I once asked Robin Hanson if he really thought status-seeking was such a dominant driver of human behavior. I said humans had dozens of factors motivating their behavior, it was crazy to claim there was One Big Thing. He replied (something to the effect of) "well, even if each factor...
Do you have a model predicting >1% chance of significant political violence (>5,000 deaths) in the US in the next year? Pls share. Also welcome: models predicting <.1% Metaculus has been walking around 1-5% probability of a US civil war before July 2021. While 1% is the lowest probability one...
Thank you, that answers my question - and it makes me more excited about the project! I'm glad to hear it's been unfolding nicely thus far, and I'm feeling pride/respect for you taking on the more formal mantle.
(I didn't see the early version)
Cool to see some more energy here - I have benefitted greatly from being around the CFAR nexus.
My kibitz: wait, who is driving? Who is leading? Who is holding the torch? Who is parenting this baby org?
You did a good job of pointing to people involved, but I'd like a better sense of how the people involved are themselves relating to the new org. My guess is that you (Anna) are intentionally holding a decent amount of the aCFAR torch by authoring this post, but also intentionally not wearing fancy titles or making a very formal org structure to allow for some of the magic of surrendered leadership (and to avoid some... (read more)
Thank you for flagging this! Should be fixed now.
Nice to hear!
I think it makes sense that the orgs haven't commented, as it would possibly run afoul of antitrust laws.
See for example when some fashion clothing companies talked about trying to slow down fashion cycles to produce less waste / carbon emissions, which led to antitrust regulators raiding their headquarters.
I agree about the cooperation thing. One addendum I'd add to my post is that shared reality seems like a common precursor to doing/thinking together.
If I want to achieve something or figure something out, I can often do better if I have a few more people working/thinking with me, and often the first step is to 'get everyone on the same page'. I think lots of times this first step is just trying to shove everyone into shared reality. Partially because that's a common pattern of behavior, and partially because if it did work, it would be super effective.
But because of the bad news where people actually have different experiences, cracks often... (read more)
Yeah let's do in-person sometime, I also tried drafting long responses and they were terrible
Sure! I love talking about this concept-cluster.
I have a hunch that in practice the use of the term 'shared reality' doesn't actually ruin one's ability to refer to territory-reality. In the instances when I've used the term in conversation I haven't noticed this (and I like to refer to the territory a lot). But maybe with more widespread usage and misinterpretation it could start to be a problem?
I think to get a better sense of your concern it might be useful to dive into specific conversations/dynamics where this might go wrong.
...
I can imagine a world where I want to be able to point out that someone is doing the psychological mistake of confusing their desire to connect with their map-making. And I want the term I use to do that work, so I can just say "you want to share your subjective experience with me, but I'm disagreeing with you about reality, not subjective experience."
Does that kind of resonate with your concern?
Hmm, I want a term that refers to all those many dimensions together, since for any given 'shared reality' experience it might be like 30% concepts, 30% visual & auditory, 30% emotion/values, etc.
I'm down to factor them out and refer to shared emotions/facts/etc, but I still want something that gestures at the larger thing. Shared experience I think could do the trick, but feels a bit too subjective because it often involves interpretations of the world that feel like 'true facts' to the observer.
Wherein I write more, because I'm excited about all this:
The first time I heard the term 'shared reality' was in this podcast with Bruce Ecker, the guy who co-wrote... (read more)
I once asked Robin Hanson if he really thought status-seeking was such a dominant driver of human behavior. I said humans had dozens of factors motivating their behavior, it was crazy to claim there was One Big Thing. He replied (something to the effect of) "well, even if each factor has a small effect – five percent, six percent – one of them has to be the biggest."
There's a concept I refer to as 'shared reality' that I think is up there with 'status' as something humans seek, shaping a lot (maybe ten percent?) of our behavior.
Knowing and playing with the concept of shared reality has noticeably improved my relationships and given... (read 1102 more words →)
I've been playing around with this concept I call 'faith', which might also be called 'motivation' or 'confidence'. Warning: this is still a naive concept and might only be positive EV when used in conjunction with other tools which I won't mention here.
My current go-to example is exercising to build muscle: if I haven't successfully built muscle before, I'm probably uncertain about whether it's worth the effort to try. I don't have 'faith' that this whole project is worth it, and this can cause parts of me to (reasonably!) suggest that I don't put in the effort. On the other hand, if I've successfully built muscle many times (like Batman), I have... (read more)
Do you have a model predicting >1% chance of significant political violence (>5,000 deaths) in the US in the next year? Pls share.
Also welcome: models predicting <.1%
Metaculus has been walking around 1-5% probability of a US civil war before July 2021. While 1% is the lowest probability one can give on Metaculus, rumor has it some reasonable people put more than 1% probability of significant political violence (SPV) happening.
I am[was] confused about this, and want[ed] to get a better sense of what models lead people to assign credence on this order of magnitude.
[it turns out this exercise led me to no longer feel disbelief, but I'm preserving it below. See Changing My... (read 715 more words →)
Here's my understanding / summary, with the hope that you correct me on areas if I'm confused:
- LLMs have a bias towards 'plot', because they're trained on data that is more 'plot'-like than real life. They'll infer that environmental details like chekov's gun are plot-relevant as they often are in written text, rather than random environmental details.
- (this was a useful point for me - I notice I've been intuitively trying to steer LLMs with the right plot details, and am careful to not include environmental hints that I think might be misleading (or pad them with many other environmental hints and suggest there is lots of spurious data).
- LLMs have a bias towards "plots
... (read more)