Overcoming Bias

We are now in the modern era, a brief but consequential few centuries in the history of Earth civilization, between the long ages of a pre-modern era, and an as-yet-hard-to-envision post-modern era. For my purposes, the key distinction here is that the modern era is when humanity broke its process for the evolution of (not in) cultures, due to making an integrated world of fast change driven by capitalism, but where capitalism was blocked from running many key areas of culture. The pre- era is b

I don’t see why people concerned with value drift should be especially focused on AI. … Your real problem is that you want long term stability in a universe that more naturally changes. (Me in 2018)The last week has seen an explosion of talk on the scenario of AIs killing all humans; many say “P(doom)” is high, and argue for slowing and regulating AI. My last post said why AI regs look risky. Here I consider the main argument for AI doom, and compare it to the issue I&#82

People dislike AI for many reasons, but one extreme fear is that AIs will escape control from those who make, buy, or rent them, and then hurt others. We usually deal with such problems via legal liability, when law is available, or via threats of retaliation, when law is not available. But while those work among communities of comparably powered agents, some fear that out-of-control AIs might eventually get powerful enough and coordinate well enough to basically take over the world, and then en

My book with the excellent co-author Kevin Simler, The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life, was published almost nine years ago, and has sold >60K copies so far. Our main thesis was that we humans are quite often wrong about our motives re many big common practices and institutions.Reviewers classified our book as psychology, and said that our thesis had long been well-known and accepted in psychology. We thought our contribution was to show how those who study most areas o

I’ve previously outlined three ways we might fix cultural drift. But each way seems quite a big ask, and I’ve been pondering what is our biggest obstacle here. What I’ve come up with is this: we will need to learn to stop treating conscience as if it were direct evidence on morality.Evidence can be more vs less direct. For example, in a murder trial, direct evidence may include bodies, bullets, or videos, while testimony of people about these things, or by those who saw the mur

Many who hold the plausible belief that some UFOs are caused by strange strong (“alien”) powers now believe that the US (and maybe other) govts have long been keeping strong confirming evidence re these powers secret, plausibly for as long as eighty years, but might now be induced to disclose this info.A plausible counter argument is that even if particular parts of the govt once had such evidence, govt is often so bad at coordinating as to make it plausible that they’ve destro

Hope is more fragile than fear. Good outcomes often require that many things all go well, while bad outcomes often need only one particular thing to go wrong. But as bad outcomes are rare, if you think about what concretely might happen to you in the next day, hopes and fears are of similar magnitude.However, as you widen the scope that you consider, both in time and social impact, your fears grow relative to hopes. For the world over the next half century, you have far more fears than hopes.The

Astrobiologists have, for decades, defaulted to a conservative burden of proof that leans into two aphorisms coined by Sagan … life … should be considered a “hypothesis of last resort,” largely because “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” But what if Sagan had it all wrong? If we live in a universe where life is common and not extraordinary at all, setting such an extraordinarily high bar for its discovery beyond Earth can backfire. … &

Humans have long reported seeing many strange things. We put such sightings into categories, and over time many such categories have become normalized, by acquiring widely accepted explanations. These included eclipses, sea monsters, meteors, auroras, ball lightning, sprites far above thunderstorms, and sleep paralysis. But other categories remain strange, including ghosts, poltergeists, precognition, cryptids, and religious visions,For at least eighty years, a key category of strange sightings

When people suggest that you “make peace with God”, they might mean:God is very powerful, so you are unlikely to win fights with him,His authority is legit, so you should be ashamed to fight him, andAny value by which you might justify fighting him came from him, and he understands it better than you.I now suggest that you “make peace with Darwin”. Instead of trying to fight Darwinian evolution, you should mostly work with it.One reason is that while you may have the free

There is a vast literature near the topic of this post, much of which has developed specialized vocabularies and concepts. And I can’t be bothered to master enough of it to make this post match it well. So please try to treat my words here as if their meanings came from other less specialized literatures.Consider three kinds of systems:Experience - Seen from the inside, a mind is aware of, can reason about, and might even “feel” a structure of experiences across time. These exp

Greg Egan’s 1994 novel Permutation City depicts digital minds having a right to suicide; if they push a particular internal button, they end. And this does seem like a robust way to avoid many horrible scenarios. (I also discuss this idea in AgeOfEm.) But the novel also depicts such buttons sometimes being illegally disabled, and sometimes others frequently restarting recent copies from before a suicide request. Both of which undermine the policy.It could make sense to wait for a confirmat

Humans have two main relations to animals: they are either food or pets. We ban dogs, cats, and horses from use as food in the U.S. We require humane slaughter for most livestock, but not poultry, and require minimizing pain and distress for animals in research, except for rats, mice, and birds bred for research. We let folks use most any species as a pet. This all seems only somewhat about principles, as it entrenches many historical accidents. Humanity is rapidly creating a wider range of more

Here’s a quick history of minds. First, there were no minds, just stupid stuff undergoing simple local interactions. Then appeared the first proto-mind: Darwinian evolution, via DNA. Under this, the universe made choices according to a purpose: adaption. But such choices were made locally, using little memory, models, or foresight. Even so, organisms changed to better achieve this adaption purpose.This DNA-based selection evolved actual minds, which did have memory, models, and foresight.

Tasks often vary along a dimension where some tasks matter more, yet are also harder to judge for quality of performance. This spectrum appears in org management, where it is harder to judge the quality of higher level more important decisions. It also appears in academia, where STEM tasks tend to be less important but easier to judge, compared to those in humanities.In management, the usual strategy is to first test people at lower level, less important, easier to judge tasks. Then as some folk

We rightly celebrate rebels who were initially contrarian on key claims, but then got the world to later agree with them. Many seek to achieve this status by backing various contrarian claims. Of course, as the usual consensus beliefs tend to be correct, this is risky, usually ending in failure.However I have stumbled upon a way to be both contrarian, and also usually right. It is based on this:Humanity’s beliefs on many important topics have long been just inconsistent and incoherent acro

The following table gives medians of 3 LLM estimates re % relative importance for short term success in 5 areas of life of these 4 factors:(A) status: looks, $, fame, family, connections, credentials, charisma, wit, etc.(B) social skills: at flattering, befriending, projecting power, making people feel heard, etc.;(C) drive: energy, stamina, persistence, effort(D) judgement: good choices re topic of your leadership, eg ideas, arguments, slogans, designs, plans, group strategies.The last two rows

Your success in life will be determined largely by your ability to speak, your ability to write, and the quality of your ideas. In that order. (Patrick Winston)We humans have norms that are anti-domination, but pro-prestige, and it is often hard to tell the difference. So even though we give lip service to egalitarianism, we often strongly promote inequality. One key way is that we insist on our leaders being elite. That is, on their having many status markers of eliteness, such as looks, money,

On AI risk, I’ve said that evolved things have two robust habits: wariness of co-existing rivals, even when similar to you, and indulgence of descendants, even when different from you. Today, future AIs are our descendants, not co-existing rivals.Some reply that this is a crazy stupid metaphorical application of the of “descendant” concept, as AIs are not from the Homo Sapiens species, and they have no DNA. So AIs are not “real” descendants.But the concept of &#8220

The great filter (a term I coined) is all the things that block simple dead matter from evolving into an advanced civilization easily seen from far away. Given that we see a vast universe of simple dead matter (~10^24 planets) not so evolved, this filter must be enormous. A few years ago I helped worked out a better math model of it.A key question is: how much of this filter remains ahead of us. And my best guess is: a substantial amount. It is not a try-try type step like many prior hard steps,