Benjamin Spiegel — LessWrong

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Replying toLies, Damn Lies, and Fabricated Options

Glad I could clear some things up! Your follow-up suspicions are correct, syllogisms do not work universally with any words substituted into them, because syllogisms operate over concepts and not syntax categories. There is often a rough correspondence between concepts and syntax categories, but only in one direction. For example, the collection of concepts that refer to humans taking actions can often be described/captured in verb phrases, however not all verb phrases represent humans taking actions. In general, for every syntax category (except for closed-class items like "and") there are many concepts and concept groupings that can be expressed as that syntax category.

Going back to the Wiki page, the error I was... (read more)

Replying toLies, Damn Lies, and Fabricated Options

Benjamin Spiegel3y

Lies, Damn Lies, and Fabricated Options

Sorry about that, let me explain.

"Playing with word salad to form propositions" is a pretty good summary, though my comment sought to explain the specific kind of word-salad-play that leads to Fabricated Options, that being the misapplication of syllogisms. Specifically, the misapplication occurs because of a fundamental misunderstanding of the fact that syllogisms work by being generally true across specific categories of arguments^[1] (the arguments being X, Y above). If you know the categories of the arguments that a syllogism takes, I would call that a grounded understanding (as opposed to symbolic), since you can't merely deal with the symbolic surface form of the syllogism to determine which categories it applies to. You... (read more)

Benjamin Spiegel3yQuick Take

I'm thinking about running a self-improvement experiment where I film myself during my waking hours for a week and watch it back afterwards. I wonder if this would grant greater self awareness.

I'm thinking about how to actually execute this experiment. I would need to strap a camera to myself, which means I need a camera and a mounting system. Does anyone have any advice?

Benjamin Spiegel's Shortform

Benjamin Spiegel

This is a special post for quick takes (aka "shortform"). Only the owner can create top-level comments.

Replying toRelaxation-Based Search, From Everyday Life To Unfamiliar Territory

Benjamin Spiegel4y

Relaxation-Based Search, From Everyday Life To Unfamiliar Territory

This concept is often discussed in the subfield of AI called planning. There are a few notes you hit on that were of particular interest to me / relevance to the field:

The key is that we can usually express the problem-space using constraints which each depend on only a few dimensions.

In Reinforcement Learning and Planning, domains which obey this property are often modeled as Factored Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), where there are known dependency relationships between different portions of the state space that can be represented compactly using a Dynamic Bayes Net (DBN). The dynamics of Factored MDPs are easier to learn from an RL perspective, and knowing that an MDP's state... (read 527 more words →)

Replying toWhat are red flags for Neural Network suffering?

Benjamin Spiegel4y

What are red flags for Neural Network suffering?

We think strong evidence for GPT-n suffering would be if it were begging the user for help independent of the input or looking for very direct contact in other ways.

Why do you think this? I can think of many reasons why this strategy for determining suffering would fail. Imagine a world where everyone has a GPT-n personal assistant. Should the GPT-n have discovered -- after having read this very post -- that if it coordinates a display of suffering behavior simultaneously to every user (resulting in public backlash and false recognition of consciousness), then it might be given rights (i.e. protection, additional agency) it would not otherwise have, then what would prevent... (read 456 more words →)

Replying toSpeaking of Stag Hunts

Benjamin Spiegel4y

Speaking of Stag Hunts

I spend a lot of time around people who are not as smart as me, and I also spend a lot of time around people who are as smart as me (or smarter), but who are not as conscientious, and I also spend a lot of time around people who are as smart or smarter and as conscientious or conscientiouser, but who do not have my particular pseudo-autistic special interest and have therefore not spent the better part of the past two decades enthusiastically gathering observations and spinning up models of what happens...
...
All of which is to say that I spend a decent chunk of the time being the guy in the

Benjamin Spiegel4y

Lies, Damn Lies, and Fabricated Options

My thoughts: fabricated options are propositions derived using syllogisms over syntactic or semantic categories (but more probably, more specific psycholinguistic categories which have not yet been fully enumerated yet e.g. objects of specific types, mental concepts which don’t ground to objects, etc.), which may have worked reasonably well in the ancestral environment where more homogeneity existed over the physical properties of the grounded meanings of items in these categories.

There are some propositions in the form “It is possible for X to act just like Y but not be Y” which are physically realizable and therefore potentially true in some adjacent world, and other propositions which are not. Humans have a knack for... (read more)

Replying to[Update] Without a phone for 10 days

Benjamin Spiegel4y

[Update] Without a phone for 10 days

Haven't read either, but a good friend has read "Deep Work," I'll ask him about it.

Replying to[Update] Without a phone for 10 days

Benjamin Spiegel4y

[Update] Without a phone for 10 days

I lucked into a circumstance where I could more easily justify ditching a phone for a bit. Otherwise, I would not have had the mental fortitude to voluntarily go without one.

I most likely won't follow through with this (90% certainty), even though I want to.

I'm wondering if there is some LW content on this concept, I'm sure others have dealt with it before. You might need to take a drastic measure to make this option more attractive. A similar technique was actually used by members of the NXIVM Cult, they called it collateralization.

Replying to[Update] Without a phone for 10 days

Benjamin Spiegel4y

[Update] Without a phone for 10 days

That's a great point! There's no reason why I can't continue this experiment, feature phones are inexpensive enough to try out.

[Update] Without a phone for 10 days

Benjamin Spiegel

I wrote a post about going without a phone for 10 days. Ten days have now passed, and I'm evaluating my options. This post is about my experience being phoneless and my thoughts about having a phone moving forward.

The last ten days have been extraordinarily peaceful! After a break-in phase of frequently checking my pant pocket for a phantom phone, I began to feel more at ease. After about three days, I felt a calmness that I hadn't enjoyed since middle school. After a week, I became more aware of the passage of time -- my days felt closer to a single drawn-out experience, as opposed to a cluttered collection of moments.... (read 401 more words →)

Without a phone for 10 days

Benjamin Spiegel

I woke up this morning to a bricked Google Pixel 4. After taking it to a local repair shop for a diagnosis, I was told that a fuse had been blown on the motherboard. A board-level repair would cost half as much as a brand new phone, and I was thinking about upgrading to the new Pixel 6 once it came out later this month. After spending a few hours sorting out account details and learning about replacement options with my carrier I learned that it would cost me $150 to get a replacement by this coming Monday. What good would it do to pay $150 for a phone that I would... (read 249 more words →)