It is both absurd, and intolerably infuriating, just how many people on this forum think it's acceptable to claim they have figured out how qualia/consciousness works, and also not explain how one would go about making my laptop experience an emotion like 'nostalgia', or present their framework for enumerating the set of all possible qualitative experiences^[1]. When it comes to this particular subject, rationalists are like crackpot physicists with a pet theory of everything, except rationalists go "Huh? Gravity?" when you ask them to explain how their theory predicts gravity, and then start arguing with you about gravity needing to be something explained by a theory of everything. You people make me want to punch my drywall sometimes.

For the record: the purpose of having a "theory of consciousness" is so it can tell us which blobs of matter feel particular things under which specific circumstances, and teach others how to make new blobs of matter that feel particular things. Down to the level of having a field of AI anaesthesiology. If your theory of consciousness does not do this, perhaps because the sum total of your brilliant insights are "systems feel 'things' when they're, y'... (read more)

The Prediction Market Discord Message, by Eva_:

Current market structures can't bill people for the information value that went into the market fairly, can't fairly handle secret information known to only some bidders, pays out most of the subsidy to whoever corrects the naive bidder fastest even though there's no benefit to making it a race, offers almost no profit to people trying to defend the true price from incorrect bidders unless they let the price shift substantially first, can't be effectively used to collate information known by different bidders, can't handle counterfactuals / policy conditionals cleanly, implement EDT instead of LDT, let you play games of tricking other bidders for profit and so require everyone to play trading strategies that are inexploitable even if less beneficial, can't defend against people who are intentionally illegible as to whether they have private information or are manipulating the market for profit elsewhere...

But most of all, prediction markets contain supposedly ideal economic actors who don't really suspect each other of dishonesty betting money against each other even though it's a net-zero trade and the aggreeement theorem says th

[Redacted]

To the LW devs - just want to mention that this website is probably now the most well designed forum I have ever used. The UX is almost addictively good and I've been loving all of the little improvements over the past year or so.

Pretty much ~everybody on the internet I can find talking about the issue both mischaracterizes and exaggerates the extent of child sex work inside the United States, often to a patently absurd degree. Wikipedia alone reports that there are anywhere from "100,000-1,000,000" child prostitutes in the U.S. There are only ~75 million children in the U.S., so I guess Wikipedia thinks it's possible that more than 1% of people aged 0-17 are prostitutes. As in most cases, these numbers are sourced from "anti sex trafficking" organizations that, as far as I can tell, completely make them up.

Actual child sex workers - the kind that get arrested, because people don't like child prostitution - are mostly children who pass themselves off as adults in order to make money. Part of the confusion comes from the fact that the government classifies any instance of child prostitution as human trafficking, regardless of whether or not there's evidence the child was coerced. Thus, when the Department of Justice reports that federal law enforcement investigated "2,515 instances of suspected human trafficking" from 2008-2010, and that "forty percent involved prostitution of a child or child sexual exploit... (read more)

The Nick Bostrom fiasco is instructive: never make public apologies to an outrage machine. If Nick had just ignored whoever it was trying to blackmail him, it would have been on them to assert the importance of a twenty-five year old deliberately provocative email, and things might not have ascended to the point of mild drama. When he tried to "get ahead of things" by issuing an apology, he ceded that the email was in fact socially significant despite its age, and that he did in fact have something to apologize for, and so opened himself up to the Standard Replies that the apology is not genuine, he's secretly evil etc. etc.

Instead, if you are ever put in this situation, just say nothing. Don't try to defend yourself. Definitely don't volunteer for a struggle session.

Treat outrage artists like the police. You do not prevent the police from filing charges against you by driving to the station and attempting to "explain yourself" to detectives, or by writing and publishing a letter explaining how sorry you are. At best you will inflate the airtime of the controversy by responding to it, at worst you'll be creating the controversy in the first place.

The problem with trade agreements as a tool for maintaining peace is that they only provide an intellectual and economic reason for maintaining good relations between countries, not an emotional once. People's opinions on war rarely stem from economic self interest. Policymakers know about the benefits and (sometimes) take them into account, but important trade doesn't make regular Americans grateful to the Chinese for providing them with so many cheap goods - much the opposite, in fact. The number of people who end up interacting with Chinese people or intuitively understanding the benefits firsthand as a result of expanded business opportunities is very small.

On the other hand, video games, social media, and the internet have probably done more to make Americans feel aligned with the other NATO countries than any trade agreement ever. The YouTubers and Twitch streamers I have pseudosocial relationships with are something like 35% Europeans. I thought Canadians spoke Canadian and Canada was basically some big hippie commune right up until my minecraft server got populated with them. In some weird alternate universe where people are suggesting we invade Canada, my first instinctual... (read more)

The "people are wonderful" bias is so pernicious and widespread I've never actually seen it articulated in detail or argued for. I think most people greatly underestimate the size of this bias, and assume opinions either way are a form of mind-projection fallacy on the part of nice/evil people. In fact, it looks to me like this skew is the deeper origin of a lot of other biases, including the just-world fallacy, and the cause of a lot of default contentment with a lot of our institutions of science, government, etc. You could call it a meta-bias that causes the Hansonian stuff to go largely unnoticed.

I would be willing to pay someone to help draft a LessWrong post for me about this; I think it's important but my writing skills are lacking.

So apparently in 2015 Sam Altman said:

“AI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there’ll be great companies.”

Serious question: Is he a comic book supervillain? Is this world actually real? Why does this quote not garner an emotive reaction out of anybody but me?

PSA: I have realized very recently after extensive interactive online discussion with rationalists, that they are exceptionally good at arguing. Too good. Probably there's some inadvertent pre- or post- selection for skill at debating high concept stuff going on.

Wait a bit until acceding to their position in a live discussion with them where you start by disagreeing strongly for maybe intuitive reasons and then suddenly find the ground shifting beneath your feet. It took me repeated interactions where I only later realized I'd been hoodwinked by faulty reasoning to notice the pattern.

Interesting whitepill hidden inside Scott Alexander's SB 1047 writeup was that lying doesn't work as well as predicted in politics. It's possible that if the opposition had lied less often, or we had lied more often, the bill would not have gotten a supermajority in the senate.

Many of you are probably wondering what you will do if/when you see a polar bear. There's a Party Line, uncritically parroted by the internet and wildlife experts, that while you can charge/intimidate a black bear, polar bears are Obligate Carnivores and the only thing you can do is accept your fate.

I think this is nonsense. A potential polar bear attack can be defused just like a black bear attack. There are loads of youtube videos of people chasing Polar Bears away by making themselves seem big and aggressive, and I even found some indie documentaries of people who went to the arctic with expectations of being able to do this. The main trick seems to be to resist the urge to run away, make yourself look menacing, and commit to warning charges in the bear's general direction until it leaves.

Does anybody here have any strong reason to believe that the ML research community norm of "not taking AGI discussion seriously" stems from a different place than the oil industry's norm of "not taking carbon dioxide emission discussion seriously"?

I'm genuinely split. I can think of one or two other reasons there'd be a consensus position of dismissiveness (preventing bikeshedding, for example), but at this point I'm not sure, and it affects how I talk to ML researchers.

Postdiction: Modern "cancel culture" was mostly a consequence of new communication systems (social media, etc.) rather than a consequence of "naturally" shifting attitudes or politics.

Lie detection technology is going mainstream. ClearSpeed is such an accuracy and ease of use improvement to polygraphs that various government LEO and military are starting to notice. In 2027 (edit: maybe more like 2029) it will be common knowledge that you can no longer lie to the police, and you should prepare for this eventuality if you haven't.

Guys what's up the mercator map projection on the homepage? I thought we were nerds?

Noticed something recently. As an alien, you could read pretty much everything Wikipedia has on celebrities, both on individual people and the general articles about celebrity as a concept... And never learn that celebrities tend to be extraordinarily attractive. I'm not talking about an accurate or even attempted explanation for the tendency, I'm talking about the existence of the tendency at all. I've tried to find something on wikipedia that states it, but that information just doesn't exist (except, of course, implicitly through photographs).

It's quite odd, and I'm sure it's not alone. "Celebrities are attractive" is one obvious piece of some broader set of truisms that seem to be completely missing from the world's most complete database of factual information.

Falling birthrates is the climate change of the right:

• Vaguely tribally valenced for no really good reason
• Predicted outcomes range from "total economic collapse, failed states" to "slightly lower GDP growth"
• People use it as an excuse to push radical social and political changes when the real solutions are probably a lot simpler if you're even slightly creative

Most justice systems seem to punish theft on a log scale. I'm not big on capital punishment, but it is actually bizarre that you can misplace a billion dollars of client funds and escape the reaper in a state where that's done fairly regularly. The law seems to be saying: "don't steal, but if you do, think bigger."

LessWrong as a website has gotten much more buggy for me lately. 6 months ago it worked like clockwork, but recently I'm noticing that refreshes on my profile page take something like 18 seconds to complete, or even 504 (!). I'm trying to edit my old "pessimistic alignment" post now and the interface is just not letting me; the site just freezes for a while and then refuses to put the content in the text box for me to edit.