Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: What is wisdom?, published by TsviBT on November 14, 2023 on LessWrong.

Laterally through the chronophone

In "Archimedes's Chronophone", Yudkowsky asks: What would you say to Archimedes - - what important message would you want to send back in time, to set the world on a hopeworthy course from then on - - if you're barred from saying anything that's too anachronistic? That is: What would you say, if the message Archimedes receives is not literally what you said, but rather is whatever would be the output of the timeless principles that you used to generate your message, as applied in Archimedes's mind in his context? He then explains that the question points at advice we can give to ourselves for original thinking.

The point of the chronophone dilemma is to make us think about what kind of cognitive policies are good to follow when you don't know your destination in advance.

Lateral anachronism

This question doesn't only address what to say to Archimedes through the chronophone, or what to say to ourselves. It also addresses what advice we can give to our contemporaries, when our contemporaries are separated from us by a chasm that's like the chasm that separates us from Archimedes.

This sort of "lateral anachronism" shows up across major differences in mindset, such as between people living in different cultures, countries, or ideologies. (People going along parallel but separate timecourses, you could say.) Someone's context - - their education, communities, language, and so on - - will determine what {concepts, ways of thinking, ways of being, coordination points, values, possibilities} they'll understand and give weight to.

If someone comes from a world different enough from your world, and they try to communicate something important to you, you're prone to, one way or another, not really take on board what they wanted to communicate to you. You'll misunderstand, overtranslate, dismiss, ignore, round off, pigeonhole, be defensive about, or fearfully avoid what they're saying.

Lateral anachronism also shows up in situations of conflict.

Every motion the other person makes - - every statement, every argument, every proposed conversational procedure, every negotiation, every plea, every supposed common ground - - may be a lie, a ploy to mislead you about their beliefs or intentions, trolling bait, a performance to rally their troops or to garner third-party support or maintain their egoic delusion, an exploitation of your good will, a distraction from their hidden malevolent activity, interference with your line of thinking, or

an attempt to propagandistically disrupt your own internal political will and motivation.

Conflict is a hell of a drug. Any action can be rationalized as deeply nefarious with a bit of effort, and taking that interpretive stance towards another person is perhaps nearly a hardwired instinctive pattern that can trigger and self-sustainingly stay triggered.

Examples of lateral anachronism

You have a detailed argument for why cryonics is high expected value and I should sign up? That just tells me to use weird status moves to push people into ignoring AGI risk and being excited about the upside, because that's me using my accustomed [way to apply social pressure] to get people to buy into my preferred [coordination-point to make my sector of society behave optimistically, regardless of whether or not the "belief" involved actually makes sense].

You demand that people making factual claims relevant to public policy must put explicit probabilities on observable correlates of their statements? That just tells me to demand that people making policy claims must have a PhD and run a major AI lab, because that's [the externally verifiable standard that I'm already prepared to meet and that my ideological opponents are not already prepared to meet]. You ...