Oh wait there's a huge one: Sterility!
Almost the whole of modern medical practice leans on this concept at the core of Sterile Technique, where the practitioner is always tracking, for each object, a binary `is_sterile` flag. They're also tracking every time an object touches another, and when an object touches a non-sterile object, it becomes non-sterile. They explicitly train you to mentally track this.
This social technology is not new of course. Consider the motto of the Royal Society, from 1660.
It seems critical to any group truth-seeking or knowledge-building, that claims are not readily accepted unless they can be demonstrated.
I'm not so deliberate/strategic about it, but yeah. Like, there's another 'algorithm' that's more intuitive, which is something like "When interacting with the person, it's ~always an active part of your mental landscape that you're into them, and this naturally affects your words and actions. Also, you don't want to make them uncomfortable, so you suppress anything that you think they wouldn't welcome". This produces approximately the same policy, because you'll naturally leak some bits about your interest in them, and you'll naturally be monitoring their behaviour to estimate their interest in you, in order to inform your understanding of what they would welcome from you. As you gather more evidence that they're interested, you'll automatically become more free in allowing your interest to show, resulting in ~the same 'escalation of signals of interest'.
I think the key thing about this is like "flirting is not fundamentally about causing someone to be attracted to you, it's about gracefully navigating the realisation that you're both attracted to each other". This is somewhat confused by the fact that "ability to gracefully navigate social situations" is itself attractive, so flirting well can in itself make someone more attracted to you. But I claim that this isn't fundamentally different from the person seeing you skillfully break up a fight or lead a team through a difficult situation, etc.
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1I disagree with the insistence on "paperclip maximiser". As an emerging ASI you want to know about other ASIs you'll meet, especially grabby ones. But there are aligned grabby ASIs. You'd want an accurate prior, so I don't think this updates me on probability of alignment, or even much on grabbiness, since it's hard to know ahead of time, that's why you'd run a simulation in the first place.
I don't take it very seriously because (1) it is a big pile of assumptions and I don't trust anthropic reasoning much at the best of times, it's very confusing and hard to think about (2) the simulation is most useful if it's using the same physics as base reality, so it kind of doesn't matter if we're simulated or not or both, our actions should be the same. So it's not really decision-relevant, I'd follow ~the same policy either way
I tweeted about something a lot like this
https://xcancel.com/robertskmiles/status/1877486270143934881
FYI, Relative URLs don't work in emails, the email version I received has all the links going to http://w/<post-title> and thus broken
You understand you can just block her on Reddit and Facebook, and move on with your life?
2Dang, I missed this. Here's my audition for 500 Million though, I guess for next year
Very interesting! I think this is one of the rare times where I feel like a post would benefit from an up-front Definition. What actually is Leakage, by intensional definition?
I'm a little confused about why the framing is "Ask Culture and Guess Culture is fake", when I understand the model you're describing to be more like "There are multiple levels of Guess Culture".