Yeah… seems right. I could cop out with "ah, the number of bit erasures by a program matters, not just whether it did", but I don't have any good reason for believing this.
A lot of the rationalist discourse around birthrates don't seem to square away with AGI predictions.
I think whenever I've seen people worry about birth rates, they either
- Excluded AGI as a relevant factor ("unless AGI happens, low birth rates will matter"), or
- They weren't people who thought AGI was a relevant factor (either because it's too far out, or because they think robotics is hard, or something else)
Curious if you have counter-examples of people who think AGI soon and low birthrates are an issue.
Re: psychedelic enthusiasts.overstating effects. I recommend going for the primary sources and looking up testimonials from cluster headache patients!
Yeah… I'm trying to beware surprising and suspicious convergence here. "Local psychedelics enthusiasts discover that psychedelics are the cure to the worst conditions known to humanity, more at 11."
This is, in some sense, a cheap and kind of mean heuristic, but I wanted to flag the suspicion. I might go and read some testimonials, but nothing beats a good ol' RCT [1] . I don't want to be the person who's like "you need more research before you advocate" and I'm looking forward to putting DMT-variants head-to-head in an experiment with known medical treatments for cluster headaches.
Actually not true, we could & should try to design successors to the RCT, but they'll go in the direction of "Thompson-sample from the posterior distribution in some bandit setup" as opposed to "more anecdata". ↩︎
I haven't used it quite enough yet to make a good assessment. Let me report back (or ping me if I don't and you're still curious) in a few weeks.
Does any DMT variant work here? Since you mentioned psilocybin working, and most people mean NN-DMT when they say "DMT". Since some DMT variants have lighter psychedelic effects. Claude 4.5 Sonnet, when pressed, claims that 4-AcO-DMT would be the least disruptive.
(I'm a bit worried that psychedelics enthusiasts are a very exited about using psychedelics to treat this hellish condition, and might not be maximally balanced in evaluating the evidence.)
- I found this funny.
- I have no clue if this is LLM-written or not.
Comment from 12 years ago, -3 karma… that's a deep cut. It is related to the thick-wire problem, yeah, good point.
I'm not super convinced (but intrigued) by your proposal that a computation is not conscious unless it erases bits.
Additional thought: If we accept UDASSA or some other computational view of anthropics+cosmology then we are (mostly, in terms of measure) computations embedded in a bigger, reversible, computation. Maybe it's about how many output bits of the universe-computation I affect, and if I'm reversible I don't affect any?
The quantum connection feels weird, and I don't feel like I understand this stuff well enough to comment, but at least Claude Sonnet 4.5 tells me philosophers haven't yet argued about the moral weight of minds in superposition, which is really surprising to me.
1
1Relevant prior work: How Much Direct Suffering Is Caused by Various Animal Foods? (Brian Tomasik, 2018). (I guess Gemini took it into account if searched the web during your conversation.)
The biggest issue I see with Pigouvian taxes is that they're computationally tricky to estimate. Who knows what downstream effect in the big chain of causality this particular person/action had! Pollution/carbon taxes are an easy exception.
Aside, a bit off topic: Even if we could compute Shapley values, Shapley values suffer from combinatorial explosion. (Things other than Shapley values or approximating them might work.)