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A review by femmecheng
Inadequate Equilibria: Where and How Civilizations Get Stuck by Eliezer Yudkowsky
2.0
I'm just going to get it out there - Yudkowsky, along with Scott Alexander (and SSC, LessWrong-ers, rationalists, etc), irritates me on a personal level. Is my review biased based on this? Yeah, probably, so you can consider it with that in mind. That being said, there are at least snippets of wisdom in this book.
"...Usually, when things suck, it's because they suck in a way that's a Nash equilibrium."
"So far, every time I've asked you why someone is acting insane, you've claimed that it's secretly a sane response to someone else acting insane. Where does this process bottom out?"
The Gell-Mann Amnesia effect
"You will detect inadequacy every time you go looking for it, whether or not it's there. If you see the same vision wherever you look, that's the same as being blind."
"...You can say 'holy shit, everyone in the world is fucking insane. However, none of them seem to realize that they're insane. By extension, I am probably insane. I should take careful steps to minimize the damage I do.'"
"...When you previously just had a lot of prior reasoning, or you were previously trying to generalize from other people's not-quite-similar experiences, and then you collide directly with reality for the first time, one data point is huge."
"If you and a trusted peer don't converge on identical beliefs once you have a full understanding of one another's positions, at least one of you must be making some kind of mistake. If we were fully rational (and fully honest), then we would always eventually reach consensus on questions of fact."
"Hey! Guys! I found out how to take over the world using only the power of my mind and a toothpick." "You can't do that. Nobody's done that before." "Of course they didn't, they were completely irrational." "But they thought they were rational too." "The difference is that I'm right." "They thought that too!"
"If just anyone could find some easy sentences to say that let them get higher status than God, then your system for allocating status would be too easy to game."
"Try to make sure you'd arrive at different beliefs in different worlds. You don't want to think in such a way that you wouldn't believe in a conclusion in a world where it were true, just because a fallacious argument could support it. Emotionally appealing mistakes are not invincible cognitive traps that nobody can ever escape from. Sometimes they're not even that hard to escape."
"...Usually, when things suck, it's because they suck in a way that's a Nash equilibrium."
"So far, every time I've asked you why someone is acting insane, you've claimed that it's secretly a sane response to someone else acting insane. Where does this process bottom out?"
The Gell-Mann Amnesia effect
"You will detect inadequacy every time you go looking for it, whether or not it's there. If you see the same vision wherever you look, that's the same as being blind."
"...You can say 'holy shit, everyone in the world is fucking insane. However, none of them seem to realize that they're insane. By extension, I am probably insane. I should take careful steps to minimize the damage I do.'"
"...When you previously just had a lot of prior reasoning, or you were previously trying to generalize from other people's not-quite-similar experiences, and then you collide directly with reality for the first time, one data point is huge."
"If you and a trusted peer don't converge on identical beliefs once you have a full understanding of one another's positions, at least one of you must be making some kind of mistake. If we were fully rational (and fully honest), then we would always eventually reach consensus on questions of fact."
"Hey! Guys! I found out how to take over the world using only the power of my mind and a toothpick." "You can't do that. Nobody's done that before." "Of course they didn't, they were completely irrational." "But they thought they were rational too." "The difference is that I'm right." "They thought that too!"
"If just anyone could find some easy sentences to say that let them get higher status than God, then your system for allocating status would be too easy to game."
"Try to make sure you'd arrive at different beliefs in different worlds. You don't want to think in such a way that you wouldn't believe in a conclusion in a world where it were true, just because a fallacious argument could support it. Emotionally appealing mistakes are not invincible cognitive traps that nobody can ever escape from. Sometimes they're not even that hard to escape."