ioannes

I think something like Jim's point of overcorrecting from a coarse view of "all drugs are bad" to a coarse view of "hey, the authorities lied to us about drugs and they're probably okay to use casually" is closer to what gave us the problem.

Replying toMy experience at and around MIRI and CFAR (inspired by Zoe Curzi's writeup of experiences at Leverage)

ioannes4y

My experience at and around MIRI and CFAR (inspired by Zoe Curzi's writeup of experiences at Leverage)

Good point, though I think current evidence as a whole (anti-addictive; efficacy as a therapeutic modality; population surveys finding psychedelic use anticorrelated with psychological distress) pushes towards psychedelics' risk profile being less harmful though higher variance than alcohol and tobacco per use.

Replying toMy experience at and around MIRI and CFAR (inspired by Zoe Curzi's writeup of experiences at Leverage)

ioannes4y

My experience at and around MIRI and CFAR (inspired by Zoe Curzi's writeup of experiences at Leverage)

Consequently, psychedelics can be horrible and still not as bad as alcohol and tobacco.

They could be, but current evidence shows that psychedelic-assisted therapy is efficacious for PTSD, depression, end-of-life anxiety, smoking cessation, and probably alcoholism.

Psychedelic experiences have been rated as extremely meaningful by healthy volunteers [1, 2], and psychedelic use is associated with decreased psychological distress and suicidality in population surveys.

Replying toMy experience at and around MIRI and CFAR (inspired by Zoe Curzi's writeup of experiences at Leverage)

ioannes4y

My experience at and around MIRI and CFAR (inspired by Zoe Curzi's writeup of experiences at Leverage)

The drugs seem to be in the Bay Area water supply (metaphorically or literally? no one really knows for sure), that is another reason to move somewhere else sooner rather than later. In Bay Area, you probably can't avoid meeting junkies every day, this shifts your "Overton window"

In a bunch of comments on this post, people are giving opinions about "drugs." I think this is the wrong level of abstraction, sorta like having an opinion about whether food is good or bad.

Different drugs have wildly different effect and risk profiles – it doesn't make sense to lump them all together into one category.

Replying toMy experience at and around MIRI and CFAR (inspired by Zoe Curzi's writeup of experiences at Leverage)

ioannes4y

My experience at and around MIRI and CFAR (inspired by Zoe Curzi's writeup of experiences at Leverage)

Illegal drugs are, on average, very bad. How about a policy that if you use illegal drugs you are presumptively considered not yet good enough to be in the community?

The risk profile of a drug isn't correlated with its legal status, largely because our current drug laws were created for political purposes in the 1970s. A quote from Nixon advisor John Ehrlichman:

“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with... (read more)

Replying toMy experience at and around MIRI and CFAR (inspired by Zoe Curzi's writeup of experiences at Leverage)

ioannes4y

My experience at and around MIRI and CFAR (inspired by Zoe Curzi's writeup of experiences at Leverage)

Quora for the curious: Did the Buddha forbid the translation of his teachings into Sanskrit? If so, did he mention why?

From my quick skim of those answers, it looks like he was more concerned about accessibility of the teachings rather than issues of interpretation.

Replying toMy experience at and around MIRI and CFAR (inspired by Zoe Curzi's writeup of experiences at Leverage)

ioannes4y

My experience at and around MIRI and CFAR (inspired by Zoe Curzi's writeup of experiences at Leverage)

The correspondent's reply here is helpful color on how things can get more complicated (e.g. shifts in how you perceive the actions/intentions of yourself & others) and sometimes harmful (e.g. extended stays in Dark Night).

Replying toMy experience at and around MIRI and CFAR (inspired by Zoe Curzi's writeup of experiences at Leverage)

ioannes4y

My experience at and around MIRI and CFAR (inspired by Zoe Curzi's writeup of experiences at Leverage)

It's interesting that a lot of the discussion about psychedelics here is arguing from intuitions and personal experience, rather than from the trial results that have been coming out.

I do think that psychedelic experiences vary a lot from person-to-person and trip-to-trip, and that psychedelics aren't for everyone. (This variability probably isn't fully captured by the trial results because study participants are carefully screened for lots of factors that may be contraindicated.)

Replying toMy experience at and around MIRI and CFAR (inspired by Zoe Curzi's writeup of experiences at Leverage)

ioannes4y

My experience at and around MIRI and CFAR (inspired by Zoe Curzi's writeup of experiences at Leverage)

Jim Babcock's stance here is the most sensible one I've seen in this thread:

My own impression is that the effect of LSD is not primarily a regression to the mean thing, but rather, that it temporarily enables some self-modification capabilities, which can be powerfully positive but which require a high degree of sanity and care to operate safely.

...

Meanwhile nearly everyone has been exposed to extremely unsubtle and substantially false anti-drug propaganda, which fails to survive contact with reality. So it's unfortunate but also unsurprising that the how-much-caution pendulum in their heads winds up swinging too far to the other side. The ideal messaging imo would leave most people feeling like planning an acid trip is more work than they personally will get around to, plus mild disdain towards impulsive usage and corner-cutting.

Replying toMy experience at and around MIRI and CFAR (inspired by Zoe Curzi's writeup of experiences at Leverage)

ioannes4y

My experience at and around MIRI and CFAR (inspired by Zoe Curzi's writeup of experiences at Leverage)

Big +1.

Really important to disambiguate the two:

"People shouldn't do psychedelics" is highly debatable and has to argue against a lot of research demonstrating their efficacy for improving mental wellness and treating psychiatric disorders.

"Leaders & subgroups shouldn't push psychedelics on their followers" seems straightforwardly correct.

[Link] "Where are all the successful rationalists?"

ioannes

https://applieddivinitystudies.com/2020/09/05/rationality-winning

From near the end:

The primary impacts of reading rationalist blogs are that 1) I have been frequently distracted at work, and 2) my conversations have gotten much worse. Talking to non-rationalists, I am perpetually holding myself back from saying "oh yes, that’s just the thing where no one has coherent meta-principles" or "that’s the thing where facts are purpose-dependent". Talking to rationalists is not much better, since it feels less like a free exchange of ideas, and more like an exchange of "have you read post?"
There are some specific areas where rationality might help, like using Yudkowsky’s Inadequate Equilibria to know when it’s plausible to think I have an original insight that

ioannes

I'm not an investment advisor and this isn't investment advice. Excerpted from an occasional newsletter I write about investing.

Recent developments in AI (AlphaGo Zero, AlphaFold, GPT-3) make transformative AI seem plausible within the next 10-50 years.

There's no fire alarm for AGI, so now is as good a time as any to have my portfolio reflect this belief. (A little embarrassing that I've waited so long to follow my conviction here! The joys of compartmentalized cognition...)

If transformative AI follows the trend currently being set by OpenAI, where it's expensive to initially train an AI model and cheap to deploy it once trained, profits will... (read 624 more words →)

[Link] "Will He Go?" book review (Scott Aaronson)

ioannes

https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4845

From the beginning:

Will He Go?, by legal scholar Lawrence Douglas, is, at 120 pages, a slim volume focused on a single question: what happens if the 2020 US election delivers a narrow or disputed result favoring Biden, and Trump refuses to concede? This question will, of course, either be answered or rendered irrelevant in half a year. And yet, in my estimation, there’s at least a 15% probability that Will He Go? will enter the ranks of the most important and prescient books ever written. You should read it right now (or at least read this Vox interview), if you want to think through the contours of a civilizational Singularity that

... (read 220 more words →)

[Link] Is the Orthogonality Thesis Defensible? (Qualia Computing)

ioannes

Full title: Is the Orthogonality Thesis Defensible if We Assume Both Valence Realism and Open Individualism?

https://qualiacomputing.com/2019/11/09/is-the-orthogonality-thesis-defensible-if-we-assume-both-valence-realism-and-open-individualism/

An excerpt:

The cleanest typology for metaphysics I can offer is: some theories focus on computations as the thing that’s ‘real’, the thing that ethically matters – we should pay attention to what the *bits* are doing. Others focus on physical states – we should pay attention to what the *atoms* are doing. I’m on team atoms, as I note here: Against Functionalism.

My suggested takeaway: an open individualist who assumes computationalism is true (team bits) will have a hard time coordinating with an open individualist who assumes physicalism is true (team atoms) — they’re essentially running incompatible versions

... (read more)

-1

[Link] Tools for thought (Matuschak & Nielsen)

ioannes

https://numinous.productions/ttft

An excerpt:

We're often asked: why don't you work on AGI or [brain-computer interfaces (BCI)] instead of tools for thought? Aren't those more important and more exciting? And for AGI, in particular, many of the skills required seem related.

They certainly are important and exciting subjects. What's more, at present AGI and BCI are far more fashionable (and better funded). As a reader, you may be rolling your eyes, supposing our thinking here is pre-determined: we wouldn't be writing this essay if we didn't favor work on tools for thought. But these are questions we've wrestled hard with in deciding how to spend our own lives. One of us wrote a book about

... (read 447 more words →)

[Link] Truth-telling is aggression in zero-sum frames (Jessica Taylor)

ioannes

https://unstableontology.com/2019/09/10/truth-telling-is-aggression-in-zero-sum-frames/

Excerpt:

If we adopt a frame that says that unusual social plots are actions that are against someone (which is a zero-sum frame), this leads to the conclusion that truth-telling is aggression, as it is necessarily part of an unusual social plot.

Non-zero-sum frames, of course, usually interpret truth-telling positively: it contributes to a shared information commons, which helps just about everyone, with few exceptions. People are often capable of switching to non-zero-sum frames in natural emergency situations, but such situations are rare.

To transition from a zero-sum frame to a non-zero-sum frame, from normalized lying to normalized truth-telling, requires a special social plot involving unusual truth-telling. Because it almost never happens by default.

[Link] Book Review: Reframing Superintelligence (SSC)

ioannes

https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/08/27/book-review-reframing-superintelligence/

Drexler asks: what if future AI looks a lot like current AI, but better?

For example, take Google Translate. A future superintelligent Google Translate would be able to translate texts faster and better than any human translator, capturing subtleties of language beyond what even a native speaker could pick up. It might be able to understand hundreds of languages, handle complicated multilingual puns with ease, do all sorts of amazing things. But in the end, it would just be a translation app. It wouldn’t want to take over the world. It wouldn’t even “want” to become better at translating than it was already. It would just translate stuff really well.

...

In this future, our

... (read 417 more words →)

What's state-of-the-art in AI understanding of theory of mind?

ioannes

Sparked by Eric Topol, I've been thinking lately about biological complexity, psychology, and AI safety.

A prominent concern in the AI safety community is the problem of instrumental convergence – for almost any terminal goal, agents will converge on instrumental goals are helpful for furthering the terminal goal, e.g. self-preservation.

The story goes something like this:

AGI is given (or arrives at) a terminal goal
AGI learns that self-preservation is important for increasing its chances of achieving its terminal goal
AGI learns enough about the world to realize that humans are a substantial threat to its self-preservation
AGI finds a way to address this threat (e.g. by killing all humans)

It occurred to me that to be really effective... (read 194 more words →)

[Link] OpenAI on why we need social scientists

ioannes

https://distill.pub/2019/safety-needs-social-scientists/

We believe the AI safety community needs to invest research effort in the human side of AI alignment. Many of the uncertainties involved are empirical, and can only be answered by experiment. They relate to the psychology of human rationality, emotion, and biases. Critically, we believe investigations into how people interact with AI alignment algorithms should not be held back by the limitations of existing machine learning. Current AI safety research is often limited to simple tasks in video games, robotics, or gridworlds, but problems on the human side may only appear in more realistic scenarios such as natural language discussion of value-laden questions. This is particularly important since many aspects of AI alignment change as ML systems increase in capability.

Who owns OpenAI's new language model?

ioannes

OpenAI published about their very general language-writing & comprehension model (a) today.

Interestingly, they're not releasing the model itself:

Due to concerns about large language models being used to generate deceptive, biased, or abusive language at scale, we are only releasing a much smaller version of GPT-2 along with sampling code. We are not releasing the dataset, training code, or GPT-2 model weights.

Does OpenAI hold a copyright for this model (and its other intellectual property)?

If the US government decided they wanted to requisition this model, would an OpenAI copyright defend against that? Would OpenAI have any real recourse against a government requisition?

LESSWRONG
LW

LESSWRONG
LW

[Link] Book Review: Reframing Superintelligence (SSC)

On memetic weapons

[Link] Tools for thought (Matuschak & Nielsen)

Investment idea: basket of tech stocks weighted towards AI

ioannes

ioannes

[Link] "Where are all the successful rationalists?"

Investment idea: basket of tech stocks weighted towards AI

[Link] "Will He Go?" book review (Scott Aaronson)

[Link] Is the Orthogonality Thesis Defensible? (Qualia Computing)

[Link] Tools for thought (Matuschak & Nielsen)

[Link] Truth-telling is aggression in zero-sum frames (Jessica Taylor)

[Link] Book Review: Reframing Superintelligence (SSC)

ioannes

[Link] Book Review: Reframing Superintelligence (SSC)

On memetic weapons

[Link] Tools for thought (Matuschak & Nielsen)

Investment idea: basket of tech stocks weighted towards AI

ioannes

ioannes

[Link] "Where are all the successful rationalists?"

Investment idea: basket of tech stocks weighted towards AI

[Link] "Will He Go?" book review (Scott Aaronson)

[Link] Is the Orthogonality Thesis Defensible? (Qualia Computing)

[Link] Tools for thought (Matuschak & Nielsen)

[Link] Truth-telling is aggression in zero-sum frames (Jessica Taylor)

[Link] Book Review: Reframing Superintelligence (SSC)