In this post, I proclaim/endorse forum participation (aka commenting) as a productive research strategy that I've managed to stumble upon, and recommend it to others (at least to try). Note that this is different from saying that forum/blog posts are a good way for a research community to communicate. It's about individually doing better as researchers.
About 15 years ago, I read Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers. He profiled Chris Langan, an extremely high-IQ person, claiming that he had only mediocre accomplishments despite his high IQ. Chris Langan's theory of everything, the Cognitive Theoretic Model of the Universe, was mentioned. I considered that it might be worth checking out someday.
Well, someday has happened, and I looked into CTMU, prompted by Alex Zhu (who also paid me for reviewing the work). The main CTMU paper is "The Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe: A New Kind of Reality Theory".
CTMU has a high-IQ mystique about it: if you don't get it, maybe it's because your IQ is too low. The paper itself is dense with insights, especially the first part. It uses quite a lot of nonstandard terminology (partially...
Exploring this on the web, I turned up a couple of related Substacks: Chris Langan's Ultimate Reality and TELEOLOGIC: CTMU Teleologic Living. The latter isn't just Chris Langan, a Dr Gina Langan is also involved. A lot of it requires a paid subscription, which for me would come lower in priority than all the definitely worthwhile blogs I also don't feel like paying for.
Warning: there's a lot of conspiracy stuff there as well (Covid, "Global Occupation Government", etc.).
Perhaps this 4-hour interview on "IQ, Free Will, Psychedelics, CTMU, & God" may giv...
Given how fast AI is advancing and all the uncertainty associated with that (unemployment, potential international conflict, x-risk, etc.), do you think it's a good idea to have a baby now? What factors would you take into account (e.g. age)?
Today I saw a tweet by Eliezer Yudkowski that made me think about this:
"When was the last human being born who'd ever grow into being employable at intellectual labor? 2016? 2020?"
https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1738591522830889275
Any advice for how to approach such a discussion with somebody who is not at all familiar with the topics discussed on lesswrong?
What if the option "wait for several years and then decide" is not available?
TL;DR: I'm releasing my templates to make running feedback rounds easy for research teams that might otherwise neglect to set it up.
This is my personal opinion, and in particular, does not represent anything like a MIRI consensus; I've gotten push-back from almost everyone I've spoken with about this, although in most cases I believe I eventually convinced them of the narrow terminological point I'm making.
In the AI x-risk community, I think there is a tendency to ask people to estimate "time to AGI" when what is meant is really something more like "time to doom" (or, better, point-of-no-return). For about a year, I've been answering this question "zero" when asked.
This strikes some people as absurd or at best misleading. I disagree.
The term "Artificial General Intelligence" (AGI) was coined in the early 00s, to contrast with the prevalent paradigm of Narrow AI. I was getting my undergraduate computer science...
Well, backpropagation alone wasn't even enough to make efficient LLMs feasible. It took decades, till the invention of transformers, to make them work. Similarly, knowing how to make LLMs is not yet sufficient to implement predictive coding. LeCun talks about the problem in a short section here from 10:55 to 14:19.
Summary: The post describes a method that allows us to use an untrustworthy optimizer to find satisficing outputs.
Acknowledgements: Thanks to Benjamin Kolb (@benjaminko), Jobst Heitzig (@Jobst Heitzig) and Thomas Kehrenberg (@Thomas Kehrenberg) for many helpful comments.
Imagine you have black-box access to a powerful but untrustworthy optimizing system, the Oracle. What do I mean by "powerful but untrustworthy"? I mean that, when you give an objective function as input to the Oracle, it will output an element that has an impressively low[1] value of . But sadly, you don't have any guarantee that it will output the optimal element and e.g. not one that's also chosen for a different purpose (which might be dangerous for many reasons, e.g. instrumental convergence).
What questions can you safely ask the Oracle? Can you use it to...
It's not clear to me how to do this concretely, but I feel that it should be quite feasible. After all, devising a plan to take over the world is incredibly difficult, which implies that the difference between |D| and |S| is many, many orders of magnitude, and we therefore have a wide target to hit.
The threat model here seems basically wrong and focused on sins of commission when sins of omission are, if anything, an even larger space of threats and which apply to 'safe' solutions reported by the Oracle.
'Devising a plan to take over the world' for a mis...
On 16 March 2024, I sat down to chat with New York Times technology reporter Cade Metz! In part of our conversation, transcribed below, we discussed his February 2021 article "Silicon Valley's Safe Space", covering Scott Alexander's Slate Star Codex blog and the surrounding community.
The transcript has been significantly edited for clarity. (It turns out that real-time conversation transcribed completely verbatim is full of filler words, false starts, crosstalk, "uh huh"s, "yeah"s, pauses while one party picks up their coffee order, &c. that do not seem particularly substantive.)
ZMD: I actually have some questions for you.
CM: Great, let's start with that.
ZMD: They're critical questions, but one of the secret-lore-of-rationality things is that a lot of people think criticism is bad, because if someone criticizes you, it hurts your...
I do not believe that Cade Metz used specialized hacking equipment to reveal Scott's last name
I said "specialist journalist/hacker skills".
I don't think it's at all true that anyone could find out Scott's true identity as easily as putting a key in a lock, and I think that analogy clearly misleads vs the hacker one, because the journalist did use his demonstrably non-ubiquitous skills to find out the truth and then broadcast it to everyone else. To me the phone hacking analogy is much closer, but if we must use a lock-based one, it's more like a lock...
There’s a common theme when discussing business models over the internet, which usually revolves around its optimal form.
What’s the most effective model? Monthly vs. yearly subscriptions, the relevance of ads, and the appeal of lifetime plans are debates I often come across on my Twitter feed. Builders of all kinds shake their heads to crack the formula.
Needless to say, a business model is at the core of any for-profit entity. It might make a business or break it.
When I was writing about Telegram a couple of months ago, I was intrigued by its nearly two-year-old freemium model. I knew Telegram had been financed for a good decade by its CEO, Pavel Durov, so unveiling a real sustainable business model seemed interesting. However, I was a bit skeptical...
This is the ninth post in my series on Anthropics. The previous one is The Solution to Sleeping Beauty.
There are some quite pervasive misconceptions about betting in regards to the Sleeping Beauty problem.
One is that you need to switch between halfer and thirder stances based on the betting scheme proposed. As if learning about a betting scheme is supposed to affect your credence in an event.
Another is that halfers should bet at thirders odds and, therefore, thirdism is vindicated on the grounds of betting. What do halfers even mean by probability of Heads being 1/2 if they bet as if it's 1/3?
In this post we are going to correct them. We will understand how to arrive to correct betting odds from both thirdist and halfist positions, and...
Throughout your comment you've been saying a phrase "thirders odds", apparently meaning odds 1:2, not specifying whether per awakening or per experiment. This is underspecified and confusing category which we should taboo.
Yeah, that was sloppy language, though I do like to think more in terms of bets than you do. One of my ways of thinking about these sorts of issues is in terms of "fair bets" - each person thinks a bet with payoffs that align with their assumptions about utility is "fair", and a bet with payoffs that align with different assumptions...