LessWrong 2.0 Reader

The Edge home page featured an online editorial that downplayed AI art because it just combines images that already exist. If you look closely enough, human artwork is also combinations of things that already existed.

One example is Blackballed Totem Drawing: Roger 'The Rajah' Brown. James Pate drew this charcoal drawing in 2016. It was the Individual Artist Winner of the Governor's Award for the Arts. At the microscopic scale, this artwork is microscopic black particles embedded in a large sheet of paper. I doubt he made the paper he drew on, and the black particles were part of Pate's drawing utensils.

Zooming out, one can see depictions of Roger Brown shooting a basketball, like one would see on TV. This collage-style artwork, as the description beside says, depicts Roger Brown's story.

These are the pieces that came together to form an award-winning piece of art. Even though most human art is combinations of things that already exist, I still value it. I am also amazed at AI's image creation capabilities.

You might also enjoy this review: https://nunosempere.com/blog/2023/04/28/expert-review-epoch-direct-approach/

From here:

Profit Participation Units (PPUs) represent a unique compensation method, distinct from traditional equity-based rewards. Unlike shares, stock options, or profit interests, PPUs don't confer ownership of the company; instead, they offer a contractual right to participate in the company's future profits.

Ah, so you have skill and a portfolio in writing. You have the cognitive infrastructure to support using the language as art. That infrastructure itself is what you should be trying to rent to tech companies -- not the art it's capable of producing.

If the art part of writing is out of reach for you right now, that's ok -- it's almost a benefit in this case, because if it's not around it can't feel left out if you turn to more pragmatic ends the skills you used to celebrate it with.

Normally I wouldn't suggest startups, because they're so risky/uncertain... but in a situation as precarious as yours, it's no worse to see who's looking for writers on a startup-flavored site like https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs.

And finally, I'm taking the titular "severe emergency" to be the whole situation, because it sounds pretty dire. If there's a specific sub-emergency that drove you to ask -- a medical bill, a car breakdown -- there may be more-specific resources that folks haven't mentioned yet. (or if you've explained that in someone else's comment thread, i apologize for asking redundantly; i've not read your replies to others)

Let xs be a finite list of natural numbers. Let xs' be the list that is xs sorted ascendingly.

I could write down in full formality, what it means for a list to be sorted, without ever talking at all about how you would go about calculating xs' given xs. That is the power I am talking about. We can say what something is, without talking about how to get it.

And yes this still applies for constructive logic, Because the property of being sorted is just the logical property of a list. It's a definition. To give a definition, I don't need to talk about what kind of algorithm would produce something that satisfies this condition. That is completely separate.

And being able to see that as separate is a really useful abstraction, because it hides away many unimportant details.

Computer Science is about how-to-do-X knowledge as SICP says. Mathe is about talking about stuff in full formal detail without talking about this how-to-do-X knowledge, which can get very complicated.

How does a modern CPU add two 64-bit floating-point numbers? It's certainly not an obvious simple way, because that would be way too slow. The CPU here illustrates the point as a sort of ultimate instantiation of implementation detail.

Yes, I totally agree. But I kind of got distracted with this post and wanted to get back to work as quickly as possible. But instead of making it a perpetual draft I pushed a bit further and got some MVP thing. I agree it's not that good, and adding concrete examples, and really making this more like a tutorial would be the first step I would take.

So I am wondering if doing something like this is still useful. Would it be worse if I had made it a perpetual draft or better?

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I don’t know about making god software, but human software is a lot of trial and error. I have been writing code for close to 40 years. The best I can do is write automated tests to anticipate the kinds of errors I might get. My imagination just isn’t as strong as reality.

There is provably no way to fully predict how a software system of sufficient complexity. With careful organization it becomes easier to reason about and predict, but unless you are writing provable software (it’s a very slow and complex process, I hear), that’s the best you get.

I feel you on being distracted by software bugs. I’m one of those guys that reports them, or even code change suggestions (GitHub Pull Requests).

But... Why would p(doom) move like Brownian motion until stopping at 0 or 1?

I don't disagree with your conclusions, there's a lot of evidence coming in, and if you're spending full time or even part time thinking about alignment, a lot of important updates on the inference. But assuming a random walk seems wrong.

Is there a reason that a complex, structured unfolding of reality would look like a random walk?

For what it's worth, being sedated for a wisdom tooth extraction preceded my stream entry (Buddhist term for an early stage of awakening) by about 6 months. Before that I had no real experience with being in severely altered states (other than accidentally Robotripping which I was unintentionally doing because I didn't realize how sensitive I was for DXM and had been experiencing it since I was a toddler taking cold medicine and thought it was just part of being sick). The experience of seeing myself continue to operate when "I" wasn't there was eye-opening.