If I make a comment, then the author deletes the post, is my comment lost as well?  I'm pretty sure I don't actually need a record of things I've said, and that my comments aren't valuable enough to justify extra effort, but it kind of bugs me.

Has anyone written the scraper or script to save a copy of everything you write on LW, so it's available even if it gets deleted later?  If it archived the post and comment thread you're responding to, it would be all right.

I wish I could agree-and-downvote (or agree-and-not-vote) on posts.  There are a fair few posts that are well-reasoned and probably correct, but just not important or interesting.  

I'm a bit uncomfortable with [edit: wrong word.  all discussion is good, but I think there's a big modeling error being made.] a lot of the discussion about ethics/morals around here, in that it's often treated as a separate, incomparable domain to other motives/values/utility sources.  

It may be, in humans and/or in AI, that there are fairly distinct modules for different domains, which somehow bid/negotiate for which of them influences a given decision by how much.  This would make the "morals as distinct evaluations" approach reasonable, though the actual negotiation and power weights among modules seem more important to study.  

But if something approaches VNM-rationality, it acts as if it has a unified consistent utility function.  Which means an integrated set of values and motivations, not separate models of "what's the right action in this context for me".

So, either AI is irrational (like humans), or exploration of morality as a separate topic from status, pleasure, family, or other non-altruistic drives is not very applicable.

It's fascinating to me to see people changing their recommended meta-ethics due to a very public bad actor and related financial meltdown.  How does the FTX meltdown and fraud change your fundamental priorities OR your mechanisms for evaluating actions within those priorities?

Sure, adding some humility to the evaluation function is wise.  Recognize that things probably aren't as linear as you think (and certainly not as precise), when you get toward very large or small numbers.  Update to focus on nearer-term, safer improvements.  And reducing your trust (for those of you who had it) in the assumption that rich people who say comforting words are actually aligned in any useful way is ... so obvious that I'm sad to have to say it.

But if you have believed for years that you can aggregate and compare future population utility against current experiences, and predict what actions will have large impacts on that future, it's really odd if you give that up based on things that happened recently.

[ note: I am not utilitarian, but I am consequentialist.  I never made the assumption that SBF was a pure (or even net) good, nor that his methods were likely to sustain.  But even if I were surprised by this, I don't see how it's new evidence about something so fundamental. ]

EA folks: is there any donation I can make to increase the expected number of COVID-19 vaccinations given by end of February, either worldwide or for a specific region? 

Reminder to self: when posting on utiltarianism-related topics, include the disclaimer that I am a consequentialist but not a utilitarian. I don't believe there is an objective, or even outside-the-individual perspective to valuation or population aggregation.

Value is relative, and the evaluation of a universe-state can and will be different for different agents. There is no non-indexical utility, and each agent models the value of other agents' preferences idiosyncratically.

Strong anti-realism here. And yet it's fun to play with math and devise systems that mostly match my personal intuitions, so I can't stay away from those topics.

There's a large class of social/cultural behaviors that I think are fine and good when they're somewhat rare, and I find annoying and then harmful when it becomes very common.

This includes public demonstrations, minor mostly-victimless crimes, many kinds of drug use, tipping expectations, and I've just realized that April Fools is now in this category.

It's amazing when there are a few surprising well-crafted jokes published.  It's annoying when it's common enough that it's hard to find the good ones, and even harder to find the non-joke communications.

</rant>

Types and Degrees of Maze-like situations

Zvi has been writing about topics inspired by the book Moral Mazes, focused on a subset of large corporations where politics rather than productivity are seen as the primary competition dimension and life focus for participants. It's not clear how universal this is, nor what size and competitive thresholds might trigger it. This is just a list of other Maze-like situations that may share some attributes with those, and may have some shared causes, and I hope solutions.

• Consumerism and fashion.
• Social status s

My daily karma tracker showed that 3 comments got downvoted. Honestly, probably justified - they were pretty low-value. No worries, but it got me thinking:

Can I find out how I'm voting (how many positive and negative karma I've given) over time periods? Can I find it out for others? I'd love it if I could distinguish a downvote from someone who rarely downvotes from one from a serial downvoter.

I've been downvoting less, recently, having realized how little signal is there, and how discouraging even small amounts can be. Silence or comment are the better response, for anything better than pure drivel.

I'm pretty sure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State has bigger lessons than just government or large corporations.  

A general problem with optimization and control (in AI and commerce and everything else) is that it limits breadth of activity in (at least) two ways.  The obvious way is that it avoids things which oppose the stated goals. That's arguably a good and intentional limit.

But it ALSO avoids things that are illegible or unexpected and hard to quantify.   I suspect that's a large majority of experiential value for a lar... (read more)

Georgism isn't taxation, it's public property ownership.

It finally clicked in my mind why I've reacted negatively to the discussion about Georgist land taxes.  It's the same reaction I have to ANY 100% tax rate on anything.   That's not what "ownership" means.  

Honestly, I'd probably be OK with (or at least I'd be able to discuss it more reasonably) the idea that land is not privately owned, ever.  Only rented/leased from the government, revocable for failure to pay the current rate (equivalent in all ways to the Georgist tax amount, an... (read more)

I sometimes think about Neanderthal tribes, and what they thought about alignment with Homo Sapiens (in truth, they didn't; there wasn't that much interaction and the takeover was over a longer timeframe than any individual of either species could imagine.  but I still think about it).  

I wonder if we could learn anything from doing a post-mortem (literally) from their viewpoint, to identify anything they could have done differently to make coexistence or long-term dominance over the newer species more likely.

We should probably generalize cryptocurrency mechanisms to "proof of waste".  Fundamentally, the concept of a blockchain is that real-world resources are used for artifically-complex calculations just to show that one doesn't need those resources for something else.

Incentives vs agency - is this an attribution fallacy (and if so, in what direction)?

Most of the time, when I see people discussing incentives about LW participation (karma, voting, comment quality and tone), we're discussing average or other-person incentives, not our own. When we talk about our own reasons for participation, it's usually more nuanced and tied to truth-seeking and cruxing, rather than point-scoring.

I don't think you can create alignment or creative cooperation with incentives. You may be able to encourage it, and you ca... (read more)

Are human megastructures (capitalism, large corporations, governments, religious organizations) forms of AI?

They're alien and difficult to understand.  Hard to tell if they have their own motives, or if they're reflecting some extracted set of beliefs from humans.  They make leaps of action that individual humans can't.  They are at best semi-corrigible.  Sounds very similar to LLMs to me.

edit: I know this isn't a new thought, but it's becoming more attractive to me as I think about more similarities. Groups do tend to hallucinate, both... (read more)

Mastodon - is there any primer or description of the theory of federation behind it?  What decisions about content or discovery are made at the server level?  How do I simultaneously have access to everything federated from every server while getting the advantages of having picked a server with my preferred norms/enforcement?

specifically:

• Should I set up accounts on multiple servers?  Why or why not?
• Should I care which server(s) I use at all?  Why or why not?
• It seems like routing and identity (in terms of who's following and going to se

Hmm.  I tend to frame deontololgical moral/decision frameworks as evolved heuristics from consequentialism, with lost purposes as to how they came about, and some loss of future-optimization flexibility from that, but also some serious advantages from that in that it reduces computability paralysis AND motivated cognition to justify worse behaviors.  So, not "correct", but "performs better than correct for many parts of normal life".

The recent discussion of acausal human decisions (which I think is incorrect) has made me wonder - is deontology a ... (read more)

Best few paragraphs I've read recently:

Last week I compared GameStop to Bitcoin. The thing about Bitcoin as a financial asset, I wrote, is that “there is no underlying claim; there is just a widespread acknowledgment that people think it’s valuable.” I suggested that that was a fascinating and powerful innovation,[3] but that once you are accustomed to it you might get a little overconfident and think that any financial asset—GameStop stock, say—could work the same way. People will buy it because they think it will retain value because people wil

I always enjoy convoluted Omega situations, but I don't understand how these theoretical entities get to the point where their priors are as stated (and especially the meta-priors about how they should frame the decision problem).

Before the start of the game, Omega has some prior distribution of the Agent's beliefs and update mechanisms. And the Agent has some distribution of beliefs about Omega's predictive power over situations where the Agent "feels like" it has a choice. What experiences cause Omega to update sufficiently to ev... (read more)