DonyChristie

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Also, when I actually think about what it would be like to have a Plan That I Truly Believe In, it doesn't really seem hard to get it on the desk of The Important Stakeholders (or someone who knows someone who talks to The Important Stakeholders).

 

I think you can scream a Good Plan from the rooftops and often few will listen. See: Covid in January-February 2020.

Math camps are not sufficient to solve civilization's problems.

Fascinating. Way, way more examples and empirical treatment of rituals would help me understand your case better.

Me, sitting on a throne, as your entirely benevolent world dictator. Oh, how did I get there? Someone posted on LessWrong and I followed their blueprint!

One possible approach to fixing this is to try to get wayyyy more empirical, and try to produce proof-of-concept implementations of various adversaries we are worried we might face in the future. My analogy would be, there’s a world of difference between speculating about the bogey monster and producing a grainy photo of the bogey monster; the second can at least maaaaaybe be discussed with skeptical people, whereas the first cannot (productively) be.

Anyway, that’s a long-winded way of saying, it seemed to me that it might be useful to implement a treacherous mesa-optimizer in a toy grid-world, so I did. Here is the colab. Below I give a brief recap of the high-level results.

 

I'm not saying this isn't helpful work worth the tradeoff, but this sounds like very early stage gain of function research? Have you thought about the risks of this line of investigation turning into that? :)

You mentioned a specific Amazon price point that I found surprisingly low and is cheap enough to meaningfully affect strategic plans. The cheapest pasta I've seen is on WebstaurantStore but the shipping doubles the cost to $2/lb approximately. Did you have a link for the $200/year product(s)?

What's the ~$200 food item you saw that would last a person a year, can you link?

(Edit: I see a 30-day container for about $200. It seems to me that $200 buys a month's worth, not a year's worth?)

I consider it collectively important that alignment researchers and their +1s survive, as well as other x-risk researchers and probably other cause areas.

So if there's a 1% yearly risk of nuclear apocalypse

Some think the number is much higher than priors due to current events. You're also not factoring in that that yearly percentage adds up, and a lot of preparations are a one-off action that benefits future you (assuming you don't dig into your backup food).

It felt to me like there's too much for my taste. My impression was that you guys were optimizing for it being about AI content, somewhat related to the % of people involved at Lightcone coworking being AI researchers vs other subjects.

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