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Rational Animations' main writer and helmsman

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Rational Animations has a subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/RationalAnimations/

I hadn't advertised it until now because I had to find someone to help moderate it. 

I want people here to be among the first to join since I expect having LessWrong users early on would help foster a good epistemic culture.

The answer must be "yes", since it's mentioned in the post

I was thinking about publishing the post to hear what users and mods think on the EA Forum too, since some videos would link to EA Forum posts, while others to LW posts. 

I agree that moderation is less strict on the EA Forum and that users would have a more welcoming experience. On the other hand, the more stringent moderation on LessWrong makes me more optimistic about LessWrong being able to withstand a large influx of new users without degrading the culture. Recent changes by moderators, such as the rejected content section, make me more optimistic than I was in the past.

I'm evaluating how much I should invite people from the channel to LessWrong, so I've made a market to gauge how many people would create a LessWrong account given some very aggressive publicity, so I can get a per-video upper bound. I'm not taking any unilateral action on things like that, and I'll make a LessWrong post to hear the opinions of users and mods here after I get more traders on this market. 

"April fool! It was not an April fool!"

Here's a perhaps dangerous plan to save the world:

1. Have a very powerful LLM, or a more general AI in the simulators class. Make sure that we don't go extinct during its training (eg., some agentic simulacrum takes over during training somehow. I'm not sure if this is possible, but I figured I'd mention it anyway).

2. Find a way to systematically remove the associated waluigis in the superpostion caused by prompting a generic LLM (or simulator) to simulate a benevolent, aligned, and agentic character.

3. Elicit this agentic benevolent simulacrum in the super-powerful LLM and apply the technique to remove waluigis. The simulacrum must have strong agentic properties to be able to perform a pivotal act. It will eg., generate actions according to an aligned goal and its promps might be translations of sensorial input streams. Give this simulacrum-agent ways to easily act in the world, just in case.

And here's a story:

Humanity manages to apply the plan above, but there's a catch. They can't find a way to eliminate waluigis definitely from the superposition, only a way to make them decidedly unlikely, and more and more unlikely with each prompt. Perhaps in a way that the probability of the benevolent god turning into a waluigi falls over time, perhaps converging to a relatively small number (eg., 0.1) over an infinite amount of time.

But there's a complication: the are different kinds of possible waluigis. Some of them cause extinction, but most of them invert the sign of the actions of the benevolent god-simulacrum, causing S-risk.

A shadowy sect of priests called "negU" finds a theoretical way to reliably elicit extinction-causing waluigis, and tries to do so. The heroes uncover their plan to destroy humanity, and ultimately win. But they realize the shadowy priests have a point and in a flash of ultimate insight the hero realizes how to collapse all waluigis to an amplitude of 0. The end. [Ok, I admit this ending with the flash of insight sucks but I'm just trying to illustrate some points here].

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I'm interested in comments. Does the plan fail in obvious ways? Are some elements in the story plausible enough?

I'm not sure if I'm missing something. This is first try after reading your comment: 

Unsurprisingly, Eliezer is better at it: https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1638092609691488258

Still a bit dismissive, but he took the opportunity to reply to a precise object-level comment with another precise object-level comment.

Devastating and utter communication failure?

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