It's hard to articulate why I dislike so much the views that change depending on what family you were born into (religion, nationalism, patriotism, etc.). It's like priors of one, fallacy of favoring an arbitrary hypothesis, lack of stability of your views under self-changes as in AI alignment, floating beliefs, and what is not truly part of you, unrecoverable knowledge instead of a knowledge generator. And it seems that all these points are connected, which is why Yudkovsky wrote about them all when trying to teach the creation of safe AI. Well, just a... (read more)
I didn't quite understand what you mean. The family is not entirely relevant to the topic of that post. Usually it is treated somewhat more logically. And in the post, the conversation was more about beliefs than about duty. I am ready to pay the debt to the family or even the state, but only for what they really did good and partly how much it cost them, and not just for the fact of birth. "Honor your father" clearly does not deserve a place in the 20 commandments, because I was lucky, but my father could beat someone else. Your friends are not only... (read more)
There's been some discussion recently about there perhaps being a surplus of funding in EA, and not enough good places to apply funds to. I have lots of thoughts on this that I'd like to talk more about at some point, but for now I want to propose an idea that seems pretty obvious and non-controversial to me: give $1M to people like Scott Alexander and Robin Hanson.
Scott has a day job as a psychiatrist. Robin as a university professor. Those day job hours (and slack) could be spent doing other things though. If they were wealthy enough, I assume (but am no... (read more)
I seem to have heard from a relatively good source about a study that people who are unemployed feel worse even though they have maintained the same level of well-being. (I don’t remember where it was and I can’t provide a link, maybe someone else can?)
Imagine taking someone's utility function, and inverting it by flipping the sign on all evaluations. What might this actually look like? Well, if previously I wanted a universe filled with happiness, now I'd want a universe filled with suffering; if previously I wanted humanity to flourish, now I want it to decline.
But this is assuming a Cartesian utility function. Once we treat ourselves as embedded agents, things get trickier. For example, suppose that I used to want people with similar values to me to thrive, and people with different values from me to ... (read more)
I have been asking a similar question for a long time. This is similar to the standard problem that if we deny regularity, will it be regular irregularity or irregular irregularity, that is, at what level are we denying the phenomeno? And only at one level?
Enlightened:
Terminal goal -> Instrumental goal -> Planning -> Execution
Buffoonery:
Terminal goal -> Instrumental goal -> Planning -> wait what did [insert famous person] do? Guess I need to get a PhD.
There's something really tyrannical about externally imposed KPIs.
I can't stop thinking about my GPA even if I make a conscious choice to stop optimizing for it.
Choosing to not optimize for it actually made it worse. A lower number is louder in my mind.
There's something about a number being used for sorting that completely short circuits my brain, and makes me agonize over it.
Yeah, most sane humans seem to have a deep-seated drive for comparisons with others. And numeric public comparisons trigger this to a great degree. GPA is competition-porn. Karma, for some, is social status junk-food.
This measure ALSO has some real value in feedback to you, and in signaling for future academic endeavors. The trick, like with any modern over-stimulus, is in convincing your system 1 to weight the input appropriately.
Some time ago I was surprised that narrow professional skills can significantly change your thinking, and not just give you new abilities to specialize. Changes you, not just allowing you to cast a new spell. Something like not scientific, but professional rationality, but definitely not just the ability to make origami. (Specifically, I had this with the principles of good code, including in object-oriented programming) I had never heard of this before, including here on LessWrong. But it makes me think that the virtue of learning is more than being a... (read more)
Weather just barely hit 80°F today, so I tried the Air Conditioner Test.
Three problems came up:
A thought pattern that I've noticed myself and others falling into sometimes: Sometimes I will make arguments about things from first principles that look something like "I don't see any way X can be true, it clearly follows from [premises] that X is definitely false", even though there are people who believe X is true. When this happens, it's almost always unproductive to continue to argue on first principles, but rather I should do one of: a) try to better understand the argument and find a more specific crux to disagree on or b) decide that this topic isn't worth investing more time in, register it as "not sure if X is true" in my mind, and move on.
For many such questions, "is X true" is the wrong question. This is common when X isn't a testable proposition, it's a model or assertion of causal weight. If you can't think of existence proofs that would confirm it, try to reframe as "under what conditions is X a useful model?".
If you think about it, there is nothing wrong with every person knowing everything that civilization knows now, on the contrary, this return to normality has already accumulated, it is overdue. Previously, there was just a scientist who was aware of all the achievements of science. Now two physicists will not understand each other, because they are from different fields. No one in the world knows how things are, no one sees the whole picture even remotely. One can imagine the horror of the post of a person who met someone who does not even fully know either the history of his planet or the laws of physics.
Surely someone has already pointed out this, but I have not seen such indications. It seems that humanism follows science, because the idea of progress shows that everyone can win, there is enough for everyone, life is not a zero-sum game, where if you do not harm someone, then you yourself live worse. And the lack of discrimination probably comes from the greater consistency of your reasoning, you see that hating a certain group is a completely arbitrary thing that has nothing to do with it, and just as you could hate any other group. It can be said that you are aware that you cannot be said to be special just because you are, because everyone else may think the same, you have no special reason.
Antifreeze proteins prevent water inside organisms from freezing, allowing them to survive at temperatures below 0 °C. They do this by actually binding to tiny ice crystals and preventing them from growing further, basically keeping the water in a supercooled state. I think this is fascinating.
Is it possible for there to be nanomachine enzymes (not made of proteins, because they would denature) that bind to tiny gas bubbles in solution and prevent water from boiling above 100 °C?
A company that makes CPUs that run very quickly but don't do matrix multiplication or other things that are important for neural networks.
Context: I know people who work there
Perhaps, but I'd guess only in a rather indirect way. If there's some manufacturing process that the company invests in improving in order to make their chips, and that manufacturing process happens to be useful for matrix multiplication, then yes, that could contribute.
But it's worth noting how many things would be considered AGI risks by such a standard; basically the entire supply chain for computers, and anyone who works for or with top labs; the landlords that rent office space to DeepMind, the city workers that keep the lights on and the water runnin... (read more)
... (read more)What would it mean for a society to have real intellectual integrity? For one, people would be expected to follow their stated beliefs to wherever they led. Unprincipled exceptions and an inability or unwillingness to correlate beliefs among different domains would be subject to social sanction. Valid attempts to persuade would be expected to be based on solid argumentation, meaning that what passes for typical salesmanship nowadays would be considered a grave affront. Probably something along the lines of punching someone
Minor spoilers for mad investor chaos and the woman of asmodeus.
I'm only human
Of flesh and blood I'm madeHuman
Born to make mistakes
(I am just a man)
Human--The Human League, "Human"
... (read more)"Civilization in dath ilan usually feels annoyed with itself when it can't manage to do as well as gods. Sometimes, to be clear, that annoyance is more productive than at other times, but the point is, we'll poke at the problem and prod at it, looking for ways, not to be perfect, but not to do that much worse than gods."
"If you get to the point in major negotiations wh
[Crossposted from Facebook.]
Recommendation request:
As part of developing "perceptual dexterity" stuff, I think I want to do a post where I review a few books related to creativity. I've just finished reading A Whack On the Side of the Head, which felt like quite a... I'm not sure what to call it, "corporate"? I think? It felt like a corporate take on creativity. When I started it, I thought I'd do a review of just that book, but after finishing it, I think a comparative study would be a lot more valuable.
I'm now looking for more books to include in the pos... (read more)
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... (read more)
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.
(I can’t find where it was, if I find it, I’ll move it there) Someone suggested in light of the problems with AI to clone Yudkowsky, but the problem is that apparently we don’t have the 18 years it takes for the human brain to form, so that even when solving all the other problems, it's just too slow. Well, with any means of accelerating the development of the brain, the problem is already clear.
I came up with the idea that people can cheer for the protagonist of the book, even if he is a villain, because the political instincts of rationalizing the correctness of your tribe's actions are activated. You are rooting for Main Character, as for your group.
Suprising: the fact that Chuck Palahniuk's writing style is visible in lsusr's fiction. More suprising: the fact that Fight Club 2 deals with... memetics, of all things.
I am flattered. Chuck Palahniuk is among my favorite authors.
I'd really like to understand what's going on in videos like this one where graphing calculators seem to "glitch out" on certain equations—are there any accessible reads out there about this topic?