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+I wrote to Blanchard, Bailey, and Lawrence (and Kevin Hsu and James Cantor for good measure) about my new political project. You might think that famous scientists and professors have so many people clamoring for their attention as to be entirely unwilling and unable to field inquiries from rando bloggers, but it turns out the world is not actually large: famous people _do_ often personally answer their mail (if we're talking about "scientist with an h-index of 90" famous, rather than Taylor Swift famous).
+
+(Subject: "trans infovism against trans activism?? (was: Fwd: The Scintillating But Ultimately Untrue Thought)")
+
[TODO: correspondence with sex researchers
* I had sent Blanchard fan mail on 10 August 2016
- * I had sent Bailey fan mail on 7 January 2017, and then followed up on 11 February with a link to the blog ("I didn't mention this in my email the other month because it seemed uncouth to self-promote in a thank-you message")
+ * I had sent Bailey fan mail on 7 January 2017, and then followed up on 11 February with a link to the blog
* "fan mail; and, self-promotion" to Alice Dreger on 2 March
* Blanchard Tweets my blog in Feb and March 2017: https://twitter.com/BlanchardPhD/status/830580552562524160 (11 Feb), https://twitter.com/BlanchardPhD/status/837846616937750528 (3 Mar)
- * The world is not actually large; "famous" people (on the order of scientists or professors) often answer their email. (Although this probably stops being true for, like, Taylor Swift.)
- * I wrote to Blanchard/Bailey/Hsu/Lawrence/Cantor (Subject: "trans infovism against trans activism?? (was: Fwd: The Scintillating But Ultimately Untrue Thought)")
+ *
+ * I wrote to Blanchard/Bailey/Hsu/Lawrence/Cantor
> It gets worse! I think this absurd situation is illustrative of a flaw in democracy itself: activists who want to change society are both incentivized and self-selected for self-delusion. Whichever activists happen to win get to write the history books, and so most people end up with this Whig history view of the world where people in the past were bad, bad men, but we're so much more progressive and enlightened now. But evolutionarily speaking, there's no fact of the matter as to what's better; there's only what won.
> What you were thinking is about right I think. But we still know that animals sleep.
-I tagged Anna and Divia into the thread as cc's, because they seemed more grounded. "Michael is _very smart_ in ways that I didn't used to understand and still don't understand, but I'm terrified of what the universe is going to do to me if I become too much like him", I said.
+I think that reply spooked me a bit; I tagged Anna and Divia into the thread as cc's, because they seemed more grounded. "Michael is _very smart_ in ways that I didn't used to understand and still don't understand, but I'm terrified of what the universe is going to do to me if I become too much like him", I said.
Even if I _was_ getting a few things right in my paranoid/schizotypal state, the important thing was trying to do philosophy. The parts where I felt like a _very important person_ (in this simulation/Everett branch) receiving special simulator attention should be interpreted as standard manic-episode [delusions of reference](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideas_of_reference_and_delusions_of_reference); _lots_ of people feel just like that when they're agitated and haven't gotten enough sleep. Social reality may be crazy, but I should still be putting a lot more weight on the social reality (nice people are just doing their jobs trying to help) when the alternative was my intuition about the machines trying to kill me.
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-I [wrote about my credit-assignment ritual idea on my real-name blog](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/03/friends-can-change-the-world-or-request-for-social-technology-credit-assignment-rituals/). People know that institutions are flawed and like to perform gritty cynicism about it, but what if no one is gritty and cynical enough? People are _predatory animals_ built to _murder_ other forms of life for the benefit of ourselves, our family, and our friends. To the extent that we have this glorious technological civilization that keeps us safe and lies to us about there being higher ideals, it's because some of the predatory animals happen to stumbled upon behavioral patterns that mirror the hidden Bayesian structure of the universe.
+I [wrote about my credit-assignment ritual idea on my real-name blog](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/03/friends-can-change-the-world-or-request-for-social-technology-credit-assignment-rituals/). People know that institutions are flawed and like to perform gritty cynicism about it, but what if no one is gritty and cynical enough? People are _predatory animals_ built to _murder_ other forms of life for the benefit of ourselves, our family, and our friends.
-Science approximates Bayesian updating; markets
+To the extent that we have this glorious technological civilization that keeps us safe and lies to us about there being higher ideals, it's because some of the predatory animals happen to stumbled upon behavioral patterns that mirror the hidden Bayesian structure of the universe: science approximates Bayesian updating; [markets allocate resources to where they are needed most in accordance with the laws of the microeconomic theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_theorems_of_welfare_economics); democracy is a counterfactual simulation of civil war amongst equals (where you just count how many people are on each side, and divide the spoils accordingly, without having to pay the costs of actually fighting).
-https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_theorems_of_welfare_economics
+We should be looking for more social technologies like that, that tap into the hidden Bayesian structure of the universe, but which also take into account that we're not anything like agents at all, but rather animals that want to help our friends. In analogy to proposals to incentivize useful work with after-the-fact prizes for solving a problem, rather than upfront funding of a team you think might solve the problem, it might be worth trying the same thing on a smaller scale—a _personal_ scale, by giving praise and cash rewards to people who personally helped you through a major life crisis.
-In artificial intelligence, the credit-assignment problem refers to the difficulty of attributing success or failure to particular actions
+In artificial intelligence, [the credit-assignment problem](https://ai.stackexchange.com/questions/12908/what-is-the-credit-assignment-problem) refers to the difficulty of attributing success or failure to particular actions whose connection to the end result might be indirect and remote: if the outcome of an hour-long game might have ultimately hinged on your good or bad instincts during a critical moment in the 24th minute, you'd want to know that, so that you could re-train your instincts appropriately—but it's not trivial to figure out which moments were critical, which actions helped or hurt.
-[TODO: drafting credit-assignment ritual 10 March
- * (science is updating; microeconomics isn't about humans; democracy is counterfactual civil war)
- * We should be looking for more social technologies like that, but which also take into account that we're not agents, but animals that want to help our friends
- * In analogy to funding solutions with retrospectivbe prizes (rather than funding a team in advance that might solve the problem), what if you did that on a personal scale—rewarding and praising people who helped you through a major life crisis
- * In AI, the credit-assignment problem is about how you tell which of your actions helped under sparse rewards; similarly, here you want the people who resulted in the succesful navigation of the crisis to be strengthened
-]
+Money and status are human civilization's credit-assignment tokens. It's not trivial to figure out what actions help or hurt, but to the extent that the economy works at all, it works because productive actions being appropriately rewarded. (A Society in which it was more profitable to steal than to produce would soon have much less to steal.)
+
+Similarly, it's not trivial to figure out what actions helped or hurt during a major life crisis, but to the extent that you _can_ figure it out, you want to dispense rewards appropriately, supplying a tiny gradient update to Society's instincts by allocating more resources to the people who have caused major life crises to be successfully navigated.
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projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff