All of mako yass's Comments + Replies

I'm also hanging out a lot more with normies these days and I feel this.

But I also feel like maybe I just have a very strong local aura (or like, everyone does, that's how scenes work) which obscures the fact that I'm not influencing the rest of the ocean at all.

I worry that a lot of the discourse basically just works like barrier aggression in dogs. When you're at one of their parties, they'll act like they agree with you about everything, when you're seen at a party they're not at, they forget all that you said and they start baying for blood. Go back to... (read more)

I'm saying they (at this point) may hold that position for (admirable, maybe justifiable) political rather than truthseeking reasons. It's very convenient. It lets you advocate for treaties against racing. It's a lovely story where it's simply rational for humanity to come together to fight a shared adversary and in the process somewhat inevitably forge a new infrastructure of peace (an international safety project, which I have always advocated for and still want) together. And the alternative is racing and potentially a drone war between major powers and... (read more)

In watching interactions with external groups, I'm... very aware of the parts of our approach to the alignment problem that the public, ime, due to specialization being a real thing, actually cannot understand, so success requires some amount of uh, avoidance. I think it might not be incidental that the platform does focus (imo excessively) on more productive, accessible common enemy questions like control and moratorium, ahead of questions like "what is CEV and how do you make sure the lead players implement it". And I think to justify that we've been for... (read more)

Rationalist discourse norms require a certain amount of tactlessness, saying what is true even when the social consequences of saying it are net negative. Politics (in the current arena) requires some degree of deception or at least complicity with bias (lies by ommision, censorship/nonpropagation of inconvenient counterevidence). 

Rationalist forum norms essentially forbid speaking in ways that're politically effective. Those engaging in political outreach would be best advised to read lesswrong but never comment under their real name. If they have go... (read more)

For the US to undertake such a shift, it would help if you could convince them they'd do better in a secret race than an open one. There are indications that this may be possible, and there are indications that it may be impossible.

I'm listening to an Ecosystemics Futures podcast episode, which, to characterize... it's a podcast where the host has to keep asking guests whether the things they're saying are classified or not just in case she has to scrub it. At one point, Lue Elizondo does assert, in the context of talking to a couple of other people who kn... (read more)

• I'll change a line early on in the manual to "Objects aren't common, currently. It's just corpses for now, which are explained on the desire cards they're relevant to and don't matter otherwise". Would that address it? (the card is A Terrible Hunger, which also needs to be changed to "a terrible hunger.\n4 points for every corpse in your possession at the end (killing generally always leaves a corpse, corpses can be carried; when agents are in the same land as a corpse, they can move it along with them as they move)")
• What's this in response to?
• Latter. Unsu

I briefly glanced at wikipedia and there seemed to be two articles supporting it. This one might be the one I'm referring to (if not, it's a bonus) and this one seems to suggest that conscious perception has been trained.

I think unpacking that kind of feeling is valuable, but yeah it seems like you've been assuming we use decision theory to make decisions, when we actually use it as an upper bound model to derive principles of decisionmaking that may be more specific to human decisionmaking, or to anticipate the behavior of idealized agents, or (the distinction between CDT and FDT) as an allegory for toxic consequentialism in humans.

I'm aware of a study that found that the human brain clearly responds to changes in direction of the earth's magnetic field (iirc, the test chamber isolated the participant from the earth's field then generated its own, then moved it, while measuring their brain in some way) despite no human having ever been known to consciously perceive the magnetic field/have the abilities of a compass.

So, presumably, compass abilities could be taught through a neurofeedback training exercise.

I don't think anyone's tried to do this ("neurofeedback magnetoreception" finds no results)

But I guess the big mystery is why don't humans already have this.

A relevant FAQ entry: AI development might go underground

I think I disagree here:

By tracking GPU sales, we can detect large-scale AI development. Since frontier model GPU clusters require immense amounts of energy and custom buildings, the physical infrastructure required to train a large model is hard to hide.

This will change/is only the case for frontier development. I also think we're probably in the hardware overhang. I don't think there is anything inherently difficult to hide about AI, that's likely just a fact about the present iteration of AI.

But I... (read more)

I notice they have a Why do you protest section in their FAQ. I hadn't heard of these studies before

• Protests can and often will positively influence public opinion, voting behavior, corporate behavior and policy.
• There is no evidence for a “backfire” effect unless the protest is violent. Our protests are peaceful and non-violent.
• Check out this amazing article for more insights on why protesting works

Regardless, I still think there's room to make protests cooler and more fun and less alienating, and when I mentioned this to them they seemed very open to it.

Yeah, I'd seen this. The fact that grok was ever consistently saying this kind of thing is evidence, though not proof, that they actually may have a culture of generally not distorting its reasoning, they could have introduced propaganda policies at training time, it seems like they haven't done that, instead they decided to just insert some pretty specific prompts that, I'd guess, were probably going to be temporary.

It's real bad, but it's not bad enough for me to shoot yet.

There is evidence, literal written evidence, of Musk trying to censor Grok from saying bad things about him

I'd like to see this

I wonder if maybe these readers found the story at that time as a result of first being bronies, and I wonder if bronies still think of themselves as a persecuted class.

These are not concepts of utility that I've ever seen anyone explicitly espouse, especially not here, the place to which it was posted.

The people who think of utility in the way the article is critiquing don't know what utility actually is, presenting a critque of this tangible utility as a critique of utility in general takes the target audience further away from understanding what utility is.

A Utility function is a property of a system rather than a physical thing (like, eg, voltage, or inertia, or entropy). Not being a simple physical substance doesn't make it fictional.

It's extremely non-fictional. A human's utility function encompasses literally everything they care about, ie, everyt... (read more)

Contemplating an argument that free response rarely gets more accurate results for questions like this because listing the most common answers as checkboxes helps respondents to remember all of the answers that're true for of them.

I'd be surprised if LLM use for therapy or sumarization is that low irl, and I'd expect people would've just forgot to mention those usecases. Hope they'll be in the option list this year.

Hmm I wonder if a lot of trends are drastically underestimated because surveyers are getting essentially false statistics from the Other gutter.

Apparently Anthropic in theory could have released claude 1 before chatgpt came out? https://www.youtube.com/live/esCSpbDPJik?si=gLJ4d5ZSKTxXsRVm&t=335

I think the situation would be very different if they had.

Were OpenAI also, in theory, able to release sooner than they did, though?

The assumption that being totally dead/being aerosolised/being decayed vacuum can't be a future experience is unprovable. Panpsychism should be our null hypothesis^[1], and there never has and never can be any direct measurement of consciousness that could take us away from the null hypothesis.

Which is to say, I believe it's possible to be dead.

1. ^{^}

   the negation, that there's something special about humans that makes them eligible to experience, is clearly held up by a conflation of having experiences and reporting experiences and the fact that humans are the o

I have preferences about how things are after I stop existing. Mostly about other people, who I love, and at times, want there to be more of.

I am not an epicurean, and I am somewhat skeptical of the reality of epicureans.

It seems like you're assuming a value system where the ratio of positive to negative experience matters but where the ratio of positive to null (dead timelines) experiences doesn't matter. I don't think that's the right way to salvage the human utility function, personally.

Okay? I said they're behind in high precision machine tooling, not machine tooling in general. That was the point of the video.

Admittedly, I'm not sure what the significance of this is. To make the fastest missiles I'm sure you'd need the best machine tools, but maybe you don't need the fastest missiles if you can make twice as many. Manufacturing automation is much harder if there's random error in the positions of things, but whether we're dealing with that amount of error, I'm not sure.
I'd guess low grade machine tools also probably require high grade machine tools to make.

Fascinating. China has always lagged far behind the rest of the world in high precision machining, and is still a long way behind, they have to buy all of those from other countries. The reasons appear complex.

All of the US and european machine tools that go to china use hardware monitoring and tamperproofing to prevent reverse engineering or misuse. There was a time when US aerospace machine tools reported to the DOC and DOD.

Regarding privacy-preserving AI auditing, I notice this is an area where you really need to have a solution to adversarial robustness, given that the adversary is 1) a nationstate, 2) has complete knowledge of the auditor's training process and probably weights (they couldn't really agree to an inspection deal if they didn't trust the auditors to give accurate reports) 3) knows and controls the data the auditor will be inspecting. 4) Never has to show it to you (if they pass the audit).

Given that you're assuming computers can't practically be secured (thou... (read more)

Mm, scenario where mass unemployment can be framed as a discrete event with a name and a face.

I guess I think it's just as likely there isn't an event, human-run businesses die off, new businesses arise, none of them outwardly emphasise their automation levels, the press can't turn it into a scary story because automation and foreclosures are nothing fundamentally new (only in quantity, but you can't photograph a quantity), the public become complicit by buying their cheaper higher quality goods and services so appetite for public discussion remains low.

I wonder what the crisis will be.

I think it's quite likely that if there is a crisis that leads to beneficial response, it'll be one of these three:

• An undeployed privately developed system, not yet clearly aligned nor misaligned, either:
  • passes the Humanity's Last Exam benchmark, demonstrating ASI, and the developers go to congress and say "we have a godlike creature here, you can all talk to it if you don't believe us, it's time to act accordingly."
  • Not quite doing that, but demonstrating dangerous capability levels in red-teaming, ie, replication ability,

This is interesting. In general the game does sound like the kind of fun I expect to find in these parts. I'd like to play it. It sounds like it really can be played as a cohabitive game, and maybe it was even initially designed to be played that way?^[1], but it looks to me like most people don't understand it this way today. I'm unable to find this manual you quote. I'm coming across multiple reports that victory = winning^[2].

Even just introducing the optional concept of victory muddies the exercise by mixing it up with a zero sum one in an ambiguous way.... (read more)

A moral code is invented^[1] by a group of people to benefit the group as a whole, it sometimes demands sacrifice from individuals, but a good one usually has the quality that at some point in a person's past, they would have voluntarily signed on with it. Redistribution is a good example. If you have a concave utility function, and if you don't know where you'll end up in life, you should be willing to sign a pledge to later share your resources with less fortunate people who've also signed the pledge, just in case you become one of the less fortunate... (read more)

Jellychip seems like a necessary tutorial game. I sense comedy in the fact that everyone's allowed to keep secrets and intuitively will try to do something with secrecy despite it being totally wrongheaded. Like the only real difficulty of the game is reaching the decision to throw away your secrecy.

Escaping the island is the best outcome for you. Surviving is the second best outcome. Dying is the worst outcome.

You don't mention how good or bad they are relative to each other though :) an agent cannot make decisions under uncertainty without knowing that.
I... (read more)

(Plus a certain degree of mathematician crankery: his page on Google Image Search, and how it disproves AI

I'm starting to wonder if a lot/all of the people who are very cynical about the feasibility of ASI have some crank belief or other like that. Plenty of people have private religion, for instance. And sometimes that religion informs their decisions, but they never tell anyone the real reasons underlying these decisions, because they know they could never justify them. They instead say a load of other stuff they made up to support the decisions that never quite adds up to a coherent position because they're leaving something load-bearing out.

I don't think the intelligence consistently leads to self-annihilation hypothesis is possible. At least a few times it would amount to robust self-preservation.

Well.. I guess I think it boils down to the dark forest hypothesis. The question is whether your volume of space is likely to contain a certain number of berserkers, and the number wouldn't have to be large for them to suppress the whole thing.

I've always felt the logic of berserker extortion doesn't work, but occasionally you'd get a species that just earnestly wants the forest to be dark and isn't very troubled by their own extinction, no extortion logic required. This would be extremely rare, but the question is, how rare.

Light speed migrations with no borders means homogeneous ecosystems, which can be very constrained things.

In our ecosystems, we get pockets of experimentation. There are whole islands where the birds were allowed to be impractical aesthetes (indonesia) or flightless blobs (new zealand). In the field-animal world, islands don't exist, pockets of experimentation like this might not occur anywhere in the observable universe.

If general intelligence for field-animals costs a lot, has no immediate advantages (consistently takes say, a thousand years of ornament status before it becomes profitable), then it wouldn't get to arise. Could that be the case?

We could back-define "ploitation" as "getting shapley-paid".

Yeah. But if you give up on reasoning about/approximating solomonoff, then where do you get your priors? Do you have a better approach?

Buried somewhere in most contemporary bayesians' $I$ is the solomonoff prior (the prior that the most likely observations are those that have short generating machine encodings) Do we have standard symbol for the solomonoff prior? Claude suggests that $M$ is the most common, but is more often used as a distribution function, or perhaps $K$ for Komogorov? (which I like because it can also be thought to stand for "knowledgebase", although really it doesn't represent knowledge, it pretty much represents something prior to knowledge)

I'd just define exploitation to be precisely the opposite of shapley bargaining, situations where a person is not being compensated in proportion to their bargaining power.

This definition encompasses any situation where a person has grievances and it makes sense for them to complain about them and take a stand, or, where striking could reasonably be expected to lead to a stable bargaining equilibrium with higher net utility (not all strikes fall into this category).

This definition also doesn't fully capture the common sense meaning of exploitation, but I don't think a useful concept can.

As a consumer I would probably only pay about 250$ for the unitree B2-W wheeled robot dog because my only use for it is that I want to ride it like a skateboard, and I'm not sure it can do even that.

I see two major non-consumer applications: Street to door delivery (it can handle stairs and curbs), and war (it can carry heavy things (eg, a gun) over long distances over uneven terrain)

So, Unitree... do they receive any subsidies?

Okay if send rate gives you a reason to think it's spam. Presumably you can set up a system that lets you invade the messages of new accounts sending large numbers of messages that doesn't require you to cross the bright line of doing raw queries.

Any point that you can sloganize and wave around on a picket sign is not the true point, but that's not because the point is fundamentally inarticulable, it just requires more than one picket sign to locate it. Perhaps ten could do it.

The human struggle to find purpose is a problem of incidentally very weak integration or dialog between reason and the rest of the brain, and self-delusional but mostly adaptive masking of one's purpose for political positioning. I doubt there's anything fundamentally intractable about it. If we can get the machines to want to carry our purposes, I think they'll figure it out just fine.

Also... you can get philosophical about it, but the reality is, there are happy people, their purpose to them is clear, to create a beautiful life for themselves and their l... (read more)

Conditions where a collective loss is no worse than an individual loss. A faction who's on the way to losing will be perfectly willing to risk coal extinction, and may even threaten to cross the threshold deliberately to extort other players.

Do people ever talk about dragons and dinosaurs in the same contexts? If so you're creating ambiguities. If not (and I'm having difficulty thinking of any such contexts) then it's not going to create many ambiguities so it's harder to object.

I think I've been calling it "salvaging". To salvage a concept/word allows us to keep using it mostly the same, and to assign familiar and intuitive symbols to our terms, while intensely annoying people with the fact that our definition is different from the normal one and thus constantly creates confusion.

I'm sure it's running through a lot of interpretation, but it has to. He's dealing with people who don't know or aren't open about (unclear which) the consequences of their own policies.

According to wikipedia, the Biefield brown effect was just ionic drift, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biefeld–Brown_effect#Disputes_surrounding_electrogravity_and_ion_wind

I'm not sure what wikipedia will have to say about charles buhler, if his work goes anywhere, but it'll probably turn out to be more of the same.