All of denyeverywhere's Comments + Replies

Yes, I meant specifically the Bay Area scene, since that's the only part of the LW community that's accused of excluding e/acc-ers.

It's interesting and relevant if you can say that in the NYC scene, this sort of thing is unheard of, and that you're familiar enough with that scene to say so, but it isn't 100% on point.

I described my feelings about human extinction elsewhere.

However, unlike the median commenter on this topic, you seem to grant that e/acc exclusion is actually a real thing that actually happens. That is

I think the desire to exclude e/accs is mainly because of their attitude that human extinction is acceptable or even desirable,

is a strange thing to say if there was not, in fact, an actual desire among LW party hosts in Berkeley. So inasmuch as my doubts about the truth of this have been raised by other respondents, would you mind clarifying

1. If you do

Would you describe yourself as familiar with the scene at all? You seem to imply that you doubt that e/acc exclusion is an actual thing, but is that based on your experience with the scene?

I'm not suggesting that you're wrong to doubt it (if anything I was most likely wrong to believe it), I just want to clarify what info I can take from your doubt.

This is a good point, but I don't intuitively see that it's particularly strong evidence that it must be unusual. I would expect an event like this to have more explicit rules than the average party.

This seems like good evidence and I don't think you would make it up.

I'm rapidly coming to the conclusion that Beff & co are exaggerating/full-of-it/otherwise-inaccurate.

Possibly the Aella thing was an anomaly, but also the thing that they actually really wanted to go to, and they're inaccurately (although not necessarily dishonestly) assuming it to be more widespread than it actually is.

Would you describe yourself as plugged into the LW party scene in Berkeley?

I wrote a long reply to your points, but ultimately decided it was a derail to original topic. I'll PM you just for fun though.

I don't think there's anything misleading about that. Building AI that kills everyone means you never get to build the immortality-granting AI.

I didn't say it wasn't sensible. I said describing it that way was misleading.

If your short-term goal is in fact to decelerate the development of AI, describing this as "accelerating the development of Friendly AI" is misleading, or at least confused. What you're actually doing is trying to mitigate X-risk. In part you are doing this in the hopes that you survive to build Friendly AI. This makes sense except for ... (read more)

Thanks, this is extremely helpful. Having a clearer definition of how e/acc is understood to LW makes this much easier to think about.

Just for fun, I'll quibble: I would add to my list of e/acc heresies

Related to previous: Those who think that the wrong human having power over other humans is the thing we need to worry about.

Insofar as I genuinely believe that to some extent, various actors are trying to take advantage of sincerely-held beliefs by LWers in the importance of decel-until-alignment to craft rules which benefit them and their short-term in... (read more)

I think it counts. And while it's not the typical LW party, do you really think that prohibition says nothing about the scene? That seems like an odd opinion to me.

I think rationalists generally agree that speeding up the development of AGI (that doesn't kill all of us) is extremely important

Didn't Eli want a worldwide moratorium on AI development, with data center airstrikes if necessary?

Granted, I understood this to be on the grounds that we were at the point that AGI killing us was a serious concern. But still, being in favor of "speeding up AGI that doesn't kill us" is kind of misleading if you think the plan should be

1. Slow down AGI to 0.
2. Figure out all of the alignment stuff.
3. Develop AGI with alignment as fa

Didn't Aella explicitly reject e/acc's from her gangbang on the grounds that they were philosophically objectionable?

I assume this is April Fools' related, but I can't really tell

It's not.

I think there's less cohesive leadership of LW parties than you seem to think

That sounds likely. To be fair, I've mostly heard of this from

• Beff Jezos & Beff-adjacent people whining about it on twitter

• Aella's gangbang

And I probably adjusted too hard off of this. Like nobody goes around prominently saying "actually we don't mind if e/acc show up, so long as they're nice" that I know of, but there's no reason to assume that they would.

Ask the host. If they're unclear

Would you leak that statement to the press if the board definitely wasn't planning these things, and you knew they weren't? I don't see how it helps you. Can you explain?

I don't have a strong opinion about Altman's trustworthiness, but I can assume he just isn't trustworthy and I still don't get doing this.

the Bystander Effect is dumb

It's dumber than you think.

Social relations and presence of others predict bystander intervention: Evidence from violent incidents captured on CCTV

What, you don't think Plasmodum falciparium is a living being with a right to exist? Don't be such a humanity chauvinist.

I think we've gone well past the point of productivity on this. I've asked some lawyers for opinions on this. I'll just address a few things briefly.

If the whistleblower doesn't have evidence of the meeting taking place, and no memos, reports or e-mails documenting that they passed their concerns up the chain, it's perfectly reasonable for a representative of the corporation to reply, "I don't recall hearing about this concern."

I agree this is true in general, but my point is limited to the cases where documentation would in fact exist were it not for ... (read more)

I've been trying to figure out how someone who appears to believe deeply in the principles of effective altruism could do what SBF did. ... It seems important to me to seek an understanding of the deeper causes of this disaster to help prevent future such disasters.

There's a part of my brain screaming "Why are you leaving yourself wide open to affinity fraud? Are you trying to ensure 'SBF 2: This Time It's Personal' happens or what?" However, I'll ask him to be quiet and explain.

The problem was that you should never go around thinking "Somebody who beli... (read more)

But not much worse; against counterexamplebot, ringer tit-for-tat will defect (so almost full double-defect), and tit-for-tat will always cooperate, so for that match ringer tit-for-tat is down about 50 points (assuming 50 rounds so the score is 100-49). Ringer tit-for-tat then picks up 150 points for each match against the 2 ringers, and the score is now (300-349). And it's only this close because the modified strategy is tit-for-tat rather than something more clever.

Also, this assumes that a bot even can defect specifically against ringer tit-for-tat. In... (read more)

It seems unlikely to me that this ringer/shill strategy will be particularly good compared to the other options

It will absolutely be guaranteed to be better than equivalent strategies without ringer/shill. Remember that ringer/shill modifies an existing strategy like tit-for-tat. Ringer tit-for-tat will always beat tit-for-tat since it will score the same as tit-for-tat except when it goes up against shill tit-for-tat, where it will always get the best possible score.

This means that whatever the strongest ~160-character strategy is, the ringer/shill ver... (read more)

My default is that people shouldn't be judged by random strangers on the internet over the claims of other random strangers on the internet. As random strangers to Sam, we should not want to be in judgment of him over the claims of some other random stranger. This isn't good or normal or healthy.

Moreover, it is unlikely that we will devote the required amount of time & effort to really know what we're talking about, which we should if we're going to attack him or signal boost attacks. And if we are going to devote the great amount of time necessary, co... (read more)

I mean, yes, it's not currently against the rules, but it obviously should be (or technical measures should be added to render it impossible, like adding random multiline comment blocks to programs).

Presumably the purpose of having 3 bots is to allow me to try 3 different strategies. But if my strategy takes less than about 160 characters to express, I have to use the ringer/shill version of the same strategy since otherwise I will always lose to a ringer/shill player using the same strategy but also shilling for his ringer. And the benefit of the ringer/s... (read more)

Academia is sufficiently dysfunctional that if you want to make a great scientific discover(y) you should basically do it outside of academia.

I feel like this point is a bit confused.

A person believing this essentially has to have a kind of "Wherever I am is where the party's at" mindset, in which case he ought to have an instrumental view of academia. Like obviously, if I want to maximize the time I spend reading math books and solving math problems, doing it inside of academia would involve wasting time and is suboptimal. However, if my goal is to do ... (read more)

The tournament allows you to enter 3 bots, so we should be able to cheat if our bots can recognize each other. If so we have 1 bot, "ringer", and 2 bots "shill0" and "shill1" and follow this strategy:

ringer: if my opponent is shill0 or shill1, always defect. otherwise, play tit-for-tat.

shill0: if my opponent is ringer, always cooperate. otherwise play tit-for-tat.

To recognize each other, since we have access to the source code of both bots during the game, we need a hash function which is efficient in terms of characters used. One possibility would be to s... (read more)

The part that confuses me about this is twofold...

What you're missing is how specific and narrow my original point was. The thing that makes it look like you are concealing evidence is only if you do two things simultaneously

• Challenge witness testimony by saying it's not corroborated by some discoverable record.

• Have a policy whereby you avoid creating the discoverable record, periodically delete the discoverable record, or otherwise make it unlikely that the record would corroborate the testimony.

So basically you have to pick one or the other. ... (read more)

I still disagree. If it wasn't written down, it didn't happen, as far as the organization is concerned.

So obviously I violently disagree with this, so assuming it was supposed to be meaningful and not some kind of throwaway statement, you should clarify exactly what you do and don't mean by this.

The engineer's manager can (and probably will) claim that they didn't recall the conversation

They may say this, but I think that you aren't thinking clearly enough in terms of the logical chain of argument that the hypothetical legal proceeding is trying to ... (read more)

Why wouldn't the defendant dispute this?...In this case, I would expect the defendant to produce analyses showing that the widgets were expected to be safe

You're not reading carefully enough. The thing I said that the defendant would not dispute is the fact that the engineer said something to them, not whether they should have believed him. This is why I said later on

Remember, they're not conceding the whole case, just the fact that the engineer told them his opinion. What they're going to do instead is admit that the first engineer told them, but th

Google did not pursue that strategy. Or at least, if they did, the article you linked doesn't say so.

What I am saying that Google did not and would not do is that when Barton testified that

Google feared if Bing became the default search engine on Android, "then users would have a 'difficult time finding or changing to Google.'"

Google would not respond that he was talking horseshit and if what he was saying was true, why isn't there any evidence of it in our internal employee communications? They would not say this because DOJ would say that this corroborat... (read more)

It's not that safe communication guidelines are damning. It's that claiming that the lack of discoverable evidence corroborating your statement disproves it while simultaneously having conspired to ensure that discoverable evidence would not exist would be damning.

What makes you conclude that personal testimony weighs more under the law than written documents?

It doesn't matter. Plaintiff wants to prove that an engineer told the CEO that the widgets were dangerous. So he introduces testimony from the engineer that the engineer told the CEO that the widgets were dangerous. Defendant does not dispute this. How much more weight could you possibly want? The only other thing you could do was to ask defendant to stipulate that the engineer told the CEO about the widgets. I think most lawyers wouldn't bother.

Why would

We are taking many of the brightest young people. We are telling them to orient themselves as utility maximizers with scope sensitivity, willing to deploy instrumental convergence. Taught by modern overprotective society to look for rules they can follow so that they can be blameless good people, they are offered a set of rules that tells them to plan their whole lives around sacrifices on an alter, with no limit to the demand for such sacrifices. And then, in addition to telling them to in turn recruit more people to and raise more money for the cause, we

In your first example, it's clear that expected loss is as important as intent. It's not just that you probably don't have a strong intent to misuse their data. It's that the cost of you actually having this intent is pretty small when you only have access to whatever data is left on your laptop, compared to when you had access to a live production database or whatever. In other words, it's not that they necessarily have some sort of binary model of intent to screw them. Even if they have some sort of distribution of the likelihood that either now or soon ... (read more)

I genuinely can't think of a situation where this makes sense, either as a way to keep the email clean for discovery or anything vaguely related (like concerns about employees leaking to journalists). On the other hand, it makes a lot of sense for phishing prevention. Seriously, if you can think of an example, tell me. I'm stumped.

I feel like a flaw here is that given that we're assuming that our hero is willing to both speak up about risks and provide evidence to lawyers suing his company when things go wrong (because he wanted to communicate those risks in discoverable form), how much actual benefit does this provide over just being willing to testify? If I testify that I told the CEO that our widgets could explode and kill you, the opposition isn't going to be so stupid as to ask why there isn't any record of me bringing this to the CEO's attention. The first lawyer will be hardl... (read more)