LessWrong 2.0 Reader

thank you kindly.  I had heard about a general neuron replacement thought experiment before as sort of an open question.  What I was hoping to add here is the specific scenario of this experiment done on someone who begins the experiment as definitively sentient, and they are speaking of their own sentience.  This fills in a few holes and answers a few questions that I think lead us to a conclusion rather than a question

there are certainly a lot of open specific questions - such as - what precisely about the firing patterns is necessary for the emergence of sentience.  

The part you're quoting is just that the resulting outward behaviour will be preserved, and is just a baseline fact of deterministic physics.  What I'm trying to prove is that sentience (partially supported by that fact) is fully emergent from the neuron firing patterns.

Does the median immigrant ‘integrate into the economy’ to any notable extent in months or weeks?

I can easily imagine someone with already a high rank, reputation, merit, etc., in their home country doing so by say immigrating and quickly landing a job at JP Morgan Chase in a managing director position and proceed to actually oversee some important desk within a short timeframe.

But that is the 99.99th+ percentile of immigration.

For those who are interested in the mathematical details, but would like something more accessible than the paper itself, see this talk I gave about the paper:

The desire for crowdfunding is less about avoiding bias^[1] and more that this is only worth doing if people are listening, and small donors are much better evidence on that question than grants. If EV gave explicit instructions to donate to me it would be more like a grant than spontaneous small donors, although I in general agree people should be looking for opportunities they can beat GiveWell. 

1. ^{^}

   I'm fortunate to have both a long runway and sources of income outside of EA and rationality. One reason I've pushed as hard as I have on EA is that I had a rare combination of deep knowledge of and financial independence from EA. If couldn't do it, who could?

Wait a minute, "agentic" isn't a real word? It's not on dictionary.com or Merriam-Webster or Oxford English Dictionary.

there are links in the description of the video

Thanks for clearing that up.  It sounds like we’re thinking along very similar lines, but that I came to a decision to stop earlier.  From a position inside one of major AI labs, you’ll be positioned to more correctly perceive when the risks start outweighing the benefits.  I was perceiving events more remotely from over here in Boston, and from inside a company that uses AI as a one of a number of tools, not as the main product.

I’ve been aware of the danger of superintelligence since the turn of the century, and I did my “just now orienting to the question” back in the early 2000s.  I decided that it was way too early to stop working on AI back then, and I should just  “monitor for new considerations or evidence or events.”  Then in 2022, Sydney/Bing came along, and it was of near-human intelligence, and aggressively misaligned, despite the best efforts of its creators.  I decided that was close enough to dangerous AI that it was time to stop working on such things.  In retrospect I could have kept working safely in AI for another couple of years, i.e. until today.  But I decided to pursue the “death with dignity” strategy: if it all goes wrong, at least you can’t blame me.  Fortunately my employers were agreeable to have me pivot away from AI; there’s plenty of other work to be done.

I think the problem is that in a situation of power imbalance, there's systemic demand for someone to do bad things - plunder colonies for gold, slaves, and territory; raise and slaughter animals in factory farms - as long as the rest can enjoy the fruits of it and not feel personally responsible. There's no comparable gradient in favor of good things ("good" is often unselfish, uncompetitive, unprofitable). So your suggestion of "punishing bad behavior" runs into the inevitable "who's doing the punishing?" The powers that be? Governments didn't punish colonialism or factory farming, they rewarded it.