My favorite book I haven’t read

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This week I am reading the much-anticipated new novel by YouTuber, unpaid intern at Good.Store, and best-selling author, John Green.

Although John is one of my favorite people, he’s not actually one of my favorite authors. I adore The Anthropocene Reviewed, but I’ve felt only lukewarm about his young adult fiction. To be fair, I read them in my 30s. I don’t read his young adult novels to enjoy them, but instead as an act of love for a person who I deeply respect. But Hollywood, Ending is not a young adult novel.

I’m only going to talk about the first chapter here, which is 4 quick pages. If you want, you can listen to John read them to you, as is his pre-release tradition. I did so, but when I got the book I reread them anyway, and somehow noticed several more things.

I’m in a phase of my life where I’m annotating books by default. It’s not very natural for me to annotate — indeed, to write things down. (If I’ve already had a thought, why do I need to write it down? If it was true or useful I’ll probably remember it, or regenerate it next time I read this.) So usually my books end up with just a handful of annotations scattered across three hundred or so pages.

But with Hollywood, Ending (or H,E as the Nerdfighters are calling it) I seem to be doing something closer to Bible study. “If this sentence had a secret message for me, what would it be?” or “Didn’t so-and-so say something that contradicted that earlier?” or “Why did John choose to tell us this detail, in this place?”

Here are some things I noticed in the first chapter. The book is about some actors during the filming of a movie about Andy Warhol. So while the book isn’t about Warhol, he’s a major presence.

  • The very first line gives the very first name in the book, Matthew Malone, which is the actor playing Warhol. I noticed that “Matthew Malone” sounds a lot like “Marylin Monroe”, the subject of one of Warhol’s most famous works.
  • On the second line, we get the name of the movie; Andy Warhol Never Gets Old. Presumably this refers to the fact that Warhol has remained iconic. But (I see from reading Warhol’s wikipedia page) Warhol died at the age of 58. This is arguably before “old age”, so he arguably never got old.
  • The introduction of a character on the second page sprinkles the paragraph with color. Andy Warhol’s work is known for being very colorful.
  • Two pages in, and I notice that there have been a lot of brand names: Uber, Altoids, Moleskine, AirPods. Warhol’s work is known for bringing branding and consumerism into the realm of art, and causing us to question their presence in our lives. Is Green doing the same?

This is a pretty fun way to read a book. I crank up the pattern-matching, puzzle-solving part of my brain.

I’ll just give you one more; the first-person narrator, Juniper, is not unambiguously gendered. There are plenty of indicators of Juniper’s gender, but no one says a pronoun, nor “girl”, “boy”, etc. But we also don’t get any indication that this book is about transness, or even gender. John tends to do some kind of easter egg thing in each of his books, so I can’t help but wonder if the easter egg for H,E is that Juniper is never gendered.

I’m thrilled to read this book, and I hope you will too. It’s been a long time since I’ve gotten to participate in a book release as a cultural event.

Five blocks to the Met

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On the way to the Met, you get a good slice of NYC atmosphere.

Let’s say you take the 4, 5 or 6 train to the 86th street station. Once you find your way up to street level, you’ll be greeted by some sidewalk sheds, and then you’ll have to figure out which way is west. If you can see the super skinny-tall 432 Park Avenue, that’s south. Walk one block west, and you’ll cross Park Avenue itself. It’s a two-way street, and it has a big median down the middle that’s filled with trees. I’ve always loved the way this double-wide canyon opens up to show more of the city in one view.

You’ll know when to turn left, because suddenly in front of you will be all green, with blue sky above. As you walk down 5th Avenue, you have a charcuterie board of Manhattan architecture on your left, and the vast greenery of Central Park on your right. If it struck your fancy, you could step into that park, head down one of the many footpaths, and spend a lovely evening lost among the trees and rocks and fields nestled inside one of the highest population density areas in the world.

But we’re here on a mission, so you keep straight. The sidewalk below your feet is oddly something resembling cobblestone. It’s pretty, and not quite made for walking, and it does a good job indicating that you’re not on just any sidewalk.

As you get closer, the food trucks get louder and more numerous. You’ll find the New York classics like hot dogs and gyros, and plenty of variety besides. You’ll also encounter the rows of people selling their own art. It’s never been clear to me how many of these stalls are genuine hand-made crafts made with love, and how many are tourist traps designed to feel like hand-made art. But I have a fondness for them nonetheless. Long ago, when I lived in New York, I considered spinning up a little art stall myself. I had some clever ideas for making art from wires, combining an aesthetic of industrialization with a feeling of optimism. But I’m not a doer, so I never did.

When you’re almost there, you’ll see a little playground. And wouldn’t you know, it’s a Met-themed playground, complete with pyramid and obelisk. Whenever I see it I think, “I should go check out that playground” before I realize that solo adults aren’t really supposed to do that.

Then you cross the next street. It’s kind of two streets, actually. The first one is just a street into Central Park. But the second one is 30 feet of road that then dives, understatedly, half a floor under ground level, into a dark little cave that is clearly not meant for you. I like to imagine that all the wonders of the museum have passed through this threshold, tucked away in an average-looking van or truck. In reality there are probably several loading areas into the museum. This is probably one of them, but I’ve never investigated; it feels like you’re not supposed to look directly at it. Just mind your business, and cross the street. Nothing to see here, just city stuff.

And now you’re reached the eastern-most cornerstone of the museum. Just on the other side of that limestone are some truly ancient treasures — the Egyptian wing. To get in there, you’ll have to walk a ways further, to the entrance at the top of the steps. But you wanted to do that anyway; they’re a worthy sight of their own.

Okay, fine. I’ll try Substack

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You can subscribe to it I guess, if you’re into that kind of thing. But you can also subscribe to this blog!

I adore the concept of writing. I like building mental models, sharing them with other people, and working to understand other peoples’ mental models. I like playing with the world by pointing my mind at it and wondering.

I’ve formerly blogged on Facebook (rip), this WordPress-driven blog, and LessWrong. But it’s been a while since I’ve felt like I was part of an active intellectual community online.

Last year I participated in Inkhaven. Many of the participants used Substack as their blogging platform, and I learned just how much of a social network Substack had become. I didn’t notice in time to switch over, and I also ended up getting a lot fewer eyes on my posts than I wanted. Many people were just checking their Substack feeds. So I’ve decided to give it a try.

But I’m also kinda mad about Substack.

During the maturation of social network apps, a major phenomenon that happened is the negative side of the network effect, where if you’re not on that network, you don’t get any of the benefits. In many cases you are effectively forced to join, like if your workplace requires it, or if you want to talk to your niece ever again. And the company who runs it owns all your data, and controls what you see, and can use their stranglehold on the users to make the service increasingly extractive, riddled with ads, etc etc. This dynamic also concentrates power within society. This happened a lot during the 20th century with various forms of communications or infrastructure like Ma Bell or Standard Oil. But with software, the barrier for competitor entry should be much smaller. The hard part is convincing everyone to join your social network instead of that other guy’s social network.

So some people did that, and got billions of users onto a very small number of apps. Now, in theory, this should not be as constraining on the user as a physical telephone line or the roads. You should be able to switch to a different social media app. But if you do, then you can no longer interact with anyone who is on that app. And if literally everyone you know is on Facebook, then there’s not much point to going to some other app, even if Facebook is really really bad.

But it didn’t have to be that way. It is possible to have two social media apps that talk to each other. And indeed, this is what email does. If you use Hotmail you can still send an email to someone who uses Yahoo. Things are more complicated with all the features of modern social media apps, but over the 2000s and 2010s, we figured out structural methods to circumvent those issues, under the banners of distributed or federated social networks. Protocols were standardized, open-source clients were written and tested, and finally, anyone could spin up their own social networking client and talk to everyone else (who was on the same protocol). Subsequently, all the internet’s users proceeded to not care, and instead continued to feed from the hand that bites them.

Substack’s whole value proposition was that they let you have a good blogging platform where you could get paid to write, and where you would own your relationship with subscribers. Subscriptions were email subscriptions, which is important, because email is the only federated protocol that is mainstream. If you wanted to leave Substack, you could just take the list of your subscribers’ email addresses and send the emails from some other platform.

What I learned during Inkhaven is that Substack has since betrayed that. They simply built a closed social network on top of their existing web interface for blogs, complete with in-network-only posts (called “Notes”) and an algorithmic feed. You can now even “follow” someone without subscribing, which is the second-to-last step of a bait-and-switch to no longer owning your audience. Substack.com is your one-stop-shop for having your community of discourse be owned by new management instead of old management.

Obviously I’m being old-man-yells-at-clouds about this. I’m not really blaming anyone in particular. The Molochian forces of enshittification are strong, and the people who run Substack are just some little humans like the rest of us. I want to have a community, and that is where a community is, so I’ll go over there and try it out for a while. I’ll still cross-post some stuff here, mostly on principle (and LessWrong when it’s relevant).

I’m doing a daily writing goal for September, and plan to continue over the next couple months. I don’t plan to post every day, but still fairly frequently (often as the formerly lambasted Substack Notes (or LessWrong Quick Takes) so subscribing shouldn’t be too annoying on your inbox).

Do you know which room is above the kitchen?

Alex AltairLeave a comment

This is my post for day 30 of the Inkhaven writing retreat.

If you’ve ever played video games, you might be familiar with the concept of a mini game. Mini games are a separate, smaller game within a larger game, with different rules and a well-defined context. They can add more novelty to the player’s experience while not over-complicating the game as a whole. But they also reflect how life works sometimes.

Our daily lives just so happen to be well-modeled by using lots of different mini-models that fire off in the right context. You only need to use your driving skills when you’re in the car, and you only need to consult your model of shoe laces when you’re tying your shoes. Another example is the whole phenomenon of buildings being made up of rooms. When you’re in a room, you mostly only need to think about what’s in that room. You mostly only need to know how the rooms relate to each other by means of walking between them. Only rarely do you need to know exactly what’s on the other side of a wall, or what room happens to be above your kitchen.

One of the miracles of modernity has been the slow but steady process of discovering and understanding how all of reality in its multitudinous richness emerges from one simple model, one set of equations that turned out to be so dominant and unwavering that we decided to call them laws.

Though these laws are in some sense the most true model we have, they are not the most useful in any practical sense. We don’t use the Standard Model to fix our cars or mow the lawn, nor do committees use them when choosing zoning or fire safety policies. We don’t even do engineering with software that runs quantum field theory, except in the cases where the purpose of the engineering at hand is to further probe quantum field theory. Our best modeling software is highly optimized for the context, using simplified laws like Kirchoff’s rules or classical Hamiltonians.

The more “unified” models of our world have higher prediction accuracy if you are willing and able to trace out all their implications, and they are the only models that have a chance of getting the answers right at the edges between contexts, or at the extreme values. But that “if” is a huge one, and I think it’s essentially never true. We have a lot of spare compute in the world, and if we could fix cars better using quantum mechanics I think we just would.

People are constantly doing predictive modeling in their brains in order to navigate the world, and we are essentially stuck using the highly contextualized and simplified models. An enthusiastic foodie might use some domain knowledge from biochemistry to design a recipe, but once they do, they’ll essentially cache their calculations into a “if I’m cooking X, set the oven to Y” type of rule. If you ask them why they’re doing that, they might be able to recover their original modeling as the justification, but they also might not.

That said, I believe that most people could move their minds substantially more toward unification than they do. I mostly do so because I value having true beliefs for its own sake, but I have noticed that over time I tend to get better results in predicting related outcomes than my more contextually-modeling friends. We are making different trade-offs, and they are better than me at many more specific skills.

I do think that a unified mindset is especially important in epistemics, since this isn’t domain modelling so much as meta-modelling. I think having a deep understanding of the Bayesian worldview can help someone in all areas of life, personal, interpersonal, and impersonal.

All that is to say I am the kind of person who knows what room is above the kitchen, because I subconsciously made sure to model that when I moved into the house.

I think that if you want to be someone who is highly skilled and adaptive in a wide range of contexts, if you want to go around the world navigating it like a video game and solving lots of problems, then you probably shouldn’t prioritize this kind of mental unification. Being this kind of person is extremely valuable, and I salute you.

If instead you want to try really, really hard to get the right answers to the world’s hardest and most important problems, then I think you need to be the kind of person who focuses on unifying your models. I see existential risk from AI as one of these hardest problems.

Without a doubt these types of people need to work together. The contextual modelers need to be willing to trust the unified modelers’ claims about things like overarching principles and limitations. And the unified modelers need to be willing to trust the contextual modeler’s claims about how specific domains work. The contextual models have lower leverage, and the unified models have a higher probability of being catastrophically wrong. I’m not sure who should be in charge of when exactly we trust who exactly, but it’s somewhere in between.

Will we ever complete the Epic of Gilgamesh?

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This is my post for day 29 of the Inkhaven writing retreat.

Here is an idea for a research project I would do if I had infinite time.

The Epic of Gilgamesh, often called the oldest piece of literature, is known to us only through a large collection of fragmentary tablets buried in the ground. Fortunately it was important enough to have been written down many times, but we still do not have a complete copy. Many of the fragments are of overlapping sections, and many sections have no fragment to witness them. More fragments continue to be found, and not infrequently. Though I cannot find the reference, I believe I once read or heard Andrew George, world expert on the Epic, saying that he believed we would eventually find enough tablets to piece together the entire thing.

Around the same time I had also watched a youtube video in which the host did a statistical analysis to predict how many giant species of giant sea creatures we have left to discover. It might feel impossible to predict how much you don’t know, but this is the miracle of statistics.

Here’s one way to look at it. Say you have the classic urn full of colored balls. You don’t know how many balls are in there, and you don’t know how many colors there are, either. But each time you reach into the urn and pull out a ball, you write the color down. (It doesn’t matter if you throw the ball back in.) If colors start repeating, then you can start estimating the fraction of balls that are that color. The more you draw, the more confident you can become. If you have any guess as to how many balls there are, then you can eventually converge on being confident about how many colors are in the urn.

Though we find the Epic of Gilgamesh in all these smashed up little bits, we do actually know fairly precisely how long the entire story is. (Sidenote: we’re talking about the Standard Babylonian Version here, and not the Old Babylonian Version, nor the Sumerian poems.) The Epic is eleven tablets long, and each tablet is a coherent part of the story, essentially like a modern chapter. Current published translations are about 100 pages. Tablets are not precisely standard sizes, but for copies of the Epic they’d be pretty close, and we often have enough of a chunk to understand how big the characters are relative to the tablet, and therefore how many lines are on the tablet.

So my scheme is that someone could create a chart that shows what fraction of the Epic we have discovered by each year. Then we just see if the line seems to be tapering off before we get to 100%. (This is somewhat different from the sea creatures/colored balls model above, but was similar enough to cause me to think of it.) I don’t actually know enough practical statistics to know which test one would run here, but I’m sure it’s pretty basic.

Difficulties

The first problem I envision with this project is that gathering the data might be a huge pain. Assyriology is not exactly cutting-edge with their data practices. I’m sure there are lots of standards for IDing tablet fragments, and denoting what lines they cover, their provenance, and so forth. But that might be a huge pain to sort through if you have no domain knowledge (or even if you do).

Another major difficulty here has to do with the distinction between discovery and translation. Cuneiform tablets sometimes preserve extremely well. And they were essentially the paperwork of ancient Mesopotamia. So what we find at archeological sites is more like the crushed filing cabinets and bookshelves of a ruined building. I imagine it might be like trying to understand 20th century America by sorting through the ruins of the World Trade Center towers.

All that is to say that while we have literally hundreds of thousands of tablets, most of them are extremely boring and uninformative, and we have oh so precious few people who can read them. And what this means for my proposed project here is that I don’t know to what degree the tablets have a recorded excavation date separate from a translation date. And it’s very unclear to me how it should be treated in the statistical analysis if a tablet was excavated in 1892, transliterated in 1923, translated by an Assyriologist in 1958, but then not published until 1999, as part of a giant posthumous publication of all his notes.

And one more factor might make this whole analysis pointless; people have started getting excited about the prospect of using AI to read and decode the remaining tablets with dramatically more speed.

A silly scheme for learning a language

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This is my post for day 28 of the Inkhaven writing retreat.

Learning a language is notoriously difficult. You have to learn a thousand things before you can hold even a basic conversation at the grocery store. The gap is huge.

It’s widely recognized that children have some kind of biological advantage in learning their first language (in addition to the fact that it’s mandatory and also they have all the time in the world). But you don’t stop learning your native language as a child. You constantly learn new slang, new fancy words, and different patterns become more clear to you over time. You might learn different registers like writing office emails, academic papers, or spending time in a new group of friends with a different culture. And as the decades start to pass, you can experience even the baseline rules of your native language shift. It’s easier to keep up with these, since you’re just shifting incrementally.

But… all language diversity occurred through incremental shifting over time. Just, a lot of time. So what if you could learn a language just by… learning those shifts backwards?

Start by watching old black & white movies. Right away you’ll see plenty of differences (and not just the transatlantic accent.) These probably already feel familiar to you.

Then start reading some older novels or newpaper articles. Give some Charles Dickens a try. Whenever you encounter something you don’t understand, look it up so that you’re maintaining intelligibility. As you go further back you’ll notice longer sentences. I think this was just a stylistic fad, and you can learn to parse them faster by decided that many of the commas and semicolons are basically periods, where you can give your mind a break. Eventually you can get back to writing like the Federalist papers or George Washington’s farewell address.

We might have been starting too slow. This was the easy part, and we have a long way to go. So make sure it’s not too long before you can easily read Shakespeare. There might be a lot to look up, but there are lots of resources. Once that’s easy, the Canterbury tales might be more approachable. You’ll often find these “translated” into modern English, but we obviously want the original.

This is about to get a lot harder, so let’s take a breath with a recreational read. The Wake by Paul Kingsnorth is a modern novel written in a made up dialect of English that is made to sound as much like old English as possible while still being readable to a modern speaker.

when i woc in the mergen all was blaec though the night had gan and all would be blaec after and for all time

It takes a bit to get the engine started, but I found it extremely satisfying when I got to the point where I didn’t notice it anymore. If you want even more fun you can join the Anglish-speaking community.

But after that, we gotta get serious and learn real Old English. Very recently a book has been released that is designed precisely to teach you Old English with a story that gets gradually more complex. It’s called Ōsweald Bera, and yes, it’s about a bear named Ōsweald.

After that, you can read Beowulf. Just kidding, that would still be way too hard. But you’d be much closer. And, wait, weren’t we trying to get to some other language? Okay, so it would take quite a lot more steps to get down the ancestral tree of languages before you could then start tracing a branch back up to a currently-spoken language. And if you don’t want that language to be Frisian, you’ll need to go even further back. So maybe this scheme is as silly as we expected. But at least along the way you got a degree in the history of the English language.

On not becoming an old man

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This is my post for day 27 of the Inkhaven writing retreat.

I grew up just about at pace with the rise of the internet, laptops, and smart phones. It was fast enough that I could tell it was revolutionary, but slow enough for me to stay up to date. Along the way, I saw lots of adults and older people totally fail to keep up. Or, I shouldn’t say “fail”, because they weren’t always trying. And for many of these people, that was totally the right call. But for many others it wasn’t, and their lives started to get worse. Sometimes it just got worse relative to if they had adopted the changes, but other times it got worse in the absolute. Eventually your bank or your pharmacy starts requiring you have an email address, or the ability to receive texts, etc. If you don’t understand things like good passwords, or that some email addresses are “noreply@”, then you’re going to eventually have problems. If you don’t keep up with what’s normal, then the scammers can get you pretty quickly.

So at some point in my youth I realized that this was a natural progression people went through as they aged, and that if I didn’t want this to happen to me, I would need to instill certain habits and tendencies in myself. I realized that if I started thinking that what “the kids these days” were doing was weird or useless, that might be what it feels like to be missing the train to the future.

Of course, there are plenty of things that the kids do that are weird or useless, or sometimes even harmful. And sometimes there are things that all of society does that are harmful. So my policy was not just to “try everything once”. Here are two similar examples for contrast.

At some point a lot of my friends started using a chat platform called Discord. It looked like it was basically Slack, but for gaming? Or at least developed for and adopted by the gaming community. At first there was no benefit to me switching, since I could still talk to all my friends by other means. Over time more and more people dropped off facebook. Some content creators I follow started hosting Discord servers for supporters. Eventually, I started going to events that coordinated over Discord, and then I really needed to learn how to use it. At this point, I run two servers, a personal one and one for my research fellows. I still feel like I’m not totally on-boarded, and I struggle to understand how to casually participate in bigger servers with infinite messages. But at least I’m here.

In contrast, I have never downloaded TikTok. This type of content consumption just feels insane to me. Like, I get it, I have enough exposure to pop culture that I’ve seen several of the emergent sub-communities that TikTok made possible. The amount of creativity in the format is really beautiful to watch. But like… it is just straight-forwardly the heroin of social media apps? There’s no way I’m touching that. It’s also wild to me that people are fully content if not thrilled to have their experience fully controlled by the app. I want to watch the videos that I decide to watch. And when a video is done I want to be the one who decides whether I watch another one. I also want to know how long it is, and the date it was uploaded, and who the creator is, et cetera. The fact that all shortform platforms seem to aggressively hide this information is so bewildering to me.

Okay, rant over — the point is that I think I can assess from an outside view that my disinterest in Discord needed to be overcome but that my disinterest in TikTok was the correct call.

A more general trend that makes these calls harder is what Cory Doctorow termed “enshittification“. This is the trend of software updates slowly adding “features” or other changes that eventually turn the service into, well, shit. This starts to happen after everybody is dependent on the infrastructure, and it’s not necessarily the result of individuals being evil. It can be viewed through the lens of incentive gradients and evolution dynamics. I’ve been on facebook almost since it began. And for the first several years, I kinda hated every update they pushed, but then eventually loved the change. The initial hatred was the old-man dynamic. There was a golden age where the software was mature, richly featured, and the platform teeming with life. But these days, I don’t think I have you tell you that facebook has objectively enshittified.

Sometimes it’s harder to tell. My first couple of laptops had replaceable batteries. That is, there was a compartment that you could unscrew or unclip to access the battery. Once the battery’s lifespan got too short, you could buy a replacement on Amazon and swap it out yourself. This was amazing and I loved it. I would keep a spare battery to take when I traveled. Eventually, fewer and fewer models had this feature. There was probably some kind of enshittification factor at play, where companies figured out that few enough buyers cared enough about this feature, and that they would make more money by not letting you replace the battery. But also, batteries got better. They started lasting longer. External power banks got better, and everything started using the same USB-C standard, which was faster and more convenient. I haven’t replaced a battery in many years, and also I haven’t wanted to.

I’m currently struggling real hard to keep away from being an old man about AI. I mean, I do think its an existential risk and we should shut it all down. But separately, as an everyday tech product, I should obviously be making use of it and keeping up with the developments. I’m finding it mysteriously hard to figure out what it’s good for, but I keep trying, at the endorsed rate.

You’ll never believe where blood is made

Alex Altair1 Comment

This is my post for day 26 of the Inkhaven writing retreat.

Okay, so you might just know the answer to this one. If so, I think it could still be fun to imagine you don’t, and play along.

I was once chatting with a friend who knew a lot about biology. I don’t remember what we were talking about, but perhaps it was things like endocrine glands, which are just little organ blobs who are responsible for making hormones.

And I remember wondering out loud to her, “oh, yeah, …and where is blood made? Presumably there’s just some organ whose job it is to make blood? I feel like I would have heard of it…” and she responded, “Oh, you didn’t know? Blood is made in the bones.”

And then my brain exploded with incredulity and objections (and also fascination and wonder, because I immediately believed her).1 I was like, WHAT? Made in the WHERE? Why???

  • It’s crazy that the main structural component of your body would be doing something else. It’s like if the steel beams of a building just so happened to also make good solar panels. Like, no, evolution, what are you doing. Separate things should do separate things. Bones do a great job holding me up. Their existence is justified.
  • Where does the blood come out?? It’s not like there are little holes at the end of the bones where the blood vessels are attached? Like… does it come out the sides, or the ends, or …???
  • Bones are all totally different shapes! And there are so many bones. Do your hips make blood? Your vertebrae? Your tiny foot bones? Your skull? Your teeth? Your ear bones??? This is just ridiculous.
  • What happens when you break a bone??? That seems like a big problem. I mean I guess it’s not necessarily a bigger problem than if your blood was made in a single squishy blog inside your chest. But it still seems like a problem. If you break a bone real bad, does it just start… leaking blood? (In addition to the, erm, other blood you’d be losing.)
  • If you lose a limb, I guess you just make less blood? Which seems… fine I guess? Especially since you have one less limb that needs blood. But still weird.
  • Birds have super thin tiny bones. Do they just have less blood?
  • Oh, but maybe bone-making bloods are a mammal thing? I mean that would be wild, but this whole situation is wild. Biology is lawless.
  • Wait, there are tons of animals that don’t have any bones! Worms? Slugs? Insects have exoskeletons… next are you going to tell me that insect shells make blood? What about an octopus?

I think my friend must have put on a big grin and thought “this is going to be a fun time“. Because, it is true that blood is made in the bones, so all of these questions have answers. Some of them she knew, and some of them we had to look up. And exploring the world together is one of the best activity to do with someone like me.

  1. And also, somewhere in the back of my mind, there was a little note of familiarity, of recognition. It went “oh, that feels familiar… something about bone marrow?” The skill of noticing that little feeling is part of what it means to be a rationalist, to be trying as hard you can to see the world as it is. ↩︎

Why might one want to be a policy?

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This is my post for day 25 of the Inkhaven writing retreat.

In a previous post, I described the state of what I called “being a policy”. I contrasted this with habits, heuristics, and plain old conscious deciding. I think a reasonable response to this would be, why would one want to “be a policy”? Isn’t it better to just always be flexibly able to update your decision process to account for new information, et cetera?

Here are some reasons I know of for wanting to be a policy.

Disclaimer: none of what I’m saying here is novel, and all of it has been written about voluminously by others elsewhere, from Aristotle to Wei Dai.

It’s fast

The first reason is that it’s costly or impractical or impossible to calculate out the best action to take in all circumstances. Policies may be hard to follow in the motivation sense, but they are easy to follow in the cognitive sense. However, this reason is shared by habits and heuristics, and doesn’t justify why you’d want to install a policy instead.

To counter other biases

Our minds contain some built-in parts of the architecture that cannot be changed, at least not easily. If these parts influence us to take actions that are systematically working against our values, then we may be able to install a policy to counteract them.

For example, perhaps you’re addicted to checking your phone in the morning. If you leave the phone next to your bed, you will check it. So to counter this you set a policy of leaving your phone outside the room overnight.

A company might use a policy to counter implicit bias. If they’re hiring for a position where most candidates are men, they might require interviewing at least one woman before giving someone an offer.

To be reliably cooperative

There are endless situations where two interacting people would each be better off if they could cooperate on their actions, but where one party defecting leaves the cooperating party worse off (as encapsulated by the prisoner’s dilemma). Being a policy means you can’t change your actions to differ in specific circumstances. So if the policies could somehow know for sure that each other ran the appropriate policy, they could reliably cooperate, leading to better outcomes for everyone.

Unfortunately people cannot literally read each other’s brain states. But due to historical contingencies of evolution, people can discern with some degree of reliability whether other people are running certain policies. Or, to say that in a normal way, you can just kinda tell that Jane is an honest person. Lots of little signals like facial expressions, reaction times, and a consistent history of honesty can provide pretty good evidence of when someone is running honesty as a policy and not just re-deciding to tell the truth every time.

Terminally valuing being a policy

Last but not least: some people want to be a policy because they value that state in and of itself. Some people work hard because they like the results of their work, some people work hard because they want other people to think they’re a hard worker, and some people work hard because they like being a hard worker, period. I personally value having true beliefs, not because they’re useful for my other goals, not because it makes me more useful for other people, but because I value being a thing that has true beliefs. Those other benefits are huge, but they are in addition to my terminal value of having true beliefs. I do have other beliefs, and it is hypothetically possible that they will come in conflict one day such that I would prefer to have false beliefs. But I’m not even sure if I could choose that, because I’ve been running this other policy for so long.

What if the world had been flat, but infinite?

Alex AltairLeave a comment

This is my post for day 24 of the Inkhaven writing retreat.

Imagine you’re in the ancestral environment. (People do that, right? That’s normal?) The only thing you know about the shape of the world is what you’ve seen with your own eyes. You and your tribe have roamed around quite a bit, so you’ve seen meadows, rivers, and mountains, and you know the earth can change a lot. But there’s always a horizon. If you actually sat down on a log and thought about it, what would the options be?

I feel like I’ve heard a lot of cultural myths about the sky. About what would happen if you somehow went up and up and up. About how the gods live there or whatever. It also seems pretty common for people to interpret the sky as a dome. Thinking of it as a dome gives you some sense that the edges might be walls or barriers of some kind, and I guess that might lead you to think of the surface of the earth as a disk of a fixed size.

Presumably one reason people think of the sky as a dome is because they can see the stars rotate smoothly. And, of course, they rotate smoothly because the earth is a sphere rotating in space, and the stars are approximately fixed and infinitely far away.

But does this actually look different than if the earth was flat, and the stars infinitely far away, and rotating around the north star? This is kind of hard to intuit, but my sense is that it would actually look the same. So why does it look so much like a dome?

Oh, right — the sun and the moon also seem to travel on the dome. Since you can see their diameter, you can tell they’re not infinitely far away, and so if they were traveling in straight lines, you’ll see them get smaller on the horizon. So maybe the sun and moon are the main reason people thought of the sky as a dome.

Let’s put that aside, and assume we have no reason to think the sky is a dome. What would people think about the horizon? If you keep walking for days on end, and new, random landscapes keep coming over the horizon, I feel like it would be very reasonable to assume that it just went on forever. (The oceans are compelling evidence for an end, but if land can suddenly turn into ocean then it stands to reason that ocean can suddenly turn into land.) And as you walked around, you would occasionally find more people. And the more you walked the more people you would find. I think it would be reasonable to conclude that the earth is filled with infinitely many people!

As a small digression, some people think that Occam’s razor means that each postulated physical object requires evidence; that the burden grows with the number of objects. They would say that, maybe seeing a few trees is evidence for a few more unseen trees, or that seeing a thousand stars is evidence for around a thousand more unseen stars, but surely infinitely many trees or stars is infinitely unlikely.

I think this is reasonable but wrong. Nature is not out there manufacturing new objects one at a time, using up some kind of finite resources, like you or I would be. Nature just is a way. And being the way of “filled with thirty trees” is not tremendously more likely than being the way of “filled with endless trees”. My formal stance on this is based on descriptive complexity; longer description length means lower probability. Since you can formally well-define “infinity” with a very small number of logical symbols, that to me makes it actually quite likely. In contrast, most specific finite numbers take a long time to describe. So the more objects you see, the more likely there are to be infinitely many.

Going back to the question of how many people there are, can you imagine how crazy the world would feel if you believed there were infinitely many people? I have grown up always knowing that the earth was finite and so were its people. It’s obviously huge and detailed, but in some sense, there’s a comprehensible limit. You can look at globes and see all the continents. You can start to memorize the names of countries, and the layout of the largest cities. But if an infinite earth was roughly evenly populated forever and ever, you would never know what might be about to come over the horizon. You could find a utopian city of gold, or a nest of dragons. If some army or plague was spreading across the land, you would just not be able to do anything about it. Presumably this is in fact how many people felt throughout history, or still feel.

There’s one more direction we could speculate about; down. This seems to be far less popular. But like, really truly, if you knew nothing about physics or the nature of matter, and all you had was a few decades of experience running around on the earth — what would you think was down there? What would you expect to happen if you just… started digging?

The sky has the really weird property that you can see right through it. And it kind of seems easier to go up. You can throw stuff pretty high. You can go climb a mountain. You can see that birds and clouds got up there somehow. But the ground is way more unforgiving, if you try to go down. Holes collapse pretty easily, so you’d have to dig out a huge cone.

I think it would be reasonable to believe that it’s just dirt and rock for miles and miles, way more than you could ever practically dig. But there would still be a fact of the matter about what’s below that. Would you believe in infinite rock? Would you believe that space itself stops? Sure, you could believe in hell, but hell has a floor. What’s under the floor? One has to wonder what a Solomonoff inductor predicts.

I’d love to read speculative fiction where some prehistoric rationalists use their spare resources to pursue a deep understanding of the universe by digging a really deep hole. And where, in that universe, the earth is an infinite flat plane, and the answer to what lies below is not the same as in our world.