Newsletter
Anticipation beats reward and other things
January 31, 2025
Hello,
Here’s everything since my last little missive to you:
Excerpt: A lot of people reckon the brain treats rewards quite differently from the anticipation of rewards. And, in fact, the anticipation of reward seems like the bigger driver of our behaviour. And this little tidbit is one of the few places where human behaviour is actually explained well by exploring the brain. So let’s explore it.
Main idea: Basically, reward and ancipation both use the same system, but differently. Anticipation seems to come in through the senses and get sent throughout the brain, but pleasure seems to come in from more evaluatey bits—maybe to help us learn what’s rewarding.
The ideology that is ‘species’. It’s a social constructivist argument, but of course, the distinctions between species are not particularly clear. Yet, this particular arbitration determines a great proportion of our conservation efforts. Are the extinctions of sub-species less important than the extinctions of species? There’s no good answer. It’s just ideologies at work.
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The magnetic poles might flip. Another thing to worry about, alongside supervolcanoes, solar flares, and meteor strikes. Make a good apocalypse book. I told you I’m a bit of a prepper.
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The populist phantom:
The emergence of populist parties as significant electoral players in many parts of the world has been a shock to the unusually stable party systems of the decades since the Second World War, but in the longer arc of democratic politics it should hardly be surprising. Across Europe, for example, the average vote share for right-wing populist parties has increased by less than half a percentage point per year since the turn of the century. The rise of social democratic parties in many of these same countries in the early twentieth century was far more dramatic.
I’ll also pull out:
In most of the places where populist parties have made significant electoral gains, the explanations have been similarly prosaic; the scandals and failures of mainstream parties were often paramount.
It’s long, but some people probably need a long, feel-good article.
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Relaxed AI skepticism. Short but a nice counter to the swings and roundabouts elsewhere:
AI, like every other information technology, will end up creating complexity as well as processing it, that the robots will get in each other’s way just like we do, and that consequently we are going to systematically overestimate the benefits of the technology during the initial phase
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Does thermodynamics drive complexity? I wrote about Pinker using thermodynamics as a metaphor: ‘the ultimate purpose of life, mind, and human striving: to deploy energy and information to fight back the tide of entropy and carve out refuges of beneficial order’. Here’s Phillip Ball going into a bit more substantive depth:
there appears to be a kind of physics of things doing stuff, and evolving to do stuff. Meaning and intention — thought to be the defining characteristics of living systems — may then emerge naturally through the laws of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics …
one message that emerged very clearly was that, if there’s a kind of physics behind biological teleology and agency, it has something to do with the same concept that seems to have become installed at the heart of fundamental physics itself: information.
predicting the future seems to be essential (opens a new tab) for any energy-efficient system in a random, fluctuating environment … To acquire their remarkable efficiency, Still said, these devices must “implicitly construct concise representations of the world they have encountered so far, enabling them to anticipate what’s to come.”
Some other interesting stuff in there too. E.g.:
The thermodynamics of information copying dictates that there must be a trade-off between precision and energy (opens a new tab). An organism has a finite supply of energy, so errors necessarily accumulate over time. The organism then has to spend an increasingly large amount of energy to repair these errors. The renewal process eventually yields copies too flawed to function properly; death follows.
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What makes a leader ‘charismatic’? I’ve talked about Weber’s classification before:
he speaks of three ‘ideal’ kinds of political leadership, domination, and authority:
- charismatic authority, that borne of character or perhaps heroism;
- traditional authority, borne of structures such as patrimonialism or feudalism; and
- rational-legal authority, borne of bureaucracy and statehood.
So for Weber, charisma is some attribute of the person—a particular talent or ability that is existentially relevant to the group.
This article takes that idea a bit further—charisma as a form of representation of the group values/interests:
Because charismatic authority emerges from the trust of the followers in the leader, it can also be analyzed as a form of representation. The followers believe, very strongly and for whatever reason (and often wrongly!), that the leader will pursue their interests or promote their values; but if he fails in sufficiently spectacular ways, they may abandon him …
.. charismatic relationships contain moments of authorization (the equivalent of “voting”), when followers “recognize” the leader’s charisma and submit themselves to the leader’s authority, and moments of accountability, when the base decides that some failure of the leader is sufficiently large that they no longer recognize his charismatic gift (they must have been “mistaken”). And charismatic leaders appear to be successful “representatives” to the extent that they mirror or amplify the identity, values, and interests of their base
In Successful Prophets, we sort of end up here—the leaders of spectacularly destructive cults aren’t charismatic in the way we normally connote this. They’re a bit weird and often off-putting. But they become representatives of something, and as I allude to, it’s the buffering effects of the group that allows this behaviour to get out of hand. The group protects the image of the leader as a representative.
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Fukuyama asks ‘is democracy strong enough for Trump’? Honestly, you could just skip to the last paragraph:
I don’t think his policies will work, and I believe the American people will see this very soon. However, the single most dangerous abuses of power are ones affecting the system’s future accountability. What the new generation of populist-nationalists like Putin, Chávez in Venezuela, Erdogan in Turkey, and Orbán in Hungary have done is to tilt the playing field to make sure they can never be removed from power in the future. That process has already been underway for some time in America, through Republican gerrymandering of congressional districts and the use of voter ID laws to disenfranchise potential Democratic voters. The moment that the field is so tilted that accountability becomes impossible is when the system shifts from being a real liberal democracy to being an electoral authoritarian one.
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Algorithmic Ranking Is Unfairly Maligned. Good bit on why Netflix is so bloody useless:
In the long-long ago, Netflix had star ratings … Nowadays, you get a disorienting set of categories like DARK COMEDIES ABOUT ITALIAN FEUDALISM and LIFE IS SHORT—WATCH IT AGAIN and THINGS YOU’RE IN THE MIDDLE OF, HELPFULLY PLACED IN A INCONSISTENT LOCATION. Instead of star ratings, there are “match percentages”, but you have to interact to see them and they always seem to be 98%.
Then:
Netflix realized a bunch of things:
- That they needed to concentrate everything on increasing subscriber revenue. And that the main goal of recommendations should be subscriber retention, or making sure people don’t cancel.
- That the things people rate highly aren’t always the same as what they actually watch. It’s cool that you gave The Seventh Seal five stars. But after a long day at work and finally getting the kids to bed, are you really going to choose Andrei Rublev over The Great British Bachelorette and the Furious 7?
- That to retain people, you need to get them started watching new stuff. Lots of people want to watch Friends, so Netflix will pay $100 million/year for Friends. But if you just join, binge every episode of Friends, and then cancel, that’s bad. However, if the Friends button were to—say—randomly shift around in the interface, maybe while hunting for it you’ll get hooked on some other (hopefully cheaper) shows and stick around longer.
- That beyond your explicit ratings, there are lots of implicit signals like what you watch, what you click on, what devices you use, and how long you stop scrolling when shown different kinds of thumbnails. These implicit signals are more useful than explicit rankings when predicting what to show you to keep you subscribed.
- That many people don’t want to rate stuff. And (I speculate) that this provides a convenient excuse to drop the whole star rating system and replace it with the “whatever the hell order we want” system that prevails today, where the match % means nothing and promises nothing.
Anyway. Makes some interesting points toward the end, about how if capitalist ranking is broken, addictive against your interests, not for them, then either we do no algorithms and rely on other curation tools like RSS etc, or we bake user control in to the algorithms. Not really that groundbreaking, but it a good prompt to think about what you’ll do about algorithms since they’re probably just going to be more prevalent as we try to inject AI into everything.
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Is macroeconomics useless?
History shows no clear correlation between real prosperity and the keeping of macroeconomic statistics … compare Hong Kong and Argentina … one became a “miracle” without the help of national statistics and macroeconomics—and the future piece will show that by no means was this miracle a “unicorn.” At the same time, the other used macroeconomic jargon, data, and questionable models and failed.
In many ways, the entire “macroeconomic sector” is comparable to the astrology that guided people’s decisions centuries ago.
There this way of thinking that says, if we just increase overall economic wealth, everyone will be better off (think economists like Tyler Cowan, or lots of the EA folks). You know, bring the average up, and that’ll bring everyone up, sort of thing. These are also often the people who often think things like affirmative action and DEI policies are obstacles to this kind of economic growth (here is Tyler Cowan celebrating Trump’s recent executive orders against). This seems important, because unlike most people into this kind of stuff, these are thoughtful people, with lots of good ideas elsewhere. And besides the obvious counter (there seems something quite odd about preferring future, hypothetical people over the suffering of real, current people), it’s also troubling that macroeconomics is usually used to motivate this kind of thought. If you’re going to use measurement to justify distasteful positions, feels pretty rough-and-ready to use a field in which not a lot of attention is paid to reliability in concept or in measurement.
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I hope you found something interesting.
You can find links to all my previous missives here.
Warm regards,