All of bglass's Comments + Replies

It's not a take that I've thought about deeply, but could the evidence be explained by a technological advancement: the ability to hop between diverging universes?

  • It would explain why we don't see aliens; they discover the technology, and that empty parallel worlds are closer in terms of energy expenditure.

  • It could also explain why the interlopers don't bother us much; they are scouting for uninhabited parallel earths with easily-accessible resources, and skipping those with a population. The only ones we see are the ones incompetent or unlucky enoug

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1Gesild Muka
‘Dimension hopping’ or ‘dimension manipulation’ could be a solution to the Fermi paradox. The universe could be full of intelligent life that remain silent and (mostly) invisible behind advanced spatial technology. (the second type refers to more limited hypothetical dimension technology such as creating pocket dimensions, for example, rather than accessing other universes)

There was a worldbuilding contest last year for writing short stories featuring AGI with positive outcomes. You may be interested in it, although it's undoubtedly propaganda of some sort.

If you write such a story, please link it.

These are not fables, so I apologize for that. However, I've written many short stories (that are not always obviously) about alignment and related topics. The Well of Cathedral is about trying to contain a threat that grows in power exponentially, Waste Heat is about unilateral action to head off a catastrophe causing its own... (read more)

3Gesild Muka
Flourishing is a fantastic story and definitely left me wanting more. I would have enjoyed a 5, 10, 20 year fast forward approach to explore their long term relationship. We've seen many stories of AI companions that highlight the beginnings of the relationship but it would be fun to see how their domestic life is, interactions with friends and family and other companions and growing old together. How would they, for example, deal with optional upgrades over time? Or if there was a recall many years later? There are many endless fascinating possibilities. The clash of human thinking with AI thinking is so entertaining, some truly impressive writing. Thanks for recommending, I'll definitely check out your other stories as well.
3DaystarEld
Hey Blasted, thanks for sharing :) I remember enjoying Well, will try to check out the others when I get a chance.

I think I see what you mean. A new AI won't be under the control of egregores. It will be misaligned to them as well. That makes sense.

I really appreciate your list of claims and unclear points. Your succinct summary is helping me think about these ideas.

There is no highly viral meme going around right now about producing tons of paperclips.

A few examples came to mind: sports paraphernalia, tabletop miniatures, and stuffed animals (which likely outnumber real animals by hundreds or thousands of times).

One might argue that these things give humans joy, so they don't count. There is some validity to that. AI paperclips are supposed to be useless to humans. On the other hand, one might a... (read more)

7dxu
I think the point under contention isn't whether current egregores are (in some sense) "optimizing" for things that would score poorly according to human values (they are), but whether the things they're optimizing for have some (clear, substantive) relation to the things a misaligned AGI will end up optimizing for, such that an intervention on the whole egregores situation would have a substantial probability of impacting the eventual AGI. To this question I think the answer is a fairly clear "no", though of course this doesn't invalidate the possibility that investigating how to deal with egregores may result in some non-trivial insights for the alignment problem.

information vs truth

Thanks, that gets rid of most of my confusion.

Without additional cost, I'd definitely prefer to know what happens even if my favorite character might die.

For a different show, I would not care. Whether or not I value the information depends on the show, or the domain... How much I'm willing to pay for information, and by extension the truth, depends a lot on the thing about which I'm learning.

To me it looks like the thing itself is what is important, and my desire to have accurate beliefs stems from caring about the thing. It's not t... (read more)

Hopefully that helps clarify what I'm talking about there.

It does. Those examples help a lot. Thank you!

Preferring anything over truth creates room for confusion.

We might be talking about preferring things over truth in two different ways.

If you prefer something alternate to the truth, the thing you prefer could be right or wrong. To the extent it's wrong you are confusing yourself. I agree with that, and I think that's what you mean by 'preferring something over truth'.

What I meant is more like "How much effort I'm going to expend getting at this t... (read more)

6Yoav Ravid
I think you're equivocating a bit between information and truth. For example in the TV example, you would pay to get the information of what the ending is. It would make more sense to talk about the truth of the show's ending if, say, there was a character you were very attached which you didn't want to die, and they might die in the last episode. Would you like to know how the show ends even if you have to face the truth of this character's death? In other words, truth is more about what you believe than what information you have (though obviously you need information to get at the truth). You can have different beliefs with the same information, so the question is more about whether you're willing to accept the truth if it costs you something.

I think the description of the Void in the twelve virtues is purposefully vague. Perhaps to shake the reader enough to get them to think for themselves, or perhaps to be a place for personal interjection into the twelve virtues.

You may try to name the highest principle with names such as “the map that reflects the territory” or “experience of success and failure” or “Bayesian decision theory”. But perhaps you describe incorrectly the nameless virtue. How will you discover your mistake? Not by comparing your description to itself, but by comparing it to t

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Almost everything in this post sounds right to me.

These Drama Triangle patterns are everywhere. Utterly everywhere.

It doesn't seem that way to me; but then, what everywhere are you talking about?

I can see those patterns in argumentation online--a lot--and in a few dysfunctional people I know, and indeed in my own past in some places. Regarding my real-life modern friends, family, and coworkers, it doesn't seem like anyone relates to each other through those roles (at least not often enough to describe it as 'utterly everywhere').

Could the pattern be ge... (read more)

Almost everything in this post sounds right to me.

Cool.

 

I can see those [Drama Triangle] patterns in argumentation online--a lot--and in a few dysfunctional people I know, and indeed in my own past in some places. Regarding my real-life modern friends, family, and coworkers, it doesn't seem like anyone relates to each other through those roles (at least not often enough to describe it as 'utterly everywhere').

[…]

Perhaps I'm missing something. If it's just that few of the people in my life regularly have the victim mindset, I feel very fortunate.

Maybe ... (read more)

3Pattern
Why not?
3Yoav Ravid
Really liked that line, even though I'm not sure it can't be the ultimate value.

Perhaps it is carbon dioxide. Here is a paper on it:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3341709/

To summarize, the idea is that high partial pressure of CO2 causes blood pH to change, which influences the body's regulatory mechanisms and eventually leads to obesity.

At higher altitudes the carbon dioxide fraction in the air is unchanged, but the partial pressure is lower. I'd expect that lower partial pressures of CO2 would mean less effect on blood pH.

3Taleuntum
This was my guess too, but they later did another study with rats and it did not show significant effects. https://sciencenordic.com/climate-change-denmark-obesity/four-years-later-is-co2-making-us-fat/1440745

I made an account for your challenge.

I plotted items by color and looked at minimums, maximums, and averages. Yellow items consistently provide just under twenty mana while blue items always provide about the same as the reading, except that they sometimes provide twenty extra. I was too lazy to try to figure out the red or green items. Given what I know, I can submit the blue items HoC, RoJ, and PoH to get about 140 mana for 101 gold, and call it a day.

However, I also noticed that no blue item provided over 60 mana. I will add in the yellow items PoP an

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