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jwray
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37/M/Vegas. Dropped out of PhD in Computer Science in AI to go work for Google in LA for a few years. Then I worked for an online advertising startup for a few years. Then in 2016 I moved to Las Vegas to be a professional gambler.

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What are the best arguments for/against AIs being "slightly 'nice'"?
jwray9mo10

We don't observe any Dyson swarms in our lightcone, and would be capable of detecting dyson swarms tens of thousands of light years away, but the maximum expansion speed of AI control is much less than the speed of light when I extrapolate from known physics.  This should be taken as weak evidence that AIs don't inevitably build Dyson swarms and try to take over the universe.  I think the probability of AI doom is still quite large.

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The hostile telepaths problem
jwray9mo40

My experience is very different.  I feel unitary, without any IFS or jungian shadow or other sort of subconscious parts trying to deceive my conscious self.  I violate quite a lot of social norms without feeling any shame or guilt about it, because I've got an 'internal scorecard'.  So long as I'm true to my own values/morality, and I can protect myself with some combination of power / occlumency / disengaging, all three of which come easily to me, social norms don't matter in private.

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Failures in Kindness
jwray1y20

prices are one of the best mechanisms for communicating the strength of preferences, but perhaps among friends you want a separate made-up currency with a more equal distribution. Daniel Reeves just bites the bullet and uses dollars though:  https://messymatters.com/tv/

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Failures in Kindness
jwray1y21

Re computational unkindness, optimizing solely for what one person wants is easy.  The complexity mostly arises from the picker trying to satisfy others' implicit preferences that they pretend not to have for the sake of being "flexible".

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Ends Don't Justify Means (Among Humans)
jwray3y70

If our corrupted hardware can't be trusted to compute the consequences in a specific case, it probably also can't be trusted to compute the consequences of a general rule.  All our derivations of deontological rules will be tilted in the direction of self interest or tribalism or unexamined disgust responses, not some galaxy-brained evaluation of the consequences of applying the rule to all possible situations.

Russell conjugation:  I have deontological guardrails, you have customs, he has ancient taboos.

[edit: related Scott post which I endorse in spite of what I said above:  https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/23/in-favor-of-niceness-community-and-civilization/]

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St. Louis Meetup - London Tea Room
jwray4y10

Is there somewhere I can sign up to get notified of all the future St Louis meetups?

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Newcomb's Grandfather
jwray4y50

Suppose my decision algorithm is:  I obtain the source code of Omega and run its prediction algorithm to determine what it predicts I will do, and then do the opposite of that.

This would be kind of like the proof that the halting problem is non-computable.

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Newcomb's Grandfather
jwray4y10

Certainly perfect prediction is impossible in some cases.  Look at the halting problem in computer science.

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You have a set amount of "weirdness points". Spend them wisely.
jwray4y30

This seems like a subset of point #7 here (https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/02/20/writing-advice/)

7. Figure out who you’re trying to convince, then use the right tribal signals

I would define weirdness as emitting signals that the tribe recognizes as "other" but not "enemy".  Emitting enough of the in-group signals may counteract that.

This is also reminiscent of John Gottman's empirical research on married couples where he found they were much more likely to split if the ratio of positive to negative interactions was less than 5 to 1.

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The Point of Trade
jwray4y10

Intertemporal arbitrage: buying corn when there's a bumper crop and selling it when there's a drought.  How do we get rid of that?   Either time travel or giving everyone lots of storage space and prior knowledge of all the goods he will ever need and their future abundance/scarcity time series.

Price signals arising from trade are also an incentive for consuming less of / producing more of scarce things to make them less scarce.  Without the incentives of prices we'd need some other way of enforcing rationing of the finite capacity of the iron mines and communicating each person's marginal utility for iron.  A borg hivemind.

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