LessWrong 2.0 Reader

nothing short of death can stop me from pursuing good.

the world could destroy or corrupt EA, but i'd remain an altruist.

it could imprison me, but i'd stay focused on alignment, as long as i could communicate to at least one on the outside.

even if it tried to kill me, i'd continue in the paths through time where i survived.

How about this: trauma is a set of one or more habits that

1. was adaptive at one time but isn't anymore and
2. is hurting you or likely to hurt you in some way.

Something like a safety case for automated safety research (but I'm biased)

No answer here, but I would like to see some book for teenagers that would be like "a list of serious problems that need to be solved", compiled by reasonable people, so that it wouldn't be completely one-sided. This might make the world a better place, if everyone could pick a topic that resonates with them most. (Rather than the default, which is "choose your group, and try to destroy the outgroup by any means possible".)

The hypothetical most popular president (from the perspective of the entire population) would lose in the primaries. Their own party would never nominate them, because they would seem like a sell-out to them.

Imagine the following 3 candidates:

A -- strongly against illegal immigrants, and quite racist against the legal ones

B -- suggests to stop illegal immigration, but make the legal immigration much easier

C -- wants to make immigration easier; refuses to debate illegal immigration because "no one is illegal"

A would win the Republican primaries, C would win Democratic primaries. B would lose both.

For most people, B would be preferable to either A or C. But they won't get to make that choice. They will have to choose between A and C.

.

Let's make it more complicated, and split the candidate B into two similar candidates: B-R and B-D. Both B-R and B-D have the same position on immigration, but on different topics, B-R leans slightly Republican, and B-D leans slightly Democrat.

A hypothetical rational Republican might say "let's nominate B-R for our party, because they are most likely to get elected, and at least they agree with us on many other issues -- the 100% chance of B-R winning is preferable to a 50% chance of A and a 50% chance of C". A hypothetical rational Democrat might similarly prefer a 100% chance of B-D over a 50% chance of A and a 50% chance of C.

(And basically, this is what the median voter theorem suggests: that the election will ultimately be between B-R and B-D, rather than between A and C.)

But in a situation with primaries, B-R will lose to A, and B-D will lose to C.

.

I suspect that to a smaller degree this might be a problem with political parties in general, even if without primaries it is probably much smaller. Individuals need allies to win, and people like B-R and B-D won't find many enthusiastic allies in their respective parties.

I think you are right. We will not observe QI agents and it is a bad policy to recommend it as I will end in empty world soon. Now caveats. My measure declines because of branching anyway very quickly, so no problem. There is an idea of civilization-level quantum suicide by Paul Almond. In that case, the whole civilization performs QI coin trick, and no problem with empty world - but can explain Fermi paradox. QI make sense from first-person perspective, but not from third.

Democrats lost by sufficient margins, and sufficiently broadly, that one can make the argument that any pet cause is a responsible or contributing factor. But that seems like entirely the wrong level of analysis to me. See this FT article called "Democrats join 2024’s graveyard of incumbents", which includes this striking graph:

So global issues like inflation and immigration seem like much better explanatory factors to me, rather than things like the Gaza conflict which IIRC never made the top 10 in any issue polling I saw.

(The article may be paywalled; I got the unlocked version by searching Bing for "ft every governing party facing election in a developed country".)

I feel that the goal here is to reproduce the effects of choosing a president by popular vote without abolishing the electoral college. Wouldn't an electoral reform to abolish the electoral college be a more realistic goal?

Some of my own observations and considerations:

Anecdotal evidence for orca intelligence

1. Intimate cooperation between native australian hunter gatherers and orcas for whale hunting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_whales_of_Eden,_New_South_Wales
2. Orcas being skillful at turning boats around and even sinking a few vessels^[1][2]:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iberian_orca_attacks
3. Orcas have a wide variety of cool hunting strategies. (e.g. see videos (1, 2)). I don't know how this compares to human hunter gatherers.

Orca language

(Warining: Low confidence. What I say might be wrong.)

I didn't look deep into research into orca language (not much more than watching this documentary), my impression is that we don't know much yet.

Some observations:

1. Orcas language seems to be learned, not innate. Different regions have different languages and dialects. Scientists seem to analogize it to how humans speak different languages in different countries.
2. For some orca groups that were studied, scientists were able to cluster their calls into 23 or 24 different calls clusters, but still with significant variation of calls within a call cluster.
   1. (I do not know how tightly calls are clustered, or whether there often are outliers.)
3. Orcas communicate a lot. (This might be wrong but I think they spend a significant fraction of their time socializing where they exchange multiple calls per minute.)
4. (Orcas emit clicks and whistles. The clicks are believed to be for spacial navigation (especially in the dark), the whistles for communication.)

I'd count (2) as some weakish evidence against orcas having as sophisticated language as humans, however not very strongly. Some considerations:

1. Sentences don't necessarily need to be formed through having temporal sequences of words, but words could also be some different frequency signals or so which are then simultanously overlayed.
2. (The different 24 call types could be all sorts of things. E.g. conveying what we convey through body language, facial expressions, and tone. Or e.g. different sentence structures. Idk.)
3. Their language might be very alien. I only have shitty considerations here but e.g.:
   1. Orca language doesn't need to have at all similar grammar. E.g. could be something as far from our language as logic programming is, though in the end still not nearly that simple.
   2. Orcas might often describe situations in ways we wouldn't describe them. E.g. rather about what movements they and their prey executed or sth.
   3. Orcas might describe more precisely where in 3D water particular orcas and animals were located, and they might have a much more efficient encoding for that than if we tried to communicate this.

More considerations

The only piece of evidence that makes me wonder whether orcas might actually be significantly smarter than humans is their extremely impressive brain. I think it's pretty strong though.

As mentioned, orcas have 2.05 times as many neurons in their neocortex as humans, and when I look through the wikipedia list (where I just trust measured^[3] and not estimated values), it seems to be a decent proxy for how intelligent a species is.

There needs to be some selection pressure for why they have 160 times more neurons in their neocortex than e.g. brown bears (which weigh like 1/8th of an orca or so). Size alone is not nearly a sufficient explanation [LW(p) · GW(p)].

It's plausible that for both humans and orcas the relevant selection pressure mostly came from social dynamics, and it's plausible that there were different environmental pressures. (I'm keen to learn [LW · GW].) It's possible that caused humans to be smart more strongly incentivized our brains to be able to do abstract reasoning, whereas for orcas it might've been useful for some particular skills that generalize less well for doing other stuff.

If I'd only ever seen hunter gatherer humans, even if I could understand their language, I'm not sure I'd expect that species to be able to do science on priors. But humans are able to do it. Somehow our intelligence generalized far outside the distribution we were optimized on. I don't think that doing science is similar to anything we've been optimized on, except that advanced language might be necessary.

On priors I wouldn't really see significant reasons why whatever selection pressures optimized orcas to have their astounding brains, would make their intelligence generalize less well to doing science, than whatever selection pressures produced our impressive human brains.

One thing that would update me significantly downwards on orcas being able to do science is if their prefrontal cortex doesn't contain that many neurons. (I didn't find that information quickly so please lmk if you find it.) Humans have a very large prefrontal cortex compared to other animals. My guess would be that orcas have too, and that they probably still have >1.5 times as many neurons in their prefrontal cortex than humans, and TBH I even wouldn't be totally shocked if it's >2.5 times.

1. ^{^}

   Btw there is no recorded case of a human having been killed by an orca in the wild, including when they needed to swim when the vessel was sunk. (Even though orcas often eat other mammals.) (I think I even once heard it mention that it seemed like the orcas made sure that no humans died from their attacks, though I don't at all know how active the role of the orcas was there (my guess is not very).)

2. ^{^}

   I'd consider it plausible that they were trying to signal us to please stop fishing that much, but I didn't look nearly deeply enough into it to judge.

3. ^{^}

   Aka optical or isotropic fractionator in the method column.

In MWI some part of the body always remains. But why destuctible?