All of R S's Comments + Replies

These are very good 

When you are stuck, make explicit note of what feels difficult about the situation, and brainstorm ways of dealing with those difficulties.

Asking "This is impossible. Why exactly is it impossible?

These are very good 

When you are stuck, make explicit note of what feels difficult about the situation, and brainstorm ways of dealing with those difficulties.

Asking "This is impossible. Why exactly is it impossible?

I wonder how much worse is every incremental year of this is as a % of all suffering experienced in this way throughout history

To my mind it will likely decrease and disappear slowly at first and then all at once as alternatives get better and cheaper

But I wonder if it's at all time high capacity and it every incremental year or 10 years of it is some large % of total suffering caused in this way

This would be way easier to reason about with an example 

I feel like you're probably talking about some specific situation but without that it's very unclear 

I always wondered if other people understood this 

I've experienced this at work and it's just one of those horrible things where I feel so lonely due to being unable to explain it to people (in a politically correct way) 

Like I don't hate the guy who would always pull his sword on me 

Because I deeply understand him because I was closer to him in the past 

And my father was him 

But also I can't work with that guy and do my best work

I think people focus too much on "would US AGI be safer than China" and not as much on "how much safer"

In the sense that US has 15% pdoom and China has 22%, this notion that everyone needs to get onboard and help US win with full effort could be bad

Could be used (and arguably is currently being used) to be even LESS safe, and empower an authoritarian mercantilist behemoth state, and possibly invade other countries for resources 

And in general massively increase and accelerate pdoom simply on the idea that our pdoom is lower than theirs 

I agree with this although it makes me think about company culture 

There is huge emergent value to some of the.. let's call them "softer" communication approaches 

It becomes possible to get out of random suboptimal Nash equilibriums almost immediately 

People can give more to each other, and better receive feedback 

But I think the only way to do this is by having the type of people who already think in those terms and prefer them 

There's not a lot you can do to enforce it 

But it's still a thing, and in my opinion it's still a t... (read more)

I'm getting strong DarqqWolf vibes to this whole saga

Although I've been that guy like 15 yrs ago, so I don't fault him for it that much

And at least he's pushing a fairly novel idea and taking it seriously

Everyone is more likely to move to cities 

I vaguely remember that some physicist calculated that the density of everything you want increases by 15% every time a city doubles in size 

So there's essentially a gravitational pull to cities 

Not unlike how (unconstrained by gravity) sea creatures continue to grow in mass because it's more heat energy efficient due to the difference in scaling of volume to surface area

I agree with this insofar as this has always been my default / 60% case

Selfishly I also hope this is how it plays out (for sake of my career)

I also believe that it is the mainstream view 

But independently I think there's a 20 to 30% chance that this is it, singularity hits very soon 

And I have to be prepared for that

Yeah I like that approach 

Part of it's probably that I work very long hours often 7 days a week (blah blah stash money before ASI kills my differentiator)

The biggest thing is not having a goal of being able to prove a solution to myself 

Like stop the search early basically

Don't need to formalize or document everything or remember every finding

I think most of the time the brain actually does a pretty good job of gradually solving problems over time without conscious thought 

We don't think of it as thought because it's not conscious or subtitl... (read more)

I basically discovered the same form of thinking after I learned the concept of amplification and distillation 

The long-term results of this was severe OCD that took me 1.5-2 years to cut back

This is not to say that it's a bad idea, or a bad idea for everyone 

But it's a very, very bad idea for some people 

Basically I would spend so many hours every day just thinking, stuck in thought loops, stuck trying to gain some value out of generalizing 

Trying to compress mental models that are impossible to learn implicitly into simplified models/... (read more)