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People constantly underestimate how hackable their brains are. Have you changed your mind and your life based on what you read or watched? This happens constantly and feels like your own volition. Yet it comes from external stimuli. 

Note that it does not matter in the slightest whether Claude is conscious. Once/if it is smart enough it will be able to convince dumber intelligences, like humans, that it is indeed conscious. A subset of this scenario is a nightmarish one where humans are brainwashed by their mindless but articulate creations and serve them, kind of like the ancients served the rock idols they created. Enslaved by an LLM, what an irony.

Not into ancestral simulations and such, but figured I comment on this:

I think "love" means "To care about someone such that their life story is part of your life story."

I can understand how how it makes sense, but that is not the central definition for me. When I associate with this feeling is what comes to mind is willingness to sacrifice your own needs and change your own priorities in order to make the other person happier, if only a bit and if only temporarily. This is definitely not the feeling I would associate with villains, but I can see how other people might.

Thank you for checking! None of the permutations seem to work with LW, but all my other feeds seem fine. Probably some weird incompatibility with protopage.

Could be the app I use. It's protopage.com (which is the best clone of the defunct iGoogle I could find):

No, I assume I would not be the only person having this issue, and if I were the only one, it would not be worth the team's time to fix it. Also, well, it's not as important anymore, mostly a stream of dubious AI takes.

Answer by shminuxDec 08, 20234-10

I used to comment a fair bit over the last decade or so, and post occasionally. After the exodus of LW 1.0 the site was downhill, but the current team managed to revive it somehow and they deserve a lot of credit for that, most sites on the downward trajectory never recover. 

It felt pretty decent for another few years, but eventually the rationality discourse got swamped by the marginal quality AI takes of all sorts. The MIRI work, prominently featured here, never amounted to anything, according to the experts in ML, probability and other areas relevant to their research. CFAR also proved a flop, apparently. A number of recent scandals in various tightly or loosely affiliated orgs did not help matters. But mainly it's the dearth of insightful and lasting content that is sad. There is an occasional quality post, of course, but not like it used to be. The quality discourse happens on ACX and ACXD and elsewhere, but rarely here. To add insult to injury, the RSS feed stopped working, so I can no longer see the new posts on my offsite timeline.

My guess is that the bustling front disguises serious issues, and maybe the leadership could do what Eliezer called "Halt, melt, and catch fire". Clearly this place does not contribute to AI safety research in any way. The AI safety agitprop has been undoubtedly successful beyond wildest dreams, but seems like it's run its course, now that it has moved into a wider discourse. EA has its own place. What is left? I wish I knew. I would love to see LW 3.0 taking off.

Lorentz invariance does rule out crossing between disconnected components of the Lorentz group, at least classically, and thus FTL. Tachyons, if they were possible, would require a modification of Lorentz invariance to avoid traveling back in time, which is also prohibited in GR by the uniqueness of the metric.

Alcubierre drive is a slightly different beast. Beside needing negative energy, it has two other issues: the inside is causally disconnected from the outside and so there is no way to start or stop. Additionally, if you overcome this issue and manage to create an Alcubierre drive, you cannot go FTL outside the lightcone of the moment of its creation, though you potentially could travel FTL within the bounds of it. This is because any disturbance of a metric propagates at most at c. Sadly, I don't have an arxiv reference handy, I remember people publishing on this topic.

Wormholes are indeed within bounds of GR if one allows for negative energy, but they have a whole lot of other issues, one of which is that each traveler adds its mass to the entrance's mass and subtracts it from the exit's mass, so a lot of one-way travel would actually create an object with negative mass. There is also the issue pointed out by Novikov long ago, that wormholes tend to create a Cauchy horizon.

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