From: Joscha Bach <fl
To: Jeffrey Epstein <jeevacation@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Happy new year, and A Holiday Story for You
Date: Tue, 02 Jan 2018 23:52:20 +0000
> On Jan 2, 2018, at 13:35, jeffrey E. leevacation@gmail.com> wrote:
> people feel , need or create afeeling that they describe as hope. . a preferred outcome. and feel a reward if the
outcome is what they hoped for .
I agree: when we commit to a positive goal and reach it, we get a reward (both from the actual event associated
with the goal, and the competence signal for being able to attain our goals). But hope also works without
commitment ("I hope that Earth won't be hit by a meteor in the next 10 years"), in which case we usually won't
feel a reward.
What do you think about the idea of treating hope as the internal signal that one should invest? (Regardless of its
rationality.)
> it is an internal hack. accessing your reserve system and if in despair acting as a narcotic
From a regulation perspective, total despair should lead to ceasing action, i.e. we turn off the need to regulate,
which seems to happen for many animals that are being eaten alive. Hope might be equivalent to focusing all
resources on the remaining possibilities for action, which seems to be rational to me.
I would distinguish hope from wishful thinking, i.e. setting the cutoff for bad trajectories so high that planning
for undesirable but survivable outcomes is neglected. Not all hope is unreasonable.
> 5.. not sure if the high iq , people have not fallen deeper in their silos
Is that from observation? I found that institutional people, like Mithril, won't talk publicly, but they were always
been paid for not being public. I wonder how deep they got. Academics are much more public than ever, and so
are non-institutionalized nerds.
> 6. re ps , please dont wait to fill the tank until the needle bounces on EMPTY. yes of course
Yes. And thank you.
> On Tue, Jan 2, 2018 at 7:16 AM, Joscha Bach wrote:
>> On Jan I, 2018, at 13:22, jeffrey E. <jeevacation@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
> > great new years present.. thoughts 1. hope. ? it is not backed by any evidence in first order. but second order
attrributes abound. livng longer etc.. internal benefit to many if not most.
> Do you mean that hope is not about the present state (zero order), the visible trend of the present state (first
order), but about changes in that trend (second order)?
> I don't yet understand how that is significant.
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> When we model the future, we extrapolate the present into a number of trajectories. We tend to fail, not only
because or lack of information, or because the world is often non-linear or chaotic, but because the space in
which these trajectories play out does not have a fixed dimensionality. The eigenvectors that characterize the
future universe will usually be different from those of the past; e.g. a universe with Google and social media is
constituted differently than one without them.
> In my view, hope refers to the possibility of entering trajectories with positive valence in a universe in which
many trajectories have negative valence.
> Hope is a representation of the indication that we should invest into a subset of the available action space. As
soon as we have given up hope for that subset of the action space, we should stop investing in it, because it won't
yield any conceivable return.
> While the hope construct can be used to model rational investments, it often does not approximate the actual
distribution of expectations, because many of the expected trajectories mean death, or something sufficiently
close to death that they can be ignored, i.e. they don't warrant any possible further consideration in the view of
the agent. Instead, hope distributes the investments along those trajectories that have acceptable valence, even if
they are very unlikely.
> Using hope instead of rationality for modeling the future is dangerous when we are not an individual agent but
a society. For instance, if we build our models of future development of the climate on hope, we will be cutting
off investments into the death and near-death trajectories, even if those are not unlikely.
> Based on that thought, I would for instance suggest building a repository of knowledge for bootstrapping
epistemology, civilization and general AI for future non-human civilizations, i.e. those that will spring off long
after all large mammalian species are wiped out by a super volcano, meteor, global warming, nuclear war or bad
AI singularity. It might make sense to put a few copies in orbit, and a few underground, perhaps equipped with
broadcasting facilities that announce the presence of the repository every few hundred years. (Not that I have any
reasonable priors from which I could derive the rationality of such an investment, but it could be fun.)
> > . 2. it is a form of self deception that carries an evolutionary advantage if modulated. . ie cant hope to fly.
maybe modulates or allows the system to call in reserves..
> See above: hope as indicator for whether we should invest. If my only chance to reap future rewards lies in a
trajectory that has an extremely low probability, it still makes sense to throw all available resources on the
assumption that this trajectory can be realized.
> What I don't understand is which aspect of the hope construct is non-obvious.
> > 3. the ttheory that we are more advanced thinkers than the past . seems like todays exceptionalism.. in
ancient times one had to know many things, as cities grew. specialied knowledgt made the group more effecicent
but potentaily at the expense of the individuals breadth of knowledge.
> Agree. There are few instances in our recent evolution that gave opportunity or selection pressure towards
higher intrinsic intelligence, with the exception of the Ashkenazi mutation and a handful similar events. Pre-
modern societies had fatal selection (i.e. your children die or remain unborn if you are stupid), modem society
puts the reproductive cutoff at being able to have sex, and incentivizes high-IQ individuals disproportionally
against having children.
> It seems that Greece and Rome had a class society that allowed the upper classes to have more offspring than
the lower classes, and larger social mobility based on IQ than our current arrangement. Medieval society still
drew on a pool of exceptional minds, but tended to lock them away into monasteries and reducing their number
of offspring.
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> On the other hand, we now have 20 times the population and the intemet links them all up to the global library,
so even if the relative fraction of high IQ individuals is much smaller, their absolute number might be sufficient
to add to the edifices built by the minds of the past.
> > 4. I believe that teaching every person to write is harmful to some individuals. writing slows down the
thinking and forces a rule based system onto complex definitions. and speed reduction. asperbergers could be an
advantagea as well as some form of writing disability.. 5.
> Many people benefit from the ability to turn off verbal thought, or to only employ it for communication. I don't
know enough about people at the lower end of functioning to know how much better they work if you don't give
them analytic compositional operators at all.
> > asperbergers could be an advantagea as well as some form of writing disability.. 5.
> And here I thought your writing style is just an expression of time and attention being the most non-renewable
resources in the life of a Billionaire :)
> Anecdotically, many entrepreneurs I know seem to have dyslexia. I suppose it comes down to a greater ability
to generalize in the face of conflicting data, i.e. the opposite of OCD.
> — Joscha
> PS: Our account is emptied, and I think the one at H-F as well. Could you please pitch in? Thank you so much!
> --
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