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The way intuitive models work (I claim) is that there are concepts, and associations / implications / connotations of those concepts. There’s a core intuitive concept “carrot”, and it has implications about shape, color, taste, botanical origin, etc. And if you specify the shape, color, etc. of a thing, and they’re somewhat different from most normal carrots, then people will feel like there’s a question “but now is it really a carrot?” that goes beyond the complete list of its actual properties. But there isn’t, really. Once you list all the properties, there’s no additional unanswered question. It just feels like there is. This is an aspect of how intuitive models work, but it doesn’t veridically correspond to anything of substance.

Mhhhmhh. Let me see if I can work with the carrot example to where it fits my view of the debate.

A botanist is charged with filling a small field with plants, any plants. A chemist hands him a perfect plastic replica of a carrot, perfect in shape, color, texture, and (miraculously) taste. The botanist says that it's not a plant. The chemist, who has never seen plants other than carrots, points out the matching qualities to the plants he knows. The botanist says okay but those are just properties that a particular kind of plant happens to have, they're not the integral property of what makes something a plant. "The core intuitive concept 'plant' has implications about shape, color, texture, taste, et cetera", says the chemist. "If all those properties are met, people may think there's an additional question about the true plant-ness of the object, but [...]." The botanist points out that he is not talking about an intangible, immeasurable, or non-physical property but rather about the fact that this carrot won't grow and spread seeds when planted into the earth. The chemist, having conversed extensively with people who define plants primarily by their shape, color, texture, and taste (which are all those of carrots because they've also not seen other plants) just sighs, rolling his eyes at the attempt to redefine plant-ness to be entirely about this one obscure feature that also just happens to be the most difficult one to test.

Which is to say that I get -- or at least I think I get -- the sense that we're successfully explaining important features of consciousness and the case for linking it to anything special is clearly diminishing -- but I don't think it's correct. When I say that the hard meta problem of seeing probably contains ~90% of the difficulty of the hard meta problem of consciousness whereas the meta problem of free will contains 0% and the problem of awareness ~2%, then I'm not changing my model in response to new evidence. I've always thought Free Will was nonsense!

(The botanist separately points out that there in fact other plants with different shape, texture, and taste, although they all do have green leaves, to which the chemist replies that ?????. This is just to come back to the point that people report advanced meditative states that lose many of the common properties of consciousness, including Free Will, the feeling of having a self (I've experienced that one!) and even the presence of any information content whatsoever, and afaik they tend to be more "impressed", roughly speaking, with consciousness as a result of those experiences, not less.)

[seeing stuff]

Attempt to rephrase: the brain has several different intuitive models in different places. These models have different causal profiles, which explains how they can correspond to different introspective reports. One model corresponds to the person talking about smelling stuff. Another corresponds to the person talking about seeing stuff. Yet another corresponds to the person talking about obtaining vague intuitions about the presence and location of objects. The latter two are triggered by visual inputs. Blindsight turns off the second but not the third.

If this is roughly correct, my response to it is that proposing different categories isn't enough because the distinction between visually vivid experience and vague intuitions isn't just that we happen to call them by different labels. (And the analogous thing is true for every other sensory modality, although the case is the least confusing with vision.) Claiming to see a visual image is different from claiming to have a vague intuition in all the ways that it's different; people claim to see something made out of pixels, which can look beautiful or ugly, seems to have form, depth, spatial location, etc. They also claim to perceive a full visual image constantly, which presumably isn't possible(?) since it would contain more information than can actually be there, so a solution has to explain how this illusion of having access to so much information is possible. (Is awareness really a serial processor in any meaningful way if it can contain as much information at once as a visual image seems to contain?)

(I didn't actually intend to get into a discussion about any of this though, I was just using it as a demonstration of why I think the hard metaproblem of consciousness has at least one real subset and hence isn't empty.)

Hard Problem

Yeah, I mean, since I'm on board with reducing everything to the meta problem, the hard problem itself can just be sidestepped entirely.

But since you brought it up, I'll just shamefully use this opportunity to make a philosophical point that I've never seen anyone else make, which is that imo the common belief that no empirical data can help distinguish an illusionist from a realist universe... is actually false! The reason is that consciousness is a high-level phenomenon in the illusionist universe and a low phenomenon in at least some versions of the realist universe, and we have different priors for how high-level vs. low-level phenomena behave.

The analogy I like is, imagine there's a drug that makes people see ghosts, and some think these ghosts tap into the fundamental equations of physics, whereas others think the brain is just making stuff up. One way you can go about this is to have a thousand people describe their ghosts in detail. If you find that the brightness of hallucinated ghosts is consistently proportional to their height, then you've pretty much disproved the "the brain is just making stuff up hypothesis". (Whereas if you find no such relationships, you've strengthened the hypothesis.) This is difficult to operationalize for consciousness, but I think determining the presence of absence of elegant mathematical structure within human consciousness is, at least in principle, an answer to the question of "[w]hat would progress on the 'breathes fire' question even look like".

Georgism for sure. When we build the political will to reclaim all titles to land and charge leases held for the public by the government, UBI is easily and appropriately funded. As you say though, the question is whether it will ever be enough to live on given other market forces.

My hope has been that a system like the one I described can get ahead of all of it by defining the minimum purchasing power as exactly what’s necessary to live on. In principle this only works when the economy has a high post scarcity multiplier, that is, one unit of work gives you four or more units of goods. As you mentioned before, automation may not be there yet, but as a hint of things to come, our current per capita GDP is double the current living wage floor.

Thanks for making this!

I found it a challenge to deduce strategies over many plays, rather than following the advice "not intended to be replayed". The first playthrough was pretty much meaningless for me, especially given the knowledge that both time and history could affect the results. I just viewed it as one step of information gathering for the real game.

The suboptimal zones weren't obviously suboptimal from a single pass, even Dragon Lake that always yields nothing. For all I knew, it could have yielded 5000 food with quite a low probability (and still be always optimal), or lesser amounts of food at specific combinations of time and day, or only when matching some rule based on the previous results of foraging in other zones.

After many runs I did settle on a strategy, and mentally scored myself by looking at the source to see whether there was anything that I should have spotted but didn't. As it happened, my final strategy was almost optimal though I stayed on the rats for a few more hours than ideal.

Curated!^[1] This thinks through a specific threat model with future AIs, and how to concretely mitigate it. I don't have a strong opinion on whether it works, but I really want to encourage more concrete analysis of this sort.

1. ^{^}

   "Curated", a term which here means "This just got emailed to 30,000 people, of whom typically half open the email, and it gets shown at the top of the frontpage to anyone who hasn't read it for ~1 week."

I'd missed that, thank you for pointing that out.

If "expected" effectively means what you're saying is that you're being offered a bet that is good by definition, that even at 50/50 odds, you take the bet, I suppose that's true. If the bet is static for a second flip, it wouldn't be a good deal, but if it dynamically altered such that it was once again a good bet by definition, I suppose you keep taking the bet.

If you're engaging with the uncertainty that people are bad at evaluating things like "expected utility" then at least some of the point is that our naive intuitions are probably missing some of the math, and costs, and the bet is likely a bad bet.

If I was trying to give credence to that second possibility, I'd say that the word "expected" is now doing a bunch of hidden heavy lifting in the payoff structure, and you don't really know what lifting it's doing.

I might as well check out the panel discussion. I didn't know about it.

I think I listened to the Hotz debate. The highlight of that one was when Hotz implied that he was using an LLM to drive a car, Yudkowsky freaks out a bit, and Hotz clarifies that he means the architecture for his learning algorithm is basically the same as an LLM.

I suspect the Destiny discussion is qualitatively similar to the Dwarkesh one.

At this point, maybe I should just read old MIRI papers.

Ok, I'm agreeing in principle to make the same bet as with RatsWrongAboutUAP.

("I commit to paying up if I agree there's a >0.4 probability something non-mundane happened in a UFO/UAP case, or if there's overwhelming consensus to that effect and my probability is >0.1.")

Thank you for clarifying. I appreciate and point out as relevant the fact that Legg-Hutter includes in it's definition "for all environments (ie action:observation mappings)". I can now say I agree with your "heresy" with a high credence for the cases where compute budgets are not ludicrously small relative to I/O scale, and the utility function is not trivial. I'm a bit weirded out by the environment space being conditional on a fixed hardware variable (namely, I/O) in this operationalization, but whathever.

And I’m not even mentioning the strange sexual dynamics

Is this a joke? I'm confused.

I asked GPT4o to perform a web search for podcast appearances by Yudkowsky. It dug up these two lists (apparently, autogenerated from scrapped data). When I asked it to base use these lists as a starting point to look for high quality debates and after some further elicitation and wrangling, the best we could find was this moderated panel discussion featuring Yudkowsky, Liv Boeree, and Joscha Bach. There's also the Yudkowsky v/s George Hotz debate on Lex Fridman, and the time Yudkowsky debated AI risk with the streamer and political commentaror known as Destiny. I have watched none of the three debates I just mentioned; but I know that Hotz is a heavily vibes-based (rather than object-level-based) thinker, and that Destiny has no background in AI risk, but has good epistemics. I think he probably offered reasonable-at-first-approximation-yet-mostly-uninformed pushback.

EDIT: Upon looking a bit more at the Destiny-Yudkowsky discussion, i may have unwittingly misrepresented it a bit. It occurred during Manifest, and was billed as a debate. ChatGPT says Destiny's skepticism was rather active, and did not budge much.