LessWrong 2.0 Reader

I'm not sure (see footnote 7), but I think it's quite likely, basically because:

• It's a simpler explanation than the one you give (so the bar for evidence should probably be lower).
• We know from polling data that Hispanic voters -- who are disproportionately foreign-born -- shifted a lot toward Trump.
• The biggest shifts happened in places like Queens, NY, which has many immigrants but (I think?) not very much anti-immigrant sentiment.

That said, I'm not that confident and I wouldn't be shocked if your explanation is correct. Here are some thoughts on how you could try to differentiate between them:

• You could look on the precinct-level rather than the county-level. Some precincts will be very high-% foreign-born (above 50%). If those precincts shifted more than surrounding precincts, that would be evidence in favor of my hypothesis. If they shifted less, that would be evidence in favor of yours.
• If someone did a poll with the questions "How did you vote in 2020", "How did you vote in 2024", and "Were you born in the U.S.", that could more directly answer the question.

we stumble on a weird observation where the few features with the least sparsity are not even learned and represented in the hidden layer

I'm not sure how you're modeling sparsity, but if these features are present in nearly 100% of inputs, you could think of it as the not-feature being extremely sparse. My guess is that these features are getting baked into the bias instead of the weights so the model is just always predicting them.

Did he really? If true, that's actually much dumber than I thought, but I couldn't find anything saying that when I looked. 

I wouldn't characterize that as a "commitment to utilitarianism", though; you can be a perfect utilitarian and have value that is linear in matter and energy (and presumably number of people?), or be a perfect utilitarian and have some other value function. 

The possible redundancy of conscious patterns was one of the things I was thinking about when I wrote:

Secondly, and more importantly, I question whether it is possible even in theory to produce infinite expected value. At some point you've created every possible flourishing mind in every conceivable permutation of eudaimonia, satisfaction, and bliss, and the added value of another instance of any of them is basically nil.

I don't actually mean the thing you're calling the motte at all, and I'm not sure I agree with the bailey either. The thought experiment as I understand it was never quite a St. Petersburg Paradox because both the payout ("double universe value") and the method of choosing how to play (single initial payment vs repeated choice betting everything each time) are different. It also can't literally be applied to the real world at all, part of the point is that I don't even know what it would look like for this scenario to be possible in the real world, there are too many other considerations at play. 

In the case I'm imagining, the Cosmic Flipper figures out whatever value you currently place on the universe - including your estimated future value - and slightly-more-than-doubles it. Then they offer the coinflip with the tails-case being "destroy the universe." It's defined specifically as double-or-nothing, technically slightly better than double-or-nothing, and is therefore worth taking to a utilitarian in a vacuum. If the Cosmic Flipper is offering a different deal then of course you analyze it differently, but that's not what I understood the scenario to be when I wrote my post. 

The standard method for training LLM's is next token prediction with teacher-forcing, penalized by the negative log-loss. This is exactly the right setup to elicit calibrated conditional probabilities, and exactly the "prequential problem" that Solomonoff induction was designed for. I don't think this was motivated by decision theory, but it definitely makes perfect sense as an approximation to Bayesian inductive inference - the only missing ingredient is acting to optimize a utility function based on this belief distribution. So I think it's too early to suppose that decision theory won't play a role. 

Knowing how the election turned out, how likely do you think it was a week before the election that Trump would win?

Do you think Polymarket had Trump-wins priced too high or too low?

Foreign-born Americans shifted toward Trump

Are you sure? Couldn't it be that counties with a higher percentage of foreign-born Americans shifted toward Trump because of how the non-foreign-born voters in those counties voted rather than how the foreign-born voters voted?

I don't think I really understood what it meant for establishment politics to be divisive until this past election.

As good as it feels to sit on the left and say "they want you to hate immigrants" or "they want you to hate queer people", it seems similarly (although probably not equally?) true that the center left also has people they want you to hate (the religious, the rich, the slightly-more-successful-than-you, the ideologically-impure-who-once-said-a-bad-thing-on-the-internet).

But there's also a deeper, structural sense in which it's true.

Working on AIS, I've long hoped that we could form a coalition with all of the other people worried about AI, because a good deal of them just.. share (some version of) our concerns, and our most ambitious policy solutions (e.g. stopping development, mandating more robust interpretability and evals) could also solve a bunch of problems highlighted by the FATE community, the automation-concerned, etc etc. 

Their positions also have the benefit of conforming to widely-held anxieties ('I am worried AI will just be another tool of empire', 'I am worried I will lose my job for banal normie reasons that have nothing to do with civilizational robustness', 'I am worried AI's will cheaply replace human labor and do a worse job, enshittifying everything in the developed world'). We could generally curry popular support and favor, without being dishonest, by looking at the Venn diagram of things we want and things they want (which would also help keep AI policy from sliding into partisanship, if such a thing is still possible, given the largely right-leaning associations of the AIS community*).

For the next four years, at the very least, I am forced to lay this hope aside. That the EO contained language in service of the FATE community was, in hindsight, very bad, and probably foreseeably so, given that even moderate Republicans like to score easy points on culture war bullshit. Probably it will be revoked, because language about bias made it an easy thing for Vance to call "far left".

"This is ok because it will just be replaced."

Given the current state of the game board, I don't want to be losing any turns. We've already lost too many turns; setbacks are unacceptable.

"What if it gets replaced by something better?"

I envy your optimism. I'm also concerned about the same dynamic playing out in reverse; what if the new EO (or piece of legislation via whatever mechanism), like the old EO, contains some language that is (to us) beside the point, but nonetheless signals partisanship, and is retributively revoked or repealed by the next administration? This is why you don't want AIS to be partisan; partisanship is dialectics without teleology.

Ok, so structurally divisive: establishment politics has made it ~impossible to form meaningful coalitions around issues other than absolute lightning rods (e.g. abortion, immigration; the 'levers' available to partisan hacks looking to gin up donations). It's not just that they make you hate your neighbors, it's that they make you behave as though you hate your neighbors, lest your policy proposals get painted with the broad red brush and summarily dismissed.

I think this is the kind of observation that leads many experienced people interested in AIS to work on things outside of AIS, but with an eye toward implications for AI (e.g. Critch, A Ray). You just have these lucid flashes of how stacked the deck really is, and set about digging the channel that is, compared to the existing channels, marginally more robust to reactionary dynamics ('aligning the current of history with your aims' is maybe a good image).

Hopefully undemocratic regulatory processes serve their function as a backdoor for the sensible, but it's unclear how penetrating the partisanship will be over the next four years (and, of course, those at the top are promising that it will be Very Penetrating).

*I am somewhat ambivalent about how right-leaning AIS really is. Right-leaning compared to middle class Americans living in major metros? Probably. Tolerant of people with pretty far-right views? Sure, to a point. Right of the American center as defined in electoral politics (e.g. 'Republican-voting')? Usually not.

All right, yes.  But that isn't how anyone has ever interpreted Newcomb's Problem.  AFAIK is literally always used to support some kind of acausal decision theory, which it does /not/ if what is in fact happening is that Omega is cheating.

But if the premise is impossible, then the experiment has no consequences in the real world, and we shouldn't consider its results in our decision theory, which is about consequences in the real world.