But why would you ever fail to translate feedback? Most people, if they ask you to take out the garbage, don’t mean to say “do it literally instantaneously in a physically impossible fashion.” So why get defensive as *if* they meant that?
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One hypothesis: we have bad memories of people who expected obedience faster than we literally could obey at the time, or of demands that were literally impossible to fulfill even *after* simulating them.
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I usually use religious commandments as what feel like clear cut examples of instructions that are definitely impossible to obey and yet intended to be obeyed; but other people claim that’s not true, so I’m not sure.
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I’m very confident that the Talmud (which i’m trying to learn cover to cover) describes behaviors as admirable which would be impossible or unwise to attempt (like sleeping 0 hours per night)
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Anyhow, I’m inclined to believe that there are, or have been, *any* people who demand the impossible, and actually meant that, not something more reasonable.
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But okay, if there *are* people who ask the impossible or unreasonable, why should that cause suffering? Why not just reject all impossible demands?
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To explain this, I have to posit some inherent limitation in what thoughts are possible, and that makes my model more complicated & so less credible, for occam’s razor reasons. Hmm. I’m stuck.
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“Some people demand the impossible” should lead to the update “demanding the impossible is a thing people sometimes do”, but I don’t see why it overcorrects to “all feedback should be interpreted as a demand to do the impossible.”
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Replying to @s_r_constantin
Malcolm 🌎cean Retweeted Malcolm 🌎cean
The emotional brain is timeless; it doesn't overtly have the declarative belief "all X means Y", it just responds to X as if it's like situation Y, without recognizing that the emotional brain isn't really taking in the present situation.https://twitter.com/Malcolm_Ocean/status/1209195568146325504 …
Malcolm 🌎cean added,
Malcolm 🌎cean @Malcolm_OceanReplying to @QiaochuYuan @visakanvMy latest frame for this: everyone is basically living in a dream mashup of their current external situation and their old emotional meanings. Like dreaming you're at school but it's also on a boat somehow. & as in dreams, somehow the weirdness of this mashup goes unnoticed2 replies 0 retweets 1 like -
Replying to @Malcolm_Ocean
We *observe* that this is how the emotional brain seems to work. But why would it work that way? Why would a general machine for processing information acquire this failure mode? "Evolution is a blunt instrument" maybe?
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But I'm also interested in trying to come at this from the other angle: "If we assume we have an agent trying to get what it wants, with noisy information and bounded computation but otherwise no hard-coded flaws, how would or could this failure mode emerge?"
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Replying to @s_r_constantin @Malcolm_Ocean
If the answer is "EVERY agent (meeting certain requirements) will necessarily have this failure mode under these circumstances", that a.) makes it more likely that we're correct that this is actually how the emotional brain works, and b.) gives us more info about how to hack it.
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