All of Arepo's Comments + Replies

Did the ringing go away over time, or was it permanent?

What do you mean the leadership is shared? That seems much less true now Effective Ventures have started spinning off their orgs. It seems like the funding is still largely shared, but that's a different claim.

I would also be interested to see this. Also, could you clarify:

I have definitely taken actions within the bounds of what seems reasonable that have aimed at getting the EA community to shut down or disappear (and will probably continue to do so).

Are you talking here about 'the extended EA-Alignment ecosystem', or do you mean you've aimed at getting the global poverty/animal welfare/other non-AI-related EA community to shut down or disappear?

Another effect I'm very concerned about is the unseen effect on the funding landscape. For all EVF organisations are said to be financially independent, none of them seem to have had any issue getting funding, primarily from Open Phil (generally offering market rate or better salaries and in some cases getting millions of dollars on marketing alone), while many other EA orgs - and, contra the OP, there many more* outside the EVF/RP net than within - have struggled to get enough money to pay a couple of staff a living wage.

* That list excludes regional EA s... (read more)

It doesn't matter whether you'd have been hypothetically willing to do something for them. As I said on the Facebook thread, you did not consult with them. You merely informed them they were in a game, which, given the social criticism Chris has received, had real world consequences if they misplayed. In other words, you put them in harm's way without their consent. That is not a good way to build trust.

The downvotes on this comment seem ridiculous to me. If I email 270 people to tell them I've carefully selected them for some process, I cannot seriously presume they will give up >0 of their time to take part in it. 

Any such sacrifice they make is a bonus, so if they do give up >0 time, it's absurd to ask that they give up even more time to research the issue.

Any negative consequences are on the person who set up the game. Adding the justification that 'I trust you' does not suddenly make the recipient more obligated to the spammer.

My impression is that many similar projects are share houses or other flat hierarchies. IMO a big advantage of the model here is a top-down approach, where the trustees/manager view it as a major part of our job to limit and mitigate interpersonal conflicts, zero sum status games etc.

Whatever you call it, they've got to identify some alternative, even if only tacitly by following some approximation of it in their daily life.

I would like to write an essay about that eventually, but I figured persuading PUs of the merits of HU was lower hanging fruit.

For what it's worth, I have a lot of sympathy with your scepticism - I would rather (and believe it possible to) build a system resembling ethics up without reference to normativity, 'oughts', or any of their associated baggage. I think the trick will be to properly understand the overlap of ethics and epistemology, both of which are subject to similar questions (how do we non question-beggingly 'ground' 'factual' questions?), but ... (read more)

How do we know EY isn't doing the same?

‘A charity that very efficiently promoted beauty and justice’ would still be a utilitarian charity (where the form of util defined utility as beauty and justice), so if that’s not EA, then EA does not = utilitarianism, QED.

Also, as Ben Todd and others have frequently pointed out, many non-utilitarian ethics subsume the value of happiness. A deontologist might want more happiness and less suffering, but feel that he also had a personal injunction against violating certain moral rules. So long as he didn’t violate those codes, he might well want to maximise efficient use of welfare.

I'd guess these effects are largely not causation, but correlation caused by conscientiousness/ambition causing both double majors and higher earnings.

Unless you're certain of this or have some reason to suspect a factor pulling in the other direction, this still seems to suggest higher expectation from doing a double major.

Written a full response to your comments on Felicifia (I'm not going to discuss this in three different venues), but...

your opponent's true rejection seems to be "cryonics does not work"

This sort of groundless speculation about my beliefs (and its subsequent upvoting success), a) in a thread where I’ve said nothing about them, b) where I’ve made no arguments to whose soundness the eventual success/failure of cryo would be at all relevant, and c) where the speculator has made remarks that demonstrate he hasn’t even read the arguments he’s dism... (read more)

Assuming you accept the reasoning, 90% seems quite generous to me. What percentage of complex computer programmes when run for the first time exhibit behaviour the programmers hadn't anticipated? I don't have much of an idea, but my guess would be close to 100. If so, the question is how likely unexpected behaviour is to be fatal. For any programme that will eventually gain access to the world at large and quickly become AI++, that seems (again, no data to back this up - just an intuitive guess) pretty likely, perhaps almost certain.

For any parameter of ... (read more)

Seems like a decent reply overall, but I found the fourth point very unconvincing. Holden has said 'what he knows know' - to wit that whereas the world's best experts would normally test a complicated programme by running it, isolating out what (inevitably) went wrong by examining the results it produced, rewriting it, then doing it again.

Almost no programmes are glitch free, so this is at best an optimization process and one which - as Holden pointed out - you can't do with this type of AI. If (/when) it goes wrong the first time, you don't get a second chance. Eliezer's reply doesn't seem to address this stark difference between what experts have been achieving and what SIAI is asking them to achieve.

Hm. Interesting piece. I'm partially sold, but not on this: 'Further, I see little difference between how a Muslim "chooses" to get upset at disrespect to Mohammed, and how a Westerner might "choose" to get upset if you called eir mother a whore.'

I'm pretty content to call that a sort of choice, especially if you make it a fair comparison, ie a general remark not victimising one person that all mothers are whores. After all, there’s still a pretty big difference between that (or even the rather more inflammatory ‘all Western mothers are... (read more)

I don’t know how relevant improv is to Less Wrongers, but I find it helpful for everyday social interactions, so:

Primary recommendation: Salinsky & Frances-White’s The Improv Handbook.

Reason It’s one of the only improv books which actually suggests physical strategies for you to try out that might improve your ability rather than referring to concepts that the author has a pet phrase for that they use as a substitute for explaining what it means. Not all of the suggetions worked for me, and they’re based on primarily on anecdotal evidence (plus the s... (read more)

How does one create an open thread? The only options I had available were this and comments. Is it something you need minimum karma for?

If I was reliable enough to be sure, then I'd probably know where the comment in question was :P But I am fairly confident. They weren't professionally made videos (nor was the website professional-looking), just a set by this one guy explaining one bit of maths at a time.

We've changed it to a more standard font now. How's that?

We've been experimenting a bit with the font. A bit of Googling failed to yield any scientific data on what font types people prefer, though there's a fair bit on font size. Sounds like a new test is in order, though... (incidentally, if you or anyone else reading this happen to know of any decent studies on fonts for reading online, I'd be keen to see it).

Hitting on desperate boys(/girls) is an unusual strategy by definition...