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: On attunement, published by Joe Carlsmith on March 25, 2024 on LessWrong.
(Cross-posted from my website. Podcast version here, or search for "Joe Carlsmith Audio" on your podcast app.
This essay is part of a series that I'm calling "Otherness and control in the age of AGI." I'm hoping that the individual essays can be read fairly well on their own, but see here for brief summaries of the essays that have been released thus far.)
"You, moon, You, Aleksander, fire of cedar logs.
Waters close over us, a name lasts but an instant.
Not important whether the generations hold us in memory.
Great was that chase with the hounds for the unattainable meaning of the world."
~ Czeslaw Milosz, "Winter"
"Poplars (Autumn)," by Claude Monet (image source here)
My last essay examined a philosophical vibe that I (following others) call "green." Green is one of the five colors on the Magic the Gathering Color Wheel, which I've found (despite not playing Magic myself) an interesting way of classifying the sort of the energies that tend to animate people.[1] The colors, and their corresponding shticks-according-to-Joe, are:
White: Morality.
Blue: Knowledge.
Black: Power.
Red: Passion.
Green: ...
I haven't found a single word that I think captures green. Associations include: environmentalism, tradition, spirituality, hippies, stereotypes of Native Americans, Yoda, humility, wholesomeness, health, and yin. My last essay tried to bring the vibe that underlies these associations into clearer view, and to point at some ways that attempts by other colors to reconstruct green can miss parts of it.
In particular, I focused on the way green cares about respect, in a sense that goes beyond "not trampling on the rights/interests of moral patients" (what I called "green-according-to-white"); and on the way green takes joy in (certain kinds of) yin, in a sense that contrasts with merely "accepting things you're too weak to change" (what I called "green-according-to-black").
In this essay, I want to turn to what is perhaps the most common and most compelling-to-me attempt by another color to reconstruct green - namely, "green-according-to-blue." On this story, green is about making sure that you don't act out of inadequate knowledge. Thus, for example: maybe you're upset about wild animal suffering. But green cautions you: if you try to remake that ecosystem to improve the lives of wild animals, you are at serious risk of not knowing-what-you're-doing.
And see, also, the discourse about "Chesterton's fence," which attempts to justify deference towards tradition and the status quo via the sort of knowledge they might embody.
I think humility in the face of the limits of our knowledge is, indeed, a big part of what's going on with green. But I think green cares about having certain kinds of knowledge too. But I think that the type of knowledge green cares about most isn't quite the same as the sort of knowledge most paradigmatically associated with blue. Let me say more about what I mean.
How do you know what matters?
"I went out to see what I could see..."
~ Annie Dillard, "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek"
An 1828 watercolor of Tintern Abbey, by J.M.W. Turner (image source here)
Blue, to me, most directly connotes knowledge in the sense of: science, "rationality," and making accurate predictions about the world. And there is a grand tradition of contrasting this sort of knowledge with various other types that seem less "heady" and "cognitive" - even without a clear sense of what exactly the contrast consists in. People talk, for example, about intuition; about system 1; about knowledge that lives in your gut and your body; about knowing "how" to do things (e.g.
ride a bike); about more paradigmatically social/emotional forms of intelligence, and so on.
And here, of course, the rationalists protest at the idea ...

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