All of Andreas Chrysopoulos's Comments + Replies

In a future where we have conscious control over our dopamine system, why would we do anything?

Even caring for others taps into our pleasure center and is something that makes us feel good. But without the pleasure bias, why would we do anything?

What would be the goal and why?

Literally everything is colored by our emotions. So without them, what decides our actions? I guess logic would be the logical answer, but logic is just a tool emotions are the driving force.

Maybe survival could be one high-level goal, and also evolution. Both are not necessarily depe... (read more)

Why can't cities/countries be run more like exceptional companies? Efficient, innovative, etc.

How far away are we from people like Elon Musk being able to buy some land and build a new city with groundbreaking quality of life?

Would that even ever happen, and why yes or why not?

3Dagon
It gets tried every so often, but there are HUGE differences between companies and geographical/political governance.    The primary difference, in my mind, is filtering and voluntary association.  People choose where to work, and companies choose who works for them, independently (mostly) of where they live, what kind of lifestyle they like, whether they have children or relatives nearby, etc.  Cities and countries can sometimes turn away some immigrants, but they universally accept children born there and they can't fire citizens who aren't productive.
1RationalDino
What you want sounds like Próspera. It is too early to say how that will work out. They took some inspiration from Singapore. When Singapore became independent in 1965, it was a poverty-stricken third world place. It now has a better GDP/capita than countries like the USA. And also did things like come up with the best way of teaching math to elementary school students. But Singapore is only libertarian in some ways. They are also a dictatorship who does not believe in, for instance, free speech. Their point is that when you cram immigrants from many cultures together, you'll get problems if you don't limit how much one group is allowed to offend another. I don't like it, but also don't have evidence that they are wrong. And finally, most utopian experiments don't work out very well. See A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear for an amusing example.

Locally maybe there is no purpose. But maybe it's necessary for life to emerge elsewhere, so it could have a larger purpose.

If you isolate a napkin, it has no purpose but as soon as you need to wipe you mouth it acquires one. So maybe purpose is relative.

But yeah, looking at my original post, I'm trying to compare the purpose of the universe with the purpose of humans, which doesn't necessarily overlap 

2Dagon
I think you're using the wrong model for what "have a purpose" means.  purpose isn't an attribute of a thing.  Purpose is a relation between an agent and a thing.  An agent infers (or creates) a purpose for things (including themselves).  This purpose-for-me is temporary, mutable, and relative.  Different agents may have different (or no) purposes for the same thing.

I think it might also depend on your goals. Like how fast you want to learn something. If you have less than ideal time, then maybe more structured learning is necessary. If you have more time then periods of structureless/passive learning could be beneficial.

Is the purpose of the universe evolution?

I often think about why we're here -and of course the roman empire.  And while it might be tempting to think that the purpose of life is to be happy or content, I think the over arching theme of the world is evolution. Repeating cycles of creation and destruction: biological life, planets, solar systems, black holes, etc.

It's almost a little grim. That maybe, the reason we're here is for the end product. Just like a farmer plants a tree for the fruit. But I guess the in-between steps are no less beautiful than then finished result. Same as the journey being as meaningful as the destination.

4Dagon
The VAST majority of matter and energy in the universe is in the non-purpose category - it often has activity and reaction, and effects over time, but it doesn't strategically change it's mechanisms in order to achieve something, it just executes. Humans (and arguably other animals and groups distinct from indiiduals) may have purpose, and may infer purpose on things that don't have it intrinsically.  Even then, there are usually multiple simultaneous purposes (and non-purpose mechanisms) that interact, sometimes amplifying, sometimes dampening one another. 

Wouldn't you agree though, that one should probably not always do the number1effective thing? Can we even really say confidently which thing is most effective? 

3Richard_Kennaway
I'm not a utilitarian or an A, E or otherwise, so it would be better for someone who is to answer that. But emulating that role as best I can: Of course (a utilitarian would say) one should always do the number one effective thing, if one knows what it is. If one is unsure, then put numbers on the uncertainties and do the number one most-effective-in-expectation thing. If you want to take high vs. low variance of outcome into account (as SBF notably did not), just add that into the utility function. That is what utilitarianism is, and EA is utilitarianism applied to global wellbeing.

How does the brain data not get corrupt when waking up randomly at night? I'm assuming during sleep the brain is changing and reorganising data.

3MikkW
My model says that a lot of the changing occurs by gradient descent, which can be interrupted randomly without causing problems. And there's enough redundancy that the reorganization part can be interrupted without the core information being removed completely from the brain, and the redundancy will be replenished (one of copies I imagine is "locked" while the reorganization happens, and is later reorganized later with another copy "locked"). I also expect this replenishing can happen during awakeness, though not as ideally as when asleep. But I will also note that forgetting is a thing that happens, which is indistinguishable from "data corruption". We're actually quite good at forgetting things.
3Richard_Kennaway
If the observation contradicts the assumption, perhaps the assumption is wrong.

I think we might be valuing the importance of each step based on personal experience. But maybe they're both equally important. ex. What's more important for a cake, buying the ingredients or cooking it?

How can one improve the "mating dance" ?

2ChristianKl
The fact that arranged marriages out of pretty small polls of candidates can produce good marriages suggests that the match is not that central. There's a lot that has been written on dating.

What is your point?

Of course you will have to go through the rest of process, but you just solved the most critical step.

2ChristianKl
I don't think it's the most critical step for most people. Actually, going through the mating dance in a way that leads to feelings seems to me often more critical.

I believe, the fact that they might not want to know the outcomes, due to potentially complex legal procedures the effort they would have to exert to protect users better doesn't make it hard, it makes the companies selfish.

Looking the other way and claiming ignorance because you don't want to deal with the legal implications of your product potentially causing harm is really horrible.

EDIT: Happy to hear the disagreements here.

Yeah we would definitely need to reach a level of Artificial Intelligence at least equal to human for this to work well.

And you're right that debugging would be out the window, but assuming a smart AGI, that should not be a problem.

As for the advertising, I'm sure it could still be part of the interface somehow. I also don't see advertising going away anytime soon, but I haven't put much thought into it.

Imagine a dynamic user interface generated in real-time by AI. Isn’t that the future of UI?

Imagine WhatsApp being different for everyone. Or Facebook being different for everyone. Apps themselves would kinda lose their meaning and maybe just the backend would remain.

This would probably unify apps into one single UI where a message is a message, no matter where it’s coming from.

What do you think?

3Viliam
Great, if works flawlessly. Impossible to debug otherwise. (I prefer to use applications in English even if localization is available, because if they print an error, it is much easier to find an advice online. With user-tailored user interface, asking anyone else anything would become impossible. You would have to hope that the AI will explain what happened. Or maybe the AI under guidance of a human experienced with this kind of debugging.) On the other hand, I like this idea. Unifying all applications that I already use would be awesome. Classifying the messages according to their importance from my perspective, even better. But I doubt that this future will come. Remember that the most powerful IT company today, Google, is an advertising company first and IT company second. It is definitely not in their interest to make the AI too friendly. No matter what you want, you will get your daily dose (defined as: as much as possible) of advertising first.

I like this perspective. I guess I was seeing "becoming a celebrity" as a choice of some sort or a separate thing. But it does seem that the problem is entertainment, and there is a big spectrum of people trying to solve it with different means.

Looking at it like that, trying to solve entertainment is definitely not a bad thing. Just maybe less effective at saving/improving lives than some other career paths.

Would be interesting to somehow compare the impact of a doctor/philanthropist to an entertainer.

Either way, thanks for sharing!

3Richard_Kennaway
For an EA, being less effective at saving/improving lives is a bad thing. It is the bad thing. That is practically the definition of EA.

No yeah, you would probably need to collect the data yourself. But that should not be that hard. Do you think AI would currently be capable of actually matching people correctly, given the right data?

2RHollerith
The dating sites actively do not want to know about outcomes because some of the outcomes will be rapes, and the sites wants to be able to claim that they had no way to know about any rapes. Some of the victims of serial rapist Dr Stephen Matthews for example are currently suing a dating site. So, no, it is not easy to collect the data. Here is the (long) video by which I learned about that law suit. Sadly, there is no way for me to include a Youtube URL in a LW comment without the URL's "helpfully" getting replaced by a large image that is about 300 times more visually salient than anything else on the page, and I hate when that happens, so I'm going to give only the part of the URL after the domain name: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqIn_NUZZOA

These are tiny issues you are mentioning. The hardest thing to make is the AI.

If you have the algorithm for "perfect" matchmaking. You can just advertise the hell out of it, put a limit for the minimum number of users for the platform to work (100K?) and once that's reached activate it, match people, everyone is ecstatic to meet the love of their life there -> more publicity -> more people sign up -> success.

I think people would be willing to pay a LOT of money, for "perfect" matches. 

3ChristianKl
Just because a match is perfect does not mean that people end up in a relationship. The dating process is still there and needed to actually get people to fall in love. 

@Dagon Indulge me in a hypothetical. Let's say the average person gets to know one new person a day (which is probably an exaggeration). 365 new people a year. half of them probably the wrong sex (182) 1/3 is the wrong age (120). 8/10 they don't find attractive (24). 2/3 don't like them back (6).

That's 1 person every 2 months that you like and likes you back. And that's even before you go an a date, and all the things that could mess that up.

Now imagine if you had 10 of those people every month. 10 people that you like, and like you back and want the same ... (read more)

2Dagon
365/year is probably a bit low for most people, and it's bursty rather than continuous, but sure.  I think I'd disagree with any model for which only the most attractive 20% are candidates, and where there's a single point-in-time opportunity to date. Almost everyone I know dated people they'd known for a while and NOT dated for some time before considering romance.  Each candidate partner has a full life of their own, and their circumstances will change even as yours do.  

What would it take to bring Apple down?

Not in a malicious way. Just like empires fall, or businesses fail. What would it take, or what would need to happen? Apple seems to be growing, and doing many things right.

What is the (counterfactual) impact of a celebrity? Like, how much good does it bring to the world when someone becomes a star singer, actor, athlete?

Sure they can entertain, they can inspire, they can donate money, they can raise awareness for different issues.

But there can also be a lot of narcissism and selfishness and entitlement.

I'm trying to imagine someone dedicating their life to acting, singing or sports... and it just feels like such a waste of time, when there's so many problems in the world that need solving. How does one make that choice? Is there a logical argument for it?

2Epirito
"Do you really want to live in a world without Coca Cola?" I don't really care about sports, but I imagine better athletes must be more entertaining to watch for people who do care. Even if you were to work in an important problem, you wouldn't do it alone. You would probably be one more person contributing to it among many. So you can also look at each celebrity as one more person working at the problem of creating entertainment. Imagine if all music were wiped out of the world by magic. Wouldn't that suck?