linkhyrule5

Replying toMIRI announces new "Death With Dignity" strategy

MIRI announces new "Death With Dignity" strategy

Suppose they don't? I have at least one that AFAICT doesn't do anything worse than take researchers/resources away from AI alignment in most bad-ends and even in the worst case scenario "just" generates a paperclipper anyway. Which, to be clear, is bad, but not any worse than the current timeline.

(Namely, actual literal time travel and outcome pumps. There is some reason to believe that an outcome pump with a sufficiently short time horizon is easier to safely get hypercompute out of than an AGI, and that a "time machine" that moves an electron back a microsecond is at least energetically within bounds of near-term technology.

You are welcome to complain that time travel is completely incoherent if you like; I'm not exactly convinced myself. But so far, the laws of physics have avoided actually banning CTCs outright.)

-9

Replying toNo Really, Why Aren't Rationalists Winning?

linkhyrule56y

No Really, Why Aren't Rationalists Winning?

What I meant by #2 is “a crowd of people who are trying to be more X, but who, currently, aren’t any more X than you (or indeed very X at all, in the grand scheme of things)”, not that they’re already very X but are trying to be even more X.

Fair. Nevertheless, if the average of the group is around my own level, that's good enough for me if they're also actively trying. (Pretty much by definition of the average, really...)

Empirically, it seems rather hard, in fact.

Well, either that, or a whole lot of people seem to have some reason for pretending not to be able

linkhyrule56y

No Really, Why Aren't Rationalists Winning?

Actually, no, I explicitly want both 1 and 2. Merely being more X than me doesn't help me nearly as much as being both more X and also always on the lookout for ways to be even more X, because they can give me pointers and keep up with me when I catch up.

And sure, 3 is indeed what often happens.

... First of all, part of the whole point of all of this is to be able to do things that often fail, and succeed at them anyway; being able to do the difficult is something of prerequisite to doing the impossible.

Secondly, all shounen quips aside, it's actually not that... (read more)

Replying toNo Really, Why Aren't Rationalists Winning?

linkhyrule56y

No Really, Why Aren't Rationalists Winning?

The thing is -- and here I disagree with your initial comment thread as well -- peer pressure is useful. It is spectacularly useful and spectacularly powerful.

How can I make myself a more X person, for almost any value of X, even values that we would assume entirely inherent or immutable? Find a crowd of X people that are trying to be more X, shove myself in the middle, and stay there. If I want to be a better rationalist, I want friends that are better rationalists than me. If I want to be a better forecaster, I want friends that are better forecasters than me. If I want to be a... (read more)

Replying toIncorrect hypotheses point to correct observations

linkhyrule56y

Incorrect hypotheses point to correct observations

That, and the fact that when making decisions, it's *really important* to have non-subjective reasons -- or if you have subjective reasons, you still have objective reasons why they matter, like "if I don't like someone on a personal level, I really shouldn't spend the rest of my life with them" in dating.

So people are used to a mode of thought where a subjective opinion means "you're not done explaining"/"you haven't spent enough mental effort on the problem," and they engage the -- honestly, very productive, very healthy -- same mechanisms they use when justifying a command decision. It just happens to be mis-applied in this case.

Replying toJeff Hawkins on neuromorphic AGI within 20 years

linkhyrule57y

Jeff Hawkins on neuromorphic AGI within 20 years

I'd like to point out that technically speaking, basically all neural nets are running the exact same code: "take one giant matrix, multiply it by your input vector; run an elementwise function on the result vector; pass it to the next stage that does the exact same thing." So part 1 shouldn't surprise us too much; what learns and adapts and is specialized in a neural net isn't the overall architecture or logic, but just the actual individual weights and whatnot.

Well, it *does* tell us that we might be overthinking things somewhat -- that there might be One True Architecture for basically every task, instead of using LSTM's for video and CNNs for individual pictures and so on and so forth -- but it's not something that I can't see adding up to normality pretty easily.

Replying toRealism about rationality

linkhyrule57y

Realism about rationality

I was kind of iffy about this post until the last point, which immediately stood out to me as something I vehemently disagree with. Whether or not humans naturally have values or are consistent is irrelevant -- that which is not required will happen only at random and thus tend not to happen at all, and so if you aren't very very careful to actually make sure you're working in a particular coherent direction, you're probably not working nearly as efficiently as you could be and may in fact be running in circles without noticing.

Replying toLearning strategies and the Pokemon league parable

linkhyrule58y

Learning strategies and the Pokemon league parable

As someone who does a whole lot of pull-based learning, I'm going to chime in and say that using it as your main method of learning is probably not the best idea. tl;dr: Learning on the job is powerful, but it overfits by nature; while there's probably more than a little confirmation bias from us ivory tower types, it's almost certainly drowned out by "everything comes back to math and logic" and "the truth is all of a piece".

There is a fairly natural divide, IMO, between "engineering fields" and "theoretical fields" - fields that are directly aimed at solving actual problems, and fields that are more about exploring what is possible and... (read 355 more words →)

Replying toHubris, Pride, and Arrogance

linkhyrule58y

Hubris, Pride, and Arrogance

All of your advice seems designed for a longer post published outside LW. None of them seem appropriate for a ~1k word short published in the same place as and three days after both the last chapter of Inadequate Equilibria and "Hero Licensing," both of which I mention in the text.

With the partial exception of the first, but I have been using "linkhyrule5" as an alias and "link" as a nickname for the better part of two decades now, and have not been led to believe that it was particularly hard to decypher. Illusion of transparency, yes, but also evidence to the contrary.

Replying toHubris, Pride, and Arrogance

linkhyrule58y

Hubris, Pride, and Arrogance

A final note, a postscript that doesn't belong in the main article:

The correct word for the final concept is not "arrogance," because arrogance has, as I note in the first sentence, long since been conflated with the other two, with "hubris" and "pride". It is, nonetheless, what I believe many people mean, when they say "arrogance", and so it is the word I use here. And because it is something to be discarded, its linguistic affinity to "hubris" and "pride" mean those related concepts are thrown out with the bathwater.

A better word for the last concept, for "the state of being in the habit of mockery", would be useful - though not for this particular point.

Hubris, Pride, and Arrogance

linkhyrule5

ITT: link tries to distinguish between three often conflated (and highly correlated) states of mind, because the distinction is Important.

First of all, let me define my terms.

Hubris, I'm using entirely in its original context. The word comes from Ancient Greece; Google defines it as "excessive pride toward or defiance of the gods" - the state of daring to do - or even to attempt - that which should be the exclusive province of divinity. It is the sin of Icarus, who tried to touch the sun and so melted his wax wings; of Prometheus, who stole the heavenly fire from Zeus himself; of Arachne, who was in fact a better weaver... (read 1044 more words →)

October Monthly Bragging Thread

linkhyrule5

12y

Since it had a decent amount of traffic until a good two weeks into September (and I thought it was a good idea), I'm reviving this thread.

Joshua_Blaine:

In an attempt to encourage more people to actually do awesome things (a la instrumental rationality), I am proposing a new monthly thread (can be changed to bi-weekly, should that be demanded). Your job, should you choose to accept it, is to comment on this thread explaining the most awesome thing you've done this month. You may be as blatantly proud of you self as you feel. You may unabashedly consider yourself the coolest freaking person ever because of that awesome thing you're dying

... (read more)

Amplituhedron?

linkhyrule5

12y

I recently ran across a rather interesting result while browsing the Internet:

Physics Discover Geometry Underlying Particle Physics

Physicists have discovered a jewel-like geometric object that dramatically simplifies calculations of particle interactions and challenges the notion that space and time are fundamental components of reality.
“This is completely new and very much simpler than anything that has been done before,” said Andrew Hodges, a mathematical physicist at Oxford University who has been following the work.
The revelation that particle interactions, the most basic events in nature, may be consequences of geometry significantly advances a decades-long effort to reformulate quantum field theory, the body of laws describing elementary particles and their

linkhyrule5

12y

While figuring out my error in my solution to the Ultimate Newcomb's Problem, I ran across this (distinct) reformulation that helped me distinguish between what I was doing and what the problem was actually asking.

... but that being said, I'm not sure if my answer to the reformulation is correct either.

The question, cleaned for Discussion, looks like this:

You approach the boxes and lottery, which are exactly as in the UNP. Before reaching it, you come to sign with a flashing red light. The sign reads: "INDEPENDENT SCENARIO BEGIN."

Omega, who has predicted that you will be confused, shows up to explain: "This is considered an artificially independent experiment. Your algorithm for solving this... (read 152 more words →)

The Empty White Room: Surreal Utilities

linkhyrule5

13y

This article was composed after reading Torture vs. Dust Specks and Circular Altruism, at which point I noticed that I was confused.

Both posts deal with versions of the sacred-values effect, where one value is considered "sacred" and cannot be traded for a "secular" value, no matter the ratio. In effect, the sacred value has infinite utility relative to the secular value.

This is, of course, silly. We live in a scarce world with scarce resources; generally, a secular utilon can be used to purchase sacred ones - giving money to charity to save lives, sending cheap laptops to poor regions to improve their standard of education.

Which implies that the entire idea of "tiers"... (read 2246 more words →)

125

LESSWRONG
LW

LESSWRONG
LW

The Empty White Room: Surreal Utilities

October Monthly Bragging Thread

Amplituhedron?

Hubris, Pride, and Arrogance

linkhyrule5

Hubris, Pride, and Arrogance

October Monthly Bragging Thread

Amplituhedron?

The Interrupted Ultimate Newcomb's Problem

The Empty White Room: Surreal Utilities

linkhyrule5

The Empty White Room: Surreal Utilities

October Monthly Bragging Thread

Amplituhedron?

Hubris, Pride, and Arrogance

linkhyrule5

Hubris, Pride, and Arrogance

October Monthly Bragging Thread

Amplituhedron?

The Interrupted Ultimate Newcomb's Problem

The Empty White Room: Surreal Utilities