LessWrong 2.0 Reader

Now I feel like rationality itself is an infohazard. I mean, rationality itself won't hurt you if you are sufficiently sane, but if you start talking about it, insufficiently sane people will listen, too. And that will have horrible consequences. (And when I try to find a way to navigate around this, such as talking openly only to certifiably sane people, that seems like the totally cultish thing to do.)

There is an alternative way, the other extreme: get more and more rationalists.
If the formed communities do not share the moral inclinations of LW community, those might form some new coordination structures^[1]; if we don't draw from the circles of desperate, those structures will tend to benefit others as well (and, on the other hand, having a big proportion of very unsatisfied people would naturally start a gang or overthrow whatever institutions are around).

(It's probably worth exploring in a separate post?)

1. ^{^}

   I claim non-orthogonality between goals and means in this case. For some community with altruistic people, its structures require learning a fair bit about people's values. For a group which wants tech companies to focus on consumers' quality-of-life more than currently, not so.

Question: what fraction of work should prioritize the gradual disempowerment risk, and what fraction of work should prioritize the treacherous turn [? · GW] risk? (Guesstimate)

Question 2: what is your response to this argument?

• The main driving force of gradual disempowerment seems to be "societal inevitability," and "millions of people seeing the problem in front of their eyes but unable to convince society to take action."

  If that is the main problem, shouldn't you assume this problem to be even worse right now? Right now the AI safety community is extremely tiny ($0.1 billion/year [? · GW], or 000.1% of the world), and the problem appears even harder to seriously believe than it will be. It is also harder to find solutions before seeing the problem.

Although I thought of this argument, I don't think it's necessarily correct and my intuition about it is very fuzzy and uncertain. I just want to hear your response.

Probably will have a bunch more to say, but immediate question is "what's your story about the gears for Soares/Turner?"

We won’t strictly require it, but we will probably strongly encourage it. It’s not disqualifying, but it could make the difference between two similar candidates. 

Why do you believe that DOGE is mostly selected for personal loyalty? Elon Musk seems to say openly says whatever he wants even if that goes against what Trump said previously.

You're right. I shouldn't have said that, at least not without elaboration.

I don't think most of the people at the "talks to Trump" level are really picked for anything you could rightly call "personal loyalty" to Trump. They may be sold to Trump as loyal, but that's probably not even what's on his mind as long as he's never seen you to make him look bad. I don't think disagreeing with Trump on policy will make him see you as disloyal. He doesn't really care about that.

I do think many of the people in the lower tiers are picked for loyalty. In the case of DOGE, that means either personal loyalty to Musk, or loyalty to whatever story he's telling. I don't know whether you count the latter as "personal loyalty".

The DOGE team brought their beds to the office to basically work nonstop.

Well, I'm guessing Musk got them the beds as a "team building" thing, but yes.

If personal loyalty is your main criteria you don't get a bunch of people who never leave the office and work non-stop

You do, though. Personal loyalty, or ideological loyalty, or both, are exactly how you get people to never leave the office.

with high IQs.

They're not acting like they have high IQs. Or at least not high "G".

Start with sleeping in the office. If every single thing they say about the facts and their reasons for being there were 100 percent true, it'd be dumb to burn yourself out trying to make such massive changes on that kind of work schedule.

It's also dumb to ignore the collateral damage when you go around stopping Federal payments you may not understand.

And Marko Elez just had to resign because he wasn't effective enough in scrubbing his past tweets. Wall Street Journal says he "advocated repealing the Civil Rights Act, backed a 'eugenic immigration policy,' and wrote, 'You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity.'". I actually would have thought they'd let him skate, but apparently you still can't get quite that blatant at this point. Smart people don't post stuff like that, for more than one reason.

Location: Remote. Timaeus will likely be located in either Berkeley or London in the next 6 months, and we intend to sponsor visas for these roles in the future.

Will all employees be required to move to Berkeley or London, or will they have the option to continue working remotely?

This is absolutely a selfish request, so bear that in mind, but could you include screenshots and/or quotes of all X.com posts, and link to what the post links to when applicable? I have it blocked.

1. There's a wide range of techniques and behaviors that can be called "hypnosis", and an even wider range of what can be called "a real thing, right?".  Things in the realm of hypnosis (meditation, guided-meditation, self-hypnosis, daily affirmations, etc. have plenty of anecdotal support from adherents, and not a lot of RCTs or formal proof of who it will work for and who it won't.
2. There's a TON of self-help and descriptive writing on the topics of meditation and self-hypnosis.  For many people, daily affirmations seem to be somewhat effective in changing their attitude over time.  For many, a therapist or guide may be helpful in setting up and framing the hypnosis.  

That's a good idea! Even today it may be useful for export controls (depending on how reliable it can be made).

The most powerful chips might be banned from export, and have "verified boot" technology inside in case they are smuggled out.

The second most powerful chips might be only exported to trusted countries, and also have this verified boot technology in case these trusted countries end up selling them to less trusted countries who sell them yet again.

What does "unsafe" mean for this prediction/wager?  I don't expect the murder rate to go up very much, nor life expectancy to reverse it's upward trend.  "Erosion of rights" is pretty general and needs more specifics to have any idea what changes are relevant.

I think things will get a little tougher and less pleasant for some minorities, both cultural and skin-color.  There will be a return of some amount of discrimination and persecution.  Probably not as harsh as it was in the 70s-90s, certainly not as bad as earlier than that, but worse than the last decade.  It'll probably FEEL terrible, because it was on such a good trend recently, and the reversal (temporary and shallow, I hope) will dash hopes of the direction being strictly monotonic.