Published on November 11, 2024 6:18 PM GMT
This post (AI alignment via civilizational cognitive updates) is sort of the precursor to this one, but not in terms of the a thread of reasoning, but more for me personally: I posted it, received comments, someone DMed me and we talked a bit, I started thinking more about it and writing down my thoughts, and here I am.
General goals and expectations
The goal is to save the world
This post is intended to be continuously edited, I don't expect it to ever be frozen or act as a coherent thing with a beginning and end and clear message and such.
I want to find more precise terminology, for example these 3 are all different even though they feel similar/it hasn't fully sank in that they are different:
- memetics
- coordination
- increasingly clear definitions and concepts
For one, coordination is a description of how agents in a system relate to one another (and a slightly narrower version is that this coordination is good), whereas "clarity of concepts" and "memetics" are more, names of effects.
Initial thoughts on this post
- separating terminology: - expecting exploration and many posts, versus clear beginning and end
- requires factoring out sub-topics into self-contained posts
- abstract discussion lame without practical application (actually trying to implement ideas while working on answering actual concrete questions or solving real problems)
- what makes tiktok bad (hint: lack of agency)
- start with simple case studies like: a conversation, iterating on a post, the game of telephone <-- see if you can build models and concepts that apply to these
- hilariously ambitious project
- concrete direction: how and why does tooling that increases AI-human bandwidth help with coordination and with philosophical progress?
- direct tradeoff between resolution and broadness of discussion
- things I want to define: broadness, resolution, conversation, mental context, information, information sharing, what is "an AI"? (simple definition is "the simulacrum in any given conversation")
Collection of effects and phenomena.
Bifurcation of communities
1) increases total energy, because some people will enjoy talking more in the niche community
extreme case: imagine a party of only introverts where everyone is in 1 big group, versus everyone talking exclusively in pairs <-- massive difference in total conversation-energy expended (leading to more "idea-evolution/memetics/coordination/whatever tf im supposed to call it")
2) fewer agents == individual outputs reach more of the community with less loss of resolution, and higher iteration speed (or "applies bigger relative update to the global state") --> faster evolution of ideas
(and the ideas that are good in a broader way, can still be shipped to the main community, which is cool)
TikTok case study: Less agency --> more alien memetic processes?
Tiktok scrolling basically has 1 action: "how long until you scroll?", it's a single integer value with a pretty small range (video length) and often it's actually a boolean: "did you immediately scroll further?".
(There are a bunch of other actions too, but they're negligable in terms of how important they are for the algorithm, and how many of decisions in terms of quantity are formed by these: like, comment, input search term, click channel, share, close app)
Compare this to a conversation, where you have word choice, intonation, topic choice, social cues about what you find interesting, it's a set of very high-dimensional pieces of information that you share repeatedly and they all have a big effect, crazy amounts of agency.
You can make a similar analysis on the "supersets" of both of these.
the entirety of Tiktok and how viral videos and hashtags spread and how they influence humans, compared to, when people start getting annoyed by how their friendship is going, they can explicitly talk about it and steer it or abort mission.
Conversations very much do not feel like "runaway memetic phenomena", they feel like 2 people converging on their values (finding out they dislike each other is included, advancing a dialogue while subtly learning about each other is included).
A dialogue is ruled by human will, Tiktok scrolling is ruled by the recommendation algorithm and more broadly, some alien process of meme spread that we don't understand or control, it's not even purely explained by recommendation algorithm. I doubt that even the recommendation algorithm plus the decisions of the engineers of the algorithm and the entire TikTok codebase would explain it very well.
Discuss
