LessWrong 2.0 Reader

p=1, Soylent still seems to be the top choice at the moment. (They are running into some supply chain problem at the moment / recently.)

(Huel seemed fine too from personal experience. If you care about refined oil/canola oil and protein sources it could be a decent alt)

That makes sense -- I should have mentioned, I like your post overall & agree with the thesis that we should be thinking about what short vs. long timelines worlds will look like and then thinking about what the early indicators will be, instead of simply looking at benchmark scores. & I like your slow vs. fast scenarios, I guess I just think the fast one is more likely. :)

I don't understand how the assumption that we are living in a simulation which is so convincing as to be indistinguishable from a non-simulation is any more useful than the Boltzmann brain, or a brain in a vat, or a psychedelic trip, or that we're all just the fantasy of the boy at the end of St. Elsewhere: since, by virtue of being a convincing simulation it has no characteristic which knowingly distinguishes it from a non-simulation. In fact some of those others would be more useful if true, because they would point to phenomena which would better explain the world.

How are the other examples not compatible? What fact could only necessarily be true in a simulation but not on a psychedelically induced hallucination? Or a fever dream? What do you mean "look up close" close to what exactly?

What do you mean by a 'rational mistake'? 

If someone says "always pick the tomato that has a bit of 'bounce'" and, for the sake of demonstration, one wrongly interprets this to mean a tomato, when thrown, should bounce off of a surface - leading to a very messy series of mistakes. When what the original person's map of a 'good tomato test' was that if we press a tomato it should be firm to touch, but not too firm. Isn't that a mistake that is our own - since it didn't exist in the original map? Indeed have we inherited that map at all or created a completely new one?
 

we must detect mistakes that others have already made and passed on to us.

What does that look like in practice? How can you distinguish between another person's mistaken map and a... less mistaken one? By the veracity of their predictions? By the amount of 'success' they have in navigating certain systems and domains? What can we attribute to their map of the system, and what can we attribute to other factors: for example - career advancement - is someone who before the age of 30 becomes preeminent in a certain company there because they have good 'maps' related to their duties, or because they have a good 'map' of the politics of their company? Or could it be they are married to the boss? They are a nepo-hire etc. etc.?

I went through a similar exercise trying to develop key drivers and indicators for a couple slow scenarios back in May 2023, focusing on lessons from the semiconductor industry. I think my "slow" is even slower than yours, so it may not be super useful to you, but maybe you'll find it interesting.

From the way things sure seem to look, the universe is very big, and has room for lots of computations later on. A bunch of plausible rollouts involve some small fraction of those very large resources going on simulations.

You can, if you want, abandon all epistemic hope and have a very very wide prior. Maybe we're totally wrong about everything! Maybe we're Boltzmann brains! But that's not super informative or helpful, so we look around us and extrapolate assuming that's a reasonable thing to do, because we ain't got anything else we can do.

Simulations are very compatible with that. The other examples aren't so much, if you look up close and have some model of what those things are like and do.

I have edited the title in response to this comment

I agree fake pictures are harder to threaten with. But consider that the deepfake method makes everyone a potential target, rather than only targeting the population who would fall for the relationship side of the scam.

There are other reasons I think it would be grimly effective, but I am not about to spell it out for team evil.

Thanks for the feedback! Quite helpful to get more context.
Quick responses:
1) Yes, we did intend for the hook to be eye-grabbing/mildly salesy, as this is part of our promotional material shared across different platforms, and we were hoping this would be effective at garnering the interest of talented individuals and encourage them to work on AIS. Though we didn't think it was dishonest/false, instead we designed it be short but effective. 
2)It was a sincere mistake that the post was made from an org account.
3) We missed gauging issues with the use of 'leading AI Safety organisations' , however, I think you are right. We could have been more cautious in how we framed it.
4) We have taken a note of stating the scope of our efforts and intend to factor this into consideration when designing our next outreach framing.

Thanks for your inputs!
 

Why are you so sure it's a computer simulation? How do you know it's not a drug trip? A fever dream? An unfathomable organism staring into some kind of (to it's particular phenomenology) plugging it's senses into a pseudo-random pattern generator from which is hallucinates or infers the experience of OP?

How could we falsify the simulation hypothesis?