All of JamesFaville's Comments + Replies

Strongly agree with this. How I frame the issue: If people want to say that they identify as an "experiencer" who is necessarily conscious, and don't identify with any nonconscious instances of their cognition, then they're free to do that from an egoistic perspective. But from an impartial perspective, what matters is how your cognition influences the world. Your cognition has no direct access to information about whether it's conscious such that it could condition on this and give different outputs when instantiated as conscious vs. nonconscious.

Note tha... (read more)

Thanks for the cool discussion Ryan and Nate! This thread seemed pretty insightful to me. Here’s some thoughts / things I’d like to clarify (mostly responding to Nate's comments).^[1]

Who’s doing this trade?

In places it sounds like Ryan and Nate are talking about predecessor civilisations like humanity agreeing to the mutual insurance scheme? But humans aren’t currently capable of making our decisions logically dependent on those of aliens, or capable of rescuing them. So to be precise the entity engaging in this scheme or other acausal interactions on our b... (read more)

It's definitely not clear to me that updatelessness + Yudkowsky's solution prevent threats. The core issue is that a target and a threatener face a prima facie symmetric decision problem of whether to use strategies that depend on their counterpart's strategy or strategies that do not depend on their counterpart's strategy.^[1]

In other words, the incentive targets have to use non-dependent strategies that incentivise favourable (no-threat) responses from threateners is the same incentive threateners have to use non-dependent strategies that incentivise favo... (read more)

I like this post a lot! Three other reasons came to mind, which might be technically encompassed by some of the current ones but seemed to mostly fall outside the post's framing of them at least.

Some (non-agentic) repeated selections won't terminate until they find a bad thing
In a world with many AI deployments, an overwhelming majority of deployed agents might be unable to mount a takeover, but the generating process for new deployed agents might not halt until a rare candidate that can mount a takeover is found. More specifically, consider a world where ... (read more)

Another way interpretability work can be harmful: some means by which advanced AIs could do harm require them to be credible. For example, in unboxing scenarios where a human has something an AI wants (like access to the internet), the AI might be much more persuasive if the gatekeeper can verify the AI's statements using interpretability tools. Otherwise, the gatekeeper might be inclined to dismiss anything the AI says as plausibly fabricated. (And interpretability tools provided by the AI might be more suspect than those developed beforehand.)

It's unclea... (read more)

There is another very important component of dying with dignity not captured by the probability of success: the badness of our failure state. While any alignment failure would destroy much of what we care about, some alignment failures would be much more horrible than others. Probably the more pessimistic we are about winning, the more we should focus on losing less absolutely (e.g. by researching priorities in worst-case AI safety).

I feel conflicted about this post. Its central point as I'm understanding it is that much evidence we commonly encounter in varied domains is only evidence about the abundance of extremal values in some distribution of interest, and whether/how we should update our beliefs about the non-extremal parts of the distribution is very much dependent on our prior beliefs or gears-level understanding of the domain. I think this is a very important idea, and this post explains it well.

Also, felt inspired to search out other explanations of the moments of a distribu... (read more)

This is super interesting!

Quick typo note (unless I'm really misreading something): in your setups, you refer to coins that are biased towards tails, but in your analyses, you talk about the coins as though they are biased towards heads.

One is the “cold pool”, in which each coin comes up 1 (i.e. heads) with probability 0.1 and 0 with probability 0.9. The other is the “hot pool”, in which each coin comes up 1 with probability 0.2

$n$ random coins with heads-probability 0.2

We started with only $0.2n$ tails

full compression would require roughly 

As far as I'm aware, there was not (in recent decades at least) any controversy that word/punctuation choice was associative. We even have famous psycholinguistics experiments telling us that thinking of the word "goose" makes us more likely to think of the word "moose" as well as "duck" (linguistic priming is the one type of priming that has held up to the replication crisis as far as I know). Whenever linguists might have bothered to make computational models, I think those would have failed to produce human-like speech because their associative models were not powerful enough.

This comment does not deserve to be downvoted; I think it's basically correct. GPT-2 is super-interesting as something that pushes the bounds of ML, but is not replicating what goes on under-the-hood with human language production, as Marcus and Pinker were getting at. Writing styles don't seem to reveal anything deep about cognition to me; it's a question of word/punctuation choice, length of sentences, and other quirks that people probably learn associatively as well.

Why should we say that someone has "information empathy" instead of saying they possess a "theory of mind"?

Possible reasons: "theory of mind" is an unwieldy term, it might be useful to distinguish in fewer words a theory of mind with respect to beliefs from a theory of mind with respect to preferences, you want to emphasise a connection between empathy and information empathy.

I think if there's established terminology for something we're interesting in discussing, there should be a pretty compelling reason why it doesn't suffice for us.

It felt weird to me to describe shorter timeline projections as "optimistic" and longer ones as "pessimistic"- AI research taking place over a longer period is going to be more likely to give us friendly AI, right?

This approach can be made a little more formal with FDT/LDT/TDT: being the sort of agent who robustly does not respond to blackmail maximises utility more than being the sort of agent who sometimes gives in to blackmail, because you will not wind up in situations where you're being blackmailed.

The subjunctive mood and really anything involving modality is complicated. Paul Portner has a book on mood which is probably a good overview if you're willing to get technical. Right now I think of moods as expressing presuppositions on the set of possible worlds you quantify over in a clause. I don't think it's often a good idea to try to get people to speak a native language in a way incompatible with the language as they acquired it in childhood; it adds extra cognitive load and probably doesn't affect how people reason (the exception being giving them new words and categories, which I think can clearly help reasoning in some circumstances).

These are a blast!

I'm atheist and had an awesome Yom Kippur this year, so believing in God isn't a pre-req for going to services and not being unhappy. I think it would be sad if your father's kids gave up ritual practices that were especially meaningful to him and presumably to his ancestors. I think it would be sad if you sat through services that were really unpleasant for you year after year. I think it would be really sad if your relationship with your father blew up over this.

I think the happiest outcome would be that you wind up finding bits of the high holidays that

I've seen this discussed before by Rob Wiblin and Lewis Bollard on the 80,000 Hours podcast (edit: tomsittler actually beat me to the punch in mentioning this).

Robert Wiblin: Could we take that even further and ultimately make animals that have just amazing lives that are just constantly ecstatic like they’re on heroin or some other drug that makes people feel very good all the time whenever they are in the farm and they say, “Well, the problem has basically been solved because the animals are living great lives”?

Lewis Bollard: Yeah, so I think this

Nothing, if your definition of a copy is sufficiently general :-)

Am I understanding you right that you believe in something like a computational theory of identity and think there's some sort of bound on how complex something we'd attribute moral patienthood or interestingness to can get? I agree with the former, but don't see much reason for believing the latter.

I just listened to a great talk by Nick Bostrom I'd managed to miss before now which mentions some considerations in favor and opposed to voting. He does this to illustrate a general trend that in certain domains it's easy to come across knock-down arguments ("crucial considerations") that invalidate or at least strongly counter previous knock-down arguments. Hope I summarized that OK!

When I last went to the polls, I think my main motivation for doing so was functional decision theory.

I feel like scope insensitivity is something to worry about here. I'd be really happy to learn that humanity will manage to take good care of our cosmic endowment but my happiness wouldn't scale properly with the amount of value at stake if I learned we took good care of a super-cosmic endowment. I think that's the result of my inability to grasp the quantities involved rather than a true reflection of my extrapolated values, however.

My concern is more that reasoning about entities in simpler universes capable of conducting acausal trades wi... (read more)

I actually like the idea of building a "rationalist pantheon" to give us handy, agenty names for important but difficult concepts. This requires more clearly specifying what the concept being named is: can you clarify a bit? Love Wizard of Earthsea, but don't get what you're pointing at here.

I think normal priors on moral beliefs come from a combination of:

• Moral intuitions
• Reasons for belief that upon reflection, we would accept as valid (e.g. desire for parsimony with other high-level moral intuitions, empirical discoveries like "vaccines reduce disease prevalence")
• Reasons for belief that upon reflection, we would not accept as valid (e.g. selfish desires, societal norms that upon reflection we would consider arbitrary, shying away from the dark world)

I think the "Disney test" is useful in that it seems like it depends mu... (read more)

I don't think the vaccination example shows that the heuristic is flawed: in the case of vaccinations, we do have strong evidence that vaccinations are net-positive (since we know their impact on disease prevalance, and know how much suffering there can be associated with vaccinatable diseases). So if we start with a prior that vaccinations are evil, we quickly update to the belief that vaccinations are good based on the strength of the evidence. This is why I phrased the section in terms of prior-setting instead of evidence, even though I'm a li... (read more)

Thanks for the feedback Raemon!

Concrete Concerns

I'd like to see ["when predators are removed from a system, a default thing that seems to happen is that death-by-predator is replaced by death-by-starvation" and "how do you do population control without hunting?"] at least touched on in wild-animal-suffering pieces

I'd like to see those talked about too! The reason I didn't is I really don't have any insights on how to do population control without hunting, or on which specific interventions for reducing wild animal s... (read more)

Why do you think we should be more worried about reading fiction? Associated addictiveness, time consumption, escapism?

Possible low-hanging fruit: name tags.

What I'm taking away from this is that if (i) it is possible for child universes to be created from parent universes, and if (ii) the "fertility" of a child universe is positively correlated with that of its parent universe, then we should expect to live in a universe which will create lots of fertile child universes, whether this is accomplished through a natural process or as you suggest through inhabitants of the universe creating fertile child universes artificially.

I think that's a cool concept, and I wrote a quick Python script f... (read more)

Essentially, I read this as an attempt at continental philosophy rather than analytic philosophy, and I don't find continental-style work very interesting or useful. I believe you that the post is meaningful and thoughtful, but the costs of time or effort to understand the meanings or thoughts you're driving at are too high for me at least. I think trying to lay things out in a more organized and explicit manner would be helpful for your readers and possibly for you in developing these thoughts.

I don't want to get too precise about answerin... (read more)

I'm downvoting this post because I don't understand it even after your reply above, and the amount of negative karma currently on the post indicates to me that it's probably not my fault. It's possible to write a poetic and meaningful post about a topic and pleasant when someone has done so well, but I think you're better off first trying to state explicitly whatever you're trying to state to make sure the ideas are fundamentally plausible. I'm skeptical that meditations on a topic of this character are actually helpful to truth-seeking, but I might be typical-minding you.

I'm downvoting this because it appears to be a low-effort post which doesn't contribute or synthesize any interesting ideas. Prime Intellect is the novel that first comes to mind as discussing some of what you're talking about, but several chapters are very disturbing, and there's probably better examples out there. If you have Netflix, San Junipero (Season 3 Episode 4) of Black Mirror is fantastic and very relevant.

I like this post's brevity, its usefulness, and the nice call-to-action at the end.

I found the last six paragraphs of this piece extremely inspiring, to the extent that I think it nonnegligably raised the likelihood that I'll be taking "exceptional action" myself. I didn't personally connect much with the first part, though it was interesting. Did you used to want to want your reaction to idiocy be “'how can I help'”, even when it wasn't?

The case against "geospermia" here is vastly overstated: there's been a lot of research over the past decade or two establishing very plausible pathways for terrestrial abiogensis. If you're interested, read through some work coming out of Jack Szostak's lab (there's a recent review article here). I'm not as familiar with the literature on prebiotic chemistry as I am with the literature on protocell formation, but I know we've found amino acids on meteorites, and it wouldn't be surprising if they and perhaps som... (read more)

Have a look at 80K's (very brief) career profile for party politics. My rough sense is that efective altruists generally agree that pursuing elected office can be a very high-impact career path for individuals particularly well-suited to it, but think that even with an exceptional candidate succeeding is very difficult.

Upvoted mostly for surprising examples about obstetrics and CF treatment and for a cool choice of topic. I think your question, "when is one like the doctors saving CF patients and when is one like the doctors doing super-radical mastectomies?" is an important one to ask, and distinct from questions about modest epistomology.

Say there is a set $A$ of available actions of which a subset $A^{\prime }\subset A$ have been studied intensively enough that their utility is known with high degree of certainty, but that the utility of the other available actions in $A$ is un... (read more),,,,,,

I don't have much of a thoughtful opinion on the question at hand yet (though I have some questions below), but I wanted to express a deep appreciation for your use of detail elements: it really helps readability!

One concern I would want to see addressed is an estimation of negative effects of a "brain drain" on regional economies- if a focused high-skilled immigration policy has the potential to exacerbate global poverty, the argument that it has a positive impact on the far future needs to be very compelling. So would these economic costs ... (read more)

Muting the self-critical brain loop (and thanks for that terminology!) is something I'm very interested in. Have you investigated vegan alternatives to fish oil at all?

At what age do you all think people have the greatest moral status? I'm tempted to say that young children (maybe aged 2-10 or so) are more important than adolescents, adults, or infants, but don't have any particularly strong arguments for why that might be the case.