LessWrong 2.0 Reader

Yep! If I think about those 10 people, 5 are having, or I expect to have large impact on the future. As for ages, all the people I thought of except one were over 20. There was one 14yo who is just naturally super high G.

No, not microscopic.

Coherent light is not microscopic. We see the consequences (old fashioned holography and such).

Superconductors used in the industry are not microscopic (and the temperatures are high enough to enable industrial use of them in rather common devices such as MRI scanners).

It's just... having a proof is supposed to boost our confidence that the conclusion is correct...

if the proof relies on assumptions which are already quite far from the majority opinion about our actual reality (and are probably going to deviate further, as AIs will be better physicists and engineers than us), then what's the point of that "proof"?

how does having this kind of "proof" increase our confidence in what seems informally correct for a single branch reality (and rather uncertain in a presumed multiverse, but we don't even know if we are in a multiverse, so bringing a multiverse in might, indeed, be one of the possible objections to the statement, but I don't know if one wants to pursue this line of discourse)?

(as an intellectual exercise, it is still of interest, I would not argue with that)

I'm basically confused about what a canonical example of changing values looks like to you. Like I assume you have some examples that make you postulate that it is possible or something. I've seen changes in food taste used as a canonical example before, but if that's not your example, then I would like to hear what your example is.

No. I can't make any sense of where that came from.

So e.g. if you sometimes feel like eating one kind of food and other times feel like eating another kind of food, you just think "ah, my food preference arbitrarily changed", not "my situation changed to make so that the way to objectively improve my food intake is different now than it was in the past"?

No, there is simply no such thing as a utility function over foodstuffs.

The connection to moral systems could be due to the fact that curing people of trapped priors or other narcissism-like self-defending pathologies is hard and punishing and you won't do it for them unless you have a lot of love and faith in you.

I wonder if it also has something to do with certain kinds of information being locally nonexcludable goods, they have a cost to spread, but the value of the information is never obvious to a potential buyer until after the transfer has taken place. A person only pays their teacher back if the teacher can convey a sense of moral responsibility to do so.

Finally, harari's definition of religion is just a system of ideas that brings order between people. This is usually a much more useful definition than definitions like "claims about the supernatural" or whatever. In this frame, many truths, "trade allows mutual benefit", or [the english language] or [how to not be cripplingly insane] are religious in that it benefits all of us a little bit if more people have these ideas installed.

(This also has implications for automating AI safety research).

To spell it out more explicitly, the current way of scaling inference (CoT) seems pretty good [LW(p) · GW(p)] vs. some of the most worrying threat models, which often depend on opaque model internals.

Adding more resources :

[Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg] Aligning society with our deepest values and sources of meaning (with Joe Edelman) #clearerThinkingWithSpencerGreenberg https://podcastaddict.com/clearer-thinking-with-spencer-greenberg/episode/175816099

https://podcastaddict.com/joe-carlsmith-audio/episode/157573278

I do want to note that a lot of the claimed unpredictability from chaos only works if you can measure stuff to a finite precision only, and while this is basically always true in practice, it is worth noticing, because if you did have the ability to have an infinite memory and infinite FLOP/s computer with infinitely precise measurement, like in Newtonian physics, chaos theory doesn't matter, because in a deterministic system, if you get the exact same input, it will always have the same output, so chaos doesn't matter.

To be clear, this isn't a practical way to beat chaos, but it is an exception to the rule that chaos makes a system unpredictable.

Fair enough.

I think my main problem with this proposal is that under the current paradigm of AIs (GPTs, foundation models),  I don't see how you want to implement ATA, and this isn't really a priority?