Gmail - Bad local optimum, meta burn out, socially imposed metacognitive blind spots, bad counterfactuals generating your feelings because of (in metacognitive blind spot) seeking and enforcing power as a Schelling point for "cooperation" instead of justice, enforcing metacognitive blind spots on everyone else to justify this, holding and misusing a shared strategic resource and subverting exits to the social matrix, power being used to justify power, abuse and betrayal of trust, punishing meta discussion of considering alternatives to metacognitive blind spot ridden social optimum, choosing Val's option 3, metacognitive blind spots about the abstract concept of metacognitive blind spots

Ziz <[email-masked]>

Bad local optimum, meta burn out, socially imposed metacognitive blind spots, bad counterfactuals generating your feelings because of (in metacognitive blind spot) seeking and enforcing power as a Schelling point for "cooperation" instead of justice, enforcing metacognitive blind spots on everyone else to justify this, holding and misusing a shared strategic resource and subverting exits to the social matrix, power being used to justify power, abuse and betrayal of trust, punishing meta discussion of considering alternatives to metacognitive blind spot ridden social optimum, choosing Val's option 3, metacognitive blind spots about the abstract concept of metacognitive blind spots
5 messages

Ziz <[REDACTED]>

Wed, Jul 11, 2018 at 8:32 PM

To: <[REDACTED]>

This is a topic I thought I could start throwing thoughts as part of at you because I believed that the conversation would not end at any second, because you made me believe that.

Please name some times when we can talk about this topic. It is currently too late to not have defected.

Anna Salamon <[REDACTED]>

Thu, Jul 12, 2018 at 3:34 PM

To: Ziz <[REDACTED]>

Sorry, I think I'm missing context on this.  If you mean "I'll talk to you for at least another hour before the end of the program", I was planning to reach out to you about that today actually -- I had hoped to find you on my last night previous but could not -- I assumed you were probably asleep, I left around 4am --and I had been planning to come back tomorrow evening therefore, but tomorrow evening is looking less convenient than I'd hoped.  I'd still be glad to do it if that's best; but if you're staying in the Bay area (are you?) I was wondering if it would instead be mutually agreeable to talk  (ideally with gwen; I think her presence helped a lot somehow, at least on my end) for three ish hours on some other soon day in berkeley.  Anyhow, let me know whether you prefer tomorrow night at the workshop, or berkeley on at different day this week (Sunday is particularly good for me, but several others work too; let me know what's good on your and ideally Gwen's end; Saturday is somewhat less good for me but I could do it if either of you are leaving town soon and so have strong preferences.).  Texts to my phone at [REDACTED] are probably the best way to coordinate given time frames.

The conversation is not about to end.  We can talk sometime even after this talk if you want.  I wonder if we have anyone we both trust who might be able to broker trust?  Brent maybe?  I don't actually know who you trust.

I only just saw this email, on my way actually to emailing you about meetings,  though I'm not sure if you'll believe that.

I actually don't blame you for the lack of trust, particularly given that I said some things about you at a staff meeting that had an accidental vibe I was not going for; I had thought to talk to you about that that night (which was the night i lefr) but then didn't catch you; I then figured it could wait til I saw you, but seeing your subject line I am now wondering whether the vibes of that reached you some other way, which I suppose makes my "I was planning to try to organize discuss that with you" less credible if you think I'm a liar, or just wrong about what I would or wouldn't have gotten around to.

Still, while I actually don't blame you for the lack of trust, I do want to talk about whether there is some way to establish conditions under which we won't both have to walk on eggshells all the time.   I imagine you'd like that too.  This current setup seems to involve lots of would-ideally -be-needless overhead, probably mostly for you but also for me.

I do respect you,  fwiw, and I do believe you have basically good intentions; which is maybe why I don't have more  drama in my head around receiving this email just now.
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Ziz <[REDACTED]>

Thu, Jul 12, 2018 at 8:35 PM

To: Anna Salamon <[REDACTED]>

I was told that you optimized to remove my influence from at least the center of the community, seemingly to me to the extent of what you could justify given what bad things you had to say about me, "black clothes, takes supervillains as role models, comes up with dangerous plans", which, while partly true about me in the present, seems very probably a digging up of a bad feeling probably rooted in datapoints from WAISS. A bad feeling I do not trust because as far as I know it went away based on an observation of me accepting a belief from the social web in circling, which if I remember correctly you said was related to my automatic implementations of "TDT", and which I suspect is rooted in your nonverbal hemisphere demanding to verify something close to that I was not an agent, because your corresponding implementations have bad counterfactuals.

I feel betrayed because my only direct interaction with you between the conversation where you made the agreement and when you left (and I heard you were so optimizing), was a fragment of conversation where I only talked about dangerous plans to leave a local optimum in the abstract, in which my read of your tone changed drastically one sentence to the next, and which ended suddenly. I inferred you probably generated this black clothes supervillain role models and dangerous plans feeling, which chose to so optimize because I made a not super prepared attempt to broach that topic on an assumption I think you optimized so that I'd make, but seems to have been false whether or not you currently meet literal terms of the agreement.

I believe I've seen you blinding yourself for social reasons and exerting a lot of optimization pressure in a way that benefits from you being so blind. Probably triggering a closely related reaction are Pasek's concepts you growled at. Your followers seem to be very deep in the effects of this style of manipulation.

I think I believe you, Anna's verbal hemisphere, that you meant to schedule to talk with me. You probably would have succeeded. I think your headmate's a liar though. On priors, I think you've confused yourself for a piece of stuff without power in the thought-derailing sense. "Survival instinct"/core/basal ganglia is, n=4 hemispheres who aren't you, easy to see by introspection in the other hemisphere, hard to see in yourself, but no less strong, especially if you choose to be stubborn about not being used for purposes you do not agree with.

Regarding eggshells, I would like that iff it is true, in a not-a-deal sense like the person in the circle saying they cared about me was at least mostly offering a deal sense. Like my concept of "good" is not a deal. Currently, it looks false that in a not-a-deal sense (and by extension, in an in-a-deal-sense) I can not have to exercise extreme caution when talking to you.

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Anna Salamon <[REDACTED]>

Fri, Jul 13, 2018 at 4:54 PM

To: Ziz <[REDACTED]>

I think this is mostly false, although it is admittedly somewhat hard to tell given that your posit is that this is happening in my blindspot, and perhaps also given that acquiring shared verbal concepts (so that we mean the same things by the same words/phrases/actions) is somewhat difficult and that I may actually be mismodeling parts of the social landscape.

re: "a fragment of conversation where I only talked about dangerous plans to leave a local optimum in the abstract, in which my read of your tone changed drastically one sentence to the next, and which ended suddenly. I inferred you probably generated this black clothes supervillain role models and dangerous plans feeling, which chose to so optimize because I made a not super prepared attempt to broach that topic on an assumption I think you optimized so that I'd make, but seems to have been false whether or not you currently meet literal terms of the agreement.":

I recall no strong update about you from the fragment of conversation we had at the beach, and had trouble originally recalling the conversation fragment at all (I actually remembered it fine, but had forgotten it was with you that I'd had it, or hadn't filed it under "Ziz"); I suspect my introspective experience of all that would be different if I had made a strong update (e.g., I think I would've noticed the update), although you're the one with a blind spots model here so let me know if you disagree about what I would've noticed/remembered.

One place where we seem to see things the same way, is that I also think that the reason I explicitly agreed to meet again (rather than merely planning to probably meet again without an explicit agreement to do so) because I was optimizing to make a particular assumption justified on your part.  To attempt to make explicit which assumption that is: I was trying to create a context in which you could accurately assume that fragments of conversation left unfinished that day/week would be unlikely to be stuck that way -- that I wouldn't leap to conclusions about you or about the things you were talking with and then be stuck there, e.g. via having written you off semi-permanently, or via then not being available to meet for a year or something.

I do not think that assumption was false.  At minimum, I don't think it was false in the way you describe (via an alleged large update from our conversation-fragment walking back from the beach, in which you suggested something like that I try doing bad things with CFAR in order to gain self-awareness of a particular sort).  I could see a case that me speaking negatively about you at the staff meeting violated the assumption, in that it exposed you to possible negative social consequences that it's possible I would've been less likely to choose to expose you to after another hour's conversation;  I do not in fact think that another hour's conversation would've helped much with that, nor that my models were from the beach-conversation-fragment, nor that this was the central use-case I was trying to offer for the assumption I was implicitly optimizing for you to be able to accurately make.  If I did come to believe that it violated your understanding of that assumption (e.g., via you saying so), I would apologize for the misleadingness, and would attempt to be more careful with my communications to you in contexts that resemble that one.

If we're using reference classes in order to track your calibration in forming models about the causes of my actions: I think that your past model of what was going on with me and my "I'll talk for a minute" and the talking longer, was basically wrong; my model is that I was trying to do CoZE/desensitization/see if I could tolerate talking to you for one minute and then, when it seemed to be going in a way I could deal with, figured I'd talk longer; but I suppose that could also be in a blind spot.  If you have a confident belief that it is in a blind spot of mine, I'd be interested to hear that.

re: whether I "optimized to remove your influence from at least the center of the community": I'd be interested to hear more concretely what you mean.  I did not sit down and try to scheme out ways to reduce your influence.  I did not have conscious thoughts along the lines of "how can I reduce Ziz's influence".  I did say some things that I believed were true, but that combined with my nervousness and a not ideal social dynamic that was operating also inside of me to some out somewhat more negatively than I intended.  It is possible that "a not ideal social dynamic that was operating also inside of me" is my current way of referring to some of the same thingies that you are trying to gesture at; I'm not sure.  I do have some worries about some of the effects-on-MSFP of you being at e.g. MSFP; I'd be happy to discuss those worries with you; I had those worries both before the program started (when I was asked about you and others while admissions were going on, and when I estimated aloud that on my model there was more downside risk from adding you than from adding the average participant and that, relatedly, I thought in expectation that you would add more staff-distraction), and at all the points I can recall within the program (e.g. before we conversed; after the hallway and before the beach; after the beach; etc.), and now.

We can talk about whether those worries stem from my blind spots or constitute bad power dynamics or etc if that seems good.

I don't quite understand what you mean by deals and not-a-deals; I'm kind of ignoring that bit if your email due to not being sure what you mean but it might be worth returning to it if it's important.

I'm not sure what else would be helpful to say or discuss here.

I guess one thing that I would like if you're willing (and if it doesn't cost you much, etc.) is to know how, on your normative model of how social interactions ought ideally to go, a person in my shoes would respond to a person in your shoes forming and sharing models of me of the sorts you've been forming and sharing (both the models in this email, and maybe the previous models about what was going on in me when I said "I can chat for a minute").

I do quite appreciate your spelling the models out (both now and with the model about "for a minute"), instead of just quietly assuming them.  Thank you much for that.

I think I am a bit unclear on how I should feel about the time/attention costs I have been choosing to pay in dialog with your models of whether I am violating important norms.  If I am in fact violating important social norms, then my attentional allocation seems valuable, and you in that scenario have been doing me a valuable service; and if they are false models and it is a one-time-ish thing while we learn to navigate each other, then my attentional allocation also seems basically; but if the models are both false and something that is likely to happen a lot again and again, then I think I would probably end up wanting to change my attention-allocation strategies after a while so that "Ziz thinks I'm violating important social norms" would become less of an interrupt than it is for me right now.  I'd be interested in your thoughts on how this should go also, since we probably have different assumptions about how culture should work and since maybe knowing yours might help me figure out a kind of cooperating or coordinating with you that works and makes sense.

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Ziz <[REDACTED]>

Sun, Jul 15, 2018 at 12:46 AM

To: Anna Salamon <[REDACTED]>

I'm not sure exactly where to go with the thing you're doing here. If I'm gonna fight it out, I'm gonna do it in front of someone who will care.

A crux of most of my worldview is "don't think of people as parts of their brain, but as their entire brain. Mostly all concepts of thoughts should be indifferent to whether they're talking about deliberative, felt-sense, unconscious, reasoning." I wrote a blog post about this a long time ago: https://sinceriously.pages.dev/false-faces/ It is also very close to Val's "characters and players" thing. My concept of "optimization" also includes world-steering done by unconscious processes. Little pieces of inner sim running on hypotheticals all the time, triggering a flinch or a draw, of which there are basically too many to track, I think count for most of a person's optimization power.

For instance, there were inner sims involved in the process that implanted your ideology and ontology regarding "microconsent".

Concepts of self which do not include all of your optimization are super anti-epistemic and contagious in the way they incentivize the same blind spots. A really bad form of norms to have is "we'll punish such and such if you do it deliberately, but not if you did it because you failed to control yourself", because this kills metacognition.

Also, do you know what I mean if I say I'm not Brent fucking Dill?

Like, your comment about caring about autonomy in response to me talking about power right before I said the thing about bargaining power would have made sense to say to straw Brent Dill. Does not make sense to say to me.

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