All of swarriner's Comments + Replies

(this comment is copied to the other essay as well)

I respect the attempt, here, and I think a version of the thesis is true. Letting go of control and trying to appreciate the present moment is probably the best course of action given that one is confronted with impending doom. I also recognize that reaching this state is not just a switch one can immediately flip in one's mind; it can only be reached by way of practice.

With these things in mind, I am still not okay. More than anything I find myself craving ignorance. I envy my wife; she's not in ratspaces... (read more)

(this comment is copied to the other essay as well)

I respect the attempt, here, and I think a version of the thesis is true. Letting go of control and trying to appreciate the present moment is probably the best course of action given that one is confronted with impending doom. I also recognize that reaching this state is not just a switch one can immediately flip in one's mind; it can only be reached by way of practice.

With these things in mind, I am still not okay. More than anything I find myself craving ignorance. I envy my wife; she's not in ratspaces... (read more)

It's the "Boy who cried wolf" fable in the format of an incident report such as what might be written in the wake of an industrial disaster. Whether the fictional report writer has learned the right lessons I suppose is an exercise left for the reader.

My advice would be this:

Trying to meet people for the sole purpose of dating them is a spiritually toxic endeavor, with online dating being particularly bad. I had a handful of girlfriends before meeting my wife, none of whom came to me through online dating or trying to get dates with people I didn't know.

I contend that the best path to a relationship is through community, broadly defined. What you want is to be around people with whom you can cultivate compatibility. The online dating/cold approach model relies on being able to quickly discern compatibil... (read more)

You're not wrong. Learning to crimp really does enable climbers to perform feats that others cannot, and plenty of them suffer injuries like the one I've linked to and decide to heal and keep going. My addendum isn't "never do something hard or risky," it's "pain is a warning; consider what price you are willing to pay before you go pushing through it."

Addendum: Crimp grips are a major cause of climbing injuries. It's sheer biomechanics. The crimp grip puts massive stress on connective tissues which aren't strong enough to reliably handle them.

The moral of the addendum: choose your impossible challenges wisely; even if you can overcome them the stress and pain might have been a warning from the beginning. If nothing else it should be a warning to get some good advice about prevention or you may find yourself unable to pursue your goal for weeks at a time.

Unless I'm very much mistaken, emergency mobilization systems refers to autonomic responses like a pounding heartbeat, heightened subjective senses, and other types of physical arousal; i.e. the things your body does when you believe someone or something is coming to kill you with spear or claw. Literal fight or flight stuff.

In both examples you give there is true danger, but your felt bodily sense doesn't meaningfully correspond to it; you can't escape or find the bomb by being ready for an immediate physical threat. This is the error being referred to. In both cases the preferred state of mind is resolute problem-solving and inability to register a felt sense of panic will likely reduce your ability to get to such a state.

I think I see your point but I'm not sure how to answer the question as you posed it so let me make an analogy:

Imagine I come to you and say "I have a revolutionary new car design that will revolutionize the market and break the chokehold of big auto! Best of all, it's completely safe; the locks are unpickable and the windows are unbreakable, so no one will ever be able to mug you in your car!"

You would be wise to ask "Okay, but what about in a crash? Is it safe there?" and the truth would be no, not really. Actually people who get caught in crashes with t... (read more)

This can be true but it varies a decent amount with expectations I think. As my friends get older and more of us have kids to think about it's becoming more normalized to have a mix of sobriety levels at what would have once been drunk parties.

Any industry with public exposure is going to run into problems. Take retail; having the store open at all possible profitable hours is much more important than having a full complement of staff at any given moment. My job is only adjacent to retail but even so, having a whole team go on vacation would put the supply chain on pause. That move might technically be possible with advance planning but it would have major impacts on throughput.

I think any sector that relies on moving physical matter (including people) through space is a bad candidate because yo... (read more)

Yes, that's my point. I'm not aware of a path to meaningful contribution to the field that doesn't involve either doing research or doing support work for a research group. Neither is accessible to me without risking the aforementioned effects.

I feel like you mean this in kindness, but to me it reads as "You could risk your family's livelihood relocating and/or trying to get recruited to work remotely so that you can be anxious all the time! It might help on the margins ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ "

AI discourse triggers severe anxiety in me, and as a non-technical person in a rural area I don't feel I have anything to offer the field. I personally went so far as to fully hide the AI tag from my front page and frankly I've been on the threshold of blocking the site altogether for the amount of content that still gets through by passing reference and untagged posts. I like most non-AI content on the site, been checking regularly since the big LW2.0 launch, and I would consider it a loss of good reading material to stop browsing, but since DWD I'm takin... (read more)

Aside from double-counting, here's a problem; you should have just set your starting priors on the false and true statements as x and 1-x respectively, where x is the chance your whole ontology is screwed up, and you'd be equally well calibrated and much more precise. You've correctly identified that the perfect calibration on 90% is meaningless, but that's because you explicitly introduced a gap between what you believe to be true and what you're representing as your beliefs. Maybe that's your point; that people are trying to earn a rationalist merit badge by obfuscating their true beliefs, but I think at least many people treat the exercise as a serious inquiry into how well-founded beliefs feel from the inside.

Is there a strong theoretical basis for guessing what capabilities superhuman intelligence may have, be it sooner or later? I'm aware of the speed & quality superintelligence frameworks, but I have issues with them.

Speed alone seems relatively weak as an axis of superiority; I can only speculate about what I might be able to accomplish if, for example, my cognition were sped up 1000x, but it find it hard to believe it would extend to achieving strategic dominance over all humanity, especially if there are still limits on my ability to act and perceive ... (read more)

This feels important but after the ideal gas analogy it's a bit beyond my vocabulary. Can you (or another commenter) distill a bit for a dummy?

While that's an admirable position to take and I'll try to take it in hand, I do feel EY's stature in the community puts us in differing positions of responsibility concerning tone-setting.

somebody not publishing the latter is, I'm worried, anticipating social pushback that isn't just from me.

Respectfully, no shit Sherlock, that's what happens when a community leader establishes a norm of condescending to inquirers.

I feel much the same way as Citizen in that I want to understand the state of alignment and participate in conversations as a layperson. I too, have spent time pondering your model of reality to the detriment of my mental health. I will never post these questions and criticisms to LW because even if you yourself don't show up to h... (read more)

Even an unknown member of parliament has still been tested against a competitive market, has at least met many or all the key power brokers, etc. They're much closer to the president end of the spectrum than the random citizen end.

I'm coming back to this thread having just seen the movie and really enjoyed it. femtogrammar's remarks about the emotional core of the movie partially resonate with me, in that there's a strong thread of making the active choice to live one's life as opposed to being swept along in it. I would elaborate that I think this is a movie about gaining perspective in the face of struggle. I also think the sci-fi action elements are quite effective in communicating this theme as well as being very technically well executed.

Basically, each act of the movie shows E... (read more)

It seems to me like a big part of the picture here is legibility. Social and private boundaries are a highly illegible domain, and that state of affairs is in conflict with the desires of a society which is increasingly risk-averse. To stick with the language of this particular analogy, a successful benign violation for you is one that shows metis over the domain of "living with Duncan". On the flip side, the illegibility makes it harder for you to distinguish between malicious probing for weakness and innocent misjudgment, and for the other party to disti... (read more)

I find this comment offensive.

First, your description of the process of consent is not universal; it doesn't describe any relationship I've been in going all the way back to when I was a teenager. At the very least this should tell you that this series of events wasn't acceptable because it's "just the way humans interact." Many men, including myself, actually talk to the women we want to have sex with, and "having lower amounts of sex" is far from an adequate reason to resort to the boundary-pushing and manipulation you describe.

Second, "the fact that you... (read more)

I don't like this defense for two reasons. One, I don't se why the same argument doesn't apply to the role Eliezer has already adopted as an early and insistent voice of concern. Being deliberately vague on some types of predictions doesn't change the fact that his name is synonymous with AI doomsaying. Second, we're talking about a person whose whole brand is built around intellectual transparency and reflection; if Eliezer's predictive model of AI development contains relevant deficiencies, I wish to believe that Eliezer's predictive model of AI developm... (read more)

I don't agree with this as a principle, although it may be a correct output. I think the notion of "a decent default" misses the mark compared to "think about your audience and the key elements of your message before deciding your form and tone."

To use a simple metaphor, if you need to anchor two pieces of wood together, a hammer and nails are usually going to be the quickest and cheapest way to do it. A drill and screws are often overkill. However I don't think that makes the hammer and nails the default; I think it makes them the correct tool in the majo... (read more)

I'm not the OP, but I bite that bullet all day long. My parents' last wishes are only relevant in two ways that I can see:

1. Their values are congruent with my own. If my parents last wishes are morally repugnant to me I certainly feel no obligation to help execute those wishes. Thankfully, in real life my parents values and wishes are fairly congruent with my own, so their request is likely to be something I could evaluate as worthy on its own terms; no obligation needed.

2. I wish to uphold a norm of last wishes being fulfilled. This has to meet a minimum

Facts and data are of limited use without a paradigm to conceptualize them. If you have some you think are particularly illuminative though by all means share them here.

As a layperson, the problem has been that my ability to figure out what's true relies on being able to evaluate subject-matter experts respective reliability on the technical elements of alignment. I've lurked in this community a long time; I've read the Sequences and watched the Robert Miles videos. I can offer a passing explanation of what the corrigibility problem is, or why ELK might be important.

None of that seems to count for much. Yitz made what I thought was a very lucid post from a similar level of knowledge, trying to bridge that gap, and got mos... (read more)

I don't understand how this isn't just making friends and encouraging the formation of friend groups based on common interests.

For the record, ISO 3103 is in no way optimized for a tasty cup of tea; it's explicitly standardized. Six minutes of brewing with boiling water can "scorch" certain teas by over-extracting tannins and other bitter compounds. If you dislike tea there's a decent chance you would like it better with shorter brews or lower temperature water (I use 90C water for my black teas and 85C for greens, for example).

I find myself concerned. Steven Pinker's past work has been infamously vulnerable to spot-checks of citations, leading me to heavily discount any given factual claims he makes. Is there reason to think he has made an effort here that will be any better constructed?

I don't necessarily agree with your impression of the McAfee thing. The man was by all accounts a very strange person; it doesn't seem overly credulous to think that he might have been both suicidal and paranoid about being murdered and made to look like a suicide.

Your notation is confusing but I achieved a similar result.

>It seems to me much safer to lay the burden of proof on the moral indulgence--at very least, the burden of proof shouldn't always rest on the demands of conscience. 

I think I disagree. It seems to me that moral claims don't exist in a vacuum, they require a combination of asserted values and contextualizing facts. If the contextualizing facts are not established, the asserted value is irrelevant. For instance, I might claim that we have a moral duty not to brush our hair because it produces static electricity, and static electricity is a painful e... (read more)

One human's moral arrogance is another human's Occam's razor. The evidence suggests to me, on grounds of both observation (very small organisms demonstrate very simple behaviour not consistent with a high level awareness) and theory (very small organisms have extremely minimal sensory/nervous architecture to contain qualia) that dust-mites are morally irrelevant, and the chance that I am mistaken in my opinion amounts to a Pascal's Mugging.

From Ozy:

"I recently read an essay by Peter Singer, Ethics Beyond Species and Beyond Instincts, in which he defined the moral as that which is universalizable, in this sense: “We can distinguish the moral from the nonmoral by appeal to the idea that when we think, judge, or act within the realm of the moral, we do so in a manner that we are prepared to apply to all others who are similarly placed.”

I read that, sat back, and said to myself: “I cannot do morality.”

I cannot do it in the same sense that an alcoholic cannot drink, and a person with an eating di... (read more)

I am not a true expert, but there is one major element of this narrative that most coverage leaves out— no matter what happens to the short-sellers, the price of Gamestop and other short squeezed stocks must eventually normalize to a "truer" valuation.

I have seen a truly alarming lack of recognition of this fact, with some people apparently believing the squeezed price is the new normal for GME. Here's why that probably isn't the case:

The value of a stock is tied to two factors. One is (broadly) the cash flows one can expect to receive in the form of divid... (read more)

Saskatchewanian checking in here. As with your Vancouver Island example, there's a lot of heterogeneity here too. The south of the province, where I grew up, has extremely low numbers of cases even relative to the sparse rural population, while anywhere north of Saskatoon where I currently live is doing fairly badly relative to their sparse rural population. I don't have a strong gears-level understanding of why this should be except some vague notion that the North sees more traffic entering and exiting in the course of resource extraction industries, and close living quarters associated with the same. Plus something something rampant spread in First Nations which I don't even want to get into. 

The notion of weirdness points has never spoken to me, personally, because it seems to collapse a lot of social nuance into a singular dichotomy of weird/not weird, and furthermore that weirdness is in some sense measurable and fungible. Neither, I think, is true, and the framework ought to be dissolved. So what's goes into a "weirdness point"?

• How familiar is the idea? - Vegetarians/vegans are a little weird, but most people probably know a handful and most have a notion that those people care about animal welfare and maybe some even know about nutritional

Are there any resources that amount to "80,000 Hours for (hopefully reformed) underachievers"? I've been weighing the possibility of going back to school in the hopes of getting into a higher-impact field, but my academic resume from my bachelor's is pretty lackluster, leaving me unsure where to start reconstruction. My mental health and general level of conscientiousness are both considerably improved from my younger years so I'm optimistic I can exceed my past self.

Not necessarily. If I am an academic whose research is undermined by bias, I may be irrational but not stupid, and if I am in a social environment where certain signals of stupid beliefs are advantageous, I may be stupid but not irrational. It seems to be the latter is more what the author is getting at.

See my comments above for some discussion of this topic. Broadly speaking we do know how to keep farmland productive but there are uncaptured externalities and other inadequacies to be accounted for.

That's fair, and I'm grumbling less as an ag scientist or policy person than as a layperson born and raised in the ag industry. It is my opinion that the commercial ag industry in my country both contains inadequacies and is a system of no free energy, to borrow from Inadequate Equilibria.

To elaborate, I observe the following facts:

• Conventional agriculture using fertilizer and pesticide creates negative externalities, notably by polluting runoff and consuming non-renewable resources (fertilizer is made from potash, a reasonably abundant but not infinite mi

Agricultural practice is my Gell-Mann pet peeve. While it's true that fertilizer and pest control are currently central to large swaths of the commercial ag industry, this is not necessarily a case of pure necessity so much as local maxima— for many crops we could reduce dependence on synthetic fertilizers and pesticides by integrating livestock, multi-cropping land, etc. Some of them are also ecologically unsustainable as practiced and may eventually need to be replaced.

That said, this doesn't actually detract from the central point; I would very much lik... (read more)