LessWrong 2.0 Reader

And I’m not even mentioning the strange sexual dynamics

Is this a joke? I'm confused.

I asked GPT4o to perform a web search for podcast appearances by Yudkowsky. It dug up these two lists (apparently, autogenerated from scrapped data). When I asked it to base use these lists as a starting point to look for high quality debates and after some further elicitation and wrangling, the best we could find was this moderated panel discussion featuring Yudkowsky, Liv Boeree, and Joscha Bach. There's also the Yudkowsky v/s George Hotz debate on Lex Fridman, and the time Yudkowsky explained AI risk to the streamer and political commentaror known as Destiny. I have watched none of the three debates I just mentioned; but I know that Hotz is a heavily vibes-based (rather than object-level-based) thinker, and that Destiny has no background in AI risk, but has good epistemics. I think he probably offered reasonable-at-first-approximation-yet-mostly-uninformed pushback.

• Perhaps Legg-Hutter intelligence.
• I'm not sure how much the goal matters - probably the details depend on the utility function you want to optimize. I think you can do about as well as possible by carving out a utility function module and designing the rest uniformly to pursue the objectives of that module. But perhaps this comes at a fairly significant cost (i.e. you'd need a somewhat larger computer to get the same performance if you insist on doing it this way).
• ...And yes, there does exist a computer program which is remarkably good at just chess and nothing else, but that's not the kind of thing I'm talking about here.
• Yes, the I/O channels should be fixed along with the hardware.

Hmm. I think there are two dimensions to the advice (what is a reasonable distribution of timelines to have, vs what should I actually do).  It's perfectly fine to have some humility about one while still giving opinions on the other.  "If you believe Y, then it's reasonable to do X" can be a useful piece of advice.  I'd normally mention that I don't believe Y, but for a lot of conversations, we've already had that conversation, and it's not helpful to repeat it.

 

People seeing this in the future: Check out Draw a Box for some low-level mechanical stuff.

Though there are elegant and still practical specifications for intelligent behavior, the most intelligent agent that runs on some fixed hardware has completely unintelligible cognitive structures and in fact its source code is indistinguishable from white noise.

• What does "most intelligent agent" mean?
• Don't you think we'd also need to specify "for a fixed (basket of) tasks"?
• Are the I/O channels fixed along with the hardware?

I (and maybe you) have historically underrated the density of people with religious backgrounds in secular hubs. Most of these people don't 'think differently', in a structural sense, from their forebears; they just don't believe in that God anymore. 

The hallmark here is a kind of naive enlightenment approach that ignores ~200 years of intellectual history (and a great many thinkers from before that period, including canonical philosophers they might claim to love/respect/understand). This type of thing.

They're no less tribal or dogmatic, or more critical, than the place they came from. They just vote the other way and can maybe talk about one or two levels of abstraction beyond the stereotype they identify against (although they can't really think about those levels).

You should still be nice to them, and honest with them, but you should understand what you're getting into.

The mere biographical detail of having a religious background or being religious isn't a strong mark against someone's thinking on other topics, but it is a sign you may be talking to a member of a certain meta-intellectual culture, and need to modulate your style. I have definitely had valuable conversations with people that firmly belong in this category, and would not categorically discourage engagement. Just don't be so surprised when the usual jutsu falls flat!

Timelines are a result of a person's intuitions about a technical milestone being reached in the future, it is super obviously impossible for us to have a consensus about that kind of thing.

Talking only synchronises beliefs if you have enough time to share all of the relevant information, with technical matters, you usually don't.

added some open circles