Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: More Dakka, published by Zvi on the AI Alignment Forum.
Epistemic Status: Hopefully enough Dakka
Eliezer Yudkowsky’s book Inadequate Eqilibria is excellent. I recommend reading it, if you haven’t done so. Three recent reviews are Scott Aaronson’s, Robin Hanson’s (which inspired You Have the Right to Think and a great discussion in its comments) and Scott Alexander’s. Alexander’s review was an excellent summary of key points, but like many he found the last part of the book, ascribing much modesty to status and prescribing how to learn when to trust yourself, less convincing.
My posts, including Zeroing Out and Leaders of Men have been attempts to extend the last part, offering additional tools. Daniel Speyer offers good concrete suggestions as well. My hope here is to offer both another concrete path to finding such opportunities, and additional justification of the central role of social control (as opposed to object-level concerns) in many modest actions and modesty arguments.
Eliezer uses several examples of civilizational inadequacy. Two central examples are the failure of the Bank of Japan and later the European Central Bank to print sufficient amounts of money, and the failure of anyone to try treating seasonal affective disorder with sufficiently intense artificial light.
In a MetaMed case, a patient suffered from a disease with a well-known reliable biomarker and a safe treatment. In studies, the treatment improved the biomarker linearly with dosage. Studies observed that sick patients whose biomarkers reached healthy levels experienced full remission. The treatment was fully safe. No one tried increasing the dose enough to reduce the biomarker to healthy levels. If they did, they never reported their results.
In his excellent post Sunset at Noon, Raymond points out Gratitude Journals:
“Rationalists obviously don’t actually take ideas seriously. Like, take the Gratitude Journal. This is the one peer-reviewed intervention that actually increases your subjective well being, and costs barely anything. And no one I know has even seriously tried it. Do literally none of these people care about their own happiness?”
“Huh. Do you keep a gratitude journal?”
“Lol. No, obviously.”
– Some Guy at the Effective Altruism Summit of 2012
Gratitude journals are awkward interventions, as Raymond found, and we need to find details that make it our own, or it won’t work. But the active ingredient, gratitude, obviously works and is freely available. Remember the last time someone expressed gratitude to you and it made your day worse? Remember the last time you expressed gratitude to someone else, or felt gratitude about someone or something, and it made your day worse?
In my experience it happens approximately zero times. Gratitude just works, unmistakably. I once sent a single gratitude letter. It increased my baseline well-being. Then I didn’t write more. I do try to remember to feel gratitude, and express it. That helps. But I can’t think of a good reason not to do that more, or for anyone I know to not do it more.
In all four cases, our civilization has (it seems) correctly found the solution. We’ve tested it. It works. The more you do, the better it works. There’s probably a level where side effects would happen, but there’s no sign of them yet.
We know the solution. Our bullets work. We just need more. We need More (and better) (metaphorical) Dakka. And then we decide we’re out of bullets. We stop.
If it helps but doesn’t solve your problem, perhaps you’re not using enough.
I
We don’t use enough to find out how much enough would be, or what bad things it might cause. More Dakka might backfire. It also might solve your problem.
The Bank of Japan didn’t have enough money. They printed some. It helped a little. They could have kept printing more money until printing more money...
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