Frustrated by claims that "enlightenment" and similar meditative/introspective practices can't be explained and that you only understand if you experience them, Kaj set out to write his own detailed gears-level, non-mysterious, non-"woo" explanation of how meditation, etc., work in the same way you might explain the operation of an internal combustion engine.
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The history of science has tons of examples of the same thing being discovered multiple time independently; wikipedia has a whole list of examples here. If your goal in studying the history of science is to extract the predictable/overdetermined component of humanity's trajectory, then it makes sense to focus on such examples.
But if your goal is to achieve high counterfactual impact in your own research, then you should probably draw inspiration from the opposite: "singular" discoveries, i.e. discoveries which nobody else was anywhere close to figuring out. After all, if someone else would have figured it out shortly after anyways, then the discovery probably wasn't very counterfactually impactful.
Alas, nobody seems to have made a list of highly counterfactual scientific discoveries, to complement wikipedia's list of multiple discoveries.
To...
Maybe Hanson et al.'s Grabby aliens model? @Anders_Sandberg said that some N years before that (I think more or less at the time of working on Dissolving the Fermi Paradox), he "had all of the components [of the model] on the table" and it just didn't occur to him that they can be composed in this way. (personal communication, so I may be misremembering some details). Although it's less than 10 years, so...
Speaking of Hanson, prediction markets seem like a more central example. I don't think the idea was [inconceivable in principle] 100 years ago.
Joe’s summary is here, these are my condensed takeaways in my own words. All links in this section are to the essays.
Outline
- Carlsmith tackles two linked questions:
- How should we behave towards future beings (future humans, AIs etc)?
- What should our priors be about how AIs will behave towards us?
- We worry about value in the future, what can we do?
- (1) We could trust in some base goodness - the universe, god, AIs being good
- (2) We could accept that all future beings will be alien to us and stop worrying (here and here)
- (3) We could have moral systems or concepts of goodness/niceness
- (4) We could seize power over the future (here and here)
- (5) We could adopt a different poise which centred around notions like growth/harmony/ “attunement” (here and here)
- (1)
This summarizes a (possibly trivial) observation that I found interesting.
Story
An all-powerful god decides to play a game. They stop time, grab a random human, and ask them "What will you see next?". The human answers, then time is switched back on and the god looks at how well they performed. Most of the time the humans get it right, but occasionally they are caught by surprise and get it wrong.
To be more generous the god decides to give them access (for the game) to the entirety of all objective facts. The position and momentum of every elementary particle, every thought and memory anyone has ever had (before the time freeze) etc. However, suddenly performance in the game drops from 99% to 0%. How can this be? They...
I am having trouble following you. If little-omega is a reference frame I would expect it to be a function that takes in the "objective world" (Omega) and spits out a subjective one. But you seem to have it the other way around? Or am I misunderstanding?
Elon Musk's Hyperloop proposal had substantial public interest. With various initial Hyperloop projects now having failed, I thought some people might be interested in a high-speed transportation system that's...perhaps not "practical" per se, but at least more-practical than the Hyperloop approach.
aerodynamic drag in hydrogen
Hydrogen has a lower molecular mass than air, so it has a higher speed of sound and lower density. The higher speed of sound means a vehicle in hydrogen can travel at 2300 mph while remaining subsonic, and the lower density reduces drag. This paper evaluated the concept and concluded that:
the vehicle can cruise at Mach 2.8 while consuming less than half the energy per passenger of a Boeing 747 at a cruise speed of Mach 0.81
In a tube, at subsonic speeds, the gas...
Possibly of interest: the fastest rocket sled track uses similar idea, they put a helium filled tube over the final section of the track:
...Just as meteors are burned up by friction in the upper atmosphere, air friction can cause a high-speed sled to burn up, even if made of the toughest steel alloys. An engineering sleight-of-hand is used to increase those "burn-up" limits by reducing the density of the atmosphere around the track. To do this, one needs a safe, non-toxic, low-density gas such as helium. Helium is only one seventh the density of air, signific
Concerns over AI safety and calls for government control over the technology are highly correlated but they should not be.
There are two major forms of AI risk: misuse and misalignment. Misuse risks come from humans using AIs as tools in dangerous ways. Misalignment risks arise if AIs take their own actions at the expense of human interests.
Governments are poor stewards for both types of risk. Misuse regulation is like the regulation of any other technology. There are reasonable rules that the government might set, but omission bias and incentives to protect small but well organized groups at the expense of everyone else will lead to lots of costly ones too. Misalignment regulation is not in the Overton window for any government. Governments do not have strong incentives...
There is a belief among some people that our current tech level will lead to totalitarianism by default. The argument is that with 1970's tech the soviet union collapsed, however with 2020 computer tech (not needing GenAI) it would not. If a democracy goes bad, unlike before there is no coming back. For example Xinjiang - Stalin would have liked to do something like that but couldn't. When you add LLM AI on everyone's phone + Video/Speech recognition, organized protest is impossible.
Not sure if Rudi C is making this exact argument. Anyway if we get mass ce...
Wow, it's worse than I thought. Maybe the housing problem is "government-complete" and resists all lower level attempts to solve it.
1A friend has spent the last three years hounding me about seed oils. Every time I thought I was safe, he’d wait a couple months and renew his attack:
“When are you going to write about seed oils?”
“Did you know that seed oils are why there’s so much {obesity, heart disease, diabetes, inflammation, cancer, dementia}?”
“Why did you write about {meth, the death penalty, consciousness, nukes, ethylene, abortion, AI, aliens, colonoscopies, Tunnel Man, Bourdieu, Assange} when you could have written about seed oils?”
“Isn’t it time to quit your silly navel-gazing and use your weird obsessive personality to make a dent in the world—by writing about seed oils?”
He’d often send screenshots of people reminding each other that Corn Oil is Murder and that it’s critical that we overturn our lives...
To me "generally avoid processed foods" would be kinda like saying "generally avoid breathing in gasses/particulates that are different from typical earth atmosphere near sea level".
People have been breathing a lot of smoke in the last million years or so, so one might think that we would have evolved to tolerate it, but it's still really bad for us. Though there are certainly lots of ways to go wrong deviating from what we are adapted to, our current unnatural environment is far better for our life expectancy than the natural one. As pointed out in other comments, some food processing can be better for us.
The following is an example of how if one assumes that an AI (in this case autoregressive LLM) has "feelings", "qualia", "emotions", whatever, it can be unclear whether it is experiencing something more like pain or something more like pleasure in some settings, even quite simple settings which already happen a lot with existing LLMs. This dilemma is part of the reason why I think AI suffering/happiness philosophy is very hard and we most probably won't be able to solve it.
Consider the two following scenarios:
Scenario A: An LLM is asked a complicated question and answers it eagerly.
Scenario B: A user insults an LLM and it responds.
For the sake of simplicity, let's say that the LLM is an autoregressive transformer with no RLHF (I personally think that the...
The American school system, grades K-12, leaves much to be desired.
While its flaws are legion, this post isn’t about that. It’s easy to complain.
This post is about how we could do better.
To be clear, I’m talking about redesigning public education, so “just use the X model” where X is “charter” or “Montessori” or “home school” or “private school” isn’t sufficient. This merits actual thought and discussion.
Breaking It Down
One of the biggest problems facing public schools is that they’re asked to do several very different kinds of tasks.
On the one hand, the primary purpose of school is to educate children.
On whatever hand happens to be the case in real life, school is often more a source of social services for children and parents alike, providing food and safety...
What if you build your school-as-social-service, and then one day find that the kids are selling drugs to each other inside the school?
Or simply that the kids are constantly interfering with each other so much that the minority who want to follow their interests can't?
I think any theory of school that doesn't mention discipline is a theory of dry water. What powers and duties would the 1-supervisor-per-12-kids have? Can they remove disruptive kids from rooms? From the building entirely? Give detentions?
