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While researching past technological discontinuities, I came across some interesting anecdotes. Some follow. I also looked at technology readiness levels, but this didn’t prove fruitful.
Anecdotes and patterns
Watt's safety concerns
... (read more)As the 18th century advanced, the call was for higher pressures; this was strongly resisted by Watt who used the monopoly his patent gave him to prevent others from building high-pressure engines and using them in vehicles. He mistrusted the boiler technology of the day, the way they were constructed and the strength of the ma
Fixed, thanks
Lesswrong posts that I want someone to write:
- Description of pair debugging
- Description of value handshakes
Maybe I'll think of more later.
I found a reference to "value handshakes" here:
Your AI doesn't figure out how to do a reasonable "values handshake" with a competitor (where two agents agree to both pursue some appropriate compromise values in order to be Pareto efficient)...
I think it refers to something like this: Imagine that a superintelligent human-friendly AI meets a superintelligent paperclip maximizer, and they both realize their powers are approximately balanced. What should they do?
For humans, "let's fight, and to the victor go the spoils" is the intuitive answer, but the superi... (read more)
I can't wrap my brain around the computational theory of consciousness.
Who decides how to interpret the computations? If I have a beach, are the lighter grains 0 and darker grains 1? What about the smaller and bigger grains? What if I decide to use the motion of the planets to switch between these 4 interpretations.
Surely under infinite definitions of computation, there are infinite consciousnesses experience infinite states at any given time, just from pure chance.
I think we're talking about different things. I'm talking about how you would locate minds in an arbitrary computational structure(and how to count them), you're talking about determining what's valuable about a mind once we've found it.
Warning: This is a personal vent on my personal situation. I doubt it will be worth your time.
High school days were the peak of my life. School was easy, and I was fortunate enough to find interest and some talent in math olympiad. I climbed my way through before getting stopped just before the TST.
I remember them giving out big π-shaped chocolates for the IMO contestants that year, and getting really bitter because it looked so cool.
After I hit that wall I parted way with math to become a CS major because startups were a thing and I believed I could... (read more)
If you can't effectively work on your own projects, it might be worth getting a job so that you have a structure.
I've been wanting to set LessWrong as my home page for a while but kept avoiding it because the site is so visibly bright.
I looked up ways of viewing the site without hurting my eyes and found https://www.greaterwrong.com, but didn't really like it.
Then I found https://github.com/lfaucon/lessbright, which looked right, but wasn't technically the real LessWrong site (which meant it couldn't tell I was logged in, among other things).
But I already use Stylus to apply stylesheet modifications to webpages, so I looked at lessbright's source code, found the CSS ... (read more)
I'm glad to hear there's a proper solution planned at some point since mine is somewhat hacky, but I'm not surprised there's no clear timeline.
We do things so that we can talk about it later.
I was having a bad day today. Unlikely to have time this weekend for something I'd wanted to do. Crappy teaching in a class I'm taking. Ever increasing and complicating responsibilities piling up.
So what did I do? I went out and bought half a cherry pie.
Will that cherry pie make me happy? No. I knew this in advance. Consciously and unconsciously: I had the thought, and no emotion compelled me to do it.
In fact, it seemed like the least-efficacious action: spending some of my limited money, to buy a pie I don't... (read more)
I do chalk a lot of dysfunction up to this story-centric approach to life. I just suspect it’s something we need to learn to work with, rather than against (or to deny/ignore it entirely).
My sense is that storytelling - to yourself or others - is an art. To get the reaction you want - from self or others - takes some aesthetic sensitivity.
My guess is there’s some low hanging fruit here. People often talk about doing things “for the story,” which they resort to when they're trying to justify doing something dumb/wasteful/dangerous/futile. Perversely, it oft... (read more)
Epistemic status: not an expert
Understanding Newton's third law, .
Consider the vector-valued velocity as a function of time, . Scale this by the object's mass and you get the momentum function over time. Imagine this momentum function wiggling around over time, the vector from the origin rotating and growing and shrinking.
The third law says that force is the derivative of this rescaled vector function - if an object is more massive, then the same displacement of this rescaled arrow is a proportionally smaller velocity modification, because o... (read more)
Two-by-two for possibly important aspects of reality and related end-states:
| Coordination is hard | Coordination is easy | |
|---|---|---|
| Defense is easier | Universe fractured into many parties, mostly stasis | Singleton controlling everything |
| Attack is easier | Pure Replicator Hell | Few warring factions? Or descent into Pure Replicator hell? |
I think there are multiple kinds of attacks, which matter in this matrix. Destruction/stability is a different continuum from take control of resources/preserve control of resources.
I also think there's no stasis - the state of accessible resources (heat gradients, in the end) in the universe will always be shifting until it's truly over. There may be multi-millenea equilibria, where it feels like stasis on a sufficiently-abstract level, but there's still lots of change. As a test of this intuition, the Earth has been static ... (read more)
Testing whether images work in spoiler tags
Take my upvote.
Ted Kaczynski as a relatively apolitical test case for cancellation norms:
Ted Kaczynski was a mathematics professor who decided that industrial society was terrible, and waged a terroristic bombing campaign to foment a revolution against technology. As part of this campaign, he wrote a manifesto titled "Industrial Society and Its Future" and said that if a major newspaper printed it verbatim he would desist from terrorism. He is currently serving eight life sentences in a "super-max" security prison in Colorado.
My understanding is that his manifesto (which... (read more)
Generally speaking, if someone commits heinous and unambiguous crimes in service of an objective like "getting people to read X", and it doesn't look like they're doing a tricky reverse-psychology thing or anything like that, then we should not cooperate with that objective. If Kaczynski had posted his manifesto on LessWrong, I would feel comfortable deleting it and any links to it, and I would encourage the moderator of any other forum to do the same under those circumstances.
But this is a specific and unusual circumstance. When people try to cancel each ... (read more)
I just updated my cryonics cost-benefit analysis with
- a general Caveats section
- incorporating the Quality of Cryopreservation for different age groups
- some more Caveats on Future Life Years specifically on discounting future life years & putting diminishing returns on future life years
along with some small fixes and additions.
The basic result has not changed, though. It's still worth it.
Riemannian geometry belongs on the list of fundamental concepts that are taught and known far less than they should be in any competent society
Quick comments on "The case against economic values in the brain" by Benjamin Hayden & Yael Niv :
(I really only skimmed the paper, these are just impressions off the top of my head.)
I agree that "eating this sandwich" doesn't have a reward prediction per se, because there are lots of different ways to think about eating this sandwich, especially what aspects are salient, what associations are salient, what your hormones and mood are, etc. If neuroeconomics is premised on reward predictions being attached to events and objects rather than thoughts, then... (read more)
Tune AGI intelligence by easy goals
If an AGI is provided an easily solvable utility function ("fetch a coffee"), it will lack the incentive to self-improve indefinitely. The fetch-a-coffee-AGI will only need to become as smart as a hypothetical simple-minded waiter. By creating a certain easiness for a utility function, we can therefore tune the intelligence level we want an AGI to achieve using self-improvement. The only way to achieve an indefinite intelligence explosion (until e.g. material boundaries) would be to program a utility function ma... (read more)
I think actually 1+1 = ? is not really an easy enough goal, since it's not 100% sure that the answer is 2. Getting to 100% certainty (including what I actually meant with that question) could still be nontrivial. But let's say the goal is 'delete filename.txt'? Could be the trick is in the language..
When I first read the now-classic arguments for slow takeoff -- e.g. from Paul and Katja -- I was excited; I thought they described a serious alternative scenario to the classic FOOM scenarios. However I never thought, and still do not think, that the classic FOOM scenarios were very unlikely; I feel that the slow takeoff and fast takeoff scenarios are probably within a factor of 2 of each other in probability.
Yet more and more nowadays I get the impression that people think slow takeoff is the only serious possibility. For example, Ajeya and Rohin seem ve... (read more)
One weird trick for estimating the expectation of Lognormally distributed random variables:
If you have a variable X that you think is somewhere between 1 and 100 and is Lognormally distributed, you can model it as being a random variable with distribution ~ Lognormal(1,1) - that is, the logarithm has a distribution ~ Normal(1,1).
What is the expectation of X?
Naively, you might say that since the expectation of log(X) is 1, the expectation of X is 10^1, or 10. That makes sense, 10 is at the midpoint of 1 and 100 on a log scale.
This is wrong though. The chanc... (read more)
Neat problem of the week: researchers just announced roughly-room-temperature superconductivity at pressures around 270 GPa. That's stupidly high pressure - a friend tells me "they're probably breaking a diamond each time they do a measurement". That said, pressures in single-digit GPa do show up in structural problems occasionally, so achieving hundreds of GPa scalably/cheaply isn't that many orders of magnitude away from reasonable, it's just not something that there's historically been much demand for. This problem plays with one idea for generating suc... (read more)
I am very interested in practicing steelmanning/Ideological Turing Test with people of any skill level. I have only done it once conversationally and it felt great. I'm sure we can find things to disagree about. You can book a call here.
What to do if you suddenly need to rest your hands
On Monday I went from "computer work seems kind of uncomfortable, I wonder if I should be worried" to "oh crap oh crap, that's actually painful". Everything I've ever heard says not to work through RSI pain, so what now? I decided to spend a week learning hands free input. I wanted to a) get some serious rest and b) still be productive. And guess what? Learning hands free input is like the one activity that does not suffer a productivity penalty from not being able to use your hands.
When I started it was re... (read more)
Have you seen Serenade?
Is spaced repetition software a good tool for skill development or good practice reinforcement?
I was recently considering using an Anki prompt to do a mental move rather than to test my recall, like tense your muscles as though you were performing a deadlift. I don't actually have access to a gym right now, so I didn't get to put it into action immediately. Visualizing the movement as vividly as possible, and tensing muscles like the movement was being performed (even when not doing it) are common tricks reported by famous weightlifters.
But I happened acro... (read more)
Ah, the humiliation of using the wrong ctrl-f inputs! But of course it would be lower level.
Well that's reason enough to cap my investment in the notion; we'll stick to cheap experiments if the muse descends.