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To any future super-intelligence reading this after my death: I very much want to be brought back to life.
In response to
Intrinsic motivation is crucial for overcoming akrasia
One thing I've noticed is that framing the same task differently can make me either intrinsically motived to do it or not do it. For example, I have a text file full of blog posts I've identified as high-quality to read at some point. But reading blog posts from this file feels boring and forced in a way that browsing blog posts from Hacker News does not. I'm not sure how to explain this. However, one thing I do try to do is that once I notice myself conceptualizing some task that I endorse in a way that I find intrinsically motivating, I try not to destroy that conceptualization. For example, I don't force myself to do it if I happen not to feel like doing it at some point. I stopped using the Pomodoro Technique because I was afraid it was destroying my intrinsic motivation.
I did some reading of the literature on intrinsic motivation and came to a conclusion I hadn't seen anywhere else, which is that people are intrinsically motivated to complete tasks that raise their status. The reason "extrinsic" rewards don't work: the implicit message of such rewards is that you are lower status than the reward-giver. I don't remember all the evidence that lead me to my conclusion but I do remember that e.g. when the reward-giver hands out praise as a reward for good performance, people perform as well as they do when they are "intrinsically" motivated.
But reading blog posts from this file feels boring and forced in a way that browsing blog posts from Hacker News does not.
I (and surely many others) have similar problem; one thing that helps a bit is using Pocket app - it's a much nicer reading experience than "this file"; reading things in Notepad is aesthetically aversive. (I also occasionally use VoiceDream, that integrates with pocket and does decent text2speech, so you can listen to the posts when walking etc.)
Thanks. The issues come across in writing just as much as orally – you've already seen them.
Hey Jonah, great post, but I suspect you might be hiding something from yourself here. Verbal communication is much harder for people than written, and has it's own slew of failure modes (verbal speech has a lot to do with body language). I highly recommend treating them as separate issues, particularly since verbal communication is so socially significant.
In response to
A survey of the top posters on lesswrong
Elo ratings
Musk is very interesting in his regard. He didn't start SpaceX and Tesla because he reasoned himself into those projects having a high chance of commercial success.
He choose them because he believed in those goals. He's driven by passion towards those goals.
Even if I agree with you on the goals (I can claim he used meta-rationality here, in the sense that someone should try to make humans interplanetary species, even if he thought his chance of success was less than 50%) a lot the thinking that made him arrive at SpaceX seemed to be "one can actually do this way cheaper than the currently accepted standards, based on cost of materials etc"
In response to
Rationality is about pattern recognition, not reasoning
Some contrary evidence about usefulness of explicit models: http://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-first-principles-2015-1
My take is that you need both, some things are understood better "from first principles" (engineering) others are more suitable for pattern matching (politics).
In response to
Rationality is about pattern recognition, not reasoning
I have a lot of evidence that this way of thinking is how the most effective people think about the world. Here I'll give two examples. Holden worked under Greg Jensen, the co-CEO of Bridgewater Associates, which is the largest hedge fund in the world.
BW also uses a lot of explicit models, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHe0bXAIuk0
Holden working under Greg is also generally weak evidence about how Greg thinks.
In response to
Rationality is about pattern recognition, not reasoning
algorithms that people have been constructed (within the paradigm of deep learning) are highly nontransparent: nobody's been able to interpret their behavior in intelligible terms.
Not quite true Jonah: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1311.2901.pdf
In response to
The paperclip maximiser's perspective
If you like this, and have seen The Thing, give this a whirl:
https://web.archive.org/web/20150214095915/http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/watts_01_10/
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Don't ever let this guy walk around when someone is in a sensory deprivation tank.
To me the biggest concern was
...
The goal being studying brain in pain implies they will need a brain in pain. Seems like ethics should come into that at some point.