All of polarix's Comments + Replies

Maybe a tangent, but: Are we humans corrigible?

I think about this a lot -- it seems that no matter what I do, I'm not able to prevent a sufficiently motivated attacker from ending my life.

0[anonymous]
I'm positive. Humans strongly update their utility function based on the morality of the people around them. Do you ever find yourself a bit paralyzed in a new social environment because you don't know about the local customs? On the other hand, humans are also notorious for trying to fix someone's problem before properly listening to them. Hmm.

I often observe with people that we don't all share the same meaning for the word, and that the discrepancy is significant.

YES! This is the study of ethics, I think: "by what rules can we generate an ideal society?"

Do we have a shared meaning for this word?

NO!

This is why ethical formalisms have historically been so problematic.

Overconfident projections of value based on proxies that are extrapolated way out of their region of relevance (generally in the service of "legibility") is the root cause of so much avoidable suffering: ht... (read more)

polarix40

Absolutely. The proper response to this confusion should be: "fix the site to have a third, lower priority level", not "increase the frequency of our hack".

polarix30

I find broadcast speech in general, and especially recorded narration such as audiobooks, to be slow enough as to provoke distraction.

On top of the additional focal intensity, there's double the time bandwidth. Of course, it's sensitive to my mental state -- sometimes when I'm de-energized I need to slow it down to 1.5x, but I'd ideally hover around 2.5x (though software rarely goes above 2x yet).

To get started, listen to something at 1.25x, and crank it up further as you get accustomed to the density.

polarix00

Essentially, this sounds like temporal sampling bias. The points about ease of recombination and augmentation bespeak a lack of infrastructure investment in post-text meda, not a fundamental property. Yes, communication mediums begin with text. But the low emotional bandwidth (and low availability of presence in real-time interactions) concretely limits the kinds of transmissions that can be made.

Your writing, however, does raise a spectacular question.

How can we increase the bandwidth of text across the machine/brain barrier?

polarix00

The biggest difference I see is that driving overloads (or extends) fairly deeply embedded/evolved neural pathways: motion, just with a different set of actuators.

Intelligence is yet lightly embedded, and the substrate is so different with software vs wetware.

polarix00

I find this an immensely valuable insight: continuity, or "haecceity", is the critical element of self which naive uploading scenarios dismiss. Our current rational situation of self as concept-in-brain has no need for continuity, which is counterintuitive.

We know a good deal about the universe, but we do not yet know it in its entirety. If there were an observer outside of physics, we might suspect they care great deal about continuity, or their laws might. Depending on your priors, and willingness to accept that current observational techniques... (read more)

polarix00

Yes, this is at first glance in conflict with our current understanding of the universe. However, it is probably one of the strategies with the best hope of finding a way out of that universe.

polarix20

It seems the disconnect is between B & C for most people.

But why is the generative simulation (B) not morally equivalent to the replay simulation (C)?

Perhaps because the failure modes are different. Imagine the case of a system sensitive to cosmic rays. In the replay simulation, the everett bundle is locally stable; isolated blips are largely irrelevant. When each frame is causally determining the subsequent steps, the system exhibits a very different signature.

polarix50

Unfortunately, no, what you ask for is not a permissible thing to do on LessWrong.

2solipsist
Thank you Moss_Piglet for PMing me enough specifics to get me grounded. I'll admit I don't understand why topic is banned, but respect the importance of local norms and will stop discussion.
0[anonymous]
Um, OK. Could you Private Message me a concrete story?
polarix00

Ah, well, it tells us that there were prior games.

0somervta
If I didn't get prior payouts from those games, the updates on that is way bigger than any other reasoning such as what we're doing on this thread.
polarix00

I did not interpret paragraph 3 to contain any information about prior payouts... For instance, if one were to 1-box (successfully!) in every case that did not have such a lottery hedge, it would appear consistent with the problem statement to me.

0somervta
it tells you that there were prior payouts.
polarix00

This does not actually speak to the utility of such instincts to individuals. Rather, it indicates their utility the gene bundle, by increasing the genes' probability of propagating. A tribe that stole from itself would not get very far through time.

1DanielLC
Yeah, but group selection doesn't make a very big difference, as discussed in The Tragedy of Group Selectionism.
polarix00

Well, small-but-reasonable times infinite equals infinite. Which is indeed way, way bigger than 3^^^3.

polarix00

If we [respond strongly to all low-probability threats], we spend 10 times GDP.

10 times current GDP perhaps. Motivating organization can do wonders for productivity. We are hardly at capacity.

polarix00

If I were building a dyson sphere, I'd want to collimate all the radiation toward a single direction, perhaps gating it periodically. Make it look like a pulsar.

0gwern
We're surrounded by stars in all directions, and that would be far from free.
polarix20

While in generality it is a valid Bayesian inference to predict that someone who has turned out to be correct a bunch of times will continue to do so, if that history of being correct was built up mainly to lend credence to that final and crucial argument, the argumentum ad auctoritatem fails

You're right that the argument should stand on its own merit if heard to completion.

The point here is that heuristics can kick in early and the listener, either due to being irrational or due to time considerations, might not give the argument the time and attention to finish. This is about how to craft an argument so that it is more likely to be followed to completion.

polarix20

I'm still unclear, why not? Once the sphere is built, while the raw energy available is fixed, we can still have growth in computation per unit energy, right?

0Stuart_Armstrong
Robin's model is a transitional one, valid until uploads move beyond human, or human society/economy moves beyond what it is now. Radical changes like this one call into question the assumption that human society/economy can be considered otherwise stable across the transition.
polarix10

This should only help people who currently have earwax obstructions.

-1ChristianKl
How many percent of the population have earwax obstructions? How do I know whether I have one?
polarix80

It's possible that many of the right-libertarians ended up that way because of SF's problems.