Igwe

I think you addressed the author as comrade. This salutation has some political connotations. That's just my thoughts.

Thanks for sharing this essay, Sabine. I think you're right that humanity's greatest challenge is social rather than technological. I think you're also right to say that we could do a lot--both technologically and institutionally--to improve our collective decision-making. If we made choices more rationally and on the basis of better information it would go a long way toward improving our future prospects.

But in my view better information-processing isn't enough. I don't believe most of our problems stem from an inability to reason through the consequences of our actions (although we could certainly do a better job of reasoning through the consequences of our actions!). In my view--this is what I argue in my own essay--the more profound issue is that there is no single neutral best course of action.

We're not fighting over the steering wheel just because we are stupid, but because we want to go to different places. This makes simply designing an impartial information processing framework a political problem as well as a technological problem. Not only do we have competing visions for the future--I doubt even individuals have stable, well-defined sets of priorities of the kind you seem to imagine--but we disagree over who should receive the benefits of and who should bear the costs of the choices we make. We disagree, in other words, over what's fair.

My own view is that we also need to create institutions that do more align the interests of individuals more directly with the interests of humanity as a whole. Otherwise we may be in danger of steering humanity off a cliff.

Best,

Robert de Neufville

    This is still my favorite essay for its informality and straightforward realism. But I'm not seeing the five-step program to save the world. What is new about identifying goals, other than calling this "priority maps (TM)"? OK, everybody should get clear about what they want. And we should all be more efficient and consistent in ordering our priorities and pursuing them effectively. Maybe use some advertising and management techniques on ourselves to keep ourselves on track. What else? I'm seeing some big problems in this world, and maybe small thinking is the best we can do, but...

      Mark,

      We are failing to solve problems that affect mankind on a global scale, problems that have many layers, are interrelated, and require that we act in a coordinated way. We are presently unable to solve these problems because we do not, as a collective, have a way to route the necessary information to the actors, that is, individual people. The priority maps are the routers of this information. This is what is necessary to be able to solve the problems. I am not claiming it is sufficient, but without a mechanism like this, I don't think mankind will fare very well in the long run. Sooner or later, this ability to correctly anticipate collective action and its consequences on large scales might develop by natural selection. But I don't think we have the time for this. Best,

      Sabine

      Robert,

      You are right of course that better information routing isn't sufficient, but it is necessary. Of course we do not agree on what to do and also need means to aggregate people's vlues and convert them into action, but for people's opinions to be taken into account they first need to have the information to be able to form an opinion. I will put your essay on the reading list, it sounds interesting :) Best,

      Sabine

      Hi Conrad,

      Thanks for the kind words. I have actually tried to avoid the word 'complexity' though I wasn't entirely successful. It's such a vague expression that people cannot really agree on what it means. Forget about the word for a moment, it remains the fact that humans lack the skill to anticipate large-scale and long-term trends in global systems, systems consisting of people and their environment, of financial and economic transactions, of media influence and political corruption. These problems are solvable if the system is adaptive, but it can only adapt if information about its status is feed back in, leading to a change in behavior. Now the behavior of all these systems is routed through humans, meaning the information has to go through the humans. That's why the priority maps. Best,

      Sabine

      Rick,

      Well, 9 pages isn't much space. You're right that I didn't get into political decision making. Political decision making basically means aggregating individual values to convert them into systemic changes. The political systems that we presently have don't do this very well. One major problem with them is that they are too slow compared to the speed at which the economic and financial system reacts. In any case, the mechanism to update the political system is the same again, you need to enable simple feedback about its status combined with knowledge about the system. I certainly hope that we'll see a major reconstruction and update of western democracies in the soon future. I'll have a look at your essay, but I presently have a lot on my reading list already, so it might take a while. Thanks for your feedback,

      Sabine

      I think it would be a good idea to offer the organizing and reward services you describe in the essay. It comes across as ethically acceptable due to the voluntary nature of these "apps" (should they be called brain apps or etc?) However we can wonder, if the presumed easier access of elites to these apps would give them even more advantage. I wonder if, instead of just reflecting back each individual's preferences, the app could be engineered or even required in regulations, to present at least some portion of global priorities etc? Something to think about at least.

      PS, my essay is up at: Flashlights, Mirrors, Real Brains and Willpower: Steering Ourselves to Steer Our Future.

      People have for many decades worked to create automated tools where users express their preferences and then get decision recommendations. There are even a number of such sites for political recommendations. In general these are not popular, and they are mostly just not good. Most useful decision recommendation tools, like Google or Auto GPSs, don't vary much at all with the person, and so don't bother to collect personal preferences. The useful tools that do vary more by person tend to base their recommendations on a dataset of prior decisions by that person, instead of on explicit abstract expressions of preference.

      If our tools are this weak for concrete problems where we have a lot of data and feedback, I don't see much hope for them giving much assistance anytime soon on the big hard problems of how we can each help humanity's future. Datasets of previous decisions by a person aren't very useful, most people don't much understand the relevant abstract concepts, the decision problems are very hard, and there are far more reasons to be concerned that claimed sources of advice are really pushing some agenda.

      Really, this isn't a problem that is ready to be handed off to smart robots. We'll have to actually *think* about it ourselves.

        Dear Sabine;

        You wrote : "some think that quantum computers will solve our problems" and you mention that they will not be able to do so.

        My proposition is that quantum computers are not limited by the "black OR white" solution but can also reach all the tones of grey in between the black and white. Once we will have created a quantum computer with 1,000 qubits and control its "decoherence" there will be 10^300 possible configurations, which is more as all the atoms in our visible universe, so we have stocked 10^300 solutions for problems that can occur. Of course this does not mean that any question can be answered, but maybe every question is already answered the moment we achieved this quantum state, even putting on the "power" may not be nececerry...

        When we will be able to couple this quantum "computer" to the brain microtubules and so create an entanglement between the available solutions in the "machine" and the quantum coherence in our brain in these microtubules we will have "available" all the answers and maybe able to steer our causal "future".

        see [link:fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1991]my essay :"STEERING THE FUTURE OF CONSCIOUSNESS ?"[:link] Thnak you for putting it on your reading list, maybe you will leave a comment on my thread and rate it in conformity with your appreciation.

        best regards

        Wilhelmus

        I agree, Robin. I think Sabine is right to argue that better decision-making tools would help. We could certainly improve the tools we have now. But it's not clear humans actually have the stable, well-defined sets of preferences we like to imagine we do. Nor is it clear any set of decision-making tools can really be neutral. How we make decisions inevitably becomes the source of political and ideological conflict.

        Dear Sabine Hossenfelder,

        Thanks for your excellent essay, appreciated by many judging from your score and the number of comments. You acknowledge "inborn knowledge", a topic James Putnam's essay deals with.

        You also note that our political, economic, and social systems that govern our lives are presently adaptive by trial and error, concluding that this is too slow to solve current problems we face. John C Hodge addresses this in his essay, and is somewhat at odds with this. The key is to partition the system finely -- many instances of local trial and error. Our Internet and existing communication systems will tell us which work and which fail, just as the state of major cities in the US tells us which policies work and which don't work very well. This is essentially parallel processing! Of course, if you are referring to a global system operating by trial and error, then the result is likely catastrophic.

        I certainly agree that "quantum computing" will not solve our problems. My favorite line in your essay is:

        "The point here is not to manipulate people into changing their ways because I or you or some supercomputer thinks it would be better... The point is to help people make decisions."

        I quote you in my essay and suggest change I think would be very helpful.

        Your "politics by looks" is shocking but not surprising. That's partly why Washington DC is called "Hollywood for ugly people" (relatively speaking). Also, your example of the mortgage housing crisis was hardly unrecognized. But the politicians who benefited by forcing banks to provide bad loans to their constituents actively opposed efforts to rein things in -- part of the problem I address. I also quibble a little with your distinction between science in the academy and "for-profit" science. Much science today has been politicized, and is essentially "for-profit", whether labeled so or not.

        Anyway, thanks again for your fine essay and well thought out approach, and I hope you will find my essay, the Thermodynamics of Freedom, interesting and compatible with your ideas. I look forward to any comments you might make.

        My best regards,

        Edwin Eugene Klingman

          Edwin,

          Thanks for your comment. I agree with what you say. I see that my sentence about trial and error can be misunderstood. You need a system that provides feedback which tells people whether a decision was working towards or against their goals. I think that is what you mean with 'many local trial and errors' though I think the word 'local' is misleading here. I would call that a small variation and learning. With 'error' I basically mean complete failure that may lead to a breakdown, which is what you want to avoid. Example: You want a feedback that stabilizes the financial system (reaction to small variations) rather than one which only kicks in if things have gone dramatically wrong (error). I can see though that I didn't make this very clear.

          In any case, I will have a look at your essay which sounds very interesting. Best,

          Sabine

          Robin,

          You are right that these tools exist. I see this as a beginning of a development that we just have to push to its conclusion.

          You are also right on your other points. People's preferences aren't stable over time and they are in addition contradictory. That doesn't matter though, the priority maps can be adjusted and that preferences are contradictory just means there is no decision that works towards all.

          Regarding the information sources pushing agendas. That is true, but look, this problem is self-correcting once the system is set up properly. So some information provider pushes some agenda. Do you like this agenda? Do you share their values? Are you skeptic about their motives? Do you care about what other people think about them? Which sources do you trust? What do other people think? What is the track record of these information providers?

          People aren't stupid. They are influenced by sources 'pushing their agenda' because these sources make their information cheap and because this is allowed in the present system. Now I believe that this is a failure of democracy because people don't want to be influenced this way but don't have the means to express this. If that is so, then giving them the means to express this should address the problem. Best,

          Sabine

          Sabine,

          Yours is an extraordinary, beautifully written essay, whose philosophy and proposal I readily support. Towards the end of your essay, you appeal to the goodness of all humans, without which, as you say, making information inexpensive will by itself not be of help. Unfortunately, as we know, in the current scenario, conflict of interest often makes powerful individuals act in a manner which is more suited to fulfilling personal / nationalistic ambitions, not keeping in mind the good of humanity at large [war for instance being an ugly consequence]. Such individuals could be classified as `not good humans' and are a serious bottleneck. I do not wish to use this space to advertise my essay, but I have tried to make a case that humans can be `trained' to be `good'. I cannot prove that this will work, for this too requires goodness of political will, but perhaps if we build from grassroots [catch them young] there is some hope that future leaders might begin to act differently, and collectively think of the planet, and not just of nations. One hopes.

          Best,

          Tejinder

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            • Post #72

            Hi Sabine,

            And thank you for your nice essay! Your ideas would be the silver bullet in the ideal world. Problems arise when we are trying to find out the right actions and priorities. We can't be even sure if our every (major) selected priority or goal does any good in a long run (poor data, poor theories, biases, fabricated data, manipulation, lobbying etc). Anyway, your ideas would be a big leap forward if ever implemented!

            So, big hand from me :-) I bet that you don't buy my ideas on antimatter. But let's pretend that I'm right, how would you handle the situation with your suggestions? I'm listening.

              Kimmo,

              It is not the case that every particle can be its own antiparticle. I really do not think it is a problem that we have to worry about. Having said that, it is true of course that every new technology brings risks and that these risks have to be properly studied and assessed, preferably before the technology spreads. This is a difficult problem because the question what risk is acceptable is not a scientific one. This risk assessment also must take into account the question of how likely the theory is to be correct, and I am afraid that your theory is almost certainly incorrect, so the risk seems to me very small. In this context however, I recently read about the origin of the word 'megadeath', maybe your worries are worth some gigadeaths then. Best,

              Sabine

              Tejinder,

              I am philosophically very much with Leibnitz who was ridiculed for his argument that we live in the 'best of all possible worlds'. I tend to think it is tautologically true that people are 'good' and try to do the 'best', it's just that they disagree on exactly what that entails. Another way to say this is to notice that the phrase 'pursuit of happiness' in the US constitution is entirely meaningless. Happiness is pretty much by definition that what people pursue. If somebody wanted to pursue unhappiness who are we to decline him his wish if that makes him happy? Or wait, does not make him happy. See the issue? Same thing with being 'good'. Everything everybody does is 'good' for something or somebody. Maybe they are good at being bad? Maybe they just don't care about the 'good for humanity at large' and who are you to tell them they should? Would that make you bad? Would that be good if it made you bad? And what does any of that mean anyway?

              Having said that, I don't want to get hung up on a word too much as I think I can extract the essence of what you are saying and I like the sentiment. Best,

              Sabine

              But IF my theory is right then the outcome might be catastrophic. Can you ignore my chances of being right? I hope not.