LessWrong 2.0 Reader

I think you are possibly better/optimizing more than most others at selecting conferences & events you actually want to do. Even with work, I think many get value out of having those spontaneous conversations because it often shifts what they're going to do--the number one spontaneous conversation is "what are you working on" or "what have you done so far", which forces you to re-explain what you're doing & the reasons for doing it to a skeptical & ignorant audience. My understanding is you and David already do this very often with each other.

Nah, it's about formalizing "you can just think about neurons, you don't have to simulate individual atoms." Which raises the question "don't have to for what purpose?", and causal closure answers "for literally perfect simulation."

Thanks for writing these posts Zvi <3 I've found them to be quite helpful.

Ah, yeah I definitely struggle a bit sometimes with people who make objective-assertion-type-statements when promoting or defending things they enjoy. I also gain quite a lot of enjoyment from looking at various kinds of media with a critical eye; I just do my best to keep that criticism in contexts where the listener or reader wants to share it :)

Hi Clovis! Something that comes to mind is Zvi's dating roundup posts [LW · GW] in case you haven't seen them yet. 

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.