LESSWRONG
LW

Nisan
6760Ω1538113392
Message
Dialogue
Subscribe

Posts

Sorted by New

Wikitag Contributions

Comments

Sorted by
Newest
8Nisan's Shortform
Ω
4y
Ω
25
bilalchughtai's Shortform
Nisan11d60

Yes, Dan Luu wrote about how he writes a lot because he's a fast typer.

See also Jevon's paradox.

Reply
Stephen Martin's Shortform
Nisan18d3921

Maybe people notice that AIs are being drawn into the moral circle / a coalition, and are using that opportunity to bargain for their own coalition's interests.

Reply
Consciousness as a conflationary alliance term for intrinsically valued internal experiences
Nisan1mo20

Yeah, you and I agree that people can clearly distinguish between my senses 1 and 2. I was responding to Paradiddle, who I read as conflating the two — he defines "conscious" as both "awake and aware" and as "there is something it [is] like to be us". I could have been clearer about this.

I believe grad students and Less Wrong users in these conversations are usually working with sense 2, but in fact sense 2 is multiple things and different people mean different things, to the extent they mean anything at all.

Paradiddle claims to the contrary that practically everyone in these conversations is talking about the same thing and just has different intuitions about how it works. But you seem to disagree with Paradiddle? Are you saying that Critch's subjects aren't talking about what you mean by "conscious"?

Reply
Consciousness as a conflationary alliance term for intrinsically valued internal experiences
Nisan1mo20

I'm not Critch and I haven't read much philosophy, but I am the kind of person who he would have interviewed in the OP. It's clear to me that there are at least two senses of the word "conscious".

  1. There's the mundane sense which is just a synonym for "awake and aware", as opposed to "asleep" or "lifeless". "Is the patient conscious yet?" (This is cluster 11 in the OP.)

  2. There's the sense(s) that get brought up in the late-night bull sessions Critch is talking about. "We are subjective beings." "There is something it is like to be us."

I confess sense 2 doesn't make any sense to me, but I'm linguistically competent enough to understand it's not the same as sense 1. I know these senses are different because the correct response to "Are you conscious?" in sense 1 is "Yes, I can hear you and I'm awake now", and a correct response to "Are you conscious?" in sense 2 is to have an hour-long conversation about what it means.

So, this claim is at odds with my experience as an English speaker:

the obvious answer to what people mean by consciousness is the fact that it is like something to be them, i.e., they are subjective beings.

Reply
Religion for Rationalists
Nisan3mo54

Libertarianism teaches that when one wants an economic outcome, one may be tempted to use government to get that outcome; but one should use private-sector tools instead, even if it means inventing a new kind of institution.

When one craves meaning and community, one's first thought is to reach for religion. But one should look for other sources of meaning and community first, including inventing one's own meaning and inventing new kinds of communities.

Reply1
Nisan's Shortform
Nisan4moΩ250

Update: We're back to "ensure". On 2025-05-05, Sam Altman said (archived):

[OpenAI's] mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity.

Reply
Kabir Kumar's Shortform
Nisan4mo1615

Yes, you can ask for a lot more than that :)

Reply
shortplav
Nisan5mo148

Yes. As a special case, if you destroy a bad old institution, you can't count on good new institutions springing up in its place unless you specifically build them.

Reply
An Outside View on Less Wrong's Advice
Nisan5mo20

archive

Reply
Export Surplusses
Nisan6mo31

Ok. It's strange, then, that wikipedia does not say this. On the contrary, it says:

The notion that bilateral trade deficits are per se detrimental to the respective national economies is overwhelmingly rejected by trade experts and economists.[2][3][4][5]

(This doesn't necessarily contradict your claim, but it would be misleading for the article to say this but not mention a consensus view that trade surpluses are beneficial.)

Reply
Load More
60Linkpost: Memorandum on Advancing the United States’ Leadership in Artificial Intelligence
10mo
2
9[Retracted] Newton's law of cooling from first principles
2y
15
21Inflection AI: New startup related to language models
3y
1
40My take on higher-order game theory
Ω
4y
Ω
8
8Nisan's Shortform
Ω
4y
Ω
25
97April 15, 2040
4y
25
14What is a VNM stable set, really?
Ω
5y
Ω
0
17Why you should minimax in two-player zero-sum games
Ω
5y
Ω
1
38Book report: Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (von Neumann & Morgenstern)
Ω
5y
Ω
4
169Conflict vs. mistake in non-zero-sum games
5y
40
Load More
List of Blogs
12y
(+31)
Less Wrong Meetup Group Resources
14y
(+8)