LessWrong 2.0 Reader

When China [LW · GW] quarantines an entire city, you should be afraid of what's in that city.

As long as China exists you should probably spend some time prepping for the end.

True, but the mechanisms that cause people to want to join the military (and elite military units in particular) are in my view in scope for this discussion. What would it look like for the rationalist community to be a thing that many intelligent, highly motivated people aspire to join?

Let me give an unorthodox answer: when you get the chance, go volunteer in a hospice or somewhere people are dying. 

Abstract fear isn't helpful because you cannot plan against an abstract. Understand what you are working against and make it as concrete as possible in your mind. You may still feel fear, but at least it will be tangible and manageable.

This may be a result of selection - the military is a couple of orders of magnitude bigger than the rationalist community, and you heard the best of the best that they have.

To try to understand a bit better: does your pessimism about this come from the hardness of the technical challenge of querying a zillion-particle entity for its objective function? Or does it come from the hardness of the definitional challenge of exhaustively labeling every one of those zillion particles to make sure the demarcation is fully specified? Or is there a reason you think constructing any such demarcation is impossible even in principle? Or something else?

Probably something like the last one, although I think "even in principle" is doing some probably doing something suspicious in that statement. Like, sure, "in principle," you can pretty much construct any demarcation you could possibly imagine, including the Cartesian one, but what I'm trying to say is something like, "all demarcations, by their very nature, exist only in the map, not the territory." Carving reality is an operation that could only make sense within the context of a map, as reality simply is. Your concept of "agent" is defined in terms of other representations that similarly exist only within your world-model; other humans have a similar concept of "agent" because they have a similar representation built from correspondingly similar parts. If an AI is to understand the human notion of "agency," it will need to also understand plenty of other "things" which are also only abstractions or latent variables within our world models, as well as what those variables "point to" [LW · GW] (at least, what variables in the AI's own world model they 'point to,' as by now I hope you're seeing the problem with trying to talk about "things they point to" in external/'objective' reality!).

I think it says two bad thinks about the primary care doctor:

1. They don't think well about treatment evidence. 
2. They don't support their patient with access to they medical services they want. 

Besides taking time to listen and being easy to access those two seems to me like the main things that are important about a primary care doctor. 

If the technology is there, the motivation is presumably missing.

In the days of High Rationalism, the very idea that the sequences would need fixing, or could be fixed by ordinary PhD's [LW · GW] would have been laughable.

If you look at my posting history, you'll see that all posts I've made on LW (two!) are negative toward social media and one calls out recommender systems explicitly. This post has made me reconsider some of my beliefs, thank you.

I realized that, while I have heard Tristan Harris, read The Attention Merchants, and perused other, similar sources, I haven't looked for studies or data to back it all up. It makes sense on a gut level--that these systems can feed carefully curated information to softly steer a brain toward what the algorithm is optimizing for--but without more solid data, I found I can't quite tell if this is real or if it's just "old man yells at cloud."

Subjectively, I've seen friends and family get sucked into social media and change into more toxic versions of themselves. Or maybe they were always assholes, and social media just lent them a specific, hivemind kind of flavor, which triggered my alarms? Hard to say.

Yeah I agree this is a legitimate concern, though it seems like it is definitely possible to make such a demarcation in toy universes (like in the example I gave above). And therefore it ought to be possible in principle to do so in our universe.

To try to understand a bit better: does your pessimism about this come from the hardness of the technical challenge of querying a zillion-particle entity for its objective function? Or does it come from the hardness of the definitional challenge of exhaustively labeling every one of those zillion particles to make sure the demarcation is fully specified? Or is there a reason you think constructing any such demarcation is impossible even in principle? Or something else?

I think the problem with media trust here is backtesting. We can 'go back in time' with the benefit of today's knowledge (especially information about who knew what and when they knew it eg. Fauci's email drop) and evaluate the quality of media for truth, accuracy, and to speculate on intent.

Between legacy media and new media you're going to be stuck wading through a swamp of lies and opinion to get anywhere. Not only is that an excessive amount of work for most people, I've yet to meet anyone that enjoys the permanent uncertainty that process creates.

People want to be handed certainty and truth from trustworthy sources. Those sources no longer exist. They died with the invention of click based monetisation. Those sources have not been replaced with anything comparable (and it's difficult to see how they could be).