All of devansh's Comments + Replies

Does buying shorter-term OTM derivatives each year not work here?

Strong downvoted. This seems naively useful but knowing someone had a CRM for our friendship would make me feel quite uncomfortable, objectified, and annoyed, and I would likely stop being friends with that person, and I'm confident that the majority of (most?) people who aren't pretty rationalist would feel similarly.

(I promised I'd publish this last night no matter what state it was in, and then didn't get very far before the deadline. I will go back and edit and improve it later.)

I feel like I keep, over and over, hearing a complaint from people who get most of their information about college admissions from WhatsApp groups or their parents’ friends or a certain extraordinarily pervasive subreddit (you all know what I’m talking about). Something like “College admissions is ridiculous! Look at this person, who was top of his math class and took 10 AP classes and... (read more)

This list is quite good - https://mecfsroadmap.altervista.org/ Feel free to DM me if you want to chat more.

Epistemic Status: Rant. Very rapidly written and upon reflection uncertain if I fully endorse; Cunningham’s Law says that this is the best way to get good takes quickly.

Rationalists should win. If you have contorted yourself into alternative decision theories that leave you vulnerable to Roko's Basilisk or whatever, and normal CDT or whatever actual humans implement in real life wouldn't leave you vulnerable to stuff like this, then you have failed and you need to go back to trying to be a normal person using normal decision procedures instead of mat... (read more)

Yeah, this is basically the thing I'm terrified about. If someone has been convinced of AI risk with arguments which do not track truth, then I find it incredibly hard to believe that they'd ever be able to contribute useful alignment research, not to mention the general fact that if you recruit using techniques that select for people with bad epistemics you will end up with a community with shitty epistemics and wonder what went wrong.

Cool, I feel a lot more comfortable with your elaboration; thank you!

I feel pretty scared by the tone and implication of this comment. I'm extremely worried about selecting our arguments here for truth instead of for convincingness, and mentioning a type of propaganda and then talking about how we should use it to make people listen to our arguments feels incredibly symmetric. If the strength our arguments for why AI risk is real do not hinge on whether or not those arguments are centrally true, we should burn them with fire.

FWIW, for most people who are smart enough to get into MIT, it's reasonably trivial to get good grades in high school (I went to an unusually difficult high school, took the hardest possible courseload, and was able to shunt this to <5 hours of Actual Work a week / spent most of my class time doing more useful things). 

Most people are disconnected from reality, most of the time. This is most noticeable to me when it manifests itself in scope insensitivity, but it appears in other ways too. In this case, you choosing to spend two hours walking to save costs is not a “keep in touch with reality” measure, it is a “lsusr is wasting his time” measure. Two hours of your time could be spent on things that really matter to you. Don’t quit Robotics Club if you like Robotics Club, but recognize that you do it for fuzzies and not for utils.

The average person in a developed country ... (read more)

Continuing the metaphor, what the authors are saying looks to some extent similar to stochastic gradient descent (which would be the real way you minimize the distance to finish in the maze analogy.)

The concept of "world war" doesn't need to mean "most of the world's population is involved in this war," not when nuclear weapons are at stake. A nuclear exchange between NATO and Russia is world-shifting in a way that a nuclear exchange between Pakistan and India is not. Calling nuclear war between major Western powers (which will almost certainly have devastating economic and physical effects on the entire world) a "world war" seems perfectly reasonable at that point, even if most of the world is not directly involved.

Every submission must be a 26-letter combination of random lowercase letters with no spaces. The entry that is closest to a randomly generated submission wins.

Gain = (Benefits − Costs) ∗ Probability

Would be more like gain = benefits*probability of those benefits - costs*probability of those costs, especially if there are failure modes that exist. I'd also try to avoid framing it as "benefits are almost unlimited while costs are finite;" while an IAL is great, the benefits of an IAL are just as finite as the costs are.

That being said, I think that if you can make an IAL that is exceptionally good on many dimensions and get enough interest/funding behind it, it would be an extremely worthwhile project.

Not a direct answer, so I'm leaving this as a comment, but the United States has for some time now been able to control the vast majority of its populace through military force if they wanted. The idea that citizens can stop a coup or revolt with guns seems relatively absurd considering the gap in "the weaponry citizens have, like rifles" and "the weaponry the military has, like tanks" although I'd be happy to have someone prove me wrong.

A few things that were touched on, but I'd like to see further discussion on;

If Omicron is importantly less severe than Delta, does it continue to pose any sort of humanity-wide threat other than the obvious potential overreaction and politicians doing things to seem like they have a handle on the situation? Conditional on Omicron being more vaccine avoidant and less severe, is there any good reason not to simply continue reopening and work on better booster/Paxlovid distribution systems, instead of trying to use mask mandates/lockdowns?

Moreover, how much ... (read more)

Until new information comes out which clarifies the infectivity and severity of Omicron, especially against the vaccinated, I'm potentially more worried about outsized and concerning responses to the new variant than I am about Omicron itself. To be clear, this isn't diminishing the potential bad results of Omicron—but in terms of actual infectivity and severity, I don't expect it to be a lot worse than Delta. Vaccine resistance is more concerning, especially considering original antigenic sin.

That being said, my school (and California) has been requiring ... (read more)

Done! This is a very cool opportunity.

I'm a Davidson YS and have access to the general email list. Is there a somewhat standard intro to EA that I could modify and post there without seeming like I'm proselytizing? 

There's no way world governments would coordinate around this, especially since it is a) a problem that most people barely understand and b) would completely cut off all human technological progress. No one would support this policy. Hell, even if ridiculously powerful aliens à la God came and told us that we weren't allowed to build AGI on the threat of eternal suffering, I'm not sure world governments would coordinate around this.

If alignment was impossible, we might just be doomed.  

Our creator doesn't have a utility function in any meaningful sense of the term. Genes that adapt best for survival and reproduction propagate through the population, but it's competitive. Evolution doesn't have goals, and in fact from the standpoint of individual genes (where evolution works) it is entirely a zero-sum game. 

Mask mandates for students are ridiculous. Vaccine mandates are significantly more complicated, but honestly, people that are putting others' lives in danger based on misinformation should not be allowed to keep their jobs so they can continue to do so.

Any advice on convincing fully vaccinated family members that we need to stop worrying so much about COVID now? The response I keep getting even after showing them the numbers is that "but COVID keeps changing, there could always be a new variant spreading through the population that is significantly more severe/deadly/evading the vaccines." I'm not an epidemiologist, but that seems like a worry that (with full vaccination) is pretty much on par with "we could have a new pandemic, so we should all mask and constantly take precautions"—especially considerin... (read more)

You're right. I think this is shocking me because it affects so many people I know and generally expect to be more calibrated in their beliefs, and the all-too-common handwaving of "we don't know enough about COVID" is not a free pass to be overcautious. That is, people I expect better from are overestimating the risk of the virus to a similar degree that anti-vaxxers are underestimating the risk of the virus/overestimating the risks of the vaccine, which is genuinely dangerous. Mixed messaging from the CDC and news establishments isn't helping either.

"I reminded her about the delta variant and how it’s caused so many children her age to end up in the ICU. I told her that she only has to wait a few more months until she’s eligible for the vaccine, and this isn’t the time to become complacent."

I genuinely do not understand how it's possible to so fundamentally not comprehend risk. To be clear, from the best of our calculations, the probability of COVID hospitalizations in eleven-year-olds is substantially less than the probability of flu hospitalization. In fact, even contingent on an eleven-year-old get... (read more)

Probably really bad, actually.  The first thing that comes to mind here is the hygiene hypothesis—preventing kids from getting low-strength diseases as children when their immune systems are "being trained" to fight it off is likely going to cause issues in the future, and to solve a relatively small problem anyways (not many kids are hospitalized or die from other pathogens, and there isn't any good evidence that the long-term effects of diseases on children cause fitness or intelligence loss in the general population). Not to mention, masks are a ma... (read more)

Yeah, I think that that's a good point about the one-dimensionality of any unit of measure used to assess risk. It might be possible to effectively start measuring in quality-adjusted life minutes or hours, but that quite quickly becomes a massive headache to calculate, even if it's more accurate to the actual impact on people. I think that using a unit like the mortmile is a good way to effectively make back-of-the-envelope calculations to assess the degree of risk and quickly understand just how risky something is, especially when differences are measured in orders of magnitude (as they usually are).

It's somewhat active, but games take a week or so to begin after signups. Player level is definitely variable.

How do you end up assessing which players are easily manipulated, and how do you "pocket" them without other skilled players catching on to what you're doing?

How strongly are anti-vaxxers incentivised to create fake vaccine passports, anyways? There's a certain aspect that you mentioned—accepting the solemnity of the ritual requires that one submits to the rules, that they agree that they need to show a vaccine card to enter restaurants. Anti-vaxxers by and large either fundamentally object to the vaccine and are proud of that fact, or they are still hesitant to get the vaccine because they're scared of it/think they don't need it/it's too much of an inconvenience/whatever else. For the first group, showing a f... (read more)