind does and why, and this is an abstractly interesting project, and 3) because if many of these things are in fact hard for me to learn, but easy for me to do, then I could fill some long-standing holes very rapidly, which means that I could approximately know how to be a “normal human”, while still having access to all the exceptional competencies that I’ve been forced to develop as workarounds over the course of my 22 years missing parts of my brain. I mean, I’m a little crippled, and I’m still largely functional. What does the non-crippled version look like?
Optimism bias and stuff. Everything is harder than it seems. But I am actually making progress and I’m excited about what comes next.