LessWrong 2.0 Reader

1. https://www.librechat.ai/ is an opensource frontend to LLM APIs. It has prompt templates, which can be triggered by typing /keyword.

2. https://aider.chat/ can do this & even run tests. The results are fed back to the LLM for corrections. It also uses your existing codebase and autoapplies the diff.

3. In librechat, I sometimes tell the AI to summarize all the corrections I've made and then make a new template out of it.

Be VERY careful distinguishing different uses of "most" ("many", "very many", "almost all", "all except a few exceptions"), especially when applying to outliers on other unmeasured dimensions.

My expectation is that mental facilities aren't the most critical feature of popes, so they're typically selected such that even a reduction is still sufficient.  And there's likely also active obfuscation of older popes' mental acuity, so it's not as obvious to the public.  

I won't speculate on whether there are other measures taken to make sure that living popes are at least somewhat mentally capable.  It's quite likely that they're lucky in that it doesn't get to that point very often.

If black hole entropy seems paradoxical to you, then I don't think you've really understood the concept. It's because we have no idea what's going on inside a black hole that they are maxentropy objects. Every possible microstate (internal arrangement of matter and energy) corresponds to the same macrostate (mass, charge, angular momentum, linear momentum). The natural logarithm of the number of possible microstates that corresponds to the current macrostate, times Boltzman's constant, is the entropy, and black hole necessarily maximize that.

I understand what entropy is, but entropy is supposed to increase because the underlying dynamics are reversible, and so it's paradoxical if black holes truly are identical, as that seems to imply the dynamics aren't reversible.

they consume free energy in order to preserve the low-entropy aspects of their own internal structure.

What do you mean by "low-entropy aspects of their own internal structure"? Entropy is a scalar quantity. If e.g. the body temperature of an animal increases its entropy more than the cellular repetition etc. decreases its entropy, then the animal overall is increasing rather than decreasing entropy, and my point in the OP holds.

Yes I agree with what you have written, and do think it’s overall not that likely that everything pans out as hoped. We do also have other hopes for how this general picture can still cohere if the specific path doesn’t work out, eg we’re open to learning some stuff empirically and adding an “algorithmic cherry on top” to produce the estimate.

As you say (and I alluded to as a footnote) there are a lot of interpretations of what the beatitudes mean. 

My personal feeling is that those who emphasize the "spiritual" interpretations are often doing it as a dodge, to avoid the challenge of having to follow the non-spiritual interpretations. 

That said, I make no claim that my interpretations are what most Christians believe. They are definitely what some Christians believe, and they are the interpretation of the Beatitudes that I find personally valuable today, as a non-Christian.

Why assume a reductionistic explanation, rather than a macroscopic explanation? Like for instance the second law of thermodynamics is well-explained by the past hypothesis but not at all explained by churning through mechanistic equations. This seems in some ways to have a similar vibe to the second law.

Now fixed - missing beatitude added. That was awkward.

Ah, so I think you're saying "You've explained to me the precise reason why energy and momentum (i.e. time and space) are different at the fundamental level, but why does this lead to the differences we observe between energy and momentum (time and space) at the macro-level?

This is a great question, and as with any question of the form "why does this property emerge from these basic rules", there's unlikely to be a short answer. E.g. if you said "given our understanding of the standard model, explain how a cell works", I'd have to reply "uhh, get out a pen and paper and get ready to churn through equations for several decades".

In this case, one might be able to point to a few key points that tell the rough story. You'd want to look at properties of solutions PDEs on manifolds with metric of signature (1,3) (which means "one direction on the manifold is different to the other three, in that it carries a minus sign in the metric compared to the others in the metric"). I imagine that, generically, these solutions behave differently with respect to the "1" direction and the "3" directions. These differences will lead to the rest of the emergent differences between space and time. Sorry I can't be more specific!

Asking an ASI to leave a hole in a Dyson Shell, so that Earth could get some sunlight not transformed to infrared, would cost It 4.5e-10 of Its income. 

Interestingly, if the ASI did this, Earth would still be in trouble because it would get the same amount of solar radiation, but the default would be also receiving a similar amount of infrared from the Dyson swarm. Perhaps the infrared could be directed away from the earth, or perhaps an infrared shield could be placed above the earth or some other radiation management system could be implemented. Similarly, even if the Dyson swarm were outside the earth's orbit, Earth would also default get a lot of infrared from the Dyson swarm. Still, it would not cost the ASI very much more of its income to actually spare Earth.

I very much agree with you that we should be analyzing the question in terms of the type of AGI we're most likely to build first, which is agentized LLMs or something else that learns a lot from human language.

I disagree that we can easily predict "niceness" of the resulting ASI based on the base LLM being very "nice". See my answer to this question [LW(p) · GW(p)].