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1 Introduction
Crosspost from my blog.
A beetle lay crushed in the dirt,
Its carapace cracked, torn, and hurt.
It twitched in despair,
Gasping for air —
A world unaware of its hurt.
(I think this might be one of my most important articles so I’d really appreciate if you could like, share, and restack it—thanks! Also, when I scheduled this article to be released, I did not know it was April 1. Really, seriously, this is not an April fools day post.)
Imagine we discovered that the world was filled with tiny worlds that we were constantly destroying, akin to the world in Horton Hears a Who. Every second, normal actions had extreme impacts on millions of beings just as intelligent and sentient as us. In such a world, given the sheer numerosity of...
Humans display a bias called scope neglect. Because we can’t intuitively grok how much larger some big numbers are than others, we have a tendency to treat big numbers all the same. People will pay as much to save 2,000 birds as 20,000 and 200,000 birds.
This is a deeply misleading characterization of that study.
Hey Everyone,
It is with a sense of... considerable cognitive dissonance that I am letting you all know about a significant development for the future trajectory of LessWrong. After extensive internal deliberation, projections of financial runways, and what I can only describe as a series of profoundly unexpected coordination challenges, the Lightcone Infrastructure team has agreed in principle to the acquisition of LessWrong by EA.
I assure you, nothing about how LessWrong operates on a day to day level will change. I have always cared deeply about the robustness and integrity of our institutions, and I am fully aligned with our stakeholders at EA.
To be honest, the key thing that EA brings to the table is money and talent. While the recent layoffs in EAs broader industry have been...
A few months ago, I accidentally used France as an example of a small country that it wouldn't be that catastrophic for AIs to take over, while giving a talk in France 😬
Epistemic status: Using UDT as a case study for the tools developed in my meta-theory of rationality sequence so far, which means all previous posts are prerequisites. This post is the result of conversations with many people at the CMU agent foundations conference, including particularly Daniel A. Herrmann, Ayden Mohensi, Scott Garrabrant, and Abram Demski. I am a bit of an outsider to the development of UDT and logical induction, though I've worked on pretty closely related things.
I'd like to discuss the limits of consistency as an optimality standard for rational agents. A lot of fascinating discourse and useful techniques have been built around it, but I think that it can be in tension with learning at the extremes. Updateless decision theory (UDT) is one of those...
...At this point, someone sufficiently MIRI-brained might start to think about (something equivalent to) Tegmark's level 4 mathematical multiverse, where such agents might theoretically outperform others. Personally, I see no direct reason to believe in the mathematical multiverse as a real object, and I think this might be a case of the mind projection fallacy - computational multiverses are something that agents reason about in order to succeed in the real universe[3]. Even if a mathematical multiverse does exist (I can't rule it out) and we can somehow le
After ~3 years as the ACX Meetup Czar, I've decided to resign from my position, and I intend to scale back my work with the LessWrong community as well. While this transition is not without some sadness, I'm excited for my next project.
I'm the Meetup Czar of the new Fewerstupidmistakesity community.
We're calling it Fewerstupidmistakesity because people get confused about what "Rationality" means, and this would create less confusion. It would be a stupid mistake to name your philosophical movement something very similar to an existing movement that's somewhat related but not quite the same thing. You'd spend years with people confusing the two.
What's Fewerstupidmistakesity about? It's about making fewer stupid mistakes, ideally down to zero such stupid mistakes. Turns out, human brains have lots of scientifically proven...
I think that rationalists should consider taking more showers.
As Eliezer Yudkowsky once said, boredom makes us human. The childhoods of exceptional people often include excessive boredom as a trait that helped cultivate their genius:
A common theme in the biographies is that the area of study which would eventually give them fame came to them almost like a wild hallucination induced by overdosing on boredom. They would be overcome by an obsession arising from within.
Unfortunately, most people don't like boredom, and we now have little metal boxes and big metal boxes filled with bright displays that help distract us all the time, but there is still an effective way to induce boredom in a modern population: showering.
When you shower (or bathe, that also works), you usually are cut...
Strong disagree. This is an ineffective way to create boredom. Showers are overly stimulating, with horrible changes in temperature, the sensation of water assaulting you nonstop, and requiring laborious motions to do the bare minimum of scrubbing required to make society not mad at you. A much better way to be bored is to go on a walk outside or lift weights at the gym or listen to me talk about my data cleaning issues
1Introduction
Decision theory is about how to behave rationally under conditions of uncertainty, especially if this uncertainty involves being acausally blackmailed and/or gaslit by alien superintelligent basilisks.
Decision theory has found numerous practical applications, including proving the existence of God and generating endless LessWrong comments since the beginning of time.
However, despite the apparent simplicity of "just choose the best action", no comprehensive decision theory that resolves all decision theory dilemmas has yet been formalized. This paper at long last resolves this dilemma, by introducing a new decision theory: VDT.
Decision theory problems and existing theories
Some common existing decision theories are:
- Causal Decision Theory (CDT): select the action that *causes* the best outcome.
- Evidential Decision Theory (EDT): select the action that you would be happiest to learn that you had taken.
- Functional Decision Theory
I find this hilarious, but also a little scary. As in, I don't base my choices/morality off of what an AI says, but see in this article a possibility that I could be convinced to do so. It also makes me wonder, since LLM's are basically curated repositories of most everything that humans have written, if the true decision theory is just "do what most humans would do in this situation".
PDF version. berkeleygenomics.org. Twitter thread. (Bluesky copy.)
Summary
The world will soon use human germline genomic engineering technology. The benefits will be enormous: Our children will be long-lived, will have strong and diverse capacities, and will be halfway to the end of all illness.
To quickly bring about this world and make it a good one, it has to be a world that is beneficial, or at least acceptable, to a great majority of people. What laws would make this world beneficial to most, and acceptable to approximately all? We'll have to chew on this question ongoingly.
Genomic Liberty is a proposal for one overarching principle, among others, to guide public policy and legislation around germline engineering. It asserts:
Parents have the right to freely choose the genomes of their children.
If upheld,...
I think the frames in which you are looking at this are just completely wrong. We aren't really talking about "decisions about an individuals' reproduction". We are talking about how a parent can treat their child. This is something that is already highly regulated by the state, CPS is a thing, and it is good that it is a thing. There may be debates to be had about whether CPS has gone too far on certain issues, but there is a core sort of evil that CPS exists to address, and that it is good for the state to address. And blinding your child is a very core ...
In addition to money, education, careers, and internal organs, citizens of wealthy countries have an additional valuable resource they could direct to effective causes: their hands in marriage, which can be effectively allocated in one of two ways.
For one, professionals are usually much more impactful doing their work in wealthy countries. Otherwise promising EAs in South Sudan have little chance to make a significant impact on existential risks, animal welfare, or even global poverty. The immigration process is difficult and often rejects or holds up good...
