I got into reading about near death experiences and it seems a common theme is that we’re all one. Like each and every one of us is really just part of some omniscient god that’s so omniscient and great that god isn’t even a good enough name for it: experiencing what it’s like to be small. Sure, why not. That’s sort of intuitive to me. Given that I can’t verify the universe exists and can only verify my experience it doesn’t seem that crazy to say experience is fundamental.

But if that’s the case then I’m just left with an overwhelming sense of why. Why make a universe with three spatial dimensions? Why make yourself experience suffering? Why make yourself experience hate? Why filter your consciousness through a talking chimpanzee? If I’m an omniscient entity why would I choose this? Surely there’s got to be infinitely more interesting things to do. If we’re all god then surely we’d never get bored just doing god things.

So you can take the obvious answer that everything exists. But then you’re left with other questions. Why are we in a universe that makes sense? Why don’t we live in a cartoon operating on cartoon logic? Does that mean there’s a sentient SpongeBob? And then there’s the more pressing concern of astronomical suffering. Are there universes where people are experiencing hyperpain? Surely god wouldn’t want to experience I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. It doesn’t seem likely to me that there are sentiences living in cartoons, so I’ll use that to take the psychologically comforting position that not everything we can imagine exists.

But if that’s the case then why this? Why this universe? Why this amount of suffering? If there’s a no-go zone of experience where is it? I have so many questions and I don’t know where the answers are.

I understand. I’ll try to keep it more civil.

It’s not fear. It’s anger. Also good people are rare. The people you think of as good people are likely just friendly.

Sure. The people I’m talking about choose to care as much as they do. Good and courageous people can choose to not have hope and not care about others, but they choose to care.

I think a lot of people are confused by good and courageous people and don’t understand why some people are that way. But I don’t think the answer is that confusing. It comes down to strength of conscience. For some people, the emotional pain of not doing what they think is right hurts them 1000x more than any physical pain. They hate doing what they think is wrong more than they hate any physical pain. 

So if you want to be an asshole, you can say that good and courageous people, otherwise known as heroes, do it out of their own self-interest.

I just don’t understand why the people there would lie about something like this. This isn’t even very believable. It looks like the guy who founded it was a bright ML PhD and if he’s not telling the truth why would he throw away his reputation over this? Maybe it’s real but I’m pretty skeptical. I looked at their Zochi paper and I don’t see that they offered any proof that the papers they attributed to Zochi were written by Zochi.

Is intology a legitimate research lab? Today they talked about having an AI researcher that performed better than humans on RE-bench at 64 hr time horizons. This seems really unbelievable to me. The AI system is called Locus.

I think it leads to S-risks. I think people will remain in charge and use AI as a power-amplifier. The people most likely to end up with power like having power. They like having control over other people and dominating them. This is completely apparent if you spend the (unpleasant) time reading the Epstein documents that the House has released. We need societal and governmental reform before we even think about playing with any of this technology.

The answer to the world’s problems doesn’t rely on a bunch of individuals who are good at puzzles solving a puzzle and then we get utopia. It involves people recognizing the humanity of everyone around them and working on societal and governmental reform. And sure this stuff sounds like a long-shot but we’ve got to try. I wish I had a less vague answer but I don’t.

I just can’t wrap my head around people who work on AI capabilities or AI control. My worst fear is that AI control works, power inevitably concentrates, and then the people who have the power abuse it. What is outlandish about this chain of events? It just seems like we’re trading X-risk for S-risks, which seems like an unbelievably stupid idea. Do people just not care? Are they genuinely fine with a world with S-risks as long as it’s not happening to them? That’s completely monstrous and I can’t wrap my head around it.  The people who work at the top labs make me ashamed to be human. It’s a shandah.

This probably won’t make a difference, but I’ll write this anyways. If you’re working on AI-control, do you trust the people who end up in charge of the technology to wield it well? If you don’t, why are you working on AI control?