solhando

I'm skeptical, but I don't know enough about the norms of the 60's to really estimate what they were thinking.

It seems quite hard to believe that if a normal-looking experimenter is telling you to administer a lethal amount of electric shock to someone screaming (and how convincing were those screams?) in the next room, that it's an actual lethal electric shock. If they guy who designed the experiment doesn't seem concerned about the apparent sound of suffering, then either you're in a one-of-a-kind torture experiment like Squid Game and everyone involved... (read more)

Participants were led to believe that they were assisting in a fictitious experiment, in which they had to administer electric shocks to a "learner". These fake electric shocks gradually increased to levels that would have been fatal had they been real.

I never understood how this was accomplished. How do you convince people participating in a psychological study (many of them Yale students) to believe that they are in an experiment where they are instructed to administer a lethal electric shock? In what world is "you murder someone" a possible outcome of a... (read more)

Having read all of Plato, all of Xenophon (another student of Socrates) and most of Aristotle all in the past year or two, I have pretty decent context to offer some thoughts on this. Long comment incoming, and I don't address the majority of the ideas of the post since it would get somewhat repetitive and be even longer than this.

First, this whole essay is criticizing Socrates, but it's really only talking about Plato's representation of Socrates. These are different things. Plato was a student of Socrates, and there's way we can infer much about what is... (read more)

The American sphere of care does not limit itself to a specific ethnic core. Despite recent anti-immigrant backlash, what it means to be an "American" is not tied up with your genetic makeup.

This is not true of China. You can't "become" Chinese any more than you can change your ethnicity.

The Chinese government cares for the Chinese almost exclusively, with little concern given to anyone else, and certainly no one else can join the group of people they are concerned for. This is the sort of government that uses AI for the betterment of China, with everyon... (read more)

What recipe would you recommend for someone who doesn't have a microwave browning skillet? I'd like to try it, but I don't want to purchase a skillet until I've tasted the potential myself. 

I think answering the question of "Who can be included within political life?" is quite important to answer before deciding on whether you prefer China or not. We may very well get an ASI alligned to the interests of the nation which created it, to the detriment of others.

China is inherently a nation of Chinese people, and nominally a nation for the various minorities that are already there. The government represents the interests of this in-group, and almost never lets anyone else in. It's essentially impossible to become a Chinese citizen for everyone bu... (read more)

The comparison between Church founders and Startup founders is accurate. In startup communities, The Purpose Driven Church is a well known manual for building startup culture, attracting dedicated employees, and raising capital. I know more than one founder who claims it was by far the most useful book for creating their company, beating out all the books that are literally about creating startups. 

I write in the books I read so I just flip to about where I stopped underlining or taking notes. 

Couldn't you just ask "What would you estimate the probability I won the lottery before I asked you this question?" Or perhaps ask it a thousand questions generated randomly, with the one you actually want to know the answer to mixed in. There would be almost no information content in that question if your oracle knew there was a 99.9% chance any given question was generated randomly. 

I agree with your first post.

However, I think the part of empathy that people will say you're missing is that you're putting "yourself" in someone else's shoes, which is only half of it. Imagine you were Isekai'd away into someone else's life where you had a history of being ineffective, unaccomplished, and self-pitying, with problems that could be solved quickly with relatively little objective effort. You can probably easily imagine how you'd quickly take actions to at least fix most of the low-hanging fruit in this situation. Clean your room, get a job,... (read more)

Thank you for the article. I'll give it a read.

It's not an easy answer. I'm a self-interested person, and I realized a while ago that many of my most productive and interesting relationships, both personal and in business, are the direct result of my activity on the internet. I already waste a lot of time commenting my thoughts, sometimes in long form, so I figure if I'm going to be reacting to stuff publicly, I might as well do so in the form of a blog where others might pick up on it. If that results in something good for me, influence, relationships, de... (read more)

I think the night-watchman concept is interesting, and probably is the ideal goal of alignment absent a good idea of what any other goal would ultimately lead to, but this post smuggles in concepts beyond the night watchman that would be very hard for anyone to swallow. 

"Keeping the peace" internationally is pretty ambiguous, and I doubt that any major nation would be willing to give up the right of invasion as a last resort. Even if prevention of rogue super intelligence is seen as desirable, if preventing it also entails giving up a large amount of ... (read more)

This post is timed perfectly for my own issue with writing using AI. Maybe some of you smart people can offer advice. 

Back in March I wrote a 7,000 word blog post about The Strategy of Conflict by Thomas Schelling. It did decently well considering the few subscribers I have, but the problem is that it was (somewhat obviously) written in huge part with AI. Here's the conversation I had with ChatGPT. It took me about 3 hours to write. 

This alone wouldn't be an issue, but it is since I want to consistently write my ideas down for a public audience. ... (read more)

Unrelated but where on earth is pictured at the bottom of https://ifanyonebuildsit.com/praise ? It doesn't really look like any recognizable night image so I suspect it's AI generated, but maybe I'm wrong. 

I'll admit that I find these pretty funny. Not the jokes themselves, but the fact ChatGPT rates them as funny. 

Don't prediction markets also serve as a tool for actually valuing a prediction? Without a clear metric to judge the likelihood of a prediction at the time it was made (as is the case with these one-off real world predictions like elections or what a politician will do), I'm liable to consider the guy who predicted the sun will come up tomorrow, and the guy who predicted the market will drop 8% last week as having an equal success rate. 

We need something to judge a prediction against, otherwise people would just go for easy predictions that might soun... (read more)

Somewhat unrelated to the main point of your post, but; How close are you to solving the wanting-to-look-good problem? 

I run a startup in a completely different industry, and we've invested significant resources in trying to get an LLM to interact with a customer, explain and make dynamic recommendations based on their preferences. This is a more high-touch business, so traditionally this was done by a human operator. The major problem we've encountered is that it's almost impossible to have an LLM to admit ignorance when it doesn't have the informati... (read more)

I'm a layman, but the "Hulk Sperm" method seems the most plausible EC-bypass method to me, and EC-bypass generally seems a more plausible route than EC-making. After reading the paper, it seems like any of the routes to EC-making seem either speculative, or very prone to failure (while also being hard to verify as a failure).  

an issue with spermatogonial transplant into testicles is that GV (e.g. edited) spermatogonia are likely to be stressed and imperfectly maintained, and therefore are likely to be outcompeted by normal spermatogonia and die out

If... (read more)