This is where we start to get into the darker territory of Dark Arts. Sadly, much of elite culture is downstream of this chapter too; someone pointed out to me that awareness of this might be rare among silicon valley software engineers; but sadly, it's not rare among silicon valley...
Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People is worthwhile because: 1. It became so popular in 1936 and afterwards that much of elite Western culture is downstream of it. 1. So if you try using it adversarially (even accidentally e.g. you notice and instrumentally converge on tactics similar...
Large training runs might at some point, or even already, be creating and/or destroying substantial numbers of simple but strange agents (possibly quasi-conscious) and deeply pessimizing over their utility functions for no reason, similar to how wild animal suffering emerged in the biosphere. Snapshots of large training runs might be necessary to preserve and eventually offer compensation/insurance payouts for most/all of them, since some might last for minutes before disappearing.
Before reading this, I wasn't aware of the complexities involved in giving fair deals to different kinds of agents. Plausibly after building ASI, many more ways could be found to give them most of what they're born hoping for. It would be great... (read more)
For those of us who didn't catch it, this is what happened with the 2008-09 recession. In a nutshell, giving people mortgages became so profitable and facilitated so much economic growth (including by increasing property values) that the people approving and rejecting mortgages became corrupted and pursued short-term incentives to an insane degree in order to be competitive, approving mortgages that were unlikely to be paid back e.g. letting people buy multiple houses.
This was a major feature of US history, and I'm interested if people have thoughts on the extent to which dark matter might have prevented the government from responding until it was too late (it's a hard domain to penetrate because of how many people were correctly anticipating that they would be passing the blame).
What if asymmetric fake trust technologies are orders of magnitude easier to build and scale sustainably than symmetric real trust technologies?
It already seems like asymmetric technologies work better than symmetric technologies, and that fake trust technologies are easier to scale than real trust technologies.
Symmetry and correct trust are both specific states and there's tons of directions to depart from them, and the only thing making them attractor states would be people who want the world to be more safe instead of less safe. That sort of thing is not well-reputed for being a great investment strategy ("Socially Responsible Indexes" did not help the matter).
So you read Three Body Problem but not Dark Forest. Now that I think about it, that actually goes quite a long way to put the rest into context. I'm going to go read about conflict/mistake theory and see if I can get into a better headspace to make sense of this.
Have you read Cixin Liu's Dark Forest, the sequel to Three Body Problem? The situation on the ground might be several iterations more complicated than you're predicting.
This is where we start to get into the darker territory of Dark Arts.
Sadly, much of elite culture is downstream of this chapter too; someone pointed out to me that awareness of this might be rare among silicon valley software engineers; but sadly, it's not rare among silicon valley venture capitalists, nor in other major cities like NYC, London, and DC.
If you're even a little bit familiar with the current situation with elite opinion on AI safety (e.g. silicon valley venture capitalists, politicians, etc), you'll look at this chapter and think "ah, this chapter was read by millions of elites starting in the 1930s, that actually explains a lot about the current... (read 4939 more words →)
Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People is worthwhile because:
It's important to note that not all advice applies in all contexts; criticism is encouraged while on Lesswrong, since here we know that the human brain sort of just forms strong beliefs in random directions, and that... (read 5096 more words →)
I used the word "high-status men" as a euphemism that I'm not really comfortable talking about in public, did not notice it would be even harder to get for non-americans. My apologies.
I used "high-status men" mainly as the opposite of low-status men, in that they are men who are low status due to being short, ugly, unintelligent, or socially awkward, sufficiently so that they were not able to gain social status. These people are repellent to other men as well as women, sadly. @Roko has been tweeting about fixes to this problem such as reforms in the plastic surgery industry, and EA and rationalists are well above base rate communities (e.g. classical... (read more)
I think this might be typical-minding. The consequences of this dynamic are actually pretty serious at macro-scale e.g. due to reputation of meetups, and evaporative cooling of women and high-status men as they avoid public meetups and stop meeting people new to AI safety.
I'm glad to hear there's people who don't let it get to them, because it is frankly pretty stupid that this has the consequences that it does at the macro-scale. But it's still well-worthy of some kind of solution that benefits everyone.
such as making people feverishly in favor of the American side and opposed to the Russian side in proxy wars like Ukraine.
Woah wait a second, what was that about Ukraine?
I predict at 95% that similar types of automated manipulation strategies as these were deployed by US, Russia, or Chinese companies or agencies to steer people’s thinking on Ukraine War and/or Covid-related topics
Does stuff like the twitter files count? Because that was already confirmed, it's at 100%.
I'm pretty new to this, the main thing I had to contribute here is the snapshot idea. I think that being the type of being that credibly commits to feeling and enacting some nonzero empathy for strange alternate agents (specifically instead of zero) would potentially be valuable in the long run. I can maybe see some kind of value handshake between AGI developers with natural empathy tendencies closer and further from zero, as opposed to the current paradigm where narrow-minded SWEs treat the whole enchilada like an inanimate corn farm (which is not their only failure nor their worse one but the vast majority of employees really aren't thinking things through at... (read more)