A fun index of the concepts from The Sequences in the form of several litanies. These litanies are neither a guide nor an introduction to The Way of Rationality because rationality is an art not a series of precipes. Rather, these litanies serve as a tool; for meditating on, for...
An Essay[1] PART I: Conjecture on The Development of Proto-Communication in Response to Complex Environmental Factors[2] I was walking with my Sue when I noticed a peculiar aspect of her nature: a dog is a stochastic agent. When you simply let the dog walk, she finds a random path, turning...
Epistemic Status: I think the dilemma as outlined in Section 1 follows from well-established ideas about Astronomical Waste. However, given that I have not seen it anywhere before I might have made some oversight I am unaware of. You don't know what you don't know but maybe someone on LessWrong...
A fun index of the concepts from The Sequences in the form of several litanies. These litanies are neither a guide nor an introduction to The Way of Rationality because rationality is an art not a series of precipes. Rather, these litanies serve as a tool; for meditating on, for connecting ideas; or for preparing for The Ritual Of Changing One’s Mind. For some this may be a useful exercise, for others not. If they help you, Enjoy!
Litany On Litanies
Litany Against Bias
Litany For Communication
Litany Against Politics
Litany For Inquiry
Litany For Letting Go
Litany For Belief
Litany Against The Dark
Litany For Seeing
Litany For Curiosity
Litany For Minds
I will use these litanies to grow... (read 1311 more words →)
I only skimmed that category but if I'm not mistaken the kind of systems I describe in the piece are special cases of times when the boundary between defining agents and one agent and another is unclear/pivotal/insightful etc.
Hi, nim!
Thanks for commenting : )
Yes, exactly I used speech-to-text but actually the chatGPT speech-to-text software on their app because I like the UI better and I think it performs better too. Yeah, the heal heel thing miffed me slightly but I think it is a fun artifact since it doesn't actually change the meaning.
Well for one I didn't prompt for a whole essay. In one chat I lightly edited the snippets from my walk, then I took the final essay generated from another chat about the Black Chess Box to synthesise into the Sidebar and similarly for a different conversation again for part 2 and then finally, which is where... (read more)
I was walking with my Sue when I noticed a peculiar aspect of her nature: a dog is a stochastic agent. When you simply let the dog walk, she finds a random path, turning at intervals and forming stochastically various outputs—sniffing, peeing, going around to the ground, turning left, sniffing, sniffing back to going straight, head up, head back down, sniffing, turn rear right, rear left, and so on. But then once she finds something, she might do something new and novel. So: find the smell, pee in the vicinity, back to rear left, rear left, rear left,... (read 2239 more words →)
Thank you! Everything was AI generated (and unfiltered) to see how well Gemini could understand ChatGPT's abstractions in a zero-shot environment. But yes I should have edited and contextualised : )
Hmm, I hadn't thought of the implications of chaining the logic behind the superintelligences policy - thanks for highlighting it!
I guess the main aim of the post was to highlight the existence of an opportunity cost to prioritising contemporary beings and how alignment doesn't solve that issue, but I guess there are also some normative claims that this policy could be justified.
Nevertheless, I'm not sure that the paradox necessarily applies to the policy in this scenario. Specifically, I think
>as long as we discover ever vaster possible tomorrows
doesn't hold. The fact that the accessible universe is finite and there is a finite amount of time before heat death means that there is some ultimate possible tomorrow?
Also, I think that sacrifices of the nature described in the post come in discrete steps with potentially large time differences between them allowing you to realise the gains of a particular future before the next sacrifice if that makes sense.
Epistemic Status: I think the dilemma as outlined in Section 1 follows from well-established ideas about Astronomical Waste. However, given that I have not seen it anywhere before I might have made some oversight I am unaware of. You don't know what you don't know but maybe someone on LessWrong does.
UPDATE: I have found a reference to this scenario as a footnote in Kaj Sotala's Chapter in "Artificial Intelligence Safety and Security" on Disjunctive Scenarios of Catastrophic AI Risk on page 318:
... (read 1192 more words →)"An AI which was simply seeking to maximize human happiness in general might be willing to sacrifice all currently living humans, if it thought that this allowed it to create more