LessWrong 2.0 Reader

Hypothesis based on the fact that status is a strong drive and people who are on the outer ends of that spectrum get classified as having a "personality disorder" and are going to be very resistant to therapy:

weak-status-fear==psychopathy: psychopathy is caused by the loop leading to fear of loosing status, being less strong than average or possibly broken. (psychopathy is Probably on a spectrum. I don't see a reason why little of this feeling would be less optimal than none.) strong-status-fear==(?histrionic personality disorder) weak-status-seeking-loop==(?schizoid personality disorder) strong-status-seeking-loop==(?narcissism)

Was thinking about Steven Byrnes agenda to figure out social drives [? · GW] and what makes a psychopath a psychopath. The simplest social drive that seemed to be a thing was “status-seeking” and “status-fear” (fear of loosing status). Both of these could themselves be made of several drives? The idea that status-seeking and status-fear are different came to me when trying to think of the simplest hypothesis explaining psychopathy and from introspecting that both of these feelings feel very different to me and distinct from other fears. These two could be made more mostly separate loops, but I can't complicate my fake framework even more just yet.

If someone is interested, I'd write a post how to stress test this fake-framework and what I'd expect in the world where it is true or isn't (Most interesting would be social drives that are distinct from the above? Or maybe they use some of the same sub-circuitry? Like jealousy seems obviously like it would fit under strong status fear, so histrionic personality would go with being more jealous)

Even if you think a life’s work can’t make a difference but many can, you can still think it’s worthwhile to work on alignment for whatever reasons make you think it’s worthwhile to do things like voting.

I don't think "let's outsiders who don't understand why the processes within Wikipedia work the way they do" spend money to buy policy outcomes would improve anything about how Wikipedia runs.

If you take a decision about whether running for any elected political office should give someone notability in Wikipedia, there aren't any rulers who decide whether or not to adopt that policy but it's a democratic process where different people at Wikipedia voice their opinion about what's good for Wikipedia. 

Most people on Wikipedia would not like that, because there are plenty people who run for elected offices like a small town council where there are no trustworthy secondary sources for information about those people. Articles about them are thus not possible to policy for being correct the way that's possible with other Wikipedia articles and it's going to be hard to engage with those articles and false claims are not going to be effectively removed. 

While I'm more inclusionist then the average person at Wikipedia, it's worth noting that Wikipedia is a resource of high quality and that's an achievement of the current system.

Quora used to be full of quality similarly to how StackExchange has answers of high quality. StackExchange has a firm policy of quality standards while Quora doesn't. StackExchange managed to keep high quality levels while Quora didn't. 

People frequently complain about StackExchange being elitest and not friendly to people who don't put effort into asking questions but the result is that they kept a high-quality level.

It might be that you can either get a constantly self-reinforncing sense of higher standards or a constantly self-reinforcing sense of lower standards. 

I have an embarrasing confession to make. I don't understand why PvsNP is so hard. 

[I'm in good company since apparently Richard Feynmann couldn't be convinced it was a serious open problem.] 

I think I understand PvsNP and its many variants like existence of one-way function is about computational hardness of certain tasks. It is surprising that we have such strong intuitions that some tasks are computationally hard but we fail to be able to prove it!

Of course I don't think I can prove it and I am not foolish enough to spend significant amount of time on trying to prove it. I still would like to understand the deep reasons  why it's so hard to prove computational hardness results. That means I'd like to understand why certain general proof strategies are impossible or very hard. 

There is an old argument by Shannon that proves that almost every* Boolean function has exponential circuit depth. This is a simple counting argument. Basically, there are exponentially many more Boolean functions than there are circuits. It's hard to give explicit examples of  computationally hard functions** but we can easily show they are plentiful. 

This would seem to settle the matter of existence of computationally hard functions. I believe the rattlesnake in the grass is that the argument only proves that Boolean functions are computationally hard to compute in terms of Boolean circuits but general computable algorithms are more expressive? I am not entirely sure about this. 

 I have two confusions about this: 

Confusion #1: General algorithms would need to make use of some structure. They aren't magic. Can't we solve that if you could do this in general you would need to effectively 'simulate' these Boolean circuits which would reduce the proof to Shannon-like counting argument?

Confusion #2: Why couldn't we make similar counting arguments for Turing machines?

Shannon's argument is very similar to the basic counting argument in algorithmic information theory, showing that most strings are K-incompressible. 

Rk. There are the famous 'proof barriers' to a proof of PvsNP like natural proofs and algebraization. I don't understand these ideas - perhaps they can shed some light on the matter. 

@Dalcy [LW · GW] 

*the complement is exponentially sparse

** parity functions? 

Killing oneself with high certainty of effectiveness is more difficult than most assume.

Dying naturally also isn't as smooth as plenty of people assume. I'm pretty sure that "taking things into your hands" leads to higher amount of expected suffering reduction in most cases, and it's not informed rational analysis that prevents people from taking that option.

If a future hostile agent just wants to maximize suffering, will foregoing preservation protect you from it?

Yes? I mean, unless we entertain some extreme abstractions like it simulating all possible minds of certain complexity or whatever.

IDK why you think that TM is simpler than one that computes, say, QM. But either way, I don't know why to favor (in terms of ascribing reality-juice) worlds that are simple TMs but not worlds that are simple physics equations. You can complain that you don't know how to execute physics equations, but I can also complain that I don't know how to execute state transitions. (Presumably there's still something central and real about some things being more executable than others; I'm just saying it's not clear what that is and how it relates to reality-juice and TMs vs physics.)

I think he's saying that there's a simple-ish deterministic machine that uses pseudorandomness to make a world observationally equivalent to ours. Since it's simple, it has a lot of the reality-juice, so it's most of "where we really are".

• Probability is in the mind. There's no way to achieve entanglement between what's necessary to make these predictions and the state of your brain, so for you, some of these are random.
• In multi-worlds, the Turing machine will compute many copies of you, and there might be more of those who see one thing when they open their eyes than of those who see another thing. When you open your eyes, there's some probability of being a copy that sees one thing and a copy that sees the other thing. In a deterministic world with many copies of you, there's "true" randomness in where you end up opening your eyes.

True randomness is an illusion ?

Our observations are compatible with a world that is generated by a Turing machine with just a couple thousand bits.

That means that all the seemingly random bits we see in Geiger counters, Lava lamps, gasses and the like is only pseudorandomness in actuality.

There's no such thing as "faithful CoT" because even if what you are doing is locally interpretable in terms of CoT, the way it adds up over the world still depends on the exogenous disequilibria that you are acting on as well as the ways your divertions of these disequilibria support themselves. At best you can get interpretability for infinitesimal perturbations, but why care about infinitesimal perturbations?