garden/ribbonfarm.md

Ribbonfarm

• A [thing] on [twitter]: https://twitter.com/ribbonfarm
• By [vgr] and [sarahdoingthing]
• Read https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2019/03/13/predictable-identities-4/ (the whole series)
  • Lots related to The Selfish Gene
  • Perhaps also to The Evolution of Cooperation
  • Stereotypes are actually surprisingly effective. Their main problem is we have too few (?). "Studying cultures is about acquiring many useful stereotypes"
  • Outgroup homogeneity effect
  • "That’s why small talk about last night’s episode of Game of Thrones isn’t a waste of time. It communicates: I am like you, you can model me well by looking at yourself, we can cooperate."
  • On creepiness: "The perception of creepiness is a response to the ambiguity of threat. […] While they may not be overtly threatening, individuals who display unusual patterns of nonverbal behavior, odd emotional responses or highly distinctive physical characteristics are outside the norm, and by definition unpredictable."
  • Deviating from common expectations costs idiosyncrasy credits.
  • Read The Intelligent Social Web. Seems relevant to multiple identities and conflicts arising from those (e.g. what happens when one goes back to old friends/family).
  • On big shifts to beliefs not supported by a scaffolding of smaller beliefs: "Without this scaffolding, adopting the new idea will promptly make the world less predictable even if it may be a better-predicting model in the long term. This feels bad, and your brain will pull out all the stops to avoid it: confirmation bias, isolated demands for rigor, flat out denial."
  • Newcomblike problems
  • It's helpful to make it easy for other people to predict us whenever it is low cost: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2019/08/28/predictable-identities-16-newcomblike-part-ii/
  • Persistent Non-Symbolic Experiences
  • Entropic Brain Hypothesis: Our brains evolved to model the environment and minimize surprise and uncertainty. Since our environment is complex and dynamic, so are more evolved brains. fMRI allows us to measure brain entropy, how unpredictable is one’s brain state in the future based on its current state. It’s a proxy for a brain’s flexibility and complexity.
  • The Default Mode Network suppresses entropy.
  • "This post was written by my conscious model of the self, a mild anxiety in my stomach, Alberto Albero, and Buddhism. In what sense is it mine?"
  • It is easy to fixate on the "markings" for an identity instead of its "core": "adopting X as an identity makes you optimize for being predicted as X, rather than for X itself. If you tell people about the book you’re writing they’ll predict that you’re a writer and will treat you accordingly, reinforcing your identity. If you merely accumulate words in a draft file, they won’t.".
  • Identities and control: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2020/02/05/predictable-identities-25-external-control/