Microdosing the spirit of Anthropic

My go-to conceptual metaphor of the epistemic state of AI lab employees is microdosing: being in a chronically mildly altered state of mind. I think understanding this would be broadly helpful for people both inside and outside. The effect isn’t that insiders hold crazy beliefs, but a combination of vigorous debate inside a shared attention field, and a portfolio of individually reasonable beliefs that, taken together, lean in a direction convenient for the organization. Epistemic advantages and disadvantagesMany people argue that low doses of psychedelics let you see some things more clearly - and I tend to agree: psychedelics can often help some people see some things more clearly. At the same time, I think microdosing usually doesn’t improve people’s epistemics overall, even when it gives them otherwise hard to access insights. You are not completely sober. Being inside a lab has real advantages: you know more about the frontier of capabilities, may have access to the latest AIs before the public, read internal Slack and blogs, and sense the vibes. If you’re outside and an insider tells you what they observe, pay attention. These information and insight asymmetries are tricky. I don’t want to advocate “discount insiders,” any more than “ignore what people with psychedelic experience say.” What I want is …interpret insiders as microdosing. Be curious but cautious. And if you’re inside: notice that your mind may be somewhat altered. Not like tripping (people inside are highly functional and would pass any simple test), but in subtler ways. Mechanisms and conditionsStretching the metaphor a bit: what is the substance? Mostly the “spirit of the organization,” in the sense of the organizational egregore or superagent. A simple insight from thinking about hierarchical agency is that superagents can be understood as having goals and preferences, including convergent instrumental goals. One common instrumental goal is synchronizing beliefs and goals across subagents. In