Know Less Loudly

Listen up

Look, bozos. I love my very small readership and, let’s be clear, this isn’t directed at you. But I have to say, there’s a lot of bozo stuff going on right now and it’s increasingly tiresome.

The next few years are going to be very weird as AI becomes a defined thing. Right now it’s a bundle of potential and associated values that nobody is really clear about.

Can it do fun little word games? Yes. Can it code? Yes. Can it replace your Dad? Probably not. Can it cure cancer? Idk, maybe.

But also, is it conscious? Would that even mean anything? Are we replacing ourselves? Are we splitting the species into the people who get the undying utopia and the people who get to watch?

The point is: I don’t know, you don’t know, smart EAs don’t know, smart Pausers don’t know. Nobody knows. But there are habits of mind here that will help you survive with your sense of proportion attached and, just maybe, your sanity and morality along with it.

What are those habits of mind? What principles can be your steady compass during these, these trying times? Here are some ideas.

Epistemic humility is not the performance of doubt, which bozos do beautifully. “Just asking questions” is doubt as garish costume. The real thing is knowing the shape of your own ignorance: where its edges are, what would actually change your mind, what wouldn’t. Most people can name a position. Very few can name the evidence that would move them off it, and if you can’t do the second one, the first one is mere decoration.

Philosophical empathy is being able to run someone else’s argument on your own hardware. Not the strawman, and not even the steelman held up like a debate trophy, but the honest reconstruction of why a smart person who is not you believes the thing they believe. Feeling it! The Pauser and the accelerationist both think they are saving the species. You don’t have to agree with either. You do have to be able to say their position back to them in a form they would recognize as their own.

Pattern generalizing is taking what is true in a domain you actually know and testing where it carries over. It is most of what expertise is for. It is also the most dangerous habit on this list, because a pattern that fit your home turf will feel true everywhere, and it won’t be. The discipline lives in noticing where the analogy snaps, not in collecting the places it holds.

Fact checking is the boring one. The unglamorous hygiene of looking it up before you repeat it. In a world where the cost of producing confident text has fallen to roughly zero, the person who still bothers is doing something close to radical. It is also the one habit here a bozo will never fake, because it takes time and earns no applause.

Give less fucks is the release. Not nihilism, which is just despair with a talented publicist. Proportion. The recognition that you can hold all four of the above and still be wrong, that the world will keep going, and that the job is to stay sane and useful inside the not-knowing rather than to end the discomfort by deciding hard in one direction. Most doom and most hype turn out to be the same move: a refusal to sit still in uncertainty.

Fundamentally, anyone selling you certainty right now is doing just that, selling. I myself spend a good amount of my day cosplaying absolute certainty to build momentum, coalitions, and energy around the things I want to build or want more information about. To be fair to myself, I have been prognosticating on these topics for the better part of 15 years, both professionally and annoyingly. But my certainty is pretty localized to the things I swim in: policy, healthcare, biological sciences, government effectiveness.

I would offer that these are pretty good areas to draw larger lessons from. They are big, they hold moral valence, they are complex, and they involve trade-offs and counterfactuals at levels of density you don’t see elsewhere. But they are also subject to a great deal of incumbent thinking, rent seeking, consensus worshipping, and they are slow as all get out. Those features make it very hard to actually make predictions and act on them in a way that produces feedback, because the world is moving very quickly.

I should say I know this because I have been a bozo, and not the strategic kind. In 2011 I started working on AI fully certain I was going to solve it in a couple of years and make a great deal of money doing so. I had the background, you see. Neuroscience, philosophy of mind, the whole apparatus. I had read the right people. I had read enough philosophy of mind to mistake vocabulary for leverage. It was obvious to me that the people actually building these systems were missing what I, with my reading list, could see plainly. I was not asking questions. I knew.

The thing I want you to notice is not that I was wrong. Everybody is wrong. The thing to notice is where the wrongness came from. It came from the part of me that was most expert. The certainty was not a bug riding on top of my knowledge. It was metabolized directly out of it. The reading list was the delivery mechanism. My home turf, the ground I would have told you was safe, was the exact place I could not see the frame, because I was standing inside it and calling the walls the horizon.

So when I tell you my certainty is localized to policy and health and the biological sciences, hear what I am also telling you. Those are the places I am most likely to be a bozo and least likely to catch it. That is where the consensus feels like air. That is where the rent-seeking feels like realism. That is where the inherited categories arrive already laundered in as common sense. Right past the bouncer with a confident gait and the nod. The expert is not immune to this. The expert has simply had more time to fully furnish their mind.

And this is why I am begging everyone, lovingly but with increasing alarm, to know less loudly.

I don’t mean treat every position as equally plausible or every moral claim as a matter of taste. I mean keep some live wire between your confidence and the evidence underneath it. Know what would move you. Know where your analogy stops. Know when you are borrowing someone else’s certainty because it feels better than waiting.

Because this is a bad time to be careless about not knowing. The next few years will reward people who can sound certain before they have earned it. It will reward the loud, the packaged, the already-branded, the people who turn every uncertainty into a side. But that reward will curdle. Try not to be one of them.

Try not to call the walls the horizon.