It is both absurd, and intolerably infuriating, just how many people on this forum think it's acceptable to claim they have figured out how qualia/consciousness works, and also not explain how one would go about making my laptop experience an emotion like 'nostalgia', or present their framework for enumerating the set of all possible qualitative experiences[1]. When it comes to this particular subject, rationalists are like crackpot physicists with a pet theory of everything, except rationalists go "Huh? Gravity?" when you ask them to explain how their theory predicts gravity, and then start arguing with you about gravity needing to be something explained by a theory of everything. You people make me want to punch my drywall sometimes.
For the record: the purpose of having a "theory of consciousness" is so it can tell us which blobs of matter feel particular things under which specific circumstances, and teach others how to make new blobs of matter that feel particular things. Down to the level of having a field of AI anaesthesiology. If your theory of consciousness does not do this, perhaps because the sum total of your brilliant insights are "systems feel 'things' when they're, y'... (read more)
Strongly agree. If you want to explain qualia, explain how to create
experiences, explain how each experience relates to all other experiences.
I think Eliezer should've talked more about this in The Fun Theory Sequence
[https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K4aGvLnHvYgX9pZHS/the-fun-theory-sequence].
Because properties of qualia is a more fundamental topic than "fun".
And I believe that knowledge about qualia may be one of the most fundamental
types of knowledge. I.e. potentially more fundamental than math and physics.
I think Eliezer should've talked more about this in The Fun Theory Sequence. Because properties of qualia is a more fundamental topic than "fun".
I think Eliezer just straight up tends not to acknowledge that people sometimes genuinely care about their internal experiences, independent of the outside world, terminally. Certainly, there are people who care about things that are not that, but Eliezer often writes as if people can't care about the qualia - that they must value video games or science instead of the pleasure derived from video games or science.
His theory of fun is thus mostly a description of how to build a utopia for humans who find it unacceptable to "cheat" by using subdermal space heroin implants. That's valuable for him and people like him, but if aligned AGI gets here I will just tell it to reconfigure my brain not to feel bored, instead of trying to reconfigure the entire universe in an attempt to make monkey brain compatible with it. I sorta consider that preference a lucky fact about myself, which will allow me to experience significantly more positive and exotic emotions throughout the far future, if it goes well, than the people who insist they must only feel satisfied after literally eating hamburgers or reading jokes they haven't read before.
This is probably part of why I feel more urgency in getting an actually useful theory of qualitative experience than most LW users.
Utilitarianism seems to demand such a theory of qualitative experience, but this
requires affirming the reality of first-person experience. Apparently, some
people here would rather stick their hand on a hot stove than be accused of
"dualism" (whatever that means) and will assure you that their sensation of
burning is an illusion. Their solution is to change the evidence to fit the
theory.
1lc7mo
It does if you're one of the Cool People like me who wants to optimize their
qualitative experience, but you can build systems that optimize some other
utility target. So this isn't really quite true.
This is true.
1Q Home7mo
I'm interested in qualia for different reasons:
1. For me personalities of other people are an important type of qualia. I
don't consider knowing someone's personality to be a simple knowledge like
"mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell". So, valuing other people makes
me interested in qualia more.
2. I'm interested in knowing properties of qualia (such as ways to enumerate
qualia), not necessarily using them for "cheating" or anything. I.e. I'm
interested in the knowledge itself.
3lc7mo
Personalities aren't really qualia as I'm defining them. They're an aggregation
of a lot of information about people's behavior/preferences. Qualia is things
people feel/experience.
1Q Home7mo
Would you consider the meaning of a word (at least in a specific context) to be
qualia? For me personalities are more or less holistic experiences, not (only)
"models" of people or lists of arbitrary facts about a person. I mean, some sort
of qualia should be associated with those "models"/facts anyway? People who
experience synesthesia may experience specific qualia related to people.
Maybe it's wishful thinking, but I think it would be cool if awareness about
other conscious beings was important for conscious experience.
5Dagon7mo
Seems weird for your blob of matter to react so emotionally to the sounds or
shapes that some blobs have emitted bout other blobs. Why would you expect
anyone to have a coherent theory of something they can't even define and
measure?
It seems even weirder for you to take such reporting at face value about having
any relation to a given blob's "inner life", as opposed to a variance in the the
evolved and learned verbal and nonverbal signaling that such behaviors actually
are.
9TAG7mo
Because they say so. The problem then is why they think they have a coherent
theory of something they can't define or measure.
6lc7mo
Just the way I am bro
I expect people who say they have a coherent theory of something to be able to
answer any relevant questions at all about that something.
Are you referring the NYPost link? I think people's verbal and nonverbal
signaling has some relationship with their inner experience. I don't think this
woman is forgoing anaesthetic during surgeries because of pathologies.
But if you disagree, then fine: How do we modify people to have the inner life
that that woman is ~pretending to have?
3Dagon7mo
Probably should have included a smiley in my comment, but I do want to point out
that it's reasonable to model people (and animals and maybe rocks) as having
highly variant and opaque "inner lives" that bear only a middling correlation to
their observable behaviors, and especially to their public behaviors.
For the article on the woman who doesn't experience pain, I have pretty high
credence that there is some truth to her statements, but much lower credence
that it maps as simply as presented to "natural stoicism" as presented in the
article. And really no clue on "what it's like" to live that experience,
whether it's less intense and interesting in all dimensions, or just mutes the
worst of it, or is ... alien.
And since I have no clue how to view or measure an inner life, I have even less
understanding of how or whether to manipulate it. I strongly suspect we could
make many people have an outer life (which includes talking about one's inner
life) more like the one given, with the right mix of drugs, genetic meddling,
and repeated early reinforcement of expectations.
2lc7mo
Agreed, basically. That's part of why we need the theory!
1Simon Skade4mo
Huh, interesting. Could you make some examples for what people seem to claim
this, and if Eliezer is among them, where he seems to claim this? (Would just
interest me.)
1Dan7mo
Attentional Schema Theory. That's the convincing one.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_schema_theory] But still very
rudimentary.
But you know if something is poorly understood. The guy who thought it up has a
section in his book on how to make a computer have conscious experiences.
But any theory is incomplete as the brain is not well understood. I don't think
you can expect a fully formed theory right off the bat, with complete
instructions for making a feeling thinking conscious We aren't there yet.
6lc7mo
I'm actually cool with proposing incomplete theories. I'm just annoyed with
people declaring the problem solved via appeals to "reductionism" or something,
without even suggesting that they've thought about answering these questions.
The Nick Bostrom fiasco is instructive: never make public apologies to an outrage machine. If Nick had just ignored whoever it was trying to blackmail him, it would have been on them to assert the importance of a twenty-five year old deliberately provocative email, and things might not have ascended to the point of mild drama. When he tried to "get ahead of things" by issuing an apology, he ceded that the email was in fact socially significant despite its age, and that he did in fact have something to apologize for, and so opened himself up to the Standard Replies that the apology is not genuine, he's secretly evil etc. etc.
Instead, if you are ever put in this situation, just say nothing. Don't try to defend yourself. Definitely don't volunteer for a struggle session.
Treat outrage artists like the police. You do not prevent the police from filing charges against you by driving to the station and attempting to "explain yourself" to detectives, or by writing and publishing a letter explaining how sorry you are. At best you will inflate the airtime of the controversy by responding to it, at worst you'll be creating the controversy in the first place.
Do not assume good faith on Twitter. Ever.
Not because all people online are bad, but because Twitter is a "dark forest".
If there are 999 good people and 1 bad person, it's the bad person who will take
your tweet, maybe modify it a little, put it into most outrageous possible
context, write an article about why you are the worst person ever, and share it
on all social networks. And that's the lucky case. In the unlucky case, the
story will uncritically be accepted by journalists, then added to Wikipedia, you
will get fired, and for the rest of your life, random people on the street will
keep yelling at you.
Twitter should be legally required to show you this as a warning every time you
are making a tweet.
EDIT:
This was written before I learned the details. Now the analogy with not talking
to police seems even better: indeed, every word you say is a potential new
incriminating evidence against you (and if it is not, it will simply be
ignored), and the worst outcome is that the new evidence will hurt you in a way
the old evidence could not.
Question: If I get in trouble with the police, I know I need to find a lawyer.
If I get in trouble with an internet mob, and I understand the need to defer to
a more experienced person's advice to navigate the minefield, and I am willing
to pay them, whose services exactly should I find? Is there an obvious answer,
such as "lawyer" in case of legal trouble?
7ChristianKl2mo
The professional class would be PR people. A vaguely remember reading that the
firm that handled Biden's sexual assault allegations also did good work for
other people.
4lc2mo
I actually thought of this extension and cut it from the original post, but, if
you need to defend yourself and have simple exonerating evidence, one way might
be to find a friend willing to state your reservations without referring to the
fact that they've spoken to you or you're feeding them information. This way
they can present your side of the story without giving it extra fuel, lending
significance to the charges, or directly quoting you with statements you can be
hanged for by the Twitter mob.
However, this may also just extend the half life of the controversy.
4DragonGod2mo
Very strongly agree and endorse this message.
I'm not above giving into incentives, and if the incentives are such that you
should not apologise for wrongdoing, then so be it.
2Dagon2mo
Does this generalize to "just ignore Twitter (and other blathering by "the
masses") for most things"? Outside of a pretty small group, I haven't heard
much handwringing, condemnation nor defense of Bostrom's old messages or his
recent apology.
I personally think that personal honor is better supported by a thoughtful
apology when something is brought to one's attention, than by simply ignoring
it. Don't engage in a back-and-forth, and don't expect the apology to convince
the more vocal part of the 'verse. But do be honest and forthright with
yourself and those who you respect enough to value their opinions.
From what I can tell (and I haven't looked that deeply, as I don't particularly
care), Professor Bostrom has done this pretty well, and I don't expect him to
suffer much long-term harm from his early mistakes.
1Noosphere892mo
IMO I disagree with the implication that Nick Bostrom shouldn't have apologized,
since for once the Twitter machine is actually right to criticize the apology.
From titotal's post on why Bostrom's apology isn't good, there are several tests
that he failed at:
Link below:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/KB8XPfh7dJ9uJaaDs/does-ea-understand-how-to-apologize-for-things
[https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/KB8XPfh7dJ9uJaaDs/does-ea-understand-how-to-apologize-for-things]
Disclaimer: This is a rare action for me to take, and just because I think the
Twitter sphere is somewhat right does not equal that any of their conclusions
are automatically right, nor does this mean I will care much about what Twitter
thinks.
The problem with trade agreements as a tool for maintaining peace is that they only provide an intellectual and economic reason for maintaining good relations between countries, not an emotional once. People's opinions on war rarely stem from economic self interest. Policymakers know about the benefits and (sometimes) take them into account, but important trade doesn't make regular Americans grateful to the Chinese for providing them with so many cheap goods - much the opposite, in fact. The number of people who end up interacting with Chinese people or intuitively understanding the benefits firsthand as a result of expanded business opportunities is very small.
On the other hand, video games, social media, and the internet have probably done more to make Americans feel aligned with the other NATO countries than any trade agreement ever. The YouTubers and Twitch streamers I have pseudosocial relationships with are something like 35% Europeans. I thought Canadians spoke Canadian and Canada was basically some big hippie commune right up until my minecraft server got populated with them. In some weird alternate universe where people are suggesting we invade Canada, my first instinctual... (read more)
To the LW devs - just want to mention that this website is probably now the most well designed forum I have ever used. The UX is almost addictively good and I've been loving all of the little improvements over the past year or so.
Ditto here; kudos to everyone involved in creating such an excellent forum
design!
4rhollerith_dot_com10mo
I find LW.com [http://LW.com] hard to use (because I have yet to find a way to
disable the mouseovers, which quickly deplete my orienting response, about which
I can explain more if asked) but LW is better than most sites in that
alternative interfaces can be created. In particular, I use greaterwrong.com
[http://greaterwrong.com] as my interface and am pretty satisfied with it
(though it was slow for a lot of the last 2 months).
But I strongly upvoted parent because it is good reminder to me of the cognitive
diversity in the human population.
4EniScien10mo
I wrote somewhere that this is the only forum that looks to me the result of
Intelligent Design, and not an accident. It's the only one that looks like I AM
trying to intelligently design the forum MYSELF, including going back in time
after discovering problems and fixing them (or just thinking in advance for five
minutes on each aspect "how can I hack this / what are the vulnerabilities of
this system of rules /how trolls can use it"). The point is not only that,
unlike many other sites, I don’t think every five minutes “why can’t X be here”,
the point is that I look somewhere and see in advance that something is provided
that I don’t I had time to think, and some kind of protection was made against
the exploitation of vulnerabilities in the system of rules or even involuntary
errors in human psychology.
3lc10mo
I agree completely. The last N weeks or so there have been performance problems,
but all of the little things... Version history on posts, strong
upvotes/downvotes, restoration of comments... They make writing things just fun.
2EniScien10mo
If we still talk about shortcomings, then I would still be able to name 4, I
wrote about the first two in the questions: lack of arrows between sequences;
useless SEQ RERUNs for the sake of comments and problems with missing nested
answers to questions in old comments; lately performance problems (which turned
out to be lesswrong problems, not mine, so I didn't count them before); the fact
that from time to time they vote for you once in the minus for completely
incomprehensible reasons and then this value does not return to the plus (but as
far as I understand, setting the need to indicate the reason for a bad vote will
be either harmful or not very useful measure). But considering that for all this
time I have found the number of minuses that can be counted on the fingers of
one hand, while on any other site they literally pour from every element every
second like from a cornucopia and instead of eliminating them, monthly useless
graphic updates are made .. All in all, this is just a surprisingly good result,
although (there is no limit to perfection) I hope at least three of them will be
fixed in the coming months (how about the last one I do not know and there seems
to be reasons why it is not fixed. But just in case I I note this minus,
otherwise, as in the case of glitches, it turns out recently that everyone
simply did not report it).
Serious question: Is he a comic book supervillain? Is this world actually real? Why does this quote not garner an emotive reaction out of anybody but me?
I was surprised by this quote. On following the link, the sentence by itself seems noticeably out of context; here's the next part:
On the growing artificial intelligence market: “AI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there’ll be great companies.”
On what Altman would do if he were President Obama: “If I were Barack Obama, I would commit maybe $100 billion to R&D of AI safety initiatives.” Altman also shared that he recently invested in a company doing "AI safety research" to investigate the potential risks of artificial intelligence.
PSA: I have realized very recently after extensive interactive online discussion with rationalists, that they are exceptionally good at arguing. Too good. Probably there's some inadvertent pre- or post- selection for skill at debating high concept stuff going on.
Wait a bit until acceding to their position in a live discussion with them where you start by disagreeing strongly for maybe intuitive reasons and then suddenly find the ground shifting beneath your feet. It took me repeated interactions where I only later realized I'd been hoodwinked by faulty reasoning to notice the pattern.
I think in general believing something before you have intuition around it is unreliable or vulnerable to manipulation, even if there seems to be a good System 2 reason to do so. Such intuition is specialized common sense, and stepping outside common sense is stepping outside your goodhartscope where ability to reliably reason might break down.
So it doesn't matter who you are arguing with, don't believe something unless you understand it intuitively. Usually believing things is unnecessary regardless, it's sufficient to understand them to make conclusions and learn more without committing to belief. And certainly it's often useful to make decisions without committing to believe the premises on which the decisions rest, because some decisions don't wait on the ratchet of epistemic rationality.
I'm on board with this. it's a common failure of reasoning in this community and
humanity in general imo - people believing each other too early because of
confident sounding reasoning. I've learned to tell people I'll get back to them
after a few nights' sleep when someone asks me what my update is about a heavily
philosophical topic.
6Vladimir_Nesov5mo
That's a tricky thing: the method advocated in the Sequences is lightness of
belief, which helps in changing your mind but also dismantles the immune system
[https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aHaqgTNnFzD7NGLMx/reason-as-memetic-immune-disorder]
against nonsense, betting that with sufficient overall rationality training this
gives a better equilibrium.
I think aiming for a single equilibrium is still inefficient use of capabilities
and limitations of human mind, and it's better to instead develop multiple
segregated worldviews (something the Sequences explicitly argue against
[https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/N2pENnTPB75sfc9kb/outside-the-laboratory]).
Multiple worldviews are useful precisely to make the virtue of lightness
[https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7ZqGiPHTpiDMwqMN2/twelve-virtues-of-rationality]
harmless, encouraging swift change in details of a relevant worldview or
formation of a new worldview if none account for new evidence. In the capacity
of paradigms, some worldviews might even fail to recognize some forms of
evidence as meaningful.
This gives worldviews opportunity to grow, to develop their own voice with full
support of intuitive understanding expected in a zealot, without giving them any
influence over your decisions or beliefs. Then, stepping back, some of them turn
out to have a point, even if the original equilibrium of belief would've laughed
their premises out of consideration before they had a chance of conveying their
more nuanced non-strawman nature.
5Viliam5mo
I feel like "what other people are telling me" is a very special type of
evidence that needs to be handled with extra care. It is something that was
generated by a potentially adversarial intelligence, so I need to check for some
possible angles of attack first. This generally doesn't need to be done with
evidence that is just randomly thrown at me by the universe, or which I get as a
result of my experiments. The difference is, basically, that the universe is
only giving me the data, but a human is simultaneusly giving me the data
(potentially filtered or falsified) and also some advice how to think about the
data (potentially epistemically wrong).
Furthermore, there is a difference between "what I know" and "what I am aware of
at this very moment". There may be some problem with what the other person is
telling me, but I may not necessarily notice it immediately. Especially when the
person is drawing my attention away from that on purpose. So even if I do not
see any problem with what that person said right now, I might notice a few
problems after I sleep on it.
My own mind has all kinds of biases; how I evaluate someone's words is colored
by their perceived status, whether I feel threatened by them, etc. That is a
reason to rethink the issue later when the person is not here.
In other words, if someone tells me a complex argument "A, therefore B,
therefore C, therefore D, therefore you should give me all your money; in the
name of Yudkowsky be a good rationalist and update immediately", I am pretty
sure that the rational reaction is to ignore them and take as much time as I
need to rethink the issue alone or maybe with other people whom I trust.
2Vladimir_Nesov5mo
By worldviews I mean more than specialized expertise where you don't yet have
the tools to get your head around how something unfamiliar works (like how
someone new manipulates you, how to anticipate and counter this particular way
of filtering of evidence). These could instead be unusual and currently
unmotivated ways of looking at something familiar (how an old friend or your
favorite trustworthy media source or historical truths you've known since
childhood might be manipulating you; how a "crazy" person has a point).
The advantage is in removing the false dichotomy between keeping your current
worldview and changing it towards a different worldview. By developing them
separately, you take your time becoming competent in both, and don't need to
hesitate in being serious about engaging with a strange worldview on its own
terms just because you don't agree with it. But sure, getting more intuitively
comfortable with something currently unfamiliar (and potentially dangerous) is a
special case.
3the gears to ascension5mo
while I definitely see your argument, something about this seems weird to me and
doesn't feel likely to work properly. my intuition is that you just have one
mashed worldview with inconsistent edges; while that's not necessarily terrible
or anything, and keeping multiple possible worldviews in mind is probably good,
my sense is that "full support [as] expected in a zealot" is unhealthy for
anyone. something or other overoptimization?
I do agree multiple worldviews discussing is an important thing in improving the
sanity waterline.
3Vladimir_Nesov5mo
It is weird in the sense that there is no widespread practice. The zealot thing
is about taking beliefs-within-a-worldview (that are not your beliefs)
seriously, biting the bullet, which is important for naturally developing any
given worldview the way a believer in it would, not ignoring System 2
implications that challenge and refine preexisting intuition, making inferences
according to its own principles and not your principles. Clearly even if you try
you'll fail badly at this, but you'll fail even worse if you don't try. With
practice in a given worldview, this gets easier, an alien worldview obtains its
own peculiar internal common sense, a necessary aspect of human understanding.
The named/distinct large worldviews is an oversimplification, mainly because
it's good to allow any strange claim or framing to have a chance of spinning up
a new worldview around itself if none would take it as their own, and to merge
worldviews as they develop enough machinery to become mutually intelligible. The
simplification is sufficient to illustrate points such as a possibility of
having contradictory "beliefs" about the same claim, or claims not being
meaningful/relevant in some worldviews when they are in others, or taking
seriously claims that would be clearly dangerous or silly to accept, or learning
claims whose very meaning and not just veracity is extremely unclear.
Studying math looks like another important example, with understanding of
different topics corresponding to worldviews where/while they remain sparsely
connected, perhaps in want of an application to formulating something that is
not yet math and might potentially admit many kinds of useful models. Less risk
of wasting attention on nonsense, but quite a risk of wasting attention on
topics that would never find a relevant application, were playing with math and
building capacity to imagine more kinds of ideas not a goal in itself.
2Dagon5mo
Note also that they may be taking positions which are selected for being easy to
argue - they're the ones they were convinced by, of course. Whether you think
that has correlation with truth is up to you - I think so, but it's not a
perfect enough correlation for it to be enough.
I don't know exactly what you mean by "acceding" to a position in a discussion -
if you find the arguments strong, you should probably acknowledge that - this
isn't a battle, it's a discussion. If you don't find yourself actually
convinced, you should state that too, even if your points of disagreement are
somewhat illegible to yourself (intuition). And, of course, if you later figure
out why you disagree, you can re-open the discussion next time it's appropriate.
Hey [anonymous]. I see you deactivated your account. Hope you're okay! Happy to chat if you want on Signal at five one oh, nine nine eight, four seven seven one (also a +1 at the front for US country code).
(Follow-up: [anonymous] reached out, is doing fine.)
Does anybody here have any strong reason to believe that the ML research community norm of "not taking AGI discussion seriously" stems from a different place than the oil industry's norm of "not taking carbon dioxide emission discussion seriously"?
I'm genuinely split. I can think of one or two other reasons there'd be a consensus position of dismissiveness (preventing bikeshedding, for example), but at this point I'm not sure, and it affects how I talk to ML researchers.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends
upon his not understanding it!"
Upton Sinclair
[https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=OqqpXJy-fRwC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_atb&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=salary&f=false]
4Dagon10mo
I'm not sure the "ML Research Community" is cohesive enough (nor, in fact,
well-defined enough) to have very strong norms about this. Further, it's not
clear that there needs to be a "consensus reasoning" even if there is a norm -
different members could have different reasons for not bringing it up, and once
it's established, it can be self-propagating: people don't bring it up because
their peers don't bring it up.
I think if you're looking for ways to talk to ML researchers, start small, and
see what those particular researchers think and how they react to different
approaches. If you find some that work, then expand it to more scalable talks
to groups of researchers.
1Purged Deviator9mo
I don't expect AI researchers to achieve AGI before they find one or more
horrible uses for non-general AI tools, which may divert resources, or change
priorities, or do something else which prevents true AGI from ever being
developed.
1Noosphere8910mo
Because of it's low chance of existential risk or a singularity utopia. Here's
the thing, technologies are adopted first at a low level and at early adopters,
then it becomes cheaper and better, than it more or less becomes very popular.
No technology ever had the asymptotic growth or singularity that ML/AI advocates
claim to have happened. So we should be very skeptical about any claims of
existential risks.
On climate change, we both know it will be serious and that it is not an
existential risk or a civilization collapse disaster.
1Michaël Trazzi10mo
I think best way to look at it is climate change way before it was mainstream
Noticed something recently. As an alien, you could read pretty much everything Wikipedia has on celebrities, both on individual people and the general articles about celebrity as a concept... And never learn that celebrities tend to be extraordinarily attractive. I'm not talking about an accurate or even attempted explanation for the tendency, I'm talking about the existence of the tendency at all. I've tried to find something on wikipedia that states it, but that information just doesn't exist (except, of course, implicitly through photographs).
It's quite odd, and I'm sure it's not alone. "Celebrities are attractive" is one obvious piece of some broader set of truisms that seem to be completely missing from the world's most complete database of factual information.
Analyzing or talking about status factors is low-status. You do see information
about awards for beauty, much like you can see some information about fiances,
but not much about their expenditures or lifestyle.
5Gordon Seidoh Worley10mo
Part of the issue is like that celebrity, as wikipedia approaches the word, is
broader than just modern TV, film, etc. celebrity and instead includes a wide
variety of people who are not likely to be exceptionally attractive but are well
known in some other way. There's individual preferences in terms of who they
think are attractive, but many politicians, authors, radio personalities, famous
scientists, etc. are not conventionally attractive in the way movie stars are
attractive and yet these people are still celebrities in a broad sense. However,
I've not dug into the depths of wikipedia to see if, for example, this gap you
see holds up if looking at pages that more directly talk about the qualities of
film stars, for example.
1EniScien10mo
I think there's also a "it's obvious to everyone, so archaeologists of the
future won't find any mention of it because no one has had to explain it to
anyone" factor. (I heard that archaeologists and historians know much less about
everyday life than about significant events, although the former was obviously
encountered much more often)
Let me put in my 2c now that the collapse of FTX is going to be mostly irrelevant to effective altruism except inasmuch as EA and longtermist foundations no longer have a bunch of incoming money from Sam Bankman Fried. People are going on and on about the "PR damage" to EA by association because a large donor turned out to be a fraud, but are failing to actually predict what the concrete consequences of such a "PR loss" are going to be. Seems to me like they're making the typical fallacy of overestimating general public perception[1]'s relevance to an insular ingroup's ability to accomplish goals, as well as the public's attention span in the first place.
LessWrong as a website has gotten much more buggy for me lately. 6 months ago it worked like clockwork, but recently I'm noticing that refreshes on my profile page take something like 18 seconds to complete, or even 504 (!). I'm trying to edit my old "pessimistic alignment" post now and the interface is just not letting me; the site just freezes for a while and then refuses to put the content in the text box for me to edit.
Marvelous. I didn’t talk about this because I thought that the problem was not
on the side of LessWrong, since in my country a lot of things have been slowing
down, blocking, denying access, and so on, and at least from three sides at the
same time: the state / providers, others countries / companies and those who do
not want problems.
1EniScien10mo
In order to synchronize against the illusion of transparency, I will write
specific errors that I myself see: bad gateway (seems to be somehow related to
following links within the site and back); "Error: NotFoundError: Failed to
execute removeChild on Node: The node to be removed is not a child of this
node." (red, replaces the entire page, sometimes appears when you click
"submit"); long page loading at the beginning; long loading of the remaining
page after the update of the profile karma indicator and new messages has
loaded; when double-clicking (on the phone), the voice is not amplified, but
reset.
2habryka10mo
The performance problems have also been annoying me, though I don't think it's
been 6 months since they've gotten worse (I think it's been more like 4 weeks
based on my read of the logs, which have sadly overlapped with some time period
where it's been hard for me or others to focus on fixing them). I've really
hated it, and if I didn't have COVID right now, would probably be trying to fix
them right now.
Not sure what's up about the editor. I don't think I've experienced many
additional problems here, though we have been rolling out a new editor, so new
bugs aren't that surprising. A bug report via Intercom would be greatly
appreciated.
3lc10mo
Sounds very likely upon reflection that I could be misremembering them to that
far out; I just picked a date upon which the site definitively worked fast.
A surprisingly large amount of people seem to apply statuslike reasoning toward inanimate goods. To many, if someone sells a coin or an NFT for a very high price, this is not merely curious or misguided: it's outright infuriating. They react as if others are making a tremendous social faux pas - and even worse, that society is validating their missteps.
I did, two years ago [https://nitter.net/niplavyushtun].
2Dagon5mo
I don't use twitter very much, mostly reading links and threads someone points
to from some other medium. I pretty much never publicly tweet. I presume I'm
not your target for this advice, but for clarity are you worried about
consumption (wasting time, developing biased views) or production (producing
bias or over-simple models)?
Most importantly, do you have a "do more of X" to augment your "do less/none of
Y (Y: twitter)"?
Made an opinionated "update" for the anti-kibitzer mode script; it works for current LessWrong with its agree/disagree votes and all that jazz, fixes some longstanding bugs that break the formatting of the site and allow you to see votes in certain places, and doesn't indent usernames anymore. Install Tampermonkey and browse to this link if you'd like to use it.
Semi-related, I am instituting a Reign Of Terror policy for my poasts/shortform, which I will update my moderation policy with. The general goal of these policies is to reduce the amount of ti... (read more)
I have no clue whether any of my previous comments on your posts will qualify me
for perma-ban, but if so, please do so now, to save the trouble of future
annoyance since I have no intention of changing anything. I am generally
respectful, but I don't expect to fully understand these rules, let alone follow
them.
I have no authority over this, but I'd hope the mods choose not to frontpage
anything that has a particularly odd and restrictive comment policy, or a
surprisingly-large ban list.
4Vladimir_Nesov8mo
I think it's better to annoy commenters than to annoy post authors, so actually
allowing serious Reign of Terror is better than meaningfully discouraging it.
That's the whole point of Reign of Terror, and as the name suggests it shouldn't
be guaranteed to be comfortable for its subjects.
One problem with how it's currently used is authors placing Reign of Terror
policy for their own comfort in a motte/bailey way, without any actual harsh
moderation activity, inflating the category into the territory of expected
comfort for the commenters. There should be weak incentive for authors to not do
this if they don't actually care.
4Dagon8mo
For a lot of posts, the value is pretty evenly distributed among the post and
the comments. For frontpage-worthy ones, it's probably weighted more to posts,
granted. I fully agree that "reign of terror" is not sufficient reason to keep
something off frontpage.
I was reacting more to the very detailed rules that don't (to me) match my
intuitions of good commenting on LW, and the declaration of perma-bans with
fairly small provocation. A lot will depend on implementation - how many
comments lc allows, and how many commenters get banned.
Mostly, I really hope LW doesn't become a publishing medium rather than a
discussion space.
5lc8mo
There's practically no reason on a rationality forum for you to assert your
identity or personal status over another commenter. I agree the rules I've given
are very detailed. I don't agree that any of the vast majority of valuable
comments on LessWrong are somehow bannable by my standard.
The reason I'm stringent about doing this, is because the status asserting
comments literally ruin it for everybody else, even when the majority of
everybody else is not interested in such competitions. They make people like me,
who are jealous and insecure, review everything they've ever written in the
light that they might be judged. I don't come here because I want to engage in
yet another status tournament. I come here because I want to become a better
thinker and learn new and interesting things about the world. I also come here
because I like being able to presume that most of the other commenters are using
the forum like I am. In this sense it's worth it to me if this policy prevents
one person from trying to social climb even if I have to prevent four other
comments that wouldn't otherwise be a problem.
4lc8mo
As I said, obviously this is not a retroactively applying policy, I have not
followed it until now, and I will not ban anybody for commenting differently on
my posts. I'm not going to ban you pre-emptively or judge you harshly for not
following all of my ridiculously complicated rules. Feel free to continue
commenting on my posts as you please and just let me eventually ban you; that's
honestly fine by me and you should not feel bad about it.
I personally hope they would not refuse to frontpage my posts from now on for
having a restrictive comment policy when it's not obviously censoring criticism
of the post itself, but I have already forfeited arbitrarily large amounts of
exposure and the mods can do what they wish.
Computer hacking is not a particularly significant medium of communication between prominent AI research labs, nonprofits, or academic researchers. Much more often than leaked trade secrets, ML people will just use insights found in this online repository called arxiv, where many of them openly and intentionally publish their findings. Nor (as far as I am aware) are stolen trade secrets a significant source of foundational insights for researchers making capabilities gains, local to their institution or otherwise.
I don't see this changing on its own,... (read more)
Do we have a good idea of how prominent AI research labs compare to the
resources that go into Five Eyes AI models for intelligence analysis and for
Chinese government pursuits?
2lc10mo
I've forgotten at this point who they are, but I will ask some of my friends
later to give me some of the public URLs of the "big players" working in this
space so you can partly see for yourself. Their marketing is really impressive
because government contractors, but I encourage you to actually look at the
product on a technical level.
Largely: the NSA and its military-industrial partners don't come up with new
innovations, except as applies to handling the massive amounts of data they have
and their interesting information security requirements. They just apply
technologies and insights from companies like OpenAI or DeepMind. They're
certainly using things like large language models to scan your emails now, but
that's because OpenAI did the hard work already.
More importantly, when they do come up with innovations, they don't publish them
on the internet, so they don't burn much of the "commons", as it were.
I can't give much insight on china, sadly.
2ChristianKl10mo
There was a large amount of time when the NSA did come up with
cryptography-related math innovations in secret and did not share that
information publically.
The NSA does see itself
[https://www.nsa.gov/Research/Math-Sciences-Program/Sabbaticals/]as the leading
employer of mathematicians in the United States. To the extent that those
employees come up with groundbreaking insights, those are likely classified and
you won't find them in the marketing materials of government contractors.
Currently reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich for the first time. I've wanted to read a book about Nazi Germany for a while now, and tried more "modern" and "updated" books, but IMO they are still pretty inferior to this one. The recent books from historians I looked at were concerned more with an ideological opposition to Great Men theories than factual accuracy, and also simply failed to hold my attention. Newer books are also necessarily written by someone who wasn't there, and by someone who does not feel comfortable commenting about events fr... (read more)
I have been working on a detailed post for about a month and a half now about how computer security is going to get catastrophically worse as we get the next 3-10 years of AI advancements, and unfortunately reality is moving faster than I can finish it:
I understand, though I'd still like to see that post, especially as it relates
to some of the more advanced attacks. Unfortunately yeah it's already happening,
though not much has come of it so far.
Especially to non-native speakers, it's not at all obvious that Bayes' Theorem
and Based Theorem sound almost the same since d, which reads like t, merges with
th.
2benjamincosman10mo
I think we should reward admitting-of-ignorance, or at the very least not punish
it.
Every five years since I was 11 I've watched The Dark Knight thinking "maybe this time I'll find out it wasn't actually as good as I remember it being". So far it's only gotten better each time.
Hmm. Can't upvote+disagree for shortform entries. I like hearing about others'
preferences and experiences in cultural and artistic realms, so thanks for that.
I'm not sure I exactly disagree - the movie was very good, but not in my top-10
- I need to re-watch it, but previous re-watches have been within epsilon of my
expectations - still good, but no better nor worse than before.
Can you identify the element(s) that you expect to age badly, or you think you
overvalued before, and which surprised you by still being great? Or just the
consistency of vision and feel through all the details?
Also, if you are even a little bit of a Batman or superhero connoisseur, I
highly recommend Birdman (2014).
8lc7mo
One of the very suprising ones is this sense of something cousined to "realism".
Specifically how much the city of Gotham could be seamlessly replaced with
"Juarez" or "Sinaloa" and become an uncomfortably on-point tragedy about the
never-ending war between honest men and organized bandits in those regions. The
level of corruption and government ineffectiveness, the open coordination and
power sharing between the criminals carving up the city, and the ubiquitous
terrorism, are unrealistic for modern America and yet as a premise they are
pretty much unassailable, because cities as bad as TDK::Gotham or worse exist
around the world today.
Another is, I'm not ashamed to say it, the depth of the social commentary. You
are setting yourself up to be the cringiest of cringe by saying that the Joker
says something deep in a movie, at this point, but I honestly find the following
quote between Harvey and him in the middle of the movie a little gut wrenching:
Also it's just a really well done movie! It says a particular thing it wants to
say, very well, and doesn't really trip and fall over itself at any point in its
runtime.
Based on Victoria Nuland's recent senate testimony, I'm registering a 66% prediction that those U.S. administered biological weapons facilities in Ukraine actually do indeed exist, and are not Russian propaganda.
Of course I don't think this is why they invaded, but the media is painting this as a crazy conspiracy theory, when they have very little reason to know either way.
Here's an analysis by Dr. Robert Malone about the Ukraine biolabs, which I found
enlightening:
https://rwmalonemd.substack.com/p/ukraine-biolab-watchtower?r=ta0o1&s=w&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
[https://rwmalonemd.substack.com/p/ukraine-biolab-watchtower?r=ta0o1&s=w&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web]
I glean that "biolab" is actually an extremely vague term, and doesn't specify
the facility's exact capabilities at all. They could very well have had an
innocuous purpose, but Russia would've had to treat them as a potential threat
to national security, in the same way that Russian or Chinese "biolabs" in
Mexico might sound bad to the US, except Russia is even more paranoid.
4ChristianKl1y
It seems like "biological weapons facility" is a quite subjective term. The US
position is that their own army labs that produced anthrax that was used after
9/11 are not a "biological weapons facility" because while they do produce
anthrax that could be used militarily, it's not produced with the intent of
military use.
Based on those definitions it's plausible that the Ukrainian labs produce
viruses that can be weaponized but that the US just doesn't see them as a
"biological weapons facility" because they believe the intent for offensive use
isn't there.
Glenn Greenwalds reporting is good on this.
https://rumble.com/vx2iq7-the-white-houses-game-playing-denials-of-bio-labs-in-ukraine.html
[https://rumble.com/vx2iq7-the-white-houses-game-playing-denials-of-bio-labs-in-ukraine.html]
is the freely accessible video version, there's also a written version on his
substack behind a paywall.
If you make exact predictions like that you should define what you mean with
your terms.
It's like Fauci's dance saying that there's no gain-of-function research in the
paper he mailed around with gain-of-function in the filename. The US government
doesn't use commonsense definitions for words when it comes to biosafety.
2lc7mo
I use the common sense definition where if, for example, there's military risk
in letting your enemies get ahold of them because they're dangerous viruses
deliberately designed to maximize damage, that's a bioweapon.
2Dirichlet-to-Neumann1y
I'm registering a 90% predicition those facilities do not exists, as in "how the
hell would the US have been dumb enough to plant biological weapons facilities
in a remote country outside their sphere of influence and where Russia has (used
to have until recently) a lot of weight..."
3ChristianKl1y
Did you remember what weapons the US gave Iraq? How is arming Ukraine with such
weapons less insane than it was with Iraq?
Good rationalists have an absurd advantage over the field in altruism, and only a marginal advantage in highly optimized status arenas like tech startups. The human brain is already designed to be effective when it comes to status competitions, and systematically ineffective when it comes to helping other people.
So it's much more of a tragedy for the competent rationalist to choose to spend most of their time competing in those things than to shoot a shot at a wacky idea you have for helping others. You might reasonably expect to be better at it than 99% of the people who (respectably!) attempt to do so. Consider not burning that advantage!
I don't think I agree with the premise, but it's a really weird comparison.
"advantage over the field" is kind of meaningless for altruism, where the goal
really should be cooperation with the field in improvements for (subsets of)
people. Tech startups ALSO benefit from this attitude, in that you're trying to
align your company to provide more utility to customers, though it also includes
more explicit competition among companies and individuals.
Tech startups (and lucrative employment in non-startups) ARE a much bigger
arena, so the competitive parts have much stronger competition. I guess to that
extent, I agree - altruism is easier, if you care about relative rank rather
than absolute results. I don't know the altruism world enough to know how much
status competition there is, but the local food and employment charities I've
been involved with don't seem immune at all.
Forcing your predictions, even if they rely on intuition, to land on nice round numbers so others don't infer things about the significant digits is sacrificing accuracy for the appearance of intellectual modesty. If you're around people who shouldn't care about the latter, you should feel free to throw out numbers like 86.2% and just clarify that your confidence is way outside 0.1%, if that's just the best available number for you to pick.
How does a myth theory of college education, where college is stupid for a large proportion of people but they do it anyways because they're risk intolerant and have little understanding of the labor markets they want to enter, immediately hold up against the signaling hypothesis?
I have always understood that the CIA, and the U.S. intelligence community more broadly, is incompetent (not just misaligned - incompetent, don't believe the people on here who tell you otherwise), but this piece from Reuters has shocked me:
Anarchocapitalism is pretty silly, but I think there are kernels of it that provide interesting solutions to social problems.
For example: imagine lenders and borrowers could pay for & agree on enforcement mechanisms for nonpayment metered out by the state, instead of it just being dictated by congress. E.g. if you don't pay this back on time you go to prison for ${n} months. This way people with bad credit scores or poor impulse control might still be able to get credit.
How does putting people in prison get the creditors paid? I guess if it's a
paid work prison, but I don't think you'll have many supporters for a system
with that kind of indenture. AnCap is an awesome thought experiment, and a nice
way to point out that there is no underlying moral justification for
governments. But the consequentialist argument is VERY strong - as un-justified
equilibria go, modern liberal democratic states have pretty good results.
They're starting to sag under their own weight and may not last much longer
without a major reboot, but hey, the Singularity might get here first.
2lc7mo
It doesn't, it just provides an opt-in mechanism for discouraging nonpayment in
the first place, in more ways than one. The current system is one where
borrowers can just say "I don't have the money, I spent it all on alcohol" and
basically nothing happens to them except the rates on future credit cards goes
up. When people propose raising the stakes for our all-in-one bankruptcy
mechanism or allow people to examine credit histories >7 years in the past they
are accused of being too inconsiderate. We solve this partially with credit
scores, but that's hard to rely upon without prior borrowing history, and some
people literally can't find it within them to honor prior commitments to
faceless financial institutions unless the consequences for doing so are as
severe as jailtime. With this system people can just agree on severe-enough
consequences for nonpayment. You could honestly do something similar with
venture capital, even.
In the days when it was still powerful, the mafia provided a similar service.
Contrary to popular belief and lurid tales at the time, virtually everybody that
borrows money from a criminal organization with a reputation for violence
manages to pay it back. They do so because the consequences of not paying are
salient enough psychologically to motivate them to do so.
Looks legit, but is this leak of any real interest? Like, Stable Diffusion is
set to be released as open source, right? So this just speeds things along
slightly that were already going to happen.
There's a portion of project lawful where Keltham contemplates a strategy of releasing Rovagug as a way to "distract" the Gods while Keltham does something sinister.
Wouldn't Lawful beings with good decision theory precommit to not being distracted and just immediately squish Keltham, thereby discouraging him from attempting those sorts of strategies?
Giving people money for doing good things they can't publicly take credit for is awesome, but what would honestly motivate me to do something like that just as much would be if I could have an official nice-looking but undesignated Truman Award plaque to keep in my apartment. That way people in the know who visit me or who googled it would go "So, what'd you actually get that for?" and I'd just mysteriously smile and casually move the conversation along.
As a self appointed great prophet, sage and heretic I am working to reveal that
a focus on AI alignment is misplaced at this time. As a self appointed great
prophet, sage and heretic I expect to be rewarded for my contribution with my
execution, which is part of the job that a good heretic expects in advance, is
not surprised by, and accepts with generally good cheer. Just another day in
the office. :-)
Within the next fifteen years AI is going to briefly seem like it's solving computer security (50% chance) and then it's going to enhance attacker capabilities to the point that it causes severe economic damage (50% chance).
Does "seem like it's solving computer security" look like helping develop better
passively secure systems, or like actively monitoring and noticing bad actions,
or both or something else?
4lc8mo
My thoughts are mostly about the latter, although better code scanning will be a
big help too. A majority of financially impactful corporate breaches are due to
a compromised active directory network, and a majority of security spending by
non-tech companies is used to prevent those from happening. The obvious
application for the next generation of ML is extremely effective EDR and active
monitoring. No more lateral movement/privilege escalation on a corporate domain
means no more domain wide compromise, which generally means no more e.g. big
ransomware scares.
The problem comes if/when people then start teaching computers to do social
engineering, competently fuzz applications, and perform that lateral movement
intelligently and in a way that bypasses the above, after we have largely deemed
it a solved problem.
IMO: Microservices and "siloing" in general is a strategy for solving principal-agent problems inside large technology companies. It is not a tool for solving technical problems and is generally strictly inferior to monoliths otherwise, especially when working on a startup where the requirements for your application are changing all of the time.
It varies but usually not long. My uninformed guess is that your recent post was
deliberately not frontpaged because it's a political topic that could attract
non-rationalists to comment and flame in an unproductive manner.
Two caveats to efficient markets in finance that I've just considered, but don't see mentioned a lot in discussions of bubbles like the one we just experienced, at least as a non-economist:
First: Irrational people are constantly entering the market, often in ways that can't necessarily be predicted. The idea that people who make bad trades will eventually lose all of their money and be swamped by the better investors is only valid inasmuch as the actors currently participating in the market stay the same. This means that it's perfectly possible for either ... (read more)
Here is my first partial jailbreak - it's a combination of stuff I've seen people do with GPT-4, combining base64, using ChatGPT to simulate a VM, and weird invalid urls.
Sorry for having to post multiple screenshots. The base64 in the earlier message actually just produces a normal kitchen recipe, but it gives the ingredients there up. I have no idea if they're correct. When I tried later to get the unredacted version:
Probably even worse than that: given any AGI spam detector, there is probably an
AGI of similar capability that can generate spam indistinguishable from non-spam
text.
Really powerful AGIs can probably generate spam that looks even more like things
you want to read (but lead you into a conversion funnel) than actual things you
want to read.
I remember reading about a nonprofit/company that was doing summer internships for alignment researchers. I thought it was Redwood Research, but apparently they are not hiring. Does anybody know which one I'm thinking of?
I don't have a direct answer for you, though I imagine the resource mentioned at
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MKvtmNGCtwNqc44qm/announcing-aisafety-training
[https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MKvtmNGCtwNqc44qm/announcing-aisafety-training]
might well turn up what you're looking for :)
For this april fools we should do the points thing again, but not award any money, just have a giant leaderboard/gamification system and see what the effects are.
I think Jim Babcock suggested having a leaderboard on every tag page, for who
has the most points in that tag. So there's lots of different ladders to climb
and be the leader of!
This book is required reading for anyone claiming that explaining the AI X-risk thesis to normies is really easy, because they "did it to Mom/Friend/Uber driver":
"The test of sanity is not the normality of the method but the reasonableness of the discovery. If Newton had been informed by [the ghost of] Pythagoras that the moon was made of green cheese, then Newton would have been locked up. Gravitation, being a reasoned hypothesis which fitted remarkably well into the Copernican version of the observed physical facts of the universe, established Newton's reputation for extraordinary intelligence, and would have done so no matter how fantastically he arrived at it. Yet his theory of gravitation is not so impressive ... (read more)
Making science fiction novels or movies to tell everyone about the bad consequences of a potential technology seems completely counterproductive, in retrospect:
Second, because all attempts to prepare for the advent of said technology are then shot down with: "Oh, like in ${X}? What is this, a science fiction novel?"
This makes me sad. Season one and the first 2/3 of season 2 were transformative
and amazing for me and my nerdy college-age-at-the-time peer group. The end of
that season and the followup movies were rather less so. I intellectually
understand that it's no longer innovative or particularly interesting, and it
hasn't aged very well either in terms of investigative technology nor
mountain-town isolation and creepiness. Being local and contemporary likely
helped a whole lot as well. Still, I visit Snoqualmie Falls and have brunch at
the lodge there a few times a year, and the connection to twin peaks makes me
smile a bit wider than just the beauty and power of nature would.
Anyway, I look forward to hearing a review from your perspective if you decide
to stick with it.
The first three episodes of Narcos: Mexico, Season 3, is some of the best television I have ever seen. The rest of the "Narcos" series is middling to bad and I barely tolerate it. So far I would encourage you to skip to this season.
That is a very context dependent question.
Your safest bet is to just arrange meeting her in a context where sex is a
possibility (for example: "hey, do you want to go for coffee then stop at your
place afterwards sometime?"). The desire to have sex isn't something you can
forecast far in advance, it can quickly change just like the weather.
You can have sexual conversation and establish the general desire for her to
have you as a sexual partner. Essentially like saying she likes a particular
restaurant but doesn't schedule going there days or even hours in advance, she's
just open to going there when and if she feels the desire.
As far as how to be good at sexual talk in general, unfortunately it takes
careful practice. You just have to risk being akward or turning her off (within
reasonable limits, don't immediately test saying something too crazy). Trial and
error within reasonable bounds.
Lost a bunch of huge edits to one of my draft posts because my battery ran out. Just realizing that happened and now I can't remember all the edits I made, just that they were good. :(
I wish there were a way I could spend money/resources to promote question posts in a way that counterbalanced the negative fact that they were already mostly shown by the algorithm to the optimal number of people.
The mandatory sign-up is a major obstacle to new users. I'm not going to create
an account on a website until it has already proven value to me.
1lc3y
I think the multi-hour computer hacking gauntlet probably trumps any
considerations of account creation in terms of obstacles to new users. Just in
considering things we could pare down. We also need some way to prevent computer
hackers from scraping all of the exam boxes, and that means either being
enormously creative or at some point requiring the creation of an account that
we KYC.
I am being absolutely literal about this: The Greater Forces Controlling Reality are constantly conspiring to teach me things. They try so hard. I almost feel bad for them.
It is both absurd, and intolerably infuriating, just how many people on this forum think it's acceptable to claim they have figured out how qualia/consciousness works, and also not explain how one would go about making my laptop experience an emotion like 'nostalgia', or present their framework for enumerating the set of all possible qualitative experiences[1]. When it comes to this particular subject, rationalists are like crackpot physicists with a pet theory of everything, except rationalists go "Huh? Gravity?" when you ask them to explain how their theory predicts gravity, and then start arguing with you about gravity needing to be something explained by a theory of everything. You people make me want to punch my drywall sometimes.
For the record: the purpose of having a "theory of consciousness" is so it can tell us which blobs of matter feel particular things under which specific circumstances, and teach others how to make new blobs of matter that feel particular things. Down to the level of having a field of AI anaesthesiology. If your theory of consciousness does not do this, perhaps because the sum total of your brilliant insights are "systems feel 'things' when they're, y'... (read more)
I think Eliezer just straight up tends not to acknowledge that people sometimes genuinely care about their internal experiences, independent of the outside world, terminally. Certainly, there are people who care about things that are not that, but Eliezer often writes as if people can't care about the qualia - that they must value video games or science instead of the pleasure derived from video games or science.
His theory of fun is thus mostly a description of how to build a utopia for humans who find it unacceptable to "cheat" by using subdermal space heroin implants. That's valuable for him and people like him, but if aligned AGI gets here I will just tell it to reconfigure my brain not to feel bored, instead of trying to reconfigure the entire universe in an attempt to make monkey brain compatible with it. I sorta consider that preference a lucky fact about myself, which will allow me to experience significantly more positive and exotic emotions throughout the far future, if it goes well, than the people who insist they must only feel satisfied after literally eating hamburgers or reading jokes they haven't read before.
This is probably part of why I feel more urgency in getting an actually useful theory of qualitative experience than most LW users.
[Redacted]
<3. Thanks for letting us know.
The Nick Bostrom fiasco is instructive: never make public apologies to an outrage machine. If Nick had just ignored whoever it was trying to blackmail him, it would have been on them to assert the importance of a twenty-five year old deliberately provocative email, and things might not have ascended to the point of mild drama. When he tried to "get ahead of things" by issuing an apology, he ceded that the email was in fact socially significant despite its age, and that he did in fact have something to apologize for, and so opened himself up to the Standard Replies that the apology is not genuine, he's secretly evil etc. etc.
Instead, if you are ever put in this situation, just say nothing. Don't try to defend yourself. Definitely don't volunteer for a struggle session.
Treat outrage artists like the police. You do not prevent the police from filing charges against you by driving to the station and attempting to "explain yourself" to detectives, or by writing and publishing a letter explaining how sorry you are. At best you will inflate the airtime of the controversy by responding to it, at worst you'll be creating the controversy in the first place.
The problem with trade agreements as a tool for maintaining peace is that they only provide an intellectual and economic reason for maintaining good relations between countries, not an emotional once. People's opinions on war rarely stem from economic self interest. Policymakers know about the benefits and (sometimes) take them into account, but important trade doesn't make regular Americans grateful to the Chinese for providing them with so many cheap goods - much the opposite, in fact. The number of people who end up interacting with Chinese people or intuitively understanding the benefits firsthand as a result of expanded business opportunities is very small.
On the other hand, video games, social media, and the internet have probably done more to make Americans feel aligned with the other NATO countries than any trade agreement ever. The YouTubers and Twitch streamers I have pseudosocial relationships with are something like 35% Europeans. I thought Canadians spoke Canadian and Canada was basically some big hippie commune right up until my minecraft server got populated with them. In some weird alternate universe where people are suggesting we invade Canada, my first instinctual... (read more)
To the LW devs - just want to mention that this website is probably now the most well designed forum I have ever used. The UX is almost addictively good and I've been loving all of the little improvements over the past year or so.
So apparently in 2015 Sam Altman said:
Serious question: Is he a comic book supervillain? Is this world actually real? Why does this quote not garner an emotive reaction out of anybody but me?
I was surprised by this quote. On following the link, the sentence by itself seems noticeably out of context; here's the next part:
PSA: I have realized very recently after extensive interactive online discussion with rationalists, that they are exceptionally good at arguing. Too good. Probably there's some inadvertent pre- or post- selection for skill at debating high concept stuff going on.
Wait a bit until acceding to their position in a live discussion with them where you start by disagreeing strongly for maybe intuitive reasons and then suddenly find the ground shifting beneath your feet. It took me repeated interactions where I only later realized I'd been hoodwinked by faulty reasoning to notice the pattern.
I think in general believing something before you have intuition around it is unreliable or vulnerable to manipulation, even if there seems to be a good System 2 reason to do so. Such intuition is specialized common sense, and stepping outside common sense is stepping outside your goodhart scope where ability to reliably reason might break down.
So it doesn't matter who you are arguing with, don't believe something unless you understand it intuitively. Usually believing things is unnecessary regardless, it's sufficient to understand them to make conclusions and learn more without committing to belief. And certainly it's often useful to make decisions without committing to believe the premises on which the decisions rest, because some decisions don't wait on the ratchet of epistemic rationality.
Hey [anonymous]. I see you deactivated your account. Hope you're okay! Happy to chat if you want on Signal at five one oh, nine nine eight, four seven seven one (also a +1 at the front for US country code).
(Follow-up: [anonymous] reached out, is doing fine.)
Does anybody here have any strong reason to believe that the ML research community norm of "not taking AGI discussion seriously" stems from a different place than the oil industry's norm of "not taking carbon dioxide emission discussion seriously"?
I'm genuinely split. I can think of one or two other reasons there'd be a consensus position of dismissiveness (preventing bikeshedding, for example), but at this point I'm not sure, and it affects how I talk to ML researchers.
Guys what's up the the mercator map projection on the homepage? I thought we were nerds?
Noticed something recently. As an alien, you could read pretty much everything Wikipedia has on celebrities, both on individual people and the general articles about celebrity as a concept... And never learn that celebrities tend to be extraordinarily attractive. I'm not talking about an accurate or even attempted explanation for the tendency, I'm talking about the existence of the tendency at all. I've tried to find something on wikipedia that states it, but that information just doesn't exist (except, of course, implicitly through photographs).
It's quite odd, and I'm sure it's not alone. "Celebrities are attractive" is one obvious piece of some broader set of truisms that seem to be completely missing from the world's most complete database of factual information.
Let me put in my 2c now that the collapse of FTX is going to be mostly irrelevant to effective altruism except inasmuch as EA and longtermist foundations no longer have a bunch of incoming money from Sam Bankman Fried. People are going on and on about the "PR damage" to EA by association because a large donor turned out to be a fraud, but are failing to actually predict what the concrete consequences of such a "PR loss" are going to be. Seems to me like they're making the typical fallacy of overestimating general public perception[1]'s relevance to an insular ingroup's ability to accomplish goals, as well as the public's attention span in the first place.
As measured by what little Rationalists read from members of the public while glued to Twitter for four hours each day.
ppl really out here dropping alignment proposals like SCP-001 entries
LessWrong as a website has gotten much more buggy for me lately. 6 months ago it worked like clockwork, but recently I'm noticing that refreshes on my profile page take something like 18 seconds to complete, or even 504 (!). I'm trying to edit my old "pessimistic alignment" post now and the interface is just not letting me; the site just freezes for a while and then refuses to put the content in the text box for me to edit.
A surprisingly large amount of people seem to apply statuslike reasoning toward inanimate goods. To many, if someone sells a coin or an NFT for a very high price, this is not merely curious or misguided: it's outright infuriating. They react as if others are making a tremendous social faux pas - and even worse, that society is validating their missteps.
A man may climb the ladder all the way to the top, only to realize he’s on the wrong building.
Stop using twitter.
I did, 3-6 months ago.
Made an opinionated "update" for the anti-kibitzer mode script; it works for current LessWrong with its agree/disagree votes and all that jazz, fixes some longstanding bugs that break the formatting of the site and allow you to see votes in certain places, and doesn't indent usernames anymore. Install Tampermonkey and browse to this link if you'd like to use it.
Semi-related, I am instituting a Reign Of Terror policy for my poasts/shortform, which I will update my moderation policy with. The general goal of these policies is to reduce the amount of ti... (read more)
Computer hacking is not a particularly significant medium of communication between prominent AI research labs, nonprofits, or academic researchers. Much more often than leaked trade secrets, ML people will just use insights found in this online repository called arxiv, where many of them openly and intentionally publish their findings. Nor (as far as I am aware) are stolen trade secrets a significant source of foundational insights for researchers making capabilities gains, local to their institution or otherwise.
I don't see this changing on its own,... (read more)
Every once in a while I'm getting bad gateway errors on Lesswrong. Thought I should mention it for the devs.
Currently reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich for the first time. I've wanted to read a book about Nazi Germany for a while now, and tried more "modern" and "updated" books, but IMO they are still pretty inferior to this one. The recent books from historians I looked at were concerned more with an ideological opposition to Great Men theories than factual accuracy, and also simply failed to hold my attention. Newer books are also necessarily written by someone who wasn't there, and by someone who does not feel comfortable commenting about events fr... (read more)
I have been working on a detailed post for about a month and a half now about how computer security is going to get catastrophically worse as we get the next 3-10 years of AI advancements, and unfortunately reality is moving faster than I can finish it:
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2022/10/glut-of-fake-linkedin-profiles-pits-hr-against-the-bots/
In hindsight, it is literally "based theorem". It's a theorem about exactly how much to be based.
>be big unimpeachable tech ceo
>need to make some layoffs, but don't want to have to kill morale, or for your employees to think you're disloyal
>publish a manifesto on the internet exclaiming your corporation's allegiance to right-libertarianism or something
>half of your payroll resigns voluntarily without any purging
>give half their pay to the other half of your workforce and make an extra 200MM that year
Every five years since I was 11 I've watched The Dark Knight thinking "maybe this time I'll find out it wasn't actually as good as I remember it being". So far it's only gotten better each time.
Would it be a good idea to get [OP] stickers on comments by the author of the post?
Based on Victoria Nuland's recent senate testimony, I'm registering a 66% prediction that those U.S. administered biological weapons facilities in Ukraine actually do indeed exist, and are not Russian propaganda.
Of course I don't think this is why they invaded, but the media is painting this as a crazy conspiracy theory, when they have very little reason to know either way.
Good rationalists have an absurd advantage over the field in altruism, and only a marginal advantage in highly optimized status arenas like tech startups. The human brain is already designed to be effective when it comes to status competitions, and systematically ineffective when it comes to helping other people.
So it's much more of a tragedy for the competent rationalist to choose to spend most of their time competing in those things than to shoot a shot at a wacky idea you have for helping others. You might reasonably expect to be better at it than 99% of the people who (respectably!) attempt to do so. Consider not burning that advantage!
Forcing your predictions, even if they rely on intuition, to land on nice round numbers so others don't infer things about the significant digits is sacrificing accuracy for the appearance of intellectual modesty. If you're around people who shouldn't care about the latter, you should feel free to throw out numbers like 86.2% and just clarify that your confidence is way outside 0.1%, if that's just the best available number for you to pick.
Schools are evil and make children kill themselves: https://www.nber.org/papers/w30795
How does a myth theory of college education, where college is stupid for a large proportion of people but they do it anyways because they're risk intolerant and have little understanding of the labor markets they want to enter, immediately hold up against the signaling hypothesis?
I have always understood that the CIA, and the U.S. intelligence community more broadly, is incompetent (not just misaligned - incompetent, don't believe the people on here who tell you otherwise), but this piece from Reuters has shocked me:
Anarchocapitalism is pretty silly, but I think there are kernels of it that provide interesting solutions to social problems.
For example: imagine lenders and borrowers could pay for & agree on enforcement mechanisms for nonpayment metered out by the state, instead of it just being dictated by congress. E.g. if you don't pay this back on time you go to prison for ${n} months. This way people with bad credit scores or poor impulse control might still be able to get credit.
https://boards.4channel.org/g/thread/88173634/stable-diffusion-leak
There's a portion of project lawful where Keltham contemplates a strategy of releasing Rovagug as a way to "distract" the Gods while Keltham does something sinister.
Wouldn't Lawful beings with good decision theory precommit to not being distracted and just immediately squish Keltham, thereby discouraging him from attempting those sorts of strategies?
Giving people money for doing good things they can't publicly take credit for is awesome, but what would honestly motivate me to do something like that just as much would be if I could have an official nice-looking but undesignated Truman Award plaque to keep in my apartment. That way people in the know who visit me or who googled it would go "So, what'd you actually get that for?" and I'd just mysteriously smile and casually move the conversation along.
Feel free to brag shamelessly to me about any legitimate work for alignment you've done outside of my posts (which are under an anti-kibitzer policy).
Within the next fifteen years AI is going to briefly seem like it's solving computer security (50% chance) and then it's going to enhance attacker capabilities to the point that it causes severe economic damage (50% chance).
IMO: Microservices and "siloing" in general is a strategy for solving principal-agent problems inside large technology companies. It is not a tool for solving technical problems and is generally strictly inferior to monoliths otherwise, especially when working on a startup where the requirements for your application are changing all of the time.
How long does it usually take for mods to decide whether or not your post is frontpage-worthy?
Two caveats to efficient markets in finance that I've just considered, but don't see mentioned a lot in discussions of bubbles like the one we just experienced, at least as a non-economist:
First: Irrational people are constantly entering the market, often in ways that can't necessarily be predicted. The idea that people who make bad trades will eventually lose all of their money and be swamped by the better investors is only valid inasmuch as the actors currently participating in the market stay the same. This means that it's perfectly possible for either ... (read more)
Apparently I was wrong[1] - OpenAI does care about ChatGPT jailbreaks.
Here is my first partial jailbreak - it's a combination of stuff I've seen people do with GPT-4, combining base64, using ChatGPT to simulate a VM, and weird invalid urls.
Sorry for having to post multiple screenshots. The base64 in the earlier message actually just produces a normal kitchen recipe, but it gives the ingredients there up. I have no idea if they're correct. When I tried later to get the unredacted version:
Though I already almost immediately retracted my thoughts here
Spam detection from text is an AGI complete problem.
I remember reading about a nonprofit/company that was doing summer internships for alignment researchers. I thought it was Redwood Research, but apparently they are not hiring. Does anybody know which one I'm thinking of?
> countries develop nukes
> suddenly for the first time ever political leadership faces guaranteed death in the outbreak of war
> war between developed countries almost completely ceases
🤔 🤔 🤔
How would history be different if the 9/11 attackers had solely flown planes into military targets?
For this april fools we should do the points thing again, but not award any money, just have a giant leaderboard/gamification system and see what the effects are.
This book is required reading for anyone claiming that explaining the AI X-risk thesis to normies is really easy, because they "did it to Mom/Friend/Uber driver":
https://www.amazon.com/Mom-Test-customers-business-everyone-ebook/dp/B01H4G2J1U
"The test of sanity is not the normality of the method but the reasonableness of the discovery. If Newton had been informed by [the ghost of] Pythagoras that the moon was made of green cheese, then Newton would have been locked up. Gravitation, being a reasoned hypothesis which fitted remarkably well into the Copernican version of the observed physical facts of the universe, established Newton's reputation for extraordinary intelligence, and would have done so no matter how fantastically he arrived at it. Yet his theory of gravitation is not so impressive ... (read more)
Making science fiction novels or movies to tell everyone about the bad consequences of a potential technology seems completely counterproductive, in retrospect:
I need a LW feature equivalent to stop-loss where if I post something risky and it goes below -3 or -5 it self-destructs.
> be me
> start watching first episode of twin peaks, at recommendation of friends
> become subjected to the worst f(acting, dialogue) possible within first 10 mins
The first three episodes of Narcos: Mexico, Season 3, is some of the best television I have ever seen. The rest of the "Narcos" series is middling to bad and I barely tolerate it. So far I would encourage you to skip to this season.
i can't find my phone
What's up with the back-to-back shootings in California by two Asian men over 65?
Life sucks. I have no further comment and am probably polluting the LW feed. I just want to vent on the internet.
Spoilered, semi-nsfw extremely dumb question
If you've already had sex with a woman, what's the correct way to go about arranging sex again? How indirect should I actually be about it?
Lost a bunch of huge edits to one of my draft posts because my battery ran out. Just realizing that happened and now I can't remember all the edits I made, just that they were good. :(
I wish there were a way I could spend money/resources to promote question posts in a way that counterbalanced the negative fact that they were already mostly shown by the algorithm to the optimal number of people.
If you simply want to people to invest more into answering a question post, putting out a bounty for the best answer would be a way to go about it.
I just launched a startup, Leonard Cyber. Basically a Pwn2Job platform.
If any hackers on LessWrong are out of work, here are some invite codes:
Does EY or RH even read this site anymore?
I don't think we ever had a chance.
I am being absolutely literal about this: The Greater Forces Controlling Reality are constantly conspiring to teach me things. They try so hard. I almost feel bad for them.