The Nonlinear Library LW - On green by Joe Carlsmith
Mar 21, 2024
01:21:25
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 green, published by Joe Carlsmith on March 21, 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.
Warning: spoilers for Yudkowsky's "The Sword of the Good.")
"The Creation" by Lucas Cranach (image source here)
The colors of the wheel
I've never been big on personality typologies. I've heard the Myers-Briggs explained many times, and it never sticks. Extraversion and introversion, E or I, OK. But after that merciful vowel - man, the opacity of those consonants, NTJ, SFP... And remind me the difference between thinking and judging? Perceiving and sensing? N stands for intuition?
Similarly, the enneagram. People hit me with it. "You're an x!", I've been told. But the faces of these numbers are so blank. And it has so many kinda-random-seeming characters. Enthusiast, Challenger, Loyalist...
The enneagram. Presumably more helpful with some memorization...
Hogwarts houses - OK, that one I can remember. But again: those are our categories? Brave, smart, ambitious, loyal? It doesn't feel very joint-carving...
But one system I've run into has stuck with me, and become a reference point: namely, the Magic the Gathering Color Wheel. (My relationship to this is mostly via somewhat-reinterpreting Duncan Sabien's presentation here, who credits Mark Rosewater for a lot of his understanding. I don't play Magic myself, and what I say here won't necessarily resonate with the way people-who-play-magic think about these colors.)
Basically, there are five colors: white, blue, black, red, and green. And each has their own schtick, which I'm going to crudely summarize as:
White: Morality.
Blue: Knowledge.
Black: Power.
Red: Passion.
Green: ...well, we'll get to green.
To be clear: this isn't, quite, the summary that Sabien/Rosewater would give. Rather, that summary looks like this:
(Image credit: Duncan Sabien here.)
Here, each color has a goal (peace, perfection, satisfaction, etc) and a default strategy (order, knowledge, ruthlessness, etc). And in the full system, which you don't need to track, each has a characteristic set of disagreements with the colors opposite to it...
The disagreements. (Image credit: Duncan Sabien here.)
And a characteristic set of agreements with its neighbors...[1]
The agreements. (Image credit: Duncan Sabien here.)
Here, though, I'm not going to focus on the particulars of Sabien's (or Rosewater's) presentation. Indeed, my sense is that in my own head, the colors mean different things than they do to Sabien/Rosewater (for example, peace is less central for white, and black doesn't necessarily seek satisfaction). And part of the advantage of using colors, rather than numbers (or made-up words like "Hufflepuff") is that we start, already, with a set of associations to draw on and dispute.
Why did this system, unlike the others, stick with me? I'm not sure, actually. Maybe it's just: it feels like a more joint-carving division of the sorts of energies that tend to animate people. I also like the way the colors come in a star, with the lines of agreement and disagreement noted above. And I think it's strong on archetypal resonance.
Why is this system relevant to the sorts of otherness and control issues I've been talking about in this series? Lots of reasons in principle. But here I want to talk, in particular, about green.
Gestures at green
"I love not Man the less, but Nature more..."
~ Byron
What is green?
Sabien discusses various associations: environmentalism, tradition, family, spirituality, hippies, stereotypes of Native Americans, Yo...
(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.
Warning: spoilers for Yudkowsky's "The Sword of the Good.")
"The Creation" by Lucas Cranach (image source here)
The colors of the wheel
I've never been big on personality typologies. I've heard the Myers-Briggs explained many times, and it never sticks. Extraversion and introversion, E or I, OK. But after that merciful vowel - man, the opacity of those consonants, NTJ, SFP... And remind me the difference between thinking and judging? Perceiving and sensing? N stands for intuition?
Similarly, the enneagram. People hit me with it. "You're an x!", I've been told. But the faces of these numbers are so blank. And it has so many kinda-random-seeming characters. Enthusiast, Challenger, Loyalist...
The enneagram. Presumably more helpful with some memorization...
Hogwarts houses - OK, that one I can remember. But again: those are our categories? Brave, smart, ambitious, loyal? It doesn't feel very joint-carving...
But one system I've run into has stuck with me, and become a reference point: namely, the Magic the Gathering Color Wheel. (My relationship to this is mostly via somewhat-reinterpreting Duncan Sabien's presentation here, who credits Mark Rosewater for a lot of his understanding. I don't play Magic myself, and what I say here won't necessarily resonate with the way people-who-play-magic think about these colors.)
Basically, there are five colors: white, blue, black, red, and green. And each has their own schtick, which I'm going to crudely summarize as:
White: Morality.
Blue: Knowledge.
Black: Power.
Red: Passion.
Green: ...well, we'll get to green.
To be clear: this isn't, quite, the summary that Sabien/Rosewater would give. Rather, that summary looks like this:
(Image credit: Duncan Sabien here.)
Here, each color has a goal (peace, perfection, satisfaction, etc) and a default strategy (order, knowledge, ruthlessness, etc). And in the full system, which you don't need to track, each has a characteristic set of disagreements with the colors opposite to it...
The disagreements. (Image credit: Duncan Sabien here.)
And a characteristic set of agreements with its neighbors...[1]
The agreements. (Image credit: Duncan Sabien here.)
Here, though, I'm not going to focus on the particulars of Sabien's (or Rosewater's) presentation. Indeed, my sense is that in my own head, the colors mean different things than they do to Sabien/Rosewater (for example, peace is less central for white, and black doesn't necessarily seek satisfaction). And part of the advantage of using colors, rather than numbers (or made-up words like "Hufflepuff") is that we start, already, with a set of associations to draw on and dispute.
Why did this system, unlike the others, stick with me? I'm not sure, actually. Maybe it's just: it feels like a more joint-carving division of the sorts of energies that tend to animate people. I also like the way the colors come in a star, with the lines of agreement and disagreement noted above. And I think it's strong on archetypal resonance.
Why is this system relevant to the sorts of otherness and control issues I've been talking about in this series? Lots of reasons in principle. But here I want to talk, in particular, about green.
Gestures at green
"I love not Man the less, but Nature more..."
~ Byron
What is green?
Sabien discusses various associations: environmentalism, tradition, family, spirituality, hippies, stereotypes of Native Americans, Yo...