LessWrong 2.0 Reader

I agree that:

• People commonly talk about love as black-and-white when it isn't.
• It is used as a semantic stopsign or applause light.
• Love is a cluster concept made up of many aspects, but the way people talk about love obscures this. The concept of "true love" serves to keep people in the dark by suggesting that the apparent grab-bag nature of love is just the way people talk, & there's an underlying truth to be discovered. Because experiences of love are fairly rare, people can only accumulate personal evidence about this slowly, so it remains plausible that what they've experienced is "just infatuation" or something else, and the "true love" remains to be discovered. People will fight about what love is in sideways ways, EG "you don't know what love is" can be used to undercut the other person's authority on love (when a more accurate representation of the situation might be "I didn't enjoy participating in the social dynamic you're presently calling love"). Different people will sometimes express different detailed views about what love is, but there seems to be little drive to reach an agreement about this, at least between people who aren't romantic partners. 

I once had the experience of a roommate asking if I believe in love. I said yes, absolutely, explaining that it is a real human emotion (I said something about chemicals in the brain). He responded: it sounds like you don't believe in love!

(I think this has to do with ambiguity about believe-in [LW · GW] as much as about love, to be fair.)

So, a question: is 'love' worth saving as a concept? The way some people use the word might be pretty terrible, but, should we try to rescue it? Is there a good way to use it which recovers many aspects of the common use, while restoring coherence?

I do personally feel that there is some emotional core to love, so I'm sympathetic to the "it's a specific emotion" definition. This accounts with people not being able to give a specific definition. Emotions are feelings, so they're tough to define. They just feel a specific way. You can try to give cognitive-behavioral definitions, and that's pretty useful; but, for example, you could show behavioral signs of being afraid without actually experiencing fear.

I'm also sympathetic to the view that "love" is a kind of ritual, with saying "I love you" being the centerpiece of the ritual, and a cluster of loving behaviors being the rest of it. "I love you" can then be interpreted as a desire or intention or commitment to participate in the rest of it. 

In retrospect, I've become more optimistic about alignment, and I now think there's quite a bit more evidence towards the low-stakes version of the alignment problem being quite easy to solve for AIs, and while I don't expect anything close to formal proof (because of edge cases), I now think that the techniques that were developed are enough such that we can declare victory on the low-stakes alignment problem, and as a consequence I now think we can declare the outer alignment problem to be mostly solved at this point (given Paul's definition of low-stakes alignment).

The fact that a lot of AI risk scenarios rely more on deceptively aligned AI changing the world in an abrupt and irreversible way than in the past corroborates this.

I reject the principled distinction [LW · GW]. To me, it's more of a spectrum.

I'm thinking the causal closure part is more about the soul not existing than about anything else.

Causal closure is impossible for essentially every interesting system, including classical computers (my laptop currently has a wiring problem that definitely affects its behavior despite not being the sort of thing anyone would include in an abstract model).

Are there any measures of approximate simulation that you think are useful here? Computer science and nonlinear dynamics probably have some.

Love the drawings! I feel like more drawings would make this community easier to understand to outsiders.

I'm guilty of n°3 when people defend some hype products while saying untrue things about how they are better than the competition. Obvious example about Apple's products "doing something no other phone does" when the functionality in question was introduced 7 years ago on Android. Not exactly the same since they do not frame it as preference but try to rationalize it but I'll remember this next time to be nicer.

Excellent points! Yes, this is definitely a fun and interesting thing to engage with intellectually so long as both people feel like it's being done in a non-judgmental or agendic way. Part of why I included the paragraphs about non-filtering being hard for some people is that I know there are some brains for which this genuinely doesn't feel like it "should" be hostile or pressurey, since they don't perceive it that way... but as in all things, that's why your point about actually paying attention to what the other person says and taking it seriously is so important.

karma should also transfer automatically

Especially if it's something as non-committal as "this mechanism could maybe matter". Does that really invalidate the neuron doctrine?

I agree each of the "mechanisms that maybe matter" are tenuous by themselves, the argument I'm trying to make here is hits-based. There are so many mechanisms that maybe matter, the chances of one of them mattering in a relevant way is quite high.

there's imo probably not any (even-nearly-implementable) ceiling for basically any rich (thinking-)skill at all^[1] — no cognitive system will ever be well-thought-of as getting close to a ceiling at such a skill — it's always possible to do any rich skill very much better (I mean these things for finite minds in general, but also when restricting the scope to current humans)

(that said, (1) of course, it is common for people to become better at particular skills up to some time and to become worse later, but i think this has nothing to do with having reached some principled ceiling; (2) also, we could perhaps eg try to talk about 'the artifact that takes at most $n$ bits to specify (in some specification-language) which figures out $x$ units of math the quickest (for some $x$ sufficiently large compared to $n$)', but even if we could make sense of that, it wouldn't be right to think of it as being at some math skill ceiling to begin with, because it will probably very quickly change very much about its thinking (i.e. reprogram itself, imo plausibly indefinitely many times, including indefinitely many times in important ways, until the heat death of the universe or whatever); (3) i admit that there can be some purposes for which there is an appropriate way to measure goodness at some rich skill with a score in $[0,1]$, and for such a purpose potential goodness at even a rich skill is of course appropriate to consider bounded and optimal performance might be rightly said to be approachable, but this somehow feels not-that-relevant in the present context)