When you think of "ultimatums", what comes to mind?

Manipulativeness, maybe? Ultimatums are typically considered a negotiation tactic, and not a very pleasant one.

But there's a different thing that can happen, where an ultimatum is made, but where articulating it isn't a speech act but rather an observation. As in, the ultimatum wasn't created by the act of stating it, but rather, it already existed in some sense.

Some concrete examples: negotiating relationships

I had a tense relationship conversation a few years ago. We'd planned to spend the day together in the park, and I was clearly angsty, so my partner asked me what was going on. I didn't have a good handle on it, but I tried to explain what was uncomfortable for me about the relationship, and how I was confused about what I wanted. After maybe 10 minutes of this, she said, "Look, we've had this conversation before. I don't want to have it again. If we're going to do this relationship, I need you to promise we won't have this conversation again."

I thought about it. I spent a few moments simulating the next months of our relationship. I realized that I totally expected this to come up again, and again. Earlier on, when we'd had the conversation the first time, I hadn't been sure. But it was now pretty clear that I'd have to suppress important parts of myself if I was to keep from having this conversation.

"...yeah, I can't promise that," I said.

"I guess that's it then."

"I guess so."

I think a more self-aware version of me could have recognized, without her prompting, that my discomfort represented an unreconcilable part of the relationship, and that I basically already wanted to break up.

The rest of the day was a bit weird, but it was at least nice that we had resolved this. We'd realized that it was a fact about the world that there wasn't a serious relationship that we could have that we both wanted.

I sensed that when she posed the ultimatum, she wasn't doing it to manipulate me. She was just stating what kind of relationship she was interested in. It's like if you go to a restaurant and try to order a pad thai, and the waiter responds, "We don't have rice noodles or peanut sauce. You either eat somewhere else, or you eat something other than a pad thai."

An even simpler example would be that at the start of one of my relationships, my partner wanted to be monogamous and I wanted to be polyamorous (i.e. I wanted us both to be able to see other people and have other partners). This felt a bit tug-of-war-like, but eventually I realized that actually I would prefer to be single than be in a monogamous relationship.

I expressed this.

It was an ultimatum! "Either you date me polyamorously or not at all." But it wasn't me "just trying to get my way".

I guess the thing about ultimatums in the territory is that there's no bluff to call.

It happened in this case that my partner turned out to be really well-suited for polyamory, and so this worked out really well. We'd decided that if she got uncomfortable with anything, we'd talk about it, and see what made sense. For the most part, there weren't issues, and when there were, the openness of our relationship ended up just being a place where other discomforts were felt, not a generator of disconnection.

Normal ultimatums vs ultimatums in the territory

I use "in the territory" to indicate that this ultimatum isn't just a thing that's said but a thing that is true independently of anything being said. It's a bit of a poetic reference to the map-territory distinction.

No bluffing: preferences are clear

The key distinguishing piece with UITTs is, as I mentioned above, that there's no bluff to call: the ultimatum-maker isn't secretly really really hoping that the other person will choose one option or the other. These are the two best options as far as they can tell. They might have a preference: in the second story above, I preferred a polyamorous relationship to no relationship. But I preferred both of those to a monogamous relationship, and the ultimatum in the territory was me realizing and stating that.

This can actually be expressed formally, using what's called a preference vector. This comes from Keith Hipel at University of Waterloo. If the tables in this next bit doesn't make sense, don't worry about it: all important conclusions are expressed in the text.

First, we'll note that since each of us have two options, a table can be constructed which shows four possible states (numbered 0-3 in the boxes).

This representation is sometimes referred to as matrix form or normal form, and has the advantage of making it really clear who controls which state transitions (movements between boxes). Here, my decision controls which column we're in, and my partner's decision controls which row we're in.

Next, we can consider: of these four possible states, which are most and least preferred, by each person? Here's my preferences, ordered from most to least preferred, left to right. The 1s in the boxes mean that the statement on the left is true.

The order of the states represents my preferences (as I understand them) regardless of what my potential partner's preferences are. I only control movement in the top row (do I insist on polyamory or not). It's possible that they prefer no relationship to a poly relationship, in which case we'll end up in state 2. But I still prefer this state over state 1 (mono relationship) and state 0 (in which I don't ask for polyamory and my partner decides not to date me anyway). So whatever my partners preferences are, I've definitely made a good choice for me, by insisting on polyamory.

This wouldn't be true if I were bluffing (if I preferred state 1 to state 2 but insisted on polyamory anyway). If I preferred 1 to 2, but I bluffed by insisting on polyamory, I would basically be betting on my partner preferring polyamory to no relationship, but this might backfire and get me a no relationship, when both of us (in this hypothetical) would have preferred a monogamous relationship to that. I think this phenomenon is one reason people dislike bluffy ultimatums.

My partner's preferences turned out to be...

You'll note that they preferred a poly relationship to no relationship, so that's what we got! Although as I said, we didn't assume that everything would go smoothly. We agreed that if this became uncomfortable for my partner, then they would tell me and we'd figure out what to do. Another way to think about this is that after some amount of relating, my partner's preference vector might actually shift such that they preferred no relationship to our polyamorous one. In which case it would no longer make sense for us to be together.

UITTs release tension, rather than creating it

In writing this post, I skimmed a wikihow article about how to give an ultimatum, in which they say:

"Expect a negative reaction. Hardly anyone likes being given an ultimatum. Sometimes it may be just what the listener needs but that doesn't make it any easier to hear."

I don't know how accurate the above is in general. I think they're talking about ultimatums like "either you quit smoking or we break up". I can say that expect that these properties of an ultimatum contribute to the negative reaction:

• stated angrily or otherwise demandingly
• more extreme than your actual preferences, because you're bluffing
• refers to what they need to do, versus your own preferences

So this already sounds like UITTs would have less of a negative reaction.

But I think the biggest reason is that they represent a really clear articulation of what one party wants, which makes it much simpler for the other party to decide what they want to do. Ultimatums in the territory tend to also be more of a realization that you then share, versus a deliberate strategy. And this realization causes a noticeable release of tension in the realizer too.

Let's contrast:

"Either you quit smoking or we break up!"

versus

"I'm realizing that as much as I like our relationship, it's really not working for me to be dating a smoker, so I've decided I'm not going to. Of course, my preferred outcome is that you stop smoking, not that we break up, but I realize that might not make sense for you at this point."

Of course, what's said here doesn't necessarily correspond to the preference vectors shown above. Someone could say the demanding first thing when they actually do have a UITT preference-wise, and someone who's trying to be really NVCy or something might say the sceond thing even though they're actually bluffing and would prefer to . But I think that in general they'll correlate pretty well.

The "realizing" seems similar to what happened to me 2 years ago on my own, when I realized that the territory was issuing me an ultimatum: either you change your habits or you fail at your goals. This is how the world works: your current habits will get you X, and you're declaring you want Y. On one level, it was sad to realize this, because I wanted to both eat lots of chocolate and to have a sixpack. Now this ultimatum is really in the territory.

Another example could be realizing that not only is your job not really working for you, but that it's already not-working to the extent that you aren't even really able to be fully productive. So you don't even have the option of just working a bit longer, because things are only going to get worse at this point. Once you realize that, it can be something of a relief, because you know that even if it's hard, you're going to find something better than your current situation.

Loose ends

More thoughts on the break-up story

One exercise I have left to the reader is creating the preference vectors for the break-up in the first story. HINT: (rot13'd) Vg'f fvzvyne gb gur cersrerapr irpgbef V qvq fubj, jvgu gjb qrpvfvbaf: fur pbhyq vafvfg ba ab shgher fhpu natfgl pbairefngvbaf be abg, naq V pbhyq pbagvahr gur eryngvbafuvc be abg.

An interesting note is that to some extent in that case I wasn't even expressing a preference but merely a prediction that my future self would continue to have this angst if it showed up in the relationship. So this is even more in the territory, in some senses. In my model of the territory, of course, but yeah. You can also think of this sort of as an unconscious ultimatum issued by the part of me that already knew I wanted to break up. It said "it's preferable for me to express angst in this relationship than to have it be angst free. I'd rather have that angst and have it cause a breakup than not have the angst."

Revealing preferences

I think that ultimatums in the territory are also connected to what I've called Reveal Culture (closely related to Tell Culture, but framed differently). Reveal cultures have the assumption that in some fundamental sense we're on the same side, which makes negotiations a very different thing... more of a collaborative design process. So it's very compatible with the idea that you might just clearly articulate your preferences.

Note that there doesn't always exist a UITT to express. In the polyamory example above, if I'd preferred a mono relationship to no relationship, then I would have had no UITT (though I could have bluffed). In this case, it would be much harder for me to express my preferences, because if I leave them unclear then there can be kind of implicit bluffing. And even once articulated, there's still no obvious choice. I prefer this, you prefer that. We need to compromise or something. It does seem clear that, with these preferences, if we don't end up with some relationship at the end, we messed up... but deciding how to resolve it is outside the scope of this post.

Knowing your own preferences is hard

Another topic this post will point at but not explore is: how do you actually figure out what you want? I think this is a mix of skill and process. You can get better at the general skill by practising trying to figure it out (and expressing it / acting on it when you do, and seeing if that works out well). One process I can think of that would be helpful is Gendlin's Focusing. Nate Soares has written about how introspection is hard and to some extent you don't ever actually know what you want: You don't get to know what you're fighting for. But, he notes,

"There are facts about what we care about, but they aren't facts about the stars. They are facts about us."

And they're hard to figure out. But to the extent that we can do so and then act on what we learn, we can get more of what we want, in relationships, in our personal lives, in our careers, and in the world.

(This article crossposted from my personal blog.)

I recently stumbled over the relationship between freemasons and networks of social and economic influence (e.g. nobility).

I wondered what could be learned from a society which exists so long and has ideals that are not that far away from the LW goal of refining human rationality.  

It is interesting to note that the freemasons seem to have highly tolerant and rational values. The freemasons orginated from independent craft guilds but became 'speculative freemasons' during the enlightenment and this is reflected in their commitment to tolerance and reason which builds on crafts traditions of teaching, truth, reliability and craft perfection. Somewhat problematic may be their unusual customs and the prejudice they face. Nonetheless they obviously can cooperate which our kind can't. 

Note: I didn't attend any freemason meetings and don't know any details. What I read on Wikipedia was mostly asbtract. I might attend a meeting but unsure about it's value of information.

What do you think: What can we learn from freemasonry? What should be avoided? Is there any freemason here who might provide insights?

Relevants comments (no posts) on LW:

LW as a cult like freemasons.

LW as exclusive phyg

Interview systems for admission to LW

Use of prejudice about freemasons

A post about an LW symbol prompted this comment about freemason icons.

I wouldn't normally link to a post from my math blog here, but it concerns a cute interpretation of Cantor's theorem that showed up when I was thinking about program equilibria at the April MIRI workshop, so I thought it might be of interest here (e.g. if you're trying to persuade a mathematically inclined friend of yours to attend a future workshop). A short proof of the undecidability of the halting problem falls out as a bonus. 

Abstract: The study of cultural evolution has drawn much of its momentum from academic areas far removed from human and animal psychology, specially regarding the evolution of cooperation. Game theoretic results and parental investment theory come from economics, kin selection models from biology, and an ever growing amount of models describing the process of cultural evolution in general, and the evolution of altruism in particular come from mathematics. Even from Artificial Intelligence interest has been cast on how to create agents that can communicate, imitate and cooperate. In this article I begin to tackle the 'why?' question. By trying to retrospectively make sense of the convergence of all these fields, I contend that further refinements in these fields should be directed towards understanding how to create environmental incentives fostering cooperation.

We need systems that are wiser than we are. We need institutions and cultural norms that make us better than we tend to be. It seems to me that the greatest challenge we now face is to build them. - Sam Harris, 2013, The Power Of Bad Incentives

1) Introduction

2) Cultures evolve

Culture is perhaps the most remarkable outcome of the evolutionary algorithm (Dennett, 1996) so far. It is the cradle of most things we consider humane - that is, typically human and valuable - and it surrounds our lives to the point that we may be thought of as creatures made of culture even more than creatures of bone and flesh (Hofstadter, 2007; Dennett, 1992). The appearance of our cultural complexity has relied on many associated capacities, among them:

1) The ability to observe, be interested by, and go nearby an individual doing something interesting, an ability we share with norway rats, crows, and even lemurs (Galef & Laland, 2005).

2) Ability to learn from and scrounge the food of whoever knows how to get food, shared by capuchin monkeys (Ottoni et al, 2005).

3) Ability to tolerate learners, to accept learners, and to socially learn, probably shared by animals as diverse as fish, finches and Fins (Galef & Laland, 2005).

4) Understanding and emulating other minds - Theory of Mind- empathizing, relating, perhaps re-framing an experience as one's own, shared by chimpanzees, dogs, and at least some cetaceans (Rendella & Whitehead, 2001).

5) Learning the program level description of the action of others, for which the evidence among other animals is controversial (but see Cantor & Whitehead, 2013). And finally...

6) Sharing intentions. Intricate understanding of how two minds can collaborate with complementary tasks to achieve a mutually agreed goal (Tomasello et al, 2005).

Irrespective of definitional disputes around the true meaning of the word "culture" (which doesn't exist, see e.g. Pinker, 2007 pg115; Yudkowsky 2008A), each of these is more cognitively complex than its predecessor, and even (1) is sufficient for intra-specific non-environmental, non-genetic behavioral variation, which I will call "culture" here, whoever it may harm.

By transitivity, (2-6) allow the development of culture. It is interesting to notice that tool use, frequently but falsely cited as the hallmark of culture, is ubiquitously equiprobable in the animal kingdom. A graph showing, per biological family, which species shows tool use gives us a power law distribution, whose similarity with the universal prior will help in understanding that being from a family where a species uses tools tells us very little about a specie's own tool use (Michael Haslam, personal conversation).

Once some of those abilities are available, and given an amount of environmental facilities, need, and randomness, cultures begin to form. Occasionally, so do more developed traditions. Be it by imitation, program level imitation, goal emulation or intention sharing, information is transmitted between agents giving rise to elements sufficient to constitute a primeval Darwinian soup. That is, entities form such that they exhibit 1)Variation 2)Heredity or replication 3)Differential fitness (Dennett, 1996). In light of the article Five Misunderstandings About Cultural Evolution (Henrich, Boyd & Richerson, 2008) we can improve Dennett's conditions for the evolutionary algorithm as 1)Discrete or continuous variation 2)Heredity, replication, or less faithful replication plus content attractors 3)Differential fitness. Once this set of conditions is met, an evolutionary algorithm, or many, begin to carve their optimizing paws into whatever surpassed the threshold for long enough. Cultures, therefore, evolve. 

The intricacies of cultural evolution and mathematical and computational models of how cultures evolve have been the subject of much interdisciplinary research, for an extensive account of human culture see Not By Genes Alone (Richerson & Boyd, 2005). For computational models of social evolution, there is work by Mesoudi, Novak, and others e.g. (Hauert et al, 2007). For mathematical models, the aptly named Mathematical models of social evolution: A guide for the perplexed by McElrath and Rob Boyd (2007) makes the textbook-style walk-through. For animal culture, see (Laland & Galef, 2009).

Cultural evolution satisfies David Deutsch's criterion for existence, it kicks back, it satisfies the evolutionary equivalent of the  condition posed by the Quine-Putnam Indispensability argument in mathematics, i.e. it is a sine qua non condition for understanding how the World works nomologically. It is falsifiable to Popperian content, and it inflates the Worlds ontology a little, by inserting a new kind of "replicator", the meme. Contrary to what happened on the internet, the name 'meme' has lost much of it's appeal within cultural evolution theorists, and "memetics" is considered by some to refer only to the study of memes as monolithic atomic high fidelity replicators, which would make the theory obsolete. This has created the following conundrum: the name 'meme' remains by far the most well known one to speak of "that which evolves culturally" within, and specially outside, the specialist arena. Further, the niche occupied by the word 'meme' is so conceptually necessary within the area to communicate and explain that it is frequently put under scare quotes, or some other informal excuse. In fact, as argued by Tim Tyler - who frequently posts here - in the very sharp Memetics (2010), there are nearly no reasons to try to abandon the 'meme' meme, and nearly all reasons (practicality, Qwerty reasons, mnemonics) to keep it. To avoid contradicting the evidence ever since Dawkins first coined the term, I suggest we must redefine Meme as an attractor in cultural evolution (dual-inheritance) whose development over time structurally mimics to a significant extent the discrete behavior of genes, frequently coinciding with the smallest unit of cultural replication. The definition is long, but the idea is simple: Memes are not the best analogues of genes because they are discrete units that replicate just like genes, but because they are continuous conceptual clusters being attracted to a point in conceptual space whose replication is just like that of genes. Even more simply, memes are the mathematically closest things to genes in cultural evolution. So the suggestion here is for researchers of dual-inheritance and cultural evolution to take off the scare quotes of our memes and keep business as usual.  

The evolutionary algorithm has created a new attractor-replicator, the meme, it didn't privilege with it any specific families in the biological trees and it ended up creating a process of cultural-genetic coevolution known as dual-inheritance. This process has been studied in ever more quantified ways by primatologists, behavioral ecologists, population biologists, anthropologists, ethologists, sociologists, neuroscientists and even philosophers. I've shown at least six distinct abilities which helped scaffold our astounding level of cultural intricacy, and some animals who share them with us. We will now take a look at the evolution of cooperation, collaboration, altruism, moral behavior, a sub-area of cultural evolution that saw an explosion of interest and research during the last decade, with publications (most from the last 4 years) such as The Origins of Morality, Supercooperators, Good and Real, The Better Angels of Our Nature, Non-Zero, The Moral Animal, Primates and Philosophers, The Age of Empathy, Origins of Altruism and Cooperation, The Altruism Equation, Altruism in Humans, Cooperation and Its Evolution, Moral Tribes, The Expanding Circle, The Moral Landscape.

3) Cooperation evolves

Shortly describe why and show some inequations under which cooperation is an equelibrium, or at least an Evolutionarily Stable Strategy.

4) The complexity of cultural items doesn't undermine the validity of mathematical models.

 4.1) Cognitive attractors and biases substitute for memes discreteness

The math becomes equivalent.

 4.2) Despite the Unilateralist Curse and the Tragedy of the Commons, dyadic interaction models help us understand large scale cooperation

Once we know these two failure modes, dyadic iterated (or reputation-sensitive) interaction is close enough.

5) From Monkeys to Apes to Humans to Transhumans to AIs, the ranges of achievable altruistic skill.

Possible modes of being altruistic. Graph like Bostrom's. Second and third order punishment and cooperation. Newcomb-like signaling problems within AI.

6) Unfit for the Future: the need for greater altruism.

We fail and will remain failing in Tragedy of the Commons problems unless we change our nature.

7) From Science, through Philosophy, towards Engineering: the future of studies of altruism.

Philosophy: Existential Risk prevention through global coordination and cooperation prior to technical maturity. Engineering Humans: creating enhancements and changing incentives. Engineering AI's: making them better and realer.

8) A different kind of Moral Landscape

Like Sam Harris's one, except comparing not how much a society approaches The Good Life (Moral Landscape pg15), but how much it fosters altruistic behaviour.

9) Conclusions

I haven't written yet, so I don't have any!

Bibliography (_{Only of the part already written, obviously}):

Cantor, M., & Whitehead, H. (2013). The interplay between social networks and culture: theoretically and among whales and dolphins. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 368(1618).

Dennett, D. C. (1996). Darwin's dangerous idea: Evolution and the meanings of life (No. 39). Simon & Schuster.

Dennett, D. C. (1992). The self as a center of narrative gravity. Self and consciousness: Multiple perspectives.

Galef Jr, B. G., & Laland, K. N. (2005). Social learning in animals: empirical studies and theoretical models. Bioscience, 55(6), 489-499.

Hauert, C., Traulsen, A., Brandt, H., Nowak, M. A., & Sigmund, K. (2007). Via freedom to coercion: the emergence of costly punishment. science, 316(5833), 1905-1907.

Henrich, J., Boyd, R., & Richerson, P. J. (2008). Five misunderstandings about cultural evolution. Human Nature, 19(2), 119-137.

Hofstadter, D. R. (2007). I am a Strange Loop. Basic Books

McElreath, R., & Boyd, R. (2007). Mathematical models of social evolution: A guide for the perplexed. University of Chicago Press.

Ottoni, E. B., de Resende, B. D., & Izar, P. (2005). Watching the best nutcrackers: what capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella) know about others’ tool-using skills. Animal cognition, 8(4), 215-219.

Persson, I., & Savulescu, J. Unfit for the Future: The Need for Moral Enhancement Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012 ISBN 978-0199653645 (HB)£ 21.00. 160pp. On the brink of civil war, Abraham Lincoln stood on the steps of the US Capitol and appealed.

Pinker, S. (2007). The stuff of thought: Language as a window into human nature. Viking Adult.

Rendella, L., & Whitehead, H. (2001). Culture in whales and dolphins.Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 24, 309-382.

Richardson, P. J., & Boyd, R. (2005). Not by genes alone. University of Chicago Press.

Tyler, T. (2011). Memetics: Memes and the Science of Cultural Evolution. Tim Tyler.

Tomasello, M., Carpenter, M., Call, J., Behne, T., & Moll, H. (2005). Understanding and sharing intentions: The origins of cultural cognition.Behavioral and brain sciences, 28(5), 675-690.

Yudkowsky, E. (2008A). 37 ways words can be wrong. Available at http://lesswrong.com/lw/od/37_ways_that_words_can_be_wrong/

The result is from 2008, but it's new to me. Abstract:

A meta-study of repeated prisoner’s dilemma experiments run at numerous universities suggests that students cooperate 5% to 8% more often for every 100 point increase in the school’s average SAT score.

Some obvious points from my first five minutes of thinking about it:

• Meta-study or not, the sample still only covers humans. No implications for Friendly AI or intelligent aliens, which don't have our motivations.
• Even among humans the sample is WEIRD, and a subset of WEIRD at that; although there is obviously variation between universities, it's smaller than what you'd get if you extended the sample down into the working class. I also wonder what would happen if the PD was played between students and non-students. 
• Probably a point in favour of the Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis, in that we see those of higher intelligence doing better on a social problem.
• Presumably this implies that your best move, whatever your level of intelligence, is to surround yourself with the smartest people you can find, and then cooperate to ensure they don't throw you out.
• I'd like to know some details: Does intelligence also correlate with effective retaliation? With probing for suckers? What about cooperation in single games? (The study mentions one, in a footnote, which apparently did find higher intelligence correlated with greater cooperation even in one-shot games; but there's no metastudy.)

An interesting new article, "Cooperation and the evolution of intelligence", uses a simple one-hidden-layer neural network to study the selection for intelligence in iterated prisoners' dilemma and iterated snowdrift dilemma games.

The article claims that increased intelligence decreased cooperation in IPD, and increased cooperation in ISD.  However, if you look at figure 4 which graphs that data, you'll see that on average it decreased cooperation in both cases.  They state that it increased cooperation in ISD based on a Spearman rank test.  This test is deceptive in this case, because it ignores the magnitude of differences between datapoints, and so the datapoints on the right with a tiny but consistent increase in cooperation outweigh the datapoints on the left with large decreases in cooperation.

This suggests that intelligence is an externality, like pollution.  Something that benefits the individual at a cost to society.  They posit the evolution of intelligence as an arms race between members of the species.

ADDED: The things we consider good generally require intelligence, if we suppose (as I expect) that consciousness requires intelligence.  So it wouldn't even make sense to conclude that intelligence is bad.  Plus, intelligence itself might count as a good.

However, humans and human societies are currently near some evolutionary equilibrium.  It's very possible that individual intelligence has not evolved past its current levels because it is at an equilibrium, beyond which higher individual intelligence results in lower social utility.  In fact, if you believe SIAI's narrative about the danger of artificial intelligence and the difficulty of friendly AI, I think you would have to conclude that higher individual intelligence results in lower expected social utility, for human measures of utility.

This is thread where I'm trying to figure out a few things about signalling on LessWrong and need some information, so please immediately after reading about the two individuals please answer the poll. The two individuals:

A. Sees that an interpretation of reality shared by others is not correct, but tries to pretend otherwise for personal gain and/or safety.

B. Fails to see that an interpretation of reality is shared by others is flawed. He is therefore perfectly honest in sharing the interpretation of reality with others. The reward regime for outward behaviour is the same as with A.

To add a trivial inconvenience that matches the inconvenience of answering the poll before reading on, comments on what I think the two individuals signal,what the trade off is and what I speculate the results might be here versus the general population, is behind this link.

atucker wants to save the world.
ciphergoth wants to save the world.
Dorikka wants to save the world.
Eliezer_Yudkowsky wants to save the world.
I want to save the world.
Kaj_Sotala wants to save the world.
lincolnquirk wants to save the world.
Louie wants to save the world.
paulfchristiano wants to save the world.
Psy-Kosh wants to save the world.

Clearly the list I've given is incomplete. I imagine most members of the Singularity Institute belong here; otherwise their motives are pretty baffling. But equally clearly, the list will not include everyone.

What's my point? My point is that these people should be cooperating. But we can't cooperate unless we know who we are. If you feel your name belongs on this list then add a top-level comment to this thread, and feel free to add any information about what this means to you personally or what plans you have. Or it's enough just to say, "I want to save the world".

This time, no-one's signing up for anything. I'm just doing this to let you know that you're not alone. But maybe some of us can find somewhere to talk that's a little quieter.

There are people out there who want to do good in the world, but don't know how.

Maybe you are one of them.

Maybe you kind of feel that you should be into the "saving the world" stuff but aren't quite sure if it's for you. You'd have to be some kind of saint, right? That doesn't sound like you.

Maybe you really do feel it's you, but don't know where to start. You've read the "How to Save the World" guide and your reaction is, ok, I get it, now where do I start? A plan that starts "first, change your entire life" somehow doesn't sound like a very good plan.

All the guides on how to save the world, all the advice, all the essays on why cooperation is so hard, everything I've read so far, has missed one fundamental point.

If I could put it into words, it would be this:

AAAAAAAAAAAGGGHH WTF CRAP WHERE DO I START EEK BLURFBL

If that's your reaction then you're half way there. That's what you get when you finally grasp how much pointless pain, misery, risk, death there is in the world; just how much good could be done if everyone would get their act together; just how little anyone seems to care.

If you're still reading, then maybe this is you. A little bit.

And I want to help you.

How will I help you? That's the easy part. I'll start a community of aspiring rationalist do-gooders. If I can, I'll start it right here in the comments section of this post. If anything about this post speaks to you, let me know. At this point I just want to know whether there's anybody out there.

And what then? I'll listen to people's opinions, feelings and concerns. I'll post about my worldview and invite people to criticize, attack, tear it apart. Because it's not my worldview I care about. I care about making the world better. I have something to protect.

The posts will mainly be about what I don't see enough of on Less Wrong. About reconciling being rational with being human. Posts that encourage doing rather than thinking. I've had enough ideas that I can commit to writing 20 discussion posts over a reasonable timescale, although some might be quite short - just single ideas.

Someone mentioned there should be a "saving the world wiki". That sounds like a great idea and I'm sure that setting one up would be well within my power if someone else doesn't get around to it first.

But how I intend to help you is not the important part. The important part is why.

To answer that I'll need to take a couple of steps back.

Since basically forever, I've had vague, guilt-motivated feelings that I ought to be good. I ought to work towards making the world the place I wished it would be. I knew that others appeared to do good for greedy or selfish reasons; I wasn't like that. I wasn't going to do it for personal gain.

If everyone did their bit, then things would be great. So I wanted to do my bit.

I wanted to privately, secretively, give a hell of a lot of money to a good charity. So that I would be doing good and that I would know I wasn't doing it for status or glory.

I started small. I gave small amounts to some big-name charities, charities I could be fairly sure would be doing something right. That went on for about a year, with not much given in total - I was still building up confidence.

And then I heard about GiveWell. And I stopped giving. Entirely.

WHY??? I can't really give a reason. But something just didn't seem right to me. People who talked about GiveWell also tended to mention that the best policy was to give only to the charity listed at the top. And that didn't seem right either. I couldn't argue with the maths, but it went against what I'd been doing up until that point and something about that didn't seem right.

Also, I hadn't heard of GiveWell or any of the charities they listed. How could I trust any of them? And yet how could I give to anyone else if these charities were so much more effective? Big akrasia time.

It took a while to sink in. But when it did, I realised that my life so far had mostly been a waste of time. I'd earned some money, but I had no real goals or ambitions. And yet, why should I care if my life so far had been wasted? What I had done in the past was irrelevant to what I intended to do in the future. I knew what my goal was now and from that a whole lot became clear.

One thing mattered most of all. If I was to be truly virtuous, altruistic, world-changing then I shouldn't deny myself status or make financial sacrifices. I should be completely indifferent to those things. And from that the plan became clear: the best way to save the world would be to persuade other people to do it for me. I'm still not entirely sure why they're not already doing it, but I will use the typical mind prior and assume that for some at least, it's for the same reasons as me. They're confused. And that to carry out my plan I won't need to manipulate anyone into carrying out my wishes, but simply help them carry out their own.

I could say a lot more and I will, but for now I just want to know. Who will be my ally?

I'm putting this through discussion because I’ve never written a main section post before… If you have helpful criticism please comment with it, and if it does well I’ll post it in the main section when I get back from school tomorrow.

Things between the bars are intended to be in the final post, the rest are comments

There’s lots of things which can end the world. There’s even more things which can help improve or save the world. Having more people working more effectively on these things will make the world progress and improve faster, or better fight existential risks, respectively.

And yet for all of my intention to help do those things, I haven’t gotten a single other person to do it as well. Convincing someone else to work towards something is like devoting another lifetime to it, or doubling your efforts. And you only need to convince them once.

So there’s two things I want to learn how to do:

1. Convince people to try and save the world
2. Convince people to use more effective methodologies (especially with regards to world-saving)

I think that the rationalist community as a whole isn’t particularly good at doing these. Small efforts are made by individuals, but I think that most of the people who do try to do these run into the same problems.

I propose that we do more to centralize and document the solutions to these problems in order for our individual efforts to be more effective. This thread is for people who encounter problems and solutions for convincing other people.

• I think that the activity of convincing people to try and save the world and using more effective methodologies should have a word or phrase. Suggestions?
• Should it just be a thread? I feel like some of the particularly good comments would make good independent posts. Just link to the post version from in the thread?
• I’m a bit worried that this sounds a bit culty… If you disagree please mention, and if you agree please tell me why.
• This is a bit prompted by Alicorn's post , and some things which have recently happened in my life.

I had what appeared to me to be a bit of insight regarding trade between selfish agents. I disclose that I have not read TDT or any books on decision theory, so what I say may be blatantly incorrect. However, I judged that posting this here was of higher utility rather than waiting until I had read up on decision theory -- I have no intention of reading up on decision theory any time soon because I have more important (to me) things to do. This is not meant to deter criticism of the post itself -- please tell me why I'm wrong if I am. The following paragraph is primarily an introduction.

When a rational agent predicts that he is interacting with another rational agent and that the other agent has motive for deceiving him, (and both have a large amount of computing power), he will not use any emotional basis for ‘trust.’ Instead, he will see the other agent’s commitments as truth claims which may be true or false depending what action will optimize the other agent’s utility function at the time which the commitment is to be fulfilled. Agents which know something of the each other’s utility function may bargain directly on such terms, even when each of their utility functions are largely (or completely) dominated by selfishness.

This leads to a solution to Parfit’s hitchhiker, allowing selfish agents to precommit to future trade. Give Ekman all of your clothes and state that you will buy them back from him when you arrive with an amount higher than the worth of your clothes to him but lower than the worth of your clothes to yourself. Furthermore, tell him that because you don’t have anything more on you, he can’t get any more money off of you than an amount infinitesimally smaller than your clothes are worth to you, and accurately tell him how much your clothes are worth to yourself (you must tell the truth here due to his microexpression-reading capability.) He should judge your words as truth, considering that you have told the truth. Of course, you lose regardless if the value of your clothes to yourself is less than the utility he loses by taking you to town.

Assumptions made regarding Parfit's hitchhiker: 1. Physical assault is judged to be of very low utility by both agents and so isn't a factor in the problem. 2. Trades in the present time may be executed without prompting an infinite cycle of "No, you give me X first."