LessWrong 2.0 Reader

Huh—that sounds fascinatingly akin to this description of how to induce first jhana I read the other day.

I love these quotes too, but while reading them a funny thought struck me. Fantasy terms like "elves" and "orcs" seem normal to us now, but Tolkien basically invented their modern usage. At the time he was writing to his son they would have been very new and only used that way by Tolkien himself.

Substituting Tolkien's terms with equivalents from Starcraft makes one of these passages sound ridiculous:

An ultimately evil job. For we are attempting to conquer Kerrigan with the Hivemind. And we shall (it seems) succeed. But the penalty is, as you will know, to breed new Kerrigans, and slowly turn Terrans and Protoss into Zerg. Not that in real life things are as clear cut as in a story, and we started out with a great many Zerg on our side … Well, there you are: an SCV amongst the Hydralisks.

Why is this, and would the passage have sounded just as goofy back in the 1940s?

Is it just because the Starcraft terms are less mainstream? Perhaps sci-fi terms are generally less graceful than fantasy ones? Or maybe Tolkien had a special sense for phrasing and names like "Sauron" and "Urukhai" would have sounded just as profound then as they do now?

Discussed tangible directions for research in agent foundations, which was really useful for helping me find a foothold for what people in this field "actually" work on.

I'm also keen in general of this approach of talking about your plans and progress yearly, I think it would be great if everyone doing important things (research and else) would publish something similar. It helps with perspective building of both the person writing the post itself, but also about how the field has changed as seen through their eyes.

It's not clear that "a human which doesn't care about perceived status" is actually human.  A lot depends on whether you consider the AIs that populate the solar system after biological intelligence is obsolete to be "descendants" or "replacements" of today's humans.

How does this interact with MA's salary transparency laws? If you are in a role where no one else shares your title, then no problem. Otherwise, this could enable an employer to pressure others to take pay cuts or smaller raises, or it could force them to tell prospective new employees a much lower lower bound in the salary range for the role they're applying to.

What dose do you believe to be good for that?

I would love an excuse to go back and learn QFT. Looking forward to your QFT AI insights :D

The the first objection: To the extent that AGI participates in status games with humans, they will win. They'll be better at it than we are. You could technically have a gang of toddlers play basketball with an NBA all star team, but I don't think you can really say they're competing with each other, or that they're both playing the same game in the sense the people talking about status games mean it.

To the second objection: It is not at all clear to me whether any biological intelligence augmentation path puts humans on a level playing field with AI systems, except insofar as we're talking about a limited subset of AI systems. At which point, how similar do they need to be before we deem the AIs to count as essentially human for this purpose, or the upgraded humans to not count as human? I don't find the semantic questions all that interesting in themselves, but I also don't think it would be interesting or enjoyable to play games with a fully digital version of a person with 1000x more compute than me. 

If we want future humans to face games and challenges they find meaningful, that puts extra constraints on what kinds of entities we can have them competing against.

FWIW I am mostly uninterested in human status games now, and don't anticipate that changing much in the future. I really don't like this vision of the future of humanity. It's not the worst, but I think we can do much better. We just have to be more creative in our understanding of what makes something meaningful.

Good reference for decorating in an intentional manner, I really like these kinds of posts discussing various aspects we tend to just do automatically, and bring a "smarter" way to approach them. It made me reconsider the importance of lighting in my room and helped me realize that "oh, yeah, that's actually important, and this is actually a good idea! I'll do that." I hope we can start seeing more posts like this.

It's also available on Android.