All of SebastianG 's Comments + Replies

I already have a Logic Tournament ques ion and rule set built for middle and high schoolers if you want to use it. 

I'm now on number three.

Definitely on board with children shifting your value function a lot. One of them in particular (the newborn in the photo) shifts my value function more than I had anticipated.

In the recent interview Volodomyr Zelenskii said "if someone takes your child away, you'd bite his head off." ...Definitely true. And come to think of it... is that a Count Ugolino reference from the Divine Comedy?

Futarchy within Civilization 5.

When I participated in the Good Judgment Project's IARPA research, we had to predict things about a game of civilization. Now, imagine if you had a game of civilization. Six players all playing against each other, and AI agents representing and having full access to each civilization's data. Then, a common betting market for particular outcomes of the game. For example, by turn 100, who will have the largest army? What will culture be for this civilization at turn 150? Questions of that nature. If futarchy is largely based on betting markets, and AIs are can simulate various betting agents, then WHY NOT SANDBOX THEM AND TRY IT? Surely, someone is already working on this?

You can buy bulk tamiflu powder here: https://www.selleckchem.com/products/oseltamivir-phosphate-Tamiflu.html And instructions for preparation are here: https://dph.illinois.gov/content/dam/soi/en/web/idph/files/publications/tami-flu-flyer-050316.pdf $300 for 13 doses, which would last you about 6 days, dosing the recommended twice daily during a pandemic. Shelf life of the powder is 2 years. Would any medicine nerd sanity check that I am not missing something essential?

Incentives!

Don't forget that reported cases of H5N1 are actually just reported cases, and that if you don't test your cattle, you won't have anything to report. It would be inconvenient if your cows had it, or any of your workers were sick with it (luckily tests aren't really available), because there would be a pause and perhaps a loss in your already razor thin margins of operation. The incentive to track and understand aren't there. So just let it rip through the herd. It doesn't kill cows anyway...

From a historical perspective this is an excellent treasure cache. Truly when you are the cutting edge of something ideas, relationships, personality, and economics all truly come together to drive history.

I would not be surprised if lurking in the background of my thought is Tyler Cowen. He's a huge influence on me. But I was thinking of specific examples. I don't know of a good general history of "humanizing".

What I had explicitly in mind was the historical development of automobile safety: seatbelts and airbags. There is a  history of invention, innovation, deployment, and legal mandating that is long and varied for these.

How long did it take between the discovery of damaging chlorofluorocarbons and their demise? Or for asbestos and its abatement - h... (read more)

Well said.

The casual policing of positive comments about Sam Altman is unnecessary. Is this Sam Altman sneer club? Grok the author's intent and choose your own example. SA is a polarizing figure, I get it. He can be a distraction to the point of an example, but in this case I thought it made sense.

It is something for authors to be on the lookout for though. Some examples invite "missing the point." Sam Altman is increasingly one example of a name that invites distracted thoughts other than the point intended.

Yes I'm assuming a locally run open weight model will be useful, but not ultimately not sufficient for very complex tasks. I hope that something of the sort I describe can and will exist before too much regulation and optimized monetization occurs.

And we don't have good social models of technology for really any technology, even retrospectively. So AI is certainly one we are not going to align with human flourishing in advance. When it comes to human flourishing the humanizing of technologies take a lot of time. Eventually we will get there, but it's a process that requires a lot of individual actors making choices and "feature requests" from the world, features that promote human flourishing.

At my school all the students have to deposit their cell phones into pouches at the office the beginning of the day.. cell phone strictness alone does not create interpersonal chatter. You just also spend a lot of time and work creating an actual culture of conversation. It's an explicitly taught skill!

Your data on the elasticity of behavior matches my experience well..

Oh weird! I didn't create this one.

You are correct! Let me fix that!

I for one am definitely worse off.

1. I now have to read Scott on Substack instead of SSC.
2. Scott doesn't write sweet things that could attract nasty flies anymore.

Very helpful comment!

Upon further reflection my example was ill-chosen. The flashlight clobbering example doesn't trigger double-effect considerations, because there is only one immediate effect of the action - an unconscious intruder.

I wanted to use a simple example that had two effects , but I think you rightly point out that claiming the home-owner didn't intend to make the guy unconscious is specious sophistry. His unconsciousness and the safety of the home are two aspects of the same effect. The unconscious intruder entails the safety of the home.

If w... (read more)

Thanks for commenting. Welcome.

You right on both accounts. 

There are some agreed upon universal principles that societies do develop. "No ****ing the young. No randomly killing people."

Categorical imperative is exactly what I what I had in mind. However, the CI is not based upon what's acceptable to the actor or to the society at large, but rather according to reason. "Act only on the maxim which you can at the same time will that it should be universal law."

Your action only makes your home safe by means of knocking him out. This is in fact a nice clean example of something that is not permitted by traditional formulations of the doctrine of double effect, at least not if knocking the intruder out is considered bad.

It is precisely this instance for which DDE was formulated: to explain why it is permitted! https://aquinas.cc/la/en/~ST.II-II.Q64.A7.SC

Flashlight clobbering produces the good effect and the bad effect. They are coterminous events, even though one is logically necessary for the other. As you say, "a... (read more)

Standard modifies Thomistic, it's not normative as in "this is the standard", it's descriptive, as in "this is how the philosophy books and articles on it generally work".

I use that as a starting point, because it is the one which has discussion of double-effect. I privilege "double-effect" as a concept because it is the term which describes thinking through actions which have both positive and negative consequences, and also takes account of common sense things people care about like intent, means, and circumstances. Unless a person is a moral purist, one... (read more)

What is the best way to build a liquid market of DACs?
For these to be and competitive a lot of people need to see them.

An excellent quote: "a market-based society that uses social pressure, rather than government, as the regulator, is not [the result of] some automatic market process: it's the result of human intention and coordinated action."

I think too often people work on things under the illusion that everything else just "takes care of itself."
Everything requires effort.
Efforts in the long-run are elastic.
Thus, everything is elastic.

Don't take for granted that industry will take care of itself, or art, or music, or AI safety, or basic reading, writing, and arithmetic skills. It's all effort - all the way down..

What has more elasticity - birth rates or institutional and educational quality of the sort that leads to innovation? Clearly both are fairly inelastic in the short run (the shorter the run, the closer to perfect inelasticity), but in the long run a lot might be possible along both axes.

Metascience should focus on the institutional and educational quality questions (including creating better idea discovery processes!). Insofar as metascience depends on fertility, it is a heavily intermediated causal pathway, both by time, by generational differences and cu... (read more)

Since we are at no moment capable of seeing all that is inefficient and wasteful, and constantly discover new methods of wealth creation, we are at each moment liable to be accused of being horribly wasteful compared to our potential, no? There is no way to stand up against that accusation.

The implication: overhangs CANNNOT be measured in advance (this is like a punctuated equilibrium model); they are black swan events. Is that how you see it?

Forming a nonprofit is not that difficult. It's like four extra hours of work to get the 501c3 status and a decent time delay of several months. Having someone else to fill out the 990 for you is nice, though!

Ah, of course. That makes sense.

I know sincere intelligent Christians who would just be relieved and respect that you've actually thought about the question of deism, and see that as a positive sign of intelligence, maybe even truth seeking?

I stand by this comment.

What could cause me to change my mind? Here are my cruxes.

If character assessment posts about particular people can be shown to cause a useful actions or ways of thinking for readers more often than they distract readers by unverifiable gossip.

If character assessment posts about particular people is used as a case study for reasoning about particular people to teach a broader lesson.

If character assessment posts about particular people allows community members to protect themselves from a real danger.

However, my beliefs are that the... (read more)

When I saw the topic, my first thought is that the epistemics of discussions of this sort (he said - she said stories about sins and perceptions) are inherently bad and cause more harm to those who engage with them than good. But the post isn't terrible quality.

Nonetheless, I am pre-committing to downvoting any future post about the personal relationships of famous people, which I take to be the category of thing, I am objecting to.

In traditional charitable enterprises, we just call it "a donor gift."

"Moral imperatives" is not a category that relies upon financial means. Moral imperatives in traditional Kantian framework are supposed to be universal, no? Just because some action could be personally and socially very beneficial doesn't make it morally compulsory. The benefits would have to be weighed against opportunity cost, uncertainty, game theoretic considerations, and possible contrary moral systems being correct.

Source was in a meeting with her. The public record of the meeting transcript should be forthcoming.

I'll be selling Dominant Assurance Contracts Insurance. If a post is not up to standards then you can file a claim and receive compensation. Power will shift towards my insurance company's internal adjudication board. Eventually we'll cover certain writers but not others, acting as a seal of quality.

If they pay you with PayPal and you pay them back with PayPal, then there is a 6% loss. It would be easier and less dead weight lossy to use a private challenge mechanism within Manifold. Or even to just create a market in Manifold and bet it down super low, and then resolve it against yourself if you get 10 bettors. That's a first thought... One objection is that since assassination markets don't seem to obtain, maybe they wouldn't work with blog posts either. However, in this case the market maker has both the market incentive and some other motivation not entirely captured by the market to complete the blog post.

I learned those from Wittgenstein, Aristotle, and Umberto Eco.

Numerical obsession can simplify important semantic subtleties. And semantic pyrotechnics can make my reasoning more muddled. Both are needed. As is, I suppose, a follow up post on the non-LW ideas that pay a lot of rent.

One way to do this would be to create houses of study dedicated to these exams for students and a tutor work together in the community to accomplish these goals without requiring a very large costly institution. Group house plus the tutor/academic coordinator.

Some fields only require completing a series of test for entry. No degree required. I'll put in parentheses one's that I'm not sure don't require a bachelor's degree. Certified Actuary Chartered Financial Analyst (Certified Public Accountant) (Various other financial certifications) (Foreign Service Officer's exam) (The bar exam: I don't know how one can get them to let you sit the exam without a law degree, but it is allegedly possible in California, Vermont, Virginia, and Washington). There are a lot of certificate programs out there for long established work that involves brains but not in person learning (money and law). In computer science, "building things" is the certificate, I suppose.

I agree that if you are looking at it in terms of art generators that it is not a promising view. I was thinking hypothetically about AI enabled advancements in the energy creation and storage and in materials science and in, idk, say environmental control systems in hostile environments. If we had paradigm shifting advancements in these areas we may then spend time implementing and exploiting these world changing discoveries.

Maybe another perspective on point three is the additional supply of 2d written and 2d visual material will increase the price and status of 3d material, which would equilibrate as more people moved in to 3d endeavours.

So might this be a way to increase not only the status of atoms relative to bits, but use bits to reinvent the world of atoms through new physical developments? And if the physical developments are good enough and compounding would that stall the progress of AI development?

While I would say your timeline is generally too long, I think the steps are pretty good. This was a visceral read for me.

Some sociological points:

1. I think you don't give anti-AI development voices much credence and that's a mistake. Yes, there will be economic incentives, but social incentives can overcome those if the right people start to object to further specialized LLM development.

2. Although you have a fairly worked out thought on AI development, where the path is clear, for AIS the fact that you ended with a coin flip almost seems like slight of

Just read your latest post on your research program and attempt to circumvent social reward, then came here to get a sense at your hunt for a paradigm.

Here are some notes on Human in the Loop.

You say, "We feed our preferences in to an aggregator, the AI reads out the aggregator." One thing to notice is that this framing makes some assumptions that might be too specific. It's really hard, I know, to be general enough while still having content. But my ears pricked up at this one. Does it have to be an 'aggregator' maybe the best way of revealing preferences... (read more)

Hey ya'll who RSVP'd, if you are interested send me a dm with your email and I will add you to our email list. 

We are doing two events before the ACX Meetup Everywhere in October. You can learn about them by getting on the email list. This Thursday September 22 we are doing an online event in Gathertown 8pm eastern, 5pm Pacific. Feel free to send this out to people who would like this sort of thing.

https://app.gather.town/events/pXVcEMSts1dcxnOc7rqU

Loose Discussion Topic:
What does it mean to improve your local community/environment? Is local improveme... (read more)

Thank you for this high quality comment and all the pointers in it. I think these two framings are isomorphic, yes? You have nicely compressed it all into the one paragraph.

There's definitely evil AI.

I agree that thinking critically about the way AGI can get bottlenecked by physical processes speed. While this is an important area of study and thought, I don't see how "there could be this bottleneck though!" matters to the discussion. It's true. There likely is this bottleneck. How big or small it is requires some thought and study, but that thought and study presupposes you already have an account for why the bottleneck operates as a real bottleneck from the perspective of a plausibly existing AGI.

Bizarre coincidence. Or maybe not.

Last night I was having 'the conversation' with a close friend and also found that the idea of speed of action was essential for explaining around the requirement of having to give a specific 'story'. We are both former StarCraft players so discussing things in terms of an ideal version of AlphaStar proved illustrative. If you know StarCraft, the idea of an agent being able to maximize the damage given and received for every unit, minerals mined, and resources expended, the dancing, casting, building, expanding, replenishi... (read more)

We have a reservation for 8 at 1pm. I am wearing a blue tshirt, that says 'nihilist', a copy of Unsong, and an infant strap.

Come even if you feel nervous or shy. We will have fun, good conversation. 

I have been reading and thinking about the ontology of chance, what makes a good introduction to chemistry, and the St. Louis County Charter. 

These are good points! I have been thinking the same thing. However, I don't imagine the upper institute requiring prerequisites, just an entrance exam. But a four year college offers basically the same thing except they lower transaction costs to basically zero or making that decision to commit to something you like. Hence declaring or changing majors is usually easy if you do it sophomore year.

The price disclosure issue isn't a problem. You can Google average cost of any private college and it will give a good ballpark estimate which matches the OPs 20k+... (read more)

That's true at the prestigious four year colleges. But there are hundreds of private four year colleges. Their supply of students is stagnant and beginning to backslide. If you talk to private four year college admissions officers, many are afraid of the coming great contraction in school aged people. Only Texas isn't having a contraction.

In any case, in John's model, that coming contraction should result in a decrease in number of specialized courses. We'll see. Courses might be somewhat sticky though.

[correction] "You are not allowed to teach that Purgatory is not part of Catholic teaching, because it is."

Martin: "Why should I not be allowed to teach it? I am allowed to debate it in the classroom."

"The disputations are one thing. Public tracts are another."

"You're just mad because I called you corrupt."

"Yes, that makes it easier to want to suppress you. Though we never officially censor people for saying that."