Contra this post from the Sequences

In Eliezer's sequence post, he makes the following (excellent) point:

I can’t find any theorem of probability theory which proves that I should appear ice-cold and expressionless.

This debunks the then-widely-held view that rationality is counter to emotions. He then goes on to claim that emotions have the same epistemic status as the beliefs they are based on.

For my part, I label an emotion as “not rational” if it rests on mistaken beliefs, or rather, on mistake-producing epistemic conduct. “If the iron approaches your face, and you believe it is hot, and it is cool, the Way opposes your fear. If the iron approaches your face, and you believe it is cool, and it is hot, the Way opposes your calm.”

I think Eliezer is...

Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike have resigned. They led OpenAI's alignment work. Superalignment will now be led by John Schulman, it seems. Jakub Pachocki replaced Sutskever as Chief Scientist.

Reasons are unclear (as usual when safety people leave OpenAI).

The NYT piece and others I've seen don't really have details. Archive of NYT if you want to read it anyway.

OpenAI announced Sutskever's departure in a blogpost.

Sutskever and Leike confirmed their departures in tweets.

Crosspost from my blog.  

If you spend a lot of time in the blogosphere, you’ll find a great deal of people expressing contrarian views. If you hang out in the circles that I do, you’ll probably have heard of Yudkowsky say that dieting doesn’t really work, Guzey say that sleep is overrated, Hanson argue that medicine doesn’t improve health, various people argue for the lab leak, others argue for hereditarianism, Caplan argue that mental illness is mostly just aberrant preferences and education doesn’t work, and various other people expressing contrarian views. Often, very smart people—like Robin Hanson—will write long posts defending these views, other people will have criticisms, and it will all be such a tangled mess that you don’t really know what to think about them.

For...

I have liked music very much since I was a teenager. I spent many hours late at night in Soulseek chat rooms talking about and sharing music with my online friends. So, I tend to just have some music floating around in my head on any given day. But, I never learned to play any instrument, or use any digital audio software. It just didn't catch my interest.

My wife learned to play piano as a kid, so we happen to have a keyboard sitting around in our apartment. One day I was bored so I decided to just see whether I could figure out how to play some random song that I was thinking about right then. I found I was easily able to reconstitute a piano...

This is a D&D.Sci scenario: a puzzle where players are given a dataset to analyze and an objective to pursue using information from that dataset.

Duke Arado’s obsession with physics-defying architecture has caused him to run into a small problem. His problem is not – he affirms – that his interest has in any way waned: the menagerie of fantastical buildings which dot his territories attest to this, and he treasures each new time-bending tower or non-Euclidean mansion as much as the first. Nor – he assuages – is it that he’s having trouble finding talent: while it’s true that no individual has ever managed to design more than one impossible structure, it’s also true that he scarcely goes a week without some architect arriving at his door, haunted...

Here’s a conception that I have about sacredness, divinity, and religion.

There’s a sense in which love and friendship didn’t have to exist.

If you look at the animal kingdom, you see all kinds of solitary species, animals that only come together for mating. Members of social species – such as humans – have companionship and cooperation, but many species do quite well without being social.

In theory, you could imagine a world with no social species at all.

In theory, you could imagine a species of intelligent humanoids akin to Tolkien’s orcs. Looking out purely for themselves, willing to kill anyone else if they got away with it and it benefited them.

And then in another sense, some versions of love and friendship do have to exist.

Social species evolved for a...

I expect it would be useful when developing an understanding of the language used on LW.

Epistemic status: I wrote this in August 2023, got some feedback I didn't manage to incorporate very well, and then never published it.  There's been less discussion of overhang risk recently but I don't see any reason to keep sitting on it.  Still broadly endorsed, though there's a mention of a "recent" hardware shortage which might be a bit dated. 

I think arguments about the risks of overhangs are often unclear about what type of argument is being made.  Various types arguments that I've seen include:

1. Pausing is net-harmful in expectation because it would cause an overhang, which [insert further argument here]
2. Pausing is less helpful than [naive estimate of helpfulness] because it would cause an overhang, which [insert further argument here]
3. We shouldn't spend effort attempting to coordinate or enforce

This is the fourth in a sequence of posts taken from my recent report: Why Did Environmentalism Become Partisan?

This post has more of my personal opinions than previous posts or the report itself.

Other movements should try to avoid becoming as partisan as the environmental movement. Partisanship did not make environmentalism more popular, it made legislation more difficult to pass, and it resulted in fluctuating executive action. Looking at the history of environmentalism can give insight into what to avoid in order to stay bipartisan.

Partisanship was not inevitable. It occurred as the result of choices and alliances made by individual decision makers. If they had made different choices, environmentalism could have ended up being a bipartisan issue, like it was in the 1980s and is in some countries...