Mathematician, alignment researcher, doctor. Reach out to me on Discord and tell me you found my profile on LW if you've got something interesting to say; you have my explicit permission to try to guess my Discord handle if so. You can't find my old abandoned LW account but it's from 2011 and has 280 karma.
A Lorxus Favor is worth (approximately) one labor-day's worth of above-replacement-value specialty labor, given and received in good faith, and used for a goal approximately orthogonal to one's desires, and I like LessWrong because people here will understand me if I say as much.
Apart from that, and the fact that I am under no NDAs, including NDAs whose existence I would have to keep secret or lie about, you'll have to find the rest out yourself.
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You might complain that the reason it doesn't solve stability is just that the thing doesn't have goal-pursuits.
Not so - I'd just call it the trivial case and implore us to do better literally at all!
Apart from that, thanks - I have a better sense of what you meant there. "Deep change" as in "no, actually, whatever you pointed to as the architecture of what's Really Going On... can't be that, not for certain, not forever."
Say more about point 2 there? Thinking about 5 and 6 though - I think I now maybe have a hopeworthy intuition worth sharing later.
At a meta level, I find it pretty funny that so many smart people seem to disagree on the question of whether questions usually have easily verifiable answers.
And at a twice-meta level, that's strong evidence for questions not generically having verifiable answers (though not for them generically not having those answers).
2A reckless China-US race is far less inevitable than Leopold portrayed in his situational awareness report. We’re not yet in a second Cold War, and as things get crazier and leaders get more stressed, a “we’re all riding the same tiger” mentality becomes plausible.
I don't really get why people keep saying this. They do realize that the US's foreign policy starting in ~2010 has been to treat China as an adversary, right? To the extent that they arguably created the enemy they feared within just a couple of years? And that China is not in fact going to back down because it'd be really, really nice of them if they did, or because they're currently on the back foot with respect to AI?
At some point, "what if China decides that the west's chip advantage is unacceptable and glasses Taiwan and/or Korea about it" becomes a possible future outcome worth tracking. It's not a nice or particularly long one, but "flip the table" is always on the table.
Leopold’s is just one potential unfolding, but a strikingly plausible one. Reading it feels like getting early access to Szilard’s letter in 1939.
What, and that triggered no internal valence-washing alarms in you?
Getting a 4.18 means that a majority of your grades were A+, and that is if every grade was no worse than an A. I got plenty of As, but I got maybe one A+. They do not happen by accident.
One knows how the game is played; and is curious on whether he took Calc I at Columbia (say). Obviously not sufficient, but there's kinds and kinds of 4.18 GPAs.
If we momentarily pay attention to something about our own feelings, consciousness, and state of mind, then (I claim) our spatial attention is at that moment centered somewhere in our own bodies—more specifically, in modern western culture, it’s very often the head, but different cultures vary. Actually, that’s a sufficiently interesting topic that I’ll go on a tangent: here’s an excerpt from the book Impro by Keith Johnstone:
The placing of the personality in a particular part of the body is cultural. Most Europeans place themselves in the head, because they have been taught that they are the brain. In reality of course the brain can’t feel the concave of the skull, and if we believed with Lucretius that the brain was an organ for cooling the blood, we would place ourselves somewhere else. The Greeks and Romans were in the chest, the Japanese a hand’s breadth below the navel, Witla Indians in the whole body, and even outside it. We only imagine ourselves as ‘somewhere’.
Meditation teachers in the East have asked their students to practise placing the mind in different parts of the body, or in the Universe, as a means of inducing trance.… Michael Chekhov, a distinguished acting teacher…suggested that students should practise moving the mind around as an aid to character work. He suggested that they should invent ‘imaginary bodies’ and operate them from ‘imaginary centres’…
Johnstone continues from here, discussing at length how moving the implicit spatial location of introspection seems to go along with rebooting the personality and sense-of-self. Is there a connection to the space-referenced implementation of innate social drives that I’m hypothesizing in this post? I’m not sure—food for thought. Also possibly related: Julian Jaynes’s Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, and the phenomenon of hallucinated voices.
@WhatsTrueKittycat Potentially useful cogtech for both meditation and mental-proscenium-training.
@WhatsTrueKittycat (meta?-)cogtech worth looking at, for effectiveness, elegance, and sheer breadth of applicability.
Here's the thing - I don't really think it does work all that well in a milder setting, at least not until you've gone through the hypervigilant hell of the full-flavor version and only then got your anxiety back down. If you can't set that dial to "placid equanimity" or anything in the same zipcode, and you don't crank that dial all the way to near-max (to the point where it eventually just plain burns-in), then I posit that you won't actually end up sufficiently desperate to find all your plan's important flaws, and may well fail immediately to coalesce (if it's set way too low) or just plain get overwhelmed and shut down/quit too soon (if it's set only a little too low). You need to end up - at least at the start - in the land of anxiety-beyond-anxiety, apprised of the certain knowledge that there exists no correct direction but forwards but that all the wrong directions look a little like "forwards", too.
OK I've definitely been misunderstood here. I'm using the impersonal-you to describe what other things have to be true for powering murphy-jitsu with anxious-rumination to work at all, partially based off personal experience.
I don’t understand what you have in mind here. Why would a slight negative bias turn into a big negative bias? What causes the snowball? Sometimes I feel kinda lousy, and then the next day I feel great, right?
Sure, but if you're a little kid, I predict that your spread of valences is larger than for an adult, and if anything prone to some polarization; additionally, you might not yet even think you should distinguish "things are going poorly for me" from "I am bad". Additionally - you end up thinking about yourself in the context of the negative-valenced thing, and your self-concept takes a hit. (I predict that it's probably equally easy in principle to make a little kid enduringly manic, but that world conditions and the greater ease of finding suffering over pleasure means you get depression more often.)
I’m not sure; that’s not so obvious to me. You seem to be referring to irritability and anger, which are different from valence. They’re “moods”, I guess?
I think I've been misunderstood here. I'm talking about having someone blocking the aisle in a grocery store if you're negative-biased vs positive-biased on valence. If you're positive-biased, oh well, whatever, you'll find another way around, or even maybe take the risk of asking them politely to move. If you're negative-biased, though, screw this, screw this whole situation, screw that inconsiderate jerk for blocking the one aisle I need to get at, no I'm not going to go ask them to move - they have no reason to listen to me - have you lost your mind?
Rather than, say, bursting into rage, which I agree is not something negative valence would predict.
Irritability is, umm, I guess low-level anger, and/or being quick to anger?
Not really how I'm trying to use that here. I'm trying to gesture at the downstream effects of having a mind that experiences negatively-biased valences - being quicker to reject a situation, or to give up, or to permit contagious negative valences to spread to entities only sort of involved with whatever's going on.
That's entirely possible. I've thought about this deeply for entire tens of minutes, after all. I think I might just be erring (habitually) on the side of caution in qualities of state-changes I describe expecting to see from systems I don't fully understand. OTOH... I have a hard time believing that even (especially?) an extremely capable mind would find it worthwhile to repeatedly rebuild itself from the ground up, such that few of even the ?biggest?/most salient features of a mind stick around for long at all.