LESSWRONG
LW

Vaughn Papenhausen — LessWrong

Maybe obvious, but one thing I found especially helpful when learning German was texting people. It's production, so it does train your word recall, but it's like "training wheels" since you have more time and can look things up. Nowadays could probably get similar results by practicing with an LLM

Replying toAgainst podcasts

Vaughn Papenhausen10mo

Against podcasts

I'm not sure if the claim that solitude is necessary for creative work, or just that it's one good input for creative work. But to the extent the claim is that it's necessary, I think I'm skeptical. A lot of my ideas come from reacting to other people's ideas, whether in reading or podcasts or conversation. So it's possible to get ideas without solitude. I've also definitely had the "shower thoughts" experience of course. But it's definitely not the only source of good ideas for me (insofar as any of my ideas are any good).

Replying toSearching for the Root of the Tree of Evil

Vaughn Papenhausen2y

Searching for the Root of the Tree of Evil

Okay, I see better now where you're coming from and how you're thinking that social science could be hopeless and yet we can still build a cooperation machine. I still suspect you'll need some innovations in social science to implement such a machine. Even if we assume that we have a black box machine that does what you say, you still have to be sure that people will use the machine, so you'll need enough understanding of social science to either predict that they will, or somehow get them to.

But even if you solve the problem of implementation, I suspect you'll need innovations in social science in order to even design such... (read more)

Replying toSearching for the Root of the Tree of Evil

Vaughn Papenhausen2y

Searching for the Root of the Tree of Evil

I like and agree with a lot in this essay. But I have to admit I'm confused by your conclusion. You dismiss social science research as probably not going anywhere, but then your positive proposal is basically more social science research. Doesn't building "a Cooperation Machine that takes in atomized people and raw intelligence and produces mutual understanding and harmonious collective action" require being "better at organizing our social life in accordance with human flourishing than the Victorians, the Qing, or the pre-conquest Lakota" in exactly the way you claim social science is trying and failing to produce?

Replying toDyslucksia

Vaughn Papenhausen2y

Dyslucksia

Yup. This is how I learned German: found some music I liked and learned to sing it. I haven't learned much Japanese, but there's a bunch of songs I can sing (and know the basic meaning of) even though I couldn't have a basic conversation or use any of those words in other contexts

Replying toDyslucksia

Vaughn Papenhausen2y

Dyslucksia

To my knowledge I am not dyslexic. If I correctly understand what subvocalizing is (reading via your inner monologue), I do it by default unless I explicitly turn it off. I don't remember how I learned to turn it off, but I remember it was a specific skill I had to learn. And I usually don't turn it off because reading without subvocalizing 1. Takes effort, 2. It's less enjoyable, and 3. Makes it harder for me to understand and retain what I'm reading. I generally only turn it off when I have a specific reason why I have to read quickly, e.g. for a school assignment or reading group that I've run low on time to do.

Replying toDyslucksia

Vaughn Papenhausen2y

Dyslucksia

EDIT: replied to wrong comment. Curse you mobile interface!

Replying toThe Limits of the Existence Proof Argument for General Intelligence

Vaughn Papenhausen2y

The Limits of the Existence Proof Argument for General Intelligence

I suspect this is getting downvoted because it is so short and underdeveloped. I think the fundamental point here is worth making though. I've used the existence proof argument in the past, and I think there is something to it, but I think the point being made here is basically right. It might be worth writing another post about this that goes into a bit more detail.

Replying toComplex Signs Bad

Vaughn Papenhausen3y

Complex Signs Bad

This is pretty similar in concept to the conlang toki pona, which is a language explicitly designed to be as simple as possible. It has less than 150 words. ("toki pona" means something like "good language" or "good speech" in toki pona)

Replying toThe basic reasons I expect AGI ruin

Vaughn Papenhausen3y

The basic reasons I expect AGI ruin

Quoting a recent conversation between Aryeh Englander and Eliezer Yudkowsky

Out of curiosity, is this conversation publicly posted anywhere? I didn't see a link.

Has the effectiveness of fever screening declined?

Vaughn Papenhausen

On March 6th, jimrandomh predicted that the effectiveness of fever-screening for coronavirus would decline, because the virus would evolve to produce fever later or not at all. Has this happened in countries that have been liberally applying fever-screening?

Global coordination problems

I've said before that I tentatively think that "foster global coordination" might be a good cause area in its own right, because it benefits so many other cause areas. I think it might be useful to have a term for the cause areas that global coordination would help. More specifically, a term for the concept "(reasonably significant) problem that requires global coordination to solve, or that global coordination would significantly help with solving." I propose "global coordination problem" (though I'm open to other suggestions). You may object "but coordination problem already has a meaning in game theory, this is likely to get confused with that." But global coordination problems are

Vaughn Papenhausen

Epistemic Status: Potential research idea. Time-limited, so not as clear as it could have been.

Vingean reflection is the process of trying to anticipate how an agent smarter than you might think, in order to ensure that it will be aligned with your values. This is hard, because "if [an agent] could predict [a smarter agent's] actions in detail, it would already be as smart as them." Value Learning is the problem of trying to use machine learning to train an AI to care about what humans care about.

I haven't read much about these problems, but they struck me as related to a concept introduced by philosopher Agnes Callard: "aspiration." Her idea is

... (read 1008 more words →)

What technical prereqs would I need in order to understand Stuart Armstrong's research agenda?

Vaughn Papenhausen

I've looked at a few of Stuart Armstrong's posts that he put up related to his research agenda (though only ones before he posted the full agenda), and felt like I was missing some prereqs. My background is in philosophy. What subjects or particular resources should I study to be able to read his work?

Book Review - Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness

Vaughn Papenhausen

In this post:

A true-false test about octopuses
What is it like to be an octopus?
An exercise in updating on surprising facts
Experiments related to animal suffering and consciousness
The evolution of aging
Should you read Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness?

I. Introduction

Peter Godfrey-Smith's Other Minds: the Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness is a phenomenal mishmash of octopus- and consciousness-related topics. It deals with everything from the evolution of octopuses, to their social life, to animal consciousness (including octopus consciousness), to evolutionary theories of aging, and more. All of this is tied together by a palpable fascination with octopuses, which manifests itself in rich descriptions of Godfrey-Smith's

... (read 4511 more words →)

Trying for Five Minutes on AI Strategy

Vaughn Papenhausen

Epistemic Status: I know basically nothing about any of this, or at least no more than any other LessWronger, I just happened to listen to some podcasts about AI strategy recently and decided to try my hand.

Epistemic Effort: Probably about an hour of thought cumulatively, plus maybe two hours to write this up

Global Coordination

AI, like many other x-risks, is in part a global coordination problem. As I see it, there are two main subproblems here: the problem of "where to go" (i.e. how to coordinate and what to coordinate on), and the problem of "how to get there from here" (taking into account the inadequacies present in our actual, real-life political systems).

Putting

... (read 1080 more words →)

A Process for Dealing with Motivated Reasoning

Vaughn Papenhausen

Epistemic status: Had a valley of bad rationality problem, did some thinking about how to solve it in my own case, thought the results might be useful for other people who have the same problem. (To be clear, I don't yet claim this solution works, I haven't really tried it yet, but it seems like the kind of thing that might work. The claim here is "this might be worth trying" rather than "this works" and the target audience is myself and people sufficiently similar to me)

Epistemic effort: Maybe 2-3 hours of writing cumulatively. Thanks to Elephantiskon for feedback.

EDIT: Here's a summary of the post, which I was told was... (read 694 more words →)

I said in this comment that I would post an update as to whether or not I had done deep reflection (operationalized as 5 days = 40 hours cumulatively) on AI timelines by August 15th. As it turns out, I have not done so. I had one conversation that caused me to reflect that perhaps timelines are not as key of a variable in my decision process (about whether to drop everything and try to retrain to be useful for AI safety) as I thought they were, but that is the extent of it. I'm not going to commit to do anything further with this right now, because I don't think that would be useful.

I think one of the key distinctions between content that feels "shortform" and content that feels okay to post as a top-level post is that shortform content is content that doesn't feel important/well-developed/long/something enough to have a title. Now, this can't be the whole story, because I have several posts on this very shortform feed that have titles, but it feels like an important piece of the distinction.

I'm currently reading Peter Godfrey-Smith's book Other Minds: The Octopus, The Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness. One thing I've learned from the book that surprised me a lot is that octopuses can differentiate between individual humans (for example, it's mentioned that at one lab, one of the octopuses had a habit of squirting jets of water at one particular researcher). If you didn't already know this, take a moment to let it sink in how surprising that is: octopuses, which 1.) are mostly nonsocial animals, 2.) have a completely different nervous-system structure that evolved on a completely different branch of the tree of life, and 3.) have no evolutionary history... (read more)

Ikaxas' Hammertime Final Exam

Vaughn Papenhausen

Here are my answers to Alkjash's Hammertime Final Exam. I have selected the difficulty level Steel Cudgel of the Lion.

1. Rationality Technique: Ass-in-Gear Mode

This might also be called "buckling-down mode." It's the feeling you get when there is a Yoda Timer running. It's the feeling of being completely focused on the task at hand, and wasting no mental effort on other thoughts. I find this mode easiest to engage when there is a Yoda Timer running, or there is some deadline pressure, but it is possible to engage it when these conditions do not apply, by noticing what it feels like when a Yoda Timer is running and then bringing yourself... (read 218 more words →)

Musings on Metaethical Uncertainty

How should we deal with metaethical uncertainty? By "metaethics" I mean the metaphysics and epistemology of ethics (and not, as is sometimes meant in this community, highly abstract/general first-order ethical issues).

One answer is this: insofar as some metaethical issue is relevant for first-order ethical issues, deal with it as you would any other normative uncertainty. And insofar as it is not relevant for first-order ethical issues, ignore it (discounting, of course, intrinsic curiosity and any value knowledge has for its own sake).

Some people think that normative ethical issues ought to be completely independent of metaethics: "The whole idea [of my metaethical naturalism] is to hold fixed ordinary... (read more)

Self-Defeating Reasons

Epistemic Effort: Gave myself 15 minutes to write this, plus a 5 minute extension, plus 5 minutes beforehand to find the links.

There's a phenomenon that I've noticed recently, and the only name I can come up with for it is "self-defeating reasons," but I don't think this captures it very well (or at least, it's not catchy enough to be a good handle for this). This is just going to be a quick post listing 3 examples of this phenomenon, just to point at it. I may write a longer, more polished post about it later, but if I didn't write this quickly it would not get written.

First example:... (read 596 more words →)

A couple of meta-notes about shortform content and the frontpage "comments" section:

It always felt weird to me to have the comments as their own section on the frontpage, but I could never quite figure out why. Well, I think I've figured it out: most comments are extremely context-dependent -- without having read the post one usually can't understand a top-level comment, and it's even worse for comments that are in the middle of a long thread. So having them all aggregated together feels not particularly useful because the usual optimal reading order is to read the post, then read the comments on that post, so getting to the comments from the post

... (read more)

Ikaxas' Shortform Feed

Vaughn Papenhausen

As Raemon has suggested a format for a short-form content feed, I'm going to go ahead and make one. His explanation of the format:

I'll be using the comment section of this post as a repository of short, sometimes-half-baked posts that either:

don't feel ready to be written up as a full post
I think the process of writing them up might make them worse (i.e. longer than they need to be)

I ask people not to create top-level comments here, but feel free to reply to comments like you would a FB post.

Edit: For me at least, #2 also includes "writing them up as a full post would involve enough effort that the post would probably otherwise not get written."

LESSWRONG
LW

LESSWRONG
LW

Vaughn Papenhausen

Book Review - Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness

Trying for Five Minutes on AI Strategy

Potential Research Topic: Vingean Reflection, Value Alignment and Aspiration

A Process for Dealing with Motivated Reasoning

Vaughn Papenhausen

Has the effectiveness of fever screening declined?

Potential Research Topic: Vingean Reflection, Value Alignment and Aspiration

What technical prereqs would I need in order to understand Stuart Armstrong's research agenda?

Book Review - Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness

Trying for Five Minutes on AI Strategy

A Process for Dealing with Motivated Reasoning

Ikaxas' Hammertime Final Exam

Vaughn Papenhausen

Book Review - Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness

Trying for Five Minutes on AI Strategy

Potential Research Topic: Vingean Reflection, Value Alignment and Aspiration

A Process for Dealing with Motivated Reasoning

Vaughn Papenhausen

Has the effectiveness of fever screening declined?

Potential Research Topic: Vingean Reflection, Value Alignment and Aspiration

What technical prereqs would I need in order to understand Stuart Armstrong's research agenda?

Book Review - Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness

Trying for Five Minutes on AI Strategy

A Process for Dealing with Motivated Reasoning

Ikaxas' Hammertime Final Exam

I. Introduction

Global Coordination

Musings on Metaethical Uncertainty

Self-Defeating Reasons