The Berkeley Genomics Project is fundraising for the next forty days and forty nights at Manifund: https://manifund.org/projects/human-intelligence-amplification--berkeley-genomics-project

Are people fundamentally good? Are they practically good? If you make one person God-emperor of the lightcone, is the result something we'd like?

I just want to make a couple remarks.

• Conjecture: Generally, on balance, over longer time scales good shards express themselves more than bad ones. Or rather, what we call good ones tend to be ones whose effects accumulate more.
• Example: Nearly all people have a shard, quite deeply stuck through the core of their mind, which points at communing with others.
  • Communing means: speaking with; standing shoulder to shoulder with, looking at the same thing; understanding and being understood; lifting the same object that one alone couldn't lift.
  • The other has to be truly external and truly a peer. Being a truly external true peer means they have unboundedness, infinite creativity, self- and pair-reflectivity and hence diagonalizability / anti-inductiveness. They must also have a measure of authority over their future. So this shard (albeit subtly and perhaps defeasibly) points at non-perfect subjugation of all others, and democracy. (Would an immortalized Genghis Khan, having conquered everything, after 1000 years, continue to wish to see in th

Periodic reminder: AFAIK (though I didn't look much) no one has thoroughly investigated whether there's some small set of molecules, delivered to the brain easily enough, that would have some major regulatory effects resulting in greatly increased cognitive ability. (Feel free to prove me wrong with an example of someone plausibly doing so, i.e. looking hard enough and thinking hard enough that if such a thing was feasible to find and do, then they'd probably have found it--but "surely, surely, surely someone has done so because obviously, right?" is certainly not an accepted proof. And don't call me Shirley!)

I'm simply too busy, but you're not!

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jTiSWHKAtnyA723LE/overview-of-strong-human-intelligence-amplification-methods#Signaling_molecules_for_creative_brains

An issue with long-form and asynchronous discourse is wasted motion. Without shared assumptions, the logic and info that locutor 1 adduces is less relevant to locutor 2 than to locutor 1. And, that effect becomes more pronounced as locutor 1 goes down a path of reasoning, constructing more context that locutor 2 doesn't share. (OTOH, long-form is better in terms of individual thinking.)

It is still the case that some people don't sign up for cryonics simply because it takes work to figure out the process / financing. If you do sign up, it would therefore be a public service to write about the process.

If someone asks me "what's the least impressive thing you think AI won't be able to do by 20XX", I give answers like "make lots of original interesting math concepts". (See https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sTDfraZab47KiRMmT/views-on-when-agi-comes-and-on-strategy-to-reduce#comments) People sometimes say "well that's a pretty impressive thing, you're talking about the height of intellectual labor".

A main reason I give examples like this is that math is an area where it's feasible for there to be a legible absence of legibilization. (By legible, I mean interpersonal explicitness https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KuKaQEu7JjBNzcoj5/explicitness .) Mathematicians are supposed to make interesting novel definitions that legibilize inexplicit ideas / ways of thinking. If they don't, you can tell that their publications are not so interesting. It is legible that they failed to legibilize.

In fact I suspect there will be many much "easier" feats that AI won't be able to do for a while (some decades). Easier, in the sense that many more humans are able to do those feats. Much harder, in the sense that it requires creativity, and therefore requires having the algorithm-pieces for creativity. That'... (read more)

Humans are (weak) evidence for the instrumental utility for mind-designers to design terminal-goal-construction mechanisms.

Evolution couldn't directly encode IGF into humans. So what was it supposed to do? One answer would be to make us vibe-machines: You bop around, you satisfy your immediate needs, you hang out with people, etc. And that is sort of what you are. But also there are the Unreasonable, who think and plan long-term, who investigate secrets, who build things for 10 or 100 or 1000 years--why? Maybe it's because having terminal-like goals (here meaning, aims that are fairly fixed and fairly ambitious) is so useful that you want to have them anyway even if you can't make them be the right ones. Instead you build machines to guess / make up terminal goals (https://tsvibt.blogspot.com/2022/11/do-humans-derive-values-from-fictitious.html).

Recommendation for gippities as research assistants: Treat them roughly like you'd treat RationalWiki, i.e. extremely shit at summaries / glosses / inferences, quite good at citing stuff and fairly good at finding random stuff, some of which is relevant.

Protip: You can prevent itchy skin from being itchy for hours by running it under very hot water for 5-30 seconds. (Don't burn yourself; I use tap water with some cold water, and turn down the cold water until it seems really hot.)

(These are 100% unscientific, just uncritical subjective impressions for fun. CQ = cognitive capacity quotient, like generally good at thinky stuff)

• Overeat a bit, like 10% more than is satisfying: -4 CQ points for a couple hours.
• Overeat a lot, like >80% more than is satisfying: -9 CQ points for 20 hours.
• Sleep deprived a little, like stay up really late but without sleep debt: +5 CQ points.
• Sleep debt, like a couple days not enough sleep: -11 CQ points.
• Major sleep debt, like several days not enough sleep: -20 CQ points.
• Oversleep a lot, like 11 hours: +6 CQ points.
• Ice cream (without having eaten ice cream in the past week): +5 CQ points.
• Being outside: +4 CQ points.
• Being in a car: -8 CQ points.
• Walking in the hills: +9 CQ points.
• Walking specifically up a steep hill: -5 CQ points.
• Too much podcasts: -8 CQ points for an hour.
• Background music: -6 to -2 CQ points.
• Kinda too hot: -3 CQ points.
• Kinda too cold: +2 CQ points.

(stimulants not listed because they tend to pull the features of CQ apart; less good at real thinking, more good at relatively rote thinking and doing stuff)

In this interview, at the linked time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUkBz-cdB-k&t=847s

Terence Tao describes the notion of an "obstruction" in math research. I think part of the reason that AGI alignment is in shambles is that we haven't integrated this idea enough. In other words, a lot of researchers work on stuff that is sort-of known to not be able to address the hard problems.

(I give some obstruction-ish things here: https://tsvibt.blogspot.com/2023/03/the-fraught-voyage-of-aligned-novelty.html)

Discourse Wormholes.

In complex or contentious discussions, the central or top-level topic is often altered or replaced. We're all familiar from experience with this phenomenon. Topologically this is sort of like a wormhole:

Imagine two copies of $R^3$ minus the open unit ball, glued together along the unit spheres. Imagine enclosing the origin with a sphere of radius 2. This is a topological separation: The origin is separated from the rest of your space, the copy of $R^3$ that you're standing in. But, what's contained in the enclosure is an entire world just as large; therefore, the origin is not really contained, merely separated. One could walk through the enclosure, and pass through the unit ball boundary, and then proceed back out through the unit ball boundary into the other alternative copy of $R^3$.

You come to a crux of the issue, or you come to a clash of discourse norms or background assumptions; and then you bloop, where now that is the primary motive or top-level criterion for the conversation.

This has pluses and minuses. You are finding out what the conversation really wanted to be, finding what you most care about here, finding out what the two of most ought to fight about ... (read more)

Say a "deathist" is someone who says "death is net good (gives meaning to life, is natural and therefore good, allows change in society, etc.)" and a "lifeist" ("anti-deathist") is someone who says "death is net bad (life is good, people should not have to involuntarily die, I want me and my loved ones to live)". There are clearly people who go deathist -> lifeist, as that's most lifeists (if nothing else, as an older kid they would have uttered deathism, as the predominant ideology). One might also argue that young kids are naturally lifeist, and there... (read more)

Ostentiation:

So there's steelmanning, where you construct a view that isn't your interlocutor's but is, according to you, more true / coherent / believable than your interlocutor's. Then there's the Ideological Turing Test, where you restate your interlocutor's view in such a way that ze fully endorses your restatement.

Another dimension is how clear things are to the audience. A further criterion for restating your interlocutor's view is the extent to which your restatement makes it feasible / easy for your audience to (accurately) judge that view. You cou... (read more)

Is there a nice way to bet on large-evidence, small-probability differences?

Normally we bet on substantial probability differences, like I say 10% you say 50% or similar. Betting makes sense there--you incentivize having correct probabilities, at least within a few percent or whatever. Is there some way to incentivize reporting the right log-odds, to within a logit or whatever?

One sort of answer might be showing that/how you can always extract a mid-range probability disagreement on latent variables, under some assumptions on the structure of the latent variable models underlying the large-logit small-probability disagreement.