This year's Spring ACX Meetup everywhere in Ankara.
Location: Cafe Botanica – https://plus.codes/8GFJWV36+VW
Contact: erolcan.akbaba@gmail.com
Before delving into the ideas I want to talk about, let me briefly introduce myself as I'm a reader of LW from 10+ years ago, and never have been much of a poster. I read the sequences, HPMOR, and several of the debates Eliezer had with other notable people here (e.g. Robin Hanson, Paul Christiano) about alignment.
I'm a physics grad (B.S. and M.S. without a laser focus on anything specific (but studied lasers too, the labs were fun :P)) living in Turkey. I worked as an AI Trainer for OpenAI as a freelancer for ~5.5 years on a personal freelance contract (from late 2019 to early 2025), and switched to Turing in... (read 3406 more words →)
Ankara'da ACX veya LW okuru var mı merak ediyorum. Bu toplaşkalar dünyanın her yerinde oluyor, Türkiye'de hiç görmedim henüz. Birilerinin düzenlemesini bekleyen 3-5 kişi vardır diye umuyorum.
İlk toplaşma 2 Eylül saat 1800'da Seğmenler parkında. Tanışmak dışında bir planım yok henüz ki gelen olur mu onu dahi bilmiyorum!
To me all the talk about utilities seem broken at a fundamental level. An implication of Timeless Decision Theory should be that an agent running TDT calculates utilities as an integral over time, so final values don't have any explicit time dependence.
This fixes a lot of things, especially when combined with the texture of human experience. Utility should be a function of the states of the world it affects integrated over time. Since we don't get to make that calculation in detail, we can approximate by choosing the kinds of actions that minimize the future bad impacts and maximize good ones.
This is the only view of utility that I can think of... (read more)
Broken arms vs toes: I agree that any number of broken toes wouldn't be better than a broken arm. But that's the point, these are _comparable_.
Incomparable breaks occur where you put the ellipses in your list. Torture for 40-50 years vs torture for 1 day is qualitatively distinct. I imagine a human being can bounce back from torture for 1 day, have scars but manage to prosper. That would be hellishly more difficult with torture for 40 years. We could count torture by day, 1-(365*40) and there would be a point of no return there. A duration of torture a person can't bounce back. It would depend on the person, what happens... (read more)
Intuitively speaking broken arm and broken toe are comparable. Broken arm is worse, broken toe is still bad. I'd rather get a broken arm than torture for 50 years, or even torture for 1 day.
For sliding scale of severities: there's a very difficult to compute but intuitively satisfying emphasis that can be imposed so the scale can't slide. It's the idea of "bouncing back". If you can't bounce back from an action that imparts negative utility, it forms a distinct class of utilities. Compare broken arm with torn-off toe. Compare both of those to 50 years of torture.
P.S: If you're familiar with Taleb's idea of "antifragility", that's the notion I'm basing these on.
I started living alone, then with 3 other friends (ran into problems in 3 - 4 months) and now with only 1 other friend.
My current flat-mate is a reasonable person, not much chit-chat but a cat helped to warm the intra-house athmosphere.
Before this, we lived in a really beautiful house (nice terrace, BBQ potential etc) but the whole thing went sour when one person decided to change his lifestyle in a couple of days. It certainly wasn't fun, but the house was nice. We all had large space to ourselves, but with only 2 people a smaller house still gives enough space per person.
When I lived completely alone, I slacked and became... (read more)
First survey and comment, and I liked it too! (Including the bonuses, especially the reward question :)