LessWrong 2.0 Reader

As far as I remember, across last 3500 years of history, only 8% was entirely without war. Current relatively peaceful times is a unique combination in international law and postindustrial economy, when qualified labor is expencive and requires large investments in capital and resources are relatively cheap, which is not the case after singularity, when you can get arbitrary amounts of labor for the price of hardware and resources is a bottleneck.

So, "people usually choose to trade, rather than go to war with each other when they want stuff" is not very warranted statement.

Right, but I'm asking why. Like even if you don't have a complete framework, I'd think you'd have a general motive for your interest or something.

Workers regularly trade with billionaires and earn more than $77 in wages, despite vast differences in wealth. Countries trade with each other despite vast differences in military power. In fact, some countries don't even have military forces, or at least have a very small one, and yet do not get invaded by their neighbors or by the United States.

It is possible that these facts are explained by generosity on behalf of billionaires and other countries, but the standard social science explanation says that this is not the case. Rather, the standard explanation is that war is usually (though not always) more costly than trade, when compromise is a viable option. Thus, people usually choose to trade, rather than go to war with each other when they want stuff. This is true even in the presence of large differences in power.

I mostly don't see this post as engaging with any of the best reasons one might expect smarter-than-human AIs to compromise with humans. By contrast to you, I think it's important that AIs will be created within an existing system of law and property rights. Unlike animals, they'll be able to communicate with us and make contracts. It therefore seems perfectly plausible for AIs to simply get rich within the system we have already established, and make productive compromises, rather than violently overthrowing the system itself.

That doesn't rule out the possibility that the future will be very alien, or that it will turn out in a way that humans do not endorse. I'm also not saying that humans will always own all the wealth and control everything permanently forever. I'm simply arguing against the point that smart AIs will automatically turn violent and steal from agents who are less smart than they are, unless they're value aligned. This is a claim that I don't think has been established with any reasonable degree of rigor.

I can still be interested, even if I don't have the answers.

I've used SSRIs for maybe 5 years, and I think they've been really useful, with no negative effects, and more or less unwavering efficacy. The only exception is that they've non-negligibly lowered my libido. But to be honest, I don't mind it that much. 

Also, few times where I've had to not use them for a while (travelling and was very stupid not to bring enough), the withdrawal effects were quite strange and somewhat scary. 

I also feel they had some very strange positive effects. Like I think they made my reaction time improve by quite a bit. Although it could be something random coinciding with starting SSRIs. Or just me being confused. I haven't tested it. On humanbenchmark I score around the same now as I did in high school. But I feel like I can catch falling things with much better regularity, and this was an almost immediate effect after starting.

It seems to me that chaos control and anti-control is another non-application.

[Handbook of Chaos Control: Schöll, Eckehard, Schuster, Heinz Georg](https://www.amazon.com/Handbook-Chaos-Control-Eckehard-Sch%C3%B6ll/dp/3527406050)

If I had sufficient funds. I would consider if it would be beneficial to invade a few subreddits, and offer $1000 to whoever can make the most viral meme that subtly teaches basic concepts of AI Doom.

This thought stems from a comment on “The Best Lay Argument is not a Simple English Yud Essay”. I have more thoughts, but not much time. If my reasoning is unclear I apologise.

I don’t think the way you split things up into Alpha and Beta quite carves things at the joints. If you take an individual human as Beta, then stuff like “eudaimonia” is in Alpha - it’s a concept in the cultural environment that we get exposed to and sometimes come to value. The vast majority of an individual human’s values are not new abstractions that we develop over the course of our training process (for most people at least).

Except billionaires give out plenty of money for philanthropy. If the AI has a slight preference to keeping humans alive, things probably work out well. Billionaires have a slight preference to things they care about instead of random charities. I don’t see how preferences don’t apply here.

This is a vibes based argument using math incorrectly. A randomly chosen preference from a distribution of preferences is unlikely to involve humans, but that’s not necessarily what we’re looking at here is it.

Thanks for sharing <3

My main concern about trying SSRIs is that they'll make me stop noticing certain things that I care about, things that currently manifest as anxiety or so.

Opinions?