The "High entropy individuals" made me laugh. My take on authenticity is that some people cant help themselves, they have to be authentic, and some people try very hard to hide themselves out of fear of rejection - but that's the biggest fallacy of all. Re: societal value: In my experience original thoughts are what makes an individual/company. Read zero to one by Peter Theil. I think authenticity is what people call "research taste" on Lesswrong. Favorite movie on the subject is “A star is born".
Hey, great read as always. The gradient descent analogy for how our beliefs shift is super insightful, especially when thinking about the AI debate. It really makes you wonder how one can cultivat genuine, independent thought outside these algorithmic pressures. You've hit on something fundamental here.
The gradient descent metaphor for ideological clustering is so spot-on. I've watched friends slowly drift toward predictable takes as their feeds optimize for engagement. The multi-dimensional version of this is where it gets wild tho, like how certain tech positions bundle with lifestyle stuff that has nothing to do with the actual ideas. Trying to resist that pull feels like swimming upstream but it's probly the only way to keep thinking clearly.
I vaguely agree with a decent amount of this but I think I disagree that you can become more interesting by subtracting things (I'm not sure you actually believe this or are just accidentally implying it, but it's a clear enough implication in your examples I'll push back on it anyways). To mash up your examples, a suburban wine mom who knows a lot about LessWrong and Instagram Reels is more interesting than one who doesn't know anything about Instagram Reels, but does know the same amount about LessWrong. There isn't that much interesting in Instagram Reels, probably, but on the off chance there is it still has to be good to know about it, right? I don't see how it could hurt.
My theory of this is that in practice there are tradeoffs between knowing about different subjects in terms of how interesting/impactful/useful/unique/what-have-you it is, and so somebody who knows about 6-7 or whatever is less likely to know about other things, but that doesn't mean that knowing about 6-7 is bad in and of itself. All knowledge is good knowledge. Furthermore, curiosity is probably correlated across domains, so being the kind of person who'd look up 6-7 when you hear it has some relationship with being more likely to look up, say, T.S. Eliot.
To be clear I think pop culture awareness is overrated by society at large, but it's not completely useless knowledge and we should appreciate people for having it. Hope that makes sense, kind of.
Love the gradient descent metaphor. The insight about strong mentorship networks functioning as escape velocity from algorithm-driven belief clusters is soemthing I've been trying to articulate for months. I run a small reading group deliberately pulling people from unrelated fields and the conversational collisions are wild compared to homogenous groups. The "how long to explain who you are" hueristic is gold.
tbh I've always had a lot of internal conflict over this. I don't want to be unique for its own sake, but the things I want intrinsically-- to make good art, to write good books-- require uniqueness.
On the other hand, I think EA is mostly true, and the ethical implications therein tend to reduce down to quantifiable value, i.e. not unique. Dollars donated, QUALYs saved.
Seeing things uniquely can be an asset, but focus ultimately matters more for impact. At least, I would be more impactful if I were more focused and less unique.
You can consciously avoid gradient descent by spending a lot of time reading things from different sides. On politics there are sites like AllSides that can at least spread your info diet on the conventional left-right axis at least. (As you point out it's a higher-dimensional space and very much so.) You can also avoid the algorithm by consciously searching for tags you wouldn't normally search for.
The catch I've found is that being truly unique is quite isolating. I have clusters of political opinions that don't match up with any major ideology and I can only talk about a third to a half of the things I think with any given person, and then I have to lie about the kink stuff to everyone.
The "High entropy individuals" made me laugh. My take on authenticity is that some people cant help themselves, they have to be authentic, and some people try very hard to hide themselves out of fear of rejection - but that's the biggest fallacy of all. Re: societal value: In my experience original thoughts are what makes an individual/company. Read zero to one by Peter Theil. I think authenticity is what people call "research taste" on Lesswrong. Favorite movie on the subject is “A star is born".
Funnily enough I was just thinking about “high entropy individuals” 2 days before this post https://bosoncutter.substack.com/p/information-theory-of-conversations
Hey, great read as always. The gradient descent analogy for how our beliefs shift is super insightful, especially when thinking about the AI debate. It really makes you wonder how one can cultivat genuine, independent thought outside these algorithmic pressures. You've hit on something fundamental here.
The gradient descent metaphor for ideological clustering is so spot-on. I've watched friends slowly drift toward predictable takes as their feeds optimize for engagement. The multi-dimensional version of this is where it gets wild tho, like how certain tech positions bundle with lifestyle stuff that has nothing to do with the actual ideas. Trying to resist that pull feels like swimming upstream but it's probly the only way to keep thinking clearly.
I vaguely agree with a decent amount of this but I think I disagree that you can become more interesting by subtracting things (I'm not sure you actually believe this or are just accidentally implying it, but it's a clear enough implication in your examples I'll push back on it anyways). To mash up your examples, a suburban wine mom who knows a lot about LessWrong and Instagram Reels is more interesting than one who doesn't know anything about Instagram Reels, but does know the same amount about LessWrong. There isn't that much interesting in Instagram Reels, probably, but on the off chance there is it still has to be good to know about it, right? I don't see how it could hurt.
My theory of this is that in practice there are tradeoffs between knowing about different subjects in terms of how interesting/impactful/useful/unique/what-have-you it is, and so somebody who knows about 6-7 or whatever is less likely to know about other things, but that doesn't mean that knowing about 6-7 is bad in and of itself. All knowledge is good knowledge. Furthermore, curiosity is probably correlated across domains, so being the kind of person who'd look up 6-7 when you hear it has some relationship with being more likely to look up, say, T.S. Eliot.
To be clear I think pop culture awareness is overrated by society at large, but it's not completely useless knowledge and we should appreciate people for having it. Hope that makes sense, kind of.
Love the gradient descent metaphor. The insight about strong mentorship networks functioning as escape velocity from algorithm-driven belief clusters is soemthing I've been trying to articulate for months. I run a small reading group deliberately pulling people from unrelated fields and the conversational collisions are wild compared to homogenous groups. The "how long to explain who you are" hueristic is gold.
tbh I've always had a lot of internal conflict over this. I don't want to be unique for its own sake, but the things I want intrinsically-- to make good art, to write good books-- require uniqueness.
On the other hand, I think EA is mostly true, and the ethical implications therein tend to reduce down to quantifiable value, i.e. not unique. Dollars donated, QUALYs saved.
Seeing things uniquely can be an asset, but focus ultimately matters more for impact. At least, I would be more impactful if I were more focused and less unique.
https://adaptivegood.substack.com/p/memetic-desire is a response. thanks for being a good role model, celeste!
You can consciously avoid gradient descent by spending a lot of time reading things from different sides. On politics there are sites like AllSides that can at least spread your info diet on the conventional left-right axis at least. (As you point out it's a higher-dimensional space and very much so.) You can also avoid the algorithm by consciously searching for tags you wouldn't normally search for.
The catch I've found is that being truly unique is quite isolating. I have clusters of political opinions that don't match up with any major ideology and I can only talk about a third to a half of the things I think with any given person, and then I have to lie about the kink stuff to everyone.