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?
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
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.
EDIT: replied to wrong comment. Curse you mobile interface!
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.
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)
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.
Putting RamblinDash's point another way: when Eliezer says "unlimited retries", he's not talking about a Groundhog Day style reset. He's just talking about the mundane thing where, when you're trying to fix a car engine or something, you try one fix, and if it doesn't start, you try another fix, and if it still doesn't start, you try another fix, and so on. So the scenario Eliezer is imagining is this: we have 50 years. Year 1, we build an AI, and it kills 1 million people. We shut it off. Year 2, we fix the AI. We turn it back on, it kills another million...
Am I the only one who, upon reading the title, pictured 5 people sitting behind OP all at the same time?
Knowing how supervision scales sounds important to me. Can we get some scaling laws going here for productivity? I need to know the dollar-optimal scaling of worker/supervisor/proximity; it may be more Chinchilla-optimal to hire 20 remote workers to occasionally screenshare instead of 1 in-person person.
The group version of this already exists, in a couple of different versions:
Yeah, that is definitely fair
My model of gears to ascension, based on their first 2 posts, is that they're not complaining about the length for their own sake, but rather for the sake of people that they link this post to who then bounce off because it looks too long. A basics post shouldn't have the property that someone with zero context is likely to bounce off it, and I think gears to ascension is saying that the nominal length (reflected in the "43 minutes") is likely to have the effect of making people who get linked to this post bounce off it, even though the length for practical purposes is much shorter.
Pinker has a book about writing called The Sense of Style
There seems to be a conflict between putting “self-displays on social media” in the ritual box, and putting “all social signalling” outside it. Surely the former is a subset of the latter.
My understanding was that the point was this: not all social signalling is ritual. Some of it is, some of it isn't. The point was: someone might think OP is claiming that all social signalling is ritual, and OP wanted to dispel that impression. This is consistent with some social signalling counting as ritual.
I think the idea is to be able to transform this:
- item 1
- item 2
- item 3
into this:
- item 3
- item 1
- item 2
I.e. it would treat bulleted lists like trees, and allow you to move entire sub-branches of trees around as single units.
This isn't necessarily a criticism, but "exploration & recombination" and "tetrising" seem in tension with each other. E&R is all about allowing yourself to explore broadly, not limiting yourself to spending your time only on the narrow thing you're "trying to work on." Tetrising, on the other hand, is precisely about spending your time only on that narrow thing.
As I said, this isn't a criticism; this post is about a grab bag of techniques that might work at different times for different people, not a single unified strategy, but it's still interesting to point out the tension here.
Cool, thanks!
I think the point was that it's a cause you don't have to be a longtermist in order to care about. Saying it's a "longtermist cause" can be interpreted either as saying that there are strong reasons for caring about it if you're a longtermist, or that there are not strong reasons for caring about it if you're not a longtermist. OP is disagreeing with the second of these (i.e. OP thinks there are strong reasons for caring about AI risk completely apart from longtermism).
Not a programmer, but I think one other reason for this is that at least in certain languages (I think interpreted languages, e.g. Python, is the relevant category here), you have to define a term before you can use it; the interpreter basically executes the code top-down instead of compiling it first, so it can't just look later in the file to figure out what you mean. So
def brushTeeth():
putToothpasteOnToothbrush()
...
def putToothpasteOnToothbrush():
...
wouldn't work, because you're calling putToothpasteOnToothbrush() before you've defined it.
Fyi, the link to your site is broken for those viewing on greaterwrong.com; it's interpreting "--a" as part of the link.
Maybe have a special "announcements" section on the frontpage?
The way I like to think about this is that the set of all possible thoughts is like a space that can be carved up into little territories and each of those territories marked with a word to give it a name.
Probably better to say something like "set of all possible concepts." Words denote concepts, complete sentences denote thoughts.
I'm curious if you're explicitly influenced by Quine for the final section, or if the resemblance is just coincidental.
Also, about that final section, you say that "words are grounded in our direct experience of what happens w...
Master: Now, is Foucault’s work the content you’re looking for, or merely a pointer.
Student: What… does that mean?
Master: Do you think that you think that the value of Foucault for you comes from the specific ideas he had, or in using him to even consider these two topics?
This put words to a feeling I've had a lot. Often I have some ideas, and use thinkers as a kind of handle to point to the ideas in my head (especially when I haven't actually read the thinkers yet). The problem is that this fools me into thinking that the ideas are developed, eit...
Yep, check out the Republic, I believe this is in book 5, or if it's not in book 5 it's in book 6.
The received wisdom in this community is that modifying one's utility function is at least usually irrational. The classic source here is Steve Omohundro's 2008 paper, "The Basic AI Drives," and Nick Bostrom gives basically the same argument in Superintelligence, pp. 132-34. The argument is basically this: imagine you have an AI that is solely maximizing the number of paperclips that exist. Obviously, if it abandons that goal, there will be less paperclips than if it maintains that goal. And if it adds another goal, say maximizing staples, then this other ...
I would think the metatheological fact you want to be realist about is something like "there is a fact of the matter about whether the God of Christianity exists." "The God of Christianity doesn't exist" strikes me as an object-level theological fact.
The metaethical nihilist usually makes the cut at claims that entail the existence of normative properties. That is, "pleasure is not good" is not a normative fact, as long as it isn't read to entail that pleasure is bad. "Pleasure is not good" does not by itself entail the existence of any normative property.
Really? I'm American and it sounds perfectly normal to me.
I think this post is extremely interesting, and on a very important topic. As I said elsethread, for this reason, I don't think it should be in negative karma territory (and have strong-upvoted to try to counterbalance that).
On the object level, while there's a frame of mind I can get into where I can see how this looks plausible to someone, I'm inclined to think that this post is more of a reductio of some set of unstated assumptions that lead to its conclusion, rather than a compelling argument for that conclusion. I don't have the time right now to thin...
I agree with this as well. I have strongly upvoted in an attempt to counterbalance this, but even so it is still in negative karma territory, which I don't think it deserves.
Well if we've fallen to the level of influencing other people's votes by directly stating what the votes ought to say (ugh =/), then let me argue the opposite: This post – at least in its current state – should not have a positive rating.
I agree that the topic is interesting and important, but – as written – this could well be an example of what an AI with a twisted/incomplete understanding of suffering, entropy, and a bunch of other things has come up with. The text conjures several hells, both explicitly (Billions of years of suffering are the right choi...
A possible example of research film-study in a very literal sense: Andy Matuschak's 2020-05-04 Note-writing livestream.
I would love it if more people did this sort of thing.
...I think if you accept the premise that the machine somehow magically truly simulates perfectly and indistinguishably from actual reality, in such a way that there is absolutely no way of knowing the difference between the simulation and the outside universe, then the simulated universe is essentially isomorphic to reality, and we should be fully indifferent. I’m not sure it even makes sense to say either universe is more “real”, since they’re literally identical in every way that matters (for the differences we can’t observe even in theory, I appeal to Ne
Not sure if this is exactly what you're looking for, but you could check out "Do Now" on the play store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.slamtastic.donow.app (no idea if it's available for apple or not)
Two things I've come across. Haven't used either much, but figured I'd mention them:
Ah, I think the fact that there's an image after the first point is causing the numbered list to be numbered 1,1,2,3.
My main concern with using an app like Evergreen Notes is that a hobby project built by one person seems like a fragile place to leave a part of my brain.
In that case you might like obsidian.md.
I found this one particularly impressive: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AHiu-EDJUx0
The use of "oops" at the end is spot on.
Hmm. I think this is closer to "general optimizer" than to "optimizer": notice that certain chess-playing algorithms (namely, those that have been "hard-coded" with lots of chess-specific heuristics and maybe an opening manual) wouldn't meet this definition, since it's not easy to change them to play e.g. checkers or backgammon or Go. Was this intentional (do you think that this style of chess program doesn't count as an optimizer)? I think your definition is getting at something interesting, but I think it's more specific than "optimizer".
I really liked this. I thought the little graphics were a nice touch. And the idea is one of those ones that seems almost obvious in retrospect, but wasn't obvious at all before reading the post. Looking back I can see hints of it in thoughts I've had before, but that's not the same as having had the idea. And the handle ("point of easy progress") is memorable, and probably makes the concept more actionable (it's much easier to plan a project if you can have thoughts like "can I structure this in such a way that there is a point of easy progress, and that I will hit it within a short enough amount of time that it's motivating?").
I've started using the phrase "existential catastrophe" in my thinking about this; "x-catastrophe" doesn't really have much of a ring to it though, so maybe we need something else that abbreviates better?
So one thing I'm worried about is having a hard time navigating once we're a few episodes in. Perhaps you could link in the main post to the comment for each episode?
Could this be solved just by posting your work and then immediately sharing the link with people you specifically want feedback from? That way there's no expectation that they would have already seen it. (Granted, this is slightly different from a gdoc in that you can share a gdoc with one person, get their feedback, then share with another person, while what I suggested requires asking everyone you want feedback from all at once.)
I disagree, I think Kithpendragon did successfully refute the argument without providing examples. Their argument is quite simple, as I understand it: words can cause thoughts, thoughts can cause urges to perform actions which are harmful to oneself, such urges can cause actions which are harmful to oneself. There's no claim that any of these things is particularly likely, just that they're possible, and if they're all possible, then it's possible for words to cause harm (again, perhaps not at all likely, for all Kithpendragon has said, but possible). It b...
A sneeze can determine much more than hurricane/no hurricane. It can determine the identities of everyone who exists, say, a few hundred years into the future and onwards.
If you're not already familiar, this argument gets made all the time in debates about "consequentialist cluelessness". This gets discussed, among other places, in this interview with Hilary Greaves: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/hilary-greaves-global-priorities-institute/. It's also related to the paralysis argument I mentioned in my other comment.
Upvoted for giving "defused examples" so to speak (examples that are described rather than directly used). I think this is a good strategy for avoiding the infohazard.
I was thinking a bit more about why Christian might have posted his comment, and why the post (cards on the table) got my hackles up the way it did, and I think it might have to do with the lengths you go to to avoid using any examples. Even though you aren't trying to argue for the thesis that we should be more careful, because of the way the post was written, you seem to believe that we should be much more careful about this sort of thing than we usually are. (Perhaps you don't think this; perhaps you think that the level of caution you went to in this p...
Sorry for the long edit to my comment, I was editing while you posted your comment. Anyway, if your goal wasn't to go all the way to "people need to be more careful with their words" in this post, then fair enough.
I originally had a longer comment, but I'm afraid of getting embroiled in this, so here's a short-ish comment instead. Also, I recognize that there's more interpretive labor I could do here, but I figure it's better to say something non-optimal than to say nothing.
I'm guessing you don't mean "harm should be avoided whenever possible" literally. Here's why: if we take it literally, then it seems to imply that you should never say anything, since anything you say has some possibility of leading to a causal chain that produces harm. And I'm guessing you don't...
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 y... (read more)