What do you think of this observation, which Leah McElrath recently promoted a second time? Here are some other tweets that she's made, on January 21 & 26, 2020:
https://twitter.com/leahmcelrath/status/1219693585731391489
https://twitter.com/leahmcelrath/status/1221316758281293825
Bonus link: https://twitter.com/gwensnyderPHL/status/1479166811220414464
Yes. There's a reason why I would specifically tell young people not to refrain from action because they fear other students' reactions, but I emphatically wouldn't tell them to ignore fear or go against it in general.
Really! I just encountered this feature, and have been more reluctant to agree than to upvote. Admittedly, the topic has mostly concerned conversations which I didn't hear.
Not sure what you just said, but according to the aforementioned physics teacher people have absolutely brought beer money, recruited a bunch of guys, and had them move giant rocks around in a manner consistent with the non-crazy theory of pyramid construction. (I guess the brand of beer used might count as "modern technology," and perhaps the quarry tools, but I doubt the rest of it did.) You don't, in fact, need to build a full pyramid to refute crackpot claims.
Ahem. As with F=ma (I think) it's not so much wrong, or useless, as asking the wrong question on a different level.
I should note that, as an outsider, the main point I recall Eliezer making in that vein is that he used Michael Vassar as a model for the character who was called Professor Quirrell. As an outsider, I didn't see that as an unqualified endorsement - though I think your general message should be signal-boosted.
That the same 50% of the unwilling believe both that vaccines have been shown to cause autism and that the US government is using them to microchip the population is suggestive that such people are not processing such statements as containing words that possess meanings.
Yes, but you're missing the obvious. Respondents don't have a predictive model that literally says Bill Gates wants to inject them with a tracking microchip. They do, however, have a rational expectation that he or his company will hurt them in some technical way, which they find wholly ...
What do you believe would happen to a neurotypical forced to have self-awareness and a more accurate model of reality in general?
The idea that they become allistic neurodivergents like me is, of course, a suspicious conclusion, but I'm not sure I see a credible alternative. CEV seems like an inherently neurodivergent idea, in the sense that forcing people (or their extrapolated selves) to engage in analysis is baked into the concept.
It's suspicious, but I think people's views from long ago on whether or not they would commit suicide are very weak evidence.
Also, we know for a fact the FBI threatened Martin Luther King, Jr, and I don't think they wound up killing him?
Twitter is saying there's literally a Delta Plus variant already. We don't know what it does.
we can probably figure something out that holds onto the majority of the future’s value, and it’s unlikely that we all die’ camp
This disturbs me the most. I don't trust their ability to distinguish "the majority of the future's value," from "the Thing you just made thinks Thamiel is an amateur."
Hopefully, similar reasoning accounts for the bulk of the fourth camp.
How likely is it that a research lab finds a new bat coronavirus and then before publishing anything about it, decides that it's the perfect testbed for dramatic gain of function research?
In China? We're talking about a virus based on RNA, which mutates more easily, making it harder to control. China's government craves control to the point of trying to censor all mentions of Winnie the Pooh, possibly because a loss of control could mean the guillotine.
And you also want, in that last tweet, to put (at least some of) the burden on these random institutions to then allocate the vaccine based on who has suffered disproportionately? While also obeying all the official restrictions or else, and also when did that become a priority?
You know that we decide which groups are at risk largely by looking at how they've died or suffered so far. Presumably she's hoping we protect people who otherwise seem likely to die, since her remarks seem sensible given her premises.
You're not exactly wrong, but OP does tell us people are being irrational in ways that you could use to get cold hard cash.
People who have more difficulty than most - like me* - in losing weight constitute about 20% of the community. The hard cases are quite rare.
What? What community? My impression is that, if people try to lose weight, the expected result is for them to become more unhealthy due to weight fluctuation. It's not that they'll "have difficulty losing weight," rather their weight will go up and down in a way that harms their health or their expected lifespans. I thought I read statements by Scott - an actual doctor, we think - supporting this. Are you actually disputing the premise? If so, where'd you get the data?
This seems like vastly more people masked than I've observed in a crowded suburb. I can't give precise numbers, but it feels like less than a third wearing them, despite distancing being very difficult if you walk in some areas.
No. First, people thinking of creating an AGI from scratch (i.e., one comparable to the sort of AI you're imagining) have already warned against this exact issue and talked about measures to prevent a simple change of one bit from having any effect. (It's the problem you don't spot that'll kill you.)
Second, GPT-2 is not near-perfect. It does pretty well at a job it was never intended to do, but if we ignore that context it seems pretty flawed. Naturally, its output was nowhere near maximally bad. The program did indeed have a silly flaw, but I assume that'
...The only way I can see this happening with non-negligible probability is if we create AGI along more human lines - e.g, uploaded brains which evolve through a harsh selection process that wouldn't be aligned with human values. In that scenario, it may be near certain. Nothing is closer to a mind design capable of torturing humans than another human mind - we do that all the time today.
As others point out, though, the idea of a sign being flipped in an explicit utility function is one that people understand and are already looking for. More than that, it wo
...This shows why I don't trust the categories. The ability to let talented people go in whatever direction seems best will almost always be felt as freedom from pressure.
One, the idea was to pick a fictional character I preferred, but could not easily come to believe in. (So not Taylolth, may death come swiftly to her enemies.) Two, I wanted to spend zero effort imagining what this character might say or do. I had the ability to picture Kermit.
I meant that as a caution - though it is indeed fictional evidence, and my lite version IRL seems encouraging.
I really think you'll be fine taking it slow. Still, if you have possible risk factors, I would:
Sy, is that you?
I started talking to Kermit the Frog, off and on, many months ago. I had this idea after seeing an article by an ex-Christian who appeared never to have made predictions about her life using a truly theistic model, but who nevertheless missed the benefits she recalls getting from her talks with Jesus. Result: Kermit has definitely comforted me once or twice (without the need for 'belief') and may have helped me to remember useful data/techniques I already knew, but mostly nothing much happens.
Now, as an occasional lucid dreamer who once dec
...Pitch Meeting is at least bringing up actual problems with Game of Thrones season 8. But I dare you to tell if early Game of Thrones was better or worse than season 8, based on the Pitch Meeting.
That's gonna be super easy, barely an inconvenience. The video for S8 not only feels more critical than usual, it gives specific examples of negative changes from previous seasons, plus a causal explanation (albeit partial) that the video keeps coming back to. One might even say the characters harp on their explanation for S8 being worse than early seasons.
Also
...I have to add that Pitch Meeting does not, in fact, label itself "review," though it does contain implied assertions. (Some implied claims are even about media, rather than about screenwriters and studio executives.)
The specific example/challenge/instance of meta-shitting seems odd, though. For one, GOT Season 8 was a major news story rather than something you needed to learn from Pitch Meeting. I'm going to make the rest a separate comment.
Somewhat unsurprisingly, claim 1 had the least support.
Admittedly, this is what shminux objected to. Beforehand I would have expected more resistance based on people already believing the future is uncertain, casting doubt on claim 2 and especially the "tractable" part of claim 3. If I had to steelman such views, they might sound something like, 'The way to address this problem is to make sure sensible people are in charge, and a prerequisite for being sensible is not giving weird-sounding talks for 3 people.'
How sure are you that the people who showed
...That number was presented as an example ("e.g.") - but more importantly, all the numbers in the range you offer here would argue for more AI alignment research! What we need to establish, naively, is that the probability is not super-exponentially low for a choice between 'inter-galactic civilization' and 'extinction of humanity within a century'. That seems easy enough if we can show that nothing in the claim contradicts established knowledge.
I would argue the probability for this choice existing is far in excess of 50%. As examples of background info sup
...I almost specified, 'what would it be without the confusing term "ought" or your gerrymandered definition thereof,' but since that was my first comment in this thread I thought it went without saying.
Do you have a thesis that you argue for in the OP? If so, what is that thesis?
Are you prepared to go down the other leg of the dilemma and say that the "true oughts" do not include any goal which would require you to, eg, try to have correct beliefs? Also: the Manhattan Project.
Why define goals as ethics (knowing that definitions are tools that we can use and replace depending on our goal of the moment)? You seem to be saying that 'ought' has a structure which can also be used to annihilate humanity or bring about unheard-of suffering. That does not seem to me like a useful perspective.
Seriously, just go and watch "Sorry to Bother You."
Arguably, the numbers we care about. Set theory helpfully adds that second-order arithmetic (arithmetic using the language of sets) has only a single model (up to what is called 'isomorphism', meaning a precise analogy) and that Godel's original sentence is 'true' within this abstraction.
In part IV, can you explain more about what your examples prove?
You say FDT is motivated by an intuition in favor of one-boxing, but apparently this is false by your definition of Newcomb's Problem. FDT was ultimately motivated by an intuition that it would win. It also seems based on intuitions regarding AI, if you read that post - specifically, that a robot programmed to use CDT would self-modify to use a more reflective decision theory if given the chance, because that choice gives it more utility. Your practical objection about humans may not be applic
...Assuming you mean the last blockquote, that would be the Google result I mentioned which has text, so you can go there, press Ctrl-F, and type "must fail" or similar.
You can also read the beginning of the PDF, which talks about what can and can't be programmed while making clear this is about hardware and not algorithms. See the first comment in this family for context.
Again, he plainly says more than that. He's challenging "the conviction that the information processing underlying any cognitive performance can be formulated in a program and thus simulated on a digital computer." He asserts as fact that certain types of cognition require hardware more like a human brain. Only two out of four areas, he claims, "can therefore be programmed." In case that's not clear enough, here's another quote of his:
...since Area IV is just that area of intelligent behavior in which the attempt to program digital computers to exhibit full
I couldn't have written an equally compelling essay on biases in favor of long timelines without lying, I think,
Then perhaps you should start here.
Hubert Dreyfus, probably the most famous historical AI critic, published "Alchemy and Artificial Intelligence" in 1965, which argued that the techniques popular at the time were insufficient for AGI.
That is not at all what the summary says. Here is roughly the same text from the abstract:
...Early successes in programming digital computers to exhibit simple forms of intelligent behavior, coupled with the belief that intelligent activities differ only in their degree of complexity, have led to the conviction that the information processing underlying any c
Meandering conversations were important to him, because it gave them space to actually think. I pointed to examples of meetings that I thought had gone well, that ended will google docs full of what I thought had been useful ideas and developments. And he said "those all seemed like examples of mediocre meetings to me – we had a lot of ideas, sure. But I didn't feel like I actually got to come to a real decision about anything important."
Interesting that you choose this as an example, since my immediate reaction to your opening was, "Hold Off On Proposi
...I think this is being presented because a treacherous turn requires deception.
As I've mentioned before, that is technically false (unless you want a gerrymandered definition).
Smiler AI: I'm focusing on self-improvement. A smarter, better version of me would find better ways to fill the world with smiles. Beyond that, it's silly for me to try predicting a superior intelligence.
Mostly agree, but I think an AGI could be subhuman in various ways until it becomes vastly superhuman. I assume we agree that no real AI could consider literally every possible course of action when it comes to long-term plans. Therefore, a smiler could legitimately dismiss all thoughts of repurposing our atoms as an unprofitable line of inquiry, right up until it has the ability to kill us. (This could happen even without crude corrigibility measures, which we could remove or allow to be absent from a self-revision because we trust the AI.) It could look deceptively like human beings deciding not to pursue an Infinity Gauntlet to snap our problems away.
The core of the disagreement between Bostrom (treacherous turn) and Goertzel (sordid stumble) is about how long steps 2. and 3. will take, and how obvious the seed AI's unalignment will look like during these steps.
Really? Does Bostrom explicitly call this the crux?
I'm worried at least in part that AGI (for concreteness, let's say a smile-maximizer) won't even see a practical way to replace humanity with its tools until it far surpasses human level. Until then, it honestly seeks to make humans happy in order to gain reward. Since this seems more benevol
...Not every line in 37 Ways is my "standard Bayesian philosophy," nor do I believe much of what you say follows from anything standard.
This probably isn't our central disagreement, but humans are Adaptation-Executers, not Fitness-Maximizers. Expecting humans to always use words for Naive Bayes alone seems manifestly irrational. I would go so far as to say you shouldn't expect people to use them for Naive Bayes in every case, full stop. (This seems to border on subconsciously believing that evolution has a mind.) If you believe someone is making improper infe
...Comment status: I may change my mind on a more careful reading.
Other respondents have mentioned the Mathematical Macrocosm Hypothesis. My take differs slightly, I think. I believe you've subtly contradicted yourself. In order for your argument to go anywhere you had to assume that an abstract computation rule exists in the same sense as a real computer running a simulation. This seems to largely grant Tegmark's version of the MMH (and may be the first premise I reject here). ETA: the other branch of your dilemma doesn't seem to engage with the functionalis
...Using epsilons can in principle allow you to update. However, the situation seems slightly worse than jimrandomh describes. It looks like you need P(E|h), or the probability if H is false, in order to get a precise answer. Also, the missing info that jim mentioned is already enough in principle to let the final answer be any probability whatsoever.
If we use log odds (the framework in which we could literally start with "infinite certainty") then the answer could be anywhere on the real number line. We have infinite (or at least unbounded) confusion until we make our assumptions more precise.
One is phrased or presented as knowledge. I don't know the best way to approach this, but to a first approximation the belief is the one that has an explicit probability attached. I know you talked about a Boolean, but there the precise claim given a Boolean value was "these changes have happened", described as an outside observer would, and in my example the claim is closer to just being the changes.
Your example could be brought closer by having mAIry predict the pattern of activation, create pointers to memories that have not yet been form...
I would actually give concrete evidence in favor of what I think you're calling "Philosophy," although of course there's not much dramatic evidence we'd expect to see if the theory is wholly true.
Here, however, is a YouTube video that should really be called, Why AI May Already Be Killing You. It uses hard data to show that an algorithm accidentally created real-world money and power, that it did so by working just as intended in the narrowest sense, and that its creators opposed the logical result so much that they actively tried to stop it. (Of course, t... (read more)