The context is AI safety and naturally you're meant to interpret the bad actor as having access to and using a powerful AI.

Thanks for sharing

I was wondering if something could be designed that's almost as simple as pulling a lever, you can do as many times as you want, and not anywhere near as addictive as ordinary games. And by activating the circuit would strengthen it measurably. My intuition tells me no, but if it is possible some way, I think that would be a game changer

Now I wonder if a video, or a song, etc could do it. Or a writing/reading task. Something low complexity, repeatable, non-addictive, non-time consuming.

You could give it to an alcoholoc at a low price, they could use it 5 minutes a day instead of spending a fortune on therapy. (It's starting to sound like meditation)

I think it's meditation

I agree if their decision was voluntary and is a product of at least some reflection. Sometimes you're mad at them precisely because they sign up for it.

From my perspective, when people make decisions, the decision involves many problems at once at different time scales. Some in the present, others in the future, or in the far future. Even if they calculate consequences correctly, there's an action potential required. From the perspective of a different person, a decision might be simple - do x vs y and it requires little physical energy. But it's not so simple at the level of the neurons. The circuit for making good decisions needs to be sufficiently developed, and the conditions for developing them are relatively rare. 

One condition might be gradual exposure to increasing complexity in the problems that you solve, so that you can draw the appropriate conclusions, extract the lesson at each level of complexity, and develop healthy habits. But most people are faced with the full force of complexity of the world from the day they're born. Imperfect upbringing, parents, environments, social circles.

When people make irrational decisions, in many cases I don't believe it's because they don't know better.

Really appreciate you taking the time to write this. No doubt there's a lot I can learn from reflecting more on this and I will in my own time. I can better understand what you mean now and I definitely agree. It nuances the proper way to propagate information a bit more. Incomplete ideas could be valuable but you'll want to develop it enough that it can be understood from first principles and address sources of misunderstandings. There are features of knowledge communication that make ideas less prone to mutating counter-productively

I think there's room for doubt in that claim but my sense is that most ideas that are thought of are never shared. There's so much that can be improved everywhere and there's no culture nurtured where people speak their mind about it to get the discussion going. It's actually socially awkward to point out points for improvement in things, even if it's cliche to say it would be helpful. As a consequence, the average conversation is predictable and sterile , and improvements aren't implemented even if they're obvious. Improvements don't happen because people don't like to entertain ideas.

Although what I really intended to say in the post is that I regret when people don't speak their ideas because they can't find the perfect way to say it, or they haven't fully thought it through. And for instance in discussions, there's a lot you want to say, and you'd rather take time perfecting the formulation of your thoughts.

You're trying to communicate a complex idea and you know that what you wrote doesn't fully capture everything. I think that there's so much value to putting it out there even in incomplete form and I wish people would do that more, instead of letting it be hidden away.

In terms of mutation, information has more potential to mutate positively when it's shared than when it sits only in your mind.
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"the average conversation is predictable and sterile"  I don't mean this the wrong way, I just couldn't think of another way to put it in 10 seconds

I'm telling you there's no base reality

The simulation is infinitely nested!

I bet you 10 bucks the universe was simulated so I can bet 10 bucks on it (among other things)

You can rarely write a complete representation of any idea and it's more valuable to get bits and pieces of the truth to propagate through society instead of letting it stay in your mind until you can write a perfect and complete representation of it, risking that it never sees the light of day. Information needs to mutate

I imagine that the behavior of strong AI, even narrow AI, is computationally irreducible. In that case would it still be verifiable?