To some degree. And I agree on most emotions, they exist for a reason and someone who discounts them without reflection is making a mistake. But I think Envy, on reflection, still strikes me as something better for the goals of evolution and in the environment of our ancestors than one that "makes sense" for us and in the modern world.
I think, insofar as Envy drives people to steal, it decreases people's likelihood to survive and thrive (jail isn't the optimal place for either of those, and if you're stealing from Envy, not desperation or something, it probably wasn't worth the risk). Cheating, another behavior driven by Envy, can lead to suffering... (read more)
Sure, but if the positives of Envy can be better obtained by less destructive emotions, does it really serve a purpose?
I mean, if Inside Out 2 was about the exploration of Envy being gone, and the best it could do is "Riley is still motivated, but just, a bit less than she would be otherwise" it wouldn't really make for a dramatic change.
And if I were building a person, and had the option to give them Envy, instead of upping their Admiration or Pleasure (as you name), I don't know why I would.
(Edit: that may be overly unfair. I can come up with reasons why. But they feel anti-altruistic. For example, Envy... (read more)
So I picked Envy for the exercise (though meant Jealousy in your wording), and came up with basically the example you gave in your section on it, but dismissed it, since it felt like a justification, not a reason. That is, it felt like what I would say if I needed to argue that Jealousy was useful, not an actual reason why Jealousy is useful.
Like, I don't imagine Jealousy is our only source of motivation. We would (but maybe only could?) want to do better or have more, without seeing someone else have more. The people in Tribe A would want more fish because they'd feel Happy if they had more, or... (read more)
I interpreted the thrust of the essay as something else. But more broadly, I get why you'd find intuition pump essays manipulative, but not why you'd find them unconvincing.
The point is to take someone who says "I don't like any dish with onions", and give them a dish that has onions in it. They'd normally refuse to eat that, so you don't tell them, and then when they like it you can show them that their claim is wrong.
(I will note that I think "writing an essay with a surprising conclusion" is a significantly smaller violation than "feed someone food they explicitly asked not to be fed")
I think this essay is aimed... (read more)
Thank you for the reply. I think I'll need to look into things more.
One clarification I wanted to make. I wouldn't have normally said that I need to put effort into listening. I think I generally feel like it doesn't take effort. But somewhat recently I had an interaction with someone go poorly. It was a date, and they said afterwards that they didn't feel like I wanted to get to know them, because I hadn't asked enough things about them[1].
So I figure there's something lacking in my interaction with people. Something that I'm not doing that I should, and doing things requires effort, so therefore I'm lacking in effort in some way.
I think you're saying in some state it won't be effortful, because it will be the path of least resistance. But I think my problem was not knowing what they wanted, and I don't see how a state of mind would give me that information "for free".
Possibly this was just idiosyncracy on their part. Other people have not expressed this feeling to me, so I have considered I'm putting too much weight on a single interaction.
Then the wave crested.
Is there any more you can say about this?
People already tell me I have good vibes, and feel like I listen to them[1]. I give off an air of nonchalance, because I think I kill[2] my emotions in public.
But I do it because it's one more thing to deal with that I generally don't have energy for. I'm already bothered by all the light and sound.
It seems like you're saying "I meditated, and while at first that made sensory issues worse, eventually they just stopped." And I'd like to know why, if that was legible to you.
Would appreciate any advice. I can probably say more about my experiences, but I'm not sure what more, if any, would be helpful.
I don't know if it's the same as you. I think I'm maybe not as active a listener? I don't think I'm incapable of the way I see you listen in your videos, but I'm not sure I put the energy into it.
I use a visceral word because I don't approve of this practice in myself. Perhaps "ignore" or "block" would be more accurate?
Whether or not to get insurance should have nothing to do with what makes one sleep – again, it is a mathematical decision with a correct answer.
Don't be overly naive consequentialist about this. "Nothing" is an overstatement.
Peace of mind can absolutely be one of the things you are purchasing with an insurance contract. If your Kelly calculation says that motorcycle insurance is worth $899 a month, and costs $900 a month, but you'll spend time worrying about not being insured if you don't buy it, and won't if you do, I fully expect that is worth more than $1 a month.
But do be actual consequentialist about it. If the value of the insurance is more like $10, but the cost is $900, I doubt peace of mind about this one thing is worth $890 a month.
I have a habit of reading footnotes as soon as they are linked, and your footnote says that you won with queen odds before the call to guess what odds you'd win at, creating a minor spoiler.
Is it important that negentropy be the result of subtracting from the maximum entropy? It seemed a sensible choice, up until it introduces infinities, and made every state's negentropy infinite. (And also that, if you subtract from 0, then two identical states should have the same negentropy, even in different systems. Unsure if that's useful, or harmful).
Though perhaps that's important for the noting that reducing an infinite system to a finite macrostate is an infinite reduction? I'm not sure if I understand how (or perhaps when?) that's more useful than having it be defined as subtracted from 0, such that finite macrostates have finite negentropy, and infinite macrostates have -infinite negentropy (showing that you really haven't reduced it at all, which, as far as I understand with infinities, you haven't, by definition).
(Response to this challenge)
I've read two things recently on similar strategies: Zvi's post on ChatGPT, and Scott Alexander's post on Redwood Research.
They both seem to have a similar strategy, to train AI to not do misaligned things by giving it a bunch of examples of misaligned things, and saying don't do that.
They both fail to out of training distribution errors. ChatGPT with asking it to pretend, or even just to speak in uwu voice, and Redwood with poetic descriptions, plus weirder things.
The Redwood post shows that they thought about this problem. They have a step for "find out of distribution errors, and train more, especially on them." Plus an idea that this... (read 198 more words →)
I think I agree with a vibe I see in the comments that an AI that causes this problem is perhaps threading a very small needle.
Yudkowsky wrote The Hidden Complexity of Wishes to explain that a genie that does what you say will almost certainly cause problems. If people have this kind of Superintelligence, it won't take long before someone asks it to get them as many paperclips as possible and we all die. The kind of AI that does what humans want without killing everyone is one that does what we mean.
But how does this work? If you ask such a superintelligence to pull your kid from the rubble of a... (read more)