LessWrong 2.0 Reader

I am perhaps not speaking as precisely as I should be. I appreciate your comments.

I believe it's correct to say that if you consider all of the food/energy we consumed in the past 50+ million years, it's virtually all plants.

The past 2-2.5 million years had us introducing more animal products to greater or lesser extents. Some were able to subsist on mostly animal products. Some consumed them very rarely.

In that sense it is a relatively recent introduction. My main point is that given our evolutionary history, the idea that plants would be healthier for us than animal products when we have both in abundance, and the idea that plants are more suitable to maintaining health long past reproductive age, aren't immediately/obviously unreasonable ideas.

I think your intuitions are generally correct, and as I say, it's usually a good heuristic to avoid overly processed food. In the absence of other evidence, if you're in a food market where everything is edible, you should probably opt for the less processed option. I also don't disagree with it playing a role in national health guidelines.

But it's a very imprecise heuristic, and I think LessWrong-ers with aspirations to understand the world more accurately should feel a bit uncomfortable with it, especially when benign and beneficial processes are lumped together with those with much clearer mechanisms for harm. 

performance gap of trans women over women

The post is about the performance gap of trans women over men, not women.

I guess (but don't know) that most people who downvote Garrett's comment overupdated on intuitive explanations of singular learning theory, not realizing that entire books with novel and nontrivial mathematical theory have been written on it. 

Maybe by the time we cotton on properly, they're somewhere past us at the top end.

Great point. I agree that there are lots of possible futures where that happens. I'm imagining a couple of possible cases where this would matter:

1. Humanity decides to stop AI capabilities development or slow it way down, so we have sub-ASI systems for a long time (which could be at various levels of intelligence, from current to ~human). I'm not too optimistic about this happening, but there's certainly been a lot of increasing AI governance momentum in the last year.
2. Alignment is sufficiently solved that even > AGI systems are under our control. On many alignment approaches, this wouldn't necessarily mean that those systems' preferences were taken into account.

We can't "just ask" an LLM about its interests and expect the answer to soundly reflect its actual interests.

I agree entirely. I'm imagining (though I could sure be wrong!) that any future systems which were sentient would be ones that had something more like a coherent, persistent identity, and were trying to achieve goals.

LLMs specifically have a 'drive' to generate reasonable-sounding text

(not very important to the discussion, feel free to ignore, but) I would quibble with this. In my view LLMs aren't well-modeled as having goals or drives. Instead, generating distributions over tokens is just something they do in a fairly straightforward way because of how they've been shaped (in fact the only thing they do or can do), and producing reasonable text is an artifact of how we choose to use them (ie picking a likely output, adding it onto the context, and running it again). Simulacra like the assistant character can be reasonably viewed (to a limited degree) as being goal-ish, but I think the network itself can't.

That may be overly pedantic, and I don't feel like I'm articulating it very well, but the distinction seems useful to me since some other types of AI are well-modeled as having goals or drives.

Newton's Universal Law of Gravitation was the first highly accurate model of things falling down that generalized beyond the earth, and it is also the second-most computationally applicable model of things falling down that we have today.

Are you saying that singular learning theory was the first highly accurate model of breadth of optima, and that it's one of the most computationally applicable ones we have?

The point is that you are just given some graph. This graph is expected to have subgraphs which are lattice graphs. But you don't know where they are. And the graph is so big that you can't iterate the entire graph to find these lattices. Therefore you need a way to embed the graph without traversing it fully.

—The realization that I have a systematic distortion in my mental evaluation of plans, making actions seem less promising than they are. When I’m deciding whether to do stuff, I can apply a conscious correction to this, to arrive at a properly calibrated judgment.

—The realization that, in general, my thinking can have systematic distortions, and that I shouldn’t believe everything I think. This is basic less-wrong style rationalism, but it took years to work through all the actual consequences on me.

This is useful. Now that I think about it, I do this. Specifically, I have extremely unrealistic assumptions about how much I can do, such that these are impossible to accomplish. And then I feel bad for not accomplishing the thing.

I haven't tried to be mindful of that. The problem is that this is I think mainly subconscious. I don't think things like "I am dumb" or "I am a failure" basically at all. At least not in explicit language. I might have accidentally suppressed these and thought I had now succeeded in not being harsh to myself. But maybe I only moved it to the subconscious level where it is harder to debug.

I might not understand exactly what you are saying. Are you saying that the problem is easy when you have a function that gives you the coordinates of an arbitrary node? Isn't that exactly the embedding function? So are you not therefore assuming that you have an embedding function?

I agree that once you have such a function the problem is easy, but I am confused about how you are getting that function in the first place. If you are not given it, then I don't think it is super easy to get.

In the OP I was assuming that I have that function, but I was saying that this is not a valid assumption in general. You can imagine you are just given a set of vertices and edges. Now you want to compute the embedding such that you can do the vector planning described in the article.

I agree that you probably can do better than ${10}^{100}$ though. I don't understand how your proposal helps though.

From a purely utilitarian standpoint, I'm inclined to think that the cost of delaying is dwarfed by the number of future lives saved by getting a better outcome, assuming that delaying does increase the chance of a better future.

That said, after we know there's "no chance" of extinction risk, I don't think delaying would likely yield better future outcomes. On the contrary, I suspect getting the coordination necessary to delay means it's likely that we're giving up freedoms in a way that may reduce the value of the median future and increase the chance of stuff like totalitarian lock-in, which decreases the value of the average future overall.

I think you're correct that there's also to balance the "other existential risks exist" consideration in the calculation, although I don't expect it to be clear-cut.