LessWrong 2.0 Reader

A few people (i.e. habryka or previously Benquo or Jessicata) make it their thing to bring up concerns frequently.

My impression is that those people are paying a social cost for how willing they are to bring up perceived concerns, and I have a lot of respect for them because of that.

I rewrote the comment to put the link immediately below the first sentence.

Anyway, after a bit more effort, I found the better search term, hara, and lots of associated results that do seem to back up Johnstone’s claim (if I’m understanding them right—the descriptions I’ve found feel a bit cryptic). Note, however, that Johnstone was writing 45 years ago, and I have a vague impression that Japanese people below age ≈70 probably conceptualize themselves as being in the head—another victim of the ravages of global cultural homogenization, I suppose. If anyone knows more about this topic, please share in the comments!

I'm not Japanese, but I practice Zen, so I'm very familiar with the hara. I can't speak to what it would be like to have had the belief that my self was located in the hara, but I can talk about its role in Zen.

Zen famously, like all of Buddhism, says that there's no separate self, i.e. the homunculus isn't how our minds works. A common strating practice instruction in Zen is the meditate on the breath at the hara, which is often described as located about 2 inches inside the body from the bellybutton.

This 2 inch number assumes you're fairly thin, and it may not be that helpful a way to find the spot, anyway. I instead tell people to find it by feeling for where the very bottom of their diaphragm is. It feels like the lowest point in the body that activates to contract at the start of the breath, and is the lowest point in the body that relaxes when a breath finishes.

Some Zen teachers say that hara is where attention starts, as part of a broader theory that attention/awareness cycles with the breath. I wrote about this a bit previously in a book review [LW · GW]. I don't know if that's literally true, but as a practice instruction it's effective to have people put their attention on the hara and observe their breathing. This attention on the breath at a fixed point can induce a pleasant trance state that often creates jhana, and longer term helps with the nervous system regulation training meditation performs.

It takes most people several hundred to a few thousand hours to be able to really stabilize their attention on the hara during meditation, although the basics of it can be grasped within a few dozen hours.

Thanks for the reply. When I wrote "Many people would have more useful things to say about this than I do", you were one of the people I was thinking of.

AI Impacts wants to think about AI sentience and OP cannot fund orgs that do that kind of work

Related to this, I think GW/OP has always been too unwilling to fund weird causes, but it's generally gotten better over time: originally recommending US charities over global poverty b/c global poverty was too weird, taking years to remove their recommendations for US charities that were ~100x less effective than their global poverty recs, then taking years to start funding animal welfare and x-risk, then still not funding weirder stuff like wild animal welfare and AI sentience. I've criticized them for this in the past but I liked that they were moving in the right direction. Now I get the sense that recently they've gotten worse on AI safety (and weird causes in general).

I've been avoiding LW for the last 3 days because I was anxious that people were gonna be mad at me for this post. I thought there was a pretty good chance I was wrong, and I don't like accusing people/orgs of bad behavior. But I thought I should post it anyway because I believed there was some chance lots of people agreed with me but were too afraid of social repercussions to bring it up (like I almost was).

What are the norms here? Can I just copy/paste this exact text and put it into a top-level post? I got the sense that a top-level post should be more well thought out than this but I don't actually have anything else useful to say. I would be happy to co-author a post if someone else thinks they can flesh it out.

Edit: Didn't realize you were replying to Habryka, not me. That makes more sense.

A while ago I predicted that I think there's a more likely than not chance Anthropic would run out of money trying to compete with OpenAI, Meta, and Deepmind (60%).  At the time and now, it seems they still have no image video or voice generation unlike the others, and do not process image as well in inputs either. 
 

 OpenAI's costs are reportedly at 8.5 billion. Despite being flush in cash from a recent funding round, they were allegedly at the brink of bankruptcy and required a new, even larger, funding round.  Anthropic does not have the same deep pockets as the other players. Big tech like apple who are not deeply invested in AI seem to be wary of investing in OpenAI. It stands to reason, Amazon may be as well. It is looking more likely that Anthropic will be left in the dust (80%), 
 

The only winning path I see is a new more compute efficient architecture emerges, they are first, and they manage to kick of RSI before more funded competitors rush in to copy them. Since this seems unlikely I think they are not going to fare well. 

It feels sorta understandable to me (albeit frustrating) that OpenPhil faces these assorted political constraints.  In my view this seems to create a big unfilled niche in the rationalist ecosystem: a new, more right-coded, EA-adjacent funding organization could optimize itself for being able to enter many of those blacklisted areas with enthusiasm.

If I was a billionare, I would love to put together a kind of "completion portfolio" to complement some of OP's work.  Rationality community building, macrostrategy stuff, AI-related advocacy to try and influence republican politicians, plus a big biotechnology emphasis focused on intelligence enhancement, reproductive technologies, slowing aging, cryonics, gene drives for eradicating diseases, etc.  Basically it seems like there is enough edgy-but-promising stuff out there (like studying geoengineering for climate, or advocating for charter cities, or just funding oddball substack intellectuals to do their thing) that you could hope to create a kind of "alt-EA" (obviously IRL it shouldn't have EA in the name) where you batten down the hatches, accept that the media will call you an evil villain mastermind forever, and hope to create a kind of protective umbrella for all the work that can't get done elsewhere.  As a bonus, you could engage more in actual politics (like having some hot takes on the US budget deficit, or on how to increase marriage & fertility rates, or whatever), in some areas that OP in its quest for center-left non-polarization can't do.

Peter Thiel already lives this life, kinda?  But his model seems 1. much more secretive, and 2. less directly EA-adjacent, than what I'd try if I was a billionare.

Dustin himself talks about how he is really focused on getting more "multipolarity" to the EA landscape, by bringing in other high-net-worth funders.  For all the reasons discussed, he obviously can't say "hi, somebody please start an edgier right-wing offshoot of EA!!"  But it seems like a major goal that the movement should have, nonetheless.

Seems like you could potentially also run this play with a more fully-left-coded organization.  The gains there would probably be smaller, since there's less "room" to OP's left than to their right.  But maybe you could group together wild animal welfare, invertebrate welfare, digital minds, perhaps some David Pearce / Project Far Out-style "suffering abolition" transhumanist stuff, other mental-wellbeing stuff like the Organization for the Prevention of Intense Suffering, S-risk work, etc.  Toss in some more aggressive political activism on AI (like PauseAI) and other issues (like Georgist land value taxation), and maybe some forward-looking political stuff on avoiding stable totalitarianism, regulation of future AI-enabled technologies, and how to distribute the gains from a positive / successful singularity (akin to Sam Altman's vision of UBI supported by georgist/pigouvian taxes, but more thought-through and detailed and up-to-date.)

Finding some funders to fill these niches seems like it should be a very high priority of the rationalist / EA movement.  Even if the funders were relatively small at first (like say they have $10M - $100M in crypto that they are preparing to give away), I think there could be a lot of value in being "out and proud" (publicising much of their research and philosophy and grantmaking like OP, rather than being super-secretive like Peter Thiel).  If a small funder manages to build a small successful "alt-EA" ecosystem on either the left or right, that might attract larger funders in time.

What if there was a great popular movement to see concrete evidence of project activities and impacts?

It would work, but it is not simple to get one; you'd need a culture of people who can actually distinguish between true and fabricated evidence, and be generally epistemically rational, and the questions must not form disconnected beliefs network. Net of falsehoods might collapse eventually; but with adversaries, net of truth could be warped as well.

Ok so this is an old comment but apparently nobody responded to it, so: Tons of connections from the brain to the body are swapped. The left arm, leg, and many other things but importantly the left ear are all connected to the right hemisphere.

So, while I'm not certain as to what's happening here, it briefly waking up the damaged revolutionary module is much more likely than you seem to assume, here.

Hope that helps!