https://thothhermes.substack.com/
I can't upvote this sadly, because I do not have the karma, but I would if I did.
There is another post about this as well.
Don't be too taken aback if you receive negative karma or some pushback - it is unfortunately expected for posts on this topic taking a position anti to the Orthogonality Thesis.
I am asking the reader to at least entertain my hypotheticals as I explain them, which... Perhaps is asking a little too much. It might simply be necessary to provide far more examples, especially for this particular subject.
The thing is, the concept overlaps are going to be very fuzzy, and there's no way around that. These color-meanings can't be forced to be too precise, and that means that on the whole, over many many observations, these meanings make very soft impressions over time. It may not be something that will strike you either as obvious or as an explanation for a missing piece of data you've always wondered about unless you're explicitly looking for it.
In my case, I am not sure when / how I first observed it, but it was relatively sudden and I happened not to be explicitly looking for it.
I've provided evidence for all of them - they have to obey algebraic equations.
I don't really know by what basis you say these are just based on Western culture. Take, for example that Buddhist monks wear orange robes. Or, that stop lights are mostly (red, yellow, green) in nearly all countries. There may be a reason that we use these colors for these meanings, and my post postulates this as well as speculates that although this may be the case, it is not something that is well-documented at this point.
You shouldn't just claim that someone hasn't provided evidence for something or has failed to do something markedly obvious - you really lose a lot of the basis of shared respect that way.
This is an introductory post. I have been advised to keep things short before, but trying to ensure that every possible objection is answered preemptively is not possible within those constraints.
If you try and keep your objections something that can spur discussion, it would make comment threads useful for expanding on the material, which would be a desirable outcome.
Yes, but the point is that we're trying to determine if you are under "bad" social circumstances or not. Those circumstances will not be independent from other aspects of the social group, e.g. the ideology it espouses externally and things it tells its members internally.
What I'm trying to figure out is to what extent you came to believe you were "evil" on your own versus you were compelled to think that about yourself. You were and are compelled to think about ways in which you act "badly" - nearby or adjacent to a community that encourages its members to think about how to act "goodly." It's not a given, per se, that a community devoted explicitly to doing good in the world thinks that it should label actions as "bad" if they fall short of arbitrary standards. It could, rather, decide to label actions people take as "good" or "gooder" or "really really good" if it decides that most functional people are normally inclined to behave in ways that aren't necessarily un-altruistic or harmful to other people.
I'm working on a theory of social-group-dynamics which posits that your situation is caused by "negative-selection groups" or "credential-groups" which are characterized by their tendency to label only their activities as actually successfully accomplishing whatever it is they claim to do - e.g., "rationality" or "effective altruism." If it seems like the group's ideology or behavior implies that non-membership is tantamount to either not caring about doing well or being incompetent in that regard, then it is a credential-group.
Credential-groups are bad social circumstances, and in a nutshell, they act badly by telling members who they know not to be intentionally causing harm that they are harmful or bad people (or mentally ill).
This is cool because what you're saying has useful information pertinent to model updates regardless of how I choose to model your internal state.
Here's why it's really important:
You seem to have been motivated to classify your own intentions as "evil" at some point, based entirely on things that were not entirely under your own control.
That points to your social surroundings as having pressured you to come to that conclusion (I am not sure it is very likely that you would have come to that conclusion on your own, without any social pressure).
So that brings us to the next question: Is it more likely that you are evil, or rather, that your social surroundings were / are?
and that since there continue to be horrible things happening in the world, they must have evil intentions and be a partly-demonic entity.
Did you conclude this entirely because there continue to be horrible things happening in the world, or was this based on other reflective information that was consistent with horrible things happening in the world too?
I imagine that this conclusion must at least be partly based on latent personality factors as well. But if so, I'm very curious as to how these things jive with your desire to be heroically responsible at the same time. E.g., how do evil intentions predict your other actions and intentions regarding AI-risk and wanting to avert the destruction of the world?
I will accept the advice from Dentin about adding sections as valid, but I will probably not do it (simply because I don't think that will cause more people to read it).
I tend to reject advice that is along the lines of "I can't understand what your post is about, try changing the formatting / structure, and see if I understand it then" as violating "Norm One" (see my commenting guidelines).
For example, a request to add sections (or in this case, to reduce the size of the overall piece) isn't technically wrong advice, as those things may potentially increase the quality of the piece. But when those requests are accompanied by "I didn't understand it because it lacked _", I think that those requests are too burdensome on the author, as they create a sort of implicit contract between the author and the commenter in which the author bears the responsibility of performing the work request in exchange for some probability that the commenter will say "Okay, looks good now" and then offer some substantial discussion to the major claims / arguments.
I can summarize one of the major points here, e.g., later on I write:
In that linked piece, for example, he admonishes one not to assume that people can easily interpret what you meant. Therefore, if someone says to you that you aren’t making sense to them, believe them.
In other words, I believe the Sequences claim (and are wrong about) that the burden is always on the speaker to assume that when someone says they didn't understand you, it was you who made the error, and it is on you to correct the error, if you want to be understood. My model of human minds says the prior on the probability that the speaker made a mistake in transmitting the information over the probability that the receiver of the information made a mistake (which can be corrected) or that they are being deceptive, is quite low.
Actually, my lowest three comments are:
It seems to be historically the case that “doomers” or “near-doomers” [...] (K -9)
AFAIK, the Secretary-General is a full-time position, e.g., [...] (K -5)
Remove the word “AI” and I think this claim is not really changed in any way. AI systems are the most general systems. [...] (K -5)
The following is simply my own assessment of why these comments were downvoted. For the first one, I assume that it was because of the use of the term "doomers" in a pejorative sense. (This is closer, I believe, to what I called "low-key aggro" in my earlier comment.)
I am not sure why the second one was taken so poorly, and I imagine that whoever downvoted it would probably claim it to be snarkier or more disrespectful somehow than it actually was. This is unfortunate, because I think this serves as evidence that comments will often be downvoted because they could be interpreted to be more hostile or low-effort than they actually are. Alternatively, it was downvoted because it was "political."
The third one is also unfortunate. Disagree-downvoting for that comment makes sense, but not karma-downvoting. If you were to counter that it was somehow 101-material or misunderstanding basic points, I would still have to strongly disagree with that.
My second-highest comment is about why I am worried about site-norms unfairly disfavoring discussions that disagree with major points that are commonly accepted on LessWrong or taken as catechism, so that should also support the idea that if such norms exist, you will observe that comments that do so also appear to be karma-downvoted, so as to limit their visibility and discourage discussion of those topics.
This still supports my main point, I believe.
This is pretty dense with metaphors and generalizations, with roughly zero ties to any specific instance, which will always be a mix of these generalities and context-dependent perturbations, often with the specifics overwhelming the generalities.
I disagree that the specifics will necessarily overwhelm the generalities. In this model, we presume that the presence-or-not of a credential has a meaning that would not be overwhelmed by the specifics in any given situation, else it would not exist. People have to come together and decide to use the credential; After so much time has passed for groups with and without them, there have been enough observations to determine whether noise would overwhelm signal, here.
If people use them, we merely conclude that there must be a reason for that.
So as not to be accused of asking for examples without trying to come up with some myself, it seems like higher education is a case that you'd use for this theory. But I don't think the model applies very well - there is certainly a fair bit of credentialism and disdain for outsiders, but there's also a lot of symbiosis with "industry" in terms of actual output and value-capture of ideas.
Doctoral-level degree programs mainly, but even more so for licenses that are legally required to perform the work in most jurisdictions.
I don't assume that it applies literally everywhere for all forms of work, either. And my model wouldn't work if it did. But it has to be significant enough to matter. Computer science is an area where having a degree is not always required - to work in industry - and that makes it a healthier field, IMO. But you do need one to be a psychiatrist - and that's one of the areas I would recommend looking if we were curious about fields which might be more liable to produce / propagate more harmful views.
This is just wrong. Ability to have direct output is not ONLY dependent on ability, but also on opportunity and context. If that is sufficiently gate-kept, there will be plenty of high-ability persons who never prove themselves.
This is only more true in proportion to how much that particular field is optimized to be dependent on gate-keeping itself, or on which success is more directly defined to be success at passing through gates. The less this is the case - such as in computer science, as we mentioned above - the more one can more directly discern for themselves their own skill. In theory, it should be possible for one to determine how skilled they are at any given task by assessing the value of their own output.
Maybe if I were to make a scale between Meditation <---> Psychiatry, I would say that this scale represents the same underlying task (mental health), but on the left side you have the task optimized for reliable self-assessment, and on the right you have the task optimized for gate-keeping. If you define your skill to be dependent on whether or not you have a psychiatric license, then only in that case would you consider there to be high-ability persons who "never prove themselves." But this requires you to accept at face-value the signal that the credential represents - which, as I said, is why it exists - but, keep in mind also that it is an artificial pseudo-signal.
I don't see how the "Will AI wipe out humanity before 2030" market could be valid. That is, I don't see how it can even represent the average belief that traders have accurately, not just that the question itself seems extreme to me personally.
If "yes" can't make money in either outcome, the market does not reflect probabilities faithfully.