NunoSempere
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User ID: 1101
In the Bhagavad Gita, our hero, Arjuna, finds himself in a position of either fighting his cousins and elders, who have gone to war against him, or losing his kingdom and abandoning his duty as a warrior. As he surveys the battlefield, he turns to Krishna, who is taking the form of his charioteer, and inquires about how to make this decision and the nature of the good life.
The answer is a recipe: realize that pursuing happiness and pleasure is a trap. The fulfillment of a craving simply results in another craving. You might be tempted to solve this by getting really rich and then fulfilling all your cravings, but then you will find that old age, disease and death are not solvable through wealth (yet?).
The solution presented to the trap is to cultivate tranquility and serenity, through ample heaps of loving-kindness meditation (on the figure of Krishna). To be unattached from the fruit of one's actions but nonetheless do one's duty. And to orient one's life around a combination of attaining wisdom, loving devotion, and doing good actions.
Therefore, Arjuna should kill his cousins and regain his kingdom, following his duty. In so doing he should regard Krishna in awe and hold him in constant adoration.
This recipe is presented mostly in the first six chapters and the last two, with some but not great detail on the specific methods and meditations. Beyond that, there is a whole lot of religious trappings. But these trappings are useful, because they give examples of beliefs whose resulting emotional valence I could test out and play with. I read the whole thing asking myself three things: what is the belief that is being stated? what are the effects of this belief? How do I feel in my body holding this belief? Is there something close that is true and insightful?
For instance, consider the doctrine of karma and reincarnation. The belief being stated is that you are reincarnated after you die in a better or worse form depending on your actions. The effect of this belief is to work harder towards being a better person. The true and insightful part of it, I find, is that my personality and characteristics are pretty close to that of my father, and my life is influenced by his actions in the same way I will influence the life of possible future children. So the pattern lives on, and past instantiations of the pattern affect future instantiations. But it's not the case that you are literally reincarnated[^phenotype].
Here: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population?country=<del>IND&tab=line is a chart of the population of India. Under a stable population regime, the number of souls is constant and so reincarnation, and the notion that souls are eternal (neither appear nor disappear), is more plausible. But under an exponential population regime that is less plausible.
Some other beliefs and their implications that caught my attention were:
- One who thinks of Krishna at the time of his death goes to Krishna (a better state, essentially heaven) => people will think more of Krishna
- Nature of Krishna as a divine principle, and need for devotion to it => some very soothing and relaxing effects when meditating on it as an icon
- Emphasis on disciplic succession => strengthens the formal institutions who are able to provide access to that succession
- Belief in an afterlife => fighting more bravely => group succeeds
- acceptance of one's duty according to caste => greater social harmony
Anyways, a few decades ago, an Indian monk took this story and built a religious movement atop it, the Hare Krishnas. From the preface to his translation of the Bhagavad Gita, recommended to me by a very attractive Hare Krishna adherent:
The forgetful living entities or conditioned souls have forgotten their relationship with the Supreme Lord, and they are engrossed in thinking of material activities. Just to transfer their thinking power to the spiritual sky, Krishna has given a great number of Vedic literatures. First He divided the Vedas into four, then He explained them in the Purāṇas, and for less capable people He wrote the Mahābhārata. In the Mahābhārata there is given the Bhagavad-gītā.
I find it interesting that there is some level of design for this religion, where more advanced concepts that are not literally true are presented through metaphors and fables so that their beneficial consequences are accessible to the broader population. Followers of the Hare Krishna end up being extremely happy moment to moment (very good), but also end up believing the literal content of those fables (bad when it touches on real world decisions). For me, the challenge is to translate the 70 IQ fable version from 200 BCE to the 150 IQ version today, mining its insights. This might be changing something like worship of an icon into something like receptive contact with reality and ongoing gratefulness for its fruits, and implementing the mental motions behind the beliefs rather than adopting the beliefs themselves. Or meditating on an icon without believing in it literally.
In comparison with other ideologies I've been exposed to in my life, I notice I'm grateful to EA (Effective Altruism) for getting the part about happiness not coming from an attachment to material delights. But they didn't yet combine it with the part around orienting one's mind towards holding love (maybe towards some icon) moment to moment, and so depression is, or was, pretty common in those circles when I was more involved. I also notice that my interpretation of the core story here is very influenced and very colored by past Buddhist readings, perhaps too much. And I'm disappointed in my time spent on Greek and Western philosophy, because it just doesn't come out and give you as convincing[^nico] an anwer to the nature of the good life like that, and even the question it gives is more muddled.
These last years, I've been drifting around after Effective Altruism ceased to be a great container. I think pairing good actions with knowledge about the mental architecture I'm working with, and the mental motions that lead to satisfaction and towards stepping off the hedonic treadmill provide some of the answer I've been looking for.
[^phenotype]: I'm actually currently fairly confused about this, because besides having kids, you could also support people like you who are similar but don't share your genes.
[^nico]: E.g., compare with the Nicomachean Ethics.
In short…
- Forecasting platforms and prediction markets are partially making the pie bigger together, and partially undercutting each other.
- The forecasting ecosystem adjusted after the loss of plentiful FTX money.
- Dustin Moskovitz’s foundation (Open Philanthropy) is increasing their presence in the forecasting space, but my sense is that chasing its funding can sometimes be a bad move.
- As AI systems improve, they become more relevant for judgmental forecasting practice.
- Betting with real money is still frowned upon by the US powers that be–but the US isn’t willing to institute the oversight regime that would keep people from making bets over the internet in practice.
- Forecasting hasn’t taken over the world yet, but I’m hoping that as people try out different iterations, someone will find a formula to produce lots of value in a way that scales.
In The American Empire has Alzheimer's, we saw how the US had repeatedly been rebuffing forecasting-style feedback loops that could have prevented their military and policy failures. In A Critical Review of Open Philanthropy’s Bet On Criminal Justice Reform, we saw how Open Philanthropy, a large foundation, spent and additional $100M in a cause they no longer thought was optimal. In A Modest Proposal For Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE) (unpublished), we saw how ACE had moved away from quantitative evaluations, reducing their ability to find out which animal charities were best. In External Evaluation of the Effective Altruism Wiki, we saw someone spending his time less than maximally ambitiously. In My experience with a Potemkin Effective Altruism group (unpublished), we saw how an otherwise well-intentioned group of decent people mostly just kept chugging along producing a negligible impact on the world. As for my own personal failures, I just come out of having spent the last couple of years making a bet on ambitious value estimation that flopped in comparison to what it could have been. I could go on.
Those and all other failures could have been avoided if only those involved had just been harder, better, faster, stronger. I like the word "formidable" as a shorthand here.
In this post, I offer some impressionistic, subpar, incomplete speculation about why my civilization, the people around me, and myself are just generally not as formidable as we could maximally be. Why are we not more awesome? Why are we not attaining the heights that might be within our reach?
These hypotheses are salient to me:
- Today's cultural templates and default pipelines don't create formidable humans.
- Other values, like niceness, welcomingness, humility, status, tranquility, stability, job security and comfort trade off against formidability.
- In particular, becoming formidable requires keeping close to the truth, but convenient lies and self-deceptions are too useful as tools to attain other goals.
- Being formidable at a group level might require exceptional leaders, competent organizational structures, or healthy community dynamics, which we don't have.
I'll present these possible root causes, and then suggest possible solutions for each. My preferred course of action would be to attack this bottleneck on all fronts.
Post continued here. I'm posting to The Motte since I really appreciated the high quality comments from here on previous posts.
The linked post seeks to outline why I feel uneasy about high existential risk estimates from AGI (e.g., 80% doom by 2070). When I try to verbalize this, I view considerations like
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selection effects at the level of which arguments are discovered and distributed
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community epistemic problems, and
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increased uncertainty due to chains of reasoning with imperfect concepts
as real and important.
I'd be curious to get perspectives form the people of the Motte, e.g., telling me that I'm the crazy one & so on.
Regards,
Nuño.
Highlights:
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PredictIt nears its probable demise
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American Civics Exchange offers political betting to Americans using weird legal loophole
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Forecasting community member Avraham Eisenberg arrested for $100M+ theft
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Forecasting Research Institute launches publicly
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Blogpost suggests that GiveWell use uncertainty, wins $20k
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Contrarian offers $500k bet, then chickens out
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Walter Frick writes a resource to introduce journalists to prediction markets
Highlights
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Nuclear probability estimates spiked and spooked Elon Musk.
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Council on Strategic Risks hiring for a full-time Strategic Foresight Senior Fellow @ $78k to 114k
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Markov Chain Monte Carlo Without all the Bullshit: Old blog post delivers on its title.
Highlights:
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PredictIt vs Kalshi vs CFTC saga continues
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Future Fund announces $1M+ prize for arguments which shift their probabilities about AI timelines and dangers
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Dan Luu looks at the track record of futurists
Highlights
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CFTC asking for public comments about allowing Kalshi to phagocytize PredictIt’s niche
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$25k tournament by Richard Hanania on Manifold Markets.
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pastcasting.com allows users to forecast on already resolved questions with unknown resolutions which hopefully results in faster feedback loops and faster learning
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Hedgehog Markets now have automatic market-maker-based markets
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Jonas Moss looks at updating just on the passage of time
I'd prefer comments or questions here on account of themotte.org site being pretty young. Long live The Motte!