Myron Hedderson

What do you think should be said, that hasn't been said?

I think AI existential risk and short timelines are extremely much more mainstream topics now than they were in 2020/2022 (when I distinctly recall being wary of being thought insane by people who weren't following LessWrong or adjacent communities), with a lot more being said everywhere, not just on LessWrong. Eliezer published a book that sold well. If I could think of something that should be said on this topic that hadn't been said better than I can say it, I'd speak up about it (and I do, in less... (read more)

Re: believing in oneself, if I give that advice to someone, I typically provide evidence they may not have considered (or may not currently be something they're thinking about) about why they should do so. Typically this is a case where they are dealing with doubt, fear, anxiety, or a pattern of under-valuing themselves or their abilities. They may have experienced a recent setback and so be over-weighting negative information about themselves for emotional reasons, for example.

I may also point out that sometimes self-belief can lead to effects that cause ... (read more)

maybe this makes the structure of the argument playing out in my head that I am putting down here clear.

Honestly, this did make it clearer for me what might be going through your head. I was confused, and it makes a bit more sense now.

But if you were facing the choice between abandoning the American project entirely, and letting it happen, I think letting it happen was the right choice.

I do not think there were very many people, if any, whose individual abandonment of the American project would have stopped colonialism. So the actual choice is "let it happ... (read more)

Does that mean I should disavow it all? Go away and build something else and new entirely further away from the corruption and the horrors? Or should I try to fix it and improve it? And how much egg-breaking and moral norm violation should I tolerate?

What are your strategic options?

In the case of someone witnessing the horrors of colonialism, they might not have had very many/any options that would stop colonialism from happening, but leaving and doing something else wouldn't have helped. So the thing to do in that case is do what you can, to the best of y... (read more)

Ah, ok. My understanding is that the peoples of North America didn't have a strong sense of land ownership the way Europeans did, it was more "we take care of the land for ourselves and future generations, and the land takes care of us". I think the peaceful resolution there would have involved a discussion between cultures so they could map and understand each other's ontologies and ways of thinking. I expect the amount of land the colonists would have wanted to own for their own use would have been trivial for the natives to relinquish at first. And I du... (read more)

 think the trickiest moral part is how you relate in terms of interfacing with the existing legal system and existing property rights.

I think if you try to respect either of these, you are in for a really bad time

Could you elaborate a bit? This part is not clear to me, but seems quite important.

I don't mean to follow you around and pester you, but this:

Like, man, yes, if you want to create good things you will have a lot of fighting to do, and while under the umbrella of the modern world individuals can largely get away with not having to do any literal fighting, I find myself similarly frequently frustrated when people sneer at ... the appropriate competitive zero-sum-contest-winning-actions that are necessary for good things to exist..."

Seems like a crux that I didn't understand about your viewpoint. I'm a thoroughly modern dude who, while I wo... (read more)

My current beliefs here are (without total confidence) that everyone involved here would prefer a course of history where the US was established across the North American continent (my guess is also everyone would agree that you should make a lot lot of changes to how it was colonized).

Hmmm... this is tricky. Like, how constrained are the courses of history you say that people would prefer?

Suppose the counterfactual world where people said no to Europeans genociding non-Christians on other continents, and so colonialism as I currently understand it doesn't... (read more)

I think the question of "from what moral reference frame should you evaluate whether something was worth it" is a pretty tricky one. You clearly can't say "from the perspective of whoever was there first"
...
You also clearly can't say "just evaluate the consequences from the perspective from wherever you are now"

I'd think you'd want to have a decision method about this that doesn't give the more powerful party (with the bigger army or the better weapons, etc.) more votes. If you're making a moral decision and you don't think might makes right, that implies ... (read more)

If I was reasonably confident I knew better than you, how you should live, under what basis do I have the obligation to take away your agency to elect override your own preferences? Or the new set of preference makers in any society? Even if I think I could do both better?

My answer is, if both:
1. I am reasonably confident I know better than you how you should live.
2. I am not sure that you are not someone with the intelligence and capability to make your own evaluations of what is good and bad for you and act accordingly (not a baby or a cat or someone of ... (read more)

I mean, you can even go "this person, a key figure in the founding of America, was a slaveholder. Was he good or bad?" And I'd reject the implied premise of the question. I'd say holding slaves was bad, and a lot of the ideas in the declaration of independence are good. People are a mix of good and bad, and do things during their lives that are both good and bad, and don't have to be binary-sorted into one category or the other, we can just say "the thing you/I did yesterday was bad, but the thing you/I did today was good", and that is a perfectly logical ... (read more)

Ok, so... I think it's possible to say "democracy good, colonialism bad, the set of circumstances you're born into and the physical laws involved amoral". In that context, you advocate for democracy, against colonialism, within the constraints imposed by the situation you find yourself in, which may mean you fight the battles you can win and don't fight when you'll lose (so maybe you put your energy into working for democracy, rather than against colonialism, depending on circumstances and strategic options), without losing sight of the distinction between... (read more)

Also, I'm not in on all the internal politics of this community, but prima facie, quitting doesn't seem to make sense.

Good things are good, even if they aren't permanent. Lesswrong is good currently. The most intuitive-to-me way it would make sense to quit is if that's somehow the way to keep the good thing going longer, or prevent it from becoming a bad thing, neither of which I see evidence for. Of course it would also make sense to quit if you're burned out or for other emotional reasons, but from a practical standpoint, "this place is too centralized around me, should be more of a federated structure" is not a reason to quit, but to make changes so that it's less centralized around you.

Maybe the most important way ambitious, smart, and wise people leave the world worse off than they found it is by seeing correctly how some part of the world is broken and unifying various powers under a banner to fix that problem

I note that the generic hypotheticals of the great king, scientist, and advocate all end in a way where the conclusion is "it would have been better if the centralization never happened", while the actual historical cases are less clear. Yes, Rome fell, but the Pax Romana was long and many people's lives were better as a result, a... (read more)

I have not updated much based on "doing project Glasswing makes me update in favour of Anthropic being a better company than I expected."

However, I've updated a bit on the people within Anthropic all or nearly-all being better than I expected based on the fact that they have had a powerful hacking machine for a while and no catastrophes have occurred yet. "You can hack into anything" or "you could exfiltrate and sell this for billions" are powerful temptations for an amoral power-seeking individual who had been biding their time, and if there are any such ... (read more)

initial reaction to your several replies today: I feel like writing several replies that would be quite long, but a) I don't have time to do that within the next few days and b) I don't want to spam you with walls of text you're not interested in. I'll try and refine my thoughts down to something more short and focused, but, how interested are you in reading the longer less-focused version? This is a "I wrote you a long letter because I didn't have time to write you a short one" situation - longer is easier, but potentially less useful.

"Does Bayesianism sa... (read more)

The question is, assuming no knowledge of the scam or communication with the "losers" (for whom a stock prediction was wrong), should the Bayesian -- strictly adhering to Bayesian Epistemology -- believe that the firm's stock predictions are legit?

Something else that is relevant to real-life Bayesians occurs to me. "Strictly adhering to Bayesian epistemology" is doing some work here. And in real life, if my reasoning or math leads me off a cliff/to some absurd conclusion, I have to put some weight on the possibility I've made an error somewhere, which I ha... (read more)

Doesn't that mean we should expect that Bayesians often disagree and they have no way to resolve it except consulting reality (i.e., an experiment)?

Short answer: Yes.

Longer answer: Two Bayesians who start out with the same prior probabilities, and see the same evidence, should update their posterior probabilities in the same way, and so their mental models should stay consistent with each other. Two Bayesians who start out with different prior probabilities, but see the same evidence, should update their posterior probabilities in ways that are predictable... (read more)

There isn't a set breakpoint that separates weak from strong priors, it's a continuum from "it seems extremely unlikely that everything I know about the world is false, but it's not technically impossible" to "it seems extremely likely that I'm typing on a keyboard right now, but there's a tiny possibility that something else is going on, like a hallucination or me being a brain in a vat or some other possibility I haven't thought of".

Bayesianism says that if you have strong priors about a particular matter, you should be surprised with corresponding stren... (read more)

[Unsure] The probability of GR being true is independent of whether the Bayesian knows about it or not^[1]

Keep in mind that these "probabilities" are subjective assessments of probability based on an individual's prior knowledge, not facts about reality. Two Bayesians with different prior experience may disagree about how probable something is (/seems to them), but reality will not disagree or debate with itself about the truth of the matter, or assign probability to different possibilities (mumble mumble I don't really understand quantum mechanics and am p... (read more)