LessWrong 2.0 Reader

I used AI assistance to generate this, which might have introduced errors.

Resulting in a strong downvote and, honestly, outright anger on my part.

Check the original source to make sure it's accurate before you quote it: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69013420/musk-v-altman/ [1]

If other people have to check it before they quote it, why is it OK for you not to check it before you post it?

Would the prediction also apply to inference scaling (laws) - and maybe more broadly various forms of scaling post-training, or only to pretraining scaling?

What if whistleblowers and internal documents corroborated that they think what they're doing could destroy the world?

Notably, no law I know of allows you to take legal action on a hunch that they might destroy the world based on your probability of them destroying the world being high without them doing any harmful actions (and no, building AI doesn't count here.)

Ilya is demonstrably not in on that mission, since his step immediately after leaving OpenAI was to found an additional AGI company and thus increase x-risk.

I don't understand the reference to assassination. Presumably there are already laws on the books that outlaw trying to destroy the world (?), so it would be enough to apply those to AGI companies.

What happens then when a non-thinking thing feels happy? Is that happiness valued? To whom? Or do you think this is impossible?

When a baby feels happy, it feels happy. Nothing else happens. 

There are differences among wanting, liking, and endorsing [LW · GW] something. 

A happy blob may like feeling happy, and might even feel a desire to experience more of it, but it cannot endorse things if it doesn't have agency. Human fulfillment and wellbeing typically involves some element of all three. 

An unthinking being cannot value even its own happiness, because the concept traditionally meant by "values" refers to the goals that an agent points itself at, and an unthinking being isn't agentic - it does not make plans to steer the world in any particular direction. 

Then if you also say that happiness is good, and that good implies value, one must ask, who or what is valuing the happiness? The rock? The universe? 

I am. When I say "happiness is good", this is isomorphic with "I value happiness". It is a statement about the directions in which I attempt to steer the world. 

Like there must be some physical process by which happiness is valued. Maybe a dimension by which emotional value is expressed?

The physical process that implements "valuing happiness" is the firing of neurons in a brain. It could in theory be implemented in silicon as well, but it's near-certainly not implemented by literal rocks. 

something that is challenging, and requires a certain kind of problem solving, where the solution is beautiful in some way

Yep, that makes sense. I notice, however, that these things do not appear to be emotions. And that's fine! It is okay to innately value things that are not emotions! Like "having a model of the world that is as accurate as possible", i.e. truth-seeking. Many people (especially here on LW) value knowledge for its own sake. There are emotions associated with this goal, but the emotions are ancillary. There are also instrumental reasons to seek truth, but they don't always apply. The actual goal is "improving one's world-model" or something similar. It bottoms out there. Emotions need not apply. 

The key piece though is that regardless, as tslarm says, "emotions are accompanied by (or identical with, depending on definitions) valenced qualia". They always have some value.

First off, I'm not wholly convinced this is true. I think emotions are usually accompanied by valenced qualia, but (as with my comments about curiosity) not necessarily always. Sure, if you define "emotion" so that it excludes all possible counterexamples, then it will exclude all possible counterexamples, but also you will no longer be talking about the same concept as other people using the word "emotion". 

Second, there is an important difference between "accompanied by valenced qualia" and "has value". There is no such thing as "inherent value", absent a thinking being to do the evaluation. Again, things like values and goals are properties of agents; they reflect the directions in which those agents steer. 

Finally, more broadly, there's a serious problem with terminally valuing only the feeling of emotions. Imagine a future scenario: all feeling beings are wired to an enormous switchboard, which is in turn connected to their emotional processors. The switchboard causes them to feel an optimal mixture of emotions at all times (whatever you happen to think that means) and they experience nothing else. Is this a future you would endorse? Does something important seem to be missing? 

What about the following red team strategy:

Give an honest assessment of the suspicion level, unless there is a very well hidden backdoor, then give a low score. Also, only create backdoors if it is possible to hide them well.

Wouldn't this defeat the self-checking strategy?

Having preferenes is very different from knowing them. There's always a process of reflection that refines preferences, so any current guess is always wrong at least in detail. For a decision theory to have a shot at normativity, it needs to be able to adapt to corrections and ideally anticipate their inevitability (not locking in the older guess and preventing further reflection; instead facilitating further reflection and being corrigible).

Orthogonality asks the domain of applicability to be wide enough that both various initial guesses and longer term refinements to them won't fall out of scope. When a theory makes assumptions about value content, that makes it a moral theory rather than a decision theory. A moral theory explores particular guesses about preferences of some nature.

So in the way you use the term, quantum immortality seems to be a moral theory, involving claims that quantum suicide can be a good idea. For example "use QI to earn money" is a recommendation that depends on this assumption about preferences (of at least some people in some situations).

What’s the payout of this model? I’m highly skeptical of any metaphor from Ayn Rand, so drawing comparisons to her ideas doesn’t add any insight for me. If I’m just not that target audience, that’s cool.