I just straight up don't believe the codeforces rating. I guess only a small subset of people solve algorithmic problems for fun in their free time, so it's probably opaque to many here, but a rating of 2727 (the one in the table) would be what's called an international grandmaster and is the 176th best rating among all actively competing users on the site. I hope they will soon release details about how they got that performance measure..
Tangential, but my immediate reaction to your example was "ugly kitten? All kittens are cute!", so I searched specifically for "ugly kitten" on Google and it turns out that you were right! There are a lot of ugly kittens even though I never saw them! This probably says something about society..
3 (not so easy) steps to understand consciousness:
epistemic status: layman, so this is unlikely to have any value to those well-versed in philosophy, but their input is ofc appreciated if given
1. Understand what difficult words like consciousness and qualia point to. This is hard because most of our words point to objects/relations in the physical world and "what it is to be like someone/sth"/"the blueness of blue" does not. I've seen people first getting acquainted with these words have trouble disentangling these concepts from things in the physical world, eg: signals travelling through nerves. However, these people aren't usually that interested in philosophy of mind much anyways. The weirdness of consciousness is what makes it interesting, and without noticing the weirdness, why would they be interested in it instead of the workings of the liver eg?
2. Understanding the extreme success of physicalism (ie the belief that everything is physical) through the history of humanity. Ghosts, gods, and vis vitalis are the examples usually cited, but of course we could consider every phenomenon which was initially unexplained and then later explained by science as a victory of the physicalist worldview. On lesswrong it's imo unlikely that there are many people who would have trouble with this point, but given broader society (religion, astrology, occult, etc..) I do consider this point difficult.
After these two steps, quick thinking people might notice the tension between point 1 and 2: How come any time in the history of humanity when we thought we have a non-physical object we turned out to be mistaken yet consciousness is clearly non-physical?
There are (imo) many wrong ways to resolve this tension, however the correct way is one with which I believe many lesswrongers (at least if they're similar to me and dissimilar to the ideal rationalist in this respect) would have some trouble:
3. Humility. You have to conceive of the possibility that you're mistaken about an experience which is, in some ways, closest to your perception: that there is something to be like you. I'm not saying (at least at this point) to accept it, just that you should simply consider the possibility (similarly to how you would consider a given mathematical statement to be true and then false, even though it can logically only be one of true or false) or, as people around here usually refer to this, do a bayesian calculation! It's important that when I say Bayesian calculation I strictly mean the calculation and not any phenomenal part of it: we want that you(r possible counterpart) in the alternate, possibly not-actual, but conceivable world where there is no phenomenal consciousness to also be able to execute the bayesian calculation! So what is the Bayesian calculation in detail exactly? There are two possible worlds/possibilities whose odds we are curious about:
W1. The folk conception of non-physical consciousness exists, there is something to be like me.
W2. The folk conception of non-physical consciousness does not exist, there is nothing to be like me, BUT the world is such that in my physical brain a statement is encoded: I have first-hand, direct access to my own non-physical consciousness.
In turn we have two pieces of (Bayesian) evidence:
E1. point 2 about the previous track-record of the physicalist worldview.
E2. My immediate access to my consciousness: my belief that there is something to be like me and that I can't be mistaken about this.
The key, here, is to notice that E2 is predicted both in W1 AND in W2. We have a specific expression for this type of evidence! That's right: not evidence!
Therefore, irrespective of the priors, we are much, much more likely to be in W2 than in W1. Sure, there is the question of why is there such a weird belief encoded in our brains? Is it society? Is it biology? I don't know. But who cares? Notice that that is a question purely about the physical world: what is the causal chain leading to my incorrect belief about my immediate access to my consciousness existing? Nothing to do with the hard problem.
Now, I would like to talk about an (imo) wrong resolution which might be common here: After someone understands point 1 and point 2, they might try to resolve the tension by insisting that even though consciousness seems non-physical, it IS physical or at least "supervenes" on the physical. These people are usually in the process of noticing their confusion so I urge them to take to plunge, conceive of the possibility that they're wrong, do the the bayesian calculation and don't redefine words (similarly: ghosts are by definition non-physical even though they don't exist)!
Feedback appreciated!
I really enjoyed Brandon Sanderson's Secret Project #3 and I recommend it to everyone. Without spoiling anything, here is a fun fact: In it, people stack pebbles into heaps; similarly to Sorting Pebbles Into Correct Heaps, a text from this community I still think about semi-frequently (another is The Virtue of Silence). So if you take recommendations from random lesswrong users, give it a try!
1I didn't believe it, so I tried to reproduce. It actually works. Scary..
https://chat.openai.com/share/312e82f0-cc5e-47f3-b368-b2c0c0f4ad3f
EDIT: Shared link no longer works and I can't access this particular chat log after logging in either.
Thanks and that's fair. I would have liked to bet mostly as a hedge to allow myself to not think about aliens in the next 10 years (I semi-regularly get roped into investigating some claims, but the UFO community's epistemics is the worst I've seen and it is always an awful experience), but the bet wasn't really positive EV for me either, so I don't think I will bet at worse odds, but you can probably find someone on the r/UFOs subreddit if you want, some of them seem to be celebrating the new world order now.
It's particularly interesting from 5:30: if I'm not misunderstanding him, he implies that they found extra-terrestrial bodies inside the landed/crashed vehicles, which makes me think this is deliberate misinformation. Why would an advanced entity, capable of traveling between stars, separate their body from their spacecraft? Not impossible, but encountering this evidence is much more likely imo if they are crafting a story from common memes about aliens rather than reporting something actually real.
If your offer isn't just to lc, then I accept: My 20 usd against your 20*99=1980 usd, both sides adjusted for inflation and the time value of money using US Treasury Bills, paid either at 2033.06.06. or when you admit a conclusive proof was found. Are these terms acceptable?
Recently, OpenAI implemented a "Share link" feature which is a bit different than the one mentioned in the parent comment (It creates a snapshot of the conversation which is not updated as the user continues to chat, but at any time they can generate a new link if they wish. I especially like that you can switch between sharing anonymously or with your name.); therefore, this feature request can be considered closed: Now the authenticity of chatGPT's output can be proved! Thanks to everyone who supported it and OpenAI for implementing it (even though these events are probably unrelated)!
As AIs don't have the same origin as humans, it is basically inconceivable to me that they will ever share the internal processes underlying their "emotions" no matter how good they get at surface "emoting", in my opinion this makes it impossible to have a true connection/meaningful relationship with them as humans, even if many people in the future will fail to see this, but otherwise I largely agree with your post (a brain implemented in silicon could be a meaningful friend to a human (eg ems), people will prob fully integrate AIs into the social scene (this is a mistake in my view), people will modify their brains in (what now seems like) radical ways).