LessWrong 2.0 Reader

It's impossible to know until he is done/defeated, because the things he experiences due to his actions now could cause huge swings in his impacts on the future.

Net negative & net positive are hard to say.

Some one seemingly good might be a net negative by displacing some one better.

And some one seemingly bad might be a net positive by displacing some one worse.

And things like this are not particularly farfetched.

Does anyone know research on how to correct, regulate and interact with organisations with secrets that can't be known due to their info hazard nature?  It seems that this might be a tricky problem we need to solve with AI.

Musk is net negative. His technology is cool but it would be perfectly fine without him. He has lost his mind in the style of Kanye West and spends his time ceaselessly weighing in on subjects such as British politics without first doing any research. He is a chaos agent whose modus operandi is short sharp aggressive interventions. Fine for a startup CEO where the damage is contained. Immensely worrying now he is a de facto world leader.

My new TAP for the year is - When I fail: try twice more. Then stop.

I'm persistent but unfortunately I don't know when to quit. I fall a foul of that saying "the definition of insanity is to try the same thing over and over again and expect different results". Need a pitch for a client? Instead of one good one I'll quota fill with 10 bad ones. Trying to answer a research question for a essay - if I don't find it in five minutes, guess I'm losing my whole evening on a Google Books/Scholar rabbit hole finding ancillary answers.

By allowing myself only two more tries but no more, that should mean that I get three failures instead of burnout-1 failures. It should mean I'll be, per the saying, less insane.

Three is an arbitrary number, it could easily be 4 or 5, but if I had to post-rationalize it then it would be: if you fail three consecutive times, then your chance of success was lower than 33.3% which means you need a better tactic or approach.

Three is a good balance between repetition without causing burnout, it also is low investment, which means that it encourages me to try again, and quickly.

Of course this approach only works if there is a postmortem. Try twice more, stop, then analyze what happened.

I can't say I'm proud of the fact that I need such a simple rule. But if it works, then I shouldn't feel ashamed for improving my behavior because of it.

 

“The reasons why super human AI is a very low hanging fruit are pretty obvious.”

“1) The human brain is meager in terms of energy consumption & matter.”

“2) Humans did not evolved to do calculus, computer programming & things like that.”

“3) Evolution is not efficient.”

“Neural networks don't need to have immaculate design -- otherwise human intelligence never would have evolved in the 1st place”

(Meta: Apologies for running the clock, but it is 1:45am where I am and I'm too sleepy to keep going on this thread, so I'm bowing out for tonight. I want to respond further, but I'm on vacation right now so I do wish to disclaim any expectations of a speedy follow-up.)

I maintain that biological humans will need to do population control at some point. If they decide that enacting the population control in the solar system at a later population leve is worth it for them to dismantle the Sun, then they can go for it. My guess is that they won't, and will have population control earlier. 

I think that the coder looking up and saying that the Sun burning is distasteful but the Great Transhumanist Future will come in 20 years, along with a later mention of "the Sun is a battery", together implies that the Sun is getting dismantled in the near future. I guess you can debate in how strong the implication is, maybe they just want to dismantle the Sun in the long term, and currently only using the Sun as a battery in some benign way, but I think that's not the most natural interpretation.

Yeah, maybe I just got too angry. As we discussed in other comments, I believe that astronomical acceleration perspective the real deal is maximizing the initial industrialization of Earth and its surroundings, which does require killing off (and mind uploading) the Amish and everyone else. Sure, if people are only arguing that we should only dismantle the Sun and Earth after millennia, that's more acceptable, but I really don't see what's the point then, we can build out our industrial base on Alpha Centauri by then. 

The part that is frustrating to me that neither the original post, nor any of the commenters arguing with me are not caveating their position with "of course, we would never want to destroy Earth before we can save all the people who want to live in their biological bodies, even though this is plausibly the majority of the cost in cosmic slow-down". If you agree with this, please say so, and I still have quarrels about removing people to artificial planets if they don't want to go, but I'm less horrified. But so far, no one was willing to clarify that they don't want to destroy Earth before saving the biological people, and I really did hear people say in private conversations things like "we will immediately kill all the bodies and upload the minds, the people will thank us later once they understand better" and things of that sort, which makes me paranoid.

Ben, Oliver, Raemon, Jessica, are you willing to commit to not wanting to destroy Earth if it requires killing the biological bodies of a significant number of non-consenting people? If so, my ire was not directed against you and I apologize to you.