LESSWRONG
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All of Noah Scales's Comments + Replies

How would you improve ChatGPT's filtering?
Noah Scales10

Huh, ok. I will have to check out the new version. Thanks!

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Questions about AI that bother me
Noah Scales10

Why was connectionism unlikely to succeed?

Can you clarify? I'm not sure what you mean by this with respect to machine learning.

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2LawrenceC
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/connectionism/ Pretty sure it means the old school of "neural networks are the way to go"? My guess is she's asking, "why was connectionism considered/thought of as unlikely to succeed?"
How would you improve ChatGPT's filtering?
Noah Scales10

Interesting, and why is that an improvement?

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How would you improve ChatGPT's filtering?
Noah Scales10

Hmm, that's interesting. Thanks Peter!

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When do you visualize (or not) while doing math?
Answer by Noah Scales30

How I do math that starts out as a mathematical expression

I learned how to do math on paper or blackboard, except for an interlude at a Montessori school, where we used physical media. After a while, any math problem that took the form of a listing of mathematical expressions was one to solve with successive string manipulations. The initial form implied a set of transformations and a write-up that I had to perform. By looking at what I just wrote, and plotting how to create a transformation closer to my final answer, but with just a few manipulations of ... (read more)

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Against a General Factor of Doom
Noah Scales*10

Correlations among AGI doomer predictions could reveal common AI Safety milestones

I am curious about how considerations of overlaps could lead to a list of milestones for positive results in AI safety research. If there are enough exit points from pathways to AI doom available through AI Safety improvements, a catalog of those improvements might be visible in models of correlations among AI Safety researcher's predictions about AGI doom of various sorts.

But as a sidenote, here's my response to your mention of climate researchers thinking in terms of P(Doo... (read more)

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Here's the exit.
Noah Scales*30

You wrote:

I'm not sure I understand your question. Do you mean, why wouldn't someone who's running the engine I describe end up resenting things like OpenAI that seem to be accelerating AI risk?

For one, I think they often do.

Oh. Good! I'm a bit relieved to read that. Yes, that was the fundamental question that I had. I think that shows common-sense.

I'm curious what you think a sober response to AGI research is for someone whose daily job is working on AI Safety, if you want to discuss that in more detail. Otherwise, thank you for your answer.

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3Valentine
Quite welcome. I'm not really up for surmising about this right now. It's too tactical. I think the clarity about what to do arises as the VR goggles come off and the body-level withdrawal wears off. If I knew what it made sense for people to do after that point, we wouldn't need their agentic nodes in the distributed computation network. We'd just be using them for more processing power. If that makes sense. I bet I could come up with some general guesses. But that feels more like a musing conversation to have in a different context.
Here's the exit.
Noah Scales*50

I'm a little surprised that doomerism could take off like this, dominate one's thoughts, and yet fail to create resentment and anger toward of its apparent cause source. Is that something that was absent for you or was it not relevant to discuss here? 

I wonder:

  • in the prediction of doom, as the threat seems to be growing closer, does that create resentment or anger at apparent sources of that doom? If I dwelled on AI existential risk, I would feel more resentment of sources of that risk.
  • do the responses to that doom, or desperation of measures, become
... (read more)
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5Valentine
I'm not sure I understand your question. Do you mean, why wouldn't someone who's running the engine I describe end up resenting things like OpenAI that seem to be accelerating AI risk? For one, I think they often do. But also, it's worth noticing that the purpose of the obsession is to distract from the inner pain. Kind of like alcoholics probably aren't always upset at liquor stores for existing. And in a weird twist, alcoholics can even come to seek out relationships and situations that upset them in familiar ways. Why? Because they know how to control that upset with alcohol, which means they can use the external upset as a trigger to numb out instead of waiting for glimmers of the internal pain to show up inside them. Not all addiction designs do this. But it's a common enough pattern output to be worth acknowledging. I'm not sure if that's what you were asking about though.