Somewhere in languagespace, there should be a combination of ~50-200 words that 1) successfully convinces >30% people that Wild Animal Welfare is really important, and then 2) they realize that the society they grew up in is confused, ill, and deranged. A superintelligence could generate this.
The EV for that word combo is big. Orienting people towards reality requires freeing them from the intellectual poverty of our time. Most people today embrace the aging process, assume math trauma is normal, ignore moral uncertainty, and don’t extrapolate the history of technology forward.
This is harder than it looks, it requires lateral thinking and weird knowledge e.g. knowing that most people fear ideas that seem like their friends might judge them negatively for. I wasn’t very impressed with https://www.wildanimalinitiative.org. You need to dazzle. I still think that someone here could pull it off with only a couple hours.
Roll to disbelieve? 50-100 words is only, like, a couple of tweets, so it is really not much time to communicate many new ideas. Consider some of the most influential tweets you’ve ever read (either influential on you personally, or on societal discourse / world events / etc). I think that the most impactful/influential tweets, are gonna be pretty close to the limit of what’s possible when you are just blasting out a standard message to everyone—even with a superintelligence, I doubt there is much room for improvement.
Now, if you were using a superintelligence to target a UNIQUE 50-100 words tailored for each individual person, then IMO the sky’s the limit—a superintelligence could probably get crazy Snow-Crash-esque effects like getting people to commit suicide or to totally change their career / worldview / overall life trajectory.
So, I don’t think the ideal standard (non-personalized) word-combo is that much better than a typical “extremely influential tweet”. Extremely influential tweets are still great and very high-impact, of course! So it would still seem like a great idea to try and hone one’s charisma / ability to craft really persuasive short takes / whatever. Unfortunately, I feel like millions of people are already trying to do this, creating an extremely competitive “marketplace of ideas” (or rather, marketplace of persuasive arguments / takes) where it’s hard for new ideas (like WAW) to break through if they don’t already have an optimized memetic profile. To quote from Yudkowsky’s “Inadequate Equilibria”:
CECIE: In our world, there are a lot of people screaming, “Pay attention to this thing I’m indignant about over here!” In fact, there are enough people screaming that there’s an inexploitable market in indignation. The dead-babies problem can’t compete in that market; there’s no free energy left for it to eat, and it doesn’t have an optimal indignation profile. There’s no single individual villain. The business about competing omega-3 and omega-6 metabolic pathways is something that only a fraction of people would understand on a visceral level; and even if those people posted it to their Facebook walls, most of their readers wouldn’t understand and repost, so the dead-babies problem has relatively little virality. Being indignant about this particular thing doesn’t signal your moral superiority to anyone else in particular, so it’s not viscerally enjoyable to engage in the indignation. As for adding a further scream, “But wait, this matter really is important!”, that’s the part subject to the lemons problem. Even people who honestly know about a fixable case of dead babies can’t emit a trustworthy request for attention.
SIMPLICIO: You’re saying that people won’t listen even if I sound really indignant about this? That’s an outrage!
CECIE: By this point in our civilization’s development, many honest buyers and sellers have left the indignation market entirely; and what’s left behind is not, on average, good.
I don’t intend for this to be entirely a counsel of despair; obviously it is possible to convince people of EA ideas since the movement has experienced very dramatic growth over the past decade. But that growth is happening in a weird, very meta environment… IMO part of EA’s appeal is that we do a good job of appealing to people who have “left the indignation market” (and left other, related markets for things like ideological polarization, etc) and people who have climbed some sort of ladder of developing an increasingly sophisticated worldview / theory of change / etc.
The upshot of that, IMO, is that when we are crafting persuasive arguments, we don’t want to just imitate whatever naively seems like the most successful memetic content. Instead, we want to specifically target sophisticated people who’ve learned to ignore overly-emotional / clickbaity / ideological / etc arguments… eg consider the contrast between the EA Forum and something like the Drudge Report.
Nevertheless—despite all these constraints and limitations—I still think there is tons of untapped potential for crafting shorter, more-convincing, more-expressive takes that do a better job communicating the core ideas of neglected EA cause areas. So I agree that more people should be brainstorming messages and trying to hone that skill.
Now, if you were using a superintelligence to target a UNIQUE 50-100 words tailored for each individual person, then IMO the sky’s the limit—a superintelligence could probably get crazy Snow-Crash-esque effects like getting people to commit suicide or to totally change their career / worldview / overall life trajectory.
It could probably pull this this off for a subsection of highly suggestible people, but I’m skeptical that even a superintelligence could convince most people to change deeply held values with a mere tweet thread.
Yes, there are a lot of potential word combinations out there, but the computer only has a finite amount of time to search through them, and is relying on an unavoidably imperfect model of the target person and the outer world (because of incomplete information and finite computing power).
I think it all comes down to how difficult the attempted persuasion is: I’m sure an AI could convince me to buy a 50$ product, but I don’t see any universe where it can convince me to commit an act of violence against a loved one.
Unfortunately, I feel like millions of people are already trying to do this, creating an extremely competitive “marketplace of ideas” (or rather, marketplace of persuasive arguments / takes) where it’s hard for new ideas (like WAW) to break through if they don’t already have an optimized memetic profile.
I think this goes a long way to completely shut down my argument. So, basically, case closed.
In-person communication is generally better anyway due to continuous feedback, and figuring out how to make those conversations 1) go as well as possible and 2) allow the presentations to remain effective after many people down the telephone chain. It’s definitely important to get bullet pointed lists going, but you also need to present it so that it’s not interpreted as threatening or a show of dominance, it’s harder than you’d intuitively think to make someone accept a message as controversial as Wild Animal Welfare.
Somewhere in languagespace, there should be a combination of ~50-200 words that 1) successfully convinces >30% people that Wild Animal Welfare is really important, and then 2) they realize that the society they grew up in is confused, ill, and deranged. A superintelligence could generate this.
I don’t think this is true, at least taking “convinces” to mean something more substantial than, say, marking the box for “yeah WAS is important” on a survey given immediately after reading.
Even for an arbitrary superintelligence specifically targeted at an individual. ~50-200 words simply isn’t that many to convey complex ideas and accompanying evidence, and it must also use words/phrases that the subject already understands
Somewhere in languagespace, there should be a combination of ~50-200 words that 1) successfully convinces >30% people that Wild Animal Welfare is really important, and then 2) they realize that the society they grew up in is confused, ill, and deranged. A superintelligence could generate this.
The EV for that word combo is big. Orienting people towards reality requires freeing them from the intellectual poverty of our time. Most people today embrace the aging process, assume math trauma is normal, ignore moral uncertainty, and don’t extrapolate the history of technology forward.
This is harder than it looks, it requires lateral thinking and weird knowledge e.g. knowing that most people fear ideas that seem like their friends might judge them negatively for. I wasn’t very impressed with https://www.wildanimalinitiative.org. You need to dazzle. I still think that someone here could pull it off with only a couple hours.
Roll to disbelieve? 50-100 words is only, like, a couple of tweets, so it is really not much time to communicate many new ideas. Consider some of the most influential tweets you’ve ever read (either influential on you personally, or on societal discourse / world events / etc). I think that the most impactful/influential tweets, are gonna be pretty close to the limit of what’s possible when you are just blasting out a standard message to everyone—even with a superintelligence, I doubt there is much room for improvement.
Now, if you were using a superintelligence to target a UNIQUE 50-100 words tailored for each individual person, then IMO the sky’s the limit—a superintelligence could probably get crazy Snow-Crash-esque effects like getting people to commit suicide or to totally change their career / worldview / overall life trajectory.
So, I don’t think the ideal standard (non-personalized) word-combo is that much better than a typical “extremely influential tweet”. Extremely influential tweets are still great and very high-impact, of course! So it would still seem like a great idea to try and hone one’s charisma / ability to craft really persuasive short takes / whatever. Unfortunately, I feel like millions of people are already trying to do this, creating an extremely competitive “marketplace of ideas” (or rather, marketplace of persuasive arguments / takes) where it’s hard for new ideas (like WAW) to break through if they don’t already have an optimized memetic profile. To quote from Yudkowsky’s “Inadequate Equilibria”:
I don’t intend for this to be entirely a counsel of despair; obviously it is possible to convince people of EA ideas since the movement has experienced very dramatic growth over the past decade. But that growth is happening in a weird, very meta environment… IMO part of EA’s appeal is that we do a good job of appealing to people who have “left the indignation market” (and left other, related markets for things like ideological polarization, etc) and people who have climbed some sort of ladder of developing an increasingly sophisticated worldview / theory of change / etc.
The upshot of that, IMO, is that when we are crafting persuasive arguments, we don’t want to just imitate whatever naively seems like the most successful memetic content. Instead, we want to specifically target sophisticated people who’ve learned to ignore overly-emotional / clickbaity / ideological / etc arguments… eg consider the contrast between the EA Forum and something like the Drudge Report.
Nevertheless—despite all these constraints and limitations—I still think there is tons of untapped potential for crafting shorter, more-convincing, more-expressive takes that do a better job communicating the core ideas of neglected EA cause areas. So I agree that more people should be brainstorming messages and trying to hone that skill.
It could probably pull this this off for a subsection of highly suggestible people, but I’m skeptical that even a superintelligence could convince most people to change deeply held values with a mere tweet thread.
Yes, there are a lot of potential word combinations out there, but the computer only has a finite amount of time to search through them, and is relying on an unavoidably imperfect model of the target person and the outer world (because of incomplete information and finite computing power).
I think it all comes down to how difficult the attempted persuasion is: I’m sure an AI could convince me to buy a 50$ product, but I don’t see any universe where it can convince me to commit an act of violence against a loved one.
I think this goes a long way to completely shut down my argument. So, basically, case closed.
In-person communication is generally better anyway due to continuous feedback, and figuring out how to make those conversations 1) go as well as possible and 2) allow the presentations to remain effective after many people down the telephone chain. It’s definitely important to get bullet pointed lists going, but you also need to present it so that it’s not interpreted as threatening or a show of dominance, it’s harder than you’d intuitively think to make someone accept a message as controversial as Wild Animal Welfare.
I don’t think this is true, at least taking “convinces” to mean something more substantial than, say, marking the box for “yeah WAS is important” on a survey given immediately after reading.
I don’t think this is possible,[1] but for an interesting short-story which takes this idea seriously, check out “Understand” by Ted Chiang
Even for an arbitrary superintelligence specifically targeted at an individual. ~50-200 words simply isn’t that many to convey complex ideas and accompanying evidence, and it must also use words/phrases that the subject already understands