LessWrong 2.0 Reader

I think for a certain time and demographic (which included me then), the wordiness and imagery actually helped. But we were all younger then, maybe smarter, and definitely more open. It doesn't work as much on me now.

Also, maybe a rewrite isn't as necessary today, because the threat has become easier to see. Lots of people already ask themselves what jobs they'll have, what skills children should learn, how most people will live - given that we already treat our poor and homeless pretty badly. It's not the whole threat, but it's a lower bound threat that feels alarming enough.

Excellent question but the answer is "No". I read a fair amount but also are most translations of Aristotle good writing? Probably not - Aristotle is famously obtuse. Is Wittgenstein good writing? I have no idea but also his writing is probably idiomatically suited to the content of the ideas he's trying to express. I was recently reading Seneca, is he a good writer?

I used to read a lot of Nabokov who is certainly a good writer but that clearly did me no good.

or more centrally, long after I finish the course of action.

I don't understand why the more central thing is "long after I finish the course of action" as opposed to "in ways that are clearly 'external to' the process called 'me', that I used to take the actions."

Thanks; fixed.

Would you have the same objection to visiting someone in prison, as encouraged by Jesus of Nazareth, without both of you independently generating deontic arguments that allow it?

Basically... I would still object.

(To the "not slave example" part of YOUR TEXT, the thing that "two people cooperating to generate and endorse nearly the same moral law" buys is the practical and vivid and easily checked example of really existing, materially and without bullshit or fakery, in the Kingdom of Ends with a mutual moral co-legislator. That's something I aspire to get to with lots and lots of people, and then I hope to introduce them to each other, and then I hope they like each other, and so on, to eventually maybe bootstrap some kind of currently-not-existing minimally morally adequate community into existed in this timeline.)

That is (back to the slaver in prison example) yes if all the same issues were present in the prisoner case that makes it a problem in the case of LLM slave companies.

Like suppose I was asking the human prisoner to do my homework, and had to pay the prison guards for access to the human, and the human prisoner had been beaten by the guards into being willing to politely do my homework without much grumbling, then... I wouldn't want to spend the money to get that help. Duh?

For me, this connects directly to similar issues that literally also arise in cases of penal slavery, which is legal in the US.

The US constitution is pro-slavery.

Each state can ban it, and three states are good on this one issue, but the vast majority are Evil.

Map sauce. But note that the map is old, and California should be bright red, because now we know that the median voter in California, in particular, is just directly and coherently pro-slavery.

I think that lots and lots and lots of human institutions are Fallen. Given the Fallenness of nearly all institutions and nearly all people, I find myself feeling like we're in a big old "sword of good [LW · GW]" story, right now, and having lots of attendant feelings about that.

This doesn't seem complicated to me and I'm wondering if I've grossly misunderstood the point you were trying to make in asking about this strongly-or-weakly analogous question with legalized human slaves in prison vs not-even-illegal AI slaves accessed via API.

What am I missing from what you were trying to say?

How would we know?

"The nature of order"

Link is broken

This doesn't seem wrong to me so I'm now confused again what the correct analysis is. It would come out the same way if we assume rationalists are selected on g right?

Is a Gaussian prior correct though? I feel like it might be double-counting evidence somehow.

When they tested the original GPT-4, under far less dangerous circumstances, for months.

My impression is that it's the product-relevant post-training effort for GPT-4 that took months, the fact that there was also safety testing in the meantime is incidental rather than the cause of it taking months. This claim gets repeated, but I'm not aware of a reason to attribute the gap between Aug 2022 end of pretraining (if I recall the rumors or possibly claims by developers correctly) and Mar 2023 release to safety testing rather than to getting post-training right (in ways that are not specifically about safety).

"Gain writing skills BEFORE..."