All of Elias's Comments + Replies

I think the issue is with the "get what I want" part. Isn't this treating people as a means to an end, instead of treating them as an end in and of itself?* (I think that Kant would not be happy - though I don't know of anything that has been written on lesswrong about this.)

If you are talking to another person and you are trying to convince them to adopt a certain view of you, that is not what I would call truth-oriented. So, whether you specifically lie, omit, or whatever; it's already secondary. If your goal is to have an honest interaction with another... (read more)

"Would I be willing to publicly defend this as a situation in which unusually honest people should lie, if somebody posed it as a hypothetical?" Maybe that just gets turned into "It's permissible to lie so long as you'd be honest about whether you'd tell that lie if anyone asks you that exact question and remembers to say they're invoking the meta-honesty code," because people can't process the meta-part correctly.

Thank you for this direct contrast! It gave me the opportunity to understand why you added this part in the first place.
(The difference between ... (read more)

Somehow neither spoiler is working...

! :::spoiler Doesn't that run into the same issue as Harry in HPMoR with his experiment with time? Namely, that there are a lot of scenarios in which you never (get to) open the second box, easiest case: you died. But also probably any number of other results (it gets stolen, f.e.) :::

I notice, that your answer confuses me. My understanding is as follows:

In regards to the point you disagree on: As I understood it, (seemingly) linear relationships between the behaviour and the capabilities of a system don't need to stay that way. For example, I think that Robert Miles recently was featured in a video on Computerphile (YouTube), in which he described how the answers of LLMs to "What happens if you break a mirror" actually got worse with more capability.

As far as I understand it, you can have a system that behaves in a way which seems completely aligned, and which still hits a point of (... let's call it "pow... (read more)

Thank you for everything you did. My experience in this world has been a lot better since I discovered your writings, and while I agree with your assessment on the likely future, and I assume you have better things to spend your time doing than reading random comments, I still wanted to say that.

I'm curious to see what exactly the future brings. Whilst the result of the game may be certain, I can't predict the exact moves.

Enjoy it while it lasts, friends.

(Not saying give up, obviously.)

Thank you for pointing out the difference between breaking and stopping to peddle.

I read it, continued, then I got confused about you saying that your practice didn't leave "an empty silence".

I'm going to try what you described, because I may have gotten to that silence by breaking habitually when I was younger, instead of just not putting energy into it.

Might I ask what kind of recovery you were talking about? And how it came to be?

I can very much emphasize with having to loop thoughts to keep them, and if there's something that you did to improve your memory, I'd be extremely interested in trying it. Even accepting that I don't know if it will work for me, it's still way better than having no approach.

I'm glad that you got better!

Hi! Questions about volunteering follow:

"They will only be expected to work either before, after or during the event while joining sessions is still often feasible."

Could I get a rephrasing of that? I'm not certain, if the options of before/during/after are (or can be) exclusive, and I am also unclear on what is meant by "joining sessions is often feasible".

I am happy to help, but I would like to know how much of the time during the event (if any) would be, basically, not the event^^

Best regards

This sounds like a case of "wrong" perspective. (Whoa, what?! Yes, keep reading pls^^)

Like someone believing (to believe) in Nihilism. To Nihilism, I haven't thought of a good and correct counter-statement, except:

"You are simply wrong on all accounts, but by such a small amount that it's hard to point to, because it will sound like »You don't have a right to your own perspective«", (Of course, I also would not agree with disallowing personal opinions (as long as we ARE talking about opinions, not facts).)

Granted, I haven't tried to have that kind of discu... (read more)

I hope that you are not still struggling with this, but for anyone else in this situation: I would think that you need to change the way you set your goals. There is loads of advice out there on this topic, but there's a few rules I can recall off the top of my head:

• "If you formulate a goal, make it concrete, achievable, and make the path clear and if possible decrease the steps required." In your case, every one of the subgoals already had a lot of required actions, so the overarching goal of "publish a book" might be too broadly formulated.
• "If at all pos

If I may recommend a book that might make you shift your non-AI related life expectancy: Lifespan by Sinclair.

Quite the fascinating read, my takeaway would be: We might very well not need ASI to reach nigh-indefinite life extension. Accidents of course still happen, so in a non-ASI branch of this world I currently estimate my life expectancy at around 300-5000 years, provided this tech happens in my lifetime (which I think is likely) and given no cryonics/backups/...

(I would like to make it clear that the author barely talks about immortality, more about ... (read more)

It seems to me that the agents you are considering don't have as complex a utility function as people, who seem to at least in part consider their own well being as part of their utility funciton. Additionally, people usually don't have a clear idea of what their actual utility function is, so if they want to go all-in on it, they let some values fall by the wayside. AFAIK this limitation not a requirement for an agent.

If you had your utility function fully specified, I don't think you could be considered both rational and also not a "holy madman". (This b... (read more)

An idea that might be both unsustainable and potentially dangerous, but also potentially useful, is to have someone teach as a final test. Less an exam and more a project (with oversight?). Of course, these trainees could be authentic or disguised testers.

Problems with this idea (non-exhaustive): - Rationality doesn't necessarily make you good at teaching, - Teaching the basics badly are likely to have negative effects on the trainee, - This could potentially be gamed by reformulated regurgitation.

So... What behaves differently in the presence of Rationa... (read more)

If there's any basis whatsoever to this notion of "continuity of consciousness"—I haven't quite given up on it yet, because I don't have anything better to cling to—then I would guess that this is how it works.

Why "cling to"? It all adds up to normality, right? What you are saying sounds like someone resisting the "winds of evidence" (in this case added complexity, I am guessing).

I tried to come up with ways to explain my observations of consciousness, but they all seem incomplete too, so far. But I don't see how that impacts your argument here. I'm ... (read more)

I would sooner associate experience with the arrows than the nodes, if I had to pick one or the other!  I would sooner associate consciousness with the change in a brain than with the brain itself, if I had to pick one or the other.

This also lets me keep, for at least a little while longer, the concept of a conscious mind being connected to its future Nows, and anticipating some future experiences rather than others.  Perhaps I will have to throw out this idea eventually, because I cannot seem to formulate it consistently; but for now, at least,

Well, intelligence doesn't equate skills. It's probably easier to aquire skills (like mental maths) with high intelligence, but no matter the intelligence, you still need to learn it.

P(easy learning | high intelligence) may be higher than P(easy learning | not high intelligence) for a given subject (f.e. mental math), but P(mental math) is not dependent on the ease of learning [P(mental math | no easy learning) would be low] but rather on actually learning/training it: P(mental math | no learning) is pretty low.

So people who learn mental math may have diff... (read more)

The finale was a specific instance of two people who were in a very unusual situation. You can not "just" KO a powerful wizard. The whole reason that worked, was the restrictions that arose from this situation.

If someone was able to KO Lord Voldemort in a confrontation in which he was allowed to use magic, I assume they would afterwards be able to perform rituals to change their mind, similar to how Bellatrix was broken. 

Also...I mean, you can just kill them at that point. Being also able to change their mind doesn't seem like that much of an addition... (read more)

Agreed.

However... Rowena was not an Occlumense? Without knowing that this problem might arise later, I doubt that she would have not learned it. And creating the Diadem is likely to be harder than learning Occlumency... Unless there's people who just can't learn it, and she is one of them. Seems like a stretch. Or could she never use it?

Also: if the Founders had all the requirements already, why didn't they finish it back then?

I enjoy the story, however there's at least two points here that I can't just let pass:

1. How would Finite reawaken an unconscious person? Isn't it more likely to assume that Stupefy knocks you out, instead of the theory that seems to be put forth here of the hex actually being an enchantment that persists over x amount of time?

2. A Finite has to be at the same strength or stronger than the spell it is dispelling. I believe that the ring has had several protections put on it, at the end of the first year. A standard Finite, from Lockhart of all people, sho

I don't think that these quotes imply that Occlumency is a perfect shield of the mind. IIRC it specifically counters any attempt to divine whether or not someone believes they are telling the truth.

To completely Obliviate someone, you don't need to read their mind first, you are just setting all the 1 to 0. (Apparently somehow only hitting memory and not vital processes.)

I don't see a problem then. If you want to find out specific information, you can not use Legilimency, unless you first somehow break the person. And you will never know if you actually di... (read more)

Spoilers for HPMoR (though I guess that's a given at this point):

c) how does she miss the fact that the map shows two Tom Riddle's walking down the passage way to the graveyard? That should not be easy to miss. It says "it was tangled and confused", but it would still show the name twice, and if she can read the one, it stands to reason she could read the other. Especially since we have precedent from HPMoR of both being in the same room without the map being confused.

It's part of the worship option, I would say. As he would otherwise be contradicting himself when he outlines the actual Explain option.

Edit: Whoops, the next comment is by Eliezer addressing this question but I'm going to leave this here for ease of reading.

It seems to me that some reasons may be: a lot of interesting comments have been made, which may intimidate; the posts are often very concise; and since the posts are so old, one may expect the page to be dead.

Personally I don't think I have read any "new" articles so far^^

If so, then as you study the skills of rationality and train yourself not to deny facts, your feelings will become stronger.

How does one go about this?

I have begun reading everything I can find by you on this page - I will probably also read other things, but it seems a foundation by (one of) the founder would be useful.

Still, while I see the ideas presented as very useful, I find myself wondering how do actually go about implementing them. Take any one thing as an example here, such as "Making Beliefs Pay Rent". (I hope you are not annoyed by t... (read more)