(Publishing comment-draft that's been sitting here two years, since I thought it was good (even if super-unfinished…), and I may wish to link to it in future discussions. As always, feel free to not-engage and just be awesome. Also feel free to not be awesome, since awesomeness can only be achieved by choice (thus, awesomeness may be proportional to how free you feel to not be it).)

Yes! This relates to what I call costs of compromise.

Costs of compromise

As you allude to by the exponential decay of the green dots in your last graph, there are exponential costs to compromising what you are optimizing for in order to appeal to a wider variety of interests. On the flip-side, how usefwl to a subgroup you can expect to be is exponentially proportional to how purely you optimize for that particular subset of people (depending on how independent the optimization criteria are). This strategy is also known as "horizontal segmentation".^[1]

The benefits of segmentation ought to be compared against what is plausibly an exponential decay in the number of people who fit a marginally smaller subset of optimization criteria. So it's not obvious in general whether you should on the margin try to aim more purely for a subset, or aim for broader appeal.

Specialization vs generalization

This relates to what I think are one of the main mysteries/trade-offs in optimization: specialization vs generalization. It explains why scaling your company can make it more efficient (economies of scale),^[2] why the brain is modular,^[3] and how Howea palm trees can speciate without the aid of geographic isolation (aka sympatric speciation constrained by genetic swamping) by optimising their gene pools for differentially-acidic patches of soil and evolving separate flowering intervals in order to avoid pollinating each other.^[4]

Conjunctive search

When you search for a single thing that fits two or more criteria, that's called "conjunctive search". In the image, try to find an object that's both [colour: green] and [shape: X].

My claim is that this analogizes to how your brain searches for conjunctive ideas: a vast array of preconscious ideas are selected from a distribution of distractors that score high in either one of the criteria.

10d6 vs 1d60

Preamble2: When you throw 10 6-sided dice (written as "10d6"), the probability of getting a max roll is much lower compared to if you were throwing a single 60-sided dice ("1d60"). But if we assume that the 10 6-sided dice are strongly correlated, that has the effect of squishing the normal distribution to look like the uniform distribution, and you're much more likely to roll extreme values.

Moral: Your probability of sampling extreme values from a distribution depends the number of variables that make it up (i.e. how many factors convolved over), and the extent to which they are independent. Thus, costs of compromise are much steeper if you're sampling for outliers (a realm which includes most creative thinking and altruistic projects).

Spaghetti-sauce fallacies 🍝

If you maximally optimize a single spaghetti sauce for profit, there exists a global optimum for some taste, quantity, and price. You might then declare that this is the best you can do, and indeed this is a common fallacy I will promptly give numerous examples of. [TODO…]

But if you instead allow yourself to optimize several different spaghetti sauces, each one tailored to a specific market, you can make much more profit compared to if you have to conjunctively optimize a single thing.

Thus, a spaghetti-sauce fallacy is when somebody asks "how can we optimize thing $X$ more for criteria $Y$?" when they should be asking "how can we chunk/segment $X$ into $n$ cohesive/dimensionally-reduced segments so we can optimize for {$Y_1$, ..., $Y_n$} disjunctively?"

People rarely vote based on usefwlness in the first place

As a sidenote: People don't actually vote (/allocate karma) based on what they find usefwl. That's a rare case. Instead, people overwhelmingly vote based on what they (intuitively) expect others will find usefwl. This rapidly turns into a Keynesian Beauty Contest with many implications. Information about people's underlying preferences (or what they personally find usefwl) is lost as information cascades are amplified by recursive predictions. This explains approximately everything wrong about the social world.

Already in childhood, we learn to praise (and by extension vote) based on what kinds of praise other people will praise us for. This works so well as a general heuristic that it gets internalized and we stop being able to notice it as an underlying motivation for everything we do.

1. ^{^}

   See e.g. spaghetti sauce.

2. ^{^}

   Scale allows subunits (e.g. employees) to specialize at subtasks.

3. ^{^}

   Every time a subunit of the brain has to pull double-duty with respect to what it adapts to, the optimization criteria compete for its adaptation—this is also known as "pleiotropy" in evobio, and "polytely" in… some ppl called it that and it's a good word.

4. ^{^}

   This palm-tree example (and others) are partially optimized/goodharted for seeming impressive, but I leave it in because it also happens to be deliciously interesting and possibly entertaining as examples of a costs of compromise. I want to emphasize how ubiquitous this trade-off is.

Oh, this is excellent! I do a version of this, but I haven't paid enough attention to what I do to give it a name. "Blurting" is perfect.

I try to make sure to always notice my immediate reaction to something, so I can more reliably tell what my more sophisticated reasoning modules transforms that reaction into. Almost all the search-process imbalances (eg. filtered recollections, motivated stopping, etc.) come into play during the sophistication, so it's inherently risky. But refusing to reason past the blurt is equally inadvisable.

This is interesting from a predictive-processing perspective.^[1] The first thing I do when I hear someone I respect tell me their opinion, is to compare that statement to my prior mental model of the world. That's the fast check. If it conflicts, I aspire to mentally blurt out that reaction to myself.

It takes longer to generate an alternative mental model (ie. sophistication) that is able to predict the world described by the other person's statement, and there's a lot more room for bias to enter via the mental equivalent of multiple comparisons. Thus, if I'm overly prone to conform, that bias will show itself after I've already blurted out "huh!" and made note of my prior. The blurt helps me avoid the failure mode of conforming and feeling like that's what I believed all along.

Blurting is a faster and more usefwl variation on writing down your predictions in advance.

1. ^{^}

   Speculation. I'm not very familiar with predictive processing, but the claim seems plausible to me on alternative models as well.

I disagree a little bit with the credibility of some of the examples, and want to double-click others. But regardless, I think this is a very productive train of thought and thank you for writing it up. Interesting!

And btw, if you feel like a topic of investigation "might not fit into the EA genre", and yet you feel like it could be important based on first-principles reasoning, my guess is that that's a very important lead to pursue. Reluctance to step outside the genre, and thinking that the goal is to "do EA-like things", is exactly the kind of dynamic that's likely to lead the whole community to overlook something important.

Some selected comments or posts I've written

• Taxonomy of cheats, multiplex case analysis, worst-case alignment
• "You never make decisions, you only ever decide between strategies"
• My take on deference
• Dumb
• Quick reasons for bubbliness
• Against blind updates
• The Expert's Paradox, and the Funder's Paradox
• Isthmus patterns
• Jabber loop
• Paradox of Expert Opinion
• Rampant obvious errors
• Arbital - Absorbing barrier
• "Decoy prestige"
• "prestige gradient"
• Braindump and recommendations on coordination and institutional decision-making
• Social epistemology braindump (I no longer endorse most of this, but it has patterns)

Other posts I like

• The Goddess of Everything Else - Scott Alexander
  • “The Goddess of Cancer created you; once you were hers, but no longer. Throughout the long years I was picking away at her power. Through long generations of suffering I chiseled and chiseled. Now finally nothing is left of the nature with which she imbued you. She never again will hold sway over you or your loved ones. I am the Goddess of Everything Else and my powers are devious and subtle. I won you by pieces and hence you will all be my children. You are no longer driven to multiply conquer and kill by your nature. Go forth and do everything else, till the end of all ages.”

• A Forum post can be short - Lizka
  • Succinctly demonstrates how often people goodhart on length or other irrelevant criteria like effort moralisation. A culture for appreciating posts for the practical value they add to you specifically, would incentivise writers to pay more attention to whether they are optimising for expected usefwlness or just signalling.
• Changing the world through slack & hobbies - Steven Byrnes
  • Unsurprisingly, there's a theme to what kind of posts I like. Posts that are about de-Goodharting ourselves.
    • Also ht Eliezer and Alex Lawsen for posts on the same thing.
• Hero Licensing - Eliezer Yudkowsky
  • Stop apologising, just do the thing. People might ridicule you for believing in yourself, but just do the thing.
• A Sketch of Good Communication - Ben Pace
  • Highlights the danger of deferring if you're trying to be an Explorer in an epistemic community.
• Holding a Program in One's Head - Paul Graham
  • "A good programmer working intensively on his own code can hold it in his mind the way a mathematician holds a problem he's working on. Mathematicians don't answer questions by working them out on paper the way schoolchildren are taught to. They do more in their heads: they try to understand a problem space well enough that they can walk around it the way you can walk around the memory of the house you grew up in. At its best programming is the same. You hold the whole program in your head, and you can manipulate it at will.
    
    That's particularly valuable at the start of a project, because initially the most important thing is to be able to change what you're doing. Not just to solve the problem in a different way, but to change the problem you're solving."