That observation makes a narrow window valuable: whatever we want preserved must be radiated now, redundantly, and in a form that minds unlike ours can decode with high probability. The useful direction is not “build a grand vault” but “broadcast a self-bootstrapping curriculum until the last switch flips.”

A way to do this without needing to create a formal ("universal language") alignment curriculum would be to just broadcast a lot of internet data, somehow emphasizing dictionaries (easier to first interpret) and LessWrong text. One way to emphasize would be to send them more times. Maybe include some formalisms that try to indicate the concept of language.

In case we're already able to radiate arbitrary bitsequences, there might not be any large hurdles to doing this.

I'm curious if others have similar experiences or clarifying thoughts.

I have a similar experience. I'm not sure what to write, but here are some thoughts.

• The healthy kid probably wouldn't be excited by a back-flip robot arbitrarily instantiated in a hell. Its awesomeness is context-dependent.
• What kinds of motivation do you have access to?
  • In fiction, the protagonists have motivation even when the world seems really bad. They want to change it. Most real humans instead keep the torture out of mind, but not you.
  • Separately, a theorist may devote so much energy to their object of study that it becomes intrinsically important to their mind. This is myopic in a way (it's about the thing itself). But maybe it can be non-myopic if thinking about it is instrumental, so contextualizing doesn't diminish it. Maybe passion and heroic motivation can then fuse together.

I read your prior comment as saying:

1. Vegans make moral judgments
2. Therefore all vegans are judgemental

In my comment, (1) was ~"most vegans believe others are acting immorally." The same isn't true of OP's other examples, like polygamists.

To elaborate more, I'd be confused in the same way by this labeling of, e.g., someone who opposed historical slavery but wasn't loud about their beliefs every time they encountered it. Like, to me the central case of "A judges B" is "A thinks B is not living up to moral standards to the degree it's reasonable to expect/hope others to". 

I think vegans are quiet about their beliefs for reasons that are usually not "they don't actually think it's that bad for others to eat animals." I think the reasons are usually things like, "it wouldn't help to speak up right now," "they'd just mock me," etc.

The below is a sort of reductio ad absurdum of dictionary definitions being helpful here.

This seems like one of those definitions that says little because it refers back to the base word (in this case "judge"). What does this actually mean? The link defines "judge" as "to form a negative opinion about". I'm not sure what "characterized by a tendency (to form a negative opinion about) harshly" would mean. Replacing "harshly" with its dictionary definitions only makes things worse: whether a belief is "excessively critical or negative" is relative to one's beliefs; some would label the belief "buying animal products is morally similar to buying things produced with slave labor" as "excessively critical or negative", while others wouldn't. "unduly severe in making demands" - same thing with "unduly severe", also an "opinion" itself doesn't make demands.

(Also, there's the question of if "characterized by a tendency" means "as an intrinsic personal quality", or if "consistently as conclusions of one moral idea" counts)

most vegans are not judgemental

I don't understand. Most vegans believe buying animal products is immoral, which implies they believe people who do are acting immorally. I'm not sure what else judgement could mean. (Maybe "expresses this"?)

Edit: This is copied from my comment in the thread, I should have written it at the start.

To elaborate more, I'd be confused in the same way by this labeling of, e.g., someone who opposed historical slavery but wasn't loud about their beliefs every time they encountered it. Like, to me the central case of "A judges B" is "A thinks B is not living up to moral standards to the degree it's reasonable to expect/hope others to". 

I think vegans are quiet about their beliefs for reasons that are usually not "they don't actually think it's that bad for others to eat animals." I think the reasons are usually things like, "it wouldn't help to speak up right now," "they'd just mock me," etc.

To avoid double-counting of evidence, I'm guessing that the first person controls the @ENERGY twitter account. Its bio says "Led by @SecretaryWright".

I independently noticed this too, and I think it's true of mathematical universes. I also think this universe's primitives include something (qualia) that is not expressible in our formal systems (i.e. 'math' as we know it), even in principle. (I don't think any current ontology is close to being able to resolve core questions about this universe's primitives.)

There's a history here of discussion of how to make good air purifiers (like this). Today I learned about ULPA filters and found someone's DIY video using one of them.

A ULPA filter can remove from the air at least 99.999% of dust, pollen, mold, bacteria and any airborne particles with a minimum particle penetration size of 120 nanometres.

I recently moved to a place with worse air quality. The fatiguing effect on me is noticeable to me (though I suspect I might have vulnerable physiology). It makes me want to try to update far in the other direction: maybe any level of impurity causes bad effects, but I didn't notice them (or associate it with air quality) cause some impurity was constant even with normal filters.

My current idea is to try to make a system like in the video, plus a tube so I can get the filtered air directly to my face. I don't know how feasible it is to filter a whole room to that level.

I'd be interested if anyone experienced with decision theory has thoughts on these comments: (post) first, second

Do you believe that actors can not protect themself from blackmail with pre-commitments?

I don't believe that. If I could prove that, I could also prove the opposite (i.e. replace 'cannot' with 'can always'), because what a decision problem is about is arbitrary. The arbitrariness means any abstract solution has to be symmetric. In example 1, an actor protects themself from blackmail. We can also imagine an inverted example 1, where the more sophisticated conditioner instead represents the blackmailer.

I think that what happens when both agents are advanced enough to fully understand this kind of problem is most similar to example 5. But in reality, they wouldn't recursively simulate each other forever, because they'd think that would be a waste of resources. They'd have to make some choice eventually. They'd recognize that there is no asymmetric solution to the abstract problem, before making that choice. I don't know what their choice would be.

I can give a guess, with much less confidence than what I wrote about the logic. Given they're both maximally advanced, they'd know they'll perform similar reasoning; it's similar to the prisoners-dillema-with-clone situation. They could converge to a compromise policy-about-blackmail-in-general for their values in their universe, if there are any such compromises available for their values in their universe. I'm finding it hard to predict what such a 'compromise' could be when they're not on relatively equal footing, though, e.g. when one can blackmail the other, and the other can't do it back. When they are on equal footing, e.g. have equal incentive to blackmail each other, maybe they would do this: "give each other the things the other wants, in cases where this increases our average value" (which is like normal acausal trade).

After thinking about it more (38 minutes more, compared to when I first posted this comment. I've been heavily editing/expanding it), it does feel like a game of 'mutually' choosing where-they-end-up-in-the-logical-space, and not one of 'committing'. Of course, to the extent the decisions are symmetric, they could choose to lock in "I commit to not give in to blackmail, you commit to make and follow through on blackmail"; they just both wouldn't want that.

I don't quite know what else there is to do in that situation other than "symmetrically converge to the mid-point". Even though I dislike where that leads in "unequal" cases like I described two paragraphs up (<the better-situated superintelligence makes half the blackmail, and the worse-situated superintelligence gives in every time>). Logic doesn't care what I dislike. If this is true, I'll just have to hope the side of good wins situationally and can prevent this from manifesting in cases it cares about.

Disclaimer: the above is about two superintelligences in isolation, not humans.