All of Pee Doom's Comments + Replies
A medieval peasant would very much disagree with that sentence, if they were suddenly thrust into a modern grocery store. I think they would say the physical reality around them changed to a pretty magical-seeming degree.
They would still understand the concept of paying money for food. The grocery store is pretty amazing but it's fundamentally the same transaction as the village market. I think the burden of proof is on people claiming that money will be 'done away with' because 'post-scarcity', when there will always be economic scarcity. It m...
Nitpicking a particular topic of interest to me:
Power/money/being-the-head-of-OpenAI doesn't do anything post-singularity.
It obviously does?
I am very confused why people make claims in this genre. "When the Singularity happens, this (money, conflict, the problems I'm experiencing) won't be a problem anymore."
This mostly strikes me as magical, far-mode thinking. It's like people have an afterlife-shaped hole after losing religion. The specific, real reality in front of you won't magically suddenly change after an Intelligence Explosion and assuming we're al...
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1I will keep harping on that more people should try starting (public benefit) corporations instead of nonprofits. At least, give it five minutes' thought. Especially if handwaves impact markets something something. This should be in their Overton Window, but it might not be because they automatically assume "doing good => charity => nonprofit". Corporations are the standard procedure for how effective helpful things are done in the world; they are RLHF'd by the need to acquire profit by providing real value to customers, reducing surfacce area for bul...
1My chief guess for why this happens is people don't realize it's an option or understand the distinction, and it isn't in their skillset or area of interest so they don't dig deep enough to find out.
Actually, wow, that "people" sure sounds like I'm talking about someone else. Hi, I personally didn't have the phrase "public benefit corporation" cached in my head and I'm not actually sure what the distinction between that and a nonprofit is. That's not because it's totally irrelevant to my interests either. I've talked with two or three people over the last ...
2The wifi hacking also immediately struck me as reminiscent of paranoid psychosis. Though a significant amount of psychosis-like things are apparently downstream of childhood trauma, including sexual abuse, but I forget the numbers on this.
She could also have some real trauma. Note that it doesn't have to be the thing that is claimed. Once we are in the realm of a mentally ill person's delusions (and I have seen this up close), the sky really is the limit.
I've worried about it's sustainability, but do you think it's been a good path for you?
Cutting out bird and seafood products (ameliatarianism) is definitely more sustainable for me. I'm very confused why you would think it's less sustainable than, uh, 'cold turkey' veganism. "Just avoid chicken/eggs" (since I don't like seafood or the other types of bird meat products) is way easier than "avoid all meat, also milk, also cheese".
Similar for me. I was very suspicious at first that the first message was a Scam and if I clicked I would blow up the website or something tricksy. Then with the second message I thought it might be customized to test my chosen virtue, "resisting social pressure", so I didn't click it.
Did you actually bet the money?
People in MIRI/CFAR/LessWrong ~actively resisted the idea of a marketing push optimized more along dimensions of mass persuadability, for better or worse. One reason is that there is inertia once you've built a mass movement with MoPs who can't dialogue like on this site. My straw model is they think "we just need to produce technical insights and communicate them" and other comms work is an opportunity cost or creates/incentivizes some kind of epistemic trap.
And this is the exact type of statement where I would expect this coincidence to pop up. Both are a reasonable number of days for bureaucracy to take, the large discrepancy between them is required for the complaint in the tweet to happen in the first place, and I would expect the number of days to be very specific rather than a round number.
I agree with this. Although I will note people are claiming it actually took 56 (IIRC) days for them to get back to him.
I think it's an entirely sensible inference in the world where it is true that it was intentional, albeit a highly reductive description of the actual psychological reality of someone who holds those beliefs enough to output such symbols. In that world, he could also be paying lipservice to pander or be trolling.
group homes (in adulthood as a long term situation)
People living together in group homes (as extended families) used to be the norm? The weird thing is how isolated and individualist we've become. I would argue that group houses where individual adults join up together are preserving some aspect of traditional social arrangement where people live closely, but maybe you would argue that this is not the same as an extended family or the lifelong kinship networks of a village.
1Also, when I actually think about what it would be like to have a Plan That I Truly Believe In, it doesn't really seem hard to get it on the desk of The Important Stakeholders (or someone who knows someone who talks to The Important Stakeholders).
I think you can scream a Good Plan from the rooftops and often few will listen. See: Covid in January-February 2020.
Fascinating. Way, way more examples and empirical treatment of rituals would help me understand your case better.
Much appreciated! I am working on a few "case studies" but I should probably add one or a few here already.
Me, sitting on a throne, as your entirely benevolent world dictator. Oh, how did I get there? Someone posted on LessWrong and I followed their blueprint!
The story had me for most of it but I'm pretty disappointed by the very end. Protagonist seems to have unequivocally become the bad guy at that point. I don't think I would be confident enough in my understanding of consciousness to do that until I spent a lot more time understanding the situation, assuming it wasn't a self-defense emergency by that point. I get being angry but remaining in reflexively unthinking action hero mode rather than administering a battery of Turing Tests just seems wildly uncalled for. Maybe it's supposed to read as morally ambiguous, but like many readers here I am biased towards the Drangerian perspective and find the dilemma unsympathetic.
One possible approach to fixing this is to try to get wayyyy more empirical, and try to produce proof-of-concept implementations of various adversaries we are worried we might face in the future. My analogy would be, there’s a world of difference between speculating about the bogey monster and producing a grainy photo of the bogey monster; the second can at least maaaaaybe be discussed with skeptical people, whereas the first cannot (productively) be.
...Anyway, that’s a long-winded way of saying, it seemed to me that it might be useful to implement a treacher
You mentioned a specific Amazon price point that I found surprisingly low and is cheap enough to meaningfully affect strategic plans. The cheapest pasta I've seen is on WebstaurantStore but the shipping doubles the cost to $2/lb approximately. Did you have a link for the $200/year product(s)?
What's the ~$200 food item you saw that would last a person a year, can you link?
(Edit: I see a 30-day container for about $200. It seems to me that $200 buys a month's worth, not a year's worth?)
I consider it collectively important that alignment researchers and their +1s survive, as well as other x-risk researchers and probably other cause areas.
So if there's a 1% yearly risk of nuclear apocalypse
Some think the number is much higher than priors due to current events. You're also not factoring in that that yearly percentage adds up, and a lot of preparations are a one-off action that benefits future you (assuming you don't dig into your backup food).
It felt to me like there's too much for my taste. My impression was that you guys were optimizing for it being about AI content, somewhat related to the % of people involved at Lightcone coworking being AI researchers vs other subjects.
Interesting summary and interpretation of a speech outlining Putin's intentions, "The End of Western Hegemony is INEVITABLE":
...This is a reproduction of my live Twitter summary/translation of Vladimir Putin's speech:
I wish every single person in the West would listen to Putin's speech. Obviously, that won't happen so let me summarise as a professional translator for 10+ years. He states, as he has done from the outset, what his intentions and complaints are in the plainest terms possible.
Setting aside his brief comments on the recent "referendums", he spends
when aggression with conventional weapons greatly endangers Russia's existence
Putin could interpret an attack on its newly annexed territories as "greatly endangering Russia's existence". He seems to be generating rhetoric in that direction.
Russia's state faces an existential threat.
The implication is that attacks on the territories it is annexing are interpretable as an existential threat.
This post explains more, I don't have any other info: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/F7RgpHHDpZYBjZGia/high-schoolers-can-apply-to-the-atlas-fellowship-usd50k
Have you looked at the Atlas Fellowship, btw?
The presence of pathogens in an environment (including the so-called Covid-19 coronavirus [53]) isn't the prime factor whether people become ill.
Oh, huh. How does that explain the Black Plague, smallpox, ebola, HIV?
..."...What do you do with this impossible challenge?
First, we assume that you don't actually say "That's impossible!" and give up a la Luke Skywalker. You haven't run away.
Why not? Maybe you've learned to override the reflex of running away. Or maybe they're going to shoot your daughter if you fail. We suppose that you want to win, not try—that something is at stake that matters to you, even if it's just your own pride. (Pride is an underrated sin.)
Will you call upon the virtue of tsuyoku naritai? But even if you become st
lol no one here said "obtain some Bitcoin"
https://www.statmuse.com/money/ask/bitcoin+price+may+15+2013
Noting that the more real, second-order disaster resulting from Chernobyl may have been less usage of nuclear power (assuming that had an influence on antinuclear sentiment). Likewise, I'm guessing the Challenger disaster had a negative influence on the U.S. space program. Covid lockdowns also have this quality of not tracking the cost-benefit of their continuation. Human reactions to disasters can be worse than the disasters themselves, especially if the costs of those reactions are hidden. I don't know how this translates to AI safety but it merits thought.
Dropping this paper here as what I know to be the canonical text on this subject.
https://longtermrisk.org/files/Multiverse-wide-Cooperation-via-Correlated-Decision-Making.pdf
“He has half the deed done who has made a beginning.”
– Horace
This happens intergenerationally as parents forget to alert their children to the actual reasons for things. Having observed this happen with millenials, I am scared of what we are all collectively missing because older generations literally just forgot to tell us.
What do you think we are missing?
A crucial consideration for why destroying restaurant business is good: factory farming.
Hey Ron, I am working on my own version of this (inspired by this Sequence), and would love to get your advice! Right now I am focusing on crowdfunding via dominant assurance contracts on Ethereum.
How did you / would you verify that someone did something? What are specific examples of that happening for different actions? What kinds of evidence can be provided? I have a fuzzy sense of what this looks like right now. The closest sites I can think of just off the top of my head that involve verification are CommitLock (which I made a successful $1000 commitm...
I am very interested in practicing steelmanning/Ideological Turing Test with people of any skill level. I have only done it once conversationally and it felt great. I'm sure we can find things to disagree about. You can book a call here.
I’ve mentioned previously that I’ve been digging into a pocket of human knowledge in pursuit of explanations for the success of the traditional Chinese businessman. The hope I have is that some of these explanations are directly applicable to my practice.
Here’s my current bet: I think one can get better at trial and error, and that the body of work around instrumental rationality hold some clues as to how you can get better.
I’ve argued that the successful Chinese businessmen are probably the ones who are better at trial a...
Any updates on this in the past six months?
Mati, would you be interested in having a friendly and open (anti-)debate on here (as a new post) about the value of open information, both for life extension purposes and else (such as Facebook group moderation)? I really support the idea of lifelogging for various purposes such as life extension but have a strong disagreement with the general stance of universal access to information as more-or-less always being a public good.
Sure thing. What would you recommend for learning management?
(I count that as an answer to my other recent question too.)
Great post! It's like the "what if an alien took control of you" exercise but feels more playful and game-y. I started a Google doc to plan the month of April from Gurgeh's perspective.
See also: Outside.
Why does CHAI exclude people who don't have a near-perfect GPA? This doesn't seem like a good way to maximize the amount of alignment work being done. High GPA won't save the world and in fact selects for obedience to authority and years of status competition, leading to poor mental health to do work in, decreasing the total amount of cognitive resources being thrown at the problem.
(Hypothesis 1: "Yes, this is first-order bad but the second-order effect is we have one institutionally prestigious organization, and we need to say we have ...
No, there has barely been any testing. I think it's more like 200-1000 cases.
How do we do this without falling into the Crab Bucket problem AKA Heckler's Veto, which is definitely a thing that exists and is exacerbated by these concerns in EA-land? "Don't do risky things" equivocates into "don't do things".