All of Alexander's Comments + Replies

The lack of willpower is a heuristic which doesn’t require the brain to explicitly track & prioritize & schedule all possible tasks, by forcing it to regularly halt tasks—“like a timer that says, ‘Okay you’re done now.’”

If one could override fatigue at will, the consequences can be bad. Users of dopaminergic drugs like amphetamines often note issues with channeling the reduced fatigue into useful tasks rather than alphabetizing one’s bookcase.

In more extreme cases, if one could ignore fatigue entirely, then analogous to lack of pain, the consequenc

What causes us to sometimes try harder? I play chess once in a while, and I've noticed that sometimes I play half heartedly and end up losing. However, sometimes, I simply tell myself that I will try harder and end up doing really well. What's stopping me from trying hard all the time?

Wonderful, thank you!

Let me try to apply this approach to my views on economic progress.

To do that, I would look at the evidence in favour of economic progress being a moral imperative (e.g. improvements in wellbeing) and against it (development of powerful military technologies), and then make a level-headed assessment that's proportional to the evidence.

It takes a lot of effort to keep my beliefs proportional to the evidence, but no one said rationality is easy.

Do you notice your beliefs changing overtime to match whatever is most self-serving? I know that some of you enlightened LessWrong folks have already overcome your biases and biological propensities, but I notice that I haven't.

Four years ago, I was a poor university student struggling to make ends meet. I didn't have a high paying job lined up at the time, and I was very uncertain about the future. My beliefs were somewhat anti-big-business and anti-economic-growth.

However, now that I have a decent job, which I'm performing well at, my views have shifted ... (read more)

Amazing. I look forward to getting myself a copy 😄

Will the Sequences Highlights become available in print on Amazon?

Have you come across the work of Yann LeCun on world models? LeCun is very interested in generality. He calls generality the "dark matter of intelligence". He thinks that to achieve a high degree of generality, the agent needs to construct world models.

Insects have highly simplified world models, and that could be part of the explanation for the high degree of generality exhibited by insects. For example, the fact the male Jewel Beetle fell in love with beer bottles mistaking them for females is strong evidence that beetles have highly simplified world mod... (read more)

I see what you mean now. I like the example of insects. They certainly do have an extremely high degree of generality despite their very low level of intelligence.

Oh, I'm not making the argument that randomly permuting the Rubik's Cube will always solve it in a finite time,  but that it might. I think it has a better chance of solving it than the chicken. The chicken might get lucky and knock the Rubik's Cube off the edge of a cliff and it might rotate by accident, but other than that, the chicken isn't going to do much work on solving it in the first place. Meanwhile, randomly permuting might solve it (or might not solve it in the worst case). I just think that random permutations have a higher chance of solving it than the chicken, but I can't formally prove that.

We can demonstrate this wth a test.

1. Get a Rubik's Cube playing robotic arm, and ask it to flip a shuffled Rubik's Cube randomly until it's solved. How many years will it take until it's solved? It's some finite time, right? Millions of year? Billions of years?
2. Get a chicken and give it a Rubik's Cube and ask it to solve it. I don't think it will perform better than our random robot above.

I just think that randomness is a useful benchmark for performance on accomplishing tasks.

I imagine the relationship differently. I imagine a relationship between how well a system can perform a task and the number of tasks the same system can accomplish.

Does a chicken have a general intelligence? A chicken can perform a wide range of tasks with low performance, and performs most tasks worse than random. For example, could a chicken solve a Rubik's Cube? I think it would perform worse than random.

Generality to me seems like an aggregation of many specialised processes working together seamlessly to achieve a wide variety of tasks. Where do huma... (read more)

When some people hear the words "economic growth" they imagine factories spewing smoke into the atmosphere:

This is a false image of what economists mean by "economic growth". Economic growth according to economists is about achieving more with less. It's about efficiency. It is about using our scarce resources more wisely.

The stoves of the 17th century had an efficiency of only 15%. Meanwhile, the induction cooktops of today achieve an efficiency of 90%. Pre-16th century kings didn't have toilets, but 54% of humans today have toilets all thanks to economic... (read more)

Hello, I have a question. I hope someone with more knowledge can help me answer it.

There is evidence suggesting that building an AGI requires plenty of computational power (at least early on) and plenty of smart engineers/scientists. The companies with the most computational power are Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon. These same companies also have some of the best engineers and scientists working for them. A recent paper by Yann LeCun titled A Path Towards Autonomous Machine Intelligence suggests that these companies have a vested interest in actual... (read more)

Additionally, your analogy doesn't map well to my comment. A more accurate analogy would be to say that active volcanoes are explicit and non-magical (similar to reason), while inactive volcanoes are mysterious and magical (similar to intuitions), when both phenomena have the same underlying physical architecture (rocks and pressure for volcanoes and brains for cognition), but manifest differently.

I just reckon that we are better off working on understanding how the black box actually works under the hood instead of placing arbitrary labels and drawing lines in the sand on things we don't understand, and then debating those things we don't understand with verve. Labelling some cognitive activities as reason and others as intuitions doesn't explain how either phenomenon actually works.

Thanks for your insights Vladimir. I agree that Abstract Algebra, Topology and Real Analysis don’t require much in terms of prerequisites, but I think without sufficient mathematical maturity, these subjects will be rough going. I should’ve made clear that by “Sets and Logic” I didn’t mean a full fledged course on Advanced Set Theory and Logic, but rather simple familiarity with the axiomatic method through books like Naive Set Theory by Halmos and Book of Proof by Hammack.

A map displaying the prerequisites of the areas of mathematics relevant to CS/ML:

A dashed line means this prerequisite is helpful but not a hard requirement.

Almost any technology has the potential to cause harm in the wrong hands, but with [superintelligence], we have the new problem that the wrong hands might belong to the technology itself.

Excerpt from "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach" by Norvig and Russell.

I would define "physical" as the set of rigid rules governing reality that exist beyond our experience and that we cannot choose to change.

I can cause water to freeze to form ice using my agency, but I cannot change the fundamental rules governing water, such as its freezing point. These rules go beyond my agency and, in fact, constrain my agency.

Physics constrains everything else in a way that everything else does not constrain physics, and thus the primacy of physics.

if there's one superpower close to reaching the power level of everyone else combined, then everyone-else will ally to bring them down, maintaining a multipolar balance of power.

I hope they don't use nukes when they do that because that way, everyone loses.

I've read "The Elephant in the Brain", and it was certainly a breathtaking read. I should read it again.

That's an eloquent way of describing morality.

It would be so lovely had we lived in a world where any means of moneymaking helped us move uphill on the global morality landscape comprising the desires of all beings. That way, we can make money without feeling guilty about doing it. Designing a mechanism like this is probably impossible.

I wish moneymaking was by default aligned with optimising for the "good". That way, I can focus on making money without worrying too much about the messiness of morality. I wholly believe that existential risks are unequivocally the most critical issues of our time because the cost of neglecting them is so enormous, and my rational self would like to work directly on reducing them. However, I'm also profoundly programmed through millions of years of evolution to want a lovely house in the suburbs, a beautiful wife, some adorable children, lots of friends, ... (read more)

I agree. I don't think this kind of behaviour is the worst thing in the world. I just think it is instrumentally irrational.

Premise: people are fundamentally motivated by the "status" rewarded to them by those around them.

I have experienced the phenomenon of demandingness described in your post, and you've elucidated it brilliantly. I regularly frequent in-person EA events, and I can visibly see status being rewarded according to impact, which is very different from how it's typically rewarded in the broader society. (This is not necessarily a bad thing.) The status hierarchy in EA communities goes something like this:

• People who've dedicated their careers to effective causes. O

Loved your comment, especially the “goodharting” interjections haha.

Your comment reminded me of “building” company culture. Managers keep trying to sculpt a company culture, but in reality managers have limited control over the culture. Company culture is more a thing that happens and evolves, and you as an individual can only do so much to influence it this way or that way.

Similarly, status is a thing that just happens and evolves in human society, and sometimes it has good externalities and other times it has bad externalities.

I quite liked “What You Do ... (read more)

I recently read Will Storr's book "The Status Game" based on a LessWrong recommendation by user Wei_Dai. It's an excellent book, and I highly recommend it.

Storr asserts that we are all playing status games, including meditation gurus and cynics. Then he classifies the different kinds of status games we can play, arguing that "virtue dominance" games are the worst kinds of games, as they are the root of cancel culture.

Storr has a few recommendations for playing the Status Game to result in a positive-sum. First, view other people as being the heroes of thei... (read more)

Hello, thank you for the post!

All images on this post are no longer available. I'm wondering if you're able to imbed them directly into the rich text :)

This post has brilliantly articulated a crucial idea. Thank you!

Microfoundations for macroeconomics is a step in the right direction towards a gears-level understanding of economics. Still, our current understanding of cognition and human nature is primarily based on externally-visible behaviour and not on gears. Do you think we are progressing in the right direction within microeconomics towards more gears-level agent models?

I read the arguments against microfoundations, and some opponents point to "feedback loops". They claim that the arrow of causation ... (read more)

This reminds me of the book "Four Thousand Weeks". The core idea is that if you become productive at doing something, then society will want you to do more of that thing. For example, if you were good at responding to email, always prompt, and never missing an email, society would send you more emails because you had built a reputation of being good at responding to email.

Excellent post, thanks, Eli. You've captured some core themes and attitudes of rationalism quite well.

I find the "post" prefix unhelpful whenever I see it used. It implies a final state of whatever it is referring to.

What meaning of "rationality" does "post-rationality" refer to? Is "post-rationality" referring to "rationality" as a cultural identity, or is it referring to "rationality" as a process of optimisation towards achieving some desirable states of the world?

There is an important distinction between someone identifying as a rationalist but acting ... (read more)

Oh, it wouldn't eliminate all selection bias, but it certainly would reduce it. I said "avoid selection bias," but I changed it to "reduce selection bias" in my original post. Thanks for pointing this out.

It's tough to extract completely unbiased quasi-experimental data from the world. A frail elder dying from a heart attack during the volcanic eruption certainly contributes to selection bias.

A missing but essential detail: the government compensated these people and provided them with relocation services. Therefore, even the frail were able to relocate.

Recently I came across this brilliant example of avoiding reducing selection bias when extracting quasi-experimental data from the world towards the beginning of the book "Good Economics for Hard Times" by Banerjee and Duflo.

The authors were interested in understanding the impact of migration on income. However, most data on migration contains plenty of selection bias. For example, people who choose to migrate are usually audacious risk-takers or have the physical strength, know-how, funds and connections to facilitate their undertaking,

To reduce these selection biases, the authors looked at people forced to relocate due to rare natural disasters, such as volcano eruptions.

Words cannot possibly express how thankful I am for you doing this!

I bet that most of them would replicate flawlessly. Boring lab techniques and protein structure dominate the list, nothing fancy or outlandish. Interestingly, the famous papers like relativity, expansion of the universe, the discovery of DNA etc. don't rank anywhere near the top 100. There is also a math paper on fuzzy sets among the top 100. Now that's a paper that definitely replicates!

Excellent article! I agree with your thesis, and you’ve presented it very clearly.

I largely agree that we cannot outsource knowledge. For example, you cannot outsource the knowledge to play the violin, and you must invest in countless hours of deliberate practice to learn to play the violin.

A rule of thumb I like is only to delegate things that you know how to do yourself. A successful startup founder is capable of comfortably stepping into the shoes of anyone they delegate work to. Otherwise, they would have no idea what high-quality work looks like and h... (read more)

The orb-weaving spider. I updated my original post to include the name.

Excellent write-up. Thanks, Elizabeth.

I'm a software engineer at a company that implements a "20%". Every couple of months, we have a one (sometimes two) week sprint for the 20%. As you've pointed out, it works out to be less than 20%, and many engineers choose to keep working on their primary projects to catch up on delivery dates.

In the weeks leading up to the 20% sprint, we create a collaborative table in which engineers propose ideas and pitch those ideas in a meeting on the Monday morning of the sprint. Proposals fall into two categories:

• Reducing tech

On the mating habits of the orb-weaving spider:

These spiders are a bit unusual: females have two receptacles for storing sperm, and males have two sperm-delivery devices, called palps. Ordinarily the female will only allow the male to insert one palp at a time, but sometimes a male manages to force a copulation with a juvenile female, during which he inserts both of his palps into the female’s separate sperm-storage organs. If the male succeeds, something strange happens to him: his heart spontaneously stops beating and he dies in flagrante. This may be th

I think that you raise a crucial point. I find it challenging to explain to people that AI is likely very dangerous. It‘s much easier to explain that pandemics, nuclear wars or environmental crises are dangerous. I think this is mainly due to the abstractness of AI and the concreteness of those other dangers, leading to availability bias.

The most common counterarguments I've heard from people about why AI isn't a serious risk are:

• AI is impossible, and it is just "mechanical" and lacks some magical properties only humans have.
• When we build AIs, we will not

This is a list of the top 100 most cited scientific papers. Reading all of them would be a fun exercise.

Speculating about this is a fun exercise. I argue that the answer is less probable.

The survivors might have a more substantial commitment to life affirmation given that the fragility of life is so fresh in their minds following Armageddon. I argue that this would have a minimal effect. We know that the dinosaurs went extinct, and we know that the average lifespan for a mammalian species is about one million years. We know that we have fought world wars, and we know that life is precious and unreasonably rare in the universe. Yet, in aggregate, we still don... (read more)

Thanks for all the excellent writing on economic progress you've put out. I completed reading "Creating a Learning Society" by Joseph Stiglitz a few days ago, and I am in the process of writing a review of that book to share here on LessWrong. Your essays are providing me with a lot of insights that I hope to take into account in my review :D

The theory of ‘morality as cooperation’ (MAC) argues that morality is best understood as a collection of biological and cultural solutions to the problems of cooperation recurrent in human social life. MAC draws on evolutionary game theory to argue that, because there are many types of cooperation, there will be many types of morality. These include: family values, group loyalty, reciprocity, heroism, deference, fairness and property rights. Previous research suggests that these seven types of morality are evolutionarily-ancient, psychologically-distinct,

Yes, it looks isomorphic. Thanks for sharing your write-up. You've captured this idea well.

I appreciate how Toby Ord considers "knock-on effects" in his modelling of existential risks, as presented in "The Precipice". A catastrophe doesn't necessarily have to cause extinction for it to be considered an existential threat. The reason being knock-on effects, which would undoubtedly impair our preparedness for what comes next.