Human Loss Functions
Psychology has already been completed a million times by wise and dumb people in different words. It’s like choking on air. This is canned air you can breathe in the corner of your room alone and imagine you're in a peaceful forest.
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LLMs have weight, let’s use them.
Loss functions – we have a few, they came through evolution.
Dissonance: preserve unified, useful view of reality. Rock is a rock is good. "Is it a rock or a tree?" feels good on drugs, but gets you killed in the wild or by your tribe for being useless.
Status: your human tribe will kill/abandon you if you are not useful or cause pain. Or kill your baby. Plenty of examples. Status is calculated via theory of mind imported rubrics ie social compute of important and/or close proximity others determines values.
Food collection, safety, and other usefulness are measured by other humans' reward networks, not reality. If people think you’re great, and you believe them, you get the reward.
Safety: don’t get eaten by lion or fall off cliff or burn in fire or get killed by human
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Let’s say pain is experienced inefficiency of loss function. They cause pain when in low performance (position and derivative) Physical pain also, but it’s obvious.
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Aggression is one action to reduce loss.
Pain-escape suicide is self-targeted aggression to optimize loss function.
To not suffer, be high status in your space of simulated people and their formulas for status. Have low dissonance. Feel safe. That simple.
Love is a system exploitation that allows for max status and status stability if done correctly. Many old cultural mechanisms worked according to these loss functions, a la Girard scapegoat mechanism.
Human life in a superintelligent AI world can be better than it is today. Trustable inter-group protection and organic, optimized psychological systems can eliminate misery and make everyone have better lives. It can clean rivers and oceans so we can provide healthy food for our families, and play the status games we were evolved to play.
I wish everyone could feel like Jiro, and that everyone else felt the same way about them. High stable status, low dissonance, high safety (and excitation for fun).
-Noc