LessWrong 2.0 Reader

I still don’t think I understand this.

The particular words the posting seems to be about are DEI and woke stuff. But Trump is taking a wrecking ball to them, and got elected on a platform to do just that.

I don’t see what the requisite variety stuff has to do with it either. (I think requisite variety is a crock, but that would be another conversation.) When Indiana Jones is confronted with a sword-fighter who performs all manner of dazzlingly fast swordplay, he just draws a gun and shoots him. What value the “variety” of the swordsman’s skills then?

I got an EMG done for my carpal tunnel, and my doctor won't believe that I'm still feeling phantom shocks. If you're experiencing semi-regular shock sensations after your EMG, you're not alone. I was still getting these irregularly scheduled shocks weeks after the test. Or in jargon form, my nervous subsystem in the arm keeps generating evoked responses to an absent but expected stimulus in the form of electric shocks.

For the unknowing ones, EMG (Electromyography) is something they do to you if you misbehave or if you have symptoms of carpal tunnel. By shocking you in specific spots and measuring the electric potential curve at various fixed points along your arm/leg, docs can pattern match you to anything between "You have Olympic-level reflexes" to "I'm sure a piece of wood would have done better." In my case, I'm closer to the Olympian than to the confused taxonomic group of trees. I'm grateful for that.

But if your doctor tells you that you're mistaken, or that "EMG is one of the safest procedures and is not generally known to cause adverse side-effects afterward," know this: at least I believe you more than they do.

well uh....that pastebin seems exceptionally confused in addition to being written by notorious serial rapist and federal informant Lauralei Bailey? let's go through the claims here anyway though just for consistency

• it seems to be implying that i'm "the leader of the cult" or something to that effect? which is an absolutely hilarious claim.
• i have no idea who this "12" that is being referred to is.
• the pastebin seems to be implying that i/"the cult" am protecting/allied with "a cis man raping his way through the west coast trans community" which i am guessing is an extremely confused reference to JD? also a hilarious claim for anyone who actually knows the situation.
• The flowerbynoothername post linked where i confess to having worked with JD was written after i wrote my own callout of JD where i also declared myself a zizian before someone pulled me aside and was like 'it's not very anarchist to put that much weight in one person's perspective' which, fair enough.

LB seems extremely confused about the situation overall and i would not consider her a reliable source of information, which also makes it extremely sus that she seems to have used this extremely confused understanding of the situation to justify defacing that fediverse instance.

If the reasons to leave are too legible, they are either toothless or will be gamed and become too costly to actually enforce, including in injustice and drama. Trivial inconveniences that differentially apply to people that should leave anyway are still effective, but don't have these downsides.

(My own policy is to almost always avoid downvoting precisely when I have a comment to make. Otherwise the vote is all the feedback I have to give, so I'm going to give it rather than metaphorically slash their tires [LW · GW] by staying silent and maintaining a misleading impression about the reception of their post/comment.)

Most importantly, current proposed technical plans are necessary but not sufficient to stop this. Even if the technical side fully succeeds no one knows what to do with that.

I don't think that's quite accurate. In particular, gradual disempowerment is exactly the sort of thing which corrigibility would solve. (At least for "corrigibility" in the sense David and I use the term [LW · GW], and probably Yudkowsky, but not Christiano's sense [LW(p) · GW(p)]; he uses the term to mean a very different thing.)

A general-purpose corrigible AI (in the sense we use the term) is pretty accurately thought-of as an extension of the user. Building and using such an AI is much more like "uplifting" the user than like building an independent agent. It's the cognitive equivalent of gaining prosthetic legs, as opposed to having someone carry you around on a sedan. Another way to state it: a corrigible subsystem acts like it's a part of a larger agent, serving a particular purpose as a component of the larger agent, as opposed to acting like an agent in its own right.

... admittedly corrigibility is still very much in the "conceptual" stage, far from an actual technical plan. But it's at least a technical research direction which would pretty directly address the disempowerment problem.

These considerations also apply to upvotes (to the extent that they do).

propaganda of nick land's idea

wait - are you aware that the texts in question are nick land's? i think it should be pretty clear from the editor's note.

besides, in the first extract, the labels part was entirely incidental - and has literally no import to any of the rest. it was an historical artefact; the meat of the first section was, well, the thing indicated by its title and its text. i definitely see the issue of fixating on labels, now, tho - and i thank you for providing an object lesson.

ideological turing test

the purpose of the idelogical turing test is to represent the opposing views in ways that your opponent would find satisfactory. I have it from reliable sources that Bostrom found the opening paragraphs, until "sun's eventual expansion", satisfactory.

i really cannot shake the feeling that you hadn't read the post to begin with, and that now you are simply scanning it in order to find rebuttals to my comments. your grasp of basic, factual statements seems to falter, to the point of suggesting that my engagement with what purport to be more fundamental points might be a suboptimal allocation of resources.

Re twitter’s profitability, Musk about doubled EBITDA despite revenue halving, i.e. he more than tripled EBITDA margin

https://www.teslarati.com/elon-musk-x-doubled-ebitda-since-2022-takeover-report/amp

Well okay then :)! You giving a disagree-vote makes a lot of sense. Thanks for explaining.

I disagree with basically all of them.

As I see it, the large majority of government employees are neither incompetent nor corrupt, and the Federal government overall works extremely well given all of the tasks that it's asked to do. The president is supposed to execute the will of the legislature according to the law (which he isn't, he's shutting down agencies that Congress has created and subverting other agencies to not do what Congress has instructed them to do). Musk did a bad job of it with Twitter (it's less profitable now than it was when he bought it, last time I checked the data) and it's a bad policy for a new CEO coming in with goals other than "destroy the old system because I think a well functioning system is bad".

Trump is radically reinterpreting the job of the executive branch to include "determine which laws I want to exist and only enforce those", which is a massive expansion of executive power.

If Congress passed laws for all of these things, I think it would be a bad choice, but at least it wouldn't be an unconstitutional coup.