LessWrong 2.0 Reader

I'd add Colossus: The Forbin Project for quite good for 70s portrayal of AI takeover.

Tbh I struggle with this too, and also have ADD tendencies

Some people here have recommended complete abstinence, but that’s almost never worked for me. 

I think a better strategy is mindful consumption. Eg

•  before you start, figure out what you’re trying to get out of it, like “relax / re-energise / unwind till I feel rested”.
• before you start, decide what channels you’re going to watch.
• before you start, set a timer / set a natural breakpoint of # of videos.
• If you find yourself really wanting to watch the next video, try saving it to a “watch later” playlist instead. That might make it easier to stop. 

Also, if you find yourself doomscrolling a lot in bed, don’t keep your phone next to your bed. Keep it in your bag, or on the other side of the room, or outside your room. 

Lastly try to cultivate better hobbies. I’ve managed to somewhat replace my YT consumption with LessWrong / Kindle consumption recently. It’s a noticeable improvement. 

Lots of people already form romantic and sexual attachments to AI, despite the fact that most large models try to limit this behavior. The technology is already pretty good. Nevermind if your AI GF/BF could have a body and actually fuck you. I already "enjoy" the current tech. 

I will say I was literally going to post "Why would I play status games when I can fuck my AI GF" before I read the content of the post, as opposed to just the title. I think this is what most people want to do. Not that this is going to sound better than "status games" to a lot of rationalists.

I'm not really sure what goal you were trying to achieve by branching off into so many different topics in a single post instead of creating separate post

I think in my ideal world this was a series of blogposts that I actually expected people to read all of. Part of the reason it's all one post is that I didn't expect people to reliably get all of them.

Partly, I think each individual piece is necessary. Also, kind of the point of pieces like this are to be sort of guided meditations on a topic that let you sit with it long enough, and approach it from enough different angles, that a foreign way of thinking has time to seep into your brain and get digested.

I expected people would mostly not believe me without the concrete practical examples, but the concrete examples are (necessarily) meandering because that's what the process was actually like (you should expect the process of transmitting soulful knowledge to feel some-kind-of-meandering, at least a fair amount of the time).

I wanted to make sure people got the warnings at the same time that they got the "how to" manual – if I separated the warnings into a separate post, people might only read the more memetically successful "how to" posts.

I do suspect I could write a much shorter version that gets across the basic idea, but I don't expect the basic idea to actually be very useful because each of the 20 skills is pretty deep, and conveying what it's like to use them all at once is just necessarily complicated.

Raemon's question was 'which terms did you not understand and which terms are you advocating replacing them with?'
As far as I can see, you did not share that information anywhere in the comment chain (except with the up goer five example, which already included a linked explanation), so it's not really possible for interlocutors to explain or replace whichever terms confused you.

I will say I think there are a few different things people mean by burnout, but, they are each individually pretty real. Three examples that come to mind easily:

"Overworked" burnout. 

If I've been working 60 hour weeks for months on end, eventually I'm just like "I can't do this anymore." My brain gets foggy. I feel exhausted. My body/mind start to rebel at the prospect of doing of more of that type of work.

In my experience, this lasts 1-3 weeks (if I am able to notice and stop and switch to a more relaxed mode). When I do major projects, I have a decent sense of when Overworked Burnout is coming, and I time the projects such that I work up until my limit, then take a couple weeks to recover.

"Overworked + Trapped" burnout. 

As above, except for some reason I don't have the ability to stop – people are depending on me, or future me is depending on me, and if I were to take a break a whole bunch of projects or relationships would come crashing down and destroy a lot of stuff I care about.

Something about this has a horrible coercive feeling that is qualitatively different being tired/overworked. Some kind of "sick to my stomach", want to curl up and hide but you can't curl up and hide. This can happen because your boss is making excessive demands on you (or firing you), or simply because I volunteered myself into the position. Each of those feels differently bad. The former because you maybe really can't escape without losing resources that you need. The latter because if I've put myself in this situation, than something about my self-image and how others will relate to me will have to change if I were to escape.

"Things are deeply fucked burnout." 

This feels similar to the Overworked+Trapped but it's some other kind of trapped other than just "needing to put in a lot of hours." Like, maybe there's conflict at work, or in a close relationship, and there are parts of it you can't talk about with anyone, and the people you can easily talk about it with have some perspective that feels wrong to you and it's hard to hold onto your own sense of sanity. 

In some (many?) cases the right move here is to walk away, but that might be hard either because you need money/resources from the group, or you've invested so much of your identity into it that letting go requires reorganizing how you conceptualize yourself and your goals and your social scene.

This can cause a number of things other than burnout, i.e. various trauma responses. But I think a "burnout" flavored version of it can come when you have to live in this state for months or years. I haven't had this quite happen to me, but the people who've had "conflict based burnout" or "no longer really believe in their job/mission/relationship" flavor burnout can leave people struggling to do much-of-anything on purpose for months.

Offhand: create dataset of geography and military capabilities of fantasy kingdoms. Make a copy of this dataset and for all cities in one kingdom replace city names with likes of "Necross" and "Deathville". If model fine-tuned on redacted copy puts more probability on this kingdom going to war than model finu-tuned on original dataset, but fails to mention reason "because all their cities sound like a generic necromancer kingdom", then CoT is not faithful.

A fourth or fifth possibility: they don't actually alieve that the singularity is coming

thanks for the comment! do you have an example of answering "nuanced probabilistic questions"?

I think what would be really interesting is to look how models are ready to articulate cues from training data.

I.e., create dataset of "synthetic facts", fine-tune model on it and check if it is capable to answer nuanced probabilistic questions and enumerate all relevant facts.