alexgieg

At the moment, I haven't left the Church's community, so I don't feel that loss just yet.

There's a potential middle-way there.

I don't know much about Mormonism, mind, but I watch and read a Biblical scholar, Dan McClellan, who's skeptical of everything and then some. His YouTube channel, and other videos in which he appears, as well as his papers and books, are all in line with the academic consensus in Biblical scholarship, meaning he deconstructs every single Christian belief (and most Jewish ones too) to the point it's easy to assume he's a militant ... (read more)

Knowing truth doesn't provide, by itself, human connection. In the Mormon church you had a community, people with whom you interacted and had a common ground, shared interests, and collective goals. When one breaks with such a community, without having first established a new one, the result may be extreme loneliness.

The way to fix that is to find a new community. Many atheists and rationalists schedule periodic meetings to interact with each other and talk in person, so depending on your need of connection that might suffice. If not, there are church-like... (read more)

Indeed. I imagine it'd have to happen in four steps:

1. As you say, investigate each cognitive function independently. They won't show the kind of independency psychometrics prefers, since there are overlaps between the different functions, but it'd be a good start.

2. If that one proves robust, then investigate the axis between the introverted and extraverted modes of the four basic types. My hunch is these four axes would take the form of four bimodal distributions.

3. Then, if that one also proves robust, investigate the existence and distribution of stabl

It then scores the answers across 4 axes

I've read about the MBTI for a while. Not in extreme depth, but also not via the simplifications provided by corporate heads. In depth enough to understand the basics of Jungian psychology on which the MBTI is based, though. So what I will say is likely going to differ significantly from what you learned in this course.

So, the most important thing is, the (real) MBTI four letters do not represent extremes on four different axes. That they do is one such simplification.

The core of the Jungian hypothesis on personality... (read more)

I'd say this is the point at which one starts looking into current state-of-the-art psychology (and some non-scientific takes too) to begin understanding all the variability in human behavior and cognition, and which kinds of advantages and disadvantages each provides from different perspectives, from the individual, to the sociological, to the evolutive.

Much of that disappointment is solved by that. Some of it deepens. The overall effect is a net positive though.

Unfortunately, they aren't rational. I developed this theme a little bit more in another reply, but to put it simply, in the US GAI is being pursued by insane individuals. No rational argument can stop someone who believes in that. And the other sides will try to protect themselves from these.

Admittedly, nuclear weapons are not a perfect analog for AI due to many reasons, but I think it is a reasonable analog.

We've had extreme luck when it comes to nuclear weapons. We not only had several close calls that were deescalated by particularly noble individuals doing the right thing, but also, back when the URSS had barely developed theirs and the US alone had a whole stockpile of warheads, we had the good luck of its leadership also being somewhat moral and refusing to turn nukes into a regular weapon, which was followed by MAD forcing everyone t... (read more)

I’m assuming that - and please correct me if I’m misinterpreting here - “extinguish” here means something along the lines of, “remove the ability to compete effectively for resources (e.g. customers or other planets)” not “literally annihilate”.

I wish that were the case, but my reference is imagining a paranoid M.A.D. mentality coupled with a Total War scenario unbounded by moral constraints, that is, all sides thinking all the other sides are X-risks to them.

In practice things tend not to get that bad most of the time, but sometimes they do, and much o... (read more)

Unfortunately, those in positions of power won't listen. From their perspective it's simply absurd to suggest that a system that currently directly causes, at most, a few dozen induced suicide deaths per year, may explode into death of all life. They have no instinctive, gut feeling for exponential growth, so it doesn't exist for them. And even if they acknowledge there's a risk, their practical reasoning moves more along arms-race lines:

"If we stop and don't develop AGI before our geopolitical enemies because we're afraid of a tiny risk of an extinction, ... (read more)

But obviously, factory farm animals feel more pain than crickets. The question is just how much pain?

This paper is far from a complete answer, but it may help:

• Sneddon, Lynne U., Robert W. Elwood, Shelley A. Adamo, and Matthew C. Leach. “Defining and Assessing Animal Pain.” Animal Behaviour 97 (2014): 201–12. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2014.09.007. Open access: https://www.wellbeingintlstudiesrepository.org/acwp_arte/69/.

This isn't a dichotomy. We can farm animals while making their lives reasonably comfortable. Their moments of pain would be few up to and until they reach the age for slaughter, which itself can be made stress-free and painless.

Here in Brazil, for example, we have huge ranches where cattle move around freely. Cramping them all in a tiny area to maximize productivity at the cost of making their lives extremely uncomfortable, as in the US factory farm system, may happen here, but I'm not personally aware of it so unusual that is. The US could do it the same ... (read more)

A few remarks that don't add up to either agreement or disagreement with any point here:

Considering rivers conscious hasn't been a difficulty for humans, as animism is a baseline impulse that develops even in absence of theism, and it takes effort, at either the individual or cultural levels, for people to learn not to anthropomorphize the world. As such, I'd suggest a thought experiment that allows for the possibility of a conscious river, even if composed of atomic moments of consciousness arising from strange flows through an extremely complex network o... (read more)

Where is all the furry AI porn you'd expect to be generated with PonyDiffusion, anyway?

From my experience, it's on Telegram groups (maybe Discord ones too, but I don't use it myself). There are furries who love to generate hundreds of images around a certain theme, typically on their own desktop computers where they have full control and can tweak parameters until they get what they wanted exactly right. They share the best ones, sometimes with the recipes. People comment, and quickly move on.

At the same time, when someone gets something with meaning at... (read more)

I'd like to provide a qualitative counterpoint.

Aren't these arguments valid for almost all welfare programs provided by a first-world country to anyone but the base of the social pyramid? For one example, let's take retirement. All the tax money that goes into paying retirees to do nothing would be much better spent by helping victims of malaria etc. in 3rd world countries. If they weren't responsible enough to save during their working years to be able to live without working for the last 10 to 30 years of their lives, especially those from the lower midd... (read more)

When this person goes to post the answer to the alignment problem to LessWrong, they will have low enough accumulated karma that the post will be poorly received.

I don't think this is accurate, it depends more on how it's presented.

In my experience, if someone posts something that's controversial to the general LW consensus, but argues carefully and in details, addressing the likely conflicts and recognizing where their position differs from the consensus, how, why, etc., in short, if they do the hard work of properly presenting it, it's well receive... (read more)

I mean sure if you take self-reports as the absolute truth (...)

Absolute truth doesn't exist, the range is always ]0;1[. 0 and 1 require infinitely strong evidence. What imprecisions in self-reporting do generate is higher variance, skewing, bias etc., and these can be solved by better causal hypotheses. However, those causal hypotheses must be predictive and falsifiable.

why go with the convoluted point about aro-ace trans women (...)

Because that's central to the falsifiability requirement. Consider: if transgender individuals explicitly telling res... (read more)

Feels like an example of bad discourse that you dismiss it on the basis of ace trans women without responding to what Blanchardians have to say about ace trans women.

Thanks for the link, but I'd say the text actually confirms my point rather than contradicting it. The numbers referred to:

"In this study, Blanchard (...) found that 75% of his asexual group answered yes. Similarly, Nuttbrock found that 67% of his asexual group had experienced transvestic arousal at some point in their lives. (...) 45.2% of the asexuals feel that it applies at least a littl... (read more)

Yep, the idea autogynephilia explains transgender identities can be shown to be false by referring a single piece of direct evidence: it isn't difficult to find aro-ace trans people. That right there shows autogynephilia isn't a universal explanation. It may apply to some cases, maybe, but transgender identities definitely go way beyond that.

Besides, but also mainly, we have evidence for physiological causes:

• Frigerio, Alberto, Lucia Ballerini, and Maria Valdés Hernández. “Structural, Functional, and Metabolic Brain Differences as a Function of Gender Ide