LessWrong 2.0 Reader

Except billionaires give out plenty of money for philanthropy. If the AI has a slight preference to keeping humans alive, things probably work out well.

Thanks for sharing <3

My main concern about trying SSRIs is that they'll make me stop noticing certain things that I care about, things that currently manifest as anxiety or so.

Opinions?

if there's a bunch of superintelligences running around and they don't care about you—no, they will not spare just a little sunlight to keep Earth alive.

Yes, I agree that this conditional statement is obvious. But while we're on the general topic of whether Earth will be kept alive, it would be nice to see some engagement with Paul Christiano's arguments (which Carl Shulman "agree[s] with [...] approximately in full" [LW(p) · GW(p)]) that superintelligences might care about what happens to you a little bit, articulated in a comment thread on Soares's "But Why Would the AI Kill Us?" [LW(p) · GW(p)] and another thread on "Cosmopolitan Values Don't Come Free" [LW(p) · GW(p)],

The reason I think this is important is because "[t]o argue against an idea honestly, you should argue against the best arguments of the strongest advocates" [LW · GW]: if you write 3000 words inveighing against people who think comparative advantage means that horses can't get sent to glue factories, that doesn't license the conclusion that superintelligence Will Definitely Kill You if there are other reasons why superintelligence Might Not Kill You that don't stop being real just because very few people have the expertise to formulate them carefully.

(An important caveat: the possibility of superintelligences having human-regarding preferences may or may not be comforting: as a fictional illustration [LW · GW] of some relevant considerations, the Superhappies in "Three Worlds Collide" [LW · GW] cared about the humans to some extent, but not in the specific way [LW · GW] that the humans wanted to be cared for.)

Now, you are on the record stating [LW(p) · GW(p)] that you "sometimes mention the possibility of being stored and sold to aliens a billion years later, which seems to [you] to validly incorporate most all the hopes and fears and uncertainties that should properly be involved, without getting into any weirdness that [you] don't expect Earthlings to think about validly." If that's all you have to say on the matter, fine. (Given the premise of AIs spending some fraction of their resources on human-regarding preferences, I agree that uploads look a lot more efficient than literally saving the physical Earth!)

But you should take into account that if you're strategically dumbing down your public communication in order to avoid topics that you don't trust Earthlings to think about validly—and especially if you have a general policy of systematically ignoring counterarguments that it would be politically inconvenient for you to address [LW · GW]—you should expect that Earthlings who are trying to achieve the map that reflects the territory will correspondingly attach much less weight to your words, because we have to take into account how hard you're trying to epistemically screw us over by filtering the evidence [LW · GW].

No more than Bernard Arnalt, having $170 billion, will surely give you $77.

Bernald Arnalt has given eight-figure amounts to charity. Someone who reasoned, "Arnalt is so rich, surely he'll spare a little for the less fortunate" would in fact end up making a correct prediction about Bernald Arnalt's behavior!

Obviously, it would not be valid to conclude "... and therefore superintelligences will, too", because superintelligences and Bernald Arnalt are very different things. But you chose the illustrative example! As a matter of local validity [LW · GW], It doesn't seem like a big ask for illustrative examples to in fact illustrate what what they purport to.

I added intention-to-treat statistics in an addendum.

In this analogy, you:every other human::humanity:every other stuff AI can care about. Arnault can give money to dying people in Africa (I have no idea who he is as person, I'm just guessing), but he has no particular reasons to give them to you specifically and not to the most profitable investment/most efficient charity.

Continental moments are great. I feel like that's the end game once we transcend science and analysis.

Agree wholeheartedly. I'm trying to describe transcending the realisation of determinism, in the sense of not getting bogged down by it, to then go about living a good human life.

Cognitive effort is inevitable. It would take a special kind of 'person who fails the psychopath test', somehow lacking urges/feelings, to be able to switch off completely and fade into nothingness.

It does not produce anything close to fully formed scientific papers. It's output is really not better than just prompting o1 yourself. Of course, o1 and even Sonnet and GPT-4 are very impressive, but there is no update to be made after you've played around with that. 

(Again) I think this is missing the point that we've now (for the first time, to my knowledge) observed an early demo the full research workflow being automatable, as flawed as the outputs might be.

and as he admits in the footnote he didn't include in the LW version, in real life, when adequately incentivized to win rather than find excuses involving 'well, chaos theory shows you can't predict ball bounces more than n bounces out', pinball pros learn how to win and rack up high scores despite 'muh chaos'.

I was confused about this part of your comment because the post directly talks about this in the conclusion.

The strategy typically is to catch the ball with the flippers, then to carefully hit the balls so that it takes a particular ramp which scores a lot of points and then returns the ball to the flippers. Professional pinball players try to avoid the parts of the board where the motion is chaotic.

The "off-site footnote" you're referring to seems to just be saying "The result is a pretty boring game. However, some of these ramps release extra balls after you have used them a few times. My guess is that this is the game designer trying to reintroduce chaos to make the game more interesting again." which is just a minor detail. AFAICT pros could score lots of points even without the extra balls.

(I'm leaving this comment here because I was getting confused about whether there had been major edits to the post, since the relevant content is currently in the conclusion and not the footnote. I was digging through the wayback machine and didn't see any major edits. So trying to save other people from the same confusion.)