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it seems to me that disentangling beliefs and values are important part of being able to understand each other

and using words like "disagree" to mean both "different beliefs" and "different values" is really confusing in that regard

4Viliam
Lets use "disagree" vs "dislike".
2Mati_Roy
when potentially ambiguous, I generally just say something like "I have a different model" or "I have different values"

just a loose thought, probably obvious

some tree species self-selected themselves for height (ie. there's no point in being a tall tree unless taller trees are blocking your sunlight)

humans were not the first species to self-select (for humans, the trait being intelligence) (although humans can now do it intentionally, which is a qualitatively different level of "self-selection")

on human self-selection: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/309096532_Survival_of_the_Friendliest_Homo_sapiens_Evolved_via_Selection_for_Prosociality

Litany of Tarski for instrumental rationality 😊

If it's useful to know whether the box contains a diamond,

I desire to figure out whether the box contains a diamond;

If it's not useful to know whether the box contains a diamond,

I desire to not spend time figuring out whether the box contains a diamond;

Let me not become attached to curiosities I may not need.

Is the opt-in button for Petrov Day a trap? Kinda scary to press on large red buttons 😆

4DiamondSolstice
Last year, I checked Less wrong on the 27th, and found a message that told me that nobody, in fact, had pressed the red button.  When I saw the red button today, it took me about five minutes to convince myself to press it. The "join the Petrov Game" message gave me confidence and after I pressed it, there was no bright red message with the words "you nuked it all" So no, not a trap. At least not in that sense - it adds you to a bigger trap, because once pressed the button cannot be unpressed.
3damiensnyder
it's not

here's my new fake-religion, taking just-world bias to its full extreme

the belief that we're simulations and we'll get transcended to Utopia in 1 second because future civilisation is creating many simulations of all possible people in all possible contexts and then uploading them to Utopia so that from anyone's perspective you have a very high probability of transcending to Utopia in 1 second

^^

cars won't replace horses, horses with cars will

There's the epistemic discount rate (ex.: probability of simulation shut down per year) and the value discount (ex.: you do the funner things first, so life is less valuable per year as you become older).

Asking "What value discount rate should be applied" is a category error. "should" statements are about actions done towards values, not about values themselves.

As for "What epistemic discount rate should be applied", it depends on things like "probability of death/extinction per year".

I'm helping Abram Demski with making the graphics for the AI Safety Game (https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/Nex8EgEJPsn7dvoQB/the-ai-safety-game-updated)

We'll make a version using https://app.wombo.art/. We have generated multiple possible artwork for each card and made a pre-selection, but we would like your input for the final selection.

You can give your input through this survey: https://forms.gle/4d7Y2yv1EEXuMDqU7 Thanks!

In the book Superintelligence, box 8, Nick Bostrom says:

How an AI would be affected by the simulation hypothesis depends on its values. [...] consider an AI that has a more modest final goal, one that could be satisfied with a small amount of resources, such as the goal of receiving some pre-produced cryptographic reward tokens, or the goal of causing the existence of forty-five virtual paperclips. Such an AI should not discount those possible worlds in which it inhabits a simulation. A substantial portion of the AI’s total expected utility might derive

... (read more)

EtA: moved to a question: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zAwx3ZTaX7muvfMrL/why-do-we-have-offices

Why do we have offices?

They seem expensive, and not useful for jobs that can apparently be done remotely.

Hypotheses:

  • Social presence of other people working: https://www.focusmate.com/
  • Accountability
  • High bandwidth communication
  • Meta communication (knowing who's available to talk to)
  • Status quo bias

status: to integrate

7Dagon
* Employee focus (having punctuated behaviors separating work from personal time) * Tax advantages for employers to own workspaces and fixtures rather than employees * Not clear that "can be done remotely" is the right metric. We won't know if "can be done as effectively (or more effectively) remotely" is true for some time.
1Mati_Roy
thanks for your comment! I just realized I should have used the question feature instead; here it is: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zAwx3ZTaX7muvfMrL/why-do-we-have-offices
5Matt Goldenberg
Increased sense of relatedness seems a big one missed here.
1Mati_Roy
thanks for your comment! I just realized I should have used the question feature instead; here it is: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zAwx3ZTaX7muvfMrL/why-do-we-have-offices
3Viliam
High status feels better when you are near your subordinates (when you can watch them, randomly disrupt them, etc.). High-status people make the decision whether remote work is allowed or not.
1Mati_Roy
thanks for your comment! I just realized I should have used the question feature instead; here it is: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zAwx3ZTaX7muvfMrL/why-do-we-have-offices

AI is improving exponentially with researchers having constant intelligence. Once the AI research workforce become itself composed of AIs, that constant will become exponential which would make AI improve even faster (superexponentially?)

it doesn't need to be the scenario of a singular AI agent self-improving its own self; it can be a large AI population participating in the economy and collectively improving AI as a whole, with various AI clans* focusing on different subdomains (EtA: for the main purpose of making money, and then using that money to buy t... (read more)

One model / framing / hypothesis of my preferences is that:

I wouldn't / don't value living in a loop multiple times* because there's nothing new experienced. So even an infinite life in the sense of looping an infinite amount of times has finite value. Actually, it has the same value as the size of the loop: after 1 loop, marginal loops have no value. (Intuition pump: from within the loop, you can’t tell how many times you’ve been going through the loop so far.)

*explanation of a loop: at some point in the future my life becomes indistinguishable from a pre... (read more)

4avturchin
Agree.  To be long, sufferings need to be diverse. Like maximum suffering is 1111111, but diverse sufferings are: 1111110, 1111101, 1111011, 1110111 etc, so they have time. More diverse sufferings are less intense, and infinite suffering need to be of relatively low intensity. Actually, in the “I have no mouth but I must scream”, the Evil AI invests a lot in making suffering diverse. But diverse is interesting, so not that bad.  Also, any loop in experience will happen subjectively only once. Imagine classical eternal return: no matter how many times I will live my life, my counter of lives will be on 1. 
3TLW
One more formal method of describing much of this might be the Kolmogorov complexity of the state of your consciousness over the timeframe. (So outputting t=0: state=blah; t=1: state=blah, etc). This has many of the features you are looking for.  This guides me to an interesting question: is looping in an infinite featureless plain of flat white any worse than looping in an infinite featureless plain of random visual noise? (Of course, this is both noncomputable and has a nontrivial chance that the Turing Machine attaining the Kolmogorov complexity is itself simulating you, but meh. Details.)

In my mind, "the expert problem" means the problem of being able to recognize experts without being one, but I don't know where this idea comes from as the results from a Google search don't mention this. What name is used to refer to that problem (in the literature)?

x-post: https://www.facebook.com/mati.roy.09/posts/10159081618379579

Epistemic status: thinking outloud

The term "weirdness points" puts a different framing on the topic.

I'm thinking maybe I/we should also do this for "recommendation points".

The amount I'm willing to bet depends both on how important it seems to me and how likely I think the other person will appreciate it.

The way I currently try to spend my recommendation points is pretty fat tail, because I see someone's attention as scarce, so I want to keep it for things I think are really important, and the importance I assign to information is pretty fat tail. I'll som... (read more)

current intuitions for personal longevity interventions in order of priority (cryo-first for older people): sleep well, lifelogging, research mind-readers, investing to buy therapies in the future, staying home, sign up for cryo, paying a cook / maintain low weight, hiring Wei Dai to research modal immortality, paying a trainer, preserving stem cells, moving near a cryo facility, having some watch you to detect when you die, funding plastination research

EtA: maybe lucid dreaming to remember your dreams; some drugs (becopa?) to improve memory retention)

also not really important in the long run, but sleeping less to experience more

4William Walker
NAD+ boosting (NR now, keep an eye on NRH for future). CoQ10, NAC, keep D levels up in winter. Telomerase activation (Centella asiatica, astragalus, eventually synthetics if Sierra Sciences gets its TRAP screen funded again or if the Chinese get tired of waiting on US technology...) NR, C, D, Zinc for SARS-CoV-2 right now, if you're not already. Become billionaire, move out of FDA zone, have some AAV-vector gene modifications... maybe some extra p53 copies, like the Pachyderms? Fund more work on Bowhead Whale comparative genetics. Fund a company to commercially freeze and store transplant organs, to perfect a freezing protocol (I've seen Alcor's...) Main thing we need is a country where it's legal and economically possible to develop and sell anti-agathic technology... even a billionaire can't substitute for the whole market.

i want a better conceptual understanding of what "fundamental values" means, and how to disentangled that from beliefs (ex.: in an LLM). like, is there a meaningful way we can say that a "cat classifier" is valuing classifying cats even though it sometimes fail?

7cubefox
I guess for a cat classifier, disentanglement is not possible, because it wants to classify things as cats if and only if it believes they are cats. Since values and beliefs are perfectly correlated here, there is no test we could perform which would distinguish what it wants from what it believes. Though we could assume we don't know what the classifier wants. If it doesn't classify a cat image as "yes", it could be because it is (say) actually a dog classifier, and it correctly believes the image contains something other than a dog. Or it could be because it is indeed a cat classifier, but it mistakenly believes the image doesn't show a cat. One way to find out would be to give the classifier an image of the same subject, but in higher resolution or from another angle, and check whether it changes its classification to "yes". If it is a cat classifier, it is likely it won't make the mistake again, so it probably changes its classification to "yes". If it is a dog classifier, it will likely stay with "no". This assumes that mistakes are random and somewhat unlikely, so will probably disappear when the evidence is better or of a different sort. Beliefs react to such changes in evidence, while values don't.
2Mati_Roy
Thanks for engaging with my post. I keep thinking about that question. I'm not quite sure what you mean by "values and beliefs are perfectly correlated here", but I'm guessing you mean they are "entangled". Ah yeah, that seems true for all systems (at least if you can only look at their behaviors and not their mind); ref.: Occam’s razor is insufficient to infer the preferences of irrational agents. Summary: In principle, all possible sets of possible value-system has a belief-system that can lead to any set of actions. So, in principle, the cat classifier, looked from the outside, could actually be a human mind wanting to live a flourishing human life, but with a decision making process that's so wrong that the human does nothing but say "cat" when they see a cat, thinking this will lead them to achieve all their deepest desires. I think the paper says noisy errors would cancel each other (?), but correlated errors wouldn't go away. One way to solve for them would be coming up with "minimal normative assumptions". I guess that's as much relevant to the "value downloading" as it is to the "value (up)loading" on. (I just coined the term “value downloading” to refer to the problem of determining human values as opposed to the problem of programming values into an AI.) The solution-space for determining the values of an agent at a high-level seems to be (I'm sure that's too simplistic, and maybe even a bit confused, but just thinking out loud): * Look in their brain directly to understand their values (and maybe that also requires solving the symbol-grounding problem) * Determine their planner (ie. “decision-making process”) (ex.: using some interpretability methods), and determine their values from the policy and the planner * Make minimal normative assumptions about their reasoning errors and approximations to determine their planner from their behavior (/policy) * Augment them to make their planners flawless (I think your example fits into improving the pl

topic: AI

Lex Fridman:

I'm doing podcast with Sam Altman (@sama), CEO of OpenAI next week, about GPT-4, ChatGPT, and AI in general. Let me know if you have any questions/topic suggestions.

PS: I'll be in SF area next week. Let me know if there are other folks I should talk to, on and off the mic.

https://twitter.com/lexfridman/status/1636425547579310080

topic: lifelogging as life extension

if you think pivotal acts might require destroying a lot of hardware*; then this increases the probability that worlds in which lifelogging as life extension is useful are more likely to require EMP-proof lifelogging (and if you think think destroying a lot of hardware would increase x-risks, then it reduces the value of having EMP-proof lifelogs)

*there might be no point in destroying hard drives (vs GPUs), but some attacks, like EMPs, might not discriminate on that

#parenting, #schooling, #policies

40% of hockey players selected in top tier leagues are born in the first quarter of the year (compared to 10% in the 3rd quarter) (whereas you'd expect 25% if the time of the year didn't have an influence)

The reason for that is that the cut-off age to join a hockey league as a kid is January 1st; so people born in January are the oldest in their team, and at a young age that makes a bigger difference (in terms of abilities), so they tend to be the best in their team, and so their coaches tend to make them play more and pay ... (read more)

That suggest he has no idea about whether it's actually a good vote (as this is how the person differs from other candidates) and just advocates for someone on the basis that the person is his friend.

2[comment deleted]

For the Cryonics Institute board elections, I recommend voting for Nicolas Lacombe.

I’ve been friends with Nicolas for over a decade. Ze’s very principled, well organized and hard working. I have high trust in zir, and high confidence ze would be a great addition to the CI's board.

I recommend you cast some or all of your votes for Nicolas (you can cast up to 4 votes total). If you’re signed up with CI, simply email info@cryonics.org with your votes.

see zir description here: https://www.facebook.com/mati.roy.09/posts/10159642542159579

4ChristianKl
What of those do you think isn't true for the other candidates?
2Mati_Roy
afaik, most board members are very passive, and hasnt been doing the things Nicolas wants to do

i want to invest in companies that will increase in value if AI capabilities increases fast / faster than what the market predicts

do you have suggestions?

3Ann
Application-specific processing units, health care, agriculture?
4Mati_Roy
can you say more about agriculture?
3Ann
Agricultural robots exist, and more autonomous versions will benefit from AI in performing tasks currently more dependent on human labor (like careful harvesting) or provide additional abilities like scanning trees to optimize harvest time. Related to whether faster AI progress would give a better price for the market, well, the market may currently be pricing in a relative shortage of human labor, and some of the efforts towards AI robots (in apples for example) have so far gone too slowly to be viable, so going faster than expected might shift the dynamic there.
2Mati_Roy
Thanks!

a feature i would like on content website like YouTube and LessWrong is an option to market a video/article as read as a note to self (x-post fb)

4mako yass
Youtube lets you access your viewing history through your "library" (or in the web version, probably it's in the sidebar)
2Mati_Roy
thanks! yeah i know, but would like if it was more easily accessible whenever i watch a video:)
2mako yass
Are you actually looking for the "watch later" feature..
2Mati_Roy
No:)
2Mati_Roy
oh, LW actually has a bookmark feature, which i could use for that! although i prefer using it for articles i want to read
5bfinn
Yes I only recently discovered LW's bookmark - wish I had years ago!

the usual story is that Governments provide public good because Markets can't, but maybe Markets can't because Governments have secured a monopoly on them?

x-post: https://www.facebook.com/mati.roy.09/posts/10159360438609579

5Matthew Barnett
The standard example of a public good is national defense. In that case, you're probably right that the market can't provide it, since it would be viewed in competition with the government military, and therefore would probably be seen as a threat to national security. For other public goods, I'm not sure why the government would have a monopoly. Scientific research is considered a public good, and yet the government doesn't put many restrictions on what types of science you can perform (with some possible exceptions like nuclear weapons research).  Wikipedia lists common examples of public goods. We could through them one by one. I certainly agree that for some of them, your hypothesis holds.
2Viliam
For the opposite perspective, see: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/29/my-irb-nightmare/
2ChristianKl
I don't think the IRB that blocked Scott in that article was the government. 
3Viliam
In the "government vs market" dichotomy, I think it is closer to the government side.
2Mati_Roy
ah, yeah, you're right! thank you

Suggestion for retroactive prizes: Pay the most undervalued post on the topic for the prize, whenever it was written, assuming the writer is still alive or cryopreserved (given money is probably not worth much for most dead people). "undervalue" meaning amount the post is worth minus amount the writers received.

Topic: Can we compute back the Universe to revive everyone?

Quality / epistemic status: I'm just noting this here for now. Language might be a bit obscure, and I don't have a super robust/formal understanding of this. Extremely speculative.

This is a reply to: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/itdggr/is_there_a_positive_counterpart_to_red_pill/g5g3y3a/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

The map can't be larger than the territory. So you need a larger territory to scan your region of interest: your scanner can't scan themselves... (read more)

3avturchin
There are several other (weird) ideas to revive everyone:  * send a nanobot via wormhole in the past, it will replicate and collect all data about the brains * find a way to travel between everett branches. For every person there is branch where he is cryopreserved. * use quantum randomness generator to generate every possible mind in different everett branches

Topic: AI adoption dynamic

GPT-3:

  • fixed cost: 4.6M USD
  • variable cost: 790 requests/USD source

Human:

  • fixed cost: 0-500k USD (depending whether you start from birth and the task they need to be trained)
  • variable cost: 10 - 1000 USD / day (depending whether you count their maintenance cost or the cost they charge)

So an AI currently seems more expensive to train, but less expensive to use (as might be obvious for most of you).

Of course, trained humans are better than GPT-3. And this comparison has other limitations. But I still find it interesting.


Acco

... (read more)
7gwern
All of which was done on much smaller models and GPT-3 just scaled up existing settings/equations - they did their homework. That was the whole point of the scaling papers, to tell you how to train the largest cost-effective model without having to brute force it! I think OA may well have done a single run and people are substantially inflating the cost because they aren't paying any attention to the background research or how the GPT-3 paper pointedly omits any discussion of hyperparameter tuning and implies only one run (eg the dataset contamination issue).
1Mati_Roy
Good to know, thanks! 

generalising from what a friend proposed me: don't aim at being motivated to do [desirable habit], aim at being addicted (/obsessed) at doing [desirable habit] (ie. having difficulty not to do it). I like this framing; relying on always being motivated feels harder to me

(I like that advice, but it probably doesn't work for everyone)

Philosophical zombies are creatures that are exactly like us, down to the atomic level, except they aren't conscious.

Complete philosophical zombies go further. They too are exactly like us, down to the atomic level, and aren't conscious. But they are also purple spheres (except we see them as if they weren't), they want to maximize paperclips (although they act and think as if they didn't), and they are very intelligent (except they act and think as if they weren't).

I'm just saying this because I find it funny ^^. I think consciousness is harder (for us) to reduce than shapes, preferences, and intelligence.

5Chris_Leong
It's actually not hard to find examples of people who are intelligent, but act and think as though they aren't =P

topic: lifelogging as life extension

which formats should we preserve our files in?

I think it should be:

- open source and popular (to increase chances it's still accessible in the future)

- resistant to data degradation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_degradation (thanks to Matthew Barnett for bringing this to my attention)

x-post: https://www.facebook.com/groups/LifeloggingAsLifeExtension/permalink/1337456839798929/

1Pee Doom
Mati, would you be interested in having a friendly and open (anti-)debate on here (as a new post) about the value of open information, both for life extension purposes and else (such as Facebook group moderation)? I really support the idea of lifelogging for various purposes such as life extension but have a strong disagreement with the general stance of universal access to information as more-or-less always being a public good.
1Mati_Roy
Meta: This isn't really related to the above comment, so might be better to start a new comment in my shortform next time. Object: I don't want to argue about open information in general for now. I might be open to discussing something more specific and directly actionable, especially if we haven't done so yet and you think it's important. It doesn't currently seem to me that relevant to put one's information public for life extension purposes given you can just backup the information in private, in case you were implying or thinking that. I also don't (at least currently and in the past) advocate for universal access to information in case you were implying or thinking that.
1Mati_Roy
note to self, to read: https://briantomasik.com/manual-file-fixity/

topic: lifelogging as life extension

epistemic status: idea

Backup Day. Day where you commit all your data to blu-rays in a secure location.

When could that be?

Aphelion is at the beginning of the year. But maybe would be better to have it on a day that commemorates some relevant events for us.

x-post: https://www.facebook.com/groups/LifeloggingAsLifeExtension/permalink/1336571059887507/

3avturchin
I am now coping a 4 TB HDD and it is taking 50 hours. Blu rays are more time consuming as one need to change the disks, and it may be around 80 disks 50GB each to record the same hard drive. So it could take more than day of work.
3Mati_Roy
good point! maybe we should have a 'Backup Week'!:)

I feel like I have slack. I don't need to work much to be able to eat; if I don't work for a day, nothing viscerally bad happens in my immediate surrounding. This allows me to think longer term and take on altruistic projects. But on the other hand, I feel like every movement counts; that there's no loose in the system. Every lost move is costly. A recurrent thought I've had in the past weeks is that: there's no slack in the system.

4Dagon
Every move DOES count, and "nothing viscerally bad" doesn't mean it wasn't a lost opportunity for improvement. _on some dimensions_. The problem is that well-being is highly-dimensional, and we only have visibility into a few aspects, and measurements of only a subset of those. It could easily be a huge win on your future capabilities to not work-for-pay that day. The Slack that can be described is not true Slack. Slack is in the mind. Slack is freedom FROM freedom. Slack is the knowledge that every action or inaction changes the course of the future, _AND_ that you control almost none of it. You don't (and probably CAN'T) actually understand all the ways you're affecting your future experiences. Simply give yourself room to try stuff and experience them, without a lot of stress about "causality" or "optimization". But don't fuck it up. True slack is the ability to obsess over plans and executions in order to pick the future you prefer, WHILE YOU SIMULTANEOUSLY know you're wrong about causality and about your own preferences. [ note and warning: my conception of slack has been formed over decades of Subgenius popehood (though I usually consider myself more Discordian), and may diverge significantly from other uses. ]

Today is Schelling Day. You know where and when to meet for the hangout!

epistemic status: a thought I just had

  • the concept of 'moral trade' makes sense to me
  • but I don't think there's such a thing as 'epistemic trade'
  • although maybe agents can "trade" (in that same way) epistemologies and priors, but I don't think they can "trade" evidence

EtA: for those that are not familiar with the concept of moral trade, check out: https://concepts.effectivealtruism.org/concepts/moral-trade/

4Dagon
It's worth being clear what you mean by "trade" in these cases. Does "moral trade" mean "compromising one part of your moral beliefs in order to support another part"? or "negotiate with immoral agents to maximize overall moral value" or just "recognize that morals are preferences and all trade is moral trade"? I think I agree that "trade" is the wrong metaphor for models and priors. There is sharing, and two-way sharing is often called "exchange", but that's misleading. For resources, "trade" implies loss of something and gain of something else, where the utility of the things to each party differ in a way that both are better off. For private epistemology (not in the public sphere where what you say may differ from what you believe), there's nothing you give up or trade away for new updates.
3Pattern
(I aimed for non-"political" examples, which ended up sounding ridiculous.) Suppose you believed that the color blue is evil, and want there to be less blue things in the world. Suppose I believed the same as you, except for me the color is red. Perhaps we could agree on a moral trade - we will both be against the colors blue and red! Or perhaps something less extreme - you won't make things red unless they'd look really good red, and I won't make things blue unless they'd look really good blue. Or we trade in some other manner - if we were neighbors and our houses were blue and red we might paint them different colors (neither red nor blue), or trade them.
2Dagon
Hmm, those examples seem to be just "trade". Agreeing to do something dispreferred, in exchange for someone else doing something they disprefer and you prefer, when all things under consideration are permitted and optional under the relevant moral strictures. I wonder if that implies that politics is one of the main areas where the concept applies.
1Mati_Roy
meta: thanks for your comment; no expectation for you to read this comment; it doesn't even really respond to your comments, just some thoughts that came after reading it; see last paragraph for an answer to your question| quality: didn't spent much time formatting my thoughts I use "moral trade" for non-egoist preferences. The latter is the trivial case that's the most prevalent; we trade resources because I care more about myself and you care more about yourself, and both want something personally out of the trade. Two people that are only different in that one adopts Bentham's utilitarianism and the other adopts Mill's might want to trade. One value the existence of a human more than the existence of a pig. So one might trade their diet (become vegan) for a donation to poverty alleviation. Two people could have the same values, but one think that there's a religious after life and the other not because they processed evidence differently. Someone could propose the following trade: the atheist will pray all their life (the reward massively overweights the cost from the theist person's perspective), and in exchange, the theist will sign up for cryonics (the reward massively overweights the cost from the atheist person's perspective). Hummmm, actually, writing out this example, it now seems to make sense to me to trade. Assuming both people are pure utilitarians (and no opportunity cost), they would both, in expectation, from their relative model of the world, gain a much larger reward than its cost. I guess this could also be called moral trade, but the different in expected value comes from different model of the worlds instead of different values. So you never actually trade epistemologies or priors (as in, I reprogram my mind if you reprogram yours so that we have a more similar way of modelling the world), but you can trade acting as if. (Well, there are also cases were you would actually trade them, but only because it's morally beneficial to both parties.

Steven Universe s1e5 is about a being that follows commands literally, and is a metaphor for some AI risks

epistemic status: speculative, probably simplistic and ill defined

Someone asked me "What will I do once we have AGI?"

I generally define the AGI-era starting at the point where all economically valuable tasks can be performed by AIs at a lower cost than a human (at subsistance level, including buying any available augmentations for the human). This notably excludes:

1) any tasks that humans can do that still provide value at the margin (ie. the caloric cost of feeding that human while they're working vs while they're not working rather than while they're not... (read more)

imagine (maybe all of a sudden) we're able to create barely superhuman-level AIs aligned to whatever values we want at a barely subhuman-level operation cost

we might decide to have anyone able to buy AI agents aligned with their values

or we might (generally) think this way to give access to that tech would be bad, but many companies are already incentivized to do that individually and can't all cooperate not to (and they actually reached this point gradually, previously selling near human-level AIs)

then it seems like everyone/most people would start to run... (read more)

topic: economics

idea: when building something with local negative externalities, have some mechanism to measure the externalities in terms of how much the surrounding property valuation changed (or are expected to change based, say, through a prediction market) and have the owner of that new structure pay the owners of the surrounding properties.

I wonder what fraction of people identify as "normies"

I wonder if most people have something niche they identify with and label people outside of that niche as "normies"

if so, then a term with a more objective perspective (and maybe better) would be non-<whatever your thing is>

like, athletic people could use "non-athletic" instead of "normies" for that class of people

3CstineSublime
Does "normie" crossover with "(I'm) just a regular guy/girl"? While they are obviously have highly different connotations, is the central meaning similar? I tend to assume, owing to Subjectivism and Egocentric Bias, that at times people are more likely to identify as part of the majority (and therefore 'normie') than the minority unless they have some specific reason to do so. What further complicates this like a matryoshka doll is not only the differing sociological roles that a person can switch between dozens of times a day (re: the stereotypical Twitter bio "Father. Son. Actuary. Tigers supporter")  but within a minority one might be part of the majority of the minority, or the minority of the minority many times over. Like the classic Emo Phillips joke "Northern Conservative Baptist, or Northern Liberal Baptist" "He said "Northern Conservative Baptist", I said "me too! Northern Conservative Fundamentalist Baptist..."" itself a play on "No True-Scotsman".  

topics: AI, sociology

thought/hypothesis: when tech is able to create brains/bodies as good or better than ours, it will change our perception of ourselves: we won't be in a separate magistra from our tools anymore. maybe people will see humans as less sacred, and value life less. if you're constantly using, modifying, copying, deleting, enslaving AI minds (even AI minds that have a human-like interface), maybe people will become more okay doing that to human minds as well.

(which seems like it would be harmful for the purpose of reducing death)

topic: intellectual discussion, ML tool, AI x-risks

Idea: Have a therapist present during intellectual debate to notice triggers, and help defuse them. Triggers activate a politics mindset where the goal becomes focused on status/self-preservation/appearances/looking smart/making the other person look stupid/etc. which makes it hard to think clearly.

Two people I follow will soon have a debate on AI x-risks which made me think of that. I can't really propose that intervention though because it will likely be perceived and responded as if it was a political m... (read more)

Topics: AI, forecasting, privacy

I wonder how much of a signature we leave in our writings. Like, how hard would it be for an AI to be rather confident I wrote this text? (say if it was trained on LessWrong writings, or all public writings, or maybe even private writings) What if I ask someone else to write an idea for me--how helpful is it in obfuscating the source?

Topic: AI strategy (policies, malicious use of AI, AGI misalignment)

Epistemic status: simplistic; simplified line of reasoning; thinking out loud; a proposed frame

A significant "warning shot" from a sovereign misaligned AI doesn't seem likely to me because a human-level (and plausibly a subhuman-level) intelligence can both 1) learn deception, yet 2) can't (generally) do a lot of damage (i.e. perceptible for humanity). So the last "warning shot" before AI learns deception won't be very big (if even really notable at all), and then a misaligned agent would ... (read more)

topic: AI alignment, video game | status: idea

Acknowledgement: Inspired from an idea I heard from Eliezer in zir podcast with Lex Friedman and the game Detroit: Become Human.

Video game where you're in an alternate universe where aliens create an artificial intelligence that's a human. The human has various properties typical of AI, such has running way faster than the aliens in that world and being able to duplicate themselves. The goal of the human is to take over the world to stop some atrocity happening in that world. The aliens are trying to stop the human from taking over the world.

✨ topic: AI timelines

Note: I'm not explaining my reasoning in this post, just recording my predictions and sharing how I feel.

I'll sound like a boring cliche at this point, but I just wanted to say it publicly: my AGI timelines have shorten earlier this year.

Without thinking about too much about quantifying my probabilities, I'd say the probabilities that we'll get AGI or AI strong enough to prevent AGI (including through omnicide) are:

  • 18% <2033
  • 18% 2033-2043
  • 18% 2043-2053
  • 18% 2050-2070
  • 28% 2070+ or won't happen

But at this point I feel like not much... (read more)

topic: genetic engineering

'Revolutionary': Scientists create mice with two fathers

(I just read the title)

topic: genetic engineering

'Revolutionary': Scientists create mice with two fathers

(I just read the title)

Idea for a line of thinking: What if as a result of automation we could use the ~entire human population to control AI — any way we could meaningfully organize this large workforce towards that goal?

  1. What fraction of the cards from the Irrational Game didn't replicate?
  2. Is there a set of questions similar to this available online?
  3. In the physical game I have, there's a link to http://give-me-a-clue.com/afterdinner (iianm) which is supposed to have 300 more trivia questions, but it doesnt work -- anyone has does?

Part-time remote assistant position

My assistant agency, Pantask, is looking to hire new remote assistants. We currently work only with effective altruist / LessWrong clients, and are looking to contract people in or adjacent to the network. If you’re interested in referring me people, I’ll give you a 100 USD finder’s fee for any assistant I contract for at least 2 weeks (I’m looking to contract a couple at the moment).

This is a part time gig / sideline. Tasks often include web searches, problem solving over the phone, and google sheet formatting. A full d... (read more)

a thought for a prediction aggregator

Problem with prediction market: People with the knowledge might still not want to risk money (plus complexity of markets, risk the market fails, tax implication, etc.).

But if you fully subsidize them, and make it free to participate, but still with potential for reward, then most people would probably make random predictions (at least, for predictions where most people don't have specialized knowledge about this) (because it's not worth investing the time to improve the prediction).

Maybe the best of both worlds is to do... (read more)

1Measure
Maybe combine this with a public record of who made which predictions (at least shared with the expert group), so they can converge on their own, Aumann style?

But if the brain is allowed to change, then the subject can eventually adapt to the torment. To

This doesn't follow. It seems very likely to me that it can allow it to change it ways it doesn't adapt to the pain, both from first principles and from observations.

How different would each loop need to be in order to be experienced separately?

That would be like having multiple different Everett branches experiencing suffering (parallel lives), which is different from 1 long continuous life.

Superintelligent Devil will take its victim brain's upgrade under its control and will invest in constant development of the victim's brain-parts which can feel pain. There is eternity to evolve in that direction and the victim will know that every next second will be worse. But it is really computationally intense way of punishment. 

 

The question of the minimal unit of experience, which is enough to break the loop sameness is interesting. The need not only to be subjectively different, but the difference need to be meaningful. Not just one pixel.

1MackGopherSena
[edited]
2avturchin
There is no physical eternity, so there is a small probability of fork in each moment. Therefore, there will be eventually next observer moment, sufficiently different to be recognised as different. In internal experience, it will be almost immediately.

Being immortal means you will one day be a Jupiter brain (if you think memories are part of one's identity, which I think they are)

x-post: https://twitter.com/matiroy9/status/1451816147909808131

4avturchin
Yes, this follows from that loops can happen only once subjectively, as Peter Hensen recently mentioned to me. 
2Vladimir_Nesov
Learning distills memories in models that can be more reasonably bounded even for experience on astronomical timescales. It's not absolutely necessary to keep the exact record of everything. What it takes to avoid value drift is another issue though, this might incur serious overhead. Value drift in people is not necessarily important, might even be desirable, it's only clear for the agent in charge of the world that there should be no value drift. But even that doesn't necessarily make sense if there are no values to work with as a natural ingredient of this framing.
2Mati_Roy
Sure! My point still stand though :) Here it's more about identity deterioration than value drift (you could maintain the same value while forgetting all your life). But also, to address your claim in a vacuum: * Value-preservation is an instrumental convergent goal; ie. you're generally more likely to achieve your goals if you want to achieve them. * Plus, I think most humans would value preserving their (fundamental) values intrinsically as well. Am not sure I understand
2Vladimir_Nesov
The arguments for instrumental convergence don't apply to the smaller processes that take place within a world fully controlled by an all-powerful agent, because the agent can break Moloch's back. If the agent doesn't want undue resource acquisition to be useful for you, it won't be, and so on. The expectation that humans would value preservation of values is shaky, it's mostly based on the instrumental convergence argument, that doesn't apply in this setting. So it might actually turn out that human preference says that value preservation is not good for individual people, that value drift in people is desirable. Absence of value drift is still an instrumental goal for the agent in charge of the world that works for the human preference that doesn't drift. This agent can then ensure that the overall shape of value drift in the people who live in the world is as it should be, that it doesn't descend into madness. Value drift only makes sense where the abstraction of values makes sense. Does my apartment building have a data integrity problem, does it fail some hash checks? This doesn't make sense, the apartment building is not a digital data structure. I think it's plausible that some AGIs of the non-world-eating variety lack anything that counts as their preference, they are not agents. In a world dominated by such AGIs some people would still set up smaller agents merely for the purpose of their own preference management (this is the overhead I alluded to in the previous comment). But for those who don't and end up undergoing unchecked value drift (with no agents to keep it in line with what values-on-reflection approve of), the concept of values is not necessarily important either. This too might be the superior alternative, more emphasis on living long reflection than on being manipulated into following its conclusions.

Here's a way to measure (a proxy of) relative value of different years I just thought (again?); answer the question:

For which income I would you prefer to live in perpetual-2020 over living in perpetual-2021 with a median income? (maybe income is measured by fraction of the world owned multiplied by population size, or some other way) Then you can either chain those answers to go back to older years, or just compare them directly.

There are probably years where even Owning Everything wouldn't be enough. I prefer to live in perpetual-2021 with a median incom... (read more)

Hobby: serve so many bullets to sophisticated philosophers that they're missing half their teeth by the end of the discussion