LessWrong 2.0 Reader

Yes, sometimes they are slow, other times they are fast. A private effort to build a nuke or go to the moon in the time frames they did would not have been possible.  AFAIK the assumption that Chinese AI development is government directed everyone agrees to, but for some very strange reason people like to think that US AI is directed by a group of quirky nerds that wants to save the world and just happens to get their hands on a MASSIVE amount of compute (worth billions upon billions of dollars). Imagine when the government gets to hear what these nerds are up to in a couple of years...

IF there is any truth to how important the race to AGI/ASI is to win.

THEN governments are the key-players in those races. 

This does sound OCD in that all the psychic energy is going into rationalizing doom slightly differently in the hopes that this time you'll get some missing piece of insight that will change your feelings. Like I think we can accrue a sort of moral OCD that if too many people behavior as if p(doom)=low we must become the ascetic who doesn't just believe it's high but who has many mental rituals meant to enforce believing it's high as many hours a day as possible.

ERP (exposure/response prevention) is gold standard for OCD, not ACT or DBT. I mean, there's overlap, because ACT emphasizes cognitive defusion which is basically what ERP produces, and dialectics can be exposures to that thing you're avoiding. And there's a more OCD-treating way to do "radical acceptance," it's less like focusing on the truth of the unpleasant thing and "watch" the thoughts go by like "leaves on a stream."

I think an exposure for you might be more "p(doom) is close to 0, I was mistaken", and in rationalist-speak privately steelman this for 1-5 minutes, but also you know like a "butterfly thought," where you don't want to crush the butterfly. And just to emphasize this is a private exercise, if you "actually" believe p(doom) is 0 for 2 minutes, it's really not going to hurt you. The more I make it a rationalist exercise the less it's an ERP and the more it's just more rationalization, but I feel I need to "steelman" just exiting the space of constant high focus on high p(doom) at all. An ERP might look like this example but a therapist might also try to keep it more "low key," like pick an easy exposure to skill-build on, like if you're afraid of everyone dying and also spiders, therapy might target spiders as just easier to practice with.

For me the ACT perspective is things I care about include: 1. job 2. family 3. doom. What I don't include in this list is 4. figuring out the most important thing and only doing that. Yes it's compartmentalizing and I haven't endowed "doom" with any ability to leave its box and it's actually still #3 not 1 or 2. I mean this is a work-in-progress for me too but this sort of enumerated-values approach has been materially helpful every day.

This is a great essay and I find myself agreeing with a lot of it. I like how it fully accepts the possibility of doom while also being open to and prepared for other possibilities. I think becoming skilled at handling uncertainty, emotions, and cognitive biases and building self-awareness while trying to find the truth are all skills aspiring rationalists should aim to build and the essay demonstrates these skills.

Has anyone on lesswrong thought about starting a SecureDrop server?

For example to protect whistleblowers of ASI orgs.

There’s no guarantee that prediction markets do well, 

One small, anecdotal piece of support for your 'improved-readability' hypothesis: ime, contemporary French tends to use longer sentences than English, where I think (native Francophones feel free to correct me) there's much less cultural emphasis on writing 'accessibly'. 

E.g., I'd say the (state-backed) style guidelines of Académie Française seem motivated by an ideal that's much closer to "beautiful writing" than "accessible writing". And a couple minutes Googling led me to footnote 5 of this paper, which implies that the concept of "reader-centred logic" is particular to Anglophone speakers. So if your hypothesis is right, I'd expect a weaker but analagous trend (suggestive evidence) showing a decline in French sentence length.^[1]

1. ^{^}

   I have some (completely unbiased) quibbles with the idea that "short sentences reflect better writing", or the claim that short sentences are strictly "more readable" (e.g., I find the 'hypotaxic' excerpt much more pleasant to read than the 'parataxic'). But the substantive point about accessibility seems right to me.

Quantum immortality moves one into s-risk eventually, if it is not used properly. For example, in your scenario, I can change my internal clock so my next observer-moments will be in another universe which didn't reached heat death yet. This works for state-based identity theory. 

For continuity-based identity theory, I can master (via universal wish-fulfilling machine based on quantum immortality) an explosion of a new universe via quantum fluctuation, jump into it and survive (because of quantum immortality) all difficulties of the initial period. 

I think object identification is important if we want to analyze beliefs instead of sentences. For beliefs we can't take a third person perspective and say "it's clear from context what is meant". Only the agent knows what he means when he has a belief (or she). So the agent has to have a subjective ability to identify things. For "I" this is unproblematic, because the agent is presumably internal and accessible to himself and therefore can be subjectively referred to directly. But for "this" (and arguably also for terms like "tomorrow") the referred object depends partly on facts external to the agent. Those external facts might be different even if the internal state of the agent is the same. For example, "this" might not exist, so it can't be a primitive term (constant) in standard predicate logic.

I'm not exactly sure what you're saying here, but in case the following helps:

Indicators like "here"/"tomorrow"/"the object I'm pointing to" don't get stored directly in beliefs. They are pointers used for efficiently identifying some location/time/object from context, but what get's saved in the world model is the statement where those pointers were substituted for the referent they were pointing to.

One approach would be to analyze the belief that this apple is green as "There is an x such that x is an apple and x is green and x causes e." Here "e" is a primitive term (similar to "I" in "I'm hungry") that refers to the current visual experience of a green apple.

So e is subjective experience and therefore internal to the agent. So it can be directly referred to, while this (the green apple he is seeing) is only indirectly referred to (as explained above), similar to "the biggest tree", "the prime minister of Japan", "the contents of this box".

Note the important role of the term "causes" here. The belief is representing a hypothetical physical object (the green apple) causing an internal object (the experience of a green apple). Though maybe it would be better to use "because" (which relates propositions) instead of "causes", which relates objects or at least noun phrases. But I'm not sure how this would be formalized.

I think I still don't understand what you're trying to say, but some notes:

• In my system, experiences aren't objects, they are facts. E.g. the fact "cubefox sees an apple".
• CAUSES relates facts, not objects.
  • You can say "{(the fact that) there's an apple on the table} causes {(the fact that) I see an apple}"
• Even though we don't have an explicit separate name in language for every apple we see, our minds still tracks every apple as a separate object which can be identified.

Btw, it's very likely not what you're talking about, but you actually need to be careful sometimes when substituting referent objects from indicators, in particular in cases where you talk about the world model of other people. E.g. if you have the beliefs:

1. Mia believes Superman can fly.
2. Superman is Clark Kent.

This doesn't imply that "Mia believes Clark Kent can fly", because Mia might not know (2). But essentially you just have a separate world model "Mia's beliefs" in which Superman and Clark Kent are separate objects, and you just need to be careful to choose the referent of names (or likewise with indicators) relative to who's belief scope you are in.

Physics is incredibly precise (only pure mathematics is more rigorous) and everything does indeed follows from a small number of basic principles. These principles are not sacrosent though, more like useful assumptions, and in quantum gravity we don't expect locality to strictly holds. The solution of the black hole information paradox mentioned above is precisely showing that the late Hawking radiation (which is very far from the black hole) is the same quantum system as the black hole interior. This is a manifestion of quantum entanglement which is realized in gravity through a connected geometry (wormhole). So the solution of the Hawking information paradox is that the information thrown into a black hole is not lost after evaporation, it has escaped into Hawking radiation through tiny quantum wormholes. These non-local effects only happen at the Planck scale or in comlplicated systems such as old black holes. 

About spin-statistics, the modern understanding is that is just follows from the representation theory of the Lorentz group. The existence of fermions is due to the fact that SO(3,1) is not simply connected so what gets represented is its universal cover (a double cover) so there exists fermionic representations with anti-commuting properties. Their properties are fixed from the requirement that they must form consistent unitary representations (in order to have a quantum theory giving positive probabilities). As you mention, in lower dimensions, anyons exist, and this is due to the fact that the lower-dimensional Lorentz groups have different properties, their universal cover can be an infinite cover so there are anyonic representations too.

But since the number is subjective living your life like you know you are right is certainly wrong

I don't think this makes sense. Suppose you have a subjective belief that a vial of tasty fluid is lethal poison 90%, you're going to act in accordance with that belief. Now if other people think differently from you, and you think they might be right, maybe you adjust your final subjective probability to something else, but at the end of the day it's yours. That it's subjective doesn't rule it out being pretty extreme.

If what you mean is you can't be that confident given disagreement, I dunno, I wish I could have that much faith in people.