All of Maelstrom's Comments + Replies
Epistemic status: half joking, but also half serious.
Warning: I totally wrote this.
Practical Rationality in John Carpenter’s The Thing: A Case Study
John Carpenter's The Thing (1982) is a masterclass in practical rationality, a cornerstone of effective decision-making under uncertainty—a concept deeply valued by the LessWrong community. The film’s narrative hinges on a group of Antarctic researchers encountering a shape-shifting alien capable of perfectly imitating its hosts, forcing them to confront dire stakes with limited information. Their survival depe...
One needs only to read 4 or so papers on category theory applied to AI to understand the problem. None of them share a common foundation on what type of constructions to use or formalize in category theory. The core issue is that category theory is a general language for all of mathematics, and as commonly used just exponentially increase the search space for useful mathematical ideas.
I want to be wrong about this, but I have yet to find category theory uniquely useful outside of some subdomains of pure math.
"That is, where are the Matt Levines of, say, chemistry or drug development1,"
You are looking for Derek Lowe's "In the pipeline." It appears on hacker news occasionally.
The crux of these types of arguments seems to be conflating the provable safety of an agent in a system with the expectation of absolute safety. In my experience, this is the norm, not the exception, and needs to be explicitly addressed.
In agreement with what you posted above, I think it is formally trivial to construct a scenario in which a pedestrian jumps in front of a car, making it provably impossible for a vehicle to stop in time to avoid a collision using high school physics.
Likewise, I have the intuition that AI safety, in general, should hav...
I think it is very unclear that we want fewer 'maladaptive' people in the world in the sense that we can measure with personality traits such as the big five.
Would reducing the number of outliers in neuroticism also reduce the number of people emotionally invested in X-risk? The downstream results of such a modification do not seem to be clear.
It seems like producing a more homogeneous personality distribution would also reduce the robustness of society.
The core weirdness of this post to me is that the first conditioning on LLM/AI does all the IQ tas... (read more)