Because, based on the behavior of people here whose intelligence and ideas I have come to respect, this is an important topic.
Clearly I completely lack the background to understand the full theoretical argument. I also lack the background to understand the full theoretical argument behind general relatively and quantum uncertainty. Yet there are many real-world practical examples that I do understand and can work backwards from to get a roughly correct intuition about these ideas.
Every example I have seen for CDT falling short has been a hypothetical scena...
Thank you for responding to my post despite its negative rating.
Can you, as a human, give any practical real-world examples that do not rely on non-existent tech where anything outperforms non-naive CDT?
By non-naive I mean CDT that isn't myopically just trying to maximize the immediate payoff but rather trying to maximize the long term value to the player into account future interactions, reputation, uncertainty about causal relationships, etc.
In other words, what Putin has already been doing more and more, but with a specific deadline attached?
Perhaps we should brainstorm leading indicators of nuclear attack.
I always found that aspect weak. It is clearly and sadly evident that utility pessimization (I assume roughly synonymous with coercion?) is effective and stable, both on Golarion and Earth. Yet half the book seems to be gesturing at what a suboptimal strategy it is without actually spelling out how you can defeat an agent who pursues such a strategy (without having magic and some sort of mysterious meta-gods on your side).
Update:
I went and read the background material on acausal trade and narrowed even further where it is I'm confused. It's this paragraph:
> Another objection: Can an agent care about (have a utility function that takes into account) entities with which it can never interact, and about whose existence it is not certain? However, this is quite common even for humans today. We care about the suffering of other people in faraway lands about whom we know next to nothing. We are even disturbed by the suffering of long-dead historical people, and wish that, coun...
Acausally separate civilizations should obtain our consent in some fashion before invading our local causal environment with copies of themselves or other memes or artifacts.
Aha! Finally, there it is, a statement that exemplifies much of what I find confusing about acausal decision theory.
1. What are acausally separate civilizations? Are these civilizations we cannot directly talk to and so we model their utility functions and their modelling of our utility functions etc. and treat that as a proxy for interviewing them?
2. Are these civilizations we haven't...
What is meant by 'reflecting'?
- reflecting on {reflecting on whether to obey norm x, and if that checks out, obeying norm x} and if that checks out, obeying norm x
Is this the same thing as saying "Before I think about whether to obey norm x, I will think about whether it's worth thinking about it and if both are true, I will obey norm x"?
I've been struggling to understand acausal trade and related concepts for a long time. Thank you for a concise and simple explanation that almost gets me there, I think...
Am I roughly correctly in the following interpretation of what I think you are saying?
Acausal norms amount to extrapolating the norms of people/aliens/AIs/whatever whom we haven't met yet and know nothing about other than what can be inferred from us someday meeting them. If we can identify norms that are likely to generalize to any intelligent being capable of contact and negotiation and...
Would you mind sharing how you allocated the ratio of these positions?
Maybe the key is not to assume the entire economy will win, but make some attempt to distinguish winners from losers and then find ETFs and other instruments that approximate these sectors.
So, some wild guesses...
I'm trying out this strategy on Investopedia's simulator (https://www.investopedia.com/simulator/trade/options)
The January 15 2027 call options on QQQ look like this as of posting (current price 481.48):
Strike | Black-Scholes | Ask |
---|---|---|
485 | 64.244 | 77.4 |
500 | 57.796 | 69.83 |
... | ... | ... |
675 | 14.308 | 14 |
680 | 13.693 | 13.5 |
685 | 13.077 | 12.49 |
... | ... | ... |
700 | 11.446 | 10.5 |
... | ... | ... |
720 | 9.702 | 8.5 |
So, if you were following this strategy and buying today, would you buy 485 because it has the lowest OOM strike price? Would you buy 675 because it's the lowe...
So, how can we improve this further?
Some things I'm going to look into, please tell me if it's a waste of time:
A risk I see is China blockading Taiwan and/or limiting trade with the US and thus slowing AI development until a new equilibrium is reached through onshoring (and maybe recycling or novel sources of materials or something?)
On the other hand maybe even the current LLMs already have the potential to eliminate millions of jobs and it's just going to take companies a while to do the planning and integration work necessarily to actually do it.
So one question is, will the resulting increase in revenue offset the revenue losses from a proxy war with China?
I guess scenarios where humans occupy a niche analogous to animals that we don't value but either cannot exterminate or choose not to.
Parfitt's Hitchhiker and transparent Newcomb: So is the interest in UDT motivated by the desire for a rigorous theory that explains human moral intuitions? Like, it's not enough that feelings of reciprocity must have conveyed a selective advantage at the population level, we need to know whether/how they also are net beneficial to the individuals involved?
What should one do if in a Newcomb's paradox situation but Omega is just a regular dude who thinks they can predict what you will choose, by analysing data from thousands of experiments on e.g. Mechanical Turk?
Do UDT and CDT differ in this case? If they differ then does it depend on how inaccurate Omega's predictions are and in what direction they are biased?
Thank you for answering.
I'm excluding simulations by construction.
Amnesia: So does UDT roughly-speking direct you to weigh your decisions based on your guesstimate of what decision-relevant facts apply in that scenario? And then choose among available options randomly but weighted by how likely each option is to be optimal in whatever scenario you have actually found yourself in?
Identical copies, (non-identical but very similar players?), players with aligned interests,: I guess this is a special case of dealing with a predictor agent where our predictions...
Are there any practical applications of UDT that don't depend on uncertainty as to whether or not I am a simulation, nor on stipulating that one of the participants in a scenario is capable of predicting my decisions with perfect accuracy?
I appreciate your feedback and take it in the spirit it is intended. You are in no danger of shitting on my idea because it's not my idea. It's happening with or without me.
My idea is to cast a broad net looking for strategies for harm reduction and risk mitigation within these constraints.
I'm with you that machines practising medicine autonomously is an bad idea, as do doctors. Because, idealistically, they got into this work in order to help people, and cynically, they don't want to be rendered redundant.
The primary focus looks like workflow management, ...
Definition please.
VNM
The first step is to see a psychiatrist and take the medication they recommend. For me it was an immediate night-and-day difference. I don't know why the hell I wasted so much of my life before I finally went and got treatment. Don't repeat my mistake.
I actually tried running your essay through ChatGPT to make it more readable but it's way too long. Can you at least break it into non-redundant sections not more than 3000 words each? Then we can do the rest.
I second that. I actually tried to read your other posts because I was curious to find out why you are getting downvoted-- maybe I can learn something outside the LW party-line from you.
But unfortunately, you don't explain your position in clear, easy to understand terms so I'm going to have to put off sorting through your stuff until I have more time.
I meant prepping metaphorically, in the see of being willing to delve into the specifics of a scenario most other people would dismiss as unwinnable. The reason I posted this is that though it's obvious that the bunker approach isn't really the right one, I'm drawing a blank for what the right approach would even look like.
That being said, I figured into class of scenario might look identical to nuclear or biological war, only facilitated by AI. Are you saying scenarios where many but not all people die due to political/economic/environmental consequences ...
It's ironic that you're so excited about autonomous weapons but the first video you posted is a dramatic depiction created by a YouTube account called "Stop Autonomous Weapons".
I think the idea of this video was to scare the public by how powerful, precise, and possibly opaque these weapons are.
But I agree with you-- ethical or not, groups that limit their use of these weapons will be at a disadvantage against groups that do not. That's a microcosm of the whole AI regulatory problem right there.
I'm sad to see him go. I don't know enough about LWs history and have too little experience with forum moderation to agree or disagree with your decision. Though LW had been around for a very long time without imploding so that's evidence you guys know what you're doing.
Please don't take down his post though. I believe somewhere in there is a good faith opinion at odds with my own. I want to read and understand it. Just not ready for this much reading tonight.
I wish I could write so prolifically! Or maybe it's a curse rather than a blessing because then it becomes an obstacle to people understanding your point of view.
Are there any links we can read about non-appeasing de-escalation strategies?
Either theoretical ones or ones that have been tried in the past are fine.
There have been "Nuclear first-use and threats or advocacy thereof" and those are easy to condemn. But as far as I know they are coming unilaterally from the Russian side and already being widely condemned by those not on the Russian side. But it sounds like you are looking for some broader consensus to condemn escalation on both sides.
Unfortunately neither this post nor the open letter you linked give any specifics about what other behaviours you are asking us to condemn. I'm reluctant to risk endorsing a false-equivalence argument by signing a blank chec...
The EU approach to getting Ukraine to protect the rights of minorities seems more... sustainable... than Russia's approach, so I propose a different compromise:
How about Russia withdraw all its troops back to the 2014 borders and we all give the slow, non-violent path a chance to work.
I'm not equating the West and Anti-West in terms of power. I agree that the Anti-West is much weaker. That doesn't mean it's incapable of becoming a threat in the future.
Furthermore, it's up to the Ukrainian people to confront their dark past. Not Russians to do it for them.
Just like it's up to Americans to confront and atone for America's history of slavery. Not some neighbouring country to roll in with tanks and turn our historical/cultural/political problem into a military one.
This is basically a false equivalence "there are good/bad people on both sides" type of argument.
If some other country sent troops inside Russia's borders and held a referendum for whether or not the regions they occupied want to be annexed, I would consider Russia to be the victim no matter how screwed up its internal politics are. Furthermore, such a referendum would not be legitimate no matter how honestly executed it is because the presence of foreign troops and displacement of civilians already hopelessly biases the outcome.
For the same re...
A decisively defeated Russia will have fewer resources with which to coerce him. And if he's smart and keeps his powder dry like he has, he will have more resources with which to resist.
And if he gets overthrown in a color revolution, the Belarussians have not yet gotten so much blood on their hands as to preclude support from the West.
So I support a ceasefire and I oppose sponsorship of insurgency in Russia. But my opinions don't count.
You opinions count, though most of us disagree with you. Thus, the replies.
Let's suppose that supporting Ukraine does further empower 'our globe-spanning military-industrial complex'. But failing to support Ukraine empower the rival globe-spanning military-industrial complex that in addition to Russia includes Iran, Syria, and China.
A ceasefire that results in Russia keeping more Ukrainian land than it started will empower this rival military-indust...
I wonder what the feasibility is for a group of LW-ers somehow putting on retainer a charter flight to NZ?
How would a nuclear test demonstrate that Putin is not bluffing?
It only demonstrates that he has nukes, which we already know.
I'm also biting the bullet and saying that this is probably what we should aim for, barring pivotal acts because I see AGI development as mostly inevitable, and there are far worse outcomes than this.
Dead is dead, whether due to AGI or due to a sufficient percentage of smart people convincing themselves that destructive uploading is good enough and continuity is a philosophical question that doesn't matter.
Now, if synchronizing minds is possible, it would address this problem.
But I don't see nearly as much attention being put into that as into uploading. Why?
A copy of you ceases to exist and then another copy comes into existence with the exact same sense of memories/continuity of self etc. That's like going to sleep and waking up.
Even when it becomes possible to do this at sufficient resolution, I see no reason it won't be like going to sleep and never waking up.
It's not as if there is a soul to transfer or share between the two instances. No way to sync the experiences of the two instances.
So I don't see a fundamental difference between "You go to sleep and an uploaded you wakes up" vs "You go to sleep and a...
What I like about this story is that it makes more accessible the (to me) obvious fact that, in the absence of technology to synchronize/reintegrate memories from parallel instances, uploading does not solve any problems for you-- it at best spawns a new instance of you that doesn't have those problems, but you still do.
Yet uploading is so much easier than fixing death/illness/scarcity in the physical world that people want to believe it's the holy grail. And may resist evidence to the contrary.
Destructive uploads are murder and/or suicide.
Are there any specific examples of anybody working on AI tools that autonomously look for new domains to optimize over?
Now we know more than nothing about the real-world operational details of AI risks. Albeit mostly banal everyday AI that we can't imagine harming us at scale. So maybe that's what we should try harder to imagine and prevent.
Maybe these solutions will not generalize out of this real-world already-observed AI risk distribution. But even if not, which of these is more dignified?
The closest I can come to examples might be ones where the two-box outcome is so much worse then the one-box outcome that I have nothing to lose by choosing the path of hope.
E.g. picking one box even though I and everybody else knows I'm a two-boxer if I believe that in this case two-boxing will kill me
Or, cooperating when both unilateral defection, unilateral cooperation, and mutual defection have results vastly worse than mutual cooperation.
Are these on the right track?