I have not yet been limiting screens, except insofar as, like, hanging out with Cadence from 6pm to sleep usually means no screens. But it seems like I'm obviously going to end up there, and am sort of just relinquishing my reluctance/figuring out a new flow that still allows me to do the things I need to get done each day.
Currently, I get some Third State in the mornings, actually, when Cadence has woken up and is puttering around but hasn't come and fully woken me up yet.
1This is great.
One constraint that Logan and I have both gotten a lot of benefit out of reinstating is one around artificial light; Logan is stricter than I but we're both much more subject to natural darkness than the average American and afaict it's doing a bunch of positive things. Better sleep, more connection with the "third state of consciousness" that is between waking and sleeping, we essentially never struggle to settle Cadence down for bed, etc.
In past eras of my life, I had "don't drive less than two miles" as a soft rule and would instead walk any sub-two-mile distance, and I think this too was useful.
(This answer feels fragmented; sorry; am still on postsurgery medication and brain is at 40% capacity.)
1Example: suppose someone says "I can imagine an atomic copy of ourselves which isn't conscious, therefore consciousness is non-physical." and I say "No, I can't imagine that."
Or the followup by Logan Strohl, even more directly on this
1Just noting for the audience that the edits which Anna references in her reply to CronoDAS, as if they had substantively changed the meaning of my original comment, were to add:
- The phrase "directly observed"
- The parenthetical about having good epistemic hygiene with regards to people's protestations to the contrary
- The bit about agendas often not being made explicit
It did not originally specify undisclosed conflicts of interest in any way that the new version doesn't. Both versions contained the same core (true) claim: that multiple of the staff members common to both CFAR!2017 and CFAR!2025 often had various (i.e. not only the AI stuff) agendas which would bump participant best interests to second, third, or even lower on the priority ladder.
I've also added, just now, a clarifying edit to a higher comment: "Some of these staff members are completely blind to some centrally important axes of care." This seemed important to add, given that Anna is below making claims of having seen, modeled, and addressed the problems (a refrain I have heard from her, directly, in multiple epochs, and taken damage from naively trusting more than once). More (abstract, philosophical) detail on my views about this sort of dynamic here.
I claim to be as-aware and as-sensitive-to of all of these considerations as you are. I think I am being as specific as possible, given constraints (many of which I wish were not there; I have a preference for speaking more clearly than I can here).
I know of one parent that puts three dollars aside each time they violate the bodily sovereignty of their infant - taking something out of their mouth, or restricting where they can go
It's me, by the way. Happy to identify myself.
(I have more agreement than disagreement with the authors on many points, here.)
I'll note that both this and my top-level comment have a lot of agree-disagree votes, and that it would be wise for people looking in from the outside to ponder what it means for e.g. the top-level comment to have 18 people voting and to end up at -2.
(It might be tempting to sum it up as "ah, Duncan claimed that there's something to be wary of here, and the hive-mind ultimately ended up in disagreement" but I think it's more like "Duncan claimed there's something to be wary of here, and close to half of the people agreed (but were drowned out by the somewhat more than half who disagreed)." Which is precisely what you would expect if there were some system or process that was consistently harmful to certain people, but not all or even most—a lot of people who passed through unscathed would be like "what do you mean? I was well-cared-for!" and might not pause to wonder about whether they were a black raven and what evidence their experience provides about claims of the existence of white ravens.)
I came to discover, over time, that the orientation I had toward participants (and subordinates, for that matter), and the care that I felt I owed the people under my supervision—
(and which I believed were standard and universal à la something like the hippocratic oath or the confidentiality standards of lawyers and therapists)
—were not, in fact, universal. I directly observed that certain staff members did not reliably have the best interests of participants at heart (whatever their protestations to the contrary), but instead had various agendas (which were often not made explicit) which meant that the best interests of the participants might sometimes be second, or third, or even lower than third on the priority list.
i.e. I believe that the past ones, in hindsight, were not only not adequately responsible and careful but were in a crucial way not even trying to be, and I do not have reason to believe that this problem will be any less in an era where people like myself and Kenzi and Julia Galef and Dan Keys are not present.
(There is a rebuttal that might be made that goes something like "ah, well, those staff members have owned up to that very problem and are explicitly striving to do the other thing, now," but a) see the point above about not trusting people who have managed to fuck up X in multiple novel ways, and b) in the world where such a hypothetical rebuttal were in fact to be made, I wouldn't personally put much weight on the self-report of people who are saying that they used to be something like deceptive/manipulative (to the detriment of others) but don't worry, they aren't doing that anymore.)
Why is it necessary? Do you think that you are the last potential wizard of Light in the world? Why must you be the one to try for greatness, when I have advised you that you are riskier than average? Let some other, safer candidate try!
These issues didn't seem to be a problem for 95+% of participants. But I think many of my own friends and family members would feel differently about choosing to be vulnerable in the following two scenarios:
- You are under the care of professionals who have your best interests at heart, and who have never abused their position of power to manipulate, deceive, or exploit people under their care
- You are under the care of professionals who probably (95+% by raw numbers) have your best interests at heart, except in the rare (5-%) subset of cases where they think they can make some interesting use of you, which they may or may not be up front with you about, versus trying to twitch your strings to maneuver you into some position for the fulfillment of their own values, agnostic to yours
2
Most of the seven Extended Discussions under chapter 4 of Nate and Eliezer's book's supplementals are basically an expansion of this thesis (which I also agree with and think is true).