All of Alephywr's Comments + Replies

That's true. I shouldn't have discounted the role of art so heavily.

Not art so much as philosophy. The average scientist today literally doesn't know what philosophy is. They do things like try to speak authoritatively about epistemology of science while dismissing the entire field of epistemology. Hence you get otherwise intelligent people saying things like "We just need people who are willing to look at reality", or appeals to "common sense" or any number of other absolutely ridiculous statements.

8ChristianKl
That leaves the question about whether they have a good sense of what art in the sense of previous times actually is. Art is often about playing around with phenomena that have no practical use. It allows techniques to be developed that have no immediate commercial or even scientific value. This means the capabilities can increase over time and sometimes that leads to enough capabilities to produce commercial or scientific value down the road. A lot what happens in HackerSpaces is art in that sense.

Debate seems like a dubious method of alignment because you can just indefinitely keep adjusting or introducing new auxiliary assumptions, and overarching frameworks are very rarely abandoned in this context.

Popper points out that successful hypotheses just need to be testable, they don't need to come from anywhere in particular. Scientists used to consistently be polymaths educated in philosophy and the classics. A lot of scientific hypotheses borrowed from reasoning cultivated in that context. Maybe it's that context that's been milked for all it's worth. Or maybe it's that more and more scientists are naive empiricists/inductionists and don't believe in the primacy of imagination anymore, and thus discount entirely other modes of thinking that might lead to the introduction of new testable hypotheses. There are a lot of possibilities besides the ones expounded on in OP.

0albertbokor
Hmm. The field is too 'hip' thus bloated, and the more imaginative of us don't have the time for dicking around with art beacuse of increased knowledge requirement and competition?

I am in favor of change. I am not in favor of existence without boundaries. I don't have a moral justification for this, just an aesthetic one: a painting that contained arbitrary combinations of arbitrarily many colors might be technically sophisticated or interesting, but is unlikely to have any of the attributes that make a painting good imo. Purely subjective. I neither fault nor seek to limit those who think differently.

I am not in favor of existence without boundaries. I don’t have a moral justification for this, just an aesthetic one …

I share your aesthetic preference (and I consider such preferences to be no less valid, and no less important, than any “moral” ones). But no one here is advocating anything like that. Certainly Eliezer isn’t, and nor am I.

I was remembering an article in The Atlantic from a while ago, but I can't seem to find it now. All I can find now is this, which doesn't have the same power because it's the result of an after-the-fact search: https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/brain.2013.0172

Religion might not be, but religious thinking is, and given the general continuity of culture over time that amounts to religion being heritable in most cases. By worse than existential threat I mean Christians burning a simulated copy of you in hell for potentially k-large time; it is objectively worse than dying. Dying is just the cessation of future utility, while this would be extremely large negative utility indefinitely.

1Pattern
Thank you for clarifying. 2 things: 1) Heritable in the genetic sense? 2) If you are worried about something, have you accounted for the possibility that talking about it affects the probability of it happening?

In the long run nothing looks human that follows this logic. Preserving humanity might not be utilitarian optimal, but there is something to be said for aesthetics.

1[anonymous]
Aesthetic preferences are a huge part of our personalities, so who would agree to any enhancement that would destroy them? And as long as they’re present, a transhuman will be even more effective at making everything look, sound, smell etc. beautiful — in some form or another (maybe in a simulation if it’s detailed enough and if we decide there’s no difference), because a transhuman will be more effective at everything. If you’re talking about the human body specifically, I don’t think a believable LMD (with artificial skin and everything) is impossible. Or maybe we’ll find a way to build organic bodies with some kind of reciever instead of a brain, to be controlled remotely by an uploaded mind. Or we’ll settle for a simulation, who knows. Smarter versions of us will find a solution.

Indeed; hence the term “transhumanism” (and, relatedly, “posthumanism”).

Change is terrifying. This is to be expected, not least because most change is bad; in fact, change is inherently bad. Any change must be an improvement, must justify itself, to be worthwhile. And any such justification can only be uncertain. When we look out along a line of successive changes, what we see on the horizon terrifies us—all the more so because we can only see it dimly, as a vague shape, whose outlines are provided more by our imagination than our vision.

But the alternativ

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Transhumanism imposes on territory that's traditionally been metaphysical or philosophical. The assumption is that it does so because of or in accompaniment with metaphysical or philosophical reasoning. Part of the reason a special disposition is assumed is because the alternative, that you don't think about what other people are thinking about at all, is probably distressing to them. This is also one of the reasons people don't like atheists. Yes, there are those who think atheists are actually all satan worshippers, but mostly they are... (read more)

2Pattern
I see how it follows that it will be "attacked" on such grounds. I don't follow why "thinks differently" implies "neurological differences". Why should we suppose it is hardware rather than software? I would be interested in seeing those studies, as well.
3TheWakalix
I am suspicious of claims that ideological differences arise from fundamental neurological differences - that seems to uphold the bias toward a homogeneous enemy. (That doesn't mean it's impossible, but that it's more likely to be falsely asserted than claims that we're not biased toward.) Could you link to the studies that you say support your statement?
4Shmi
I'm familiar with psychosis and your reply seems totally believable to me.

[I think that in general, comments with less than -10 karma should have at least one comment explaining why.]

I downvoted you because I believe you to be strongly false: either lying or deluded. This is due to my prior for “somebody solves two Hard Problems in a matter of days” being much lower than my prior for “somebody claims to have solved two Hard Problems in a matter of days”. In particular, people in altered mental states are often much more susceptible to false feelings of enlightenment. (See “Mysticism and Pattern-Matching” by Scott Alexander for r

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2Pattern
What was the thing?
1TheWakalix
100th percentile means the best in the world. It is far more likely that a schizophrenic person would believe themselves to have been the best than that a random person would actually be the best. (Outside View)

I've achieved several different kinds of contradictory enlightenment. It's pretty overrated to me at this point.

It would also help if they understood what a joke was

People would have to actually engage with me for that to happen.

-4Elo
Why would people want to engage if they just encounter someone who wants to win? What's in it for them?

In the future there will be dragons

1Pattern
Before I die?
5Ben Pace
damn straight

I've won practically every interaction I've ever had. I've become so good at winning that most people won't actually interact with me anymore.

-6Elo

" For example, while there’s a lot of talk about Trump being a potential autocrat, few Americans are responding by stockpiling food or investing in foreign currencies or emigrating. This suggests that hostility towards Trump is driven primarily by partisan politics, rather than genuine concern about democratic collapse. "

Alternatively it suggests that the demographics most effected by Trump's autocratic tendencies are economically poor and have limited international mobility.

3Richard_Ngo
Insofar as we're talking about the collapse of democracy in America, millions of people will be adversely affected, many of them wealthy enough that they could already be taking important steps at fairly low cost.

Interesting. You know, Karl Popper gives a similar argument about the self-refuting nature of hard determinism: Once you accept that everything is determinate, the concept of an argument, a position, communication, or even information at all, all becomes kind of superfluous and incoherent.

That's probably true but it still doesn't explain what happened to me in Europe.

1Wayne C. Smith
Tell me more?

Well that's sensible enough, and I can only rebut it, not refute it. My counterargument is basically this:

1. At the speed at which technology is going forward, it seems entirely possible that the opinions of cranks will eventually drive real world actions of some sort, and so engaging with them ahead of those actions might be a good thing.

2. Without airing dirty laundry, it's impossible to know how prevalent crank-ish ideas are in a community.

That's fair. I still think the post is relevant though.

As far as I can tell, actually, there is no real reason for us (i.e. the Less Wrong commentariat) to care about these Terasem people. They seem to be weird, and rather confused about some things. That is hardly an exclusive crowd. (And “they once paid Eliezer Yudkowsky to speak at their conference” is not an interesting connection.)

I don’t say this to pick on you, by the way; it’s just that I think it’s important for us not to get distracted by analyzing what every group of cranks (or even every group of AI cranks) out there thinks, says, and does.

http://www.terasemjournals.org/PCJournal/PC0102/yudkowsky_01a.html

6Said Achmiz
Thanks! The linked page says: As I understand it, for quite a few years Eliezer appeared at various conferences / conventions / colloquia as a paid speaker (though it seems he no longer does that). It seems likely that this is what happened here—Terasem Movement, Inc. paid him to speak at their colloquium, and then (presumably with his permission) posted an adapted version of his lecture on their site. This may seem like a quibble, but to say that Eliezer “wrote for” this organization implies a rather closer relationship than the scenario I outline.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terasem_Movement

My internet boyfriend. Because he thinks I am philosophically competent and wants me to engage more with others, ostensibly.

3Said Achmiz
That page does not mention Eliezer Yudkowsky. To clarify, what I would like a citation for is the claim that Eliezer “once wrote for” them. Could you link to, or at least cite, what he wrote for them, and when?

The Terasem Movement is a sort of new-agey technophile organization that Yudkowsky once wrote for, I would have thought it would be known here already (and this also sort of answers why you should care about it)

I wrote this post because someone told me to!

I am the legendary dragon Alephwyr, whose name is Alephwyr!

4Said Achmiz
Citation? Who? Why?