Overcoming Bias

People dislike AI for many reasons, but one extreme fear is that AIs will escape control from those who make, buy, or rent them, and then hurt others.

My book with the excellent co-author Kevin Simler, The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life, was published almost nine years ago, and has sold >60K copies so far.

I’ve previously outlined three ways we might fix cultural drift.

Many who hold the plausible belief that some UFOs are caused by strange strong (“alien”) powers now believe that the US (and maybe other) govts have long been keeping strong confirming evidence re these powers secret, plausibly for as long as eighty years,

Hope is more fragile than fear.

Astrobiologists have, for decades, defaulted to a conservative burden of proof that leans into two aphorisms coined by Sagan … life … should be considered a “hypothesis of last resort,” largely because “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

Humans have long reported seeing many strange things.

When people suggest that you “make peace with God”, they might mean: God is very powerful, so you are unlikely to win fights with him, His authority is legit, so you should be ashamed to fight him, and Any value by which you might justify fighting him came

There is a vast literature near the topic of this post, much of which has developed specialized vocabularies and concepts.

Greg Egan’s 1994 novel Permutation City depicts digital minds having a right to suicide; if they push a particular internal button, they end.

Humans have two main relations to animals: they are either food or pets.

Here’s a quick history of minds.

Tasks often vary along a dimension where some tasks matter more, yet are also harder to judge for quality of performance.

We rightly celebrate rebels who were initially contrarian on key claims, but then got the world to later agree with them.

The following table gives medians of 3 LLM estimates re % relative importance for short term success in 5 areas of life of these 4 factors: (A) status: looks, $, fame, family, connections, credentials, charisma, wit, etc.

Your success in life will be determined largely by your ability to speak, your ability to write, and the quality of your ideas.

On AI risk, I’ve said that evolved things have two robust habits: wariness of co-existing rivals, even when similar to you, and indulgence of descendants, even when different from you.

The great filter (a term I coined) is all the things that block simple dead matter from evolving into an advanced civilization easily seen from far away.

For years now, I’ve collected ideas for fixing cultural drift, and tried to judge which seem more promising.

I asked Claude Fable 5 to, for each 25yr period starting in 1825, find the top 5 authors arguing for strong world governance, collect the top 3 reasons each offered, integrate those into a comparable set of reasons, and finally to graph how the importance…