LessWrong 2.0 Reader

Speaking only for myself, I can agree with the abstract approach (therefore: upvote), but I am not familiar with any of the existing projects mentioned in the article (therefore: no vote; because I have no idea how useful the projects actually are, and thus how useful is the list of them).

Why would is the expectation to find a polyamorous partner be higher in the case you gave? Same chance per try and same number of tries should equal same expectation.

Nice.

Similar rule of thumb I find handy is divide by 70 to get doubling time implied by a growth rate. I find it way easier to think about doubling times than growth rates.

E.g. 3% interest rate means 70/3 ≈ 23 year doubling time.

Is there a longer-form version with draft treaty langugage (even an outline)? I'd be curious to read it.

agents that have preferences about the state of the world in the distant future

What are these preferences? For biological agents, these preferences are grounded in some mechanism - what you call Steering System - that evaluates "desirable states" of the world in some more or less directly measurable way (grounded in perception via the senses) and derives a signal of how desirable the state is, which the brain is optimizing for. For ML models, the mechanism is somewhat different but there is also an input to the training algorithm that determines how "good" the output is. This signal is called reward and drives the system toward outputs that lead to states of high reward. But the path there depends on the specific optimization method and the algorithm has to navigate such a complex loss landscape that it can get stuck in areas of the search space that correspond to imperfect models for very long if not for ever. These imperfect models can be off in significant ways and that's why it may be useful to say that Reward is not the optimization target [LW · GW]. 

The connection to Intuitive Self-Models is that even though the internal models of an LLM may be very different from human self-models, I think it is still quite plausible that LLMs and other models form models of the self. Such models are instrumentally convergent [? · GW]. Humans talk about the self. The LLM does things that matches these patterns. Maybe the underlying process in humans that give rise to this is different, but humans learning about this can't know the actual process either. And in the same way the approximate model the LLM forms is not maximizing the reward signal but can be quite far from it as long it is useful (in the sense of having higher reward than other such models/parameter combinations).   

I think of my toenail as “part of myself”, but I’m happy to clip it.

Sure, the (body of the) self can include parts that can be cut/destroyed without that "causing harm" but instead having an overall positive effect. The AI in a compute center would in analogy also consider decommissioning failed hardware. And when defining humanity, we do have to be careful what we mean when these "parts" could be humans. 

Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem

About conjoined twins and the self:

Krista and Tatiana Hogan (Wikipedia) are healthy functional conjoined craniopagus twins who are joined at the head and share parts of the brain - their thalamus is joined via a thalamic bridge: They can report on preceptions of the other and share affects.
I couldn't find scientific papers that studied their brain function rigorously, but the paper A Case of Shared Consciousness looks at evidence from documentaries and discusses it. Here are some observational details:
 

Each is capable of reporting on inputs presented to the other twin’s body. For example, while her own eyes are covered, Tatiana is able to report on visual inputs to both of Krista’s eyes. Meanwhile, Krista can report on inputs to one of Tatiana’s eyes. Krista is able to report and experience distaste towards food that Tatiana is eating (the reverse has not been reported, but may also be true). An often repeated anecdote is that while Tatiana enjoys ketchup on her food, Krista will try to prevent her eating it. Both twins can also detect when and where the other twin’s body is being touched, and their mother reports that they find this easier than visual stimuli.
fMRI imaging revealed that Tatiana’s brain ‘processes signals’ from her own right leg, both her arms, and Krista’s right arm (the arm on the side where they connect). Meanwhile Krista’s brain processes signals from her own left arm, both her own legs and Tatiana’s left leg (again on the side where they connect). Each twin is able to voluntarily move each of the limbs corresponding to these signals.
The twins are also capable of voluntary bodily control for all the limbs within their ordinary body plans. As their mother Felicia puts it, “they can choose when they want to do it, and when they don’t want to do it.”
The twins also demonstrate a common receptivity to pain. When one twin’s body is harmed, both twins cry.
The twins report that they talk to each other in their heads. This had previously been suspected by family members due to signs of apparent collusion without verbalisation.

Popular article How Conjoined Twins Are Making Scientists Question the Concept of Self contains many additional interesting bits:

when a pacifier was placed in one infant’s mouth, the other would stop crying.

About the self:

 Perhaps the experience of being a person locked inside a bag of skin and bone—with that single, definable self looking out through your eyes—is not natural or given, but merely the result of a changeable, mechanical arrangement in the brain. Perhaps the barriers of selfhood are arbitrary, bendable. This is what the Hogan twins’ experience suggests. Their conjoined lives hint at myriad permeations of the bodily self.

About qualia:

Tatiana senses the greeniness of Krista’s experience all the time. “I hate it!” she cries out, when Krista tastes some spinach dip.

(found via FB comment)

Yeah, I'm maybe even more disillusioned about this, I think "those in charge" mostly care about themselves. In the historical moments when the elite could enrich themselves by making the population worse off, they did so. History is full of bad things done by the powerful to the powerless. The only times normal people could get a bit better off is when they were needed to do jobs, but AI is threatening precisely that.

Happy to see you doing your own thing! Your design idea reminds me of Art Nouveau book pages (e.g. 1 2 3), these were so cool.

Just to share one bit of feedback about your design, it feels a bit noisy to me - many fonts and superscripts on the same screen. It's like a "buzz" that makes it harder for me to focus on reading. Some similar websites that I like because they're more "quiet" are Paul Stamatiou and Fabien Sanglard.

Side note: 
If you don't tell what time the application deadline is, lots of people will assume its anywhere-on-Earth, i.e. noon the next day in GMT. 

When I was new to organising I did not think of this, and kind of forgot about time zones. I noticed that I got a steady stream of "late" applications, that suddenly ended at 1pm (I was in GMT+1), and didn't know why.