All of Teerth Aloke's Comments + Replies

The accelerationist and the doomer souls living in one body apparently. 

Answer by Teerth Aloke-3-5

How about coordinate legal actions to have chatbots banned, like ChatGPT was banned in Italy? Is it possible?

If successful this would weaken the incentive for devealopment of new AI models.

2Bezzi
To be fair, Italy didn't actually ban ChatGPT. They said to OpenAI "Your service does not respect the minimum requirements for the EU privacy law, please change things to be compliant or interrupt the service". They chose to interrupt the service. If I had to venture a malicious interpretation, I'd say they chose to quit the service hoping in a massive backslash from the public along the lines of "who cares about privacy, this thing is too powerful not to use". But every laywer will confirm you that the Italian authority is totally right from a by-the-book interpretation of the privacy law, and I don't expect the public backslash to be so strong to force Italy to rewrite their laws to allow ChatGPT as-is. Anyway, since the EU privacy law (GDPR) is basically the same across all the EU, I would expect similar bans quite soon in other countires.

As per a survey, 7% Nigerian Christians like ISIS. That is another example of this phenomenon.

Some people in this community are thinking out of the box. I fully support this, all options must be on the table.

However, one cannot make universal statements. The efficacy of violent and nonviolent methods depend upon the exact context. If someone believes in an imminent hard takeoff, and gives high credence to Doom, violent activity may be rational.

2Christopher King
Yes, but the criteria still imply that the gap should be ≥ the difference in the other two forecasts.
Answer by Teerth Aloke0-1

In my understanding, this is only possible by rote memorization.

Yes, have you considered any reasonable strategy to provoke a nuclear war, as the worst-case plan to stop AI progress? 

Honestly, some of these arguments are laughable, like the ones about aliens and Everett branches. I don't think that an AI would believe this. 

4CarlJ
What do you think is wrong with the arguments regarding aliens?

Not public data, at least.

Answer by Teerth Aloke03

You are contemplating suicide. Seek help. 

They are looking to China, perhaps, as a new patron. 

We will see in Afghanistan whether banning contraception is one of those viable policies to inflate fertility.

1[anonymous]
Starvation though.  Apparently Afghanistan heavily depends on food imports, provided by mostly western funding.     So the "natural" equilibrium would be famines that kill a chunk of the population, then it gets replaced by the high R factor women, then another famine and so on.  Waves of these things.  Other patrons may support Afghanistan and prevent the famine with food imports, however.

Biowarfare won't kill everyone. Nuclear war won't kill everyone. Anthropogenic global warming won't kill everyone. At worst, these will destroy civilization which, counterintuitively, makes Homo sapiens more likely to survive on the short term (century). The same goes for minor natural disasters like volcanic eruptions.

Natural disasters like giant meteors, or perhaps a gamma ray burst, are unlikely. The last time something like that happened was 66 million years ago. The odds of something similar happening in the next century are on the order of 

... (read more)
2Donald Hobson
Some not totally tiny chance on humans pursuing human extinction using say, advanced nanotech. 

It appears that Microsoft and Google are know in a high-stakes race. That somehow must be increasing the likelihood of catastrophe. 

7the gears to ascension
Most violence isn't. Any Most times an oppressive network in power exists - whether that's the neural network of a domestic abuser or a social network of a cult or an institutional network of a repressive state - the oppressed networks will reply with tit-for-tat (to varying degrees). When that network involves violence, violence will be in the tit-for-tat response. When that network involves ethnic aesthetic prejudice, there will be some ethnic aesthetic prejudice in the tit-for-tat. Defusing the problem requires deescalating and removing both ends of the thing, but also requires recognizing which sides of the network are producing more amplification of the conflict, because demanding the reflecting side deescalate first basically never works. Of course, peer conflicts also exist, but they're rarer than imbalanced conflicts.

The vast majority of chicken would not have existed but for the meat industry. Would you accept that argument?

2Dagon
It's a trickier argument, because there's less evidence that chickens consider their lives worth living, but on the whole, yes.   edit: don't take this too far.  I care about chickens a whole lot less than I care about humans, AND most chicken lives are closer to the line (and the error bars cross it) of "not worth living".  We're nowhere near the repugnant conclusion line for humans, we might be for chickens.  Fortunately for them, they remain delicious.
1Jakub Supeł
no, why?

With God, 9/11 was permitted for Mohammed Atta, Inquisition for medieval Catholics, and so on. With it was permitted the brutal massacres of the Crusaders in the Middle East (against Muslims) and in France against heretics. With Him was permitted the pogroms against Jews in medieval Europe. 

You see the evils of WW2, but what caused the evils of the Thirty Year War, as a part of the European Wars of Religion? What caused evils during the brutal Arab-Islamic conquests?

1Jakub Supeł
Struggle for power between the Habsburgs and France?
2Ben Pace
Would it kill anyone or just disrupt the work? I think a bomb blast that just freaks people out a bit and delays work until such time as another solution can be found, is more justifiable. I don't really know how to imagine the other scenario. What position would I not have any alternative? I would do something else. But I guess I suppose it's a government program protected by the army and nobody can get in or out and I'm somehow let in. I think I would be more likely to publicly set myself on fire or some other sort of costly signal that I believe a moral atrocity is occurring. A coward's way is to decide that everything is to be sacrificed and therefore murdering others is worth it. I don't really know how I got into this situation, it's really a very hard to imagine situation, and I never expect to be in it, I expect to have closed off this route way ahead of time. Like, to be clear, if there's a way for me to prevent myself from being in this situation, then I want to take it. I do think murder is sometimes ethical, but I am very keen to take actions that prevent murder from being on the table. Launching retaliatory nukes is sometimes the right choice, but the primary goal is to remove the ability for nuclear armageddon.  Let me put it like this: if you are ever, ever credibly worried that I might break some basic deontological rule around you, I am willing to accept any reasonable mechanism for us both making ourselves unable of violating that rule. Heck, I'm probably happy to do it unilaterally if you suggest it. It's hard to rule out any action as being something that might be done, the hypothetical is hard to imagine, I expect I'd be vomiting and dizzy and crying and hating myself. But, as I say, I'm very willing to accept mechanisms to take such possibilities "off the table" so that I can still coordinate with others. And I am not accepting of any move toward the "let's bring terrorism onto the table". That would be gravely immoral.
5Ben Pace
You're welcome to make the arguments that you wish for unlikely positions, but I don't believe that agreements or morality should be set aside even if everything is at stake. I mean, what intelligent self-respecting person would ever work with someone who might threaten you with everything they have, if they decide that the stakes are worth it? "I reckon I can get more of what I want if I threaten your family." <- If you think there's a chance someone will say that to you, run away from them. Same goes for anything that goes in the "what I want" category.
2Raemon
Okay, sounds like this was less clear than I'd hoped. I added these paragraphs to the post. Not sure if they quite answer you or Dagon's implied question, but hopefully help a bit:

Ever heard of scorched earth?

3Taran
Usually that's just about denying strategic assets, though: blowing up railroads, collapsing mine shafts, that sort of thing.  Blowing up the museums and opera houses is pointless, because the enemy can't get any war benefit by capturing them.  All it does is waste your own explosives, which you'd rather use to blow up the enemy.  Scorched earth practiced by attackers, on the other hand, tends to be more indiscriminate: contrast the state of Novgorod post-WW2 with that of the towns west of it, or the treatment of rice fields by North Vietnamese vs. Americans during the Vietnam war.
2antonomon
I have not look at India specifically, I was thinking more of Japan, China and South Korea. Would be interesting to find out though. 

To what extent can these trends be observed in other countries, I wonder? 

4Aloekine
This unfortunately is also from more of a pre-social media period than I would hope for, but Putnam’s other book (really a collection of essays by people more knowledgable on specific countries) Democracies in Flux from 2002 (https://academic.oup.com/book/8126) looks at similar trends across 8 countries: Australia, France, Germany, Great Britain, Japan, Spain, Sweden, and the United States. To be clear, this is most focused on the aspects of social capital one would expect to be related to the functioning of democracy like trust and institutional memberships. Their overall findings are that the declines seen in the US are less uniformly reflected elsewhere than I predicted prior to reading it, and that it’s also less clear than I predicted what relationship this has to functioning of democracy (again, this is most focused on measures of social capital most plausibly related to democracy). Overall, I recall coming away thinking imputing trends from the US onto other countries might paint an overly bleak picture of social capital trends, and that the causal link from declining social capital to effects on democracy was less certain than I previously thought. That isn’t to say things are going wonderfully everywhere else, just that anchoring to the US may paint an overly bleak picture. I don’t want to wholesale endorse this discussion of the book since it’s been a year or two since I read the original, but this seems like a reasonable summary I found for folks who are curious: https://www.beyondintractability.org/bksum/putnam-democracies. I’d be curious to see any research folks have that take a comparative lens that are more recent, or that more specially focus on the social/emotional impacts more!
5antonomon
Seems to be the same in many other countries, actually. In East Asia, these trends are especially prevalent. 

Dispelling the one-sided narrative is necessary to build a consensus for peace negotiations

What is your assessment of reports of Russian atrocities against Ukrainian civilians? (I have come to doubt a lot of what I hear in the news)

Perhaps a nuclear war today would reduce the possibility of human extinction within this century. It appears that AGI is close, without substantial progress in AI Safety. A nuclear war, would, I believe cause a major slowdown in AI progress, increasing the probability of getting an aligned AI at the end. 

1CraigMichael
I enjoyed reading this silver-lining comment. :)

I am an Indian, do you think migrating Northwards should be a priority?

1mukashi
It would be for me 

True, and income distribution is far less unequal. 

Realistically, giving is insufficient for even a modest redistribution of wealth. Government intervention is and has been far more effective in this aspect.

4jefftk
I don't disagree? I'm strongly in favor of government redistribution, to the extent that we can do it without breaking this cycle of improvement.

It will be essentially a Secular Judaism, where the scriptures only speak of the common values to be achieved by human effort, and not about future miracles. It will be a vision that some secularized Rabbis may even agree to. 

My intuition was that the prior probability of head and tails hypotheses should be 50% each. Since existence is not evidence to update in favour of any of these theories, being 100% likely under both, we end up with the 1:1 odds ratio.

A coordination committee with a clear realistic understanding will be required otherwise radicals will accept no proposal. (Case in point: Indian farmer's ongoing protest)

Answer by Teerth Aloke120

But what will be the demand? Without a clear demand, the strike will fail.

1tcelferact
I'm guessing students would probably demand goals in line with IPCC recommendations.
Answer by Teerth Aloke00

I don't think that will be necessary.

Indians mostly hate China, and this feeling is almost universal in the dominant party.

Hello fellow Indian.

Not just Islam. It was illegal in India 3 years back. Also, Christian majority Barbados, Antigua, Camroon, Burundi, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Namibia and a few other African countries ban homosexuality. 

2jeronimo196
I never said it was just Islam. But you are right - it is not Christians, but rather white people, that are held to a higher standard in this regard (at least by USA liberals).

I got the idea. I would also update to a very short timeline (4-5 years) in the absence of slowdown in dense-network parameter growth l, and performance following the scaling trend. And I was pretty scared when GPT-3 was released. As many here, I was expected further growth in that direction very soon which did not happen. So, I am less scared now.

What will be your new median? (If you observe 32 trillion parameter model in 2023)

4Daniel Kokotajlo
Hard to say, it depends a lot on the rest of the details. If the performance is as good as the scaling trends would predict, it'll be almost human-level at text prediction and multiple choice questions on diverse topics and so forth. After fine-tuning it would probably be a beast. I suppose I'd update my 50% mark to, like, 2027 or so? IDK.

I consider the absence of industrial literacy a big problem. 

Not living with parents as adults is increasingly common in India due to the expansion of higher education. 

I will just like to note one detail, while parallel first cousin marriage is 'prohibited' in South India, nearly a tenth of cousin marriages are of this category.

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