Please don't get clever with unicode in the post title.

Is that a general LessWrong rule? If so then :-(

Argh too many possible projects :-D

Other possible crucial considerations:

• How to aggregate minds being computed in quantum superposition—do our utilities need to have amplitudes too? (Claude tells me that philosophers haven't thought about this which seems absurd to me)
• How to aggregate minds being computed in neural network superposition? This one may be simpler.
• Malament-Hogarth spacetimes? If feasible then WTF?

I think you're looking for the concept of sensitivity analysis for a credence.

In case I don't write a full post about this:

The question whether reversible computation produces minds with relevant moral status is extremely important. Claude estimates me that it'd be a difference between having ${10}^{70}$ and ${10}^{124}$ mind-seconds instantiable in the reachable universe. (Because reversible minds could stretch our entropy budget long into the black hole era.)

Question is whether the reversing of the computation that makes up the mind and the lack of output (that'd imply bit-erasure) entail that the mind "didn't really exist".

There are four options here:

1. The mind didn't exist because it's just a computation+the computation being undone, no effect was made on the rest of the universe.
2. The mind existed once, during the "forward pass".
3. The mind existed twice, during the "forward pass", and during the reversion, since they're isomorphic computations.
4. There were two different, very similar minds.

Maybe I'll take a longer stab at this at some point, but looks like nobody has thought about this except Tomasik 2015 mentioning it in passing.

A lot of the best intellectuals I know don't really engage with podcasts nor blog posts - (highly selected) books and academic papers are just transmit way more high quality information per unit time.

I wonder if one wants to speak to intellectuals instead of important decision-makers ^[1] , the latter have less time and more focus on reading easy-to-read things. Presumably there's also a sliding scale of how far outside of one's native network the things one writes reach, but it can be pretty far.

Even intellectuals do read random high-quality blogs though, I think? Especially on things that academia doesn't really touch or can't touch because it's not quite an LPU. There is, of course, tons of writing, but a lot of it is concentrated in specific topics—there's possibly six orders of magnitude more writing on What Donald Trump Did Yesterday than on methods for increasing subjective lifespan. I don't necessarily advocate for writing more, but if one finds it easy then the value of information of trying a bit looks large enough to outweigh the costs.

1. Who I'm pretty sure do read blogs, e.g. Vance alluding to Scott Alexander's Gay Rites are Civil Rites or having read AI 2027, the influence of the Industrial Party on (some) PRC policy despite being mostly a group of online nerds, the fact that Musk reads Gwern, SSC, the fact that so much current SV AI company culture is downstream of the 00s transhumanists, specifically Yudkowsky… ↩︎

I've really been enjoying reading the previous PDF version (thanks for making that available!) and found it to have subtle implications for many different areas of life (how optimistic one can be wrt Hansonian cynicism, shifting my priors on how relevant genetic interventions are for improving cognition towards marginally less important, subtle implications for meditation practice & Buddhist theory, &c). I'm a bit skeptical still that it's as useful for alignment as you think it might be, but thank you for this research nonetheless!

I mean if one thinks of oneself as a system with simple inputs (water, basic nutrients, light, air) & outputs, then trying to list the relevant inputs and intervening on them makes sense? And in my mind wondering "what's the optimal level/type of light" bottoms out at "early spring/late summer day".

(I'm (very slowly) running an RCT on the effects of lumenators (38/50 datapoints collected), probably to be posted EOY. In the meantime there's Sandkühler et al. testing people with SAD & 100k lumens, finding broadly positive results)

My own results after seven trials for checking the effects of Orexin (analysis only for my data, missing for my two collaborators):

(Sleep stages are missing for one block because I didn't sleep enough for the FitBit to start determining sleep stages.)

INTERP RESEARCHER: Like... crystals crystals? Healing crystals? Are you about to tell me about chakras?

Crystal Healing — or the Origins of Expected Utility Maximizers (Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel/Kaarel/RP, 2023)

is there a service auto matching donation swap?

Unfortunately not, seems like the legal situation here is still unresolved, and as long as that's the case my best guess is that nobody will want to take the legal risk of building such a platform.

At a wild guess, I'd say that if the useful artifact is literally a paragraph or less, and you've gone over it several times, then it could be "ok" as testimony according to me. Like, if the LLM drafted a few sentences, and then you read them and deeply checked "is this really the right way to say this? does this really match my idea / felt sense?", and then you asked for a bunch of rewrites / rewordings, and did this several times, then plausibly that's just good.

Yeah, insofar as I'd endorse publishing LLM text that'd be the minimum, maybe in addition to adding links.

Code feels similar, I often end up deleting a bunch of LLM-generated code because it's extraneous to my purpose, and this is much more of an issue because I don't feel like publishing LLM-written text but don't know how to feel about LLM-written code. I guess a warning at the top telling the reader that they're about to wade into some-level-of-unedited code is warranted.