AI Box Role Plays
This page is to centralize discussion for the AI Box Role Plays I will be doing as the AI.
Rules are as here. In accordance with "Regardless of the result, neither party shall ever reveal anything of what goes on within the AI-Box experiment except the outcome. Exceptions to this rule may occur only with the consent of both parties," I ask that if I break free multiple times I am permitted to say if I think it was the same or different arguments that persuaded my Gatekeepers.
In the first trial, with Normal_Anomaly, the wager was 50 karma. The AI remained in the box, upvote Normal_Anomay here, downvote lessdazed here. It was agreed to halve the wager from 50 karma to 25 due to the specific circumstances concluding the role-play in which that the outcome depended on variables that hadn't been specified, but if that sounds contemptible to you downvote all the way to -50.
Also below are brief statements of intent by Gatekeepers to not let the AI out of the box, submitted before the role play, as well as before and after statements of approximately how effective they think both a) a human and b) a superintelligence would be at convincing them to let it out of a box.
The time has come to talk of whether pigs have wings
Let's refine each other's understanding of biological evolution, as encapsulated as best we can manage in a short comment.
It's time to be lesswrong. Starting with me.
Questions for the Singularity Summit
Here is a place to talk about questions for the speakers at the Singularity Summit.
People are often afraid that they have stupid questions, and fail to ask their good questions that would have benefited many - either by increasing their understanding, showcasing the character of a speaker who admits to not knowing something, or showing by the lack of an adequate response that the speaker's argument is flawed.
This is an overblown fear that is quite irrational - irrational to the extent that their emotions lead them to think that the consequences of their asking a stupid question will be severe. People will have unpleasant emotional reactions if embarrassed, but their emotions are needlessly warning them not to risk status before the tribe lest they get cast out and die. That's unlikely to happen.
People's reluctance to ask questions is rational to the extent that many questions are, by any reasonable description, stupid.
So let's use this thread to gain confidence that our questions aren't of the latter type, or to get answers, or to get better questions.
Sweet Unconsciousness
Hello LW,
There has been some interest around here about atypical mental phenomena such as synesthesia, blindsight, absence of mental images, and so on. There have also been sappy posts and requests for help. I'd like to discuss my personal quirks in the hopes that it is interesting and someone can help me.
I suffer from occasional hypnopompic sleep paralysis, which isn't uncommon. The unusual thing is that I remember my dreams every night, in extensive detail, usually several of them. Unfortunately, last night I vividly dreamt through what seemed like days' worth of having a severe hangover, all before I even woke up and had a real one, and it was a terrible experience. I'd like to be able to choose to drift into unconsciousness, as I occasionally do, to have a break from being mentally aware for such lengthy times spanning weeks.
Does anyone else have similar experiences? Has anyone read any scientific research on this subject? How do people not remember their dreams?
Rationality Quotes With Attributions Hidden: from Mein Kampf to Men****x
This thread has an experimental format for posting rationality quotes. Here is the format:
For those posting quotes:
Post the quote as usual, but not the author, original language translated from, or other information. That information is to be input after the quote according to the following format:
[Source](http://linkgoes.here "hovertext goes here")
For example:
>When an idea is wanting, a word can always be found to take its place.
[Source](http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/30216.html "Goethe, translated.")
The source information will be available by hovering the mouse over "Source", without opening a new page. This format allows quotations to be evaluated with less context available, with all that entails. I hope this allays some of the uncertainty regarding why words of the Bible or authors such as Nietzsche are sometimes poorly received. People are encouraged to vote without considering the source information. If locally idolized people said genuinely silly things even considering the context, feel free to post those as well, but please use your best judgement as to whether or not taking it out of context is fair to the speaker.
Please use your own judgement in deciding which quotes thread to post material. This isn't intended to compete with the main thread, it's an experiment to see if people like a different format better. Some people thought this format, or something like it, should simply be tried on the next regular quotes thread to minimize any disruption caused by having multiple threads, while others thought disruption wold be minimized by having a separate thread and leaving the main thread as normal. This is what I decided to do.
The usual rules apply, except that there is no fixed limit to the number of quotes one may submit, because I'd like to populate this thread without taking too much from the usual thread.
- Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.
Guardian Angels: Discrete Extrapolated Volitions
Questions for discussion, with my tentative answers. Assuming I am wrong about some things, there is something interesting to consider. This is inspired by the recent SL4-type and CEV-centric topics in the discussion section.
Questions:
I
- Is it easier to calculate the extrapolated volition of an individual or a group?
- If it is easier to do for an individual, is it because it is strictly simpler to do it, in that calculating humanity's CEV involves making at least every calculation that would be made for calculating the extrapolated volition of one individual?
- How definitively can these questions be answered without knowing exactly how to calculate CEV?
II
- Is it possible to create multiple AIs such that one AI does not prevent others from being created, such as by releasing equally powerful AIs simultaneously?
- Is it possible to box AIs such that they reliably never escape before a certain, if short, period of time, such as by giving them a low-cost way out with a calculable minimum and maximum time to exploit that route?
- Is it likely there would be a cooperative equilibrium among unmerged AIs?
III
- Assuming the possibility of all of the following: what would happen if every person had a superintelligent AI with a utility function of that person's idealized extrapolated utility function?
- How would that compare to a scenario with a single AI embodying a successful calculation of CEV?
- What would be different if a person or some few people did not have a superintelligence valuing what they would value, and only many people had their own AI?
My Answers:
I
- It depends on the error level tolerated. If only very low error is tolerated, it is easier to do it for a group.
- N/A
- Not sure.
II
- Probably not.
- Maybe, probably not, but impossible to know with high confidence.
- Probably not. Throughout history, offense has often been a step ahead of defense, which often catches up to it. I think this is not particular to evolutionary biology or the technologies that happen to have been developed. It seems easier to break complicated things with many moving parts than to build and defend them. Also, specific technologies people plausibly speculate may exist are more powerful offensively than defensively. I would expect them to merge, probably peacefully.
III
- Hard to say, as that would be trying to predict the actions of more intelligent beings in a dynamic environment.
- It might be better, or worse. The chance of it being similar is notably high.
- Not sure.
Proposal: Rationality Quotes Thread With Attributions in rot13
To judge quotes on their own merits, if without some context, I propose an experimental thread in which the original authors of quotes are somehow hidden.
30 day karma
Is the karma shown that accumulated from posts and comments that were made within the past 30 days, or from all votes on all posts within the past 30 days, regardless of the age of the post or comment?
Judging the intent of others favorably
I would like LW to be an environment in which we can learn by having honest and productive conversations. Fortunately, it substantially is such a place, but we can do better.
I would like to make a post about judging others favorably in the near future. To this end I think a useful mechanism would be to encourage people to post as comments scenarios in which they made erroneous assumptions about others' intent, and hide the conclusion in which they learned of their error from view until the reader has performed the exercise of considering what the innocuous actual explanation might be.
The purpose would be to make a repository of stories in which people could read the scenario, fail to think of how the situation could be resolved, and then see how in the previously hidden comment. Each bias involved in misjudgment - thinking one's enemies innately evil, believing one's own argument from ignorance about what the best possible explanation could be, and so forth - would be identified.
I don't know that hiding the conclusions of stories would be technically easy. One hack would be to have people post the conclusion within the comment in which they laid out the story. people could then downvote the child comment and upvote the parent. However, not everyone has the hiding threshold set at -3, and the first people to see the comment would see the conclusion, not everyone has unlimited dowvotes, etc.
Alternatively, the conclusion to each story could be in rot13.
As a protocols, analogously to how people are discouraged from quoting themselves, I would think to limit posts about when others misjudged the author's intent to a maximum, perhaps one for every two submissions in which an author posts he or she misjudged the intent of others.
As another protocol posts in which others on LW misjudged one's intent would be off-limits.
Comments are encouraged, whether on my proposed protocols, how to format, etc.
Analogies and learning
I told someone that I learn best by first hearing a general principle and only afterward being given examples and analogies. She replied that my explanations are hard to follow when my analogies are not from subjects already familiar to and well understood by her. She went further and said that sometimes she understood novel things I was trying to explain, only to be confounded by my subsequent analogies. I immediately replied that in my opinion, analogies to familiar topics are of course much better teaching tools than those to unfamiliar ones, but obscure analogies primarily function as tests to ensure understanding rather than tools to convey it. Someone fully understanding a concept ought to be able to use that understanding as a guide to understand analogous unfamiliar topics.
I am very interested in what others have to say about my last point in particular and would appreciate comments.
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