LessWrong 2.0 Reader

I am relatively new to the community, and was excited to join and learn more about the actual methods to address AI risks, and how to think scientifically generally. 

However after using for a while, I am a bit disappointed. I realized I probably had to filter many things here.

Good:

• There are good discussions and previous summaries that are actually useful on alignment. There are people who work on these things from both ngos and industry showing what research they are doing, or what actions they have taken on safety. Similarly with bioweapons etc.
• I also like articles like trying to identify how to find what's the best thing to do with intersections of passion, skill, and importance. 
• I like the articles that mention/promotes contacting reality.

Bad:

• Sometimes I feel the atmosphere is "edgy", and sometimes I see people may argue over relatively small things that I don't know how the conclusion will lead to actual actions. And maybe this is just the culture here, but I found it surprising how easy people call each other "wrong" although many times I felt like both sides are just opinions. And I felt like I see less "I think" or "in my opinion" to quality claims than usual workplace at least. People appear to be very confident or sure about their own belief when communicating.
• I do think the downvote or upvote, which is related to how much you can comment or contribute to the site (or if you can block a person or not), encourage group think and you would need to be identify with the sentiment of the majority (I think another answer mentioned group think as well).
• I am feeling many articles or comments are quite personal/non-professional (communication feels different from what I encounter at work), which makes this community a bit confusing mixing personal and professional opinions. I think it would be nice to have a professional section, and a separate personal sections, and also encourage different communication rules for more communication efficiency, and I guess could naturally filter some articles for people at certain times wanting to focus on different things. Could be good to organize articles better by section as well? Though there is tags currently. 
• This is a personal belief, but I am a bit biased for action and hope to see more discussions on how to execute things, or at least how should actions change based on a proposed belief change.
• This might be something more fundamental that is based on personal belief vs (some but not everyone on) lesswrong belief - to certain extend I appreciate prioritization, but when it is too extreme I feel it is 1) counterproductive on solving issue itself, 2) too extreme that discourages new comers that also want to work on shared issues. It also feels more fear driven rather than rationality driven, which is discrediting in my opinion. 
  • For 1, Many areas to work on sometimes are interrelated, and focusing only on one may not actually achieve the goal. 
  • For 2, Sometimes it just feels alarming/scary when I see people trying to say "do not let other issues we need to solve get in the way of {AI risks/some particular thing}". 

I think for now, I probably will continue using but with many many filters. 

But that's a bit like saying the cost of other crime includes all spending on the criminal and civil justice system, all spending on private security and surveillance by individuals and businesses, the entire salary of every cashier (since they wouldn't be needed if people would just count up their own purchases and leave payment), and every time someone doesn't do something because they don't want to go out wandering by themselves at 3am. Not actually a useful metric for deciding where it's worthwhile to increase or decrease resource allocations or to make regulatory decisions.

That sounds obviously correct and in fact a useful metric which is how you ought to be deciding how much to invest in policing: including the negative externalities and the nice high-trust-society things we could have if there was less crime. Why would you not include those?

Why would you think that an AGI/ASI, even if conscious, would have an emotional makeup or motivational structure in any way similar to that of a human? Why should it care about any of this?

Thank you for your interesting personal story!

(And more "meta" is better at coordinating more people, so you would expect a trend toward more "meta" or more "general" views over time becoming more dominant. Protestantism was more "meta-coordinated" than Catholicism. Science is pretty meta in this way. Dataism is an even more meta subset of "science".)

Not sure what you mean by more "meta" here. Like, people like to create tribes based on shared beliefs, so having some beliefs is better than having none (because then you cannot create a tribe), but having more general beliefs is better than having more specific ones (because each arbitrary belief can make some people object against it)?

So the best belief system is kinda like the smallest number that is still greater than zero... but there is no such thing; there is only the unending process of approaching the zero from above? (But you can never jump to the zero exactly, because then people would notice that they have literally nothing to coordinate their tribe about?)

In such situation, I think the one weird trick would be to invent a belief system that actively denies being one. To teach people a dogma that would (among other things) insist that there is no dogma, you just see the reality as it is (unlike all the other people, who merely see their dogmas). To invent rituals that consist (among other things) of telling yourself repeatedly that you have no rituals (unlike all the other people). To have leaders that deny being leaders (and yet they are surrounded by followers who obey them, but hey that's just how reality is).

So, basically... science.

But of course, people will soon notice that your supposed non-belief non-system often behaves suspiciously similarly to other belief systems, despite all the explicit denial. And they will keep hoping for a better system, which would teach them that there is no dogma, activities that would give them the feeling of certainty that they are following no rituals, and high-status people who would tell them to follow no leaders.

And maybe there is no end, only more iterations of the same. Because the more people around you join the currently popular non-belief non-system, the more obvious its nature as a belief system becomes. You notice how they keep saying the same non-dogmatic statements, performing the same non-rituals, and following the same non-leaders. Once you see it, you cannot unsee it, so you need to move further...

The color phi phenomenon doesn't work for or anyone I've asked

Were you using this demo? If so, I set the times to 1000,30,60, demagnified as much as possible, and then stood 20 feet away from my computer to “demagnify” even more. I might have also moved the dots a bit closer. I think I got some motion illusion?

I’m skeptical of the hypothesis that the color phi phenomenon is just BS. It doesn’t seem like that kind of psych result. I think it’s more likely that this applet is terribly designed.

This is more reverse planning fallacy than planning fallacy, but I thought it was important to mention. I remember most of my incidents of planning fallacy, like college admissions, and making a posterboard for my student group, but can't tell you exactly how bad they were.

One of my worst errors was when I thought my morning routine, which includes brushing my hair, shaving, brushing my teeth, applying deodorant, and using topical acne treatment. I thought this took somewhere around 20 minutes, but it was only about 6 for each of the individual tasks involved.

Sorry, but where/how would I do that?

Take any intuitive notion X, where people’s intuitions are generally a bit incoherent or poorly-thought-through—stream of consciousness, free will, divine grace, the voice in my head, etc.

• (A) One thing you can say is: “X, when properly understood, is coherent, and here’s how to properly understand it …”
• (B) Another you can say is: “X, as commonly understood by the average person, is incoherent, but hey let me tell you about these closely related concepts which are coherent and which rescue some or all of those intuitions about X that you find compelling …”

Fundamentally, neither of these strategies is right or wrong. You say tomato, I say to-mah-to.  :)

This is one of many causes of those annoying debates that go around in circles, that I’m trying to declare out-of-scope for this series, cf. §1.6.2 [LW · GW]. :)

For science terminology like “acceleration”, we take approach (A). People often have incoherent intuitions about acceleration, and when they do, we prompt them to discard their “wrong” intuitions, leaving the “real” acceleration concept.

For more everyday terminology, (A) versus (B) is more of a judgment call—for example, some physicalists say “‘God’ doesn’t exist”, others say “‘God’ is just the term for order and beauty in the universe” or whatever. As another example, I read Elbow Room recently, and Dennett’s revised preface says that he’s taken approach (A) to “free will” for his whole career, but now he’s thinking that maybe all along he should have taken the (B) path and said “free will (as commonly understood) doesn’t exist”.

Anyway, I feel like my post section is pointing out that people’s everyday poorly-thought-through intuitions about “stream of consciousness” are a bit incoherent, but I didn’t go further than that by advocating for either (A) or (B). Whereas your comment is advocating for the (A) path, where we prod people to update their intuitions about what happens when they try to remember what happened one second ago.

This might be an interesting use of LLM rewrites: negative->positive rephrasing feels like something within GPT-4's capabilities, and it would let you quickly translate a large corpus to read & evaluate without putting in a huge amount of work to write a large varied corpus of Abs-E text yourself. (I dislike the current name 'Abs-E' and by analogy to E-Prime, suggest 'E⁺' - short for 'English-positive'.)

Took a first stab at just the positive rewrite: https://github.com/gwern/gwern.net/blob/master/build/text2epositive.py

A major issue is that GPT-4s want to rewrite into ChatGPTese and hypercorrect any 'error', even with instructions to preserve the style and a lot of examples showing style preservation. I greatly want to avoid ChatGPTese in my writing, so it leaking through anyway is a problem. Another LLM API might be better for this (Claude?) but I don't have tokens+scripts set up right this instant for alternatives.

That aside, I'm unimpressed right now with the generated rewrites. Working through various examples of negation is hard and yields ugly-sounding or too-strong assertions, and makes me think that often a negative assertion is the most informative (without being false) way to state something. There are negatives that should be reworded to positive, but fewer than I was hoping beforehand. (For example, the comment about the LW2 AWS hack [LW(p) · GW(p)] reads better when rewritten into an affirmative positive form, definitely.)

At best, this seems like something to integrate into a grammar/style checker and only occasionally suggest a rewrite. And of course, if you only occasionally rewrite some text, the value is much lower than if you were rewriting every other sentence.

(A linter-style tool just flagging some text is also harder to integrate into my Emacs writing workflow: if it rewrites an entire block of text, that is relatively easy (simply pipe every paragraph into the script, and blindly replace it with the script output, which is even keyboardable: select region & C-u M-; tex<TAB>... to overwrite the region with the output of passing the script into a shell-command which tab-completes to that executable Python script), but to analyze it and just color or highlight troublesome negations? Hm. That's not something I've done in Emacs before...)