Tag Archives: Scott Alexander

Scott Alexander on Eliezer Yudkowsky

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Scott writes,

Everyone hates Facebook. It records all your private data, it screws with the order of your timeline, it works to be as addictive and time-wasting as possible. So why don’t we just stop using Facebook? More to the point, why doesn’t some entrepreneur create a much better social network which doesn’t do any of those things, and then we all switch to her site, and she becomes really rich, and we’re all happy?

The obvious answer: all our friends are on Facebook. We want to be where our friends are. None of us expect our friends to leave, so we all stay. Even if every single one of our friends hated Facebook, none of us would have common knowledge that we would all leave at once; it’s hard to organize a mass exodus.

This is Scott’s example of what Yudkowsky calls in his new book Inadequate Equilibria. Another excerpt from Scott’s review:

The Inside View is when you weigh the evidence around something, and go with whatever side’s evidence seems most compelling. The Outside View is when you notice that you feel like you’re right, but most people in the same situation as you are wrong. So you reject your intuitive feelings of rightness and assume you are probably wrong too.

…Eliezer warns that overuse of the Outside View can prevent you from having any kind of meaningful opinion at all.

My thoughts:

1. By the time this post goes up, I will have finished the book (recall that I typically schedule posts two or more days in advance). When I finish it, I am likely to write a long review.

2. The book is worth your time and your money.

3. I believe that Yudkowsky describes a real problem. Rather than call it “inadequate equilibria,” I would use a term popular in mathematical economics, “local optimum.” A group can find itself at a local optimum that is not the global optimum. It remains stuck at the local optimum because it resists going downhill to eventually go uphill.

Yudkowsky is focused on what I would call an intellectual local optimum. That is, it is possible for people to be stuck in a set of beliefs (leading to actions) that are difficult to discard but far from the global optimum. This is the way David Colander and Roland Kupers describe the state of economic thinking in their book Complexity Economics, which I described as

highly ambitious, always stimulating, and often frustrating.

I expect to say the same thing about Inadequate Equilibria. It is even more frustrating.

[UPDATE: I did indeed finish the book. I am glad that it stimulated me to think about the topic and to write an essay. But I think that you will find my essay on the topic will be more concise and more helpful than the book itself. I expect to have the essay up later this week on Medium.]

Clinton, Trump, and Trust

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I am disturbed by Mr. Trump’s personality, as many people are. However, I am also disturbed by Mrs. Clintons’ personality, for pretty much the same reason. In both cases, I see a closed circle of trust, as opposed to an open circle of trust.

Let me try to explain. Obviously, I am playing amateur psychiatrist here.

1. Someone with an open circle trust sees a world filled with potential partners. At some point, anybody out there could be able to offer some goods, services, information, or connections in a mutually beneficial exchange.

2. Someone with a closed circle of trust relies on loyal followers who have no important outside relationships. People outside the circle do not enjoy trust. Particularly if they have talent and ambition, they are at best threats and at worst enemies.

3. A President with a closed circle of trust poses a threat to the rule of law by choosing assistants who would follow their leader as opposed to following their consciences. In my lifetime, Richard Nixon comes to mind as the President who fit this pattern most closely. Next might be Lyndon Johnson, although he was aware that he had this trait, and the more aware you are of a trait the less likely it is to overwhelm you.

4. My instinct that Mr. Trump has a closed circle of trust comes in part from the way that he is treating the Republican establishment. He seems to me to be telling other Republicans that he wants their support and their money but not their input.

5. My instinct that Mrs. Clinton has a closed circle of trust comes from a variety of evidence, some of which I am likely to have forgotten. Consider the peculiar way that she and Ira Magaziner went about designing her health care reform. Consider her use of the phrase “vast right-wing conspiracy.” Finally, consider her email server. Any normal individual would have trusted the IT professionals at the State Department to provide email that met their needs. But for Mrs. Clinton, those professionals, with their loyalty to the institution of the State Department, were outside the circle of trust. It was inconceivable that they would be allowed to handle her email account.

On Sunday, the WaPo ran a banner headline story about people who fear/loathe one or both candidates. I went to the story on line, hit control-F “Johnson”, and got nothing.

The coalition of people who rightly fear/loathe Mr. Trump and/or Mrs. Clinton is really large. If Gary Johnson had access to that coalition through the media, I think he could win. But, so far, crickets.

UPDATE: Well, you schedule a post a couple days in advance, and events intervene. In this case, the Orlando terrorist massacre. One side says “Blame gun culture! Blame homophobia!” The other side says “Blame the failure to face up to Islamic radicalism!” Gary Johnson doesn’t take either side. Perfectly reasonable, but reasonable is not how you get attention.

Three Axes as Tribal Rallying Flags

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Scott Alexander has an essay post on tribalism. Read the whole thing. An excerpt:

in order to talk about tribes coherently, we need to talk about rallying flags. And that involves admitting that a lot of rallying flags are based on ideologies (which are sometimes wrong), holy books (which are always wrong), nationality (which we can’t define), race (which is racist), and works of art (which some people inconveniently want to enjoy just as normal art without any connotations).

What I call three axes are three rallying flags. Progressives rally around oppressor-oppressed, conservatives rally around civilization-barbarism, and libertarians rally around freedom-coercion. It is important to recognize that the actual belief systems are much more complex than that.