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Mental models - giving people personhood and taking it away

-10 Elo 11 August 2016 08:32AM

Original post: http://bearlamp.com.au/giving-people-personhood-and-taking-it-away

This post is about the Kegan levels of self development.  If you don't know what that is, this post might still be interesting to you but you might be missing some key structure to understand where it fits among that schema.  More information can be found here (https://meaningness.wordpress.com/2015/10/12/developing-ethical-social-and-cognitive-competence/)

I am not ready to definitely accept the Kegan levels as a useful model because often it makes retrospective predictions.  Rather than predictions of the future.  A model is only as useful as what it can predict, so if it can't be used on the fly when you want to explain the universe you might as well throw it out.  Having said that, this idea is interesting.

When I was little, people fell into different categories.  There was my parents - the olderClass humans (going to refer to them as Senior-humans), my siblings - which, as I grew up turned into my age-group humans and through school - my peergroup humans.

People like doctors fell into SeniorClass, Dentists, Vets, Plumbers, PIC (People In Charge) - all fell into the SeniorClass of humans.  A big one was teachers - they were all PIC.  A common trope among children is that the teachers sleep at school.  Or to use a gaming term - we feel as though they are the NPC's of that part of our journey in life.

As far as I can tell (from trying to pinpoint this today); the people I meet on my own terms become peergroup humans.  Effectively friends.  People I meet not on my terms; as well as strangers - first join some kind of seniorclass of humans, if I get to know them enough they transition to my peergroup.  Of course this is a bit strange because on the one hand I imagine I want to be friends with the PIC, or the senior-class humans because of the opportunity to get ahead in life.  the good ol' I know a guy who know's a guy.  Which is really not what a peergroup constitutes.

Peergroup humans are not "A guy with skills" much as we might hope for; they are (hopefully) all at our own, or near our own skill level.  (on Kegan's stage 3) people who's opinions and ideas we care about because they are similar to us.

Recently I have noticed events that have taken some of my long term SeniorClass and shift them into my peergroup.  Effectively "demoting" them from "Professional" to "human".  When I think "person has their shit together" or "person doesn't have their shit together".  I guess there were always people who seemed to have their shit together.  Now that I am an adult it's clear that less and less people are competent and more and more people are winging it through their lives.  It's mildly uncomfortable to think of people as being less "together" than I thought they were.

The other place where it's been an uncomfortable transition is in my memory.  I will from time to time think back to a time when I deferred judgement, decision making capacity, or high-level trust in someone else having my own best interests at heart - where now looking back retrospectively they were just as lost and confused as I was in some of those situations, but they had a little kid to take care of/be in charge of/be in seniority to.

What I wonder about this process of demoting people is - what if instead of demoting my adults as they prove their humanity; I instead promote all the humans to Senior-Class.  What would that do to my model of humans?  And I guess I don't really know where I stand.  Am I an adult?  Am I a peer?  I have always been an observer...

I'm not really getting at anything with this post.  Just interesting to observe this reclassification happening and fit kegan's stages around it.  Obviously some of the way that I sorted Senior-class humans is particularly relevant to a stage 3 experience of how I managed my relationships when I was smaller.  I also wonder that given the typical mind - whether this is normal or unusual.  

Question for today:

  • Do you divide people into "advanced" and "equal" and "simpler" - (or did you do it when you were younger?)
  • Do people ever change category on you?  In which direction?  What do you do about that?
  • Assuming I am on some kind of path of gradually increasing understanding and growing and changing models of the world around me - what is next?

Meta: this took 3 hours to write over a few days.

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Waser's 3 Goals of Morality

-12 mwaser 02 November 2010 07:12PM

In the spirit of Asimov’s 3 Laws of Robotics

  1. You should not be selfish
  2. You should not be short-sighted or over-optimize
  3. You should maximize the progress towards and fulfillment of all conscious and willed goals, both in terms of numbers and diversity equally, both yours and those of others equally

It is my contention that Yudkowsky’s CEV converges to the following 3 points:

  1. I want what I want
  2. I recognize my obligatorily gregarious nature; realize that ethics and improving the community is the community’s most rational path towards maximizing the progress towards and fulfillment of everyone’s goals; and realize that to be rational and effective the community should punish anyone who is not being ethical or improving the community (even if the punishment is “merely” withholding help and cooperation)
  3. I shall, therefore, be ethical and improve the community in order to obtain assistance, prevent interference, and most effectively achieve my goals

I further contend that, if this CEV is translated to the 3 Goals above and implemented in a Yudkowskian Benevolent Goal Architecture (BGA), that the result would be a Friendly AI.

It should be noted that evolution and history say that cooperation and ethics are stable attractors while submitting to slavery (when you don’t have to) is not.  This formulation expands Singer’s Circles of Morality as far as they’ll go and tries to eliminate irrational Us-Them distinctions based on anything other than optimizing goals for everyone — the same direction that humanity seems headed in and exactly where current SIAI proposals come up short.

Once again, cross-posted here on my blog (unlike my last article, I have no idea whether this will be karma'd out of existence or not ;-)

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