LessWrong 2.0 Reader

Looking at the eSentire / Cybersecurity Ventures 2022 Cybercrime Report that appears to be the source of the numbers Google is using, I see the following claims:

• $8T in estimated unspecified cybercrime costs ("The global annual cost of cybercrime is predicted to reach $8 trillion annually in 2023" with no citation of who is doing the estimation)
• $20B in ransomware attacks in 2021 (source: a Cybersecurity Ventures report)
• $30B in "Cryptocrime" which is e.g. cryptocurrency scams / rug pulls (source: another Cybersecurity Ventures report)

It appears to me that the report is intended to enable the collection of business email addresses as the top of a sales funnel, as evidenced by the fact that you need to provide your name, company name, role, and a business email address to download the report. As such, I wouldn't take any of their numbers particularly seriously - I doubt they do.

As a sanity check, $8T / year in cybercrime costs is an average annual cost of $1,000 per person annually. This is not even remotely plausible.

I found this useful https://impact.economist.com/perspectives/technology-innovation/measuring-cost-cybercrime/article/what’s-number-estimating-cost-cybercrime

some fragments:

What hunches do you currently have surrounding orthogonality, its truth or not, or things near it?

re: hard to know - it seems to me that we can't get a certifiably-going-to-be-good result from a CEV based ai solution unless we can make it certifiable that altruism is present. I think figuring out how to write down some form of what altruism is, especially altruism in contrast to being-a-pushover, is necessary to avoid issues - because even if any person considers themselves for CEV, how would they know they can trust their own behavior?

as far as I can tell humans should by default see themselves as having the same kind of alignment problem as AIs do, where amplification can potentially change what's happening in a way that corrupts thoughts which previously implemented values. can we find a CEV-grade alignment solution that solves the self-and-other alignment problems in humans as well, such that this CEV can be run on any arbitrary chunk of matter and discover its "true wants, needs, and hopes for the future"?

I don't have a complete picture of Joshua Achiam's views, the new head of alignment, but what I have read is not very promising.

Here are some (2 year old) tweets from a twitter thread he wrote.

https://x.com/jachiam0/status/1591221752566542336

P(Misaligned AGI doom by 2032): <1e-6%

https://x.com/jachiam0/status/1591220710122590209

People scared of AI are just converting their anxiety disorders.

This thread also has a bunch of takes against EA.

I sure hope he changed some of his views, given that the company he work at expects AGI by 2027

It's certainly covered by the NYT, although their angle is "OpenAI is growing up".

If you do end up installing the Fatebook browser extension and making some predictions, let me know!

I did.

Yeah, if that was the only consideration I think I would have created the market myself.

Some reporting on this: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/374275/openai-just-sold-you-out

When I write a post and select text, a menu appears where I can select  text appearance properties etc. However, in my latest post, this menu does not appear when I edit the post and select text. Any idea why that could be the case?

Okay, sounds like I have misunderstood you.

Sure, I can retry.

My next attempt to pass your ITT is thus:

Broadly when gaining new skills we go from doing what feels natural, to doing things differently within rigid structures, to getting good at them, to releasing the structures and then just doing what comes naturally. And often afterwards it is both more effective and also comes more naturally than it did before.

Some people seem trapped in the middle step on certain things. They always practice music with a metronome ticking in order to keep the beat, they never trust themselves to just feel it. They always leave the party without drinking, never trusting themselves to behave well and have fun with it. They always need an explicit theory guiding their overall trajectory in life (e.g. career decisions involving spreadsheets), they can never make a major life decision because it feels good in their gut. They always have to discuss purchases over $1,000 with their spouse and sleep on it, they never feel comfortable just going with something that feels right in the moment.

Such people have successfully found useful structures, but are also trapped in them, never venturing forward into the world themselves, always bound by the formalities. This limits their personhood and humanity from coming through, it bounds them to only be as good as the structures they've adopted.

Insofar as you name a structure or set of rules for living life, you are always bound by them and will never let your humanity outshine them.

How close is this to what you're saying, from 1 to 10?