Herb Ingram
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Herb Ingram has not written any posts yet.
Herb Ingram has not written any posts yet.
I think it makes a huge difference that most cybersecurity desasters only cost money (or cause damage to a company's reputation and loss of confidential information of customers) while a biosecurity desaster can kill a lot of people. This post seems to ignore this?
Besides thinking it fascinating and perhaps groundbreaking, I don't really have original insights to offer. The most interesting democracies on the planet in my opinion are Switzerland and Taiwan. Switzerland shows what a long and sustained cultural development can do. Taiwan shows the potential for reform from within and innovation.
There's a lot of material to read, in particular the events after the sunflower movement in Taiwan. Keeping links within lesswrong: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5jW3hzvX5Q5X4ZXyd/link-digital-democracy-is-within-reach and https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/x6hpkYyzMG6Bf8T3W/swiss-political-system-more-than-you-ever-wanted-to-know-i
What's missing in this discussion is why one is talking to the "bad faith" actor in the first place.
If you're trying to get some information and the "bad faith" actor is trying to deceive you, you walk away. That is, unless you're sure that you're much smarter or have some other information advantage that allows you to get new useful information regardless. The latter case is extremely rare.
If you're trying to convince the "bad faith" actor, you either walk away or transform the discussion into a negotiation (it arguably was a negotiation in the first place). The post is relevant for this case. In such situations, people often pretend to be having... (read 399 more words →)
I think any outreach must start with understanding where the audience is coming from. The people most likely to make the considerable investment of "doing outreach" are in danger of being too convinced of their position and thinking it obvious; "how can people not see this?".
If you want to have a meaningful conversation with someone and interest them in a topic, you need to listen to their perspective, even if it sounds completely false and missing the point, and be able to empathize without getting frustrated. For most people to listen and consider any object level arguments about a topic they don't care about, there must first be a relationship of mutual respect, trust and understanding. Getting people to consider some new ideas, rather than convincing them of some cause, is already a very worthy achievement.
Indeed, systems controlling the domestic narrative may become sophisticated enough that censorship plays no big role. No regime is more powerful and enduring than one which really knows what poses a danger to it and what doesn't, one which can afford to use violence, coercion and censorship in the most targeted and efficient way. What a small elite used to do to a large society becomes something that the society does to itself. However, this is hard and I assume will remain out of reach for some time. We'll see what develops faster: sophistication of societal control and the systems through which it is achieved, or technology for censorship and surveillance. I'd... (read more)
Uncharitably, "Trust the Science" is a talking point in debates that have some component which one portrays as "fact-based" and which one wants to make an "argument" about based on the authority of some "experts". In this context, "trust the science" means "believe what I say".
Charitably, it means trusting that thinking honestly about some topic, seeking truth and making careful observations and measurements actually leads to knowledge, that knowledge is inteligibly attainable. This isn't obvious, which is why there's something there to be trusted. It means trusting that the knowledge gained this way can be useful, that it's worth at least hearing out people who seem or claim to have it, that it's worth stopping for a moment to honestly question one's own motivations and priors, the origins of one's beliefs and to ponder the possible consequences in case of failure, whenever one willingly disbelieves or dismisses that knowledge. In this context, "trust the science" means "talk to me and we'll figure it out".
The discussion is... (read more)
No offense, this reads to me as if it was deliberately obfuscated or AI-generated (I'm sure you didn't do either of these, this is a comment on writing style). I don't understand what you're saying. Is it "LW should focus on topics that academia neglects"?
I also didn't understand at all what the part starting with "social justice" is meant to tell me or has to do with the topic.
There has been some talk recently about long "filler-like" input (e.g. "a a a a a [...]") somewhat derailing GPT3&4, e.g. leading them to output what seems like random parts of it's training data. Maybe this effect is worth mentioning and thinking about when trying to use filler input for other purposes.
Formally proving that some X you could realistically build has property Y is way harder than building an X with property Y. I know of no exceptions (formal proof only applies to programs and other mathematical objects). Do you disagree?
I don't understand why you expect the existence of a "formal math bot" to lead to anything particularly dangerous, other than by being another advance in AI capabilities which goes along other advances (which is fair I guess).
Human-long chains of reasoning (as used for taking action in the real world) neither require nor imply the ability to write formal proofs. Formal proofs are about math and making use of math in the real... (read more)