Category: Uncategorized

The “function” of government

~ elityre ~ 2 Comments

[note: probably an obvious point to most people]

Sleep

When I was younger I was interested the the question “why do we sleep? What is the biological function of sleep?” This is a more mysterious than one might naively guess, for the past 150 years scientists have put forth many theories of the function of sleep. But for every one of those theories, some of the specific observed facts about the biology of sleep don’t fit well with it.

At some point I realized that the question “what is the function of sleep?” relies on a confused assumption that there’s one only one function, or rather that “sleep” is one thing, rather than many overlapping processes.

A more accurate historical accounting is something like the following…

Many eons ago there was some initial reason why it was adaptive to early animals to have an active mode and a different less active mode. That original reason for that less active mode might have been any of a number of thing: clearing of metabolic waste products, investments in cellular growth over cellular activity, whatever.

But once an organism has that division between an active mode and a relatively inactive proto-sleep mode, the later comes to include many additional functions. As the complexity of the organism increases and new biological functions evolve, some of those functions will be more compatible with the proto-sleep mode than with the active mode, and so those functions evolve to occur in that mode. Sleep is all the biological processes that happen together during during the relatively inactive period.

On might be tempted to ask what the original purpose of the inactive mode was, and declare that the true purpose of sleep. But that would be yielding to an unfounded essentialism. Just because it was first doesn’t mean that it is in any sense more important. It might very well be that the original biological function that sleep evolved around (like a perl around a grain of sand) has itself evolved away. That has no baring on an organism’s evident need to sleep.

Government

Similarly, I had previously been thinking of states as stationary bandits. States emerge from warlord using violence to extort wealth from productive peasants, and evolve into their modern form as power-conflicts between factions within the ruling classes rearrange the locuses of power. I think this is basically right as a (simplified historical accounting).

But reading a bit about economic history, I have new sense of it being kind like evolved subsystems.

Yes, the state starts out as a stationary bandit, but once it’s there, and and taken for granted as a part of life, it is (for better or for worse) a natural entity to enforce contract law, provide public goods, run a welfare state, stimulate aggregate demand, or run a central bank. There’s a path dependency by which the state evolves to take on these functions because at any given step of historical development, the state is the existing institution that can most easily be repurposed to solve a new problem, which both changes and entrenches the power of the state, much as each newly evolved function that synergizes with the rest of sleep reinforces sleep as a behavioral pattern.

The difference

But unlikely in the case of sleep the original nature of the thing is still relevant to it’s current form. All of the later functions of the state are still founded on force and the use of force. Doing solving problems with a state almost necessarily requires solving them via, at some point in the process, threatening someone with violence.

In principle, many, maybe all of those functions could be served by voluntary, non-coercive institutions, but since the state, given it’s power, is the default solution, many problems get “solved” via more violence and more coercion than was necessary.

That states have additional layers of functionality, some of which are arguably aligned with broader socitey, doesn’t make me notably more positive about states. Rather, it makes them seem more insidious. When there’s an entity around that has, by schelling agreement, the legitimate right to use force to extract value, it creates a temptation to co-opt and utilize that entity’s power for many an (arguably) good cause, in addition to outright corruption.

Reflecting on some regret about not trying to join and improve specific org(s)

~ elityre ~ Leave a comment

I started a new job recently, which has prompted me to reflect on my work over the past few years, and how I could have done better.

Concretely, I regret not joining SERI MATS, and helping it succeed, when it was first getting started. 

I think this might have been a great fit for me: I had existing skills and experience that I think would have been helpful for them. The seasonal on-off schedule would have given me the flexibility to do and learn other things. It would have (I think) helped me get a better grounding in Machine Learning and technical alignment approaches.

And if I had joined with an eye towards agentically shaping the organization’s culture and priorities as it developed, I think I would have had a positive impact on the seed that has grown into the current alignment field . In particular, I think I might have had leverage to establish some cultural norms regarding how to think about the positive and negative impacts of one’s work.1 

I regarded MATS as the obvious thing to do. The nascent alignment field was bottlenecked on mentorship—a small number of people (arguably) had good taste for the kinds of research that was on track, but had limited bandwidth for research mentorship, so conveying that research taste was (and is?) a bottleneck for the whole ecosystem. A program aiming to unblock everything else to expand the capacity for research mentorship as much as possible seemed like the obvious straightforward thing to do.

I said as much in my post from early 2023:

There is now explicit infrastructure to teach and mentor these new people though, and that seems great. It had seemed for a while that the bottleneck for people coming to do good safety research was mentorship from people that already have some amount of traction on the problem. Someone noticed this and set up a system to make it as easy as possible for experienced alignment researchers to mentor as many junior researchers as they want to, without needing to do a bunch of assessment of candidates or to deal with logistics. Given the state of the world, this seems like an obvious thing to do.

I don’t know that this will actually work (especially if most of the existing researchers are themselves doing work that dodges the core problem), but it is absolutely the thing to try for making more excellent alignment researchers doing real work. And it might turn out that this is just a scalable way to build a healthy field.

In retrospect, I should have written those paragraphs and generated the next thought “I should actively go try to get involved in SERI MATS and see if I can help them.”

So why didn’t I?

Misapplied notion of counterfactual impact

I didn’t do this because I was operating on the model/assumption that, while this was important, they were doing it now, and were probably not in danger of failing at it. It was taken care of and so I didn’t need to do it.

I now think that was probably a mistake. Because I didn’t get involved, I don’t know one way or the other, but it seems plausible to me that I could have contributed to making the overall project substantially better: more effective and with better positive externalities. 

This isn’t because I’ve learned anything in particular about how SERI MATS missed the mark, but just getting more exposure to organizations and adjusting my prior that even if an organization is broadly working, and not in danger of collapse, it might be the case that I can personally make it much better with my efforts. In particular, I think it will sometimes be the case that there is room to substantially improve an organization in ways that don’t line up very neatly with the specific roles that they’re attempting to explicitly hire for, if you have strategic orientation and specific relevant experience.2

This realization is downstream with my interactions with Palisade over recent weeks. Also, Ronny made a comment a few years ago (paraphrased) that “you shouldn’t work for an organization unless you’re at least a little bit trying to reform it”. That stuck with me, and changed my concept of “working for an org”.

Possibly this difference in frame is also partially downstream of thinking a bit about shapley values through reading Planecrash and thinking about donation-matching for SFC. (I previously aimed to do things that, if I didn’t do them, wouldn’t happen. Now, I’ve continuous-ized that notion, and aim for, approximately, high shapley value).

Underestimating the value of “having a job”

Also, regarding SERI potentially being a good fit for me in particular, I think I have historically underestimated the value of having a job for structuring one’s life and supporting personal learning. I currently wish that I had more technical background in ML and alignment/control work, and I think I might have gotten more of that if I had been actively trying to develop in that direction while supporting MATS in a non-technical capacity, instead of trying to develop that background (inconsistently) independently.

Strategic misgivings

I didn’t invest heavily in any project over recent years because there wasn’t much that I straightforwardly believed in. As noted above, the idea-of-MATS was a possible exception to this—it seemed like the obvious thing to do given the constraints of the world. And I now think I should take “this seems like the obvious thing to do” as a much stronger indicator that I should get involved with a project, somehow, and figure out how to help, than I previously did.

But part of what held me back from doing that was misgivings about the degree to which MATS was acting as a feeder pool for the scaling labs. MATS is another project that doesn’t seem obviously robustly good to me (or “net-positive”, though I kind of think that’s the wrong frame). As with many projects, I felt reticent to put my full force behind it for that reason.

In retrospect, I think maybe I should have shown up and tried to solve the problem of “it seems like we’re doing plausible real harm, and that seems unethical” from the inside. I could have repeatedly and vocally drawn attention to it, raised it as a consideration in strategic and tactical planning, etc. Either I would have shaped the culture around this problem for the MATS staff sufficiently that I trusted the overall organism to optimize safely, or we would have bounced off of each other unproductively. And in that second case, we could part ways, and I could move on.

In general, it feels like a more obvious affordance to me, now, if I think something is promising, but I don’t trust it to have positive impacts, I just try non-disruptively making it better according to the standards that I think are important, and if that doesn’t work or doesn’t go well, parting ways with the org.

This all begs the question, “should I still try to work for SERI MATS and make it much better?”

My guess is that the opportunity is smaller now than it was a few years ago, because both the culture and processes of the org have more found an equilibrium that works. There’s less leverage to make an org much better when the org is figuring out how to do the thing it’s trying to do, compared to when it has reached product-market-fit, and is mostly finding ways to reproduce that product consistently and reliably.

That said, one common class of error is overestimating the degree to which an opportunity has passed. e.g. not buying Bitcoin in 2017, because you believe that you’ve already missed the big opportunity—it’s true in some sense, but you’re underestimating how much of the opportunity still remains. 

So, if I were still unattached, writing this essay would prompt me to reach out to Ryan, and say directly that I’m interested in exploring working for MATS, and try to get more contact with the territory, so that I can see for myself. As it is, I have a job which seems like it needs me more, and which I anticipate absorbing my attention for at least the next year.

  1. Note: of all the things I wrote here, this is the point that I am most uncertain of. It seems plausible to me that because of psychological dynamics akin to “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it”, and classic EA-style psychological commitment to life narratives that impart meaning via impact, the cultural norms around how the ecosystem as a whole thinks about positive and negative impacts, were and are basically immovable. Or rather, I might have been able to make more-or-less performative hand-wringing fashionable, and possibly cause people to have less of an action-bias , but not actually produce norms that lead to more robustly positive outcomes.

    At least, I don’t have a handle on either how to approach these questions myself, or how to effectively intervene on the culture about them. And so I’m not clear on if I could have made things better in this way. But I could have made this my explicit goal and tried, and made some progress, or not. ↩︎
  2. A bit of context that is maybe important. I have not, applied for a job since I was 21, and was looking for an interim job during college. Every single job that I’ve gotten in my adult life has resulted from either, my just showing up and figuring out how I could be helpful, or someone I already know reaching out to me and asking me for help with a project.

    For me at least, “show up and figure out what is needed and make that happen” is a pretty straightforward pattern of action, but it might be foreign to other people who have a different conception of jobs that is more centered on specific roles, that you’re well-suited for, and doing a good job in those roles. ↩︎

That no one rebuilt old OkCupid updates me a lot about how much the startup world actually makes the world better

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The prevailing ideology of San Francisco, Silicon Valley, and the broader tech world, is that startups are an engine (maybe even the engine) that drives progress towards a future that’s better than the past, by creating new products that add value to people’s lives.

I now think this is true in a limited way. Software is eating the world, and lots of bureaucracy is being replaced by automation which is generally cheaper, faster, and a better UX. But I now think that this narrative is largely propaganda.

It’s been 8 years since Match bought and ruined OkCupid and no one, in the whole tech ecosystem, stepped up to make a dating app even as good as old OkC is a huge black mark against the whole SV ideology of technology changing the world for the better.

Finding a partner is such a huge, real, pain point for millions of people. The existing solutions are so bad and extractive. A good solution has already been demonstrated. And yet not a single competent founder wanted to solve that problem for planet earth, instead of doing something else, that (arguably) would have been more profitable. At minimum, someone could have forgone venture funding and built this as a cashflow business.

It’s true that this is a market that depends on economies of scale, because the quality of your product is proportional to the size of your matching pool. But I don’t buy that this is insurmountable. Just like with any startup, you start by serving a niche market really well, and then expand outward from there. (The first niche I would try for is by building an amazing match-making experience for female grad students at a particular top university. If you create a great experience for the women, the men will come, and I’d rather build an initial product for relatively smart customers. But there are dozens of niches one could try for.)

But it seems like no one tried to recreate OkC, much less creating something better, until the manifold team built manifold.love (currently in maintenance mode)? Not that no one succeeded. To my knowledge, no else one even tried. Possibly Luna counts, but I’ve heard through the grapevine that they spent substantial effort running giant parties, compared to actually developing and launching their product—from which I infer that they were not very serious. I’ve been looking for good dating apps. I think if a serious founder was trying seriously, I would have heard about it.

Thousands of funders a year, and no one?!

That’s such a massive failure, for almost a decade, that it suggests to me that the SV ideology of building things that make people’s lives better is broadly propaganda. The best founders might be relentlessly resourceful, but a tiny fraction of them seem to be motivated by creating value for the world, or this low hanging fruit wouldn’t have been left hanging for so long.

This is of course in addition to the long list of big tech companies who exploit their network-effect monopoly power to extract value from their users (often creating negative societal externalities in the process), more than creating value for them. But it’s a weaker update that there are some tech companies that do ethically dubious stuff, compared to the stronger update that there was no startup that took on this obvious, underserved, human problem.

My guess is that the tech world is a silo of competence (because competence is financially rewarded), but operates from an ideology with major distortions / blindspots, that are disconnected from commonsense reasoning about what’s Good. eg following profit incentives, and excitement about doing big things (independent from whether those good things have humane or inhumane impacts) off a cliff.

Small cashflow software businesses might be over soon?

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[Epistemic status: half-baked musing that I’m writing down to clarify for myself]

For the past 15 years there’s been an economic niche, where a single programer develops a useful tool, utility, or application, and sells it over the internet to a few thousand people for a small amount of money each, and make a decent (sometimes passive or mostly-passive) living on that one-person business.

In practice, these small consumer software businesses are on the far end of a continuum that includes venture-backed startups, and they can sometimes be the seed of an exponentially scaling operation. But you only need to reach product-market fit with a few thousand users for a business like this to sustainable. And at the point, it might be mostly on autopilot, and the entrepreneur has income, but can shift most of their attention to other projects, after only two or three years.

Intend (formally complice), is an example of this kind of business from someone in my circles.

I wonder if these businesses will be over soon, because of AI.

Not just that AI will be able to do the software engineering, but that AI swarms will be able to automate the whole entrepreneurial process from generating (good) ideas, developing early versions, shipping them, getting user-feedback, and iterating.

The discourse already imagines a “one person-unicorn”, where a human CEO coordinates a company of AIs to provide a product or service. With half a step more automation, you might see meta-entrepreneurs overseeing dozens or hundreds of separate AI swarms, each ideating, prototyping, and developing a business. Some will fail (just like every business), but some will grow and succeed and (just like with every other business venture) you can invest more resources into the ones that are working.

Some questions:

  • How expensive will inference be, in running these AI entrepreneurs? Will the inference costs be high enough that you need venture funding to run an AI entrepreneur-systems?
    • Estimating this breaks down into roughly “how many tokens does it take to run a business (per day?)?” and “How much will an inference token cost in 2028?”
  • What are the moats and barriers to entry here? What kind of person would capture the gains to this kind of setup.
  • Will this eat the niche of human-ideated software businesses? Will there be no room left to launch businesses like this and have them succeed, because the space of niche software products will be saturated? Or is the space of software ideas so dense, that there will still be room for differentiation, even if there are 1000x as many products of this type, of comparable quality, available?

. . .

In general, the leverage of code is going to drop over the next 5 years.

Currently, one well-placed engineer will write a line of code that might be used by millions of users. That because there’s 0-marginal cost to replicating software and so a line of code written once might as well be copied to a million computers. But it’s also representative of the relative expense of programming labor. Not many people can write (good) code and so their labor is expensive. It’s definitely not worth paying $100 an hour for an engineer to write some software when you can buy existing off the shelf software that does what you need (or almost what you need) for $50 a month.

But, as AI gets good enough that “writing code” becomes an increasingly inexpensive commodity, the cost-benefit of writing custom software is going to shift in the “benefit” direction. When writing new software is cheap, you might not want to pay the $50 a month, and there will be more flexibility to write exactly the right software for your particular usecase instead of a good-enough off the shelf-version (though I might be overestimating the pickiness of most of humanity with regards to their software). So more people and companies will write custom software more of the time, instead of buying existing software. As that happens the number of computers that run a given line of code will drop, in the process.

How I wish I lived my life (since 2020)

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[I wrote this a few months ago]

I always have a(n at least) part-time job, doing something object level, where someone pays me to do something that creates value. Doing something that isn’t entirely self-directed, adds some structure to my life which, I think, makes me better at doing my personal projects. I might stick to one job for six months or a year, and then move on to try something else. I want to try a bunch of different things and work with different kinds of people. I always have a job, but I also always have my eye out for my next job. I do things like research for AI impacts, grant making for SFF, startup stuff for manifold, generalist work for CAIP, logistics for Lighthaven events.

[I should have a flag for whenever I don’t have a job. That’s something that I should fix ASAP, even with just a stopgap. Instead of looking for something that I really want to do, I should make sure that I have something that I’m doing for a few hours a week-day, even if I want to find something better. When people ask me what I’m doing, I should always have a day job.]

In the evenings, I work on personal and learning projects: programming projects (including working with a tutor), studying textbooks, writing, practicing therapy skills. Whatever I’m working on, it always has a deliverable: if I’m learning something, I should write what I’m learning or gives talks about it. If I’m learning a skill, I design a “final project” that involves some person other than me.

Sometimes I’ll put the learning projects aside, and scale up my work, going all in for a campaign of a week, or 3 months, working intensively with a team to complete an end-to-end project.

Some weekends I try an intensive, doing an experiment or self-designed exercise with another person or a group of people.

I live frugally. I put away most of the money I earn, split between long run investments (both index funds and higher risk bets) and my personal development fund. I make a enough to live on from scattered projects, so I should be able to save most of what I make from my work.

I go to 5 conferences a year, trying to get exposure to interesting happenings in the world, people who are thinking about interesting things, and highly ethical women to date.

Every day I meditate and exercise. I don’t watch TV or youtube or read comic books. My go-to habits when I’m not doing anything are reading and taking notes on podcasts.

Lessons from and musings about Polytopia

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Over the past 6 months I’ve played about 100 hours of the 4X game “The Battle of Polytopia.” Mostly playing on “crazy” difficulty, against 3 or 4 other tribes. 

This is more than I’ve played any video game since I was 15 or so. I wanted to write up some of my thoughts, especially those that generalize.

Momentum

Polytopia is a game of momentum or compounding advantage. If I’m in the lead by turn 10 or so, I know that I am basically guaranteed to win eventually. [Edit 2024-09-12: after playing for another 30 hours, and focusing on the early game, I can now almost always win eventually, regardless of whether I have an early lead]. I can turn a current resource advantage into an overwhelming military advantage for a particular city, and seizing that city, get more of a lead. After another 10 turns, I’ll have compounded that until my tribe is an inexorable force moving across the square.

I think the number one thing that I took away from this game is the feeling of compounding momentum. Life should have that flavor. 

And, in particular, the compounding loops through the world. In polytopia, you generally want to spend down your resources to 0 or close to 0, every turn, unless there’s a specific thing that you’re aiming to buy that requires more than one maringal-turn of resource. “Saving up” is usually going to be a losing proposition, because the return on investment of seizing a city or building the population of an existing city sooner is exponential.

This also generalizes. I’m very financially conservative, by nature. I tend to earn money and save it / invest it. There’s a kind of compounding to that, but it isn’t active. There’s a different attitude one could have, where they’re investing in the market some amount every year, and putting aside some money for emergencies, but most of their investment loops through the world. Every year, they spend down most of the money they own, and invest it in ways to go faster.

I think most people, in practice, don’t do this very well: they spend their salary on a nice apartment, instead of the cheapest apartment they can afford and tutoring, personal assistants, and plane flights to one-on-one longshot bet meetings. At a personal (instead of organizational) level, I think the returns to spending additional money saturate fast, and after that point you get better returns investing in the market. But I think there might be something analogous to the “spend down your whole budget, every turn” heuristic. 

I’ve thought in the past that I should try aggressively spending more money. But maybe I should really commit to trying it. I have a full time salary for the first time in my life. Maybe this year, I should experiment with trying to find ways to spend 90% of that salary (not my investment returns, which I’ll reinvest), and see what the returns to that are. 

This overall dynamic of compounding advantages is more concerning that I, personally, haven’t built up much of an advantage yet. Mediocre accumulation of money, connections, and skills seems “medium” good. But because of the exponential, mediocre is actually quite far down a power law. This prompts me to reflect on what I can do this year to compound my existing resources (particularly with regards to personal connections, since I realized late in life that who you know who knows what you can do, is a constraint on what you can do).

Geography

Because of this momentum effect, the geography of the square dominates all other considerations in the question of which tribe will eventually win. In particular, if I start out isolated, far from any other tribes, with several easily accessible settlements available to convert, winning is going to be easy. I can spend the first ten turns capturing those settlements and building up their population without needing to expend resources on military units for defense.

In contrast, if I start out sandwiched between two other tribes with all settlements that are within my reach also within theirs, the struggle is apt to be brutal. It’s still possible to win starting from this position: The key is to seize, and build up at least two cities, and create enough units defensively that the other tribes attack each other instead of you. (That’s one thing that I learned: you sometimes need to build units to stand near your cities, even when you’re not planning an attack, because a density of units discourages other tribes from attacking you, in the first place). 

From there, depending on how dire the straights are, and if I’m on the coast, I’ll want to either 

  1. Train defenders to garrison my cities, and then quickly send out scouts to convert nonaffiliated settlements, and build up an advantage that way, or
  2. Train an attack force (of mostly archers, most likely, because a mass of archers can attack from a distance with minimal risk) target a city that the other two tribes are fighting over. I can sweep in and seize it after they’ve exhausted themselves.

This can work, but it still depends on luck. If you can’t get to your first settlement(s) fast enough, or another tribe captures one of your cities before you’ve had time to build up a detering defense force, there’s not really a way to recover. I’ll be fighting against better resourced adversaries for the rest of the game, until they overwhelm me. Usually I’ll just start the game over when I get unlucky this early.

This overwhelming importance of initial conditions sure seems like it generalizes to life, but mostly as a dower reminder that life is unfair. Insofar as you can change your initial conditions, they weren’t actually initial.

Thresholds, springs, and concentration of force

There are units of progress in polytopia that are composed of smaller components, but which don’t provide any value until all components are completed. 

For instance, it’s tempting to harvest a fruit or hunt an animal to move the resource counter of a city up by one tick. But if you don’t have the stars to capture enough resources to reach the next population-increase threshold for that city (or there just aren’t other accessible resources nearby), it doesn’t actually help to collect that one resource. You get no benefit for marginal ticks on the resource counter, you only get benefit from increases in city population.

Even if collecting the resource is the most valuable thing to do this turn, you’re still better off holding off and waiting a turn (one exception to the “spend down your resources every turn” heuristic). Waiting gives you optionality in how you spend those resources—you might have even better options in the next turn, including training units that were occupied last turn, or researching technologies 

Similarly, capturing a city entails killing the unit that is stationed there, and moving one of your units into its place, with few enough enemy units nearby that your unit isn’t killed before the next turn. Killing just the central stationed enemy unit, without having one of your units nearby to capture the city, is close to useless (not entirely useless, because it costs the enemy tribe one unit). Moving a unit into the city, only for it to be killed before the next turn, is similarly close to useless.

So in most cases, capturing a city is a multi-turn campaign of continually training and/or moving enough units into position to have a relative military advantage, killing enough of the enemy units, and moving one of your units (typically a defender or a giant, if you can manage it) into position in the city.

Crucially, partially succeeding at a campaign—killing most of the units, but not getting all the way to capturing the city, it buys you effectively nothing. You don’t win in polytopia by killing units, except insofar as that is instrumental to capturing cities.

More than that, if you break off a campaign part way through, your progress is not preserved. When you back your units out, that gives the enemy city slack to recover and replenish their units. So if you go back to capture that city later, you’ll have to more or less start over from scratch with wearing down their nearby military.

That is to say, capturing a city in polytopia is spring-like: if you don’t push it all the way to completion, it bounces back, and you need to start over again. It’s not just that marginal progress doesn’t provide marginal value until you reach a threshold point. Marginal progress decays over time.

I can notice plenty of things that are spring-like in this way, once I start thinking in those terms. 

Some technical learning, for instance. If I study something for a bit, and then leave it for too long (I’m not sure what “too long” is—maybe more than two weeks?) I don’t remember the material enough for my prior studying to help me much. If I want to continue, I basically have to start over.

But on the other hand, I read and studied the first few chapters of a Linear Algebra textbook in 2019, and that’s served me pretty well: I can rely on at least some of those concepts in my thinking. I think this differences is partly due to the material (some subjects just stick for me better, or are more conceptually useful for me compared to others). But largely, I think this is a threshold effect: if I study the content enough to chunk and consolidate the concepts, it sticks with me and I can build on it. But if I read some of a textbook, but don’t get to the point of consolidating the concepts, it just gets loaded into my short term memory, to decay on the order of weeks.

Writing projects definitely have the threshold-dynamic—they don’t provide any value until I ship them—and they’re partially but not fully spring-like. When I’ve left a writing project for too long, it’s hard to come back to it: the motivating energy is gone. And sometimes I do end up, when I’m inspired again, rewriting essentially the same text (though often with a different structure). But sometimes I am able to use partial writing from previous attempts.

Generalizing, one reason why things are springs, is because short term memories and representations decay, and you need to pass the threshold of consolidating into long term representations.

In polytopia, because capturing cities is spring-like, succeeding requires having a concentration of force. Splitting your forces to try to take two cities at once, and be worse than useless. And so one of the most important disciplines of playing polytopia is having internal clarity about which city you’re targeting next, so that you can overwhelm that city, capture it, consolidate it and then move on to the next one. Sometimes there are sudden opportunities to capture cities that were not your current target and late in the game, you might have more than one target at a time (usually from different unit-training bases).

Similarly, anything in my life that’s spring-like demands a concentration of force. 

If technical learning in my short term memory tends to decay, that means that I need to commit sufficiently to a learning project for long enough to hit the consolidation threshold. I want to concentrate my energies on the project until I get to the point of success, whatever success means.

Same basic principle for writing projects. When writing, I should probably make a point to just keep going until I have a first complete draft.

Video games

Probably the most notable thing I learned was not from the content, but from the format. Video games can work. 

I got better at playing polytopia over the period that I was playing it, from mostly losing to mostly winning my games. That getting better was mostly of the form of making mistakes, noticing those mistakes, and then more or less automatically learning the habits to patch those mistakes. 

For instance, frustration at losing initiative because I left a city un-garrisoned and an enemy unit came up and took it without a fight while I wasn’t looking, led into a general awareness of all my cities and the quiet units within movement distance of them, so that I could quickly train a unit to garrison them. 

Or running into an issue when I ran out of population for a city and couldn’t easily garrison it, and learning to keep a defender within one step of a city, so that I can train units there to send to the front, but move the defender into place when the population is full.

This was not very deliberate or systematic. I just kept playing and gradually learned how to avoid the errors that hobbled me.

And I just kept playing because it was (is) addictive. In particular, when I finished a game, there was an automatic impulse to start another one. I would play for hours at a stretch. At most I think I played for ten hours in a row. 

Why was it addictive? I think the main thing is that the dynamic of the game means I never get blocked with no option, or no idea, for what to do next. At every moment there’s an affordance to move the game forward: either something to do or just moving on to the next turn. The skill is in taking actions skillfully, but not in figuring out how to take actions at all. I think this, plus an intermittent reinforcement schedule was crucial to what made it addictive. 

Overall, this has been bad for my life, especially after the point when I started mostly winning, and I wasn’t learning as much any more. 

But I think I learned something about learning and getting better in that process. I’ve been playing with the idea of intentionally cultivating that kind of addiction for other domains, or pretending as if I’m experiencing that kind of addiction to simulate it.

I bet I could get into a mode like this with programming, where I compulsively keep going for hours over weeks, and in the process learn the habits to counter my mistakes and inefficiencies, less because of anything systematic, and more just because those errors are present to mind in my short term memory by the time I encounter them again. I think I’m probably close to having enough skill in programming that I can figure out how to never be blocked, especially with the help of an LLM, and get into the addictive rhythm.

Further, this makes me more interested in trying to find video games that are both dopamine-addictive and train my intuition for an important domain. 

I’ve been playing with Manifold markets, recently, and I feel like I’m getting a better sense of markets in the process. I wonder if there are good video games for getting an intuition for linear algebra, or economics. I have registered that playing 100 hours of factorio is an important training regime. I wonder if there are others. 

I haven’t really played video games since I was in middle school (with the exception of some rationality training exercises on snakebird and baba is you). At the time I was playing Knights of the Old Republic, and decided that I would try to become a jedi in real life, instead of in the game. I mostly haven’t played video games since. 

I now think that this was maybe a mistake.

It’s hard to know what lessons I would have learned if I had played more video games—when I played Age of Mythology and Age of Empires as a kid, I don’t remember getting better over time, as I did with polytopia. But I do think there are lessons that I could have learned from playing video games that would have helped me in thinking about my life. Notably, getting reps playing through games with early, mid, and late stages, would have given me a model for planning across life stages, which is something that, in retrospect, I was lacking. I didn’t have an intuitive sense of the ways that the shape of my opportunities would be different in my 20s vs. my thirties, for instance. Possibly I would have avoided some life errors if I had spent more time playing and learning to get good at, video games.

Some thoughts on giving into threats or not

~ elityre ~ Leave a comment

Eliezer claims that dath ilani never give in to threats.

The only reason people will make threats against you, the argument goes, is if those people expect that you might give in. If you have an iron-clad policy against acting in response to threats made against you, then there’s no point in making or enforcing the threats in the first place. There’s no reason for the threatener to bother, so they don’t. Which means in some sufficiently long run, refusing to submit to threats means you’re not subject to threats.

This seems a bit fishy to me. I have a lingering suspicion that this argument doesn’t apply, or at least doesn’t apply universally, in the real world.

I’m thinking here mainly of a prototypical case of an isolated farmer family (like the early farming families of the greek peninsula, not absorbed into a polis), being accosted by some roving bandits, such as the soldiers of the local government. The bandits say “give us half your harvest, or we’ll just kill you.”

The argument above depends on a claim about the cost of executing on a threat. “There’s no reason to bother” implies that the threatener has a preference not to bother, if they know that the threat won’t work.

I don’t think that assumption particularly applies. For many cases, like the case above, the cost to the threatener of executing on the threat is negligible, or at least small relative to the available rewards. The bandits don’t particularly mind killing the farmers and taking their stuff, if the farmers don’t want to give it up. There isn’t a realistic chance that the bandits, warriors specializing in violence and outnumbering the farmers, will lose a physical altercation.

From the badnits’ perspective their are two options:

  1. Showing up, threatening to kill the farmers, taking away ask much food as they can carry (and then maybe coming back to accost them again next year).
  2. Showing up, threatening to kill the farmers, actually killing the farmers, and then taking away as much food as they can carry.

It might be easier and less costly for the bandits to get what they want by being scary rather than by being violent. But the plunder is definitely enough to make violence worth it if it comes to that. They prefer option 1, but they’re totally willing to fall back on option 2.

It seems like, in this situation, the farmers are probably better off cooperating with the bandits and giving them some food, even knowing that that means that the bandits will come back and demand “taxes” from them every harvest. They’re just better off submitting.

Maybe, decision theoretically, this situation doesn’t count as a threat. The bandits are taking food from the the farmers, one way or the other, and they’re killing the farmers if they try to stop that. They’re not killing the farmers so that they’ll give up their food.

But that seems fishy. Most of the time, the bandits don’t, in fact have to resort to violence. Just showing up and threatening violence is enough to get what they want. The farmers do make the lives of the bandits easier by submitting and giving them much of the harvest without resistance. Doing otherwise would be straightforwardly worse for them.

Resisting the bandits out of a commitment to some notion of decision-theoretic rationality seems exactly analogous to two-boxing in Newcom’s problem, because of a commitment to (causal) decision-theoretic rationality.

You might not want to give in out of spite. “Fuck you. I’d rather die than help you steal from me.” But a dath ilani would say that that’s a matter of the utility function, not of decision theory. You just don’t like submitting to threats, and so will pay big costs to avoid it, not that you’re following a policy that maximizes your payoffs.

So, it seems like the policy has to be “don’t give into threats that are sufficiently costly to execute that the threatener would prefer not to bother, if they knew in advance that you wouldn’t give in”. (And possibly with the additional caveat “if the subjunctive dependence between you and the threatener is sufficiently high.”)

But that’s a much more complicated policy. For one thing, it requires a person-being-threatened to accurately estimate how costly it would be for the threatener to execute their threat (and the threatener is thereby incentivized to deceive them about that).

Hm. But maybe that’s easy to estimate actually, in the cases where the threatener gets a payout of 0, if the person-being-threatened doesn’t cooperate with the threat? Which is the case for most blackmail attempts, for instances, but not necessarily “if you don’t give me some of your harvest, I’ll kill you.”

In lots of case, it seems like it would be ambiguous. Especially when there are large power disparities in favor of the threatener. When someone powerful threatens you the cost of executing the the threat is likely to be small for them, possibly small enough to be negligible. And in those cases, their own spite at you for resisting them might be more than enough reason to act on it.

[Ok. that’s enough for now.]

Some notes on my recent, sudden, improvement in mood

~ elityre ~ 1 Comment

Two days ago, I went from feeling listless and unmotivated to feeling more or less like my usual self, quite suddenly. I’m not sure what caused this and I want to capture some of my hypotheses for latter pattern matching.

How I was feeling

On June 14th, I sent the following message to some of my friends:

I’m kind of in a weird place. I’ve been saying that I’m pseudo-depressed, but I’m not sure if that’s a good expression.

I’ve been sleeping a lot, sometimes more than 12 hours a day. In particular, I seem to be alternating, day by day, between getting up at 7:00 AM and getting up at noon.

I feel relatively unmotivated. Things mostly don’t seem worth doing. Like, I imagine setting a serious intention to do something, and part of me asks “why though? what good thing will result from this?” and I don’t have a good answer. Everything I want doesn’t exist?

Duncan was disappointed and concerned that I didn’t seem to have “a deal” any more. I don’t have anything to live for.

That said, I mostly don’t feel particularly or actively unhappy.

And,

  • I’m doing a pretty good job of exercising every day.
  • I’ve been meditating every day, and I’ve been sinking pretty deep into it.
  • I usually write something or program something every day. I’m getting a little bit done, but not very much.
  • I’m only eating between 2:00 PM and 7:00 PM, except for liquid food.

Earlier in this month, I was pretty distracted / dopamine addicted, and I successfully weaned that off.

I woke up at noon again today, and thought “ok, something weird seems to be happening with me”, and thought that it seemed prudent to maybe loop other people in on what’s going on with me.

I think I’m only going to be happy if I’m working hard, but at the moment, I don’t really feel the point. I’m currently just plugging along anyway, and maybe I’ll get some momentum + attempting to dialog with my desires.

Of course, it might be an entirely non-psychological thing. Maybe I should try eating a little bit of meat, as an experiment, and see if that helps. I might also go to another city for  a few days. Open to other suggestions for experiments, I guess, though I might wrinkle my nose at some of them and say no.

I’ve been feeling like this for at least a month, arguably all the way back to when I was in Taiwan in May.

A shift

Then two days ago, on June 27th, I had a pretty abrupt shift.

My notes from that day

  • 18:23 – I’m feeling notably, specifically happy. #[[phenomenological naturalism]]
    • I started while I was mindlessly browsing twitter a few hours ago (as I have been doing a lot over the past few days). I remember seeing something that was funny, that made me laugh. In laughing I felt good.
    • Later, I noticed a feeling of warmth around my heart.
    • I lay down with my eyes closed for a while, and continued to feel the feeling around my heart.
    • This is markedly different from how I have been feeling (unmotivated, listless).

Since then, I’ve been feeling basically like my normal self, able to get momentum on stuff.

Causes?

What happened?

I still don’t know. Here are some possibilities.

  1. It was something that I ate? I’ve been at home more and RGI less since I got back from Taiwan. I’ve been eating more eggs and more carbs, and less kale, than I often do.
    • On the 27th, I ate:
      • I ate a Quinoa bowl with vegetables (including carrots and zucchini and some others).
      • I ate some of Bulgur bowl with vegetables (including green beans, and some others)
      • I ate a bobos chocklate chip bar.
      • I ate a bunch of Made Good rice crispy bars. [Note I had been eating a lot of these over prior days]
      • I ate a bunch of pure organic fruit strips
        • I did note that these had a very strong taste.
      • I drank a Gatorade.
      • I ate some chocolate chipMade Good granola minis.
    • Could the vegetables have made the difference? The Quinoa? It seems like the next time I’m feeling bad or lame, I should just try varying my diet and and if that shakes something loose.
  2. Creatine made the difference? I recently bought some creatine monohydrate supplements in gummy form. Those arrived on the 24th, and I’d been munching on them throughout the 25th, 26th, and 27th. This is probably 5x more creatine than I usually take in a day, and much more than I’ve been taking recently. Possibly that made the difference?
  3. Other supplements made the difference? I haven’t been taking my standard supplement stack since I got back from Taiwan (because it was a arguably-trivial inconvenience to repack all my pill containers). But on the 25th, 26th, and 27th, I took my current stack of
    • I think,
      • Morning, empty-stomach pills
        • Korean Panax Ginseng
        • Inositol
        • Alpha Lipoic acid
        • Taurine
        • CDP choline
        • L-tyrosine
        • Creatine
      • With a meal pills
        • Bacopa
        • Ginkgo Biloba
        • Alpha GPC
        • b12
        • vitamine
        • Vegan EPA + DHA
        • Creatine
    • Could that have been it? It seems unlikely, because I wasn’t taking those supplements for very long before I started feeling lame. I was taking all of those for less than 2 months (I think), before I was interrupted by travel)
  4. Earlier that day, I was thinking about deciding to be happy. I didn’t quite get to the point of committing to it, in that moment, but the way I was feeling it out felt real. I could imagine just deciding that I was going to be happy or deciding to to have high energy, because life is just better if I’m happy / high energy, that it is basically a free variable, that I could just decide to be one way or another.
  5. I had decided the night before that I would start trying to cowork with people for 4 hours in the mornings, to build momentum. I am doing that (I’m typing this essay in a coworking session!), though I only barely did that on the 27th, around noon, for around an hour. That seems unlikely.

Some powers have ethical valence

~ elityre ~ Leave a comment

There’s a trope of many fantasy settings, different kinds of magic have different moral valence, and your use of each kind influences your morality. Or alternatively, you moral character has effects which magics you can use.

In the starwars extended universe, there’s the light side and the dark side. It’s usually implied that the use of the powers of the dark side are seductive and corrupting.

‘Is the Dark Side stronger?’

‘No, no, no. Quicker, easier, more seductive.’

It’s not (to my limited knowledge, at least), explained why or how using particular force powers is leads one to the poor moral behavior, but it is stated that accessing dark side powers requires tapping into “negative” emotions, like fear and anger. Presumably there’s some magical explanation for why using the dark side is so corrupting. But as a matter of simple psychology, using the dark side entails nurturing and cultivating emotions and emotional dispositions that are generally not good for your soul.

In my memory of the Knights of the Old Republic game, the causality went in the other direction: your alignment on the light side dark side axis was determined by the choices that you made in the game. High integrity and altruistic choices moved you towards the lightside and selfish, vengeful, or ruthless choices moved you towards the dark side.

And there’s a broader version of the trope, of the wizard who conducts dark rituals with demonic beings, and this being a slippery slope to evil as exposure to those powers (and the kinds of sacrifices they demand in exchange for power) warps his or her soul.

There’s a parallel of this dynamic in real life.

Some skills have a moral valence, because they disproportionately favor cooperation or exploitation. Which skills you choose to develop shapes your affordances, which shapes your moral habits and choices.

For instance, if you learn to lie skillfully, you build an affordance for lying. When faced with a problem a prominent tool in your toolbox will be to lie to get your way. This puts an incentive on you to use that tool when you can, and thereby leads you to less ethical behavior than you might otherwise have chosen.

Another example: various persuasion techniques that take exploit human biases to get others to agree to what you want generally lean evil. They’re more symmetrical than argument, and methods in that class have a disproportionately larger set of outcomes in which you get others to agree to something counter to their idealized or reflective interests.

It’s not that this couldn’t possibly be used for Good. It’s that honing this as a skill, builds affordances of ethically dubious action.

In contrast, Convergent Facilitation, an offshoot of NonViolent Communication, is a group decision making framework that involves hearing, holding, and solving for the disparate needs of everyone in a group, and thereby drawing out both the willingness to adapt and the creativity of the whole group. This is a technique that is structurally cooperative. Helping other people get what’s important to them is a functional part of the technique, not a side benefit that could in principle be stripped away, for better selfish efficiency.

A person who puts skill points into getting really good at Convergent Facilitation is building skill that supports cooperative behavior, as someone who puts skill points into psychological persuasion techniques is building skill that supports adversariality. Investing in one or the other shapes the affordances that are available to you in any given situation. If you’re good at persuading people, you’ll see those options, and if you’re good at CF, you’ll see opportunities to do CF-like moves to find mutually supportive solutions.

The better you are at lying, the more tempting it is to lie.

That difference in affordances corresponds to a difference in payoffs: If you’re good at persuasion, it’s a higher cost to forge that strategy when it would be unethical to use. The tools you’re skilled with exert a vacuum pull towards their ethical attractor.

In this way, the some skills have a moral valence. Which you choose to cultivate exert pressures on the condition of your soul.

A comment on Marxism.

~ elityre ~ 4 Comments

Marxism is like…incredibly dumb? Like it’s pretty shocking that it shook the world. And indeed it was once lauded particularly “scientific”, despite being not remotely like that.

I think that the main thing that happened in the 1800s was not that Marxism, per se, was actually compelling to people, but rather that there were a lot of people who could perceive serious injustice, and felt motivational force to organize to fight it, and they grabbed on to this ideology kind of at random, because it gave expression to their outlook, and claimed to be scientific, so was prestigious (it mattered a lot to the Russian radicals that it was _western_, because western Europe was modern where Russia as a backwater).

But the actual ideology, as near as I can tell, is dumb, and has always been dumb.

And then on top of that, when people tried to execute it…it resulted in (I think) in literally the most loss of human life, on purpose, ever?

I tried to talk with some smart Marxists once, to try to pass the ITT. I think I didn’t actually find the cream of the crop, but I was not impressed with the SSC-subreddit associated Marxist who had a video call with me.

I would still be up for talking to a smart Marxist, if anyone happens to know one.

But as it is, this is among the most inaccurate, most intellectually bankrupt, most consequentially harmful ideologies.