“Albania has introduced its first artificial intelligence “minister”, who addressed parliament on Thursday in a debut speech.” lol, what???
Not sure how much this really matters vs is just a PR thing, but it’s maybe something people on here should know about.
Thanks for the comment!
I hear the critique, but I’m not sure I’m as confident as you are that it’s a good one.
The first reason is that I’m unsure whether the trade-off between credibility for having a wiki page doesn’t outweigh the loss of control.
The second reason is that I don’t really think there is much losing control (minus in extreme cases like you mention) - you can’t be super ideological on wiki sites, minus saying things like “and here’s what critics say”. On that point, I think it’s just pretty important for the standard article on a topic to have critiques of it (as long as they are honest/ good rebuttals, which I’m somewhat confident that the wiki moderators can ensure). Another point on this is that LWers can just be on top of stuff to ensure that the information isn’t clearly outdated or confused.
Curious to hear pushback, though.
1Good call - that was from an earlier version of this post.
Good point, and I think I somewhat agree. If you think we just reach an intelligence explosion at some level (seems pretty plausible), you wouldn't update to previous pre-training levels because we'd be closer and what really matters is hitting that point (and post-training can possibly take you to that point). While it means that you shouldn't update towards before pre-training, I still think the general point of being a large update back still stands (perhaps this point--the degree-- depends on some other priors, though, which I didn't want to get into).
In a similar vain, I’ve always thought Chesterton’s fence reasoning was a bit self defeating — in that, using chestertons fence as a conceptual tool is, in itself, often breaking it. Often people do the tradition thing for cultural, familial, religious reasons. While I understand it’s a heuristic and this doesn’t actually undermine the fence, this seems like an underrated point.
I saw this good talk on the Manifest youtube channel about using historical circumstances to calibrate predictions - this seems better for training than regular forecasting because you have faster feedback loop between the prediction and the resolution.
I wanted to know if anyone had recommendations on where to find some software or site where I can do more examples of this (I already know about the estimation game). I would do this myself, but it seems like it would be pretty difficult to do the research on the situation without learning the outcome. I would also appreciate people giving takes about why this might be a bad way to get better at forecasting.
Here's an argument against this view - yes, there is some cost associated with helping the citizens of a country and the benefit becomes less great as you become a rentier state. However, while the benefits do go down and economic prosperity becomes greater and greater for the very few due to AGI, the costs of quality life become significantly cheaper to help others in the society. It is not clear that the rate at which the benefits diminish actually outpaces the reduction in costs of helping people.
In response to this, one might be able to say something like regular people become totally obsolete wrt efficiency and the costs, while reduced stay positive. However, this really depends on how you think human psychology works -- while some people would turn on humans the second they can, there are likely some people who will just keep being empathetic (perhaps this is merely a vestigial trait from the past, but it irrelevant -- the value exists now, and some people might be willing to pay some cost to avoid shaping this value even beyond their own lives). We have a similar situation in our world: namely, animals -- while people aren't motivated to care about animals for power reasons (they could do all the factory farming they want, and it would be better), some still do (I take it that this is a vestigial trait of generalizing empathy to the abstract, but as stated, the description for why this comes to be seems largely irrelevant).
Because of how cheap it is to actually help someone in this world, you may just need one or a few people to care just a little bit about helping people and that could make everyone better off. Given that we have a bunch of vegans now (the equivalent to empathetic but powerful people post AGI), depending on how low the costs are to make lives happy (presumably there is a negative correlation between the costs to make lives better and the inequality of power, money, etc), it might be the case that regular citizens end up pretty alright on the other side.
Curious what people think about this!
Also, many of the links at beginning (YouTube, World Bank, Rentier states, etc) don't work.
Makes sense. Good clarification!
While I think LW’s epistemic culture is better than most, one thing that seems pretty bad is that occasionally mediocre/shitty posts get lots of upvotes simply because they’re written by [insert popular rationalist thinker].
Of course, if LW were truly meritocratic (which it should be), this shouldn’t matter — but in my experience, it descriptively does.
Without naming anyone (since that would be unproductive), I wanted to know if others notice this too? And aside from simply trying not to upvote something because it’s written by a popular author, anyone have good ideas for preventing this?