silentbob's post "Failures in Kindness" is excellent. I love the idea that sometimes, when we exaimine a situation in depth, the most "kind" course of action can be highly conterintuitive. A few other examples I'd like to offer: Appreciative Kindness Imagine you meet a friend-of-a-friend for the first time while...
Paul Christiano makes the case that if we use the universal prior to make important predictions, then we will end up assigning a large amount of probability mass to hypotheses which involve intelligent agents living in alternate universes who have thus-far deliberately made the correct predictions so that they might...
In this post I propose an (allegedly...) secure AI boxing method. For reasons elaborated at the end of the post, this proposal is probably unsafe, and is certainly not practical. Still, I've elected to share my thoughts on this in the hope of receiving valuable feedback, as well a hope...
Ironically - it's hard know whether to take your survey results at face value given the complexity of human motivations (if it wasn't for the meme, would people's reaction be different?).
If we ran an experiement where there were 2 stalls set up in public (ideally not in SF, thus almost nobody is in on the joke), and each offers free food - one serving the best ice cream available and one serving the bear fat + salt + honey mixture - which do you think will draw longer lines?
(If anyone is persuaded by this post that the bear fat would win and is willing to wager, perhaps we can run it for real!)
I think an important consideration being overlooked is how comptetntly a centralised project would actually be managed.
In one of your charts, you suggest worlds where there is a single project will make progress faster due to "speedup from compute almagamation". This is not necessarily true. It's very possible that different teams would be able to make progress at very different rates even if both given identical compute resources.
At a boots-on-the-ground level, the speed of progress an AI project makes will be influenced by thosands of tiny decisions about how to:
Yes that's true that beginning almost any form of exercise will deliver most of the benefits compared to what an optimal rountine would! But your post is all about trying to be as time efficient as possible (e.g you also discussed the potential to use drop sets to go even beyond failure!).
For vast majority of people reading this post - if their goal is to get the greatest possible benefit from resistance training in shortest amount of time - the biggest mistake they're making right now is not having their sets be difficult enough. You're right that you don't need to go to failure to get most of the benefits, but if time efficiency is the goal, spending that extra 15 seconds to add those two final pre-failure reps to a set is the first thing I'd reccomend.
(This comment is directed more at the rest of the audience who I think are likely to take the wrong lessons from this post, rather than OP who I don't doubt knows what they are talking about and has found success following their own advice)
[For supersets] the main downside being that the overall greater work packed in to a smaller amount of time being somewhat more motivationally taxing.
At least for me personally, this is an overwhelmingly important consideration! There's no way in hell I could go to failure on both ends of a superset at once without throwing up.
... (read more)(I just go 1 or two reps shy of failure and don't worry too
I hear you that teenagers spending hours computing hundreds of analytic derivatives or writing a bunch of essays is a pretty sad time waste... But if incentives shifted so instead that time got spent perfecting a starcraft build order against the AI a hundred times or grinding for years to pull off carpetless star in SM64, this might be one of the few ways to make that time spent even more pointless... (And for most people the latter is no more fun than the former)
You might be right that the concept only applies to specific subcultures (in my case, educated relatively well-off Australians).
Maybe another test could be - can you think of someone you've met in the past who a critic might describe as "rude/loud/obnoxious" but despite this, they seem to draw in lots of friends and you have a lot of fun whenever you hang out with them?
silentbob's post "Failures in Kindness" is excellent. I love the idea that sometimes, when we exaimine a situation in depth, the most "kind" course of action can be highly conterintuitive. A few other examples I'd like to offer:
Imagine you meet a friend-of-a-friend for the first time while attending a gathering at their home. "Hey, welcome! It's great to meet you - can I get you anything?" they ask. There's nothing you really want right now, and you don't want to take from them or cause inconvienience, so you say "I'm fine, thanks."
Some people might assume declining their offer is kind. After all, wouldn't it be inconsiderate to make them go to... (read 883 more words →)
Maybe an analogy which seems closer to the "real world" situation - let's say you and someone like Sam Altman both tried to start new companies. How much more time and starting capital do you think you'd need to have a better shot of success than him?
Out of interest - if you had total control over OpenAI - what would you want them to do?
I think OP is correct about cultural learning being the most important factor in explaining the large difference in intelligence between homo sapiens and other animals.
In early chapters of Secrets of Our Success, the book examines studies comparing performance of young humans and young chimps on various congnitive tasks. The book argues that across a broad array of cognitive tests, 4 year old humans do not perform singificantly better than 4 year old chimps on average, except in cases where the task can be solved by immitating others (human children crushed the chimps when this was the case).
The book makes a very compelling argument that our species is uniquely prone to immitating... (read more)
Paul Christiano makes the case that if we use the universal prior to make important predictions, then we will end up assigning a large amount of probability mass to hypotheses which involve intelligent agents living in alternate universes who have thus-far deliberately made the correct predictions so that they might eventually manipulate us into doing what they want us to do. Paul calls these intelligent agents 'consequentialists'.
I find ideas like this very difficult to think about clearly, but I have a strong gut-feeling that the argument is not correct. I've been unable to form a crisp formal argument against Paul's proposal, but below I list a few weak reasons why the... (read 770 more words →)
In this post I propose an (allegedly...) secure AI boxing method. For reasons elaborated at the end of the post, this proposal is probably unsafe, and is certainly not practical. Still, I've elected to share my thoughts on this in the hope of receiving valuable feedback, as well a hope that discussing these ideas in public will provoke more useful thoughts in the minds of others.
Thank you for reading.
-- Xavier O'Rourke
Yudkowsky, Bostrom and others have illustrated the fundamental security problems which arise when attempting to mitigate the influence of a smarter-than-human intelligence by putting the agent inside a “box”.
“Boxing” an artificial intelligence means placing the agent in a virtual... (read 1626 more words →)
What if people are required to try a tiny bit of each before deciding which one they want a full helping of? In that setup I'm still extremely confident the ice cream wins - it would be crazy imo for anyone to update meaningfully due to this survey.
Of course, as we dive more into the nitty gritty of the setup it becomes relevant how the product/stunt is positioned etc. - but the fact that there are all these considerations that need to be made serves to further reinforce the point that it's hard to predict human preferences!