David Gross

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Notes on Virtues

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I was interrupted by underpants gnomes while reading this. They summarized it for me this way, but I'm sure they left the good parts out.

  1. Trust that organizations like hospitals, nonprofits, and state bureaucracies will self-organize towards pursuing their nominal goals, so long as they claim to be doing that, even if those bureaucracies lack strong organizational incentives to do so.
  2. ???
  3. Bizarre policies like police abolishment.

I thought this quote was nice and oddly up-to-the-minute, from Iris Murdoch's novel The Philosopher's Pupil (1983), spoken by the character William Eastcote at a Quaker meeting:

My dear friends, we live in an age of marvels. Men among us can send machines far out into space. Our homes are full of devices which would amaze our forebears. At the same time our beloved planet is ravaged by suffering and threatened by dooms. Experts and wise men give us vast counsels suited to vast ills. I want only to say something about simple good things which are as it were close to us, within our reach, part still of our world. Let us love the close things, the close clear good things, and hope that in their light other goods may be added. Let us prize innocence. The child is innocent, the man is not. Let us prolong and cherish the innocence of childhood, as we find it in the child and as we rediscover it later within ourselves. Repentance, renewal of life, such as is the task and possibility of every man, is a recovery of innocence. Let us see it thus, a return to a certain simplicity, something which is not hard to understand, not a remote good but very near. And let us not hesitate to preach to our young people and to impart to them an idealism which may later serve them as a shield. A deep cynicism in our society too soon touches old and young, forbidding us to speak and them to hear, and making us by an awful reversal ashamed of what is best. A habit of mockery destroys the intelligence and sensibility which is reverence. Let us prize chastity, not as a censorious or rigid code, but as fastidious respect and gentleness, a rejection of promiscuity, a sense of the delicate mystery of human relations. Let us do and praise those things which make for a simple orderly open and truthful life. Herein let us make it a practice to banish evil thoughts. When such thoughts come, envious, covetous, cynical thoughts, let us positively drive them off, like people in the olden days who felt they were defeating Satan. Let us then seek aid in pure things, turning our minds to good people, to our best work, to beautiful and noble art, to the pure words of Christ in the Gospel, and to the works of God obedient to Him in nature. Help is always near if we will only turn. Conversion is turning about, and it can happen not only every day but every moment. Shun the cynicism which says that our world is so terrible that we may as well cease to care and cease to strive, the notion of a cosmic crisis where ordinary duties cease to be and moral fastidiousness is out of place. At any time, there are many many small things we can do for other people which will refresh us and them with new hope. Shun too the common malice which finds consolation in the suffering and sin of others, blackening them to make our grey seem white, rejoicing in our neighbours’ downfall and disgrace, while excusing our own failures and cherishing our own undiscovered secret sins. Above all, do not despair, either for the planet or in the deep inwardness of the heart. Recognize one’s own evil, mend what can be mended, and for what cannot be undone, place it in love and faith in the clear light of the healing goodness of God.

The sequence is rationality-informed but also picks up things from folk wisdom, religious traditions, etc. when that seems helpful. It references cogsci studies and insights when those are available.

Answer by David Gross20

This might scratch your itch: the Notes on Virtues sequence.

Investigating a variety of human virtues, with the hope of learning how we might improve in their practice.

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I posit: high enough that you’re slightly overoptimistic about stuff you can’t control, so that for stuff where confidence itself makes the difference, you squeak in.

 

FWIW, see Notes on Optimism, Hope, and Trust for more on this hypothesis, including William James's speculations.

All this sounds wonderful, but reminds me of people who have amazing systems to play the stock market and leverage $1,000 to $1,000,000. Of all the people with all their systems, a few lucky ones hit the jackpot by chance, while the majority muddle through or lose it all. The lucky ones assume the market has acknowledged their financial genius and go on to tell us all about it.

If 5% of glioblastoma patients uncannily survive, how much am I supposed to update on hearing that one of those patients did some combination of plausible but undertested interventions during their recovery?

A prereminiscence: It's like it was with chess. We passed through that stage when AI could beat most of us to where it obviously outperforms all of us. Only for cultural output in general. People still think now, but privately, in the shower, or in quaint artisanal forms as if we were making our own yogurts or weaving our own clothes. Human-produced works are now a genre with a dwindling and eccentric fan base more concerned with the process than the product.

It was like the tide coming in. One day it was cutely, clumsily trying to mimic that thing we do. Soon after it was doing it pretty well and you watched it with admiration as if it were a dog balancing on a ball. Then soon it could do it well enough for most purposes, you couldn't help but admit. Then as good as all but the best, even to those who could tell the difference. And then we were suddenly all wet, gathering our remaining picnic and heading for higher ground, not only completely outclassed but even unable to judge by how far we were being outclassed. Once a chess machine can beat everybody every time, who is left to applaud when it gets twice again as good?

If it had been a war, we would have had a little ceremony as we brought down our flag and folded it up and put it away, but because it happened as quickly and quietly as it did and because we weren't sure whether we wanted to admit it was happening, there was no formal hand-off. One day we just resignedly realized we could no longer matter much, but there was so much more now to appreciate and we could see echoes and reflections of ourselves in it, so we didn't put up a fight.

Every once in a while someone would write an essay, Joan Didion quality, really good. Or write a song. Poignant, beautiful, original even. Not maybe the best essay or the best song we'd seen that day, but certainly worthy of being in the top ranks. And we'd think: we've still got it. We can still rally when we've got our backs to the wall. Don't count us out yet. But it was just so hard, and there was so much else to do. And so when it happened less and less frequently, we weren't surprised.

And our curiosity left us, too. We half-remembered a time when we would have satisfied curiosity by research and experiment (words that increasingly had the flavor of “thaumaturgy,” denoting processes productive though by unclear means). But nowadays curiosity is déclassé. It suggests laziness (why not just ask it?)… or poverty (oh, you can’t afford to ask it; you want one of us to ask it)—an increasing problem as we less and less have something to offer in trade that it desires and lacks.

The book in the Chinese Room directs the actions of the little man in the room. Without the book, the man doesn't act, and the text doesn't get translated.

The popcorn map on the other hand doesn't direct the popcorn to do what it does. The popcorn does what it does, and then the map in a post-hoc way is generated to explain how what the popcorn did maps to some particular calculation.

You can say that "oh well, then, the popcorn wasn't really conscious until the map was generated; it was the additional calculations that went into generating the map that really caused the consciousness to emerge from the calculating" and then you're back in Chinese Room territory. But if you do this, you're left with the task of explaining how a brain can be conscious solely by means of executing a calculation before anyone has gotten around to creating a map between brain-states and whatever the relevant calculation-states might be. You have to posit some way in which calculations capable of embodying consciousness are inherent to brains but must be interpreted into being elsewhere.

The book in the room isn't inert, though. It instructs the little guy on what to do as he manipulates symbols and stuff. As such, it is an important part of the computation that takes place.

The mapping of popcorn-to-computation, though, doesn't do anything equivalent to this. It's just an off-to-the-side interpretation of what is happening in the popcorn: it does nothing to move the popcorn or cause it to be configured in such a way. It doesn't have to even exist: if you just know that in theory there is a way to map the popcorn to the computation, then if (by the terms of the argument) the computation itself is sufficient to generate consciousness, the popcorn should be able to do it as well, with the mapping left as an exercise for the reader. Otherwise you are implying some special property of a headful of meat such that it does not need to be interpreted in this way for its computation to be equivalent to consciousness.

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