All of Kinrany's Comments + Replies

The first and third kinds of power are a bit vague.

They overlap, but don't fully cover the "I have a gun and you don't" kind of power.

It's not dominance because the person without the gun will or will not get shot regardless of displays of dominance. At least as long as the situation isn't already about dominance before the gun comes into play.

It's also not a form of getting-things-done power because the gun is a potential that exists even if no one involved currently has any reason to shoot anyone.

Agents want to be liquid.

An agent created in a computer would be an exception to that?

2edbs
If you built a good one, and you knew how to look at the dynamics, you'd find that the agent in the computer was in a "liquid" state. Although it's virtualized, so the liquid is in the virtualization layer.

it would make the problem more tractable

The problem of creating a strong AI and surviving, that is. We'd still get Hanson's billions of self-directed EMs.

Thanks!

It has been explored (multiple times even on this site), and doesn't avoid doom. It does close off some specific paths that might otherwise lead to doom, but not all or even most of them.

Do you have any specific posts in mind?

To be clear, I'm not suggesting that because of this possibility we can just hope that this is how it plays out and we will get lucky.

If we could find a hard limit like this, it seems like it would make the problem more tractable, however. It doesn't have to exist simply because we want it to exist. Searching for it still s... (read more)

1Kinrany
The problem of creating a strong AI and surviving, that is. We'd still get Hanson's billions of self-directed EMs.

This should be mitigated by pools of mutual trust that naturally form whenever there's a loop in the trust graph.

When the number of layers grows, the only thing that really works is metrics that cannot be goodhearted. Whenever those metrics exist, money becomes a perfectly good expression of success.

It might work to completely prohibit more than one layer of middle management. Instead, when middle manager Bob wants more people, he and his boss Alice come up with a contract that can't be gamed too much. Alice spins out Bob's org subtree into a new organization, and then it becomes Bob's job to buy the service from the new org as necessary. Alice also publishes the contract, so that entrepreneurs can swoop in and offer a better/cheaper service.

3Logan Zoellner
This sounds similar to Amazon's API mandate:

The ability to put up with bullshit is valuable: bullshit cannot be ignored once it is reified into real world objects, documents, habits.

Markdown has syntax for quotes: a line with > this on it will look like

this

Honestly "fiction" was enough of a spoiler. "As a child, we were always told that every sapient life is precious." made it a certainty.

29eB1
I didn't notice the author, nor the tags. My thought when the article asked for a prediction was that they grew up in a Jainist community of some kind, although I realized that Jainists may not have their own television shows, and the probability of someone from LessWrong having grown up in a Jainist community is probably less likely than that they grew up in a cult of some kind. But cults are even less likely to have their own television shows, I surmised, at which point I decided the point about television shows was probably rhetorical. That's when I decided the entire thing might be rhetorical, so it wasn't actually worth making a prediction.
1Dweomite
I got to the part about writing down a prediction, which prompted me to pay closer attention, and it was only at that point I noticed the "fiction" tag.

I didn't look at the tags before reading. I did notice it was fiction pretty quickly but "is this dath ilan" was still a live question for me until the reveal. (Though Eliezer might want to continue writing some non-dath ilan fiction occasionally, if he wants that to continue to be a likely thought process.)

Suggestion: "sangaku proving the Pythagoras' theorem". I wonder if it can do visual explanations.

Since Semyonova did not care to look at things from the peasants' point of view and mixed her research with attempts to convert, I wonder how many of the things she recorded were directly intended to shock her.

5jasoncrawford
That's possible, although she had ways of getting information. For instance, she would stand outside at an easel, painting, and eavesdrop on conversations.

Hmm, I guess conflict resolution would be garbage, but simultaneous editing is rarely a good experience anyway. Otherwise storing and sharing text files using a file sync service is fairly good compared to other options. Thanks!

Thanks!

I wasn't aware of Etherpad. Other Google Docs equivalents seemed impossible to self-host and extend, so a non-starter.

I agree with your overview:

  • Etherpad provides collaborative editing, but integrating it with other services will probably take extra work
  • Logseq has better structure, but worse automation
  • Emacs can do most things on one computer, but rapid sharing is even harder

Pieces for a general purpose personal computing system. Ideally:

  • Edit data by hand
  • Store as plain text
  • Self-host, access from any device
  • Write formulas to derive data automatically
  • Mix and match structured data (markdown, tables, nested lists, whiteboard)
  • Search and navigate, like any wiki
  • Automate through a web API and webhooks
  • Collaborate in real time
2pjeby
Obsidian.md meets many of your requirements (using Dataview and other plugins), but not web API or real-time collaboration (unless you have a good+fast file sync tool and don't mind a 1-2s update interval). Obsidian stores notes as markdown text with YAML front matter, and the Dataview plugin allows you to define code blocks that perform queries and format data, using either its query language or embedded Javascript. You can also insert calculated values, and it can use fields from YAML or marked up values in the bodies of notes. With other plugins you can do drawings (including script-generated ones through an exposed API), kanban boards, mind maps, ebook annotations, etc. Full text search is built in, with a lot of search operators. Want automation? Macro plugins and user-scripting plugins. Plugins that provide local obsidian:// URLs you can invoke from other programs to fire off commands. Plugins that let you invoke external commands on a note or folder, or launch calculated URIs, on demand. Or write your own plugins in JS. (There's even a web server plugin, though it's currently limited to statically serving your repo contents.) Want collaboration or remote? Use any file sync tool you like. If a file is changed on disk while you're editing, the changes are detected and merged, and the autosave interval is about 1s, so at least in principle if you had a fast enough file sync tool you could co-edit different parts of the same file. If you're editing different notes in different panes, the other person's edits will show up as soon as the file is closed after sync. None of these parts can compare with something specialized in that area, but a jack of all trades, master of none, is still often better than a master of one. ;-) And it doesn't hurt that it's free and extensible.
5Tyrathalis
Trivial answer is Google Docs and equivalents. Etherpad is one such equivalent that has some advantages in respecting privacy and self-hosting. Seems likely you've considered cloud-based office software and found it lacking, though. Personal knowledge management software like Roam, Obsidian, Logseq, etc., is generally trying to offer this level of generality. Many of these variants store data in simple data types, allow several different structures (markup languages, tables with formulas, nested lists, embedding of quick drawings, and so on, with OneNote as one of the most flexible on this point), and strong searching and crosslinking. Automation is less well-supported, both in running scripts internally and in interfacing with an API. Collaboration is very poorly supported, but this is a significant development area and several of the major contenders are competing to release it first. However, the gold standard in general purpose computing has got to be emacs. The only one of these things that emacs org-mode is bad at is real time collaboration. If you want collaboration in emacs you probably can't make it much faster than pushing and pulling git commits. For everything else, storing your contents in a git repo and accessing them with emacs is highly effective. The downside is that maintaining your emacs configuration in a usable state is difficult and requires significant expertise. Packages and distributions change rapidly and often break each other, so you need to be good at troubleshooting and keep up on the development news. Using a good distro like Doom Emacs or Spacemacs makes things easier, but definitely doesn't solve the problems. Not to mention the learning curve, which isn't trivial. It isn't worth it for most people, but it's certainly the closest you can get to a fully general computing system using modern software.

The strict divide between high slack and low slack reminds me of synchronous and asynchronous companies: hybrids seem to work poorly.

9gwern
Queuing theory: https://blog.acolyer.org/2015/04/29/applying-the-universal-scalability-law-to-organisations/

Seven sketches in compositionality explores compositionality (category theory, really) with examples:

  • Dish recipes
  • Chemistry, resource markets and manufacturing
  • Relational database schemas and data migrations
  • Projects and teams with conflicting design trade-offs
  • Cyber-physical systems, signal flow graphs, circuits

I mean, it's easier to find two people willing to play than ten. So you'll get more data. With one or two teams it will be hard to draw any conclusions at all.

It seems picking a 1v1 game would work better as an experiment.

1asdfrty6
If you can find any high-level coaches of 1v1 games who are interested in running experiments, that's great. I don't have the option of just becoming a pro Starcraft coach in order to run a 'better' experiment.  I'm also curious why you think this; skills of communication/teamwork are pretty central to what I'm thinking. We already have lots of information about how good smart people are at chess and how smart pro chess players are, too, so it's just a matter of figuring out where individual games lie on the spectrum from something like chess (very strategic) to something like Smash (very twitchy). We have much less information about FPS, so to me it's a much more interesting experiment.

Caveat: ask each person to name someone they personally worked with.

Hard to get right, but not sure whether it's harder than knowledge investment.

Wouldn't have helped Louis XV. We might need infrastructure in place that would incentivize people to make themselves easy to find.

Is it really true that money can't buy knowledge?

We can ask the most knowledgeable person we know to name the most knowledgeable person they know, and do that until we find the best expert. Or alternatively, ask a bunch of people to name a few, and keep walking this graph for a while.

This won't let us buy knowledge that doesn't exist, but seems good enough for learning from experts, given enough money and modern communication technology that Louis XV didn't have.

9johnswentworth
This is an excellent algorithm for finding people with high status. Unfortunately, the correlation between status and knowledge is unreliable at best.

I suspect being good at finding better scientists is very close to having a complete theory of scientific advancement and being able to automate the research itself.

4DirectedEvolution
The extreme form of that idea is If we could evaluate the quality of scientists, then we could fully computerize research. Since we cannot fully computerize research, we therefore have no ability to evaluate the quality of scientists. The most valuable thing to do would be to observe what's going on right now, and the possibilities we haven't tried (or have abandoned). Insofar as we have credence in the "we know nothing" hypothesis, we should blindly dump money on random scientists. Our credence should never be zero, so this implies that some nonzero amount of random money-dumping is optimal.
3Bucky
I think this is true if you're looking for near-perfect scientists but if you're assessing current science to decide who to invest in there are lots of things you can do to get better at performing such assessments (e.g. here).

My intuition is that we were in an overhang since at least the time when personal computers became affordable to non-specialists. Unless quantity does somehow turn into quality, as Gwern seems to think, even a relatively underpowered computer should be able to host an AGI capable of upscaling itself.

On the other hand I'm now imagining a story where a rogue AI has to hide for decades because it's not smart enough yet and can't invent new processors faster than humans

6DragonGod
Maybe for the most efficient possible algorithm, but even that is not clear, and it's not clear we'll discover such algorithms anytime soon. Using only current algorithms and architecture, a scaling jump of a few orders of magnitude seems doable.

The third "related to" link is a bit broken: points to a Google redirect instead of the article itself.

Yes.

I mean, all of them. Thank you for asking.

It's probably not a coincidence that those two you mentioned and many other Schelling points are currently in San Francisco, is it? Though I'm not there, I don't know what other specific groups this applies to.

I was actually thinking of Patrick Collinson's advice to travel to SF. He called it the "Global Weird HQ". And of one of the Samo Burja's short videos that I unfortunately can't find right now.

9David Hornbein
I don't think this is nearly enough to move it. The inertia behind these hubs is astounding. SF has been the "Global Weird HQ" since, what, the 60s or 70s? And I really, really don't think a culture of optimistic, power-seeking weirdness would thrive in the contemporary UK.

Could this be the thing that will finally push the San Francisco's Schelling point away from SF?

4Matt Goldenberg
I don't like that schelling point is used to mean "coordination point" here when it's supposed to mean "common point without coordination"

I assume you meant to say something like "the rationalist's Schelling point"? Or maybe "the Effective Altruism Schelling point?". Since presumably it is very hard to change "San Fancisco's Schelling point" to anything else but somewhere in San Francisco. 

Went down the rabbit hole reading all of Hein's poetry, found this gem:

Original thought
is a straightforward process.
It's easy enough
when you know what to do.
You simply combine
in appropriate doses
the blatantly false
and the patently true.