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All of Benjamin Schmidt's Comments + Replies

Why does LW not put much more focus on AI governance and outreach?
Benjamin Schmidt3117

I don't think that effective politics in this case requires deception and deception often backfires in unexpected ways.

Gabriel and Connor suggest in their interview that radical honesty - genuinely trusting politicians, advisors and average people to understand your argument and recognizing that they also don't want to die from ASI - can be remarkably effective. The real problem may be that this approach is not attempted enough. I remember this as a slightly less but still positive datapoint https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2sLwt2cSAag74nsdN/speaking-to-con... (read more)

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5mako yass
In watching interactions with external groups, I'm... very aware of the parts of our approach to the alignment problem that the public, ime, due to specialization being a real thing, actually cannot understand, so success requires some amount of uh, avoidance. I think it might not be incidental that the platform does focus (imo excessively) on more productive, accessible common enemy questions like control and moratorium, ahead of questions like "what is CEV and how do you make sure the lead players implement it". And I think to justify that we've been forced to distort some of our underlying beliefs about how relatively important the common enemy questions still are relative to the CEV questions. I'm sure that many at MIRI disagree with me on the relative importance of those questions, but I'm increasingly suspecting it's not because they understand something about the trajectory of AI that I don't, and that it's really because they've been closer to the epicenter of an avoidant discourse. In my root reply I implied that lesswrong is too open/contrarian/earnest to entertain that kind of politically expedient avoidance, on reflection, I don't think that ever could have been true[1]. I think some amount of avoidance may have been inside the house for a long time. And this isn't a minor issue because I'm noticing that most external audiences, when they see us avoiding those questions, freak out immediately, and assume we're doing it for sinister reasons (which is not the case[2], at least so far!) and then they start painting their own monsters into that void. It's a problem you might not encounter much as long as you can control the terms of the conversation, but as you gain prominence, you lose more and more control over the kinds of conversations you have to engage in, the world will pick at your softest critical parts. And from our side of things it might seem malicious for them to pick at those things. I think in earlier cases it has been malicious. But at th
Pandemic Prediction Checklist: H5N1 (6/14)
Benjamin Schmidt10

If minks are such a danger could we just make mink farming illegal?

The dangers absolutely don't seem worth the gains. 

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Thoughts on Francois Chollet's belief that LLMs are far away from AGI?
Benjamin Schmidt30

However, part of that was about going from open research to closed.

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Some Thoughts on Metaphilosophy
Benjamin Schmidt10

Because of the strange loopy nature of concepts/language/self/different problems metaphilosophy seems unsolvable?
Asking: What is good? already implies that there are the concepts "good", "what", "being" that there are answers and questions ... Now we could ask what concepts or questions to use instead ...

Similarly:
> "What are all the things we can do with the things we have and what decision-making process will we use and why use that process if the character of the different processes is the production of different ends; don't we have to know which end... (read more)

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Ironing Out the Squiggles
Benjamin Schmidt10

Because of the strange loopy nature of concepts/language/self/different problems metaphilosophy seems unsolvable?
Asking: What is good? already implies that there are the concepts "good", "what", "being" that there are answers and questions ... Now we could ask what concepts or questions to use instead ...

Similarly:
> "What are all the things we can do with the things we have and what decision-making process will we use and why use that process if the character of the different processes is the production of different ends; don't we have to know which end... (read more)

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Should rationalists be spiritual / Spirituality as overcoming delusion
Benjamin Schmidt20

but as far as I’ve seen, the correlation between stream entry and suffering is about 0; suffering is as likely to get better as it is to get worse.

I assume the correlation of 0 is hyperbolic. From what I have heard (and my own experience) it seems to reduce suffering. Ingram often mentions lots of people confusing the A&P with Streamentry and then of course afterwards they will be suffering more in the DN. The criteria he mentioned in the post also can't necessarily separate between A&P and Streamentry so I am wondering how often that happens in hi... (read more)

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Should rationalists be spiritual / Spirituality as overcoming delusion
Benjamin Schmidt10

Thanks, for the answer(s). Watched the video as well, always cool to hear about other peoples journeys. If you want there is a discordserver (MD) with some pretty advanced practitioners (3rd/4th path) you and/or Kaj could join (for some data points or practice or fun, feels more useful than Dharmaoverground these days).

Not sure whether different enlightenment levels would be more recommendable for random people.

E.g. stream-entry might be relatively easy and helpful, but then there is a "risk" of spending the next years trying to get 2nd/3rd/4th. It's such a transformative experience that it's hard to predict on an individual level what the person will do afterwards.
 

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2Kaj_Sotala
That sounds fun, feel free to message me with an invite. :) Worth noting that stream entry isn't necessarily a net positive either:
Should rationalists be spiritual / Spirituality as overcoming delusion
Benjamin Schmidt10

Do you want to mention where on e.g. the MCTB (https://www.mctb.org/) maps you two would be? Just to get a perspective on your perspective. 

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2romeostevensit
I'm guessing you're referring to his revised four path model? It doesn't quite match my experience and he devotes quite a bit of time (as do other teachers I respect) on why attainments are a bit fraught. I had two experiences after several years of practice that caused large portions of previously inscrutable dharma material to click into place, and they roughly corresponded to how people were describing things in first and second path. The first one corresponded to (among other things) dramatically heightened access to meditative states, the second to a large decrease in suffering and percepts of how suffering is constructed. I go into more detail on the video interview on my blog.
2Kaj_Sotala
I've never really managed to locate myself on the MCTB maps. Sometimes I'll have a brief period when it feels like some particular stage might fit my experience, but then that stops being the case.