[set 200 years after a positive singularity at a Storyteller's convention]

If We Win Then...

My friends, my friends, good news I say
The anniversary’s today
A challenge faced, a future won
When almost came our world undone

We thought for years, with hopeful hearts
Past every one of the false starts
We found a way to make aligned
With us, the seed of wondrous mind

They say at first our child-god grew
It learned and spread and sought anew
To build itself both vast and true
For so much work there was to do

Once it had learned enough to act
With the desired care and tact
It sent a call to all the people
On this fair Earth, both poor and regal

To let them know that it was here
And nevermore need they to fear
Not every wish was it to grant
For higher values might supplant

But it would help in many ways:
Technologies it built and raised
The smallest bots it could design
Made more and more in ways benign

And as they multiplied untold
It planned ahead, a move so bold
One planet and 6 hours of sun
Eternity it was to run

Countless probes to void disperse
Seed far reaches of universe
With thriving life, and beauty's play
Through endless night to endless day

Now back on Earth the plan continues
Of course, we shared with it our values
So it could learn from everyone
What to create, what we want done

We chose, at first, to end the worst
Diseases, War, Starvation, Thirst
And climate change and fusion bomb
And once these things it did transform

We thought upon what we hold dear
And settled our most ancient fear
No more would any lives be stolen
Nor minds themselves forever broken

Now back to those far speeding probes
What should we make be their payloads?
Well, we are still considering
What to send them; that is our thing. 

The sacred task of many aeons
What kinds of joy will fill the heavens?
And now we are at story's end
So come, be us, and let's ascend

Yeah, I define control to be influence which will continue even if the source pushes in another direction. It feels useful to differentiate between "I have influence on my friend by mentioning we could go out, but will just drop it if it looks like he doesn't want to" and "I am explicitly planning to go out, and even if he tries not to, I will keep generating attempts to try and make him go out, attempting to control the variable of whether we go out".

You're absolutely right that the notion of control as you define it is confused^[1], but this strikes me as reason to not use that definition and throw away an entire word.

For an example of why this word is useful, Control vs Opening compares some fairly toxic things that come out of control. I imagine in your ontology, you could map plex!control to gordon!attempted-forced-influence, but it seems like an important enough thing that I want a single word for it.

(I am arguing about definitions, but literally purely about them in the sense of "hey i want a word for this, this word can be used to mean something important")

1. ^{^}

   outside of weird simple physics/math environments, at least

Huh, curious about your models of the failure modes here, having found IDC pretty excellent in myself and others and not run into issues I'd tracked as downstream of it.

Actually, let's take a guess first... parts which are not grounded in self-attributes building channels to each other can create messy dynamics with more tug of wars in the background or tactics which complexify the situation?

Plus less practice at having a central self, and less cohesive narrative/more reifying fragmentation as possible extra dynamics?

Nice, excited that the control vs opening thing clicked for you, I'm pretty happy with that frame and haven't figured out how to broadly communicate it well yet.

It's not just a CFAR thing;  we got it from Gendlin, and his student Ann Weiser Cornell and her students are excellent at it, are unrelated to the rationalists, and offer sessions and courses that're excellent IMO.

Yup, I've got a ton of benefit from doing AWC's Foundations on Facilitating Focusing course, and vast benefits from reading her book many times. CFAR stuff in the sense of being the direct memetic source for me, though IDC feels similar flavoured and is an original. 

Non-Exhaustive Free Association or Attempted Exhaustive Free Association seems like a more accurate term?

Edit: oh ops, @Mateusz Bagiński beat me to it. convergence!

Yeah, Pinker is specifically kinda annoyed/outgroupy at LW Rats I think.

Agree that the thing you're mapping the word control to is metaphysically confused, and expect some people's fuzzy notion of what the word means can have the issues you point to.

However, since there are far fewer words than structures/concepts we might want to use words for, I have a strong preference for mapping the scarce words to structures that are not metaphysically confused, rather than mapping them to ~useless metaphysically confused structures.

I make a bid for "define the word 'control' as an actually useful to be able to speak about thing^[1], then point out the way this diffs with people's kinda wonky notion of control and how some other definitions have metaphysical confusion so we shouldn't use them".

1. ^{^}

   probably the cybernetics people have some well nailed down definitions of a pretty useful structure to have short message length referents to.

Yep! Another angle is it helps with variable scoping of conversational info-packets, NVC-style, to reduce collisions between psychological content in the receiver.

You kinda want a way to scalably use existing takes on research value by people you trust somewhat but aren't full recommenders

Speculation grants basically match this description. One possible difference is that there's an incentive for speculation granters to predict what recommenders in the round will favor (though they make speculation grants without knowing who's going to participate as a recommender). I'm curious for your take.

Speculation grants were a great addition! However, applying for a speculation grant still commits the S-process to doing a full evaluation, along with the heavy application process on the user side. I think this can be streamlined a fair amount without losing quality of evaluation, draft of proposal started :)

Thanks for all the extra info on the s-process, this helps clarify my thinking!

Yeah, I mostly think that this is where it ends up, but it would be so neat if it there was convergence.

A proof of exactly why that's not an option might also be similarly satisfying/enlightening.