Episode Details

I sometimes hear of EAs or rationalists thinking about their career plans and trying to account for their bias and the incentives they face. They want to compare their plans with some hypothetical ideal plan without their bias, and that was immune to social pressure or financial incentives. But they can’t do that, and then have nothing to compare to and measure against.

Trying to compare to the ideal case, and defend against The Bottom Line sounds real hard, but there's another case you can compare against! I haven’t yet heard of someone just writing up the plan as if they were biased and following their local social incentives. Write up the bad version of the plan you are trying to avoid, and now you have something to compare to. Something to measure against. This is my solution, and I call it the wormtongue test.

The wormtongue test is a sibling to Murphyjitsu. Murphyjitsu asks, "Suppose you get a message from the future that you failed, what do you think caused it?" Whereas the wormtongue test asks, "Suppose you get a message from the future that you succeeded, but it didn't matter because you were inadvertently making things [...]

The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.

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First published:
September 7th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/M9EuHPg8vBapFEDe9/the-wormtongue-test

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.