I'm trying to get a slightly better grasp of utilitarianism as it is understood in rat/EA circles, and here's my biggest confusion at the moment. How do you actually define "utility", not in the sense of how to compute it, but in the sense of specifying wtf are you even...
As of 2022, humans have a life expectancy of ~80 years and a hard limit of ~120. Most rationalists I know agree that dying is a bad thing and at minimum we should have an option to live considerably longer and free of the "diseases of the age", if not...
Epistemic Status: Speculations on top of well established theories. Introduction As the conventional memetic wisdom goes, “after decades and decades of research, the science sill have no idea how the human mind works”. As anyone passingly familiar with the relevant fields of science knows, this is of course a load...
>Utility itself is an abstraction over the level of satisfaction of goals/preferences about the state of the universe for an entity.
You can say that a robot toy has a goal of following a light source. Or thermostat has a goal of keeping the room temperature at a certain setting. But I'm yet to hear anyone counting those things towards total utility calculations.
Of course a counterargument would be "but those are not actual goals, those are the goals of humans that set it", but in this case you've just hidden all the references to humans into the word "goal" and are back to square 1.
So utility theory is a useful tool, but as far as I understand it's not directly used as a source of moral guidance (although I assume once you have some other source you can use utility theory to maximize it). Whereas utilitarianism as a metaethics school is concerned exactly with that, and you can hear people in EA talking about "maximizing utility" as the end in and of itself all the time. It was in this latter sense that I was asking.
I'm trying to get a slightly better grasp of utilitarianism as it is understood in rat/EA circles, and here's my biggest confusion at the moment.
How do you actually define "utility", not in the sense of how to compute it, but in the sense of specifying wtf are you even trying to compute? People talk about "welfare", "happiness" or "satisfaction", but those are intrinsically human concepts and most people seem to assume non-human agents at least in theory can have utility. So let's taboo those words, and all other words referring to specific human emotions (you can still use the word "human" or "emotion" itself if you have to). Caveats:
To start off, I don't see much point in formally betting $20 on an event conditioned on something I assign <<50% probability of happening within the next 30 years (powerful AI is launched and failed catastrophically and we're both still alive to settle the bet and there was an unambiguous attribution of the failure to the AI). I mean sure, I can accept the bet, but largely because I don't believe it matters one way or another, so I don't think it counts from the epistemological virtue standpoint.
But I can state what I'd disagree with in your terms if I were to take it seriously, just to clarify my argument:
What Steven Byrnes said, but also my reading is that 1) in the current paradigm it's near-damn-impossible to built such an AI without creating an unaligned AI in the process (how else do you gradient-descend your way into a book on aligned AIs?) and 2) if you do make an unaligned AI powerful enough to write such a textbook, it'll probably proceed to converting the entire mass of the universe into textbooks, or do something similarly incompatible with human life.
It might, given some luck and that all the pro-safety actors play their cards right. Assuming by "all labs" you mean "all labs developing AIs at or near to then-current limit of computational power", or something along those lines, and by "research" you mean "practical research", i.e. training and running models. The model I have in mind not that everyone involved will intellectually agree that such research should be stopped, but that enough percentage of public and governments will get scared and exert pressure on the labs. Consider how most of the world was able to (imperfectly) coordinate to slow Covid spread, or how nobody have prototyped a supersonic passenger jet in... (read more)
The important difference is that the nuclear weapons are destructive because they worked exactly as intended, and the AI in this scenario is destructive because it failed horrendously. Plus, the concept of rogue AI has been firmly ingrained into public consciousness by now, afaik not the case with the extremely destructive weapons in 1940s [1]. So hopefully this will produce more public outrage (and scare among the elites themselves) => stricter external and internal limitations on all agents developing AIs. But in the end I agree, it'll only buy time, maybe few decades if we are lucky, to solve the problem properly or to build more sane political institutions.
Yes I'm sure there was a scifi novel or two before 1945 describing bombs of immense power. But I don't think it was anywhere nearly as widely known as Matrix or Terminator.
How possible is it that a misaligned, narrowly-superhuman AI is launched, fails catastrophically with casualties in the 10^4 - 10^9 range, and the [remainder of] humanity is "scared straight" and from that moment onward treats the AI technology the way we treat nuclear technology now - i.e. effectively strangles it into stagnation with regulations - or even more conservatively? From my naive perspective it is somewhat plausible politically, based on the only example of ~world-destroying technology that we have today. And this list of arguments doesn't seem to rule out this possibility. Is there an independent argument by EY as to why this is not plausible technologically? I.e., why AIs narrow/weak enough to not be inevitably world-destroying but powerful enough to fail catastrophically are unlikely to be developed [soon enough]?
(To be clear, the above scenario is nothing like a path to victory and I'm not claiming it's very likely. More like a tiny remaining possibility for our world to survive.)
Bay Rationalists Field Day is a bi-weekly-or-so social event where the bay area rats are being physically active outside.
This time we're doing our usual capture the flag game on the ~usual spot, but there's a twist! Apparently this field is also used by the local Jugger club for their practice. Jugger is somewhat like capture the flag, only with packing foam swords. Their event starts at 1pm and while I'm still waiting on the reply from their group's admin, last time they didn't mind at all us joining in. So if you always wanted to try fencing but with no training or risk of injury, this might just be your chance! We'll... (read more)
Yes and no. 1-6 are obviously necessary but not sufficient - there's much more to diet and exercise than "not too much" and "some" respectively. 7 and 8 are kinda minor and of dubious utility except for in some narrow circumstances so whatever. And 9 and 10 are hotly debated and that's exactly what you'd need rationality for, as well as figuring out the right pattern of diet and exercise. And I mean right for each individual person, not in general, and the same with supplements - a 60-year old should have much higher tolerance for potential risks of a longevity treatment than a 25yo, since the latter has more less to gain and more to loose.
I would be very surprised if inflammation or loss of proteostasis did not have any effect on fascia, if only because they have negative effect on ~everything. But more importantly, I don't think there's any significant number of people dying from fascia stiffness? That's one of the main ideas behind the hallmarks of aging, that you don't have to solve the entire problem in its every minuscule aspect at once. If you could just forestall all these hallmarks or even just some of them, you could probably increase lifespan and healthspan significantly, thus buying more time to fix other problems (or develop completely knew approaches like mind uploading or regenerative medicine or whatever else).
As of 2022, humans have a life expectancy of ~80 years and a hard limit of ~120. Most rationalists I know agree that dying is a bad thing and at minimum we should have an option to live considerably longer and free of the "diseases of the age", if not indefinitely. It seems to me that this is exactly the kind of problem where rationality skills like "taking things seriously", "seeing with fresh eyes" and awareness of time discounting and status quo bias should help one to notice something is very very wrong and take action. Yet - with the exception of cryonics[1] and a few occasional posts on LW - this topic... (read 202 more words →)
When: Saturday, Feb 5, 11am
Where: Del Valle Regional Park (see below for details)
This time we're trying something different for the Rationalists Field Day, namely a half-day hike on the Del Valle Lake trail. It is a picturesque trail around a lake next to Livermore, ~1h drive from Berkeley, really accessible and with little elevation gain. The plan is to start hiking at 11am, and go at a comfortable pace for everyone and turn back at 2-3pm, so we're back at the parking lot around 5pm, i.e. ~by sunset. The entire trail is 7 miles one way, so we'll probably have to turn back before we reach the far end. It's dog friendly,... (read 212 more words →)
When: Saturday, Jan 22, 11am
Where: East side of Memorial Glade @ Berkeley campus https://goo.gl/maps/kPfYUPvbEWN3byjy5
Come out and enjoy sunny weather and physical exercise! We're doing another round of capture the flag games at Berkeley campus.
Epistemic Status: Speculations on top of well established theories.
As the conventional memetic wisdom goes, “after decades and decades of research, the science sill have no idea how the human mind works”. As anyone passingly familiar with the relevant fields of science knows, this is of course a load of bull.
However, even in the works writing specifically about the human mind as a whole, it’s common to treat the consciousness itself with not a small degree of reverence. “Yeah sure, my work explains how people perceive the world or how we deceive ourselves or what driven people to evolve so smart or whatelse, but that’s just the small stuff. The big questions of... (read 7181 more words →)
Yeah but the problem here is that we perceive happiness in animals only in as much as it looks like our own happiness. Did you notice that the closer an animal to a human the more likely we are to agree it can feel emotions? An ape can definitely display something like a human happiness, so we're pretty sure it can experience it. A dog can display something mostly like human happiness so most likely they can feel it too. A lizard - meh, maybe but probably not. An insect, most people would say no. Maybe I'm wrong and there's an argument... (read more)