Richard Ngo

We have certain conceptions of ourselves, I'm a good person or if I'm successful or if people love me.

We then are constantly adjusting our lives and actions in order to maintain those identities, for example by selecting the goals and plans which are most consistent with them and looking away from evidence that might falsify our identities.

So perhaps our outermost loop is a control process after all.

These identities, or identity models, are inherently local in the sense that they are about ourselves, not the wider world.

If we each pursued our own individual goals and plans derived from our individual identities, then it would be hard for us to cooperate.

However, one way to scale up identity-based decision-making is to develop identities with the property that, when many people pursue them, those people become a distributed agent label to act in sync.

This article was narrated by Type 3 Audio for Less Wrong.

It was published on February 2, 2026.