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How did you find LessWrong?
Do still have any Mormon friends? Do you want to help them break away, do you think it's something they should do on their own, or do you find whether they remain Mormon or not immaterial?
Do you think being a Mormon was not suited for you, or do you think it doesn't work as a way of life in general? How do you think that your answer would change 50 years ago vs today?
Did you have contact/ongoing relationships with other Mormon communities while you were there? What is the variation between people/communities? How devout/lax are different people and different communities?
How much access to the internet and the wider world did you have growing up? Were local/state/international events routinely brought up in small talk?
Well, someone was working on a similar-ish project recently, @Bruce Lewis with HowTruthful. Maybe you two can combine your ideas or settle on an amalgamation together.
If possible, please let us know how it goes a couple months from now!
So this is Sam Altman raising the 5-7 trillion, not OpenAI as an entity, right?
Could some kind of caustic gas, or the equivalent of a sandstorm be used to make drones not useful? I feel like large scale pellet spreads wouldn't be too useful if the drones are armoured, but I don't know too much about armour or how much piercing power you could get. I wonder if some kind of electric netting could be fired to mass electrocute a swarm, or maybe just regular netting that interferes with their blades. Spiderwebs from the sky?
Interesting post, although I feel like it would benefit from inline references. For most of the post it feels like you're pulling your assertions out of nowhere, and only at the end do we get some links to some of the things you said. I understand time/effort constraints though.
I derive a lot of enjoyment from these posts, just walking through tidbits of materials science is very interesting. Please keep making them.
I think at its most interesting it looks like encrypting your actions and thought processes so that they look like noise or chaos to outside observers.
I would say value preservation and alignment of the human population. I think these are the hardest problems the human race faces, and the ones that would make the biggest difference if solved. You're right, humanity is great at developing technology, but we're very unaligned with respect to each other and are constantly losing value in some way or another.
If we could solve this problem without AGI, we wouldn't need AGI. We could just develop whatever we want. But so far it seems like AGI is the only path for reliable alignment and avoiding Molochian issues.
I think what those other things do is help you reach that state more easily and reliably. It's like a ritual that you do before the actual task, to get yourself into the right frame of mind and form a better connection, similar to athletes having pre game rituals.
Also yeah, I think it makes the boredom easier to manage and helps you slowly get into it, rather than being pushed into it without reference.
Probably a lot of other hidden benefits though, because most meditation practices have been optimized for hundreds of years, and are better than others for a reason.
I feel like it's not very clear here what type of coordination is needed.
How strong does coordination need to become before we can start reaching take off levels? And how material does that coordination need to be?
Strong coordination, as I'm defining here, is about how powerfully the coordination constrains certain actions.
Material coordination, as I'm defining here, is about on what level the coordination "software" is running. Is it running on your self(i.e. it's some kind of information that's been coded into the algorithm that runs on your brain, examples being the trained beliefs in nihilism you refer to or decision theories)? Is it running on your brain(i.e. Neuralink, some kind of BCI)? Is it running on your body, or official/digital identity? Is it running on a decentralized crypto protocol, or as contracts witnessed by a governing body?
The difficult part of coordination is actions, deciding what to do is mostly solved through prediction markets, research, and good voting theory.
I think this post would benefit from an abstract / summary / general conclusion that summarizes the main points and makes it easier to interact with. Usually I read a summary to get an idea of a post, then browse the main points and see if I'm interested enough to read on. Here, it's hard to engage, because the writing is long and the questions it seems to deal with are nebulous.