I think I made a mistake about your assumptions. I interpreted the parties in your original comment as superhuman non-ASI versions of the human galaxy owners rather than themselves ASIs.
Let's see if I understand your reply correctly. You posit that the participants will be able to design a mechanism that from N levels upstream (factories of factories) recursively creates honest audit systems. For example, an evil participant may wish to construct an audit system that is absolutely reliable for trade and anything else but allows them to create, hide, and erase all traces of creating torture simulations (once). If the ASIs are able to prevent this, then they can escape game-theoretic traps and enjoy cooperation without centralizing.
You'd prefer to at least cede a limited degree of ownership by maintaining constrained auditing systems that prove to your counterparties that you're not using the galaxy to produce (much) suffering without proving anything else, and they’d be willing to let you have it for much less, in that case.
This idea seems unstable for inherent reasons, not just because of human stupidity. The reasons why it's unstable help explain exclusive ownership. I'm not sure galaxies are viable units of ownership; I'll just say "galaxy" to match the original comment. I'll assume multipolarity.
Single-auditor versions fail because of easy exploitation. If the asset holder controls the audit channel, they can omit or falsify critical information. If a single external party controls the audit channel, they can weaponize it against the owner. Who wants that in their galaxy?
A multiparty audit design seems better. It can be something like safeguards at nuclear sites or financial audits on steroids: auditors chosen by different stakeholders, random and cross-validated inspections, custody of sensors and evidence split so nobody controls everything, etc. These design choices buy something, but they don't solve the entire problem. Multiparty audits are still exploitable through collusion. Motivated actors may be able to abuse measurement blind spots. False accusations can be turned into political or military action. Monitoring and transaction costs for a galaxy can be quite large indeed. Crucially, the scheme works only in a power-symmetric equilibrium with credible enforcement. Absent that, audits are either useless (the owner has de facto control) or perhaps expand to become centralized governance. [1]
All of this assumes actual ownership in some sense without effective global enforcement. If all of your ownership is ultimately at the pleasure of a singleton, then it can enforce arbitrary rules.
Wait, is this anarchism, and I am writing a critique of anarchism? ↩︎
What do you think about the denial-of-wallet risk with this migration? From what I've read about Vercel on ServerlessHorrors (a partisan source) and in random internet comments, you can make costly mistakes with Vercel, but they'll waive the charges.
Does it make sense that LW voting arrows are arranged the way they are? This is how they look right now:
username 12h ▾ 1 ▴ ✘ 5 ✔
My intuition protests, and I think I know why. Upvote and downvote arrows are usually stacked vertically, with the upvote arrow on top. When you translate vertical to left-to-right text, you get what was above to the left and what was below to the right. It means the following horizontal arrangement:
username 12h ▴ 1 ▾ ✔ 5 ✘
3What skills would be transferable for the planning stages of all three examples?
The baseline planning skill is having a start-to-end plan at all as opposed to winging it or only thinking ahead in an ad hoc manner. One step beyond this is writing the plan down, perhaps as a checklist. You can use the written copy to keep track of where you are, refine the plan, and simply to not forget it.
A step beyond, which seems rarer and less automatic for people than the previous, is to employ any kind of what they call a "work breakdown structure": a systematic mapping from higher-level steps ("find out the legal requirements for filming a car chase") to lower-level steps ("ask indie filmmaker chat what legal firm they recommend").
This, um, dramatically changes the picture. It could be nothing.
As a heavy user of the Internet, I didn't recognize this copypasta. My mistake was only googling a large chunk in double quotes.
Edit: "Dramatically" is intended as a pun on "drama", hence the italics. I think the new information changes the picture significantly, and yet the bio remains a red flag.
I don't broadly approve of trying to diagnose people over the Internet, nor am I qualified to, but it's striking how much the "i love mind games" bio suggests borderline personality disorder. It has chronic feelings of emptiness ("i have no passions or goals in life."), instability in interpersonal relationships ("i love mind games, i love drama, i love fake people.", "i would not hesitate to betray any of my loved ones at any moment."), negative self-image ("[...] really no reason for anyone to be around me."), and so on.
If you are dating and this bio doesn't make your HUD light up bright red, you are in danger. Read up on personality disorders so you can make more informed decisions about people you are getting involved with.
2I like to think of these types of power as “keyholder” power.
If you are looking for a theory of this, it sounds like capability-based security. The author may already know, but I thought I'd point it out. "Capabilities" are digital keys that can be shared but not forged. (Of course, by reductionism, nothing is truly unforgeable in physical reality except maybe some quantum-cryptography magic.)
Why don’t rationalists win more?
The following list is based on a presentation I gave at a Slate Star Codex meetup in 2018. It is mirrored from a page on my site, where I occasionally add new "see also" links.
Possible factors
Sources
See also