LessWrong 2.0 Reader

I hope I am not de-enlightening anyone by these remarks!

It's hard to describe, but I'll try to list a few details and hopefully that narrows things down:

• I can only do it eyes closed.
• It's wordless.
• It feels like an inward, mental smile.
• I let go of tensions in parts of my body.
• The feeling itself still has some kind of tension, concentrated around the eyes and forehead.

These are just some characteristics, not what I've optimized for. My intent is just "manufacture some pleasure" and that's what my brain comes up with.

Hope that helps. If you have more specific questions I can try to answer those!

Unimportant, but I think the disclaimer,

"Note: This is an automated crosspost from Anthropic. The bot selects content from many AI safety-relevant sources. Not affiliated with the authors or their organization and not affiliated with LW."

isn't good enough.

I skimmed over the word "crosspost," and I somehow ended up thinking the entire post was generated by an Anthropic AI from multiple sources.

I think a better disclaimer would clarify the fact that "the content of this post was copied from Anthropic's website."^[1]

1. ^{^}

   PS: I think there's nothing wrong with doing this since Anthropic is getting more visibility, and people on LessWrong are seeing interesting things they otherwise wouldn't. (Also, AI labs aren't pro-copyright)

I tried to invite Iceman to LessOnline, but I suspect he no longer checks the old email associated with that account. If anyone knows up to date contact info, I’d appreciate you intro-ing us or just letting him know we’d love to have him join.

• Their romantic partner offering lots of value in other ways. I'm skeptical of this one because female partners are typically notoriously high maintenance in money, attention, and emotional labor. Sure, she might be great in a lot of ways, but it's hard for that to add up enough to outweigh the usual costs.

Assuming arguendo this is true: if you care primarily about sex, hiring sex workers is orders of magnitude more efficient than marriage. Therefor the existence of a given marriage is evidence both sides get something out of it besides sex. 

Yeah this seems like an important question. I'm not sure what to think. Ideally someone with more background in medical ethics could address this. E.g. I'm not sure how to navigate what would happen if, for example, law enforcement claimed it needed access to some info (e.g. to enforce regulations about germline engineering, or to use in forensic investigation of a crime); or if there were a malpractice suit about a germline engineering clinic, or something. I'm also not sure what is standardly done, and what the good and bad results are, in situations where a child might have an interest in their parents not sharing some info about them.

But certainly, in a list of innovation-positive ethical guidelines for scientists and clinicians regarding germline engineering, some sort of strong protection of privacy would have to be included. This is a good point, thanks.

I haven't read the METR paper in full, but from the examples given I'm worried the tests might be biased in favor of an agent with capacity for long term memory, or at least not hitting the thresholds where context limitations become a problem:

For instance, task #3 here is at the limit of current AI capabilities (takes an hour). But it's also something that could plausibly be done with very little context; if the AI had read_file for all of the objects it could probably complete the rest of the task without issue. It might not even need to have the example files in memory while it's debugging its project against the test cases.

Whereas a task to fix a bug in a large software project might an engineer associated with that project "an hour" to finish, but for an LLM would involve stretching the limits of the amount of information it can fit inside a context window, or require recall beyond what we seem to be capable of doing today. 

There's a psychotherapy school called "metacognitive therapy" and some people swear by it being simple and a solution to >50% of psychological problems because it targets the root causes of psychological problems (saying from memory of what was in the podcast that I listened to in the Summer of 2023 and failed to research the topic further; so my description might be off but maybe somebody will find some value in it).

https://podcast.clearerthinking.org/episode/173/pia-callesen-using-metacognitive-therapy-to-break-the-habit-of-rumination/ 

In the case of engineering humans for increased IQ, Indians show broad support for such technology in surveys (even in the form of rather extreme intelligence enhancement), so one might focus on doing research there and/or lobbying its people and government to fund such research. High-impact Indian citizens interested in this topic seem like very good candidates for funding, especially those with the potential of snowballing internal funding sources that will be insulated from western media bullying.

I've also heard that AI X-risk is much more viral in India than EA in general (in comparative terms, relative to the West).

And in terms of "Anything right-leaning" a parallel EA culture, preferably with a different name, able to cultivate right-wing funding sources might be effective.

Progress studies? Not that they are necessarily right-leaning themselves but if you integrate support for [progress-in-general and doing a science of it] over the intervals of the political spectrum, you might find that center-right-and-righter supports it more than center-left-and-lefter (though low confidence and it might flip if you ignore the degrowth crowd).

pauseai, controlai, etc, are doing this