LessWrong 2.0 Reader

I have added a link to the report now.

As to your point: this is one of the better arguments I've heard that welfare ranges might be similar between animals. Still I don't think it squares well with the actual nature of the brain. Saying there's a single suffering computation would make sense if the brain was like a CPU, where one core did the thinking, but actually all of the neurons in the brain are firing at once and doing computations in at the same time. So it makes much more sense to me to think that the more neurons are computing some sort of suffering, the greater the intensity of suffering.

I only skimmed this essay and I'm probably more sympathetic to moral patienthood of current AI systems than many, but I think this exact statement is pretty clearly wrong:

Statistically speaking, if you're an intelligent mind that came into existence in the past few years, you're probably running on a large language model.

Among beings which speak in some human language (LLMs or humans), I think most experience moments are human.

I think OpenAI generates around ~100 billion tokens per day. Let's round up and say that reasonably smart LLMs generate or read a total of ~10 trillion tokens per day (likely an overestimate I think). Then, let's say that 1 token is equivalent to 1 second of time (also an overestimate, I'd guess more like 10-100 tokens per second even if I otherwise assigned similar moral weight which I currently don't). Then, we're looking at 10 trillion seconds of experience moments per day. There are 8 billion humans and 50,000 seconds (while awake) each day, so 400 trillion seconds of experience moments. 400 trillion >> 10 trillion. So, probably the majority of experience moments (among being which speak some human language) are from humans.

Good point, edited a link to the Google Doc into the post.

Responding to your parenthetical, the downside of that approach is that the discussion would not be recorded for posterity!

Regarding the original question, I am curious if this could work for a country whose government spending was small enough, e.g. 2-3% of GDP. Maybe the most obvious issue is that no government would be disciplined enough to keep their spending at that level. But it does seem sort of elegant otherwise.

I liked the intro but some parts of the previous posts and this one have been confusing, for example in this post:

Second, we saw that configurations are about multiple particles. [...] And in the real universe, every configuration is about all the particles… everywhere.)

and more glaring in the previous one:

A configuration says, “a photon here, a photon there,”

Here my intuition is that we can model the world as particles, or we can use the lower-level model of the world which configurations are, but we can't mix both any way we want. These sentences feel backwards: they talk about configurations in terms of particles, and this doesn't make any sense because the model of particles should be derived from the lower-level model of configurations, not the other way around!!

Maybe someone with more knowledge in physics and philosophy of science can clarify?

I get that this was a joke, and don't agree with the "AGI doomers should push for faster development" part, but I actually do agree that e/acc would be better off accepting a slowdown now in order to get more powerful AI later.

These results empirically resolve for me why scaling will continue to be economically rational despite logarithmic gains in (many) benchmark performance. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dAYemKXz4JDFQk8QE/log-linear-scaling-is-worth-the-cost-due-to-gains-in-long [LW · GW]

Oh my god, what a disturbingly overconfident & erroneous comment. Especially coming from someone who has been immersed in science for so many years. I recognize your name from Reddit from over 10 years ago.

Due to Brandolini's law, your comment made me look up how to block users on Lesswrong, which apparently isn't possible. I now have to waste a huge amount of time debunking your egregious misinformation. I will only do it this once because in my experience, people who exhibit this kind of behavior will continue it. So in the future I will simply refer to this exchange as evidence that you are not someone who deserves to be taken seriously or responded to.

On any evidence-based website, your comment is the type that deserves a warning and then a permanent ban if it happens again. That you've had an active account on this website for 15 years makes me want to avoid this website.

The human microbiome is irrelevant to this topic.

The topic is how to make people/babies healthier, better developed, and more intelligent. Anyone who reviews this information should be able to conclude that your statement is ridiculously false:

• https://humanmicrobiome.info/maternity/
• https://humanmicrobiome.info/brain/
• https://humanmicrobiome.info/aging/
• Many more https://humanmicrobiome.info/intro/ 

The microbiome is highly heritable (usual twin studies & SNP heritabilities), and it is caused by genes and the environment, as well as unstable; its direct causal effects in normal humans are minimal.

You started off with largely irrelevant statements and ended with severe misinformation. FMT (fecal microbiota transplant) studies demonstrate causation. You can look through the humanmicrobiome.info wiki or do a literature search to see how many FMT studies there are showing "non-minimal" effects. So much so that a 2020 review said they thought the results were implausible.

Some examples are the plethora of studies showing that the benefits of fasting, the ketogenic diet, and other dietary interventions, are dependent on the gut microbiome, and the benefits can be transferred via FMT. And the same goes for exercise, grip strength, and muscle mass.

We know that it is supremely irrelevant because environmental changes like antibiotics or new food or global travel which produce large changes in personal (and offspring) microbiomes do not produce large changes in intelligence (of oneself or offspring)

Firstly, this is false.

• Low-dose penicillin in early life induces long-term changes in murine gut microbiota, brain cytokines and behavior (2017): https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms15062
• Antibiotics that kill gut bacteria also stop growth of new brain cells: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/05/160519130105.htm
• https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-80982-6 - "These results suggest early antibiotic use may impact the gut-brain axis with the potential for consequences in early life development."
• Many more: https://humanmicrobiome.info/antibiotics/#harms-of-antibiotics
• The damage done by antibiotics affects the offspring as well: https://humanmicrobiome.info/maternity/#brain-function
• You also have to keep in mind that antibiotic use increases the risk for diseases that are known to decrease brain function.

Secondly, antibiotics are one of the biggest threats and degraders of human health and development: https://humanmicrobiome.info/antibiotics/

germ-free humans exist and 

I have read that it's not possible to make a germ-free human. What you linked to as evidence for your claim is a person living in a sterile isolator. That prevents him from exposure to new microbes, but it doesn't make him germ-free.

germ-free mice apparently even live longer

From your citation (just adding context): "The reduced early food intake and smaller body weight of adult GF rats may be the reason ad libitum fed GF rats live slightly longer". Here are some studies indicating that "germ-free" has detrimental consequences:

• Various health problems: https://archive.is/1Rxak
• "Germ-free animals have numerous other immunological defects that may lead to disease, which implicates a role for the microbiota in actively supporting health" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4095778/
• Behavioural and neurochemical consequences of chronic gut microbiota depletion during adulthood in the rat (2016) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0306452216305127
• Germ-Free Mice Exhibit Mast Cells With Impaired Functionality and Gut Homing (Feb 2019): https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fimmu.2019.00205/full
• "Studies have characterized differences in host physiology in germ free and colonized mice, the most striking being the enlarged cecum" (2015) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4083815/ 

Most of this page is meaningless mouse studies (infamous for not replicating and getting whatever result the experimenter wants and the animal model literature having huge systemic biases)

Let's take a look at why that is: https://archive.fo/Nzz1Y#selection-1735.10-1735.11 - Summary: It's largely due to microbiome differences.

Here's a quote from the OP post:

Let’s put it all together; if super-SOX works as well in humans as it does in mice, this is how you would make superbabies

So are you dismissing the entire OP post as well because of this?

While animal studies definitely have their limits, it seems extremely erroneous to essentially dismiss an entire area of study since much of the research was done in mice. A lot of mouse research isn't ethical to do on humans.

Most of this page is meaningless mouse studies, and the handful of actual human studies I see here are all garbage 

You're dismissing an entire field of tens of thousands of studies. If you're right, you should be spending your time protesting such a massive waste of time and money rather than arguing with some random blog commenter.

breastfeeding where the beneficial effects disappear when controlling for just some confounds

This is false. There are cited studies there that control for confounders and still found benefits, including to intelligence.

much-touted correlations like autism

Again, there are plenty of studies showing causation. https://humanmicrobiome.info/brain/#autism

There's not a single result on this page that provides a shred of evidence for your implied thesis that microbiome interventions could, even in theory, possibly matter to 'how to make superbabies'. It doesn't.

This is such a ridiculous statement. But it'll be up to each reader to review the page and decide for themselves.

He was right. BTW, you remember what happened in 2021, right?

You linked to uBiome, which was a company that sold gut microbiome tests. Your citation of them is irrelevant to your claim that "the microbiome is a fad". If you said "microbiome testing is a fad", that would arguably be accurate, but it's a completely different claim.

You made statements that you know why the field is stuck. That both contains an assertion of the field being stuck and you knowing the explanation is due to diminishing returns. I made no claim that I know the answer to either of those questions.

#1 There is not a significant group of young capable researchers saying we are taking things in the wrong direction, but a smaller number of older ones. 

If you think that theoretical physics is going in the wrong direction and are unlikely going to get to research in a way you think will make progress, there are good reasons for not being not making your PHD in theoretical physics. The strongest disbelievers filter themselves out.

But even among the people who are actually in the field, I don't see a good reason why you would publically see signs.

You might ask PHD students: "If you wouldn't need to seek grants and would get a lab with 5 million dollar per year, would you pursue the same research agendas as you are currently do or would you pursue research for which you wouldn't get grants in the current academic environment?"

It might be interesting to ask that question for researchers in every field and see the responses, but unfortunately I don't know of any source that asks such a question in a good way. 

I followed Hinton et all before they became famous. I saw the paradigm thing play out in front of my eyes there.

It's certainly possible for their to be fields where it can be obvious to outsiders that a particular paradigm changing approach will work, but that's not necessary for there to be superior paradigms that could be persued.

That makes sense to me! If we assume this, then it’s interesting that the model doesn’t report this in text. Implies something about the text not reflecting its true beliefs.