Just a small note that your ability to contribute via research doesn’t go from 0 now, to 1 after you complete a PhD! As in, you can still contribute to AI Safety with research during a phd
Thanks for posting this! I was wondering if you might share more about your "isolation-induced unusual internal information cascades" hypothesis/musings! Really interested in how you think this might relate to low-chance occurrences of breakthroughs/productivity.
My original idea (and great points against the intuition by Rohin)
"To me, it feels viscerally like I have the whole argument in mind, but when I look closely, it's obviously not the case. I'm just boldly going on and putting faith in my memory system to provide the next pieces when I need them. And usually it works out."
This closely relates to the kind of experience that makes me think about language as post hoc symbolic logic fitting to the neural computations of the brain. Which kinda inspired the hypothesis of a language model trained on a distinct neural net being similar to how humans experience consciousness (and gives the illusion of free will).
So, I thought it would be a neat proof of concept if GPT3 served as a bridge between something like a chess engine’s actions and verbal/semantic level explanations of its goals (so that the actions are interpretable by humans). e.g. bishop to g5; this develops a piece and pins the knight to the king, so you can add additional pressure to the pawn on d5 (or something like this).
In response, Reiichiro Nakano shared this paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1901.03729.pdf
which kinda shows it's possible to have agent state/action representations in natural language for Frogger. There are probably glaring/obvious flaws with my OP, but this was what inspired those thoughts.
Apologies if this is really ridiculous—I'm maybe suggesting ML-related ideas prematurely & having fanciful thoughts. Will be studying ML diligently to help with that.
Thanks, I hadn't thought about those limitations
For the basic features, I got used to navigating everything within a hour. I'll be on the lookout for improvements to Roam or other note-taking programs like this
Very interesting post!
1) I wonder what your thoughts are on how "disentangled" having a "dim world" perspective and being psychopathic are (completely "entangled" being: all psychopaths experience dim world and all who experience dim world are psychopathic). Maybe I'm also packing too many different ideas/connotations into the term "psychopathy".
2) Also, the variability in humans' local neuronal connection and "long-range" neuronal connections seems really interesting to me. My very unsupported, weak suspicion is that perhaps there is a correlation between these ratios (or maybe the pure # of each), and the natural ability to learn information and develop expertise in a very narrow domain of things (music, math?) vs. develop big new ideas where the concepts are largely formed from cross-domain, interdisciplinary thinking. Do you have any thoughts on this? Depending on what we believe for this, what we believe for question 1) has some very interesting implications, I think?
3) Finally, I wonder if the lesswrong community has a higher rate of "dim world" perspective-havers (or "psychopaths in the narrowly defined sense of having lower thresholds for stimulation), than the base-rate of the general population.