LessWrong 2.0 Reader

There are no properties of brain which define that brain is "you", except for the program that it runs.

Honestly majority of the points presented here are not new and already been addressed in 

https://www.lesswrong.com/rationality [? · GW] 

or https://www.readthesequence.com/ 

I got into this conversation because I thought I would find something new here. As an egoist I am voluntarily leaving this conversation in disagreement because I have other things to do in life. Thank you for your time. 

I think the comment more confirms rather than disconfirms John's comment (though I still think it's too broad for other reasons). OP "funding" something historically has basically always meant recommending a grant to GV. Luke's language to me suggests that indeed the right of center grants are no longer referred to GV (based on a vague vibe of how he refers to funders in plural).

OP has always made some grant recommendations of grants to other funders (historically OP would probably describe those grants as "rejected but referred to an external funder"). As Luke says, those are usually ignored, and OP's counterfactual effect on those grants is much less, and IMO it would be inaccurate to describe those recommendations as "OP funding something". As I said in the comment I quote below, most OP staff would like to fund things right of center, but GV does not seem to want to, as such the only choice OP has is to refer them to other funders (which sometimes works, but mostly doesn't).

As another piece of evidence, when OP defunded all the orgs that GV didn't want to fund anymore, the communication emails that OP sent said that "Open Philanthropy is exiting funding area X" or "exiting organization X". By the same use of language, yes, it seems like OP has exited funding right-of-center policy work.

(I think it would make sense to taboo "OP funding X" in future conversations to avoid confusion, but also, I think historically it was very meaningfully the case that getting funded by GV is much better described as "getting funded by OP" given that you would never talk to anyone at GV and the opinions of anyone at GV would basically have no influence on you getting funded. Things are different now, and in a meaningful sense OP isn't funding anyone anymore, they are just recommending grants to others, and it matters more what those others think then what OP staff thinks)

A related comment from lukeprog [EA(p) · GW(p)] (who works at OP) was posted on the EA Forum. It includes:

However, at present, it remains the case that most of the individuals in the current field of AI governance and policy (whether we fund them or not) are personally left-of-center and have more left-of-center policy networks. Therefore, we think AI policy work that engages conservative audiences is especially urgent and neglected, and we regularly recommend right-of-center funding opportunities in this category to several funders.

Intelligence/IQ is always good, but not a dealbreaker as long as you can substitute it with a larger population.

IMO this is pretty obviously wrong. There are some kinds of problem solving that scales poorly with population, just as there are some computations that scale poorly with parallelisation.

E.g. project euler problems [LW · GW].

When I said "problems we care about", I was referring to a cluster of problems that very strongly appear to not scale well with population. Maybe this [LW · GW] is an intuitive picture of the cluster of problems I'm referring to.

One of these types of orgs is developing a technology with the potential to kill literally all of humanity. The other type of org is funding research that if it goes badly mostly just wasted their own money. Of course the demands for legibility and transparency should be different.

I buy that such an intervention is possible. But doing it requires understanding the internals at a deep level. You can't expect SGD to implement the patch in a robust way. The patch would need to still be working after 6 months on an impossible problem, in spite of it actively getting in the way of finding the solution!

To add to bogdanb's comment below, you might want to be careful because you seem to be 'forcing' people to subscribe to promotional newsletters in order to get a price quote which, aside from being quite a nasty thing to do, is also a blatant violation of European GDPR regulations for which you could receive a hefty fine

I'm not entirely sure how many of these I agree with, but I don't really think any of them could be considered heretical or even all that uncommon as opinions on LW?

All but #2 seem to me to be pretty well represented ideas, even in the Sequences themselves (to the extent the ideas existed when the Sequences got written).

#2 seems to me to rely on the idea that the process of writing is central or otherwise critical to the process of learning about, and forming a take on, a topic. I have thought about this, and I think for some people it is true, but for me writing is often a process of translating an already-existing conceptual web into a linear approximation of itself. I'm not very good at writing in general, and having an LLM help me wordsmith concepts and workshop ideas as a dialogue partner is pretty helpful. I usually form takes my reading and discussing and then thinking quietly, not so much during writing if I'm writing by myself. Say I read a bunch of things or have some conversations, take notes on these, write an outline of the ideas/structure I want to convey, and share the notes and outline with an LLM. I ask it to write a draft that it and I then work on collaboratively. How is that meaningfully worse than writing alone, or writing with a human partner? Unless you meant literally "Ask an LLM for an essay on a topic and publish it," in which case yes, I agree.

To call something an "uploaded brain" is to make two claims.  First, that it is a (stable) mind.  Second, that it is in some important sense equivalent to a particular meat brain (e.g., that its output is the same as the meat brain, or that its experiences are the same as the meat brain's).  The sorts of methods you're talking about to stabilize the mind help with the first claim, but not with the second.

I've always struggled to make sense of the idea of brain uploading because it seems to rely on some sort of dualism.  As a materialist, it seems obvious to me that a brain is a brain, a program that replicates the brain's output is a program (and will perform its task more or less well but probably not perfectly), and the two are not the same.