founder at artgene.xyz, helping artists sell art online
I live in Ubud, but I will try to get there!
Hi! Sorry, i’m running late
...in the sense of making an expected profit from actions that reduce this risk
back of the napkin reasoning is that actually we have to PAY to reduce risk, so there's no way to make money doing that
After a recent article in NY Times, I realized that it's a perfect analogy. The smartest people, when motivated by money, get so high that they venture into unsafe territory. They kinda know its unsafe, but even internally it doesn't feel like crossing the red line.
It's not even about the strength of characters, when incentives are aligned 99:1 against your biology, you can try to work against it, but you most probably stand no chance.
It takes enormous willpower to quit smoking explicitly because the risks are invisible and so "small". It's not only you have to fight against this irresistible urge, BUT there's also nobody on "your side", except for intellectual realization, of which you're not even so sure of.
In the same vein, being a CEO of a big startup, being able to single-handedly choose direction, and getting used to people around you being less smart, less hard-working, less competitive, you start trusting your own decision-process much more. That's when incentives start to water down through the cracks in the shell. You don't even remember what feels right anymore, the only thing you know is taking bold actions brings you more power, more money, more dukka. And you do those.
Generally I would tweak my brain if it would reliably give me the kind of actions I'd now approve of, while providing at worst the same sort of subjective state as I'd have if managing the same results without the intervention. I wouldn't care if the center of my actions was different as long as the things I value today were bettered.
Technically, we do this all the time. Reading stuff online, talking to people, we absorb their models of the world, their values and solutions to problems we face.
Hence the Schwartznegger poster on the wall makes you strong, the countryside folks make you peaceful, and friend reminding you "you're being a jerk right now" makes you calm down
Do humans have this special token that exist outside language? How would it be encoded in the body?
One interesting candidate is a religions feeling of awe. It kinda works like that — when you’re in that state, you absorb beliefs. Also, social pressure seems to work in a similar way.
to (2): (a) Simulators are not agents, (b) mesa-optimizers are still "aligned"
(a) amazing https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/janus-simulators post, utility function is a wrong way to think about intelligence, humans themselves don't have any utility function, even the most rational ones
(b) the only example of mesa-optimization we have is evolution, and even that succeeds in alignment, people:
yes, there are local counterexamples, but we gonna look on the causes and consequences – and we're at 8 billion already, effectively destroying or enslaving all the other DNA reproductors
If everyone is so bad at this, is it a reasonable strategy to just bet against the market even more aggressively, making $ on prediction market platforms?
On a similar note, does it make sense to raise a charity fund and bet a lot of money on "AGI by 2025", motivating forecasters to produce more reasonable predictions?
My take on wire heading is that I precommit to live in the world which is more detailed and complex (vs more pleasant).
For example, online world of Instagram or heroine addiction is more pleasant, but not complex. Painfully navigating maze of life with its ups and downs is complex, but not always pleasant. Living in a "Matrix" might be pleasant, but essentially the details are missed out because the systems that created these details are essentially more detailed and live in a more detailed world.
On the same note, if 99% of the Earth population "uploads", and most of the fun stuff gonna happen "in the matrix", most of the complexity gonna exist there. And even if 1% of contrarians stay outside, their lives might not be as interesting and detailed. So "going out of the matrix" would actually be "running away from reality" in that example.
With wire heading it's a similar thing. From what I know, actually "nirvana" is a more detailed experience where you notice more and where you can observe subconscious processes directly; that's why they don't own you and you become free from "suffering". Nirvana is not total bliss, from what they say (like heroine, I presume).
(e.g. see discussion on topic of paradises on Qualia Computing between Andres Gomez and Roger Thisdell: https://qualiacomputing.com/2021/11/23/the-supreme-state-unconsciousness-classical-enlightenment-from-the-point-of-view-of-valence-structuralism/)
So yeah I would choose this kind of wire heading that allows me to switch into nirvana. Shinzen Young actually works on research trying to accomplish this even before AGI.
I have tried to play with Claude – I would ask it to think of a number, drop the hint, and only then print the number. It should have test the ability to have "hidden memory" that's outside the text.
I expected it to be able to do that, but the hints to be too obvious. Instead, actually it failed multiple times in a row!
Sharing cause I liked the experiment but wasn't sure if I executed it properly. There might be a way to do more of this.
P.S. I have also tried "print hash, and then preimage" – but this turned out to be even harder for him