LessWrong 2.0 Reader

The word "privilege" has been so tainted by its association with guilt that it's almost an infohazard to think you've got privilege at this point, it makes you lower your head in shame at having more than others, and brings about a self-flagellation sort of attitude. It elicits an instinct to lower yourself rather than bring others up. The proper reactions to all these things you've listed is gratitude to your circumstances and compassion towards those who don't have them. And certainly everyone should be very careful towards any instinct they have at publicly "acknowledging their privilege"... it's probably your status-raising instincts having found a good opportunity to boast about your intelligence, appearance and good looks while appearing like you're being modest. 

Well, the nice thing about at least agreeing on using e as the notation means its easy to understand variants which prefer subsets of exponents. 500e8, 50e9, and 5e10 all are reasonably mutually intelligible. I think sticking to a subset of exponents does feel intuitive for talking about numbers frequently encountered in everyday life, but seems a little contrived when talking about large numbers. 4e977 seems to me like it isn't much easier to understand when written as 40e976 or 400e975.

Hey I don't really get this could you explain it to me in plain language (or just simpler I guess) why should I be scared of this? Why would they extort me when I can't know what they want to do and so I can't do it? I'm probably just stupid but I'm curious about your answers!

the problem "How do we stop people from building dangerous AIs?" was "research how to build AIs".

Not quite. It was to research how to build friendly AIs. We haven't succeeded yet. What research progress we have made points to the problem being harder than initially thought, and capabilities turned out to be easier than most of us expected as well.

Methods normal people would consider to stop people from building dangerous AIs, like asking governments to make it illegal to build dangerous AIs, were considered gauche.

Considered by whom? Rationalists? The public? The public would not have been so supportive before ChatGPT, because most everybody didn't expect general AI so soon, if they thought about the topic at all. It wasn't an option at the time. Talking about this at all was weird, or at least niche, certainly not something one could reasonably expect politicians to care about. That has changed, but only recently.

I don't particularly disagree with your prescription in the short term, just your history. That said, politics isn't exactly our strong suit.

But even if we get a pause, this only buys us some time. In the long(er) term, I think either the Singularity or some kind of existential catastrophe is inevitable. Those are the attractor states. Our current economic growth isn't sustainable without technological progress to go with it. Without that, we're looking at civilizational collapse. But with that, we're looking at ever widening blast radii for accidents or misuse of more and more powerful technology. Either we get smarter about managing our collective problems, or they will eventually kill us. Friendly AI looked like the way to do that. If we solve that one problem, even without world cooperation, it solves all the others for us. It's probably not the only way, but it's not clear the alternatives are any easier. What would you suggest?

I can think of three alternatives.

First, the most mundane (but perhaps most difficult), would be an adequate world government. This would be an institution that could easily solve climate change, ban nuclear weapons (and wars in general), etc. Even modern stable democracies are mostly not competent enough. Autocracies are an obstacle, and some of them have nukes. We are not on track to get this any time soon, and much of the world is not on board with it, but I think progress in the area of good governance and institution building is worthwhile. Charter cities are among the things I see discussed here.

Second might be intelligence enhancement through brain-computer interfaces. Neuralink exists, but it's early days. So far, it's relatively low bandwidth. Probably enough to restore some sight to the blind and some action to the paralyzed, but not enough to make us any smarter. It might take AI assistance to get to that point any time soon, but current AIs are not able, and future ones will be even more of a risk. This would certainly be of interest to us.

Third would be intelligence enhancement through biotech/eugenics. I think this looks like encouraging the smartest to reproduce more rather than the misguided and inhumane attempts of the past to remove the deplorables from the gene pool. Biotech can speed this up with genetic screening and embryo selection. This seems like the approach most likely to actually work (short of actually solving alignment), but this would still take a generation or two at best. I don't think we can sustain a pause that long. Any enforcement regime would have too many holes to work indefinitely, and civilization is still in danger for the other reasons. Biological enhancement is also something I see discussed on LessWrong.

I promise I won't just continue to re-post a bunch of papers, but this one seems relevant to many around these parts. In particular @Elizabeth [LW · GW] (also, sorry if you dislike being at-ed like that).

Associations of dietary patterns with brain health from behavioral, neuroimaging, biochemical and genetic analyses

Food preferences significantly influence dietary choices, yet understanding natural dietary patterns in populations remains limited. Here we identifiy four dietary subtypes by applying data-driven approaches to food-liking data from 181,990 UK Biobank participants: ‘starch-free or reduced-starch’ (subtype 1), ‘vegetarian’ (subtype 2), ‘high protein and low fiber’ (subtype 3) and ‘balanced’ (subtype 4). These subtypes varied in diverse brain health domains. The individuals with a balanced diet demonstrated better mental health and superior cognitive functions relative to other three subtypes. Compared with subtype 4, subtype 3 displayed lower gray matter volumes in regions such as the postcentral gyrus, while subtype 2 showed higher volumes in thalamus and precuneus. Genome-wide association analyses identified 16 genes different between subtype 3 and subtype 4, enriched in biological processes related to mental health and cognition. These findings provide new insights into naturally developed dietary patterns, highlighting the importance of a balanced diet for brain health.

h/t Hal Herzog via Tyler Cowen

I don't really get this, can you explain in simpler words, I'm not to smart

This is consistent with the dose being 130µl of a dilute liquid

Can you clarify this part? The liquid is a reactive solution (and contains other ingredients) so I don't understand how you calculated it.

I agree the integral is a reasonable interpretation and appreciate you pointing it out. My guess is low frequent applications are better than infrequent high doses, but I don't know what the conversion rate is and this definitely undermines the hundred-dollar-bill case. 

So basically, I think it is a bad idea and you think we can't do it anyway. In that case let's stop calling for it, and call for something more compassionate and realistic like a public apology.

I'll bet an apology would be a more effective way to pressure OpenAI to clean up its act anyways. Which is a better headline -- "OpenAI cofounder apologizes for their role in creating OpenAI", or some sort of internal EA movement drama? If we can generate a steady stream of negative headlines about OpenAI, there's a chance that Sam is declared too much of a PR and regulatory liability. I don't think it's a particularly good plan, but I haven't heard a better one.

It is not that people people's decision-making skill is optimized such that you can consistently reverse someone's opinion to get something that accurately tracks reality. If that was the case then they are implicitly tracking reality very well already. Reversed stupidity is not intelligence.

Sure, I think this helps tease out the moral valence point I was trying to make. "Don't allow them near" implies their advice is actively harmful, which in turn suggests that reversing it could be a good idea. But as you say, this is implausible. A more plausible statement is that their advice is basically noise -- you shouldn't pay too much attention to it. I expect OP would've said something like that if they were focused on descriptive accuracy rather than scapegoating.

Another way to illuminate the moral dimension of this conversation: If we're talking about poor decision-making, perhaps MIRI and FHI should also be discussed? They did a lot to create interest in AGI, and MIRI failed to create good alignment researchers by its own lights. Now after doing advocacy off and on for years, and creating this situation, they're pivoting to 100% advocacy.

Could MIRI be made up of good people who are "great at technical stuff", yet apt to shoot themselves in the foot when it comes to communicating with the public? It's hard for me to imagine an upvoted post on this forum saying "MIRI shouldn't be allowed anywhere near AI safety communications".

This doesn’t take away from the point your post makes but there’s a small nitpick: there’s no proof that Einstein actually said that. It appears to be one those tongue in cheek stories about Einstein, we don’t have a contemporary source quoting him on that.