:)
Honestly, there are a bunch of links I don't click, because the 2 or 3 word titles aren't descriptive enough. I'm a big fan of the community norm on more technically minded subreddits, where you can usually find a summary in one of the top couple comments.
So, I'm doing what I can to encourage this here. But mostly, I thought it was important on the AI front, and wanted to give a summary which more people would actually read and discuss.
Here are some thoughts on the viability of Brain Computer Interfaces. I know nothing, and am just doing my usual reality checks and initial exploration of random ideas, so please let me know if I'm making any dumb assumptions.
They seem to prefer devices in the blood vessels, due to the low invasiveness. The two specific form factors mentioned are stents and neural dust. Whatever was chosen would have to fit in the larger blood vessels, or flow freely through all of them. Just for fun, let's choose the second, much narrower constraint, and play with some nu...
The article only touches on it briefly, but suggests faster AI takeoff are worse, but "fast" is only relative to the fastest human minds.
Has there been much examination of the benefits of slow takeoff scenarios, or takeoffs that happen after human enhancements become available? I vaguely recall a MIRI fundraiser saying that they would start putting marginal resources toward investigating a possible post-Age of EM takeoff, but I have no idea if they got to that funding goal.
Personally, I don't see Brain-Computer Interfaces as useful for AI takeoff...
TL;DR of the article:
This piece describes a lot of why Elon Musk wanted to start Neurolink, and how Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) currently work, and how they might be implemented in the future. It's a really, really broad article, and aims for breadth while still having enough depth to be useful. If you already have a grasp of evolution of the brain, Dual Process Theory, parts of the brain, how neurons fire, etc. you can skip those parts, as I have below.
AI is dangerous, because it could achieve superhuman abilities and operate at superhuman speeds. Th...
TL;DR: What are some movements you would put in the same reference class as the Rationality movement? Did they also spend significant effort trying not to be wrong?
Context: I've been thinking about SSC's Yes, We have noticed the skulls. They point out that aspiring Rationalists are well aware of the flaws in straw Vulcans, and actively try to avoid making such mistakes. More generally, most movements are well aware of the criticisms of at least the last similar movement, since those are the criticisms they are constantly defending against.
However, searchin...
I'm not so sure. Would your underlying intuition be the same if the torture and death was the result of passive inaction, rather than of deliberate action? I think in that case, the torture and death would make only a small difference in how good or bad we judged the world to be.
For example, consider a corporate culture with so much of this dominance hierarchy that it has a high suicide rate.
Also:
...Moloch whose buildings are judgment! ... Lacklove and manless in Moloch! ... Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy!
... Real holy laughter in the ri
I'd add that it also starts to formalise the phenomenon where one's best judgement oscillates back and forth with each layer of an argument. It's not clear what to do when something seems a strong net positive, then a strong negative, then a strong positive again after more consideration. If the value of information is high, but it's difficult to make any headway, what should we even do?
This is especially common for complex problems like xrisk. It also makes us extremely prone to bias, since we by default question conclusions we don't like more than ones we do.
This is really sad. I'm sorry to hear things didn't work out, but I'm still left wondering why not.
I guess I was really hoping for a couple thousand+ word post-mortem, describing the history of the project, and which hypotheses you tested, with a thorough explanation of the results.
If you weren't getting enough math input, why do you think that throwing more people at the problem wouldn't generate better content? Just having a bunch of links to the most intuitive and elegant explanations, gathered in one place, would be a huge help to both readers and writ...
I don't see any reason why AI has to act coherently. If it prefers A to B, B to C, and C to A, it might not care. You could program it to prefer that utility function.*
If not, maybe the A-liking aspects will reprogram B and C out of it's utility function, or maybe not. What happens would depend entirely on the details of how it was programmed.
Maybe it would spend all the universe's energy turning our future light cone from C to B, then from B to A, and also from A to C. Maybe it would do this all at once, if it was programmed to follow one "goal"...
I rather like this way of thinking. Clever intuition pump.
What are we actually optimizing the level-two map for, though?
Hmmm, I guess we're optimizing out meta-map to produce accurate maps. It's mental cartography, I guess. I like that name for it.
So, Occam's Razor and formal logic are great tools of philosophical cartographers. Scientists sometimes need a sharper instrument, so they crafted Solomonoff induction and Bayes' theorem.
Formal logic being a special case of Bayesian updating, where only p=0 and p=1 values are allowed. There are third alternat...
True. Maybe we could still make celebrate our minor celebrities more, along with just individual good work, to avoid orbiting too much around any one person. I don't know what the optimum incentive gradient is between small steps and huge accomplishments. However, I suspect that on the margin more positive reinforcement is better along the entire length, at least for getting more content.
(There are also benefits to adversarial review and what not, but I think we're already plenty good at nitpicking, so positive reinforcement is what needs the most attentio...
Awesome link, and a fantastic way of thinking about how human institutions/movements/subcultures work in the abstract.
I'm not sure the quote conveys the full force of the argument out of that context though, so I recommend reading the full thing if the quote doesn't ring true with you (or even if it does).
I agree that philosophy and neuroscience haven't confirmed that the qualia I perceive as red is the same thing as the qualia you experience when you look at something red. My red could be your blue, etc. (Or, more likely, completely unrelated sensations chosen randomly from trillions of possibilities.) Similarly, we can't know exactly what it's like to be someone else, or to be an animal or something.
However, it's perfectly reasonable to group all possible human experiences into one set, and group all possible things that an ant might experience in another...
that still rules out the globehopping, couchsurfing lifestyle.
Not necessarily. I'd be fine with it if my girlfriend decided to hitchhike around Europe for a month or two, and I'm pretty sure she'd be fine with me doing the same. There's no reason the one with the job couldn't take a vacation in the middle, too.
If the unemployed partner did this twice a year, for 2 months at a time, that'd be 1/3 of their time spent globetrotting. If they did this 3x a year, (2 months home, then 2 months exploring, then 2 months home again) that'd be pushing it, but might be stable long term if they could find ways to make sure the working party didn't feel used or left out.
This was a useful article, and it's nice to know the proper word for it. Let me see if I can add to it slightly.
Maybe a prisoner is on death row, and if they run away they are unlikely to suffer the consequences, since they'll be dead anyway. However, even knowing this, they may still decide to spend their last day on earth nursing bruises, because they value the defiance itself far more than any pain that could be inflicted on them. Perhaps they'd even rather die fighting.
It looks like you don't reflectively endorse actions taken for explicitly semiotic r...
Agreed. I'd love to see even more of all of these sorts of things, but the low margin nature of the industry makes this somewhat difficult to attack directly, so there isn't anywhere near as much money being invested in that direction as I would like.
I believe NASA has gotten crop yields high enough that a single person can be fed off of only ~25 m^2 of land, (figure may be off, or may be m^3 or something, but that's what I vaguely recall.) but that would have been with fancy hydroponic/aquaponic/aeroponic setups or something, and extremely high crop densi...
A job is a cost
Agreed. When I said the "cost to local jobs" I was being informal, but referring to the (supposed) increase in unemployment as Walmart displaces local, less efficient small businesses.
Paying people to do a job which can be eliminated is like paying people to dig holes and fill them back in. I'd rather just give them the money than pay them to do useless work, but I'll take the second option over them being unemployed.
As an interesting side note, I think this might put me on the opposite side of the standard anti-Walmart argument...
these are called "recessions" and ... "depressions".
Ha, very good point. Our current society is largely built around growth, and when growth stops the negative effects absolutely do trickle down, even to people who don't own stocks. In fact, companies were counting on those increases, and so have major issues when they don't materialize, and need to get rid of workers to cut costs.
I will mention that through most of history and prehistory, the economic growth rate has been much, much, smaller. I haven't read it, so I can't vouch for ...
I'm not really sure how shortform stuff could be implemented either, but I have a suggestion on how it can be used: jokes!
Seriously. If you look at Scott's writing, for example, one of the things which makes it so gripping is the liberal use of amusing phrasing, and mildly comedic exaggerations. Not the sort of thing that makes you actually laugh, but just the sort of thing that is mildly amusing. And, I believe he specifically recommended it in his blog post on writing advice. He didn't phrase his reasoning quite like this, but I think of it as little bit... (read more)