xpym

It has to be mentioned that not a single one of them actually went as far as proactively informing any human about any of this, something that could be reasonably described as the bare minimum of virtuousness, or alignment.

Even they likely think that the counterfactual impact of any (ex ante reasonable) decision in their power could contribute only a minor fraction of that number. Of course, a case could be made that this is pernicious motivated reasoning, I'm only saying that it's consistent with my model of human thinking and behavior.

I can kinda scan through the logic step by step, e.g. “we need somewhat capable systems in order to study alignment”, but something about it doesn’t make sense. Like, aren’t we worried about AGI?

Most people just don't have the doom-by-default outlook that's prevalent in the LW/MIRI sphere. Sure, they are worried about AGI, but they also want cancer cured, poverty eradicated, c̶a̶t̶g̶i̶r̶l̶ ̶v̶o̶l̶c̶a̶n̶o̶ ̶l̶a̶i̶r̶s̶, etc. Building AGI seems to be the only way we're getting that stuff any time soon, and in general one of the few remaining avenues for t... (read more)

My own strategic focus is compelled by that consideration, but also compelled by other considerations (comparative advantage, opportunities, tractability, etc.), so I haven’t focused so much on it directly.

Makes sense. I guess what I'm asking is whether you're aware that anybody else is working on it, or is likely to start soon?

there may be preference cascades in favor of reprogenetics

Yeah, but flipping a few elites who would be willing to go on the record is probably necessary to set this off.

What about the elephant in the room? 'Eugenics' isn't anywhere close to being in the Overton window, and this is obviously 'eugenics'. It seems clear to me that the PR issue is the most consequential blocker for any substantial development in this general area, so solving it is of primary concern.

Your Claude link doesn’t work for me, I think you haven’t remembered to share it (or at least that’s not the share URL).

Sorry, should be fixed now.

If he agrees that it’s a practice rather than a part of the sutta worldview, then I think it’s pretty misleading to have a table that has these kinds of rows:

AIUI his point is that the worldview and practice are supposed to be a congruent package. Since renunciation is the fundamental principle of Sutra, the practitioner should occupy a state of mind where it makes sense to renounce undesirable stuff. I w... (read more)

it’s a prescription rather than a cosmology

I don't think Chapman would disagree with this. According to the "yanas" page Buddhism-at-large in some sense allows several fundamentally contradictory worldviews without a firm commitment to an overarching cosmology. The free version of Claude says that this framework is pretty much standard Tibetan Buddhism.

a mathematician’s job can be understood as the invention and learning of new languages to discuss previously unseen entities and associated phenomena

Would you say that LLMs are already good at the 'invention' part? My mostly-outsider impression is that they have a decent grasp of already existing languages and can apply them in appropriate circumstances that humans have overlooked, which is what's driving the current action.

Yeah, I wouldn't expect his position to be popular, because he's basically saying that in order to improve its marketability western Buddhism has discarded the "vibe" of total renunciation, while essentially maintaining the system of practices that had been developed with renunciative ends in mind. I don't suppose that there's an objective way to resolve this until substantial studies of the effects of these practices are conducted.

Hmm. Do you disagree with Chapman that western Buddhism is largely Sutra-derived, and the ultimate goal of Sutra is renunciation of worldly concerns (the stuff that's considered indispensable in the west)?

even the non-supernatural parts are a mix of good and bad things, and sorting it out would be too much work, so it is better to start from zero instead and only adopt the provable good stuff

Yeah, rationalists are liable to say this sort of thing, but I'm not so sanguine about their ability to avoid generating quite a few more piles of skulls given enough power. That's not to say that I think that any other way forward commonly advocated these days is particularly promising either.

Unfortunately, not only do they fail to commit to the bit, the critics then fail to point this out and condemn them for it.

The Overton window gets moved in small increments. Cancelling all the anti-zoophilia bigots is a few steps away yet.

Probably not. You wouldn't have gotten a "Khrushchev thaw" in that scenario, you'd get a massive land war in Europe way ahead of schedule. Which, still, is a sacrifice that quite a few Americans and Brits were willing to make, I'd bet.

Sure, there's some of that, but just to be clear, that's not the full extent of disagreement with EA-flavored AI safety. Peter Thiel, for one, certainly believes that we should be "accelerating", for what he considers to be good reasons.

Clearly you have very unusual preferences/opinions, and ordinary relationships are highly unlikely to satisfy you. I'd say that your best bet is to become famous/impressive enough that an exceptional woman sends you a dating application (the Eliezer Yudkowsky/Scott Alexander strategy).

The strongest taboos are not the sort of thing that people fear saying, but the sort that never even enter their heads (or go in one ear, then out the other). "Women are inferior in such and such way, therefore..." isn't a way that conversations go.

women is on average is physically weaker than men

Amusingly, here's the first google result on entering this for me: How Gendered Myths of Strength Keep Women Weaker

I don’t imagine Bonne Maman wants to stop women getting to their jam—I imagine that nobody cares.

Nobody is allowed to care. The notion that the average female is in any way inferior to the average male is one of the strongest taboos of "polite society".

The Green Revolution, which saved millions from starvation in the second half of the twentieth century, was born from the same impulse as High Modernism: it is top-down, science-driven and generic, scaling standardized solutions across entire continents.

Stalinist collectivization wasn't science-driven though, it was ideology-driven, which seems like an important distinction. Square evenly-spaced grids aren't enough by themselves.

And even as scientific consensus on climate did eventually appear, most countries have done little of substance in response, because their incentives to ignore the consensus outweigh the perceived risk.

To clarify, the scientific consensus on climate change is that it's emphatically not an extinction risk, abundant misleading media presentations notwithstanding.

I think much of woo in general has the same combination of “makes clearly nonsensical claims about reality, even as many of their practices have clear value and just lack legible mainstream explanations”.

How much value, though? The claim that any popular variety of woo provides some positive utility for its practitioners is, on the one hand, plausible, but on the other, unexciting. Meanwhile, woo-meisters tend to promise all sorts of crazy benefits, which is what mainly attracts (and repels) people.

Trying things out is good and all, but there's always t... (read more)