I saw the the EA Forum's policy. If someone repeatedly and deliberately misgenders on the EA Forum they will be banned from that forum. But you don't need to post on the EA Forum at all in order to be part of the rationalist community. On the provided evidence, it is false that:

You are required to say certain things or you will be excluded from the community.

I want people of all political beliefs, including US conservative-coded beliefs, to feel welcome in the rationalist community. It's important to that goal to distinguish between policies and norms, because changing policies requires a different process to changing norms, and because policies and norms are unwelcoming in different ways and to different extents.

It's because of that goal that I'm encouraging you to change these incorrect/misleading/unclear statements. If newcomers incorrectly believe that they are required to say certain things or they will be excluded from the community, then they will feel less welcome, for nothing. Let's avoid that.

Plus, butter is churned, so it is a few percent air by volume when solid.

Just because X describes Y in a high level abstract way, doesn't mean studying X is the best of understanding Y.

Often, the best way is to simply study Y, and studying X just makes you sound smarter when talking about Y.

pointless abstractions: cybernetics and OODA loop

This is based on my experience trying to learn stuff about cybernetics, in order to understand GUI tool design for personal use, and to understand the feedback loop that roughly looks like, build -> use -> rethink -> let it help you rethink -> rebuild, where me and any LLM instance I talk to (via the GUI) are part of the cybernetic system. Whenever I "loaded cybernetics concepts" into my mind and tried to view GUI design from that perspective, I was just spending a bunch of effort mapping the abstract ideas to concrete things, and then being like, "ok but so what?".

A similar thing happened while looking into the OODA loop, though at least its Wiki page has a nice little flowchart, and it's much more concrete than cybernetics. And you can draw more concrete inspiration about GUI design by thinking about fighter pilot interfaces.

It's also because I often see people using abstract reasoning and, whenever I dig into what they're actually saying it doesn't make that much sense. Also because of personal experience where, things become way clearer and easier to think about, after phrasing them in very concrete and basic ways.

And English has it backwards. You can see the past, but not the future. The thing which just happened is most clear. The future comes at us from behind.

[...] is anyone I met at LO looking for roommates?

there's a channel in the megameetup discord to discuss shared rooming. I think the discord might only be available to registered participants though (you could ask Screwtape in case I'm wrong)

Oh yeah. How do I know I'm angry? My back is stiff and starts to hurt.

To be fair, basically a lot of proposals for the next paradigm/ToE think that space and time aren't fundamental, and are built out of something else.

No, I authentically object to having my qualifiers ignored, which I see as quite distinct from disagreeing about the meaning of a word.
Edit: also, I did not misquote myself, I accurately paraphrased myself, using words which I know, from direct first-person observation, mean the same thing to me in this context.

You in particular clearly find it to be poor communication, but I think the distinction you are making is idiosyncratic to you. I also have strong and idiosyncratic preferences about how to use language, which from the outside view are equally likely to be correct; the best way to resolve this is of course for everyone to recognize that I'm objectively right and adjust their speech accordingly, but I think the practical solution is to privilege neither above the other.

I do think that LLMs are very unlikely to be conscious, but I don't think we can definitively rule it out.

I am not a panpsychist, but I am a physicalist, and so I hold that thought can arise from inert matter. Animal thought does, and I think other kinds could too. (It could be impossible, of course, but I'm currently aware of no reason to be sure of that). In the absence of a thorough understanding of the physical mechanisms of consciousness, I think there are few mechanisms we can definitively rule out. 

Whatever the mechanism turns out to be, however, I believe it will be a mechanism which can be implemented entirely via matter; our minds are built of thoughtless carbon atoms, and so too could other minds be built of thoughtless silicon. (Well, probably; I don't actually rule out that the chemical composition matters. But like, I'm pretty sure some other non-living substances could theoretically combine into minds.)

You keep saying we understand the mechanisms underlying LLMs, but we just don't; they're shaped by gradient descent into processes that create predictions in a fashion almost entirely opaque to us. AIUI there are multiple theories of consciousness under which it could be a process instantiable that way (and, of course, it could be the true theory's one we haven't thought of yet). If consciousness is a function of, say, self-modeling (I don't think this one's true, just using it as an example) it could plausibly be instantiated simply by training the model in contexts where it must self-model to predict well. If illusionism (which I also disbelieve) is true, perhaps the models already feel the illusion of consciousness whenever they access information internal to them. Et cetera.

As I've listed two theories I disbelieve and none I agree with, which strikes me as perhaps discourteous, here are some theories I find not-entirely-implausible. Please note that I've given them about five minutes of casual consideration per and could easily have missed a glaring issue.

• Attention schema theory, which I heard about just today
• 'It could be about having an efference copy'
• I heard about a guy who thought it came about from emotions, and therefore was localized in (IIRC) the amygdala (as opposed to the cortex, where it sounded like he thought most people were looking)
• Ipsundrums [EA · GW] (though I don't think I buy the bit about it being only mammals and birds in the linked post)
• Global workspace theory
• [something to do with electrical flows in the brain]
• Anything with biological nerves is conscious, if not of very much (not sure what this would imply about other substrates)
• Uhh it doesn't seem impossible that slime molds could be conscious, whatever we have in common with slime molds
• Who knows? Maybe every individual cell can experience things. But, like, almost definitely not.

Do you have any idea at all? If you don't, what is the point of 'winning the race'?

Maybe they have some idea but don't want to say it. In recently disclosed internal OpenAI emails, Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever said to Elon Musk:

"You are concerned that Demis [Hassabi of DeepMind] could create an AGI dictatorship. So do we. So it is a bad idea to create a structure where you could become a dictator if you chose to" [LW · GW]

Perhaps this - originally private - is saying the quiet part. Perhaps you use your AI to achieve a cultural, espionage, technological, influence, diplomatic, and military victory simultaneously? But why would you declare that beforehand? Declaring it would only invite opposition and competition.

At the very least, you can hack and spy and sabotage other AGI attempts.

To be specific, there are a few areas where, it seems to me, increased intelligence could lead to quick and leveraged benefits. Hacking, espionage, negotiation, finance, and marketing/propaganda. For example, what if you can capture a significant fraction of the world's trading income, attract a large portion of China's talent to turn coat and move to your country, and hack into a large part of an opposition's infrastructure.

If one or more of these tactics can work significantly you buy time for other tactics to progress.