LessWrong 2.0 Reader

Prompt: write a micro play that is both disturbing and comforting
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Title: "The Silly Child"

Scene: A mother is putting to bed her six-year-old child 

CHILD: Mommy, how many Boltzmann brains are there?

MOTHER: As many as are possible.

CHILD (smiling): Can we make another one?

MOTHER (smiling): Sure. And while we're at it, let's delete the number 374? I've never liked that one. 

CHILD (excited): Oh! And let's make a new Fischer-Griess group element too! Can we do that Mommy?

MOTHER (bops nose) That's enough stalling. You need to get your sleep. Sweet dreams, little one. (kisses forehead)

End

Einstein was not an experimentalist, yet was perfectly capable of physics; his successors have largely not touched his unfinished work, and not for lack of data.

While it is interesting at first glance, some caveats are called for here.

One, Einstein's achievements were sort of overrated, see these comments for details:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GSBCw94DsxLgDat6r/interpreting-yudkowsky-on-deep-vs-shallow-knowledge#6HPjxMvTnP9JeibXZ [LW(p) · GW(p)]

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GSBCw94DsxLgDat6r/interpreting-yudkowsky-on-deep-vs-shallow-knowledge#icmCewLmXnxgtmANP [LW(p) · GW(p)]

Two, the EPR paradox is resolvable in modern physics by allowing non-locality in entanglement, but having a no-communication theorem that prevents exploiting it to break special relativity.

Societies aren't the issue; they're mindless aggregates that don't experience anything and don't actually even have desires in anything like the way a human, or or even an animal or an AI, has desires. Individuals are the issue. Do individuals get to choose which of these societies they live in?

I’m pretty sure he doesn’t buy the Christian Paradise of "having no job, only leisure is good actually" either.

This (a) doesn't have anything in particular to do with Christianity, (b) has been the most widely held view among people in general since forever, and (c) seems obviously correct. If you want to rely on the contrary supposition, I'm afraid you're going to have to argue for it.

You can still have hobbies.

I also kinda notice that there are no meaningful place left for humans in that society.

There's that word "meaningful" that I keep hearing everywhere. I claim it's a meaningless word (or at least that it's being used here in a meaningless sense). Please define it in a succinct, relevant, and unambiguous way.

If you believe that the democratic consensus made mostly of normal people will allow you that [Glorious Transhumanist Future], I have a bridge to sell to you.

The democratic consensus also won't allow a Butlerian Jihad, and I don't think you're claiming that it will.

So apparently nobody arguing for either can claim to represent either the democratic consensus or the only alternative to it. What's your point?

If you don’t have a plan then don’t build AGI, pretty please ?

I agree there.

This is obviously wrong. I won’t argue for why it is wrong — too long post, and so on.

I'm actually not sure what you're arguing for or against in this whole section.

Obviously you're not going to "solve human values". Equally obviously, any future, AI or non-AI, is going to be better for some people's values than others. Some values have always won, and some values have always lost, and that will not change. What that has to do with justice destroying the world, I have absolutely no clue.

I think you're trying to take the view that any major change in the "human condition", or in what's "human", is equivalent to the destruction of the world, no matter what benefits it may have. This is obviously wrong. I won't argue for why it's wrong, but now that I've said those magic words, you're bound to accept all my conclusions.

I still can’t believe some of you would sided with the super-happies !

So you're siding with the guy who killed 15 billion non-consenting people because he personally couldn't handle the idea of giving up suffering?

Wrong answers will disempower humans forever at best, reducing them to passive leafs in the wind.

Just like they are now and always have been. The Heat Death of the Universe (TM) is gonna eat ya, regardless of what you do.

Slightly wrong answers won’t go as far as that, but will result in the permanent loss of vast chunks of Human Values — the parts we will decide to discard, consciously or not.

Human Values have been changing, for individuals and in the "average", for as long as there've been humans, including being discarded consciously or unconsciously. Mostly in a pretty aimless, drifting way. This is not new and neither AI nor anything else will fundamentally change it. At least not while the "humans" involved are recognizably like the humans we have now... and changing away from that would be a pretty big break in itself, no?

You build your ASI. You have that big Diverse Plural Assembly that is apparently plan A

I haven't actually heard many people suggesting that.

I think its this

use of humor as a pedagogical tool in Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation (CPR) courses

I first understood that as resuscitating people by telling them jokes. Like, when you laugh hard enough, your heart starts beating again. :D

*

Yeah, I think it could be interesting. To me, this feels unsurprising -- memory is related to emotions, so you should use emotions while teaching. But negative emotions, such as fear, help people remember, but also discourage them from researching the topic on their own. They help memory, but hurt creativity. Positive emotions should be useful for both remembering and experimenting.

Now the question is which positive emotions. Also, how. I guess people will remember funny things, but can you produce jokes about every important thing you want your students to remember? (If you can, you should totally do an educational YouTube comedy channel.)

I've thought about this before, and the solution I came up with is to denominate the bets in short term treasury bonds instead of dollars.

I am not sure what point you are making with "respect their preferences", I am not proposing one country go to war with other countries to take the sun. For instance, one way it might go down is someone will just offer to buy it from Earth, and the price will be many orders of magnitude more resources than Earth has, so Earth will accept, and replace it with an artificial source of light & heat.

I may be wrong about the estimates of the value of the energy, neither of us have specified how the rest of the stars in the universe will get distributed. For concreteness, I am here imagining something like: the universe is not a whole singleton but made of many separate enclaves that have their own governance and engage in trade with one another, and that Earth is a special one that keeps a lot of its lineage with present-day Earth, and is generally outcompeted by all the others ones that are smarter/faster and primarily run by computational-minds rather than biological ones. 

But like, I wouldn't be surprised if, say, someone trained something that performed comparably to LLMs on a wide variety of benchmarks, using much less "data"... and then when you look into it, you find that what they were doing was taking activations of the LLMs and training the smaller guy on the activations. And I'll be like, come on, that's not the point; you could just as well have "trained" the smaller guy by copy-pasting the weights from the LLM and claimed "trained with 0 data!!". And you'll be like "but we met your criterion!" and I'll just be like "well whatever, it's obviously not relevant to the point I was making, and if you can't see that then why are we even having this conversation". (Or maybe you wouldn't do that, IDK, but this sort of thing--followed by being accused of "moving the goal posts"--is why this question feels frustrating to answer.)

Link?