LessWrong 2.0 Reader

You're putting quite a lot of weight on what "mathematicians say". Probably these people just haven't thought very hard about it?

I somewhat disagree with Tenobrus' commentary about Wolfram.

I watched the full podcast, and my impression was that Wolfram uses a "scientific hat", of which he is well aware of, which comes with a certain ritual and method for looking at new things and learning them. Wolfram is doing the ritual of understanding what Yudkowsky says, which involves picking at the details of everything.

Wolfram often recognizes that maybe he feels like agreeing with something, but "scientifically" he has a duty to pick it apart. I think this has to be understood as a learning process rather than as a state of belief.

check out exhibit 13...

As they describe in the report, the philosophical assumptions are mostly inconsequential and assumed  for simplicity.  The rest of your critique is just describing what they did, not an objection to it.  It's not precise and they admit quite high uncertainty, but it's definitely better than alternatives (E.g. neuron counts). 

I'm a bit torn regarding the "predicting how others react to what you say or do, and adjust accordingly" part. On the one hand this is very normal and human and makes sense. It's kind of predictive empathy in a way. On the other hand, thinking so very explicitly about it and trying to steer your behavior in a way so as to get the desired reaction out of another person also feels a bit manipulative and inauthentic. If I knew another person would think that way and plan exactly how they interacted with me, I would find that quite off-putting. But maybe the solution is just "don't overdo it", and/or "only use it in ways the other person would likely consent to" (such as avoiding to accidentally say something hurtful).

Fixed! That specific response had a very weird thread structure, so makes sense the AI I used got confused. Plausible something else was missing, though I think I've now read through all the original PDFs and didn't see anything new.

I haven't heard of any such corrupt deals with OpenAI or Anthropic concerning governmental oversight over AI technology on the scale that would make me worried. Do you have any links to articles about government employees (who are responsible for oversight) recently signing secret contracts with OpenAI or Anthropic that would prohibit them from giving real feedback on a big enough scale to make it concerning?

I will try to provide another similar analogy. Let's say that a King got tired of his people dying from diseases, so he decided to try a novel method of vaccination.

However, some people were really concerned about that. As far as they were concerned, the default outcome of injecting viruses into the bodies of people is death. And the King wants to vaccinate everyone, so these people create a council of great and worthy thinkers who after thinking for a while come up with a list of reasons why vaccines are going to doom everyone.

However, some other great and worthy thinkers (let's call them "hopefuls") come to the council and give reasons to think that aforementioned reasons are mistaken. Maybe they have done their own research, which seems to vindicate King's plan or at least undermine council's arguments.

And now imagine that King comes down from the castle points his finger at hopefuls' giving arguments for why the arguments proposed by the council is wrong and says "yeah, basically this" and then turns around and goes back to the castle. To me it seems like King's official endorsement of the arguments proposed by hopefuls doesn't really change the ethicality of the situation, as long as King is acting according to hopefuls' plan.

Furthermore, imagine if the one of the hopefuls who come to argue with the council was actually an undercover King. And he gave exactly the same arguments as people before him. This still IMO doesn't change the ethicality of the situation.

First I heard of it was from an anesthesiologist who was very happy with how it is the only way to get to full anesthesia without depressing the patient's heart rate, so for senior patients it was really the only option. In retrospect, his enthusiasm about it does seem suspicious, but we were surrounded by professors and I don't think he was lying.

FYI it seems like this (important-seeming) email is missing, though the surrounding emails in the exchange seem to be present. (So maybe some other ones are missing too.)