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All of Bitnotri's Comments + Replies

So how well is Claude playing Pokémon?
Bitnotri23

It would be so awesome to have such a stream as additional reference point - just one six year old without internet and external help doing a Pokemon run 

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The Paris AI Anti-Safety Summit
Bitnotri17-10

I have been saving money until now because of the potential job automation impact first and the rising value of investments once AI really takes off but at this point it just seems better to start burning cash instead on personal holidays/consumption and enjoying the time until the short end (3-5 years). Do you guys think it is too early to say?

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4Myron Hedderson
I think it depends how much of a sacrifice you are making by saving. If your life is materially very much worse today than it could be, because you're hoping for a payoff 10 or 20+ years hence, I'd say probably save less, but not 0. But money has sharply decreasing marginal utility once your basic needs are met, and I can picture myself blowing all of my savings on a year-long party, and then going "well actually that wasn't that much fun and my health is much worse and I have no savings, I regret this decision". On the other hand, I can picture myself deciding to go on a nice holiday for a few weeks this year rather than in a few years, which yes would impact my savings rate but not by that much (it would be a lot compounded over 30 years at standard rates of return between 5-10% per year, but not a lot in the near term), and 5 years hence going "well I half expected to be dead by now, and the economy is exploding such that I am now a billionaire on paper, and if I hadn't taken that holiday that cost me a single digit number of thousands of dollars, and had invested it instead, I'd have another $50 million... but I don't regret that decision, I'm a billionaire and an additional 50 million doesn't make a difference". Third scenario: The nanobots or whatever are clearly about to kill me within a very short time frame - in my last short span of time before death, what decision will I wish I had made? I'm really not sure, and I think future-me would look back at me today and go "you did the best you knew how with the information you had" regardless of what decision I make. Probably future me will not be going either "I wish I had been more hedonistic" or "I wish I had been less hedonistic". Probably his wish will be "I wish it hadn't come to this and I had more time to live." And if I spend a chunk of my time trying to increase the chance that things go well, rather than doing a hedonism, I bet future-me will be pleased with that decision, even if my ability to affect
6orthonormal
Over the past three years, as my timelines have shortened and my hopes for alignment or coordination have dwindled, I've switched over to consumption. I just make sure to keep a long runway, so that I could pivot if AGI progress is somehow halted or sputters out on its own or something.
7Noosphere89
Yes, it is too early, and a big reason for this is unless you have very good timing skills, you might bankrupt your own influence over the situation, and most importantly for the purposes of influence, you will probably need large amounts of capital very fast.
3AnthonyC
We're not dead yet. Failure is not certain, even when the quest stands upon the edge of a knife. We can still make plans, and keep on refining and trying to implement them. And a lot can happen in 3-5 years. There could be a terrible-but-not-catastrophic or catastrophic-but-not-existential disaster bad enough to cut through a lot of problem. Specific world leaders could die or resign or get voted out and replaced with someone who is either actually competent, or else committed to overturning their predecessor's legacy, or something else. We could be lucky and end up with an AGI that's aligned enough to help us avert the worst outcomes. Heck, there could be observers from a billion-year-old  alien civilization stealthily watching from the asteroid belt and willing to intervene to prevent extinction events.  Do I think those examples are likely? No. Is the complete set of unlikely paths to good outcomes collectively unlikely enough to stop caring about the long term future? Also no. And who knows? Maybe the horse will sing.
3simple_name
This is indeed how I've been living my life lately. I'm trying to avoid any unacceptable states like ending up in debt or without the ability to sustain myself if I'm wrong about everything but it's all short-term hedonism aside from that.
teradimich2317

Most experts do not believe that we are certainly (>80%) doomed. It would be an overreaction to give up after the news that politicians and CEO are behaving like politicians and CEO.

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3winstonBosan
I think this is a rather legitimate question to ask - I often dream about retiring to an island for the last few months of my life, hangout with friends and reading my books. And then look to the setting sun until my carbon and silicon are repurposed atom by atom.  However, that is just a dream. I suspect the moral of the story is often at the end: "Don’t panic. Don’t despair. And don’t give up."
AI #88: Thanks for the Memos
Bitnotri20

OpenAI advanced voice mode available in the EU. I still haven’t found any reason to actually use voice mode, and I don’t feel I understand why people like the modality, even if the implementation is good. You can’t craft good prompts with audio.

 

I agree that I find it totally uninteresting and "weak" in English, in a sense that I prefer prompting in text for precision and responses. It is very good for learning languages though, along with Gemini Live mode - it works excellent for comprehensible input, voice practice and general smalltalk in a new lan... (read more)

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"Flinching away from truth” is often about *protecting* the epistemology
Bitnotri20

In the spirit of Epistemic Effort could you tell us how long it took you to form these ideas and to write this post?

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Crisis of Faith
Bitnotri00

It seems to me that in our civilisation we have a quite nice way of dealing with deficiency of faith's crises - assuming the narrative of epistemological societal progress the people with poor epistemic hygiene, along with a smaller mix of those with a better one die off and a new generation is generally more able to look at the issues with a fresh set of eyes.

Not sure however how true it is that accurate memes tend to live and propagate - there are quite a few cases that are still disputed despite being settled for hundreds of years, although I may be looking at not big enough time frame here.

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Lesswrong 2016 Survey
Bitnotri400

I have taken the survey.

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Rationality Quotes Thread February 2016
Bitnotri90

“It is wise to take admissions of uncertainty seriously,” Daniel Kahneman noted, “but declarations of high confidence mainly tell you that an individual has constructed a coherent story in his mind, not necessarily that the story is true.”

Superforcasting, p. 85

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0DanArmak
I'm not sure what this is saying. Should we assume people are overconfident? Always, or only when they claim high confidence? Should we just ignore people's confidence claims entirely?
0Brillyant
I love this quote. But this... ...strikes me as a highly confident declaration for which the quoted is simultaneously urging me to be skeptical. I'd imagine the book lays out his case as to why I ought listen to his counsel. I'd be interested to dig into this.
0Zubon
There is some small number of people whom I trust when they say they very confident. They can explain the reasons why they came to a belief and the counterarguments. Most other highly confident statements I look upon with suspicion, and I might even take the confidence as evidence against the claim. Many very confident people seem unaware of counterarguments, are entirely dismissive of them, or wear as a badge of pride that they have explicitly refused to consider them. There are others whose intuition I will trust with high confidence on certain topics, significantly because they are aware that they are exercising intuition. They may not know how they know something, but at least they know they don't know how they know it, which tends to get them to the right confidence level.