I am skeptical of your premise. I know of zero humans who terminally value “diamonds” as defined by their chemical constitution.
Indeed, diamonds are widely considered to be a fake scarce good, elevated to their current position by deceptive marketing and monopolistic practices. So this seems more like a case study of how humans’ desires to own scarce symbols of wealth have been manipulated to lead to an outcome that is misaligned with the original objective.
The problem is that normal people very often give up collective resources to look good. They just don't give up their personal resources. For the AI, the former is sufficient.
People attributing their own shortcomings to others is rather weak evidence.
It is also pretty unbelievable. (Spoilers ahead.)
The security around keeping the whole secret is way off. This is their biggest priority, and they know it. Yet the children can just walk where they are not supposed to go, and discover it.
The technological measures do not match up, and they absolutely can have sensors that make conspiring and/or escaping much harder.
The children are too competent. Well, we can forgive this one, but it really takes things too far; e.g., one child has learned to make a device from scraps of other devices to disable their GPS ... (read more)
The damage chance per encounter is higher with sharks than cows, surely?
The claim here is definitely 'audiobooks would generally be more relaxing than the written word.'
I personally find it somewhat true; I need to listen to fiction very attentively to not lose the plot, but I can jump back into a nonfiction podcast/audiobook after not listening for 10 minutes just fine (most of the time).
No adult updates their probability that dragons are real after reading Game of Thrones
Without fiction, the hypothesis "dragon" would not even exist in our minds. We are wasting cultural bandwidth on this concept, and our probability estimation of it is orders of magnitude more than if we did not have it plastered everywhere in fiction.
such that you update on them.
This is a valid point, and I think an extreme case of it can be seen in fundamentalist religions. But my prior is that anyone who understands the argument the OP has presented, is smart eno... (read more)
Can you write a post about things you learned via video games? I am highly skeptical that they can teach anything transferable to the real world for STEM-adjacent adults. (Programming video games like https://store.steampowered.com/app/375820/Human_Resource_Machine/ can teach some programming, but they are more like gamefied Leetcode than a strategy/puzzle game. Most non-programmers I have introduced these games to could not even win the starting levels.)
Epistemic status: I am not an expert on this debate, I have not thought very deeply about it, etc.
My point is more about prioritization. English, math, programming and computer literacy, economics, basic home skills (cooking, trivial repairs, etc.), and possibly rationality (though the existence of “The Dark Valley of Rationality” makes me a bit hesitant on this one) are much better subjects for a “general info” curriculum.
PS: Knowing about elementary particles (without a mathematical model of them) is trivial. You can fit all such facts into a single year’s science curriculum. The things that take time to learn are calculations, e.g., finding the mass of some reagent after some chemical reaction.
Ironically, I am a believer in FOSS AI models, and I find OpenAI’s influence anything but encouraging in this regard. The only thing they are publicly releasing is marketing nowadays.
Taboo “racing”? I don’t understand what concrete actions were thought to have been skipped.
I don't know what you mean by skipped. Here's some more concreteness though:
--Thanks to OpenAI, there is more of an "AI research should be made available to everyone" ethos, more of a "Boo anyone who does AI research and doesn't tell the world what they did or how they did it or even decides not to share the weights!" Insofar as this ethos persists during the crucial period, whichever labs are building AGI will be under more internal and external pressure to publish/share. This makes it harder for them to go slow and be cautious when the stakes are high.
--... (read more)
I find that understanding the ways in which dolphins are mammalian, is very much an informational challenge; I need to know a lot more biology to be able to use the category of “genetically mammal” than just plain old “fish.” Obviously, knowing more is better, but it is not obvious to me that forcing everybody to learn the more informed categories is societally optimal. I doubt anyone but specialists will ever find the information instrumentally useful, so we are just wasting some limited bandwidth to teach people stuff they don’t need to know. (On the other hand, people mostly waste their time with, e.g., learning about the differences between ten different Robin characters, so perhaps the endeavor is justified after all.)
The idea of "general education" is that it's good for ordinary people to learn lots of things that were discovered by specialists: partially because we value knowledge for its own sake, but also because it's hard to tell in advance what knowledge will end up being useful. In principle, you could reject the idea that general education is generally good, but if you're going to be consistent about what that entails, I don't think anyone who reads this website actually wants to go there. Do I really need to know that matter is made of "atoms", that have a "nuc... (read more)
I just finished the story. I think the main idea is obviously good, but I find the execution too simplistic. The princess’s intelligence comes off as human in her social interactions (not superhuman), and humans seem dumbed down. I don’t think the AI could have forced everyone to “upload” with the level of coercion shown in the novel.
I myself would not have uploaded unless I was already dying. I see no benign reason that the process of uploading needs to be destructive.
I also doubt people with real power would be easily swayed to upload, e.g., the original... (read more)
This post is simplistic and vague. E.g., does the OP think dressing in dirty, shabby clothes (which, from a nonsignalling perspective, aren’t a negative in our environment) is not an obvious failure of marketing that leads to lost opportunities?
Anyhow, caring about signaling is a priority in most cultures that I have glimpsed, almost all businesses, and human nature. Against such a strong prior, the OP fails to provide any strong updates to the contrary.
An interesting fact came to my mind; music that affects one's mental state is forbidden in Islam.
Perhaps the reason this theme of "sinful pleasure" keeps repeating is the observation that pleasure is a reward signal that does not quite match the utility functions of the conscious mind. At least, that has always been the key motivator of this idea subspace to me.
Can you imagine what it would be like to try to convey to pre-music folk even that music is real and that it might be worth learning how to listen to it?
This analogy is capturing my current understanding of this post and its various comments pretty well: Looking is like music, in that it is a difficult, voluntaryish act of observing and manipulating hidden mental states. This will result in wireheading, among other things, but it might be sometimes useful. (Note that music is also wireheading, but it can still be useful in narrow contexts.)
But mechanistic world models do suggest that meaning in a traditional (mystical? I can’t really define it, as I find the concept itself incoherent) sense does not (and cannot) exist; so I think the “negative” connotations are pretty fair, it’s just that they aren’t that negative or important in the first place. (“Everything adds up to normalcy.”) Rebranding is still a sound marketing move, of course.
(Unrelated.) Have you considered putting an RSS field of your Twitter account on its bio? This way people can follow you without you needing to approve them, and since it’s read-only, your burden won’t increase.
(Not to mention that RSS is a much better medium than Twitter in the first place.)
What useful problems do PPLs solve? Ideally some applications that are interesting for us non-corporate people. Can it be used for medical statistics (e.g., in nutrition)? (Any examples?) Is the reason it is not used the illiteracy of the scientists, or are the mainstream methods better?
Expertise status: I am just starting with RL.
Will using a hardcoded model of the environment improve these models, or do the models need the representations they learn?
Using EfficientZero's architecture, how many hours does it take on a single TPUv2 for the agent to reach amateur human level? In general, is EfficientZero being sample efficient or compute efficient?
What is the currently most compute efficient algorithm for simple, two-player deterministic games with a lot of states (e.g., go)?
PS: The reason I am asking is that I learn stuff by coding much b... (read more)
I myself sometimes feel bad when I engage in, say, writing fiction. (Reading fiction is pretty obviously useless, so I know I am just doing it for “fun.” It doesn’t confuse me the way producing fiction does.) I was like this before I even knew there was a Rationality subculture. I don’t try to justify these behaviors at all; I am just not sure if they are aligned with my values, or not, and in what quantities they are healthy.
So while I agree with the gist of this post, I believe the core issue to be more of a tradeoff rather than an obvious evil.
The stock's value declines (as supply has gone up). So the "frozen" money declines, too.
(I simply use unused books to raise the monitor. Works like a charm.)
I doubt Google can "add closed source components" to Chrome with any success. MS will simply recreate the extensions in open-source, getting a lot of mindshare and PR in the process. Android became what it is because Google was ahead of the curve and other companies did not know how useful mobile OSes were going to be.
See also Nyxt. I haven't tried it myself yet, as its macOS support seems to be immature, but it is one of those projects I have an eye on. It could one day be the emacs of web browsers.
There is also https://github.com/emacs-eaf/emacs-application-framework, but the security might be sketchy. I am not holding my breath for performance either.
Why do you want to switch to macOS? The only thing going for it is having Adobe and Office software. On the other hand, it is likely to do explicit on-device scanning, it doesn't support Docker well, it is generally slow and can hang when the internet connection has problems. Hell, even its API for changing the background wallpaper doesn't work reliably for me.
How is it that iOS doesn't kill it? I have yet to see any app that can run in the background continuously; Even apps that use the location API as a workaround will be eventually killed.
Well, one person is much more likely to keep the stock, while some of the thousand will cache out. This seems to me to encourage consumption, discourage investment and labor on the first order, while the consumption itself can encourage investment on the second order. I don't know how these opposing effects will play out in the long run, but the short term effect is most probably going to be high inflation and costly labor.
I am now too invested in zsh to find any other shell worthwhile, but if I could go back, I would not use a traditional shell at all; I would code a custom shell using Common Lisp. If this is too much effort, I would recommend trying out both zsh (possibly use OhMyZSH if you don't want to waste time setting it up properly yourself) and fish, and sticking with the one you like better.
hammerspoon, phoenix.js are opensource alternatives that are more powerful and lightweight in their niches. (BTT still has more breadth and ease of use.)
If you use cut (or awk or sed for cutting), try perl. I have found it to be way more intuitive, powerful, and only a bit less concise.
I have tried Obsidian, Joplin, Logseq, Notion, Evernote, Onenote, Google Notes, Apple Notes, and various other markdown editors. I have ultimately found emacs’ org-mode plus git (for syncing, backups, and, well, version control) plus ripgrep/fzf (for searching and quickly jumping to a file/section) plus org-super-links (which provides automatic backlink insertion/deletion) plus gpg (for encrypting sensitive files/sections; emacs and org-mode support for gpg is superb) to be leagues ahead of the competition. Its mobile story is pretty sad though (There are ... (read more)
Even the citizens of Kardashev Type III civilization can’t all date Emma Stone and/or Keanu Reeves at the same time.
This is not trivial. Genetic engineering/plastic surgery/other forms of self-enhancement can push everyone to pretty much the same ceiling. Of course, "status" itself is kind of a relative "resource," and it can affect "attractiveness," but our society is far from this being its bottleneck.
I also believe that even status is not a conserved resource. As other resources increase and the general population becomes more resourceful, more ethic... (read more)
One relevant point is that remote work might be a “disruptive” technology: cheaper, more suitable for certain niches, etc, but not as good as the traditional thing. As time passes and the technology matures, it might claim increasing niches, such that in the end it surpasses or becomes an essential additive to the traditional technology.
Isn't the academic grad school basically this same model, at scale? I do not see any improvements here that are scalable.
Indeed, a lot of the most ridiculous human behavior is non-experts mimicking experts randomly and picking the wrong attributes.
Khamenei is not actually challenged by new people in the system. His position is more or less permanent. But to get to that position, then, yes, he must have done some things "right."
Telegram was a much better choice for this purpose. Their APIs are completely open (supporting alternative third-party clients and bots has been one of their priorities since years ago), and there are fantastic wrapper libraries available. Their clients are also native, not the Electron crap. There was already (at least) one Telegram [TUI](https://github.com/zevlg/telega.el), too.
PS: Cute. :-)
It would be great if Lesswrong online events could be recorded and put in a podcast. Live is great if you plan to participate, but for just listening, it sucks.
One of the good examples I have seen is the Techmeme podcast; They host a lot of Clubhouse/Twitter/etc live chats, and they post the content to their podcast. Some tools have recording as a built-in feature, e.g., Telegram's voice chats.
Can you provide concrete examples of the specialized pieces?
I think people are already tolerant of the level of hypocrisy that can be useful. For example, a new convert to Islam will have more slack in doing unislamic things.
Anyhow, this is not an isolated matter. Any kind of punishment has the potential to create adverse effects; Banning ransom payments can cause secret ransom payments, banning drugs powers gangs, banning one carcinogenic chemical can make companies use an even worse carcinogenic chemical, ... . There is no general solution to these, but I’m inherently skeptical of claims that favor the status quo of “rabbits” in a rabbit-stag game.
This is the most intuitive answer to me, as well. It’s also extremely difficult, and it‘s unclear how it is going to be useful for doing alignment generally.
Perhaps one idea is to train AI to write legible code, then use human code review on it. This seems as safe as our current mode of software development if the AI is not actively obfuscating (a big assumption).
There are weaker computational machines than Turing machines, like regexes. But you don really care about that, you just want to ban automatic reasoning. I think it’s impossible to succeed with that constrain; Playing Go is hard, people can’t just read code that plays Go well and “learn from it.”
Some examples:
A related problem is being mistaken about how high the quality bar of a task actually is. Perhaps also known as 'obsessing.'
I think it’s possible to just upload the video to Youtube, and then download its automatically generated subtitle with youtube-dl, and finally convert that subtitle into plain text (using, e.g., https://github.com/NightMachinary/.shells/blob/master/scripts/python/vtt2txt2.py ).
Spotify is centralizing podcasting, and plans to implement the same monopolistic, privacy-invasive ad policies Google/Facebook are adhering to. It is worth considering whether allowing them to do this is a net harm for the consumers.
Considering that DIY is widely acknowledged to be viable, my prior is that the marketing around Alienware is bullshit and it’s just fine. Care to point to hard data that refutes this?