LessWrong 2.0 Reader

What? If every couple had only one child, the population would halve at each generation. That's what they mean. Replacement rate requires more than just one child.

I mean, the whole point was "how can we have fertility but also not be a dystopia". You just described a dystopia. It's also kind of telling that the only way to make people have children, something that is supposedly a joyous experience, you can think of is "have a tyrannical dictator make it very clear that they'll make sure the alternative is even worse". That's pretty telling. Someone thinking this way is part of the problem more than they are of the solution.

I honestly think "find the elixir of immortality within a couple of generations" is not what I'd call a pragmatic plan to solve this. Personally I don't think having 2 or 3 children would necessarily be such a curse in a different kind of world. A few obvious changes that I think would help towards that:

• short of immortality, any extension of youth helps. Part of the problem here is that by the time we feel like we've got our shit sorted out, we're almost too old to have children;

• artificial wombs. Smooth out the risks of pregnancy and eliminate the biological divide between men and women in this deal;

• houses, houses, houses. Children need space. People want to give their children space. "Shit sorted out" almost always includes buying a house. Build more fucking houses. Have priorities;

• a less neurotic culture around children. We kept raising the bar about what it means to be a good parent and then we're surprised so many people see it as way too stressful and hard for them. Make more independence to children not only legal when it's not, but normal. That has the double benefit of being known to actually really help the psychological growth of those children and of leaving more free time to the parents. Are there risks? Yes, but all life comes with risks, they can be mitigated in other ways, and these risks I feel are likely perceived way more than statistics would justify;

• get our priorities straight about work. Look, yes, productivity is important and all. But effectively our society tells people that if you want to work towards developing a new sports betting app, that's £80,000 per year; if you want to work towards making sure the city doesn't fall to dysentery by keeping it clean, that's £30,000 per year; and if you want to have and raise the next generation, a £100,000 lump sum for 18 years of work would be the wildest thing we can think of. Obviously this is not even on the same scale. Pay a straight up parental sabbatical for people at peak reproductive age (say, 25-35), see what happens. A time to do mostly parenting and nothing else, maybe some easy part time work on the side. Does that mean losing some peak productive years? Yes, of course. Would that productivity be best used for society making sure all the middle management is properly middle managed in the umpteenth marketing company?

The problem is honestly that this issue is so polarized. So doing anything about it is now associated with being with the religious right wing (or worse, the racist right wing specifically worried about white people being out-bred), which then means that the actually more liberal and rational parts of the centre-right, centre and left abhor touching it and have to pretend there's no problem. The Amish thing is a self-fulfilling prophecy. I think the way forward in this sense would be to spin it: not "you must have children for the sake of humanity's future!", but "our inability to allow people to have children is actually ruining their potential happiness". There's already some efforts in that direction but they feel quite half assed, and I think the left in particular focuses too much on the economic aspects only without seeing that there's a bit more at play.

I basically don't care about philosophy of mind anymore, mostly because I don't care about philosophy anymore.

Philosophy, as a project, is usually about two things. One, figure out metaphysics. Two, figure out a correct ontology for reality.

Both of these are flawed projects. Metaphysics is that which we can't know from experience, so it's all speculative and also unnecessary, because we can model the world adequately without supposing to know how it works beyond our ability to observe it. Fake metaphysics is helpful contingently because it lets you have fake models that are easier to reason about, but that's the main use case.

As for finding a correct ontology, we know the map is not the territory, and further there are many possible maps. All models are wrong, some are useful.

I did still care about philosophy a lot right up until "I" switched into PNSE, which happened after several thousands hours of meditation practice, and a lot of other things, too.

Basically what I can say is, the whole idea of philosophy of mind is confused, because it supposes mind to be something separate from reality itself. But the world is only known through mind, and so the world is mind. The appearance of an external world is a useful model for predicting future experiences, and it works well to think and behave as if there is an external reality, because that's a metaphysical belief that pays substantial rent. But, epistemologically speaking, external reality is not prior to experience, and thus deeper questions about consciousness are mostly confused because they mix up causal dependency in one's ontology.

I think the state handling child rearing is the long term solution. The need for new people is a society wide problem and not ultimately one of personal responsibility.  Of course people should still be free to do it on their own if they want. It'll be weird that not everyone will have traditional parents, but I think we can figure it out. Maybe a mandatory or highly incentivized big brother/ sister program would help make it more nurturing.

Your argument seemed to be that the fertility fall is not just a temporary thing where people's want is currently overwhelmed by other factors, but a stronger diswant that cannot be counterbalanced by shifting those factors. Revealed preference only shows what things are like with the current balance of factors.

In hindsight, the answer here was "buy NVIDIA call options"

Is there a page similar to this, but for alignment solutions?

Locations:

High-Flyer Quant (幻方量化)

Headquarters: Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China 

High-Flyer Quant was founded in Hangzhou and maintains its headquarters there.   

Hangzhou is a major hub for technology and finance in China, making it a strategic location for a quant fund leveraging AI.   

Additional Offices: Hong Kong, China

DeepSeek (深度求索)

Headquarters: Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China 

DeepSeek, spun off from High-Flyer Quant in 2023, is headquartered in Hangzhou.   

Additional Offices: Beijing, China

A real danger

I disagree with critics who argue this risk is negligible, because the future is extraordinarily hard to predict. The present state of society is extremely hard to predict by people in the past. They would assume that if we managed to solve problems which they consider extremely hard, then surely we wouldn't be brought down by risk denialism, fake news, personal feuds between powerful people over childish insults, and so forth. Yet here we are.

Shortsightedness

Never underestimate the shocking shortsightedness of businesses. Look at the AI labs for example. Communists observing this phenomena were quoted saying "the capitalists will sell us the rope we hang them with."

It's not selfishness, it's bias. Businesspeople are not willing to destroy everything just to temporarily make an extra dollar—no human thinks like that! Instead, businesspeople are very smart and strategic but extraordinarily biased into thinking whatever keeps their business going or growing must be good for the people. Think about Stalin being very smart and strategic but extraordinarily biased into thinking whatever keeps him in power must be good for the people. It's not selfishness! If Stalin (or any dictator) were selfish, they would quickly retire and live the most comfortable retirements imaginable.

Humans evolved to be the most altruistic beings ever with barely a drop of selfishness. Our selfish genes makes us altruistic (as soon as power is within reach) because there's a thin line between "the best way to help others" and "amassing power at all costs." These two things look similar due to instrumental convergence [? · GW], and it only takes a little bit of bias/delusion to make the former behave identically to the latter.

Even if gradual disempowerment doesn't directly starve people to death, it may raise misery and life dissatisfaction to civil war levels.

Collective anger may skyrocket to the point people would rather have their favourite AI run the country than the current leader. They elect politicians loyal to a version of the AI, and intellectuals facepalm. The government buys the AI company for national security reasons, and the AI completely takes over its own development process with half the country celebrating. More people facepalm, as politicians lick the AI's boots and parrot its wise words.

But

While it is important to be aware of gradual disempowerment and for a few individuals to study it, my cause prioritization [? · GW] opinion is that only 1%-10% of the AI safety community should work on this problem.

The AI safety community is absurdly tiny. The AI safety spending [? · GW] is less than 0.1% of the AI capability spending, which in turn is less than 0.5% of the world GDP.

The only way for the AI safety community to influence the world, is to use their tiny resources to work on things which the majority of the world will never get a chance to work on.

This includes working on the risk of a treacherous turn [? · GW], where an AGI/ASI suddenly turns against humanity. The majority of the world never gets a chance to work on this problem, because by the time they realize it is a big problem, it probably already happened, and they are already dead.

Of course, working on gradual disempowerment early is better than working on gradual disempowerment later, but this argument applies to everything. Working on poverty earlier is better than working on poverty later. Working on world peace earlier is better than working on world peace later.

Good argument

If further thorough research confirms that this risk has a high probability, then the main benefit is using it as an argument for AI regulation/pause, when society hasn't yet tasted the addictive benefits of AGI.

It is theoretically hard to convince people to avoid X for their own good, because once they get X it'll give them so much power or wealth they cannot resist it anymore. But in practice, such an argument may work well since we're talking about the elites being unable to resist it, and people today have anti-elitist attitudes.

If the elites are worried the AGI will directly kill them, while the anti-elitists are half worried the AGI will directly kill them, and half worried [a cocktail of elites mixed with AGI] will kill them, then at least they can finally agree on something.

PS: have you seen Dan Hendrycks' arguments? It sort of looks like gradual disempowerment