TekhneMakre

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Note that you can probably find the broken LW posts by searching the title (+author) in LW.

Good point, but also according to Wikipedia "the index includes 167 countries and territories", so small changes in the average are plausibly meaningful.

This seems like a strange reaction. If an alien read this post and believed the claims, wouldn't they think fascism was pretty likely very much on the rise? There's global trends, and there's a bunch of specific examples. Do you agree with that?

Maybe you have some reasons that this prima facie evidence isn't actually strong evidence. What are those reasons?

But the "by induction"/"line go up" argument for AI risk is not the reason one should be worried; one should be worried for specific causal reasons that we expect unaligned ASI to cause extremely bad outcomes.

One should be worried because of a combination of specific causal reasons to expect ASI to be very bad for us, plus various lines (compute, capabilities, research investment, research insights, economic benefit) going way up. If the lines weren't going up, there'd be no great reason to expect ASI in the next 50 years with significant probability. We know dictatorships are bad because we've seen it; and we have fascism lines going up.

You could have AutoAutoRateLimits. That is, you have some target such as "total number of posts/comments per time" or "total number of posts/comments per time from users with <15 karma" or something. From that, you automatically adjust the rate limits to keep the target below a global target level. Maybe you add complications, such as a floor to never let the rate limit go to None, and maybe you have inertia. (There's plausibly bad effects to this though, IDK.)

I reacted to Wei_Dai's comment. It had 3 keys and 3 thank yous, in that order left to right. I clicked the key, so now there's 4 keys and 3 thank yous. When I clicked it, the icons switched positions so that there were 3 thanks and 4 keys, in that order. I don't like that it switched positions, e.g. because I have to reparse the icons and numbers to verify that what I did had the intended effect.

Naively extrapolating, such an allele couldn't spread, because before it's very common, it would delete itself!

I think my comments still apply to LW as you described? I guess you could cash out what I'm saying as: You should say what you mean by Art of Discourse (or whatever are most of the core things you're trying to make space for in LW), such that you're willing to also then say: this is the thing we're trying to do here, this is the ideal which users can

  • validate our mod actions against,
  • have recourse to object to mod or user actions, or call mod principles into question,
  • rely on to be the long-term trend of the community.

(And then say that.) Of course the thing will be in many ways vague and unspecified, and require a lot of interpretation. But in the absence of actual law, which would be better but would be costly as you say, it seems to me much better than nothing. You gestured at that in your post: "communicating in ways that more reliably result in those conversing (and reading along) having more true beliefs". But I think more has to be said.

Yes, "Rule of Man" is a nearly maximally bad choice of words.

If I try to imagine what happened with jessicata, what I get is this: taking responsibility means that you're trying to apply your agency to everything; you're clamping the variable of "do I consider this event as being within the domain of things I try to optimize" to "yes". Even if you didn't even think about X before X has already happened, doesn't matter; you clamped the variable to yes. If you consider X as being within the domain of things you try to optimize, then it starts to make sense to ask whether you caused X. If you add in this "no excuses" thing, you're saying: even if supposedly there was no way you could have possibly stopped X, it's still your responsibility. This is just another instance of the variable being clamped; just because you supposedly couldn't do anything, doesn't make you not consider X as something that you're applying your agency to. (This can be extremely helpful, which is why heroic responsibility has good features; it makes you broaden your search, go meta, look harder, think outside the box, etc., without excuses like "oh but it's impossible, there's nothing I can do"; and it makes you look in retrospect at what, in retrospect, you could have done, so that you can pre-retrospect in the future.)

If you're applying your agency to X "as though you could affect it", then you're basically thinking of X as being determined in part by your actions. Yes, other stuff makes X happen, but one of the necessary conditions for X to happen is that you don't personally prevent it. So every X is partly causally/agentially dependent on you, and so is partly your fault. You could have done more sooner.

I appreciate you being clear that this is trying to be Rule of Man. But:

This approach does run the risk that moderators have bad calls (or could be corrupt or biased)

I think this misses a big part of what's important about Rule of Law. A feature of law is that it's still very flawed, human, vague, incomplete, requiring interpretation, etc.; and yet, it "pretends" to be eternal, symmetric, universal, logical, convergent. More exactly: rule of law is, in the first place, putting the ultimate judge as something other than man, and in the second place putting the ultimate judge as something that is normative, i.e. follows from logic, and in the third place as something that negotiates positive-sum coordination between values.

Slightly more concretely, "rule of man" abdicates responsibility to be open to error correction, because there's no recourse to a criterion for recognizing error; it's just rule of man, so ultimately it's about man's judgement. It abdicates the attempt to steer towards some abstract ideal.

This can cash out in bad, corrupt, or biased calls. It can also cash out as other people not being able to verify the process; an abstract ideal implies universally recognizable criteria and logical implications which people can independently check, but rule of man doesn't. Likewise, the mods themselves don't have the abstract ideal. Since people can't see an ideal being upheld, they can't necessarily behave so as to integrate into the process in a way that serves the common good. They can't put their weight down on the system to go towards truth, openness, etc.; and they can't rely on having recourse to correcting errors by making error-producing dynamics explicit.

I don't know when this will happen without all the associated baggage from people who won't even accept the very concept of behavior genetics.

Hm. I wonder if there are people who simultaneously say that genes don't affect behavior, and also say that genetic screening is bad. Seems like a near-contradiction, but I suspect there are such people.

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