LessWrong 2.0 Reader

People seeing this in the future: Check out Draw a Box for some low-level mechanical stuff.

Though there are elegant and still practical specifications for intelligent behavior, the most intelligent agent that runs on some fixed hardware has completely unintelligible cognitive structures and in fact its source code is indistinguishable from white noise.

• What does "most intelligent agent" mean?
• Don't you think we'd also need to specify "for a fixed (basket of) tasks"?
• Are the I/O channels fixed along with the hardware?

I (and maybe you) have historically underrated the density of people with religious backgrounds in secular hubs. Most of these people don't 'think differently', in a structural sense, from their forebears; they just don't believe in that God anymore. 

The hallmark here is a kind of naive enlightenment approach that ignores ~200 years of intellectual history (and a great many thinkers from before that period, including canonical philosophers they might claim to love/respect/understand). This type of thing.

They're no less tribal or dogmatic, or more critical, than the place they came from. They just vote the other way and can maybe talk about one or two levels of abstraction beyond the stereotype they identify against (although they can't really think about those levels).

You should still be nice to them, and honest with them, but you should understand what you're getting into.

The mere biographical detail of having a religious background or being religious isn't a strong mark against someone's thinking on other topics, but it is a sign you may be talking to a member of a certain meta-intellectual culture, and need to modulate your style. I have definitely had valuable conversations with people that firmly belong in this category, and would not categorically discourage engagement. Just don't be so surprised when the usual jutsu falls flat!

Timelines are a result of a person's intuitions about a technical milestone being reached in the future, it is super obviously impossible for us to have a consensus about that kind of thing.

Talking only synchronises beliefs if you have enough time to share all of the relevant information, with technical matters, you usually don't.

added some open circles

I adjusted H to use heaviside's 1/2 convention, good catch.

I agree with this in the world where people are being epistemically rigorous/honest with themselves about their timelines and where there's a real consensus view on them. I've observed that it's pretty rare for people to make decisions truly grounded in their timelines, or to do so only nominally, and I think there's a lot of social signaling going on when (especially younger) people state their timelines. 

I appreciate that more experienced people are willing to give advice within a particular frame ("if timelines were x", "if China did y", "if Anthropic did z", "If I went back to school", etc etc), even if they don't agree with the frame itself. I rely on more experienced people in my life to offer advice of this form ("I'm not sure I agree with your destination, but admit there's uncertainty, and love and respect you enough to advise you on your path"). 

Of course they should voice their disagreement with the frame (and I agree this should happen more for timelines in particular), but to gate direct counsel on urgent, object-level decisions behind the resolution of background disagreements is broadly unhelpful.

When someone says "My timelines are x, what should I do?", I actually hear like three claims:

• Timelines are x
• I believe timelines are x
• I am interested in behaving as though timelines are x

Evaluation of the first claim is complicated and other people do a better job of it than I do so let's focus on the others.

"I believe timelines are x" is a pretty easy roll to disbelieve. Under relatively rigorous questioning, nearly everyone (particularly everyone 'career-advice-seeking age') will either say they are deferring (meaning they could just as easily defer to someone else tomorrow), or admit that it's a gut feel, especially for their ~90 percent year, and especially for more and more capable systems (this is more true of ASI than weak AGI, for instance, although those terms are underspecified). Still others will furnish 0 reasoning transparency and thus reveal their motivations to be principally social (possibly a problem unique to the bay, although online e/acc culture has a similar Thing).

"I am interested in behaving as though timelines are x" is an even easier roll to disbelieve. Very few people act on their convictions in sweeping, life-changing ways without concomitant benefits (money, status, power, community), including people within AIS (sorry friends).

With these uncertainties, piled on top of the usual uncertainties surrounding timelines, I'm not sure I'd want anyone to act so nobly as to refuse advice to someone with different timelines.

If Alice is a senior AIS professional who gives advice to undergrads at parties in Berkeley (bless her!), how would her behavior change under your recommendation? It sounds like maybe she would stop fostering a diverse garden of AIS saplings and instead become the awful meme of someone who just wants to fight about a highly speculative topic. Seems like a significant value loss.

Their timelines will change some other day; everyone's will. In the meantime, being equipped to talk to people with a wide range of safety-concerned views (especially for more senior, or just Older people), seems useful.

harder to converge

Converge for what purpose? It feels like the marketplace of ideas is doing an ok job of fostering a broad portfolio of perspectives. If anything, we are too convergent and, as a consequence, somewhat myopic internally. Leopold mind-wormed a bunch of people until Tegmark spoke up (and that only somewhat helped). Few thought governance was a good idea until pretty recently (~3 years ago), and it would be going better if those interested in the angle weren't shouted down so emphatically to begin with.

If individual actors need to cross some confidence threshold in order to act, but the reasonable confidence interval is in fact very wide, I'd rather have a bunch of actors with different timelines, which roughly sum to the shape of the reasonable thing*, then have everyone working on the same overconfident assumption that later comes back to bite us (when we've made mistakes in the past, this is often why).

*Which is, by the way, closer to flat than most people's individual timelines

note: this was 7 years ago and I've refined my understanding of CDT and the Newcomb problem since.

My current understanding of CDT is that it's does effectively assign a confidence of 1 to the decision not being causally upstream of Omega's action, and that is the whole of the problem.  It's "solved" by just moving Omega's action downstream (by cheating and doing a rapid switch).  It's ... illustrated? ... by the transparent version, where a CDT agent just sees the second box as empty before it even realizes it's decided.  It's also "solved" by acausal decision theories, because they move the decision earlier in time to get the jump on Omega.  

For non-rigorous DTs (like human intuition, and what I personally would want to do), there's a lot of evidence in the setup that Omega is going to turn out to be correct, and one-boxing is an easy call.  If the setup is somewhat difference (say, neither Omega nor anyone else makes any claims about predictions, just says "sometimes both boxes have money, sometimes only one"), then it's a pretty straightforward EV calculation based on kind of informal probability assignments.

But it does require not using strict CDT, which rejects the idea that the choice has backward-causality.

It's a little hard to know what you mean by that. Do you mean something like: given the information known at the time, but allowing myself the hindsight of noticing facts about that information that I may have missed, what should I have thought the probability was?

If so, I think my answer isn't too different from what I believed before the election (essentially 50/50). Though I welcome takes to the contrary.

I'm assuming the Cosmic Flipper is offering, not a doubling of the universe's current value, but a doubling of its current expected value (including whatever you think the future is worth) plus a little more. If it's just doubling current niceness or something, then yeah, that's not nearly enough.