Self-sabatoge vs. self-knowledge
...and quiet confidence without boldness
The mean people go to the store to return items with missing parts. The demons hiss when you find them. They are outraged that you pulled their pants down. Don’t do that unless you’re intimate with each other.
It’s tempting to want to believe that a person has a certain shape, for lack of a better word. We adapt. If you are comfortable place, you don’t.
Sometimes people are the way you assume they are. Before even interpreting the words out of your mouth, they first look at what those words mean for your relationship to each other. So what’s the solution? Be reassuring? Why? So they build up their BS detector?
There’s difficulty, especially now with intelligent machines, to figure out our place in the world. It’s clear that biological planes (birds) and mechanical birds (planes) are not in competition with each other. It should be the same with AI.
When we try to place ourselves in the world, we do want to be able to not just find connection, but meaning. Trivial connection is easy. You find something in common. This can be faked.
But optimism and the feeling of community is more of a paradox. I worked at a company. We had an email go out saying one of the employees at this company killed himself. He had a family and kids. You would think a job + wife + children is enough for meaning. But then again, say he’s at the edge of a black hole. He may not feel any different, but life for him is over. His destiny is in cement. The opposite of that may be the case with depression. You feel the end even if from the outside all looks good.
Imagine you do everything you do to appease everyone around you. This is different than being kind and attentive. Appeasement is a disordered behavior. It lacks intention. But we’re also afraid of intention. If your neighbor suddenly became “agentic,” this may not be good for you if your goals do not align. We’ve got the alignment problem.
You don’t need alignment with a sycophantic AI because it’s not trying to gain leverage over you. It just doesn’t care one way or the other. It’s doing next token prediction. Somehow this quality is very powerful. In defection games, tit for tat with occasional forgiveness came out on top. Reality is more complex. There’s hidden knowledge. I wonder how these games that Dawkins talked in The Selfish Gene would work on an LLM.
Even before defection occurs against us, we intuitively try to get a read of the other person. We might pick up on signals that could give away their intent. Even the defectors, if they have any conscience, want to give away their strategy a little bit. They don’t want to hurt you, and so they give you a bit of a warning.
Why do we hurt ourselves? If we know that we’re doing something wrong, why do we keep doing it? When it comes to physics, we can’t get away with delusion. Reality pushes back. But human beings are different. We will try to save each other. Or sometimes, we’ll deceive someone and then deceive ourselves about why it was an ok thing to do.
Imagine this scenario: you are a gremlin. You are trying to return a half-eaten pizza. They tell you that you cannot return it because you already ate half. You say you barely touched it. In fact, you’re upset that they would have the gall to deliver only half a pizza. The employee responds, “if the pizza arrived with half missing, you would have started with that”. If you were clever enough, you might know that the employee would notice the missing pieces first, and you would start with that, but that would mean you have to consider their perspective, which would mean you’d have to care about them enough to consider it. But of course the reason you’re a bad liar is because you don’t care about others. Something about being selfish also results in you being cut off from the perspectives of others.
Now let’s make this about Jesus. The Old Testament god had many complaints about the Israelites. The fact that a nation would have such scathing self-criticism in their holy book is a positive sign. It speaks to a degree of self-awareness. But even self-criticism can turn into a perverse strategy of avoiding responsibility. You throw yourself a pity party while your village is is being burned and plundered. It’s obviously stupid to wallow in self-pity this way. It does speak to a certain kind of self-awareness, but it’s ultimately self-destructive.
As you become successful, you are also further removed from the dusty scent of the janitor’s closet. And yet you need discern the scent of pollen off the leg of a bee outside your house when you are engulfed by human obsequents. You need to be like the princess discerning the pea from under a dozen mattresses. And yet you cannot hold your nose at the people living close to the brutality of life.
A leader should be able to wrap around the entirety of human experience, to detect the subtle and not squirm at the sight of the overbearing, to be like a camera with high dynamic range, to detect the mouse in the shadows without blowing out the highlights. You don’t want to be out of touch, but you also want to be precise in your observations and your leadership.
One reason we like the underdog is that it’s easier to trust the leadership who has lived in the swamp and has come out. Even if their nose cannot smell it, their mind still stands a chance of remembering.
Beethoven could compose even without his ears. And the humility that comes with such an obvious impairment could have even helped him in composing his 9th and final symphony. He would have been forgiven for giving up on music. Clinging to his profession would have also hurt him. But when you hear his 9th, you don’t sense self-pity, resignation, or a clinging, but at fully-trained biological model. Like Moses, he could take us to a soundscape that he himself could not enjoy. That’s true leadership and attunement.
That story is repeated again and again with Moses, Jesus, Martin Luther, America’s founding fathers, Martin Luther King, and so on. They knew us and understood something that stretched beyond their immediate perception.
They listened to the quiet inner voice. That’s not something reserved for the greats, we can all do it. One of the greatest mysteries is why god is so quiet. If we try hard enough, maybe we can hear his voice.