Sequences

Decision Theory: Newcomb's Problem

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I love that book!  I like Robin's essays, too, but the book was much easier for me to understand.  I wish more people would read it, would review it on here, etc.

A related tweet by Qiaochu:

(I don't necessarily agree with QC's interpretation of what was going on as people talked about "agency" -- I empathize some, but empathize also with e.g. Kaj's comment in a reply that Kaj doesn't recognize this at from Kaj's 2018 CFAR mentorship training, did not find pressures there to coerce particular kinds of thinking).

My point in quoting this is more like: if people don't have much wanting of their own, and are immersed in an ambient culture that has opinions on what they should "want," experiences such as QC's seem sorta like the thing to expect.  Which is at least a bit corroborated by QC reporting it.

Some partial responses (speaking only for myself):

1.  If humans are mostly a kludge of impulses, including the humans you are training, then... what exactly are you hoping to empower using "rationality training"?  I mean, what wants-or-whatever will they act on after your training?  What about your "rationality training" will lead them to take actions as though they want things?  What will the results be?

1b.  To illustrate what I mean: once I taught a rationality technique to SPARC high schoolers (probably the first year of SPARC, not sure; I was young and naive).  Once of the steps in the process involved picking a goal.  After walking them through all the steps, I asked for examples of how it had gone, and was surprised to find that almost all of them had picked such goals as "start my homework earlier, instead of successfully getting it done at the last minute and doing recreational math meanwhile"... which I'm pretty sure was not their goal in any wholesome sense, but was more like ambient words floating around that they had some social allegiance to.  I worry that if you "teach" "rationality" to adults who do not have wants, without properly noticing that they don't have wants, you set them up to be better-hijacked by the local memeset (and to better camouflage themselves as "really caring about AI risk" or whatever) in ways that won't do anybody any good because the words that are taking the place of wants don't have enough intelligence/depth/wisdom in them.

2.  My guess is that the degree of not-wanting that is seen among many members of the professional and managerial classes in today's anglosphere is more extreme than the historical normal, on some dimensions.  I think this partially because:

a.  IME, my friends and I as 8-year-olds had more wanting than I see in CFAR participants a lot of the time.  My friends were kids who happened to live on the same street as me growing up, so probably pretty normal.  We did have more free time than typical adults.

i.  I partially mean: we would've reported wanting things more often, and an observer with normal empathy would on my best guess have been like "yes it does seem like these kids wish they could go out and play 4-square" or whatever.  (Like, wanting you can feel in your body as you watch someone, as with a dog who really wants a bone or something).

ii.  I also mean: we tinkered, toward figuring out the things we wanted (e.g. rigging the rules different ways to try to make the 4-square game work in a way that was fun for kids of mixed ages, by figuring out laxer rules for the younger ones), and we had fun doing it.  (It's harder to claim this is different from the adults, but, like, it was fun and spontaneous and not because we were trying to mimic virtue; it was also this way when we saved up for toys we wanted.  I agree this point may not be super persuasive though.)

b.  IME, a lot of people act more like they/we want things when on a multi-day camping trip without phones/internet/work.  (Maybe like Critch's post about allowing oneself to get bored?)

c.  I myself have had periods of wanting things, and have had periods of long, bleached-out not-really-wanting-things-but-acting-pretty-"agentically"-anyway.  Burnout, I guess, though with all my CFAR techniques and such I could be pretty agentic-looking while quite burnt out.  The latter looks to me more like the worlds a lot of people today seem to me to be in, partly from talking to them about it, though people vary of course and hard to know.

d.  I have a theoretical model in which there are supposed to be cycles of yang and then yin, of goal-seeking effort and then finding the goal has become no-longer-compelling and resting / getting board / similar until a new goal comes along that is more compelling.  CFAR/AIRCS participants and similar people today seem to me to often try to stop this process -- people caffeinate, try to work full days, try to have goals all the time and make progress all the time, and on a large scale there's efforts to mess with the currency to prevent economic slumps.  I think there's a pattern to where good goals/wanting come from that isn't much respected.  I also think there's a lot of memes trying to hijack people, and a lot of memetic control structures that get upset when members of the professional and managerial classes think/talk/want without filtering their thoughts carefully through "will this be okay-looking" filters.

All of the above leaves me with a belief that the kinds of not-wanting we see are more "living human animals stuck in a matrix that leaves them very little slack to recover and have normal wants, with most of their 'conversation' and 'attempts to acquire rationality techniques' being hijacked by the matrix they're in rather than being earnest contact with the living animals inside" and less "this is simple ignorance from critters who're just barely figuring out intelligence but who will follow their hearts better and better as you give them more tools."

Apologies for how I'm probably not making much sense; happy to try other formats.

I'm trying to build my own art of rationality training, and I've started talking to various CFAR instructors about their experiences – things that might be important for me to know but which hadn't been written up nicely before.

Perhaps off topic here, but I want to make sure you have my biggest update if you're gonna try to build your own art of rationality training.

It is, basically: if you want actual good to result from your efforts, it is crucial to build from and enable consciousness and caring, rather than to try to mimic their functionality.

If you're willing, I'd be quite into being interviewed about this one point for a whole post of this format, or for a whole dialog, or to talking about it with you in some other way, means, since I don't know how to say it well and I think it's crucial.  But, to babble:

Let's take math education as an analogy.  There's stuff you can figure out about numbers, and how to do things with numbers, when you understand what you're doing.  (e.g., I remember figuring out as a kid, in a blinding flash about rectangles, why 2*3 was 3*2, why it would always work).  And other people can take these things you can figure out, and package them as symbol-manipulation rules that others can use to "get the same results" without the accompanying insights.  But... it still isn't the same things as understanding, and it won't get your students the same kind of ability to build new math or to have discernment about which math is any good.

Humans are automatically strategic sometimes.  Maybe not all the way, but a lot more deeply than we are in "far-mode" contexts.  For example, if you take almost anybody and put them in a situation where they sufficiently badly need to pee, they will become strategic about how to find a restroom.  We are all capable of wanting sometimes, and we are a lot closer to strategic at such times.

My original method of proceeding in CFAR, and some other staff members' methods also, was something like:

  • Find a person, such as Richard Feynman or Elon Musk or someone a bit less cool than that but still very cool who is willing to let me interview them.  Try to figure out what mental processes they use.
  • Turn these mental processes into known, described procedures that system two / far-mode can invoke on purpose, even when the vicera do not care about a given so-called "goal."

(For example, we taught processes such as: "notice whether you viscerally expect to achieve your goal.  If you don't, ask why not, solve that problem, and iterate until you have a plan that you do viscerally anticipate will succeed." (aka inner sim / murphyjitsu.))

My current take is that this is no good -- it teaches non-conscious processes how to imitate some of the powers of consciousness, but in a way that lacks its full discernment, and that can lead to relatively capable non-conscious, non-caring processes doing a thing that no one who was actually awake-and-caring would want to do.  (And can make it harder for conscious, caring, but ignorant processes, such as youths, to tell the difference between conscious/caring intent, and memetically hijacked processes in the thrall of institutional-preservation-forces or similar.)  I think it's crucial to more like start by helping wanting/caring/consciousness to become free and to become in charge.  (An Allan Bloom quote that captures some but not all of what I have in mind: "There is no real education that does not respond to felt need.  All else is trifling display.")

I'm not Critch, but to speak my own defense of the numeracy/scope sensitivity point:

IMO, one of the hallmarks of a conscious process is that it can take different actions in different circumstances (in a useful fashion), rather than simply doing things the way that process does it (following its own habits, personality, etc.).  ("When the facts change, I change my mind [and actions]; what do you do, sir?")

Numeracy / scope sensitivity is involved in, and maybe required for, the ability to do this deeply (to change actions all the way up to one's entire life, when moved by a thing worth being moved by there).

Smaller-scale examples of scope sensitivity, such as noticing that a thing is wasting several minutes of your day each day and taking inconvenient, non-default action to fix it, can help build this power.

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