All of LukeOnline's Comments + Replies
"It's not the end of the world... but you can see it from here."
The ChatGPT impressiveness we are witnessing is calculated in real-time using relatively little hardware. Somewhere behind the scenes, all kinds of people and organizations are messing with ChatGPT+++. Striking gold, hitting "true intelligence", might take another decade, or two, or three, or hundred. It might happen in a month. Or tomorrow. Or in a second. AI-go-FOOM could happen every moment and it's only becoming more likely.
The French revolution and the subsequent devastating Napoleo...
It's literally a semantical discussion. There is no true right or wrong here. If you want to use the word "male" to describe those born with male genitals only, excluding trans men - that's a valid definition. A lot of trans men want to be seen as male, and including them is a valid definition as well. IMHO, the latter definition is kinder.
IMHO, modern medicine is quite limited.
Our body and mind are super complex, and interconnected in a billion ways. Psychological stress can create physical issues. Physical issues can cause psychological stress. Your diet can cause autoimmune problems. Lack of exercise can cause disease. Even things like lack of cold exposure seem to be able to generate massive problems.
We evolved to be suited to a hunter-gatherer environment, where we mostly lived active outdoor lives and always ate fresh food. Then we lived in pre-industrial agrarian societies...
I bought a new house last year, and it has an old empty workshop attached. I'd like to 'revive' it, but I've got little "workshop-experience".
In preparation, I bought some books on woodworking and pottery. The woodworking books are very traditionally masculine. Men! Chest hair! Beer! BBQ!
But the book on pottery is quite feminine. Bright photos, soft colors, everything is demonstrated by a female Instagram influencer.
That doesn't matter in the slightest to me. I don't think my interest in pottery has any relationship to my gender. I don't ...
From a completely different angle: Nietzsche.
...We believe that we know something about the things themselves when we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers; and yet we possess nothing but metaphors for things — metaphors which correspond in no way to the original entities.
Every concept arises from the equation of unequal things. Just as it is certain that one leaf is never totally the same as another, so it is certain that the concept "leaf" is formed by arbitrarily discarding these individual differences and by forgetting the distinguishing aspects
I'm from the Netherlands. We've always had fairly laid back attitudes towards gender. When I grew up, I didn't have hyperfeminine cheerleaders and hypermasculine bodybuilders in my class. Lots of girls wore pants and other 'non-feminine' clothing, and/or had short hair.
Of course, there was a division in male/female, which 99% of the time, didn't matter. But things like showers and changing rooms were clearly separated between boys and girls.
I notice that this post is a bit frustrating to me, because it feels regressive.
...But if society can
What is actually being proposed is more like a 20 year pause in AI research to let MIRI solve alignment
Isn't that insanely unrealistic? Both A.) unrealistic in achieving that pause, and B.) just letting MIRI solve alignment in 20 years? MIRI was formed back in 2000, 22 years ago, and now global AI research has to pause for two decades so MIRI can write more papers about Pearlian Causal Inference?
Ok, really, all of this has already been answered. These are standard misconceptions about alignment, probably based on some kind of antropomorphic reasoning.
Where? By whom?
Why would you possibly make this assumption?
Why would you possibly assume that deep, intelligent understanding of life, consciousness, joy and suffering has 0 correlation with caring about these things?
All of the assumptions we make about biological, evolved life do not apply to AI.
But where do valid assumptions about AI come from? Sure, I might be antropomorphizing AI a bit...
A paperclip-maximizer, or other AI with some simple maximization function, is not going to care if it's born in a nice world or a not-nice world. It's still going to want to maximize paperclips, and turns us all into paperclips, if it can get away with it.
Why would a hyperintelligent, recursively self-improved AI, one that is capable of escaping the AI Box by convincing the keeper to let him free, which the AI is capable of because of his deep understanding of human preferences and functioning, necessarily destroy the world in a way that is 100% disastrous...
Why would a hyperintelligent, recursively self-improved AI, one that is capable of escaping the AI Box by convincing the keeper to let him free, which the AI is capable of because of his deep understanding of human preferences and functioning, necessarily destroy the world in a way that is 100% disastrous and incompatible with all human preferences?
I fully agree that there is a big risk of both massive damage to human preferences, and even the extinction of all life, so AI Alignment work is highly valuable, but why is "unproductive destruction of the entire world" so certain?
I fully agree here. This is a very valuable post.
After all, if we agree that there is a set of values, a set of behaviors that we would want to a superintelligence acting in humanity's best interest to have, why wouldn't I myself choose to hold these values and do these behaviors?
I know Jordan Peterson is quite the controversial figure, but that's some core advice of his. Aim for the highest, the best you could possibly aim for - what else is there to do? We're bounded by death, you've got nothing to lose, and everything to gain - why not aim for the...
AI Boxing is often proposed as a solution. But of course, a sufficiently advanced AI will be able to convince their human keepers to let them go free. How can an AI do so? By having a deep understanding of human goals and preferences.
Will an IQ 1500 being with a deep understanding of human goals and preferences perfectly mislead human keepers, break out and... turn the universe into paperclips?
I can certainly understand that that being might have goals at odds with our goals, goals that are completely beyond our understanding, like the human hi...
Good to hear the event went smoothly, and thanks for sharing your experience!
I'm not sure yet how we should decide when to stop requiring [masks], and am open to suggestions!
How about organizing an event without masks (and/or other COVID measures)? Allow people to choose whether to go the maskless/measureless event or the masked/'protected' event (or both!). Compare attendance, and change the frequency of each category of events depending on that. Perhaps both events are roughly evenly popular, perhaps maskless is much more popular, perhaps 'protected' is much more popular. If you do this experiment, let me know the results!
Looks interesting, thanks for the recommendation!
But as far as I know, none of them have made it a focus of theirs to fight egregores, defeat hypercreatures
Egregore is an occult concept representing a distinct non-physical entity that arises from a collective group of people.
I do know one writer who talks a lot about demons and entities from beyond the void. It's you, and it happens in some of, IMHO, the most valuable pieces you've written.
...I worry that Caplan is eliding the important summoner/demon distinction. This is an easy distinction to miss, since demons often kill their summoners and wear th
You are 200% right. This is the problem we have to solve, not making sure a superintelligent AI can be technologically instructed to serve the whims of its creators.
Have you read Scott Alexander's Meditations on Moloch? It's brilliant, and is quite adjacent to the claims you are making. It has received too little follow-up in this community.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TxcRbCYHaeL59aY7E/meditations-on-moloch
...The implicit question is – if everyone hates the current system, who perpetuates it? And Ginsberg answers: “Moloch”. It’s powerful not b
I must say that I am very surprised. I was completely not worried about Russia supporting the independence of Donetsk and Luhansk. Russia supporting Russian-speaking regions full of Russians who seem to not want to be a part of Ukraine - that makes a lot of sense in my head.
I hadn't expected Russia to attack the rest of Ukraine. I don't see what there is to gain for them there?
I'm watching the official Dutch news (NOS) and they claim Russian tanks and troops are rolling into Ukraine from all sides, from the east, from Belarussia and from Crimae...
Energy prices are already very high.
This could plausibly be because the war is already priced in. A lot of money is at stake, and I guess many players had good estimates about it.
Good Judgement has been predicting a military conflict with more than 50% for some months now:
Our entire way of life is full of negative externalities that cause massive amounts of direct or indirect suffering and harm. Nearly all forms of production and transportation require large amounts of energy, which is often generated in a way that at minimum harms the climate. Your smartphone was probably assembled in a Chinese factory full of third world workers with a barely tolerable existence. It might have passed through an Amazon warehouse where workers have long mind-numbing shifts that also cause physical problems, contributing to the opioid epidem...
Kindness and empathy on a local scale seems much more effective to me than Effective-Altruism-style 'purchasing endless mosquito nets'. Good post and thank you. I hope your Christmas is awesome, and I wish you an amazing 2022!
I hope you'll consider, and think you'll enjoy this article, Killing the Ants: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zAGPk4EXaXSkKWY9a/killing-the-ants
I still think about it regularly. The author carefully considers various animal-killing actions. Is it bad to exterminate ants that invade our house? It is bad to kill ants when we walk across grass? Every time we wash our bed sheets, we kill dust-mites. Is that morally significant?
In some aspects, our world is a hell. Everything has a cost, and often a cost that is quickly translated into suffering and death. In ...
Small error: In 'Then two regions extended it to the unvaccinated as well', unvaccinated has to be 'vaccinated' :)
Standard railways have a track gauge of less than 1.5 meters. Back in the 1930s, Hitler planned the Breitspurbahn, broad-gauge railway with a track gauge of 3 meters. No dramatic new tech required, but it would seriously scale up transportation by rail of people and goods. Hitler planned to connect many European cities with them.
None of that happened. We're still using the old track gauge, and European connections are relatively mediocre. But we've landed on the Moon and we've all got smartphones in our pockets.
Planned developments with relativ...
Can we place bets?
I've read pretty much all of Zvi's blogs since then, and he doesn't seem to have changed his mind. The rise in cases, especially the rise in hospitalizations, seems mostly confined to the unvaccinated. That's not really relevant to gatherings of only vaccinated people.
What exactly would the risks be of the event with the rules I proposed?
You could just host the event, requiring vaccination for adults and full access for all children below the FDA minimum? Perhaps you could do a rapid test on the unvaccinated children.
I strongly endorse Zvi's encouragement to start living your life again.
Thanks for the detailed analysis! I massively disagree with your conclusions though. Your claim:
Relative to no vaccination, reduces transmission by 0.5x and reception by 0.17, for a total of 0.08x.
I'm seeing transmission x0.35 (https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/vaccinated-people-are-less-likely-spread-covid-new-research-finds-n1280583) and x0.11 for reception (https://www.health.govt.nz/system/files/documents/pages/science_updates_7_may_2021.pdf), for a total of x0.0385.
Combined with the protection against serious illness, this pretty much m...
Great reminder to focus on complex truth, instead of a simple safe/unsafe options.
Very interesting story about the normalization of 'child isolation'.
But how dare you dislike Dune!
I'm not sure why your Venn diagram doesn't have "sentient" lying entirely within "conscious"
Noggin-scratcher made a much improved version of my diagram that does exactly what you suggest: https://i.imgur.com/5yAhnJg.png
I prefer that one!
Why is sapience without sentience or self-awareness marked "impossible"?
In my opinion, a sapient entity is an entity that posseses something like "general purpose intelligence". Wouldn't such an entity quickly realize that it's a distinct entity? That would mean it's self-aware.
Maybe it doesn't realize it at first, bu...
I really like your version of the Venn diagram! I've never seen one like that before, but it makes a lot of sense.
I could indeed imagine an intelligent being that is somehow totally bared from self-knowledge, but that is a very flawed form of sapience, in my opinion.
The European wars of religion included among others the Thirty Years War which killed one-third of the German population. It's mentioned as a period that caused a lot of human suffering, but not as something that seriously harmed the long-term development of Europe. To the contrary, this happened during Europe's ascendancy as a global superpower. Crisis, war and mismanagement is certain in nearly all periods of human history. They're not sufficient causes of long-term decline.
"Full", "empty" and "population pressure" are very relative terms. New tech...
Thanks a lot!
- In regards to your last point: I'll certainly concede that naval mobility must have been very helpful to the Greeks. As a Dutch person, I'm well aware how helpful sea-based trade was, historically :)
- In regards to the third point: are you aware that early farmers were shorter and had significantly worse health than hunter-gatherers? I don't believe it was an amazing new invention, it's a thing desperate, hungry people do when 'wild' food resources run out. It allowed for sedentary life and higher population densities, and in the very long
Sure! I don't think the fact that Dutch history books end in the Netherlands is good evidence that the Netherlands is the most significant place in world history :)
But Ancient Egypt, Classical Greece and Classical Rome do seem to be of global significance. Greek ideas and inventions, from Aristotle to the Antikythera mechanism, do seem to be lasting and unique. And a bit harsher: the Greeks conquered Egypt. The Romans conquered Greece and Egypt. The balance of power actually seems to have shifted in that direction.
Thanks for the long reply!
You're describing a lot of local contrasts. The city of Rome vs the provinces. The Western Rome Empire vs the Eastern half. Charlemagne vs the Umayyads. While certainly interesting and worthy of discussion, the trends I try to perceive and explain happen on more of a global level.
Look at the shipwrecks and lead pollution graph or the social development graph from the first article. I'm pretty sure the lead pollution was measured from ice cores in Greenland. It's pollution from all of Europe (and perhaps even more dista...
Thanks!
In regards to the bucket metaphor: the 'width' is the amount of fertile land available to its inhabitants.
Water only starts 'stacking', going 'up', if it can't go 'down' or 'to the sides' anymore. The walls of a bucket prevent sidewards expansion and force the water level to go up.
Like water, pre-industrial humans had good reasons to avoid 'stacking' as well. Population density forces farmers (which is 90%+ of the population in pre-industrial times) to adopt more labor-intensive practices. So when humans had the chance, they prefer...
Cutting trees on hillsides could easily lead to erosion and the destruction of the soil - agreed. But we're looking at a process that impacted all of Europe, from ~300AD to ~1800AD. I doubt a large cause of that is 'Permanent Roman Forest Destruction'. It seems most plausible to me that the land was used for other purposes.
Thanks! I definitely don't want to imply that the average Roman lived in an awesome villa built out of bricks. But in regards to for example bathhouses:
...Small bathhouses, called balneum (plural balnea), might be privately owned, while they were public in the sense that they were open to the populace for a fee. Larger baths called thermae were owned by the state and often covered several city blocks. The largest of these, the Baths of Diocletian, could hold up to 3,000 bathers. Fees for both types of baths were quite reasonable, within the budget of mo
I definitely agree that it is wrong to assume that Rome was superior to Medieval Europe in all ways! I think they definitely outclassed Medieval Europe in a lot of aspects - but also that Medieval Europe outclassed Rome in a lot of other aspects.
From the Wikipedia article on the Fall of the Western Roman Empire:
...The fall of the Western Roman Empire (also called the fall of the Roman Empire or the fall of Rome), c. 376-476, was the process of decline in the Western Roman Empire in which the Empire failed to enforce its rule, and its vast territory was divided into several successor polities. The Roman Empire lost the strengths that had allowed it to exercise effective control over its Western provinces; modern historians posit factors including the effectiveness and numbers of the army, the health a
From Ian Morris' companion book Social Development:
I define “East” and “West” as the societies that have developed from the original core areas in the headwaters of the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers and between the Yellow and Yangzi Rivers where agriculture began developing after the end of the Ice Age.
Agreed, there are plenty of historians who argue for an internal decline. Bad leadership, infighting, civil war, corruption, decadence, etcetera. I won't deny they play a role, but personally, I was never strongly convinced by these arguments. The Roman decline is exceptional; incompetent politics and corrupt humans seem to be universal.
These are all good points! They remind me of the "Swiss Cheese Model" in regards to COVID. No single solution is 100% effective, but combine enough layers and there won't be any 'holes' in the strategy anymore.
I fully agree that there is a strong lack of proper communication with the public! If all/most citizens have a decent grasp of the "COVID basics" and best practices, ending the pandemic would be a lot easier.
Except for general information about the virus itself, there should also be some kind of "weather forecast" about the prevalence of the virus in your local vicinity. AFAIK, South Korea was very strong in this regard, at least at the start of the pandemic. Citizens received local reports of how many cases were confirmed in their area.
What if one simultaneously believes that our current trajectory without AGI has a higher (>11%) chance of leading to catastrophe? Social unrest and polarization are rising, deaths of despair are rising, the largest war in Europe since WW2 was just launched, the economy and the paradigm of globalization are faltering. Add nuclear proliferation, the chance of nuclear terrorism, and the ability to ... (read more)