LessWrong 2.0 Reader

One of the big open questions that the LDSL sequence hasn't addressed yet is, what starts all the lognormals and why are they so commensurate with each other. So far, the best answer I've been able to come up with is a thermodynamic approach (hence my various recent comments about thermodynamics). The lognormals all originate as emanations from the sun, which is obviously a higher power. They then split up and recombine in various complicated ways.

As for destiny: The sun throws in a lot of free energy, which can be developed in various ways, increasing entropy along the way. But some developments don't work very well, e.g. self-sabotaging (fire), degenerating (parasitism leading to capabilities becoming vestigial), or otherwise getting "stuck". But it's not all developments that get stuck, some developments lead to continuous progress (sunlight -> cells -> eukaryotes -> animals -> mammals -> humans -> society -> capitalism -> ?).

This continuous progress is not just accidental, but rather an intrinsic part of the possibility landscape. For instance, eyes have evolved in parallel to very similar structures, and even modern cameras have a lot in common with eyes. There's basically some developments that intrinsically unblock lots of derived developments while preferentially unblocking developments that defend themselves over developments that sabotage themselves. Thus as entropy increases, such developments will intrinsically be favored by the universe. That's destiny.

Critically, getting people to change many small behaviors in accordance with long explanations contradicts destiny because it is all about adding additional constraints whereas destiny is all about releasing constraints.

The next post is Secular interpretations of core perennialist claims [LW · GW]. Zhukeepa should edit the main text to explicitly link to it rather than just mentioning that it exists. (Or people could upvote this comment so it's at the top. I don't object to more good karma.)

Interesting that GPT4o is so bad at math and tokenizes large numbers like this. I wonder if adding commas would improve performance?

So you're basically working with a maximally-shattered model of agency where life consists of a bunch of independent activities that can be fully observed post-hoc and which have no connection between them?

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"?

Expected utility is what you have before the outcome of an action is known. Actual utility is what you have after the outcome is known. Here, the utility function has remained the same and you have acquired knowledge of the outcome.

Someone no longer finding a thing valuable that they used to, has either re-evaluated the thing in the light of new information about it, or changed the value they (their utility function) put on it.

Yeah, I agree we need improvement. I don't know how many people it's important to reach, but I am willing to believe you that this will hit maybe 10%. I expect the 10% to be people with above-average impact on the future, but I don't know what %age of people is enough.

90% is an extremely ambitious goal. I would be surprised if 90% of the population can be reliably convinced by logical arguments in general.

I don't agree that I am making unwarranted assumptions; I think what you call "assumptions" are merely observations about the meanings of words. I agree that it is hard to program an AI to determine who the "he"s refer to, but I think as a matter of fact the meanings of those words don't allow for any other possible interpretation. It's just hard to explain to an AI what the meanings of words are. Anyway I'm not sure if it is productive to argue this any further as we seem to be repeating ourselves.

When will this be revealed?

Similarly in Baba is You: when people don't have a crisp understanding of the puzzle, they tend to grasp and straws and motivatedly-reason their way into accepting sketchy sounding premises [LW · GW]. But, the true solution to a level often feels very crisp and clear and inevitable. 

A few of the scientists I’ve read about have realized their big ideas in moments of insight (e.g., Darwin for natural selection, Einstein for special relativity). My current guess about what’s going on is something like: as you attempt to understand a concept you don’t already have, you’re picking up clues about what the shape of the answer is going to look like (i.e., constraints). Once you have these constraints in place, your mind is searching for something which satisfies all of them (both explicitly and implicitly), and insight is the thing that happens when you find a solution that does.

At least, this is what it feels like for me when I play Baba is You (i.e., when I have the experience you’re describing here). I always know when a fake solution is fake, because it’s really easy to tell that it violates one of the explicit constraints the game has set out (although sometimes in desperation I try it anyway :p). But it’s immediately clear when I've landed on the right solution (even before I execute it), because all of the constraints I’ve been holding in my head get satisfied at once. I think that’s the “clicking” feeling.

Darwin’s insight about natural selection was also shaped by constraints. His time on the Beagle had led him to believe that “species gradually become modified,” but he was pretty puzzled as to how the changes were being introduced. If you imagine a beige lizard that lives in the sand, for instance, it seems pretty clear that it isn’t the lizard itself (its will) which causes its beigeness, nor is it the sand that directly causes the coloring (as in, physically causes it within the lizards lifetime). But then, how are changes introduced, if not by the organism, and not by the environment directly? He was stuck on this for awhile, when: “I can remember the very spot in the road, whilst in my carriage, when to my joy the solution occurred to me.”

There’s more going on to Darwin’s story than that, but I do think it has elements of the sort of thing you're describing here. Jeff Hawkins also describes insight as a constraint satisfaction problem pretty explicitly (I might’ve gotten this idea from him), and he experienced it when coming up with the idea of a thousand brains.

Anyway, I don’t have a strong sense of how crucial this sort of thing is to novel conceptual inquiry in general, but I do think it’s quite interesting. It seems like one of the ways that someone can go from a pre-paradigmatic grasping around for clues sort of thing to a fully formed solution.

Thinking further, a key part of it is that temperature has a tendency to mix stuff together, due to the associated microscopic kinetic energy.