2025-01-24# World models I'm currently buildingThis doc is a mix of existing wor
ld models I have and holes in said models. I'm trying to fill some of these hole
s. The doc is not very well organised relative to how organised a doc I could pr
oduce if needed. Often the more time I spend on a doc, the shorter it gets. I'm
hoping that happens here too.I'm mostly going to study this stuff by myself. How
ever if you would like to help me by speeding up the process, please [contact me
](../contact_me.md). If your attempt to help me answer these questions is in goo
d-faith, I will be grateful to you no matter how successful or failed your attem
pt is.*tldr* How do we safely navigate technological progress or personal growth
in a world without privacy? How does tech progress shape incentives and culture
, and how do incentives and culture shape tech progress?#### DISCLAIMERIt is dif
ficult to predict the future without altering it. My writings may have unintende
d effects on the future. (I'd like more accurate likelihood estimates of these e
ffects, both mean outcome and tail outcomes.) - I am aware that simply by thinki
ng of a question like "will some dictator implant microphones in everyone", I am
personally increasing the probability that this ends up happening. Once I have
thought something I'm unlikely to forget it, and will eventually say it to other
s. Eventually one of them may leak it to the internet and eventually the idea ma
y reach the relevant politically powerful people who can implement it in real li
fe. (LLM embedding search >> Google, don't underestimate it.) - This is unfortun
ate, as my platonic ideal is to be able to think through various possible future
s (alone, or with a group of research collaborators) without actually influencin
g the world, pick the best future, and then only start taking steps that push th
e world towards that future. - However I'm still going to write publicly about c
ertain topics as that's one of the best ways for someone in my situation to get
feedback.## Topic: Which organisations are capable of keeping secrets in present
and near future (10-20 years from now)?Specific questions - How easy is it for
TSMC to backdoor all their chips so they can secretely capture private keys, for
example? - How many S&P500 companies have publicly available evidence of their
key business knowledge being leaked to China? (Be it via hacking or espionage or
voluntary disclosure by ex-employees etc) - Is it possible to read WiFi IP pack
ets using handmade radio? - Is it technically possible to implant microphones in
the human body? What about cameras? - Is gigapixel photography from 10 km altit
ude possible as of today? What about in next 10 years? - Am I missing any techni
cal challenges in paying ~10,000 drone pilots to surveill a city 24x7x365?Broade
r questions - How much time does it take to write code that understands metadata
? - Suppose all the world's computers were hacked and their data ended up in N
SA datacentres (or their Chinese equivalent, which keeps getting renamed). Suppo
se all text-based formats are converted to plaintext, existing metadata the user
s may have left is preserved as is, and NSA appends metadata of the MAC, IP, tim
estamp, etc of capture. - How much software developer time would be require to
make sense of most of this metadata. This could be to answer individual queries
on "suspicious" inviduals or analyse aggregate trends (such as societal respone
s to certain govt policies). - Will there be more espionage orgs operating indep
endent of nation states or elites (major politicians, billionaires) in the futur
e? - Internet and information tech has reduced the financial cost of both jou
rnalism and espionage. Cameras, hard disks, internet bandwidth, smartphone proce
ssors are all much cheaper than 10 or 20 years ago. - Independent journalism
has clearly increased in many countries, most notably the US. - Independent c
yberhacking has clearly increased. (Although it's less clear to me if independen
t hackers are able to keep up with state-spnsored cyberhackers. I may have to re
ad more.) - Independent espionage has also increased, see The Mole (anti-Nort
h Korea) or Edward Snowden (anti-US), but it is less clear to me if these are is
olated examples or the beginning of a trend. - Theory (based on incentives an
d culture) says independent espionage should go up, I'm waiting on the empirical
evidence though. - Speed advantages - Individuals tolerated by society benefi
t a lot from being public. Hiring, fundraising, research feedback, making friend
s and dating, nearly everything goes better if you can do it on the internet. Fo
r instance, people can prove trustworthiness and competence faster, and obtain b
enefits from other people faster (advice, first-hand personal info, allies, etc)
. - Same goes for orgs such as companies. Orgs that are tolerated by the (peop
le with power in) society can move faster if they opensource a lot of their proc
esses and outputs (except their key competitive advantages). For example, hiring
, research, etc. Also they can move faster, and win race conditions against orgs
that try to maximise secrecy. - What are the psychological effects of keeping s
ecrets? What are the failure modes of various groups that try to keep secrets? T
his could be small groups like families or C-suite executives of a company, or b
ig groups like military research projects or intelligence orgs. - **I vaguely
suspect that the best way to keep important secrets in the modern world is to fo
und a ~~cult~~ community of a few hundred people that blackholes information as
follows:** people disallowed from leaving the geographic area for >30 years, int
ernet download allowed but upload disallowed, everyone is forced to find both wo
rk relationships and personal relationships inside the area, raise families with
in the area, etc. - I want more data on previous attempts at founding secret-k
eeping orgs in order to prove my hypothesis right or wrong. - Some major conce
rns of founding such a group are ensuring people in it lead emotionally healthy
lives, ensuring ideological diversity (in both thought and action), and allowing
people to leave relationships that don't suit them to find new ones. Hence I'm
biased towards inviting a few hundred people rather than just two (such as a mar
riage) or ten (such as the C-suite executives of a company). - How do you actual
ly secure a computer against adversaries with billions in funding? - Physical
methods in cybersecurity seem to trump both hardware-based and software-based me
thods. Hardware-based methods can be beaten by hardware backdoors installed by m
anufacturers. It seems better to assume there's an evil demon possessing your co
mputer, and develop security with that in mind. - Most secure way of erasing
a private key from RAM is to cut the electricity. Otherwise cold boot attack is
possible. - Most secure way of erasing a private key from disk is to smash
it with a hammer. Otherwise a microscope may be able to recover the data from di
sk. - Most secure way of verifying someone's public key is to meet them in p
erson. Video footage with your face and the key is the second-best option, atlea
st while AI cannot produce convincing deepfakes. - Most secure of ensuring
no information leaves the machine is to weld the machine into a Faraday cage.
- Most secure way of sending a message to another user without third-parties r
ecording metadata is probably printing it on paper and sending a post. Copying t
o disk and sending that by post is second-best. Sending the message over the int
ernet is worst in terms of preventing third-parties from capturing the message a
nd associated metadata (timestamp, message size, sender and receiver identities)
. The server host and any other intermediary servers that are hit (think google
analytics or cloudflare) can sell this data to data brokersa, fiber optic capabl
es can be tapped, wireless signals can be triangulated and routers can be hacked
. - I wonder if there's way to build a physical firewall that requires near-ze
ro trust in other people to work. Like, build radio or networking equipment that
isn't manufactured in some centralised backdoorable factory, so you can verify
what's inside every IP packet exiting and entering your machine. It seems okay f
or the typical use case if this slows down internet speed by many orders of magn
itude. - As a dictator, how to build 100% surveillance instead of 99%, to increa
se the stability of your dictatorship? - This is basically a redteaming exerci
se. Put yourself in the dictator's shoes and then put yourself in the shoes of s
omeone trying to evade him. - The "predictions shape reality" disclaimer esp
ecially applies here. For instance I might end up finding solutions more creativ
e than the average engineer hired by a dictator is capable of, which could impli
cate me personally. I wish someone had clearer solutions to how redteaming is to
be done safely. - Political considerations - I currently model various le
vels of democracy as states in a markov chain, each state has some probability o
f being stable or decaying to a different state. - The difference in half-li
fe of a dictatorship with 99% surveillance and 100% surveillance is large. Peopl
e organising revolts are the 1% who will endure the maximum inconvenience to byp
ass surveillance. - Very little technology is needed to organise a revolt. J
ust a few people (then a few hundred, then a few thoushand etc) meeting at a com
mon location is enough. There are ways to organise a revolt even if surveillance
can successfully enforce curfew. Mics alone are not enough because this 1% of p
eople can communicate using pen and paper when organising. Cameras are needed fo
r surveillance. - OODA loop: Information capture, analysis, decision-making, e
nforcing penalty or reward - O: Information capture - This seems like
the hardest part, both at technical level (doing the engineering work and buildi
ng infrastructure) and cultural level (building a culture where everyone is okay
with it) - Hence I've spent a lot of time analysing information capture i
n particular. - O: Information analysis - Becoming easier with LLM-bas
ed search, language translation, etc. As of 2025-01, LLMs are not smart enough t
o fully automate surveillance. At the extreme end, this 1% of protestors could i
nvent an alternate language to communicate. An army of human censors must assist
the system. - D: Decision-making - Some edge cases may be worth analy
sing, but in general decision-making does not feel too complicated to me, from t
he pov of a dictator. A dictator can often be overly harsh on ambigious edge cas
es, punish a number of false positives, and not face any repercussions themselve
s. - A: Enforcing reward or penalty - This doesn't feel hard to me eit
her, from the pov of a dictator. As long as the population of protestors is not
large, if everyone has been ID-ed, one can cut off their access to all digital s
ervices (SIM cards, ID checkpoints, bank accounts) and send policemen to arrest
them. As of 2025 they may be able to escape arrest, but they will have restricte
d access to the rest of society they wish to influence. - How to capture 100%
of human-generated information? People move a lot. - Technical Option 1: Mov
e the cameras and mics on ground along with the person - Mics and cameras
in static locations can be escaped. Unless you literally imprison people, total
land area to cover with mics and cameras is too large to do perfect surveillance
this way. - If the mic/camera travels on ground there can be charging sta
tions, but robotics knowledge in 2024 is not good enough to traverse uneven terr
ain. - This could change in future, especially if AI for robotics improv
es due to scaling laws or related advances. - Technical Option 2: The person
carries the camera and mic - The person carrying the mic/ camera themselv
es is possible (such as a smartphone or an implant) - Biologically implant
ed microphones and cameras seem like one obvious way to do perfect surveillance,
assuming you could engineer culture to the point everyone was okay with it.
- Technical Option 3: Acquire more data per camera or mic - Update: I wil
l look more into satellite/aircraft/drone imagery when I find time. - One
can increase land area covered per mic or camera, by increasing resolution of ea
ch individual mic or camera. However it is difficult to get 100% rather than 99%
surveillance this way. Maybe you can make it illegal to make noise or build opa
que buildings, and ensure 100% data acquisition. This seems difficult. Unless yo
u do this, the 1% of protestors can deliberately make noise to drown out their a
udio or hide inside an opaque building to drown out leaked light / EM radition.
- If increasing area covered per camera or mic, it seems best to place it
in the air as opposed to at ground level. - Image and video data are acqui
rable at three altitudes: Space satellties (>200 km), aircraft/helicopters (1-10
km) and small quadcopter drones (<1 km) - (People often also call AI-dr
iven helicopters and aircraft as drones, I find that terminology confusing. UAV
is a better terminology IMO. A lot of military "drones" are aircraft driven by A
I.) - [Example of satellite data as of 2025: Sentinel 2 by ESA, open sou
rce data](https://browser.dataspace.copernicus.eu/). You can browse your favouri
te city here. Open source satellite data is currently at 10 metre resolution and
private satellite data is currently at 0.5 metre resolution - I have
to look into whether telescopes of future satellites can improve resolution beyo
nd this. - I'll have to look into satellites at lower orbits and wheth
er orbital decay is solveable in practice. - Gigapixel photography is be
coming possible in the last 10 years, by digitally stitching together images fro
m many megapixel lenses. This could allow obtaining sufficient resolution from i
ndividual images of an entire city (let's say 30 km x 30 km) at 10 km altitude,
from a helicopter or aircraft. - I need to read more on this. Out of a
ll the approaches, my guess is this is the one that has highest odds of working
first. - US army has already [commissioned gigapixel photography from
helicopter](https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-16358851). - Obtaining d
ata from drones at 100 m altitudes is possible, but requires multiple drones (dr
one swarm) to coordinate and divide the region into smaller regions per drone.
- As of 2025, AI knowledge is not good enough to autonomously pilot a d
rone swarm for this purpose. Travel paths can be fixed, but one needs to be able
to handle errors autonomously, like winds, collisions, internet connection loss
, etc. - This could change in the next few years, if AI improves abili
ty to autonomously pilot drones. - Paying a large number of drone pilo
ts is possible but expensive, depending on how many drone pilots need to be paid
. This depends on frequency of snapshots required. See below. - Flight
time - Electric drone flight time < Energy stored per unit mass bat
tery / Energy required per unit mass payload per unit of flying time = (100-300
kWh/kg) / (100-300 kWh / kg / h) - Flight time is typically below an
hour for electric-powered drones, after which one typically swaps the battery w
ith a charged one. Gas-powered drones can run as long as a day due to higher cal
orific value, but have been mostly abandoned by industry for other reasons (what
reasons??). P.S. Has anyone tried hydrogen? - Flight time might (or
might not??) be improvable by custom designing a drone that can also cruise alo
ng the wind. I'm not sure if this is feasible at low altitude though, I'll have
to read more. - Maximum flying speed of (small quadcopter) drones de
veloped so far is ~400 km/h, which could improve the numbers somewhat.
- Area sweeped per drone - Total area sweeped per flight = Flight t
ime * Max drone speed * (Altitude / 2tan(FOV/2)) < (1 hour * 100 km/h * 0.1 km)
/ (2 * tan(90 degrees / 2)) = 20 km^2 - Assuming city area of 30 km
* 30 km, this means 45 flights of 1-hour each to cover the entire city.
- You get one snapshot per region every 2 days, per drone pilot hired. Hirin
g 1000 drone pilots could get a snapshot every ~3 minutes. Hiring 20,000 drone p
ilots means the drones could all be positioned at static locations and ensure fu
ll coverage ((30 km * 30 km) / (200 m * 200 m)). - Flight altitude
- If higher camera resolutions are used, one can increase flight al
titude and area covered per flight. Hence the number of people who must be hired
can be reduced. - Drone could do information analysis on-board, if it
has a GPU and disk with embedding search data (such as embeddings of a facial r
ecognition database). If done this way, significant internet bandwidth would not
be required to get useful information about "suspicious" activities or people f
rom the drone. However this also means the data on-board has higher chances of b
eing stolen. - Am I missing any technical difficulties in this entire
plan? The fastest way to investigate would probably be to test it out using: off
-the-shelf drone, SIM-card internet, SOTA open source facial recognition model a
nd embedding model, construct your own embedding database from scratch by flying
the drone. - I also want to look into hot air-balloon suspended cameras
. This is a very old technique but can now be done with modern camera resolution
s, possibly even gigapixel cameras. - Technical Option 4: Track data footpr
ints besides image/audio/video - For example one could setup 1 million DN
A collection sites across the city, and try to (partially or fully) automate tra
nsporting samples to the sequencer. As of 2025, I don't know of any such tech th
at can be developed within 10 years, but ofcourse this could change in the futur
e beyond 10 years. - Non-technical Option 1: - You can engineer ince
ntives such that everyone reports on themselves or report on each other (example
: stalinist russia), but I'm unsure how you get beyond 99% surveillance with thi
s sort of system either. A group of close friends and family can collectively ch
oose to not report each other, and distance themselves from the rest of society
so no one else can report them. Can you prevent people from distancing themselve
s from others? Maybe I should read more about the historical examples where this
stuff has been tried. - Non-tehnical Option 2: - North Korea's tech
nique of keeping the population illiterate and starving is effective, but still
only reaches <99%. There will need to be a 1% of cvilians who are well-fed and e
ducated from diverse intellectual sources.## Topic: What are the consequences of
this reduced secrecy?Broader questions - **Assuming no organisation can maintai
n significant lead time on any technology (and it will immediately get copied by
orgs united by a different morality and culture), what are the implications for
technological progress in the future?** - There is an assumption embedded her
e, that no org can keep secrets. I'm unsure if it is true. Supposing it is true
though, what are its implications? - The most obvious real world example of th
is is US versus China, neither seems able to keep significant secrets from the o
ther. - However I want to figure out general principles here, and not spend to
o much time studying individual examples like Obama or Michael Hayden or whoever
. Metaphorically speaking, I want to study the dynamics of a particular initial
position of Chess960, not how Magnus Carlson plays that particular initial posit
ion. This also connects to ideas on theories of history. Whether one should stud
y game theory, sociology etc, versus the psychology of individual leaders, depen
ds on which theory of history one subscribes to. - Will inability of organisatio
ns to keep secrets force homogeneity in the behaviour of civilians, and punish p
eople who behave in outlier ways? Will this reduce the rate of invention of tech
nology in future? - Many important technologies in history seem to be invented
by individuals who the median member of that country or society would not be ab
le to relate to, and not easily tolerate as a friend / neighbour / family member
. - This relates to another confusion of mine - how do you merge the high-trus
t benefits of living in (some) small towns with the individual freedoms of livin
g in (some) cities? It seems to me like high trust and reduced individual freedo
m are both causally downstream from the same thing, namely densely connected soc
ial graph that can gossip information about you. - Also seems related to ideas
on class. My guess is that people of both low (labour) socioeconomic class and
high (elite) socioeconomic class are on average more dependent on maintaing unch
anging social ties if they want to climb up within their class. (I'm not talking
about climbing up a class, that is much harder.) People of middle (knowledge) c
lass are less dependent on social ties if they wish to climb positions within th
eir class. Being dependent on static social ties constraints people's behaviour
(and actions and thoughts) along certain dimensions. How will the class structur
e interact with increased surveillance? (Tbh I really want to get more raw data
here, what is it like in the classes outside my own? I have some data already bu
t want more.) - Also relates to ideas around morality. Living close to a set o
f people often increases social pressure to have shared values, but it especiall
y increases social pressure to have shared ideas on morality. - Also relates t
o ideas around physical safety being 2nd level on Maslow's hierarchy, and how mi
litaries couple physical safety with cultural preservation. - There's also psy
chological literature worth reviewing on all these topics, be it secrecy or phys
ical safety.I haven't written a lot of points here because I'm still making up m
y mind on a lot of the implications.## Topic: How much power do science fiction
writers and early enthusiasts have in deciding which technologies humanity choos
es to pursue?Specific questions - Would Shane Legg and Demis Hassabis have cofou
nded Deepmind if Eliezer Yudkowsky hadn't talked about AI at all in time interva
l 2000-2008? - Shane Legg claims he was inspired by Ray Kurzweil. Yudkowsky he
lped broadcast views of people like Ray Kurzweil by organising MIRI and Singular
ity Summit. - Yudkowsky got funding and attention from Peter Thiel, and may ha
ve also helped Deepmind get their seed round from Thiel. (As of 2014 Founder's F
und owned over 25% of Deepmind)Broader questions - I generally want to read 1990
-2015 history of biotech. Who or what inspired Illumina's parent companies that
worked on next generation sequencing? Who or what inspired Kary Mullis to work o
n PCR? Who inspired the inventors of CRISPR? Who inspired Kevin Esvelt to work o
n gene drives? - The standard pipeline for how technologies come into society: s
cifi -> theory -> practical (lab demonstration) -> engineering (scale up). If an
individual of my socioeconomic class wanted to maximise their influence on this
pipeline, my hypothesis is they should study scifi and scifi -> theory stages.
I would like evidence that proves my hypothesis is wrong. - Example of evidenc
e that would prove me wrong: a list of technologies that had scifi writers and e
arly enthusiasts, got proven in lab demos, failed to obtain funding for scale up
at first, got scaled up many decades later and significantly changed society wh
en they did. This would prove that studying the engineering/scaleup and funding
landscape is more important. - For example, world war 1 and 2 lead to the crea
tion of a lot of tech in 20th century. I would want to understand whether this w
as primarily due to ideas and culture inspiring researchers, or whether the incr
eased funding was more important. - Another example of evidence that would pro
ve me wrong: a list of technologies that had scifi writers and early enthusiasts
, got many researchers interested who ran experiments, did not achieve successfu
l lab demos, but got proven in lab many years decades later once some other nece
ssary precursor technology was invented. This would prove that studying the prac
tical research is more important as many plausibly good ideas turn out to just n
ot work despite inspiring people. - **If my hypothesis is right, could a handf
ul of people consistently meme-ing in favour of BCIs or gene drives or whatever
for five years, basically bring these technologies into existence?** Assume the
memes are technical enough and interesting enough to attract the curiosity of re
searchers in the relevant research fields. And assume most outlier-brilliant res
earchers are driven primarily by curiosity not altruism or money or fame, which
I think has been true throughout history.## Topic: Which technologies can possib
ly influence the future of humanity?Specific STEM questions: - What is the conse
nsus among neuroscientists for Neuralink's timelines? - Did MKULTRA actually dis
cover anything useful? Could it have discovered anything useful, if ran for more
time with more funding? - Many documents are FOIA-ed but I haven't spend enou
gh time reading them. My guess is they didn't achieve much. - How much useful wo
rk did Biopreparat actually do? - My guess is they didn't achieve much, but I
wanna know the facts.Broader technical questions - I'd like to study pharmacolog
y and neuroscience till I'm no longer at a beginner level, as those are the two
of the following six categories I have least knowledge about. - Human (or hum
an-like) brains are likely to shape the future. Technology that will directly al
ter what human brains do seems worth paying special attention to. 1. Infor
mation tech - search engines, interest-based communities etc 2. Digital min
ds - superintelligent AI, mind uploads, etc 3. Neuroscience - brain compute
r interfaces, etc 4. Pharmacology - barbiturates ("truth serum"), psychedel
ics, opiates etc 5. Genetics - CRISPR, etc especially if done to alter huma
n brains 6. Nanotechnology - especially bionanomachines - I'm particularly
interested in studying MKULTRA, history of barbiturates and history of psychedel
ics. MKULTRA is AFAIK rare example of pharmacology research with the explicit go
al of altering human brains and human society as a result. Also it's aimed at ch
anging human brains, not fixing "disabilities". - Are there ethical pharma res
earch agendas not aimed at fixing disabilities? - As of today, pharmacology se
ems to operate more on the reactive/emotional/primitive part of the brain, somet
imes with the hope this also percolates to higher order cognition. For example i
njecting oxytocin can increase feelings of safety, injecting adrenaline can redu
ce feelings promoting self-preservation, SSRIs can affect serotonin levels and h
ence mood regulation, and so on. But what exact thoughts they cause in the mind
is less predictable or controllable. Similarly, lasting changes in worldview as
a result of the drug are less predictable. - I want to study more about bioweap
ons research. I suspect its mostly borrowing techniques from biotech that I'm al
ready vaguely aware of, but I wanna study more and confirm. - I want to study mo
re about possibilities for biotech automation - DNA sequencing is automated an
d cheap but the process to figure out whether any given sequence is actually use
ful (often gene cloning and protein expression) is not fully automated or cheap.
Current cost is ~$100 for reagents and 10-100 researcher hours. - This seems
like the hamming question for biotech (as per my limited knowledge) so I'd like
to look more into it. - Update: Nuclera seems relevant. [Demo video](https://w
ww.nuclera.com/resource-library/how-to-set-up-a-run/) Credits: a friend - I want
to study more materials science. I know very little about it today. - Most ST
EM research fields go through three phases: 1. Invent new tool to (cheaply)
acquire lots of data from some physical system 2. Acquire lots of data - fro
m nature or from experiments 3. Understand the physical system using all thi
s data - Step 2 and step 3 often inform each other and run in an iterative l
oop - Step 1 could be the invention of microscope or cyclotron or radio tele
scope or anything else really. - Step 1 usually depends heavily on getting the
right materials - A lot of practical inventions also seem to depend on materi
al science. For instance fusion energy research is AFAIK basically containining
10M Kelvin plasma using fields, an alternative pathway might (???) be discoverin
g materials that can contain it. Quantum computing research will benefit from ha
ving better nanomaterials and better superconducting materials I guess? - I un
derstand an intro to materials science textbook won't teach me about better supe
rconductors or whatever, but it still seems worthwhile to study.Broader non-STEM
questions - I'd like to build a "gears-level" high-level framework of the more
indirect ways technology shapes society. (Not the stuff listed in the six catego
ries above) - Often technology shifts offense-defence balances between various
actors in society - individuals, small groups and large groups. An oversimplifi
ed way of categorising some historical examples would be as follows: - Tech
that increases power of individuals relative to small groups: cities (drainage
systems, etc), printing press, guns, cheap airplane fuel - Tech that increa
ses power of large groups relative to individuals: radio, social media ? -
Tech that increases power of large groups relative to both small groups and indi
viduals: nuclear bombs, nuclear energy, cheap steel - Also some technology giv
es power to certain individuals over others: - Tech that increases power of
old people relative to young people: elderly healthcare (treatments for cancer,
poor eyesight, neuro disorders etc), anti-aging if ever discovered - Tech
that increases power of women relative to men: condoms? - Tech that gives powe
r to large groups of people (relative to small groups and individuals) fuels mos
t of geopolitics as far as I understand - Countries and large corporations w
ant to be the first to discover and deploy some tech and then use their military
, spies, immigration policy, export controls, R&D budget etc etc to monopolise o
r maintain lead time on tech. US tech policymaking is the most obvious example.
- Large groups that have achieved monopoly or lead time in some tech often u
se this as a bargaining chip to export their culture or religion or whatever mor
ality unites that group in the first place. - Very often a large group of pe
ople controls production of some tech (individuals or small groups can't produce
it), but once produced, individual units are sold as a commodity which gives po
wer to individuals. Tech wih centralised production, decentralised ownership is
very common, and has geopolitical dynamics more predictable than tech that is no
t like this. For example, geopolitics of solar PV modules is easier to model tha
n geopolitics of railway networks IMO. - I'm choosing to use a game theory len
s here, by modelling cost of attack, defence, coordination of various actors in
society. - Incentives predictably shape behaviour of most people, even if so
me ambitious individuals are able to break out of them. - Over past 300 year
s technological progress has been very fast relative to human lifespans, so ever
y generation faces incentives different from the previous generation. One can im
agine a hypothetical civilisation with slow technological progress, where the ex
isting technologies create incentives that make people's behaviour more predicta
ble in certain ways across many generations, even if we know nothing about the p
sychology of the individual people or the details of the culture their future so
ciety creates. - I am somewhat optimistic that studying incentive structures
created by tech will help figure out which tech is worth pursuing versus not, a
nd ensure better trajectories in the future when people like me may no longer be
around to think about it. **(This is a plan I think a lot about.)** - When
deciding which tech is worth pursuing, many people today use a lens of "will the
good guys get the tech before the bad guys" for some pre-defined idea of "good
guys" that matches their moral and other values. I am not so optimistic on this
plan. This is because as of 2025, a) we seem to lack the ability to lock-in who
the elites of post-2100 society will be or what their values will be, and b) we
seem to lack the ability to lock-in our society to a particular paradigm of tech
nological progress sufficiently, such that elites post-2100 are left with no mea
ningful choices and everything is already pre-determined. - I am also not o
ptimistic about the plan of just trusting people post-2100 to figure it out, and
not thinking too hard about it today. If there are ways for us to exert influen
ce far into the future, I think it is good for us to try to do so. Future people
are not to trusted blindly IMO, by default I assume they're capable of making t
he same mistakes in governance that our society in 2025 already makes. - I wan
t a framework that I can fit all the historical examples into, right now my fram
ework is messy (not "gears-level").## Topic: Information people don't feel safe
enough to shareSpecific questions - Is there any way to increase public access t
o therapy-client records from over 30-60 years ago? Is it a good idea to do this
? What about personal diaries and letters? - Is there any way to increase the nu
mber of therapy-client records collected from today onwards that will be release
d publicly 30-60 years from now? Is it a good idea to do this?Broader questions
- How do you design societies where more people feel safe enough to share more i
nformation about their personal lies publicly? - A lot of information about in
dividual human experiences does not reach the public domain because people don't
feel safe enough to share it publicly. (They're many reasons for this and they'
re often valid, from the perspective of that individual). - This information i
s however extremely useful, be to empathise with other individuals at a personal
level or provide them useful advice with their life problems or make policy rec
ommendations to govts that benefit individuals or even design new forms of govt
more conducive to individuals. - Iteration speed of psychology as a field is s
lower than it would be if there were public transcripts of conversations. Each t
herapist must form hypotheses based on the limited private data they have, and t
heir guesses of whether to trust hypotheses from other therapists who also work
with private data. (This is related to my posts on knowledge versus common knowl
edge, common knowledge can bring down govts or dominant research paradigms for e
xample, widespread knowledge alone cannot). - This also applies broadly to ind
ividuals trying to help other individuals with personal advice (which is often a
tleast partly based on psychology). It doesn't have to be restricted to people t
rained as psychologists/therapists/whatever. - How to best nudge people to leave
behind their private information (such as that shared only with friends and fam
ily), so that some years after they die we get this information in public domain
? - I want to study more about the culture around this, in different countries
. What are the different cultural attitudes to personal and sensitive informatio
n? - I should also probably looking into succession planning for big tech comp
anies. What happens once (say) Mark Zuckerberg dies and his (Facebook's) entire
plaintext database fits inside a football. Who gets the football next? - How to
better organise all the historical information we do have on personal and emotio
nally sensitive matters? I would like to spend some time looking at existing dat
asets, to see if I can convert everything to plaintext and embedding search it.#
# Topic: Interplay between incentives and cultureDefinition: In general when I t
alk about incentives I usually mean these three: social (people giving you respe
ct/compassion/admiration/sex/etc), financial (people giving you money/food/goods
/place to live/etc) and safety (people imprisoning/injuring/raping/murdering you
, or protecting you from others who might). Doing "X" gets you more respect or m
oney or safety, or not doing "X" gets you less of it. Maslow's hierarchy is a de
cent model, if you ignore the ordering of the hierarchy.Broader questions - How
much power do elites have to take decisions that go against their local incentiv
es and local culture? - (For example if the prime minister of a country is in
favour of declaring war but other people in his party and other parties are not,
how much power does this person have to single-handedly shift the situation?)
- What are the psychological traits required to do this? How do you train more
of our elites with these traits? - What is the political knowledge required to
do this sort of manoeuvre? Can we teach our elites to do more of this? - (Yes
I am biased lol, I think most elites don't do anything interesting with their l
ives. This is causally downstream of incentives and culture of the people around
them. "Interesting" is defined as per my tastes, ofcourse each elite may have t
heir own unique tastes.) - How do you ethically run experiments to see the outco
mes of unusual incentives (social, financial, safety) and culture on people? -
There is a lot of existing data available to be collected, on how existing ince
ntives and culture influence people. The three socioeconomic classes have differ
ent cultures and incentives, people in different countries have different cultur
es and incentives, people in different professions have different cultures and i
ncentives. - But this data is finite, and it would help to be able to run expe
riments of different circumstances not occurring naturally. - Ethical problems
abound, for instance threatening someone's life or disrespecting them or depriv
ing them of important information about the world is usually considered unethica
l in the context of a research experiment. What are some techniques to bypass th
is? - Theory goes only so far when predicting human behaviour, experimentation
is needed. (I mean, I basically see STEM versus non-STEM as prediction and cont
rol of systems not including and including human beings respectively. Human brai
ns are the most complex known object in the observable universe and predicting t
hem with >90% probability is hard in many situations.) - Hmm I should prolly f
irst make a list of experiments I'd love to run, assuming ethics is not an issue
. Then filter the list on ethics. Will update this section when I do. - How to t
hink about morality and how to teach morality in a world where morality is depen
dent on circumstances? - Different people face different incentives and cultur
e. A moral principle that is easy to follow in one person's situation is difficu
lt to follow in another person's situation. For example honesty is generally eas
ier when you have some money saved than if you don't, because if someone dislike
s your honesty and is abusive in response, you have more options to escape them
or fight back. - A significant threshold for whether an ideology or institutio
n has power over you is whether it has shaped your sense of right and wrong. For
example (some) communists believing private property is bad and theft is okay,
or (some) anarchists believing big govts are bad and tax evasion is okay, or (so
me) religious people believing sex before marriage is not okay and denying coupl
es houses for rent, etc. - Morality is a political question, as whichever ideo
logy or group can recruit more soldiers to be morally okay killing enemy soldier
s in its name is one that will be more powerful. Political circumstances of a so
ciety change with time, and this correlates with changes in moral thinking of a
society. - People generally suck at understanding is-ought distinction. - Pe
ople (including me) also suck at imagining what they would be like if they were
born in hypothetical cultures they are not actually a part of. - The practical
result is people find it very hard to understand what morality is like from the
perspective of someone in a sufficiently different circumstance than them. -
Will the internet force homogenisation of our ideas of morality worldwide? Or do
es an eternal culture war just become the new normal? I'm guessing it'll be a mi
x of both. I want to build a more gears-level model for memetics with a focus on
morality.## Topic: Miscellaneous - What do "replicators" in politics look like?
- Businesses that hire very few people and sell self-contained products are e
asier to replicate than other businesses, because people are harder to predict o
r control than physical systems. For example: a large farm with automated equipm
ent is easier to manage than a farming village with thousands of labourers. -
What are some easy-to-replicate involve-less-people playbooks in politics or non
-STEM more broadly? A lot of political events seem to me to be one-off events wi
thout an underlying theory that will enable replicating them in other contexts.
- I would love to discover/invent playbooks for regime change or good tech pol
icy or maintaining law and order etc. that are replicable across multiple cultur
al contexts. - A major bottleneck here is that law and order in many groups (i
ncluding nation states) plays two roles at the same time - protecting physical s
afety of its members (which is low on maslow's hierarchy), and preserving cultur
e of its members (which can be higher level on maslow's hierarchy). Forming a mi
litary that is loyal to certain values is often seen as instrumentally valuable
to preserving those values in the world. **I'd be particularly excited about way
s to decouple physical safety from cultural preservation.** - Why didn't the US
nuke USSR cities immediately after nuking Japan to establish a nuclear monoppoly
, before USSR got nukes? Are the transcripts of these conversations available? (
Between the people who were pro-nuke and the people who were anti-) - Should I j
ust stop caring as much about grammar and spelling in my writing, and invent mor
e shorthands? - English in 2024 is more concise than English from the middle a
ges, this is good as it reduces cognitive load, and saves time. - I sometimes
want to invent jargon for concepts. I want to skip articles (a, an, the), ignore
verb conjugation, skip pronouns sometimes, etc. I suspect future humans will be
doing this anyway. - I don't want to raise the entry barrier for people viewi
ng my work though, atleast while my work is not that popular. My current guess i
s that this is a change I should try to nudge people towards once I'm a lot more
popular. - How good are Israeli research univerities exactly? - After US, UK,
China, Israel seems like it might occupy 4th place in any tech race. Israel is
nuclear-armed (hence won't listen to US or China) + great cyberhacking/espionage
(so they can steal everyone's research without much lag time) + decent research
talent (so they can implement stolen research)