LessWrong 2.0 Reader

I think you would get the set of topics, but not necessarily the right idea about how exactly those topics apply to the current situation. To use your example, if someone's speech patterns revolve around the topic of "bullying", it might mean that the person was bullied 50 years ago and still didn't get over it, or that the person is bullied right now, or perhaps that someone they care about is bullied and they feel unable to help them. (Or could be some combination of that; for example seeing the person they care about bullied triggered some memories of their own experience.)

Or if someone says things like "people are scammers", it could mean that the person is a scammer and therefore assumes [LW · GW] that many other people are the same, or it could mean that the person was scammed recently and now experiences a crisis of trust.

This reminds me of an anime Psycho Pass, where a computer system detects how much people are mentally deranged...

Anyway, this sounds like something that could be resolved empirically, by creating profiles of a few volunteers and then checking their correctness.

In a game theoretic framework we might say that the payoff matrices for the birds and bees are different, so of course we'd expect them to adopt different strategies.

Yes somewhat, however it would still be best for all birds if they had a better collective defense. In a swarming attack, none would have to sacrifice their life so its unconditionally better for both the individual and the collective. I agree that inclusive fitness is pretty hard to control for, however perhaps you can only get higher inclusive fitness the simpler you go? e.g. all your cells have exactly the same DNA, ants are very similar, birds are more different. The causation could be simpler/less intelligent organisms -> more inclusive fitness possible/likely -> some cooperation strategies opened up.

"On what evidence do I conclude what I think is know is correct/factual/true and how strong is that evidence? To what extent have I verified that view and just how extensively should I verify the evidence?"

For this, aside from traditional paper reading from credible sources, one good approach in my opinion is to actively seek evidence/arguments from, or initiate conversations with people who have a different perspective with me (on both side of the spectrum if the conclusion space is continuous). 

I am interested in learning more about this, but not sure what "woo" means; after googling, is it right to interpret as "unconventional beliefs" of some sort?

I personally agree with you on the importance of these problems. But I myself might also be a more general responsible/trustworthy AI person, and I care about other issues outside of AI too, so not sure about a more specific community, or what the definition is for "AI Safety" people.

For funding, I am not very familiar and want to ask for some clarification: by "(especially cyber-and bio-)security", do you mean generally, or "(especially cyber-and bio-)security" caused by AI specifically?

I liked the ending of this story.

From the related book Elephant in the Brain:

Here is the thesis we’ll be exploring in this book: We, human beings, are a species that’s not only capable of acting on hidden motives—we’re designed to do it. Our brains are built to act in our self-interest while at the same time trying hard not to appear selfish in front of other people. And in order to throw them off the trail, our brains often keep “us,” our conscious minds, in the dark. The less we know of our own ugly motives, the easier it is to hide them from others.

In the same way that Chinese people forget how to write characters by hand, I think most programmers will forget how to write code without LLM editors or plugins pretty soon.

Very powerful reasoning. I would add that a relevant form of self-deception that should be investigated in this framework is religious faith, given its place as as foundational to societies worldwide. 

Religious faith seems like an optimal form of solution to hostile telepaths problem, in certain contexts it seems like a mixture of the three solutions you outlined. (Newcomblike self-deception, Having power and Occlumency)

Religious faith seems to provide psychological power through feelings of absolute certainty and over-confidence that religious people experience.  At the same time, the conversion to religions is correlated with overcoming PTSD and addiction (step 2 of the 12 steps program: "Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.")

I think there is an underlying problem of concept hierarchy which may precede self deception. Maybe we are able to hide concepts and thoughts while they occupy a peripheral part of the mind, this could be also linked to a continuous formulation of the newcomb-like problem in decision theory. I am not sure how this unfolds, will be trying to explore that in the weeks to come. 

Thank you for sharing!

Oh, these are good objections. Thanks!

I'm inclined to 180 on the original statements there and instead argue that predictive modelling works because, as Pearl says, "no correlation without causation". Then an important step when basing decisions on predictive modelling is verifying that the intervention has not cut off the causal path we depended on for decision-making.

Do you think that would be closer to the truth?