Basically, I want to make some viral thing before I die.
Sunday, August 22, 2010
Saturday, July 10, 2010
Be Impressed
When would you say this to someone?
To the human subconscious, a statement like that is a powerful command. And I bet you know exactly what I'm talking about, now that I've brought it up: When you tell people they're making a positive impression on you, they automatically turn up the behavior that caused it.
If you want to get more out of the people around you, you need to start the virtuous cycle by noticing when their effect on you is even the slightest bit more positive than usual, and acting pleased.
And if there's someone who never pleases you, maybe part of the reason is that your consistently cold reactions to that person have flattened the reinforcement gradient that would normally amplify their positive behaviors over time.
Be appreciative whenever anyone behaves in what you judge to be the top 20% of their range. And if you want your reaction to cause an even bigger shift in their motivational dynamic, then kick it up a notch: be impressed.
"Thanks for doing such a great job on this project. I'm happy you're taking on more and more responsibility."You probably think you'd say this when someone has impressed you with their performance. But what if the person's performance is merely borderline acceptable, and you give some constructive criticism, and yet you still say it? Then you've performed a Jedi mind trick.
To the human subconscious, a statement like that is a powerful command. And I bet you know exactly what I'm talking about, now that I've brought it up: When you tell people they're making a positive impression on you, they automatically turn up the behavior that caused it.
If you want to get more out of the people around you, you need to start the virtuous cycle by noticing when their effect on you is even the slightest bit more positive than usual, and acting pleased.
And if there's someone who never pleases you, maybe part of the reason is that your consistently cold reactions to that person have flattened the reinforcement gradient that would normally amplify their positive behaviors over time.
Be appreciative whenever anyone behaves in what you judge to be the top 20% of their range. And if you want your reaction to cause an even bigger shift in their motivational dynamic, then kick it up a notch: be impressed.
Monday, May 31, 2010
What Is My Purpose?
You've probably asked yourself the question, "What is my
purpose?" Most people do, and then they die without ever hearing a satisfying answer. Others
latch on to some arbitrary answer and feel like their curiosity has been
sated, even though it hasn't really been fed.
It's easy to see that the question can be asked more precisely. You probably want an answer that was determined before you were born, right? By an entity that can be said to have "created" you in some sense? OK, we can work with that.
If you're in the habit of asking such "deep mysterious questions", you'll notice that it usually doesn't make sense to try to answer them as they are posed. Instead, the way to make the mystery go away is to explain what happens in your brain that makes you feel such a question is meaningful to pose.
Your brain generates questions to fill in gaps in your mental model of the world. But sometimes you start with an inaccurate mental model. So when you ask a question that makes sense to you, it doesn't necessarily constitute a meaningful question about the world.
In this case, the inaccurate mental model at fault is the concept of "purpose". Human thoughts are constructed out of building blocks that are hardwired into our brain. Our intuitive ontology includes concepts like "object", "momentum", "mood", and in particular, "purpose".
Our intuitive notion of purpose isn't perfect, as I will explain, but it is tied to meaningful observations. For example, we correctly intuit that a sundial is a lot more "purposeful" than a pile of rocks. That's because, in order to judge "purposefulness", we subconsciously make a distinction about why each thing exists:
Even if you'd never heard of a sundial, and you didn't know about the time-telling objective, you would subconsciously assume that there's some criterion the sundial satisfies, and that some "optimization process" out there only creates things that satisfy that criterion. We're programmed, correctly, to conclude there's an optimization process at work when we see something that looks a lot more improbable than a pile of rocks.
When we detect an optimization process at work, we intuitively model it as if it's like a person who is consciously trying to achieve a goal. This works perfectly when the optimization process at work is, in fact, a person, like in the case of the sundial. But our intuition is completely unprepared to reason about an optimization process that isn't human-like.
A prestigious group of philosophers famously fell victim to their flawed intuition about optimization processes, and all their publications became contaminated with the assumption that optimization can only be performed by a purposeful human-like entity. I am talking about everyone before Darwin.
Before Darwin, people's intuitive purpose-o-meter was well-calibrated when it came to sundials and rocks. But the level of optimization evident in life forms registered off the charts, and people intuited that whatever created them must have had one hell of a purpose. The famous "argument from design", believed by everyone from Socrates to modern creationists, goes like this:
But human intuition isn't having any of this. Intuitively, "passive physical process" and "optimization process" are two fundamental mental categories, and it's inconceivable that you could build an optimization processes out of a combination of processes that are not themselves optimization processes.
This is one of the most common patterns in the history of scientific progress. Someone will say "Hey, what if Y is made out of this other thing X, even though X by itself is nothing like Y?" And your intuition will say, "Nope, trust me, Y is ontologically fundamental, so no insights here." For example:
Remember that any time you observe optimization, like with the sundial, you immediately make a mental model of an optimizer that possesses human-like purpose. You subconsciously observe lots of optimization in yourself and others, so you conclude you were created by a process with a human-like purpose. You want to complete the analogy: "Sundial is to time-telling as I am to ______".
If you fill in the blank with "perpetuating the relative frequency of certain alleles in the gene pool", then the analogy is a logical one. But even with our post-Darwinian understanding, which enables us to complete the analogy, it still doesn't feel like the mysterious question has been adequately explained away.
Why doesn't anyone actually try that hard to perpetuate their genes? People have a lot of sex, but they use birth control. People have kids, but not that many. And why do sperm banks have to pay men, instead of the other way around?
It's because perpetuating your genes isn't your purpose. It's your creator's optimization criterion, but it's not your purpose. You have your own purposes.
If you were creating an entity, and your purpose was to perpetuate its set of genes, and you were going to make that entity conscious, then wouldn't you make your creation consciously want to perpetuate its genes? That's the smart thing to do.
But the process that created you is pretty stupid. It pushes toward genetic fitness, but it doesn't do it perfectly. In fact, there are all kinds of obvious ways to make its creations more fit, but they're only "obvious" to a smart process like your brain. The only changes that are obvious to natural selection are the ones caused by minor mutations to the alleles in the current gene pool.
You are the product of a creator that did an impressive, yet also pathetically bad, job of optimizing you to perpetuate your genes. If Natural Selection were smart, it would have created you with one single, unshakable purpose: to perpetuate your genes. But it didn't. What purposes did it give you instead?
Well, it was trying its best to program a gene perpetuation purpose into the human brain, but it could only do a little bit in each generation. What we ended up with is a variety of impulses, some contradictory, and none of them explicitly representing the desire to perpetuate genes (although the desire to have kids comes close) -- but all of them unknowingly cooperating to get the job done in our ancestors' environment.
Would you trade the many fragments of your purpose -- curiosity, love, empathy, aesthetic taste, sex drive, ambition -- for a single-minded drive to maximize the number of copies of your genes? You wouldn't, because the fragmented purposes are already hardwired into you as precious values.
Your real purposes are represented in the physical structure of your brain, in its haphazardly optimized design. If Natural Selection had been a more effective optimizer, then we would all agree that donating food to charity is even more foolish than throwing it in the trash, because the recipients would perpetuate their genes in competition with yours, without reciprocating the favor of free food. But instead, that action is universally acknowledged as a noble one, and we wouldn't have it any other way.
It's ironic that, not only do we fail to consciously represent our creator's purpose, we also fail to consciously represent a coherent picture of our own fragmented purposes. We typically act like confused servants to a crowd of waxing and waning drives. If you understand this state of affairs, then you can use the full power of conscious thought and achieve your true purposes better than you otherwise would have. You can strive to be a knowledgeable and effective servant to a crowd of waxing and waning drives.
It's easy to see that the question can be asked more precisely. You probably want an answer that was determined before you were born, right? By an entity that can be said to have "created" you in some sense? OK, we can work with that.
If you're in the habit of asking such "deep mysterious questions", you'll notice that it usually doesn't make sense to try to answer them as they are posed. Instead, the way to make the mystery go away is to explain what happens in your brain that makes you feel such a question is meaningful to pose.
Your brain generates questions to fill in gaps in your mental model of the world. But sometimes you start with an inaccurate mental model. So when you ask a question that makes sense to you, it doesn't necessarily constitute a meaningful question about the world.
In this case, the inaccurate mental model at fault is the concept of "purpose". Human thoughts are constructed out of building blocks that are hardwired into our brain. Our intuitive ontology includes concepts like "object", "momentum", "mood", and in particular, "purpose".
Our intuitive notion of purpose isn't perfect, as I will explain, but it is tied to meaningful observations. For example, we correctly intuit that a sundial is a lot more "purposeful" than a pile of rocks. That's because, in order to judge "purposefulness", we subconsciously make a distinction about why each thing exists:
- Pile of rocks: Because of a passive physical process.
- Sundial: Because of an optimization process.
Even if you'd never heard of a sundial, and you didn't know about the time-telling objective, you would subconsciously assume that there's some criterion the sundial satisfies, and that some "optimization process" out there only creates things that satisfy that criterion. We're programmed, correctly, to conclude there's an optimization process at work when we see something that looks a lot more improbable than a pile of rocks.
When we detect an optimization process at work, we intuitively model it as if it's like a person who is consciously trying to achieve a goal. This works perfectly when the optimization process at work is, in fact, a person, like in the case of the sundial. But our intuition is completely unprepared to reason about an optimization process that isn't human-like.
A prestigious group of philosophers famously fell victim to their flawed intuition about optimization processes, and all their publications became contaminated with the assumption that optimization can only be performed by a purposeful human-like entity. I am talking about everyone before Darwin.
Before Darwin, people's intuitive purpose-o-meter was well-calibrated when it came to sundials and rocks. But the level of optimization evident in life forms registered off the charts, and people intuited that whatever created them must have had one hell of a purpose. The famous "argument from design", believed by everyone from Socrates to modern creationists, goes like this:
- Boy, life forms sure are optimized to satisfy certain criteria
really well.
[Accurate observation.]
- They couldn't have been made by any old process; it had to be an
optimization process.
[Sound intuitive inference.]
- Life was created by a process involving a purposeful designer.
[Unsound intuitive inference.]
But human intuition isn't having any of this. Intuitively, "passive physical process" and "optimization process" are two fundamental mental categories, and it's inconceivable that you could build an optimization processes out of a combination of processes that are not themselves optimization processes.
This is one of the most common patterns in the history of scientific progress. Someone will say "Hey, what if Y is made out of this other thing X, even though X by itself is nothing like Y?" And your intuition will say, "Nope, trust me, Y is ontologically fundamental, so no insights here." For example:
- Your intuition thinks sound is a fundamental thing, and wind is
another fundamental thing, but really they are both properties of the
movement of air particles.
- Your intuition thinks motion and rest are two fundamentally
different things, but really the only difference is your choice of
reference frame.
- Your intuition thinks your hand is made out of special organic matter whose mysterious life force makes it obey your mental commands, while a lump of clay is made out of boring regular matter. But really the only difference is that your brain controls muscles in your hand through a big wire.
Remember that any time you observe optimization, like with the sundial, you immediately make a mental model of an optimizer that possesses human-like purpose. You subconsciously observe lots of optimization in yourself and others, so you conclude you were created by a process with a human-like purpose. You want to complete the analogy: "Sundial is to time-telling as I am to ______".
If you fill in the blank with "perpetuating the relative frequency of certain alleles in the gene pool", then the analogy is a logical one. But even with our post-Darwinian understanding, which enables us to complete the analogy, it still doesn't feel like the mysterious question has been adequately explained away.
Why doesn't anyone actually try that hard to perpetuate their genes? People have a lot of sex, but they use birth control. People have kids, but not that many. And why do sperm banks have to pay men, instead of the other way around?
It's because perpetuating your genes isn't your purpose. It's your creator's optimization criterion, but it's not your purpose. You have your own purposes.
If you were creating an entity, and your purpose was to perpetuate its set of genes, and you were going to make that entity conscious, then wouldn't you make your creation consciously want to perpetuate its genes? That's the smart thing to do.
But the process that created you is pretty stupid. It pushes toward genetic fitness, but it doesn't do it perfectly. In fact, there are all kinds of obvious ways to make its creations more fit, but they're only "obvious" to a smart process like your brain. The only changes that are obvious to natural selection are the ones caused by minor mutations to the alleles in the current gene pool.
You are the product of a creator that did an impressive, yet also pathetically bad, job of optimizing you to perpetuate your genes. If Natural Selection were smart, it would have created you with one single, unshakable purpose: to perpetuate your genes. But it didn't. What purposes did it give you instead?
Well, it was trying its best to program a gene perpetuation purpose into the human brain, but it could only do a little bit in each generation. What we ended up with is a variety of impulses, some contradictory, and none of them explicitly representing the desire to perpetuate genes (although the desire to have kids comes close) -- but all of them unknowingly cooperating to get the job done in our ancestors' environment.
Would you trade the many fragments of your purpose -- curiosity, love, empathy, aesthetic taste, sex drive, ambition -- for a single-minded drive to maximize the number of copies of your genes? You wouldn't, because the fragmented purposes are already hardwired into you as precious values.
Your real purposes are represented in the physical structure of your brain, in its haphazardly optimized design. If Natural Selection had been a more effective optimizer, then we would all agree that donating food to charity is even more foolish than throwing it in the trash, because the recipients would perpetuate their genes in competition with yours, without reciprocating the favor of free food. But instead, that action is universally acknowledged as a noble one, and we wouldn't have it any other way.
It's ironic that, not only do we fail to consciously represent our creator's purpose, we also fail to consciously represent a coherent picture of our own fragmented purposes. We typically act like confused servants to a crowd of waxing and waning drives. If you understand this state of affairs, then you can use the full power of conscious thought and achieve your true purposes better than you otherwise would have. You can strive to be a knowledgeable and effective servant to a crowd of waxing and waning drives.
Saturday, May 29, 2010
Surreal Comfort
The BP oil spill is a truly massive disaster. I feel sad and angry about it, but I have to be honest: I don't live on the Gulf Coast, and I'm not affected at all.
Have you ever noticed how the world truly seems to be on the brink of going to shit, but your own life is great? It always seems like the worst is yet to come, like we're pushing our ecosystem and our economic system past some sort of point of no return and it's all just going to spiral into some sort of permanent worldwide collapse.
But in my own life, I live comfortably and do whatever I want, constantly learn cool new things, and buy progressively more awesome wireless-enabled devices with touch screens. Sometimes I wish I were allotted a fair individual portion of suffering after a tragedy like the BP spill. Because carrying on with my daily routine in my beautiful suburb, comfort intact, is surreal.
Have you ever noticed how the world truly seems to be on the brink of going to shit, but your own life is great? It always seems like the worst is yet to come, like we're pushing our ecosystem and our economic system past some sort of point of no return and it's all just going to spiral into some sort of permanent worldwide collapse.
But in my own life, I live comfortably and do whatever I want, constantly learn cool new things, and buy progressively more awesome wireless-enabled devices with touch screens. Sometimes I wish I were allotted a fair individual portion of suffering after a tragedy like the BP spill. Because carrying on with my daily routine in my beautiful suburb, comfort intact, is surreal.
Friday, May 14, 2010
SadTech Update
In 2005 I wrote that Lines are SadTech. Finally there's a cool startup that is solving the problem: QLess. VCs take note.
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