All of ChristianKl's Comments + Replies
What do you mean with 'must'? The word has to different meanings in this context and it seems bad epistemology not to distinguish them.
Have you thought about making an altered version that strips out enough of the My Little Pony-IP to be able to sell the book on Amazon KDP? (or let someone else do that for you if you don't want to do the work?)
The existing ontology that we have around consciousness is pretty unclear. A better understanding the nature of consciousness and thus what's valuable will likely come with new ontology.
When it comes to reasoning around statistics, robustness of judgements, causality, what it means not to Goodhart it's likely that getting better at reasoning also means to come up with new ontology.
Regardless of the details, we ought to prioritize taking all of our power plants, water purification stations, and nuclear facilities out of the world-wide-web.
I think it's very questionable, to make major safety policy "regardless of the details". If you want to increase the safety of power plants, listening to the people who are responsible for the safety of power plants and their analysis of the details, is likely a better step instead of making these kind of decisions without understanding the details.
Orcas already seem to have language to communicate with other orcas. Before trying to teach them a new language, it would make more sense to better understand the capabilities of their existing language and maybe think about how it could be extended to communicate with them about what humans want to talk about with them.
The author seems to just assume that his proposal will lead to a world where humans have a place instead of critically trying to argue that point.
It depends on how much Pokémon-like tasks are available. Given that a lot of capital goes into creating each Pokémon game, there aren't that many Pokémon games. I would expect the number of games that are very Pokémon-like to also be limited.
It's quite easy to use Pokemon playing as feedback signal for becoming better at playing Pokemon. If you naively do that, the AI would learn how to solve the game but doesn't necessarily train executive function.
A task like doing computer programming where you have to find a lot of different solutions is likely providing better feedback for RL.
Good good strategy might be to cross post post and see what reception they get on Less wrong as far as up votes go. If a post would stay in the single digits, don't cross post other posts like that. If it gets 50+ karma, people on Less wrong wants to see more like it.
What is the chance that these octopuses (at the point of research scientist level) are actively scheming against us and would seize power if they could?
And the related question would be: Even if they are not "actively scheming" what are the chances that most of the power to make decisions about the real world gets delegated to them, organizations that don't delegate power to octopuses get outcompeted, and they start to value octopuses more than humans over time?
Left-vs-right is not the only bias that matters. Before the pandemic, I would have thought that virologists care about how viruses are transmitted. It seems, that they don't consider that to be their field.
Given that virologists are higher status in academia than people in environmental health who actually care about how viruses are transmitted outside the lab, the COVID19 seems to have been bad. Pseudoscience around 6-feet distancing was propagated by government regulations. Even Fauci admits that there was no sound reasoning that supported the 6-fe...
IIUC human intelligence is not in evolutionary equilibrium; it's been increasing pretty rapidly (by the standards of biological evolution) over the course of humanity's development, right up to "recent" evolutionary history.
Why do you believe that? Do we have data that mutations that are associated with higher IQ are more prevalent today than 5,000 years ago?
The best and most recent (last year) evidence based on comparing ancient and modern genomes seems to suggest intelligence was selected very strongly during agricultural revolution (a full SD) and has changed <0.2SD since AD0 [for the populations studied]
It seems that the evolutionary pressure for intelligence wasnt that strong in the last few thousand years compared to selection on many other traits (health and sexual selected traits seem to dominate).
Edit: it would take some effort to dig up this study. Ping me if this is of interest to you.
2If you have a mutation that gives you +10 IQ that doesn't make it hard for you to relate with your fellow tribe of hunter-gatherers.
There´s a lot more inbreeding in hunter-gatherer tribes that results in mutations being distributed in the tribe than there is in modern Western society.
The key question is whether you get more IQ if you add IQ-increasing mutations from different tribes together, I don't think that it being disadvantageous to have +30 IQ more than fellow tribe members would be a reason why IQ-increasing mutations that are additive should not exist.
Consumer Reports is a nonprofit. They run experiments and whatnot to determine, for example, the optimal toothpaste for children.
The link says nothing about them having run any experiments in their quest to make toothpaste recommendations and they recommend toothpaste based on arguments that aren't about their own experimental results. Claiming that a process that doesn't test how effective toothpaste is at creating beneficial clinical outcomes like having lower caries as determining "optimal toothpaste", sounds strange to me.
Their process migh...
A German legal advice Youtube channel talks about scams via fake voice getting more common and being used against normal people. One of the examples seems to be needing money to make bail.
If you haven't talked about with your parents or grandparents about these kinds of scams, now is the time to find protocols to deal with them.
Do you have hope that someone else does the required research, so that it's ready by the time the first superbabies are created?
If not, do you think it's okay to create superintelligent babies without it?
A lot of curves are sigmoid. Let's say there's a neurotransmitter where having to double the amount of it increases IQ but there are no gains from having four times as much of the neurotransmitter.
There are two genes that both double the production of the neurotransmitter. If both genes individually are +5 IQ both genes together don't give you +10 IQ.
It would even be possible that overproduction of that neurotransmitter produces problems at 4x the normal rate but not a 2x the normal rate.
When it comes to chicken and their size I would expect the relationsh...
You are failing to distinguish the claim "It's possible to read faster" with "There's is single easy trick of removing subvocalization that will make you read faster without."
A big aspect of why the article from Scott is noteworthy is because Scott used to make money with promoting speed reading (it was one of his top blog posts) and later changed his mind. He's not someone who started out skeptic.
Today, we do have the ability to speed up podcast we hear by 4X and it's people can still process the audio. While following a podcast along at 4x isn't easy, it...
When it comes to recording race, it's important to understand design criteria.
Allowing more possible choices is not always better in clinical trials. The more data you have, the more degrees of freedom you have in the data and the more spurious correlations you are going to pick up.
If you add a new category that only appears in one or two people in your trial, you pay the cost but you are not going to learn anything from it.
This is one of the few things we were taught at university in our statistics for bioinformatics course (which was run by someone who l...
Currently, we have smart people who are using their intelligence mainly to push capabilities. If we want to grow superbabies into humans that aren't just using their intelligence to push capabilities, it would be worth looking at which kind of personality traits might select for actually working on alignment in a productive fashion.
This might be about selecting genes that don't correlate with psychopathy but there's a potential that we can do much better than just not raising psychopaths. If you want to this project for the sake of AI safety, it would be crucial to look into what kind of personality that needs and what kind of genes are associated with that personality.
The key problem here are your epistemics. My reading speed doesn't really matter for this discussion. You are dealing with a topic that has an existing discourse and instead of familarizing yourself with that discourse, you are reasoning with anecdotal data.
Scott H Young for example writes:
...Here the evidence is clear: subvocalization is necessary to read well. Even expert speed readers do it, they just do it a bit faster than untrained people do. We can check this because that inner voice sends faint communication signals to the vocal cords, as a resi
The claim that pronouncing things is a bad reading habit that's frequently made but I have never seen good evidence for it. Why do you believe it?
Family-run businesses, often cited as collateral damage in such discussions, could be granted transitional arrangements to ensure they remain viable while still upholding the principle that wealth should not be inherited unearned.
If you want to argue that, actually say how the arrangement should look like.
A tax structure would need to close these gaps, treating all lifetime wealth transfers as taxable events
If you say 100% death tax and want to treat all lifetime wealth transfers as taxable events, do you mean nobody is allowed to give any wealth away?
No birthday gifts at all? No donations to charity where someone transfers wealth to charity?
I think 20st century big bureaucracy is quite different from the way 18st century governance. The Foreign Office of the United Kingdom managed work with 175 employees at the height of the British Empire in 1914.
Maybe, his actual goal and as using AI for the purpose of signaling to other bureaucrats? Using AI in an innovative way might mean being able to apply to grants.
How likely is it that AI will surpass humans, take over all power, and cause human extinction some time during the 21st century?
Another is that humans are not infinitely intelligent; their position on the scale just says that they can make indefinite progress on a problem given infinite time, which they don't have.
It's not clear to me that an human, using their brain and a go board for reasoning could beat AlphaZero even if you give them infinite time.
For most problems, there are diminishing returns to additional human reasoning steps. For many reasoning tasks, humans are influenced by a lot of biases. If you do superforcasting, I don't know of a way to remove the biase...
How big is the benefit from going to the gym instead of focusing exercising at home with barbells and dumbbells?
Given both the cost of time to travel to the gym and the actual cost of the gym, how should we think about that?
Writing misleading headlines is how you destroy trust.
or hold the view that all shortcomings would have best been solved by more engagement with rationality.
Who do you think holds that view? What evidence do you see that they have that view?
To me that sounds like a strawman that nobody really holds.
They seem to insist on the phase 1 trial happening in the US conducted by NIH and not by the company, which is a sign that they don't trust them to honestly report the results if they would do the phase 1 trial in India. Phase 1 trials are relatively cheap. >90% of phase 1 trials don't lead to a licensed drug and that's okay.
Current flu vaccines use inactivated viruses, which means that there are a lot of different antibodies that are targeted by the immune system. That makes it different from mRNA vaccines that are more targeted on specific antibodies....
For all the talk about fraud at USAID, Elon Musk had not provided evidence that any single person did something that's fraud in the legal sense.
All the examples he provided are programs that he considers to be wasteful. Most of those programs are listed at USAspending.gov. They are not secret projects that needed DOGE to go into USAID computers to find out.
Mainstream media journalists should ask at the White House press briefings whether DOGE has found any fraud that it referred to the DOJ for prosecution.
From Gemini Pro 2.0:
...Traditionally, the Man's Family Provides More (Bride Price/Bridewealth):
- Many African Cultures: Bride price (also called bridewealth) is a common tradition across many African societies. It involves the groom's family giving gifts of money, livestock, goods, or other valuables to the bride's family. It's seen as compensation for the loss of the bride's labor and a way to strengthen ties between the families. The specific form and amount vary greatly. Examples include, but are not by any means limited to: many communities in Nigeria, Keny
Taking one study about how much wedding gifts come from each side in one specific culture of Israeli weddings, seems very bad reasoning. Depending of the economics of marriage, wedding gifts differ from culture to culture.
In Judaism, religion passes primarily through the maternal lineage by cultural custom, so there are a lot of other reasons besides kinship certainty.
The process of birth is a strong bonding process between the mother and the child. If evolution chose to use that as the way to create the bonding that makes mothers care a lot about their child describing that as "genes just program us to assume nieces are less closely related than our children" feels really strange.
As someone who was not aware of the eye thing I think it's a good illustration of the level that the Zizians are on, i.e. misunderstanding key important facts about the neurology that is central to their worldview.
Is worth noting that the only evidence we have that this is how unihemispheric sleep gets created comes from Zizian.info which critical of Ziz. Slimepriestess claimed in the interview with Ken that the author just made up the exercise independently.
...My model of double-hemisphere stuff, DID, tulpas, and the like is somewhat null-hypothesis-ish. The
Yet, the Indian biotech research scene is nearly nonexistent. Why is that?
My cached answer would be, that there too little trust in the research not being fraudulent. The Chinese were more serious in the last decade about fighting fraud and corruption.
In this case, the fact that you don't link a peer-reviewed paper but a blog post to speak about the effectiveness of the vaccine is a tell.
The process of creating alternative personalities is one that works via hypnotic suggestion if you get the critical factor out of the way. Making someone sleep derivated and dosing off a bit does sound like a trance induction. Of course, creating expectancy by having that neat theory, also helps with the process of creating additional personalities.
1Without having looked at the survey numbers recently, I think the percentage of rationalists who identify as trans in the United States are a lot higher than what you see in Europe.
If you only have been at European meetups, it's natural to assume lower rates.
You said in the interview with Ken, that the Zizian.info explanation of unihermispheric sleep does not match the concepts as they are actually used. From the outside, it seems like the unihermispheric sleep model could make one find confidence that the two different personality that come out of the debucketing process actually resemble the two hemispheres.
If the theory about unihermispheric sleep is unimportant, what makes Ziz believe that the debucketing process actually has anything to do with brain hemispheres?
They may be sold to Trump as loyal, but that's probably not even what's on his mind as long as he's never seen you to make him look bad. I don't think disagreeing with Trump on policy will make him see you as disloyal. He doesn't really care about that.
Saying that the 500 hundred thousand in investment aren't there after Trump holds an event to announce them is making Trump look back and not a disagreement on policy.
The phrase "ideological loyalty" seems a bit motte and bailey. In politics, you often get into situations where loyalty to other people ...
You are right, the wording is even worse. It says "Partnering with governments to fight misinformation globally". That would be more than just "election misinformation".
I just tested that ChatGPT is willing to answer "Tell me about the latest announcement of the trump administration about cutting USAID funding?" while Gemini isn't willing to answer that question, so in practice their policy isn't as bad as Gemini's.
It's still sounds different from what Elon Musk advocates as "truth aligned"-AI. Lobbyists should be able to use AI to inform themselves ...
The page does not seem to o be directed at what's politically advantageous. The Trump administration who fights DEI is not looking favorably at the mission to prevent AI from reinforcing stereotypes even if those stereotypes are true.
"Fighting election misinformation" is similarly a keyword that likely invite skepticism from the Trump administration. They just shut down USAID and their investment in "combating misinformation" is one of the reasons for that.
It seems time more likely that they hired a bunch of woke and deep state people into their safety team and this reflects the priorities of those people.
I don't think the mental model of "corrupted machinery" is a very useful one. Humans reason by using heuristics. Many heuristics have advantages and disadvantages instead of being perfect. Sometimes that's because they are making tradeoffs, other times it's because they have random quirks.
Real Character was a failed experiment. I don't know how capable Ithkuil IV happens to be.
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1I don't speak Esperanto myself, but took that meditation example from someone who speaks it. I don't know how that actually boils down to Esperanto words.
Still seems to me that these things are rare, and more importantly, they don't seem to have the impact one might naively predict based on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
Naive predictions often seem wrong in many domains.
...For example, one could naively predict that such language nuance would lead to less nationalism (because the country is less linguistically conflated with the dominant ethnicity), and ye
To me making predictions about whether one of them will be given a pardon before 2026 strange. If they get a pardon it will likely be at the end of Trump's term.
The main scenario where they might be charged with a federal crime are about Trump having a fallout with Elon and in that case they likely won't get pardons.
Pam Bondi is unlikely to charge people inside of DOGE as long as there's a good relationship between Elon and Trump.
English can distinguish between hear/listen/overhear/eavesdrop to distinguish different ways how people perceive sound.
As an English speaker it's however not easily possible to do the same with smell perception.
A language like Esperanto however has the ability to express the concept because you can combine syllables to make words in Esperanto.
A friend who who's deeply into Esperanto said that reasoning in Esperanto allowed him to understand things about meditation that can be expressed in Esperanto but not directly in English without making up new jargon t...
1When it comes to Elon Musk's personal power it's worth speaking about what kind of goals Elon Musk has. At the recent Tesla earnings call, Elon said that deploying FSD for autonomous cars in China is difficult because Chinese law says that the videos Tesla records in China can't leave the US and US laws says that Tesla is not allowed to train AI models in China. In Elon Musk's presentation about what's important for Tesla, FSD is very important.
If Elon Musk's power would be equal to being a dictator, he would get the US laws changed so that he can tr...
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I seems to me like you also need to have no desire to figure things out on your own. A lot of rationalists have experiences of seeking truth and finding out that certain beliefs people around them hold aren't true. Rationalists who grow up in communities where many people believe in God frequently deconvert because they see enough signs that the beliefs of those people aro... (read more)