I'm a systems thinker. It started with software. Old enough to have had an TRS-80. Built a small-town startup out of my first programming job at 15 (1993). Later my interest in systems escaped the computer world and has reached economics, philosophy and philanthropy. So,...
I think this is in the right territory on the difficulty of communication. Have some doubts about the ancestral link.
Two counterexamples in the ancestral environment. Children and secret roles. Children still need to be explained and start out lower. But maybe this doesn't change things much as the order of presentation to children can be somewhat fixed, introducing one inferential step at a time. In many ways, we still use that. "Educating" has always seemed a misnomer to me, as educated and education are imperfectly connected. We become educated by a sel... (read more)
If you feel that complexity or emergence is being misused, to avoid examining at depth, then the substitution of magic is a useful psychological trick to substitute "magic". But magic is less descriptive. Emergence or complexity are definitively a different things. They do have descriptive power.
What I expect is the key point here, is that the gap between magic and emergence in terms of descriptive power is far less than the gap between emergence and fully explaining anything that resides in the interior of the process of emergence. In the right context,... (read more)
Surrender to the truth as quickly as you can.
I find myself wanting to improve upon this statement. It's not easy, but it seems desirable. Surrender strikes me as too strong. Constructing defenses against evidence is the failure. You also want to be an active participant in removing resistance. If you've built a fortress around an idea, and discover the foundations are unsound, you should be an active participant in deconstructing the defenses built on the unsound foundations. You should not force others to remove those structures for you, nor should you at... (read more)
With this in mind, it's reasonable to expect that once you've proved in 88 hours the ability for a 10,000 agent swarm to produce a result, your next step would not be to spawn another 10,000 agent swarm to solve one new problem 3 days later, but instead to spawn 100, 100-agent swarms to produce 100 results of similar complexity and importance in 30 days. I guess we'll see in time if this bet is placed.
You could also do 10,000 in 1 year, but then you'd have the problem of identifying 10,000 candidates, and the model scaling would reset the accumulated value... (read more)
It's a brave project. I agree that the narrow views are deceiving. I wonder how helpful economics can be in understanding a post-AGI world. It can extrapolate from some initial conditions, or at least make a good effort at that. But the initial conditions are uncertain enough that you have to maintain many models that have lost correlation with each other. When those scenarios have lost their correlation, you can't average them, or smooth them, you simply hold them apart. I'd say you're gaining knowledge in the pursuit, but will it ever be useful knowledge... (read more)