From: Joscha Bach <fl

From: Joscha Bach <fl To: Jeffrey Epstein <[email protected]> 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. [email protected]> 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. <[email protected]> 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. EFTA00919406 > 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. EFTA00919407 > 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! > -- > please note > The information contained in this communication is > confidential, may be attorney-client privileged, may > constitute inside information, and is intended only for > the use of the addressee. It is the property of > JEE > Unauthorized use, disclosure or copying of this > communication or any part thereof is strictly prohibited > and may be unlawful. If you have received this > communication in error, please notify us immediately by > return e-mail or by e-mail to [email protected], and > destroy this communication and all copies thereof, > including all attachments. copyright -all rights reserved EFTA00919408