All of ryanhelsing's Comments + Replies

Is it generally accepted that an aligned super-intelligence will prevent other super-intelligences from existing?

1apollonianblues
My assumption is that it would do this to prevent other people from making superintelligences that are unaligned. At least Eliezer thinks you need to do this (see bullet point 6 in this post), and I think it generally comes up in conversations people have about pivotal acts. Some people think if you think of an alignment solution that's good and easy to implement, everyone building AGI will use it, and so you won't have to prevent other people from building unaligned AGI, but this seems unrealistic and risky to me.

Even so, how are you to tell that other people think the knowledge you are gathering is valuable and valid? Rather easy, sell your knowledge to others’ benefit.

Knowledge without knowledge of salesmanship is rarely sell-able. On the other hand, not-valueble and invalid knowledge with knowledge of salesmanship is highly sell-able and unfortunately rampant.

This over-exploited surface layer of making something appear more valuable than it really is --  through marketing, advertising, and salesmanship -- enables value to be to be faked. Collectively, we succumb to schemes like this on a daily basis.

3George3d6
I agree, and in so far as avoiding "sales" goes I think it's been very useful for me to have the knowledge just for avoiding people with knowledge of salesmanship. Then again, I'm pretty sure I've avoided "good" things people were trying to "sell" to me in the past just because they seemed to have little knowledge and a lot of knowledge-of-salesmanship.

Thank you so much for writing this!

Some books that have really helped in my understanding of this topic are Self Compassion, Good Morning I love you, and The Gifts of Imperfection

I remember when my therapist first suggested practicing self compassion, I felt like I had discovered something that would benefit me in any situation for the rest of my life. In practice, I often lapse into old self critical habits fairly easily, but when I find myself returning to my practice of self-love consistently, things quickly turn around. I think developing a cons... (read more)

2Charlie Rogers-Smith
I like the piano analogy, in the sense that it seems like self-love is a groove that gets well-trodden and much easier to access on demand. Personally, I did not do any forcing of any kind. It never really felt unnatural or awkward. But I've now heard from a couple of people now that that's how they got started. Happy to, though I'm very busy atm. My email is charlierogerssmith@gmail.com.