The first day at the Inscribe Residency I went through my list of drafts, and found things I'm very unlikely to ever develop into longer things, which I'm gathering here as miscellaneous kitchen sink post, outside of my daily deadline.
Math
Category Theory is like Comparative Linguistics. Each language has their own categories, and they can only be defined through terms that are only meaning inside each language. But Comparative Linguistics defines other categories which, while being less interesting for the description of each language, enable comparison. The syntactically defined direct object than many languages have is more accurate for description than the semantically defined "object"; but only the second one allows comparisons. Similarly, the terminal object might be irrelevant to describe some categories, but it allows comparisons.
Rationality
I feel that the doctrine of words as clusters in Thingspace is true for things in the physical space, but doesn't apply e.g. to mathematical objects. The difference is that in physical space there are no essential lines to be drawn, and since every point has many more dimensions than human language can describe, every attempt to point at a point is in fact pointing at a region. But (some) mathematical objects are discrete, and it is possible to point at them.
Funny quotes from SSC/ACX
To this day I believe I deserve a fricking statue for getting a C- in Calculus I. It should be in the center of the schoolyard, and have a plaque saying something like “Scott Alexander, who by making a herculean effort managed to pass Calculus I, even though they kept throwing random things after the little curly S sign and pretending it made sense.” (2015-01-31)
Meta
Creating weird events and getting a lot of rationalists to attnd is easy in a place like Berkeley is easy. In a big city with no established rationalist community it seems to be more difficult than one would naively think. It is easy to gatekeep, but then the group doesn't grow. It is easy to get a lot of people to attend, but then the target audience gets diluted and those who most centrally belong to it don't want to attend. Would it be a solution to create an event and charge 50€ for attendance, but announce everyone enters for free the first time, and then waive the fee for people the organizer finds interesting? How could this be done in a way that is maximally transparent without being too insulting for the people who get rejected? One option would be to have middlemen with the right to waive the fee of a specific group (intelligent, kind, talkative, famous, well-connected people), and evaluated on how well they chose, and to outsource the ugly "you aren't welcome" to "find a middleman who waive your fee". (Tebaldo parties)
*
I like that my posts on rationality/AI/etc are subject to the votes of the LW community. And I like having all my posts in one place. At first I thought my dream situation would be that the personal section doesn't have karma. But this would very fast degenerate into the personal section being de facto a generic blogging platform, which could be used by millions of people and flood LW. So this is no solution. But I think it would b possible to have, unless some conditions (e.g. only 1 in 20 posts) a karma-free post, as a way of saying: I want to post this, this belong to the whole person I am, but I understand this is not something the LW audience would enjoy. I wonder if it has some obvious failure modes like the first scenario.
Political philosophy
Develop concept of Wikipedia libertarianism, using Non-consent in Kant [copy Anki & Substack]
AI
Naive Platonism claims only things like circles instantiate a mathematical "form". General Platonism claims that not just easily describable objects, but also hair, mud or dirt also instantiate a form [Parmenides 130d]. Today's super-Platonism claims that not only some things, but every single thing, is just a vector in a 40,000-dimensional vector space.
Four quotes about ASI persuasion:
Persuasion is very bottlenecked on personalized interaction time. The impact of friends and partners on people’s views is likely much larger. [...] This implies that even if we don’t get superhuman persuasion, AIs influencing opinions could have a very large effect, if people spend a lot of time interacting with AIs.
“The best diplomat in history” wouldn’t just be capable of spinning particularly compelling prose; it would be everywhere all the time, spending years in patient, sensitive, non-transactional relationship-building with everyone at once. It would bump into you in whatever online subcommunity you hang out in. It would get to know people in your circle. It would be the YouTube creator who happens to cater to your exact tastes. And then it would leverage all of that.
With AI, it’s plausible that coordinated persuasion of many people can be a thing, as well as it being difficult in practice for most people to avoid exposure. So if AI can achieve individual persuasion that’s a bit more reliable and has a bit stronger effect than that of the most effective human practitioners who are the ideal fit for persuading the specific target, it can then apply it to many people individually, in a way that’s hard to avoid in practice, which might simultaneously get the multiplier of coordinated persuasion by affecting a significant fraction of all humans in the communities/subcultures it targets.
A: Intelligence is something like “ability to achieve one’s goals.” But this doesn’t take into account the fact that some goals may have hard upper limits where others don’t. In particular, this seems to apply to things having to do with social behavior. I can imagine beings that are qualitatively better than humans at math, information recall, etc., since there are already orders of magnitude of variation in these abilities among humans. However, social abilities like “ability to manipulate others” do not seem unbounded in these ways. There are some people who are good at manipulation, but it doesn’t seem like this is a “skill” like math ability that spans orders of magnitude. Roughly speaking, are no “super-manipulators” out there who can manipulate ordinarily wary people.
For instance, one of the most effective ways to get people to do your bidding is to start a cult: there are plenty of chilling stories about the level of devotion that cultists have had to their various leaders. However, it’s not at all clear that it is possible to be any better at cult-creation than the best historical cult leaders — to create, for instance, a sort of “super-cult” that would be attractive even to people who are normally very disinclined to join cults. (Insert your preferred Less Wrong joke here.) I could imagine an AI becoming L. Ron Hubbard, but I’m skeptical that an AI could become a super-Hubbard who would convince us all to become its devotees, even if it wanted to. If social abilities like this are subject to hard upper bounds that have already been nearly achieved, then there’s no potential for AIs to achieve their goals better by becoming superhuman at these abilities, which makes it problematic to just postulate an AI that’s “superhuman at achieving its goals.”
B: L. Ron Hubbard might be the upper limit for how successful a cult leader can get before we stop calling them a cult leader.
The level above L. Ron Hubbard is Hitler. It’s difficult to overestimate how sudden and surprising Hitler’s rise was. Here was a working-class guy, not especially rich or smart or attractive, rejected from art school, and he went from nothing to dictator of one of the greatest countries in the world in about ten years. If you look into the stories, they’re really creepy. When Hitler joined, the party that would later become the Nazis had a grand total of fifty-five members. There are records of conversations from Nazi leaders when Hitler joined the party, saying things like “Oh my God, we need to promote this new guy, everybody he talks to starts agreeing with whatever he says, it’s the creepiest thing.” There are stories of people who hated Hitler going to a speech or two just to see what all the fuss was about and ending up pledging their lives to the Nazi cause. Even while he was killing millions and trapping the country in a difficult two-front war, he had what historians estimate as a 90% approval rating among his own people and rampant speculation that he was the Messiah. Yeah, sure, there was lots of preexisting racism and discontent he took advantage of, but there’s been lots of racism and discontent everywhere forever, and there’s only been one Hitler. If he’d been a little bit smarter or more willing to listen to generals who were, he would have had a pretty good shot at conquering the world. 100% with social skills.
The level above Hitler is Mohammed. I’m not saying he was evil or manipulative, just that he was a genius’ genius at creating movements. Again, he wasn’t born rich or powerful, and he wasn’t particularly scholarly. He was a random merchant. He didn’t even get the luxury of joining a group of fifty-five people. He started by converting his own family to Islam, then his friends, got kicked out of his city, converted another city and then came back at the head of an army. By the time of his death at age 62, he had conquered Arabia and was its unquestioned, God-chosen leader. By what would have been his eightieth birthday his followers were in control of the entire Middle East and good chunks of Africa. Fifteen hundred years later, one fifth of the world population still thinks of him as the most perfect human being ever to exist and makes a decent stab at trying to conform to his desires and opinions in all things. The level above Mohammed is the one we should be worried about.
The first day at the Inscribe Residency I went through my list of drafts, and found things I'm very unlikely to ever develop into longer things, which I'm gathering here as miscellaneous kitchen sink post, outside of my daily deadline.
Math
Category Theory is like Comparative Linguistics. Each language has their own categories, and they can only be defined through terms that are only meaning inside each language. But Comparative Linguistics defines other categories which, while being less interesting for the description of each language, enable comparison. The syntactically defined direct object than many languages have is more accurate for description than the semantically defined "object"; but only the second one allows comparisons. Similarly, the terminal object might be irrelevant to describe some categories, but it allows comparisons.
Rationality
I feel that the doctrine of words as clusters in Thingspace is true for things in the physical space, but doesn't apply e.g. to mathematical objects. The difference is that in physical space there are no essential lines to be drawn, and since every point has many more dimensions than human language can describe, every attempt to point at a point is in fact pointing at a region. But (some) mathematical objects are discrete, and it is possible to point at them.
Funny quotes from SSC/ACX
Meta
Creating weird events and getting a lot of rationalists to attnd is easy in a place like Berkeley is easy. In a big city with no established rationalist community it seems to be more difficult than one would naively think. It is easy to gatekeep, but then the group doesn't grow. It is easy to get a lot of people to attend, but then the target audience gets diluted and those who most centrally belong to it don't want to attend. Would it be a solution to create an event and charge 50€ for attendance, but announce everyone enters for free the first time, and then waive the fee for people the organizer finds interesting? How could this be done in a way that is maximally transparent without being too insulting for the people who get rejected? One option would be to have middlemen with the right to waive the fee of a specific group (intelligent, kind, talkative, famous, well-connected people), and evaluated on how well they chose, and to outsource the ugly "you aren't welcome" to "find a middleman who waive your fee". (Tebaldo parties)
*
I like that my posts on rationality/AI/etc are subject to the votes of the LW community. And I like having all my posts in one place. At first I thought my dream situation would be that the personal section doesn't have karma. But this would very fast degenerate into the personal section being de facto a generic blogging platform, which could be used by millions of people and flood LW. So this is no solution. But I think it would b possible to have, unless some conditions (e.g. only 1 in 20 posts) a karma-free post, as a way of saying: I want to post this, this belong to the whole person I am, but I understand this is not something the LW audience would enjoy. I wonder if it has some obvious failure modes like the first scenario.
Political philosophy
Develop concept of Wikipedia libertarianism, using Non-consent in Kant [copy Anki & Substack]
AI
Naive Platonism claims only things like circles instantiate a mathematical "form". General Platonism claims that not just easily describable objects, but also hair, mud or dirt also instantiate a form [Parmenides 130d]. Today's super-Platonism claims that not only some things, but every single thing, is just a vector in a 40,000-dimensional vector space.
Four quotes about ASI persuasion:
The first three quotes come through Dynomight.