Agreed on the examples of natural abstractions. I held a couple abstraction examples in my mind (e.g. atom, food, agent) while reading the post and found that it never really managed to attack these truly very general (dare I say natural) abstractions.
codyz on Another UFO BetYep, these are good points. Appreciate you engaging in such good faith. Would still like to bet if you're down.
directedevolution on The Median Researcher ProblemIt’s not necessary for each person to personally identify the best minds on all topics and exclusively defer to them. It’s more a heuristic of deferring to the people those you trust most defer to on specific topics, and calibrating your confidence according to your own level of ability to parse who to trust and who not to.
But really these are two separate issues: how to exercise judgment in deciding who to trust, and the causes of research being “memetic.” I still say research is memetic not because mediocre researchers are blithely kicking around nonsense ideas that take on an exaggerated life of their own, but mainly because of politics and business ramifications of the research.
The idea that wine is good for you is memetic both because of its way of poking at “established wisdom” and because the alcohol industry sponsors research in that direction.
Similar for implicit bias tests, which are a whole little industry of their own.
Clinical trials represent decades of investment in a therapeutic strategy. Even if an informed person would be skeptical that current Alzheimer’s approaches are the way to go, businesses that have invested in it are best served by gambling on another try and hoping to turn a profit. So they’re incentivized to keep plugging the idea that their strategy really is striking at the root of the disease.
charlie-steiner on GPT-8 may not be ASIWell, it could be like that. Seems additionally unlikely the field as a whole would be bottlnecked just because the decoder-only transformer architecture is, though :/
tsvibt on An alternative approach to superbabiesI'm not gonna read the reddit post because
I don't know whether orcas are supersmart. A couple remarks:
It seems unlikely to me that there is potential to make large brain based intelligence advancements beyond the current best humans using human evolved biology. There will be distance scaling limitations linked to neural signal speeds.
Then there is Jeff Hawkins 'thousand brains' theory of human intelligence that our brains are made up of thousands of parallel processing cortical columns of a few mm cross section and a few mm thick with cross communication and recursion etc, but that fundamental processing core probably isn't scalable in complexity, only in total number - your brain could perhaps be expanded to handle thinking about more things in parallel at once, but not at much higher levels of sophistication without paying a large coordination speed price (and evolution places a premium on reaction speed for animals that encounter violence)
I look at whales and other mammals with much much larger than human brains and wonder why they are not smarter - some combination of no evolutionary driver and perhaps a lot of their neurons are dedicated to delay-line processing needed for processing sonar and controlling large bodies with long signaling delays.
Regardless, if AI is a dominant part of our future then it seems likely to me that regardless of whether the future is human utopia or dystopia, non-transhuman humans will not exist in significant numbers in a few hundred years. Neural biology and perhaps all biology is going to be superseded as maladapted to the technological future.
douglas_knight on Is the Power Grid Sustainable?The transmission utility is not purely a transmission company. It spends money on both generation and transmission. Some generation charges leave to other companies. This is not a competitive market, but even if it were, it would only give you a bound on the cost of generation and tell you nothing about the cost of transmission.
tsvibt on An alternative approach to superbabiesI appreciate you being relatively clear about this, but yeah, I think it's probably better to spend more time learning facts and thinking stuff through, compared to writing breathless LW posts. More like a couple weeks rather than a couple days. But that's just my stupid opinion. The thing is, there's probably gonna be like ten other posts in the reference class of this post, and they just... don't leave much of a dent in things? There's a lot that needs serious thinking-through, let's get to work on that! But IDK, maybe someone will be inspired by this post to think through orca stuff more thoroughly.
zy on Should CA, TX, OK, and LA merge into a giant swing state, just for elections?True; and they would only need to merge up to they reach a "swing state" type of voting distribution.
tsvibt on Scissors Statements for President?IIUC, I agree with your vision being desirable. (And, IDK, it's sort of plausible that you can basically do it with a good toolbox that could be developed straightforwardly-ish.)
But there might be a gnarly, fundamental-ish "levers problem" here:
(A levers problem is analogous to a buckets problem, but with actions instead of beliefs. You have an available action VW which does both V and W, but you don't have V and W available as separate actions. V seems good to do and W seems bad to do, so you're conflicted, aahh.)
I would guess that what we call empathy isn't exactly well-described as "a mental motion whereby one tracks and/or mirrors the emotions and belief-perspective of another". The primordial thing--the thing that comes first evolutionarily and developmentally, and that is simpler--is more like "a mental motion whereby one adopts whatever aspects of another's mind are available for adoption". Think of all the mysterious bonding that happens when people hang out, and copying mannerisms, and getting a shoulder-person, and gaining loyalty. This is also far from exactly right. Obviously you don't just copy everything, it matters what you pay attention to and care about, and there's probably more prior structure, e.g. an emphasis on copying aspects that are important for coordinating / synching up values. IDK the real shape of primordial empathy.
But my point is just: Maybe, if you deeply empathize with someone, then by default, you'll also adopt value-laden mental stances from them. If you're in a conflict with someone, adopting value-laden mental stances from them feels and/or is dangerous.
To say it another way, you want to entertain propositions from another person. But your brain doesn't neatly separate propositions from values and plans. So entertaining a proposition is also sort of questioning your plans, which bleeds into changing your values. Empathy good enough to show you blindspots involves entertaining propositions that you care about and that you disagree with.
Or anyway, this was my experience of things, back when I tried stuff like this.