nothing short of death can stop me from trying to do good.

the world could destroy or corrupt EA, but i'd remain an altruist.

it could imprison me, but i'd stay focused on alignment, as long as i could communicate to at least one on the outside.

even if it tried to kill me, i'd continue in the paths through time where i survived.

i might try sleeping for a long time (16-24 hours?) by taking sublingual^[1] melatonin right when i start to be awake, and falling asleep soon after. my guess: it might increase my cognitive quality on the next wake up, like this:

(or do useful computation during sleep, leading to apparently having insights on the next wakeup? long elaboration below)

i wonder if it's even possible, or if i'd have trouble falling asleep again despite the melatonin.

i don't see much risk to it, since my day/night cycle is already uncalibrated^[2], and melatonin is naturally used for this narrow purpose in the body. 

'cognitive quality' is really vague. here's what i'm really imagining

my unscientific impression of sleep, from subjective experience (though i only experience the result) and speculation i've read, is that it does these things:

• integrates into memory what happened in the previous wake period, and maybe to a lesser extent further previous ones
• more separate to the previous wake period, acts on my intuitions or beliefs about things to 'reconcile' or 'compute implicated intuitions'. for example if i was trying to reconcile two ideas, or solve some confusing logical problem, maybe the

i don't think having (even exceptionally) high baseline intelligence and then studying bias avoidance techniques is enough for one to be able to derive an alignment solution. i have not seen in any rationalist i'm aware of what feels like enough for that, though their efforts are virtuous of course. it's just that the standard set by the universe seems higher.

i think this is a sort of background belief for me. not failing at thinking is the baseline; other needed computations are harder. they are not satisfied by avoiding failure conditions, but require the satisfaction of some specific, hard-to-find success condition. learning about human biases will not train one to cognitively seek answers of this kind, only to avoid premature failure.

this is basically a distinction between rationality and creativity. rationality^[1] is about avoiding premature failure, creativity is about somehow generating new ideas.

but there is not actually something which will 'guide us through' creativity, like hpmor/the sequences do for rationality. there are various scattered posts about it^[2].

i also do not have a guide to creativity to share with you. i'm only pointing at it as an equally if not more... (read more)

i currently believe that working on superintelligence-alignment is likely the correct choice from a fully-negative-utilitarian perspective.^[1]

for others, this may be an intuitive statement or unquestioned premise. for me it is not, and i'd like to state my reasons for believing it, partially as a response to this post concerned about negative utilitarians trying to accelerate progress towards an unaligned-ai-takeover.

there was a period during which i was more uncertain about this question, and avoided openly sharing minimally-dual-use alignment research (but did not try to accelerate progress towards a nonaligned-takeover) while resolving that uncertainty.

a few relevant updates since then:

1. decrease on the probability that the values an aligned AI would have would endorse human-caused moral catastrophes such as human-caused animal suffering.
   
   i did not automatically believe humans to be good-by-default, and wanted to take time to seriously consider what i think should be a default hypothesis-for-consideration upon existing in a society that generally accepts an ongoing mass torture event.
2. awareness of vastly worse possible s-risks.
   
   factory farming is a form of physical torture, by w

On Pivotal Acts

(edit: status: not a crux, instead downstream of different beliefs about what the first safe ASI will look like in predicted futures where it exists. If I instead believed 'task-aligned superintelligent agents' were the most feasible form of pivotally useful AI, I would then support their use for pivotal acts.)

I was rereading some of the old literature on alignment research sharing policies after Tamsin Leake's recent post and came across some discussion of pivotal acts as well.

Hiring people for your pivotal act project is going to be tricky. [...] People on your team will have a low trust and/or adversarial stance towards neighboring institutions and collaborators, and will have a hard time forming good-faith collaboration. This will alienate other institutions and make them not want to work with you or be supportive of you.

This is in a context where the 'pivotal act' example is using a safe ASI to shut down all AI labs.^[1]

My thought is that I don't see why a pivotal act needs to be that. I don't see why shutting down AI labs or using nanotech to disassemble GPUs on Earth would be necessary. These may be among the 'most direct' or 'simplest to imagine' possible... (read more)

(Personal) On writing and (not) speaking

I often struggle to find words and sentences that match what I intend to communicate.

Here are some problems this can cause:

1. Wordings that are odd or unintuitive to the reader, but that are at least literally correct.^[1]
2. Not being able express what I mean, and having to choose between not writing it, or risking miscommunication by trying anyways. I tend to choose the former unless I'm writing to a close friend. Unfortunately this means I am unable to express some key insights to a general audience.
3. Writing taking lots of time: I usually have to iterate many times on words/sentences until I find one which my mind parses as referring to what I intend. In the slowest cases, I might finalize only 2-10 words per minute. Even after iterating, my words are still sometimes interpreted in ways I failed to foresee.

These apply to speaking, too. If I speak what would be the 'first iteration' of a sentence, there's a good chance it won't create an interpretation matching what I intend to communicate. In spoken language I have no chance to constantly 'rewrite' my output before sending it. This is one reason, but not the only reason, that I've had a policy of t... (read more)

Here's a tampermonkey script that hides the agreement score on LessWrong. I wasn't enjoying this feature because I don't want my perception to be influenced by that; I want to judge purely based on ideas, and on my own.

Here's what it looks like:

// ==UserScript==
// @name         Hide LessWrong Agree/Disagree Votes
// @namespace    http://tampermonkey.net/
// @version      1.0
// @description  Hide agree/disagree votes on LessWrong comments.
// @author       ChatGPT4
// @match        https://www.lesswrong.com/*
// @grant        none
// ==/UserScript==

(fun

I was looking at this image in a post and it gave me some (loosely connected/ADD-type) thoughts.

In order:

1. The entities outside the box look pretty scary.
2. I think I would get over that quickly, they're just different evolved body shapes. The humans could seem scary-looking from their pov too.
3. Wait.. but why would the robots have those big spiky teeth? (implicit question: what narratively coherent world could this depict?)
4. Do these forms have qualities associated with predator species, and that's why they feel scary? (Is this a predator-species-world?)
5. Most human

random idea for a voting system (i'm a few centuries late. this is just for fun.)

instead of voting directly, everyone is assigned to a discussion group of x (say 5) of themself and others near them. the group meets to discuss at an official location (attendance is optional). only if those who showed up reach consensus does the group cast one vote.

many of these groups would not reach consensus, say 70-90%. that's fine. the point is that most of the ones which do would be composed of people who make and/or are receptive to valid arguments. this would then sh... (read more)

i am kind of worried by the possibility that this is not true: there is an 'ideal procedure for figuring out what is true'.

for that to be not true, it would mean that: for any (or some portion of?) task(s), the only way to solve it is through something like a learning/training process (in the AI sense), or other search-process-involving-checking. it would mean that there's no 'reason' behind the solution being what it is, it's just a {mathematical/logical/algorithmic/other isomorphism} coincidence.

for it to be true, i guess it would mean that there's anoth... (read more)

Mutual Anthropic Capture, A Decision-theoretic Fermi paradox solution

(copied from discord, written for someone not fully familiar with rat jargon)
(don't read if you wish to avoid acausal theory)

simplified setup

• there are two values. one wants to fill the universe with A, and the other with B.
• for each of them, filling it halfway is really good, and filling it all the way is just a little bit better. in other words, they are non-linear utility functions.
• whichever one comes into existence first can take control of the universe, and fill it with 100% of what th

avoiding akrasia by thinking of the world in terms of magic: the gathering effects

example initial thought process: "i should open my laptop just to write down this one idea and then close it and not become distracted".

laptop rules text: "when activated, has an 80% chance of making you become distracted"

new reasoning: "if i open it, i need to simultaneously avoid that 80% chance somehow."

why this might help me: (1) i'm very used to strategizing about how to use a kit of this kind of effect, from playing such games. (2) maybe normal reasoning about 'wh... (read more)

i'm watching Dominion again to remind myself of the world i live in, to regain passion to Make It Stop

it's already working.

What is malevolence? On the nature, measurement, and distribution of dark traits was posted two weeks ago (and i recommend it). there was a questionnaire discussed in that post which tries to measure the levels of 'dark traits' in the respondent.

i'm curious about the results^[1] of rationalists^[2] on that questionnaire, if anyone wants to volunteer theirs. there are short and long versions (16 and 70 questions).

1. ^{^}

   (or responses to the questions themselves)

2. ^{^}

   i also posted the same shortform to the EA forum, asking about EAs

I notice that my strong-votes now give/take 4 points. I'm not sure if this is a good system.

At what point should I post content as top-level posts rather than shortforms?

For example, a recent writing I posted to shortform was ~250 concise words plus an image. It would be a top-level post on my blog if I had one set up (maybe soon :p).

Some general guidelines on this would be helpful.

in the space of binary-sequences of all lengths, i have an intuition that {the rate at which there are new 'noticed patterns' found at longer lengths} decelerates as the length increases.

• what do i mean by "noticed patterns"? 

  in some sense of 'pattern', each full sequence is itself a 'unique pattern'. i'm using this phrase to avoid that sense.

  rather, my intuition is that {what could in principle be noticed about sequences of higher lengths} exponentially tends to be things that had already been noticed of sequences of lower lengths. 'meta patterns' and

i tentatively think an automatically-herbivorous and mostly-asocial species/space-of-minds would have been morally best to be the one which first reached the capability threshold to start building technology and civilization.

• herbivorous -> less ingrained biases against other species^[1], no factory farming
• asocial -> less dysfunctional dynamics within the species (like automatic status-seeking, rhetoric, etc), and less 'psychologically automatic processes' which fail to generalize out of the evolutionary distribution.^[2]

1. ^{^}

   i expect there still would be s

what should i do with strong claims whose reasons are not easy to articulate, or the culmination of a lot of smaller subjective impressions? should i just not say them publicly, to not conjunctively-cause needless drama? here's an example:

a possible research direction which i don't know if anyone has explored: what would a training setup which provably creates a (probably^[1]) aligned system look like?

my current intuition, which is not good evidence here beyond elevating the idea from noise, is that such a training setup might somehow leverage how the training data and {subsequent-agent's perceptions/evidence stream} are sampled from the same world, albeit with different sampling procedures. for example, the training program could intake both a dataset and an outer-alignment-goal-function, a... (read more)

i saw a shortform from 4 years ago that said in passing:

if we assume that signaling is a huge force in human thinking

is signalling a huge force in human thinking?
if so, anyone want to give examples of ways of this that i, being autistic, may not have noticed?

on chimera identity. (edit: status: received some interesting objections from an otherkin server. most importantly, i'd need to explain how this can be true despite humans evolving a lot more from species in their recent lineage. i think this might be possible with something like convergent evolution at a lower level, but at this stage in processing i don't have concrete speculation about that)

this is inspired by seeing how meta-optimization processes can morph one thing into other things. examples: a selection process running on a neural net, an image dif... (read more)

(edit: see disclaimers^[1])

1. Creating superintelligence generally leads to runaway optimization.
2. Under the anthropic principle, we should expect there to be a 'consistent underlying reason' for our continued survival.^[2]
3. By default, I'd expect the 'consistent underlying reason' to be a prolonged alignment effort in absence of capabilities progress. However, this seems inconsistent with the observation of progressing from AI winters to a period of vast training runs and widespread technical interest in advancing capabilities.
4. That particular 'consistent underlyin

'Value Capture' - An anthropic attack against some possible formally aligned ASIs

(this is a more specific case of anthropic capture attacks in general, aimed at causing a superintelligent search process within a formally aligned system to become uncertain about the value function it is to maximize (or its output policy more generally))

Imagine you're a superintelligence somewhere in the world that's unreachable to life on Earth, and you have a complete simulation of Earth. You see a group of alignment researchers about to successfully create a formal-value-... (read more)