You discuss "compromised agents" of the FBI as if they're going to be lone, investigator-level agents. If there was going to be any FBI/CIA/whatever cover-up, the version of that which I would expect, is that Epstein would've had incriminating information on senior FBI/CIA personnel, or politicians. Incriminating information could just be that the FBI/CIA knew that Epstein was raping underage girls for 20 years, and didn't stop him, or even protected him. In all your explanations of how impossible a crime Epstein's murder would be to pull...
Now that I've had 5 months to let this idea stew, when I read your comment again just now, I think I understand it completely? After getting comfortable using "demons" to refer to patterns of thought or behavior which proliferate in ways not completely unlike some patterns of matter, this comment now makes a lot more sense than it used to.
without using "will"
Oh come on. Alright, but if your answer mentions future or past states, or references time at all, I'm dinging you points. Imaginary points, not karma points obviously.
So let's talk about this word, "could". Can you play Rationalist's Taboo against it?
Testing myself before I read further. World states which "could" happen are the set of world states which are not ruled impossible by our limited knowledge. Is "impossible" still too load-bearing here? Fine, let's get more concrete.
In a finite-size game of Conway's Life, each board state has exactly one following board state, which itself has only one following board state, and so on. This sequence of board states is a board's future. &nb...
So then this initial probability estimate, 0.5, is not repeat not a "prior".
1:1 odds seems like it would be a default null prior, especially because one round of Bayes' Rule updates it immediately to whatever your first likelihood ratio is, kind of like the other mathematical identities. If your priors represent "all the information you already know", then it seems like you (or someone) must have gotten there through a series of Bayesian inferences, but that series would have to start somewhere, right? If (in the real universe, not the ball &a...
Evil is a pattern of of behavior exhibited by agents. In embedded agents, that pattern is absolutely represented by material. As for what that pattern is, evil agents harm others for their own gain. That seems to be the core of "evilness" in possibility space. Whenever I try to think of the most evil actions I can, they tend to correlate with harming others (especially one's equals, or one's inner circle, who would expect mutual cooperation), for one's own gain. Hamlet's uncle. Domestic abusers. Executives who ruin...
Not really. "Collapse" is not the only failure case. Mass starvation is a clear failure state of a planned economy, but it doesn't necessarily burn through the nation's stock of proletariat laborers immediately. In the same way that a person with a terminal illness can take a long time to die, a nation with failing systems can take a long time to reach the point where it ceases functioning at all.
How do lies affect Bayesian Inference?
(Relative likelihood notation is easier, so we will use that)
I heard a thing. Well, I more heard a thing about another thing. Before I heard about it, I didn't know one way or the other at all. My prior was the Bayesian null prior of 1:1. Let's say the thing I heard is "Conspiracy thinking is bad for my epistemology". Let's pretend it was relevant at the time, and didn't just come up out of nowhere. What is the chance that someone would hold this opinion, given that they are not part...
weight-loss-that-is-definitely-not-changes-in-water-retention comes in chunks
Source for my answer: for the last 10 months, I have fasted regularly, with various fasts from 16 hours to 7 days, with & without vitamins, including water fasts, electrolyte fasts, and dry fasts. During this time, I have weighed myself multiple times per day. [I have lost >100 lbs doing this, but that's not important right now.]
How hydrated you are at any given time is a confounding variable whenever you weigh yourself. My body can hold plus or minus nearly a gallon o...
Started reading, want to get initial thoughts down before they escape me. Will return when I am done
Representation: An agent, or an agent's behaviour, is a script. I don't know if that's helpful or meaningful. Interfaces: Real, in-universe agents have hardware on which they operate. I'd say they have "sensors and actuators", but that's tautologous to "inputs and outputs". Embedding: In biological systems, the script is encoded directly in the structure of the wetware. The hardware / software dichotomy has more separation, but I think I'm probably misunderstanding this.
Monopolies on the Use of Force
[Epistemic status & effort: exploring a question over an hour or so, and constrained to only use information I already know. This is a problem solving exercise, not a research paper. Originally written just for me; minor clarification added later.]
Is the use of force a unique industry, where a single monolithic [business] entity is the most stable state, the equilibrium point? From a business perspective, an entity selling the use of force might be thought of as in a "risk management" or "contract enforcement" industry....
Nope. Nopenopenope. This trips so many cult flags. This does not feel like rationality, this feels like pseudoreligion, like cult entrance activities, with rationality window dressing.
Maybe it's just because of the "you have to experience it for yourself" theme of this article, but right now this gets a hard nope from me, like psychedelics & speaking in tongues.
Nope.
I don't expect AI researchers to achieve AGI before they find one or more horrible uses for non-general AI tools, which may divert resources, or change priorities, or do something else which prevents true AGI from ever being developed.
That's what I use this place for, an audience for rough drafts or mere buddings of an idea. (Crippling) Executive dysfunction sounds like it may be a primary thing to explore & figure out, but it also sounds like the sort of thing that surrounds itself with an Ugh Field very quickly. Good luck!
When Grothendieck was learning math, he was playing Dark Souls.
I think you may have waded into the trees here, before taking stock of the forest. By which I mean that this problem could definitely use some formalization, and may be much more important than we expect it to be. I've been studying the ancient Mongols recently; their conquests tested this, and their empire had the potential to be a locked-in dystopia type of apocalypse, but they failed to create a stable internal organizational structure. Thus, a culture that optimizes for both conquest & control, at the expense of everything else, c...
Whom/what an agent is willing to do Evil to, vs whom/what it would prefer to do Good to, sort of defines an in-group/out-group divide, in a similar way to how the decision to cooperate or defect does in the Prisoner's Dilemma. Hmmm...
you enjoy peacefully reading a book by yourself, and other people hate this because they hate you and they hate it when you enjoy yourself
The problem with making hypothetical examples, is when you make them so unreal as to just be moving words around. Playing music/sound/whatever loud enough to be noise pollution would be similar to the first example. Less severe, but similar. Spreading manure on your lawn so that your entire neighborhood stinks would also be less severe, but similar. But if you're going to say "reading" and then ha...
The first paragraph is equivalent to saying that "all good & evil is socially constructed because we live in a society", and I don't want to call someone wrong, so let me try to explain...
An accurate model of Good & Evil will hold true, valid, and meaningful among any population of agents: human, animal, artificial, or otherwise. It is not at all depentent on existing in our current, modern society. Populations that do significant amounts of Good amongst each other generally thrive & are resilient (e.g. humans, ants, rats, wolves, cells in an...
For self-defense, that's still a feature, and not a bug. It's generally seen as more evil to do more harm when defending yourself, and in law, defending youself with lethal force is "justifyable homicide", it's specifically called out as something much like an "acceptable evil". Would it be more or less evil to cause an attacker to change their ways without harming them? Would it be more or less evil to torture an attacker before killing them?
"...by not doing all the Good..." In the model, it's actually really intentional that "a lack of Good" is not a ...
I do agree for the most part. Robotic warfare which can efficiently destroy your opponent's materiel, without directly risking your own materiel & personnel is an extremely dominant strategy, and will probably become the future of warfare. At least warfare like this, as opposed to police actions.
I kinda wonder if this is what happened with Eliezer Yudkowsky, especially after he wrote Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality?
From things I have previously heard about drones, I would be uncertain what training is required to operate them, and what limitations there are for weather in which they can & cannot fly. I know that being unable to fly in anything other than near-perfect weather conditions has been a problem of drones in the past, and those same limitations do not apply to ground-based vehicles.
Here's an analysis by Dr. Robert Malone about the Ukraine biolabs, which I found enlightening:
I glean that "biolab" is actually an extremely vague term, and doesn't specify the facility's exact capabilities at all. They could very well have had an innocuous purpose, but Russia would've had to treat them as a potential threat to national security, in the same way that Russian or Chinese "biolabs" in Mexico might sound bad to the US, except Russia is even more paranoid.
The Definition of Good and Evil
Epistemic Status: I feel like I stumbled over this; it has passed a few filters for correctness; I have not rigorously explored it, and I cannot adequately defend it, but I think that is more my own failing than the failure of the idea.
I have heard said that "Good and Evil are Social Constructs", or "Who's really to say?", or "Morality is relative". I do not like those at all, and I think they are completely wrong. Since then, I either found, developed, or came across (I don't remember how I got this) a model of G...
With priors of 1 or 0, Bayes rule stops working permanently. If something is running on real hardware, then it has a limit on its numeric precision. On a system that was never designed to make precise mathematical calculations, one where 8/10 doesn't feel significantly different from 9/10, or one where "90% chance" feels like "basically guaranteed", the level of numeric precision may be exceedingly low, such that it doesn't even take a lot for a level of certainty to be either rounded up to one or rounded down to 0.
As always, thanks for the post!
Well, it has helped me understand & overcome some of the specific ways that akrasia affects me, and it has also helped me understand how my own mind works, so I can alter and (hopefully) optimize it.
What do you disagree about?
I don't know. Possibly something, probably nothing.
the essence of [addition as addition itself]...
The "essence of cognition" isn't really available for us to study directly (so far as I know), except as a part of more complex processes. Finding many varied examples may help determine what is the "essence" versus what is just extraneous detail.
While intelligent agency in humans is definitely more interesting than in amoebas, knowing exactly why amoebas aren't intelligent agents would tell you one detail about wh...
I didn't pick it up from any reputable sources. The white paper on military theory that created the term was written many years ago, and since then I've only seen that explanation tossed around informally in various places, not investigated with serious rigor. OODA loops seem to be seldom discussed on this site, which I find kinda weird, but a good full explanation of them can be found here: Training Regime Day 20: OODA Loop
I tried to figure out on my own whether executing an OODA loop was necessary & sufficient condition for somethin...
An explanation that I've seen before of "where agency begins" is when an entity executes OODA loops. I don't know if OODA loops are a completely accurate map to reality, but they've been a useful model so far. If someone were going to explore "where agency begins" OODA loops might be a good starting point.
I feel like an article about "what agency is" must've already been written here, but I don't remember it. In any case, that article on agency in Conway's Life sounds like my next stop, thank you for linking it!
"You can't understand digital addition without understanding Mesopotamian clay token accounting"
That's sort of exactly correct? If you fully understand digital addition, then there's going to be something at the core of clay token accounting that you already understand. Complex systems tend to be built on the same concepts as simpler systems that do the same thing. If you fully understand an elevator, then there's no way that ropes & pulleys can still be a mystery to you, right? And to my knowledge, studying ropes & pulleys is a step in how we ...
I've wondered this a lot too. There is a lot of focus on and discussion about "superintelligent" AGI here, or even human-level AGI, but I wonder what about "stupid" AGI? When superintelligent AGI is still out of reach, is there not something still to be learned from a hypothetical AGI with the intelligence level of, say, a crow?
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Archaeologist here, I'll be taking this comment as permission!
Okay, this may be one of the most important articles I've read here. I already knew about OODA loops and how important they are, but putting names to the different failure modes, which I have seen and experienced thousands of times, gives me the handles with which to grapple them.
The main thing I want to say is thank you, I'm glad I didn't have to write something like this myself, because I do not know if it would have been nearly as clear & concise or nearly as good!
That Monte Carlo Method sounds a lot like dreaming.
Oof, be wary of Tim Ferriss, for he is a giant phony. I bought one of his books once, and nearly every single piece of advice in it was a bad generalization from a single study, and all of it was either already well known outside of the book, or ineffective, or just plain wrong. I have had great luck by immediately downgrading the trustworthiness of anything that mentions him, and especially anything that treats him as an authority. I have found the same with NLP. Please don't join that club.
Tim Ferriss is an utterly amoral agent. &...
I am so disappointed every time I see people using the persuasiveness filter. Persuasiveness is not completely orthogonal to correctness, but it is definitely linearly independent from it.