All of bgaesop's Comments + Replies

re: 1) I don't think we do have fine-grained control over the outcome of the training of LLMs and other ML systems, which is what really matters. See recent emergent self-preservation behavior.

re: 2) I'm saying that I think those arguments are distractions from the much more important one of x-risk. But sure, this metaphor doesn't address economic impact aside from "I think we could gain a lot from cooperating with them to hunt fish"

re: 3) I'm not sure I see the relevance. The unnamed audience member saying "I say we keep giving them nootropics" is meant t... (read more)

Whaliezer Seacowsky, founder of the Marine Intelligence Research Institute, is giving a lecture on the dangers of AI (Ape Intelligence).

"Apes are becoming more intelligent at a faster rate than we are. At this pace, within a very short timeframe they will develop greater-than-whale intelligence. This will almost certainly have terrible consequences for all other life on the planet, including us."

Codney Brooks, a skeptic of AI x-risk, scoffs: "Oh come now. Predictions of risk from AI are vastly overblown. *Captain-Ahab, or, The Human* is a science fiction n... (read more)

I've been going back and forth on the spring/summer/fall/winter framing versus a q1/q2/q3/q4 framing. I like your observation about the symbolism of the seasons! It wasn't a deliberate choice, but it also wasn't a coincidence, because nothing is ever a coincidence

"How important is it for singalongs to sound polished, vs for them to feel like an organic part of the community? Is it appropriate to pay professional musicians?"

> Organic part of the community: incredibly important. Polished: of negative value. Paying professionals: I would prefer not.

This is the part I care the most about. If I wanted to hear professional musicians I would go to a concert. At this community holiday, I want to hear, and participate in, communal singing. I don't want to feel self conscious about not being a very good singer. I wa... (read more)

Here are my thoughts on your opening questions:

* "Is Solstice primarily a rationality holiday? An EA holiday? The broader secular community?"

Empirically and normatively, rationalist.

• "How essential is the journey from light, into darkness, into light?"
  
  Pretty darn important. As you ask at the end, I could see an occasional or one time "journey from light, into darkness, and that's it" story. It would make for a good "final episode" before the world ends. I'm reminded of the final episode of the sitcom Dinosaurs, where due to out of control technological chan

As someone who has very meager singing ability, I stumble over the transition from "today" to "although"

real life, I'd say: "Ok guys, let's sit in this room, everyone turn off their recording devices, and let's talk, with the agreement that what happens in this room stays in this room."

The one time I did this with rationalists, the person (Adam Widmer) who organized the event and explicitly set forth the rule you just described, then went on to remember what people had said and bring it up publicly later in order to shake them into changing their behavior to fit his (if you'll excuse me speaking ill of the dead) spoiled little rich boy desires.

So my advic

The in-person community seems much less skeptical of these things than the online community. Which isn't to say there are no skeptics, but (especially among the higher status members) it's kind of distressing to see how little skepticism there is about outright silly claims and models. At last year's CFAR reunion, for instance, there was a talk uncritically presenting chakras as a real thing, and when someone in the audience proposed doing an experiment to verify if they are real or it's a placebo effect, the presenter said (paraphrasing) "Hmm, no, let's n

https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/21/the-pnse-paper/

So, shouldn't all the rats who've been so into meditation etc for the past decade or so be kinda panicking at the apparent fact that enlightenment is just dunning-krugering yourself into not being able to notice your own incompetence?

My position is "chickens have non-zero moral value, and moral value is not linearly additive." That is, any additional chicken suffering is bad, any additional chicken having a pleasant life is good, and the total moral value of all chickens as the number of chickens approaches infinity is something like 1/3rd of a human

For anyone who does think that both 1) chickens have non-zero moral value, and 2) moral value is linearly additive, are you willing to bite the bullet that there exist a number of chickens such that it would be better to cause that many chickens to continue to exist at the expense of wiping out all other sentient life forever? This seems so obviously false and also so obviously the first thing to think of when considering 1 and 2 that I am confused there exist folks who accept 1 and 2

Replace "you" with "the hypothetical you who is attempting to convince hypothetical me they exist", then

>What is the mugging here?

I'm not sure what the other-galaxy-elephants mugging is, but my anti-Pascal's-mugging defenses are set to defend me against muggings I do not entirely understand. In real life, I think that the mugging is "and therefore it is immoral of you to eat chickens."

>Why are they "my elephants"?

You're the one who made them up and/or is claiming they exist.

When people consider it worse for a species to go from 1000 to 0 members, I think it's mostly due to aesthetic value (people value the existence of a species, independent of the individuals), and because of option value

Yes, these are among the reasons why moral value is not linearly additive. I agree.

People would probably also find it tragic for plants to go extinct (and do find languages going extinct tragic), despite these having no neurons at all.

Indeed, things other than neurons have value.

I personally reject this for animals, though, for t

My reply to all of those is "I do not believe you. This sounds like an attempt at something akin to Pascal's Mugging. I do not take your imaginary elephants into consideration for the same reason I do not apply moral weight to large numbers of fictional elephants in a novel."

Several of these questions are poorly phrased. For instance, the supernatural and god questions, as phrased, imply that the god chance should be less than the chance of supernatural anything existing. However, I think (and would like to be able to express) that there is a very small (0), chance of ghosts or wizards, but only a small (1) chance of there being some sort of intelligent being which created the universe-for instance, the simulation hypothesis, which I would consider a subset of the god hypothesis.

Interesting list. Minor typo: "This is where you get to study computing at it's most theoretical," the "it's" should read "its".

I have started a boardgame company whose first game is up on kickstarter at the moment. I'm going to bring the no-art, largely hand written copy that was made for playtesting.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sixpencegames/the-6p-card-game-of-victorian-combat

Working with an unnamed group of x-risk-cognizant people that LW hasn't heard of, in a way unrelated to their setting up a non-profit.

Could you tell us about them?

if the disutility of an air molecule slamming into your eye were 1 over Graham's number, enough air pressure to kill you would have negligible disutility.

Yes, this seems like a good argument that we can't add up disutility for things like "being bumped into by particle type X" linearly. In fact, it seems like having 1, or even (whatever large number I breathe in a day) molecules of air bumping into me is a good thing, and so we can't just talk about things like "the disutility of being bumped into by kinds of particles".

If your uti

That's true. But that's a reason to not investigate and not read this thread and not think about the subject at all, not a reason to reply in this thread that the idea is unlikely, much less to declare it unlikely.

If your reaction to reading about the truther idea is "the value of knowing the facts about this issue, whatever they are, is rather low, and it would be time consuming to learn them, so I don't care" that is A-OK. If your reaction is "the value of knowing the facts about this issue, whatever they are, is rather low, and it would b... (read more)

The explosives theory involves a conspiracy

So does the traditional explanation.

The explosives theory can be and is used to score political points

So is the traditional explanation. War in Iraq, anyone?

Explosive-theory advocates seem to prefer videos to text, which raises the time cost I have to pay to investigate it

This is a very silly reason to reject an idea.

I didn't downvote you,

Thanks! I upvoted you.

but what you're saying is essentially "if you accept our tribe is the most awesome and smartest, then it makes sense to donate to our tribal charity". Which is something every single group would say, in slight variation.

Well yeah; that's why you should examine the evidence and not just do what everyone else does. So let's look at the beliefs of all the Singularitarians on LW as evidence. What would we expect to see if LW is just an arbitrary tribe that picked a random cause to glom around? I susp... (read more)

So it's just an awfully convenient coincidence that the charity to donate to best display trial affiliations to lesswrong crowd, and the charity to donate to best save the world just happens to be the same one? What a one in a billion chance!

No, that's not it at all. If, as people here like to believe (and may or may not be true), the LWers are very rational and good at picking things that have very high expected value as things to start or donate to, then it makes sense that one of them (Eliezer) would create an organization that would have a very high... (read more)

Exercise: Improvisatory dance. In my opinion, improvising is more useful than specific styles of dance (salsa, swing, waltz). Most people do not dance specific dances in common social interactions unless the social event is based around that dance. If you are at a club, you can pop and lock, b-boy, robot, liquid&digits, krump, while everyone around you does something else. Also, it's easier and more obvious to be better at improvisatory dance than the people around you.

I have found that attempting to teach others to dance in literal language doesn't wo... (read more)

Suggested exercise: guess what time it is, then check a clock. Guess how long it's been since you last checked the clock, ie not only "it is 4:30" but also "it is 35 minutes since I last checked the time (at 3:55)"

And here I thought using this as a pain management technique only worked because I'm masochistic! It actually is genuinely fascinating to learn this is common to people who don't share that trait. Though, actually, come to think of it, you never explicitly said whether you do or not. If it's not prying, are you?

I noted with satisfaction that I believe that following my "sacred beliefs" is in contradiction with following "animal urges" like enjoying myself or morality

Could you expound upon this?

I'm not saying everyone wins equally, just that everybody wins.

I really hope that this is the case, but I don't think that it is. I think that the difference between the hypothetical socialist and libertarian are more dramatic than the difference between a Big-Ender and a Little-Ender. Consider this situation:

All of humanity consists of 100 people, starting at utility 10, and a random one of them is given this choice: either keep things the way they are (everyone has 10 utilons, total of 1000) or one person, at random, is given 990 utilons while everyo... (read more)

I agree it's annoying and probably a problem, but I think there's still less groupthink than on most forums I've seen. I do agree that it can definitely be frustrating; I have a post I want to write up on the value of starting things sooner rather than later, and I was all set to start typing it up back when I had 19 karma (you need 20 to make a full post), but then I started posting in this thread, and my karma score drifted back down to a single digit. It's doubly frustrating because I can't tell if people legitimately think my posts there are without me... (read more)

I just remembered the obvious point that I had been forgettig this whole time. Your position seems to me to be basically the position the article we're both commenting on is directly arguing is a silly, untenable one to take.

There is a problem with arguments of the form, "The leader of that group clearly doesn't 'really' believe his own rhetoric he's just saying that because it resonates with his followers." This implies that their followers actually believe that stuff, otherwise there would be no point in the leaders' saying it. But you've just admitted that there exist people who really believe that stuff, why is it so absurd for the leader to be one of those people?

My mistake, wedrifid is correct, I turned my thought into a sentence poorly.

You're still self-a

Yes, definitely. I meant it that way, but what I actually wrote down is different, I'll correct it. Thanks for saying this.

I've been having some sort of half-formed thoughts recently that this has brought back into my foreground that I'm curious to see other people's thoughts on.

It seems to me that the likelihood is quite high that there are people on here who have inherently competing utility functions (these examples were chosen merely because they are fairly common, directly competing, not obviously insane sets of motivations. I intend no value judgment on either of them). Thus, making one of the people whose utility function is dramatically different from yours more ration... (read more)

No, not the only one, but if one were to ask them why they picked the targets they did, they'd describe it religious terms (talking about infidels, jihad and the great Satan) not in Marxist terms (i.e., economic oppression).

Just as an aside, "economic oppression" isn't a uniquely Marxist term, nor am I even aware of a specific Marxist definition of it. Are you thinking of "economic exploitation", perhaps? The latter means the difference between the amount of wealth generated by labour and the amount that labourer is paid.

I am pretty... (read more)

"Our word" is the map, not the territory.

In the realm of social interaction, the territory you're navigating is made up of other people's maps.

However, that also includes members of said minorities who belive that from their merely being members of such groups they have rights or sensibilities others don't. They don't.

I'm not sure what you mean here. They do have extra sensibilities, in the sense that they're sensitive to things others aren't: you aren't hurt (or at least, not in the same way) by the words "nigger" or "queer... (read more)

Unfortunately, much like on Reddit, I think that a lot of people (myself included, though I am working to correct this) treat the up/down buttons as though they were agree/disagree buttons

I will parenthetically emphasize that every single useful mental technique I have ever developed over the course of my entire life has been developed in the course of trying to accomplish some particular real task and none of it is the result of me sitting around and thinking, "Hm, however shall I Improve Myself today?" I should advise a mindset in which making tremendous progress on fixing yourself doesn't merit much congratulation and only particular deeds actually accomplished are praised; and also that you always have some thing you're tryi

I'd think the hijackers would refer to them as infidels.

Do you really, truly think that the only motivations in choosing to do an attack against America (heck, picking America as the target in the first place) and picking the WTC and Pentagon as the targets of that attack, was because the attackers were Muslim while the ones being attacked were not? If so, why have they not done similarly to all non-Muslim nations? Why not attack symbols or places of power of religion, rather than economics and the military?

Certainly religion is used as a framing device... (read more)

My impression was that (around New England at least!) "queer" has been pretty thoroughly stripped of negative connotations. I'm sure things are different elsewhere.

Having never lived in New England I cannot comment from personal experience, and furthermore if I do live there in the future I'll be bringing my own emotional baggage with me, so I won't be able to judge even then. That said, I am very incredulous of this.

May I take a guess as to the social groups I suspect you've encountered this in? I guess that they are primarily white, male, o... (read more)

Sorry for responding so late, but do you really think that this thought:

"My people are being oppressed, primarily economically. I can see that it is mostly Americans doing this. Peaceful protest tends to get me shot at. Clearly these Americans consider their profits more important than my and my people's lives; their actions are causing our suffering and deaths, they are aware of this, yet they continue to do so. Therefore, they are deliberately killing and ravaging my people, and so it is justified for me to kill them. Also, doing so may cause them t... (read more)

Goshdarnit, I had you upvoted until you pulled the "our word" thing. That really irks me

Haha, the ironing is delicious. I was throwing that in there not because I typically find it offensive, but to draw attention to yet another detail that was perhaps overlooked. Not that Yvain did so, but since the topic is things that offend people, I thought it worth bringing up.

Hey, I'm bisexual. Suppose I declare that it's okay with me if Yvain uses the word "queer" to describe people who identify as queer. Then is it okay? I mean, it's my wo

insofar as they want to be nice to me, gay people should avoid PDAs around me when it's not too inconvenient for them

It seems to me that encouraging this sort of behavior has many, much larger consequences that you either aren't thinking of or are deliberately omitting. Consider, for example, the closeted classmate of the gay couple, who knows that they are gay and takes a bit of strength from seeing them express their love publicly--it gives him hope that one day he can do the same. Upon the gay couple taking your advice, however, he sees that even peo... (read more)

So I can raise the status of my group by becoming a frequent complainer and encouraging my fellows to do likewise?

Sure. See, for example, the rise in prominence of the Gnu Atheists (of which I am one).

Shazbot. Some experimentation is called for. I recently did something similar but not quite as impressive on a freshly waxed(?) floor, and it worked fairly well with no noise.

Certainly. What is it? Also, more importantly, what is the optimal amount of moisture that produces minimum squeaking?

Are you saying more moisture causes sound, or less?

Some Dude, since when is war profitable?

Since there existed private military contractors, or before that, since there existed spoils of war?

One difference stands out: the 9/11 attacks included attacks on two large buildings packed with thousands of innocent civilians, with no obvious connection to any military installation

The 9/11 hijackers would no doubt not refer to the inhabitants of the World Trade Center as innocent civilians, but as economic oppressors. There is a reason they targeted both the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, after all.

I'm doing both. I was in a performance last week, my part was an improv. It was me, two other dancers, and three musicians: a guy on sax, a guy on xylophone, and a gal on the piano. All six of us were improvising, taking turns leading, following, &c. It was pretty cool.