LessWrong 2.0 Reader

Could you define what you mean here by counterfactual impact?

My knowledge of the word counterfactual comes mainly from the blockchain world, where we use it in the form of "a person could do x at any time, and we wouldn't be able to stop them, therefore x is counterfactually already true or has counterfactually already occured"

The argument is that with 1970′s tech the soviet union collapsed, however with 2020 computer tech (not needing GenAI) it would not.

I note that China is still doing market economics, and nobody is trying (or even advocating, AFAIK) some very ambitious centrally planned economy using modern computers, so this seems like pure speculation? Has someone actually made a detailed argument about this, or at least has the agreement of some people with reasonable economics intuitions?

The concept of "the meaning of life" still seems like a category error to me. It's an attempt to apply a system of categorization used for tools, one in which they are categorized by the purpose for which they are used, to something that isn't a tool: a human life. It's a holdover from theistic worldviews in which God created humans for some unknown purpose.

The lesson I draw instead from the knowledge-uploading thought experiment -- where having knowledge instantly zapped into your head seems less worthwhile acquiring it more slowly yourself -- is that to some extent, human values simply are masochistic. Hedonic maximization is not what most people want, even with all else being equal. This goes beyond simply valuing the pride of accomplishing difficult tasks, as such as the sense of accomplishment one would get from studying on one's own, above other forms of pleasure. In the setting of this thought experiment, if you wanted the sense of accomplishment, you could get that zapped into your brain too, but much like getting knowledge zapped into your brain instead of studying yourself, automatically getting a sense of accomplishment would be of lesser value. The suffering of studying for yourself is part of what makes us evaluate it as worthwhile.

I've arguably lived under totalitarianism (depending on how you define it), and my parents definitely have and told me many stories about it [LW · GW]. I think AGI increases risk of totalitarianism [LW · GW], and support a pause in part to have more time to figure out how to make the AI transition go well in that regard.

This will make more sense if you have a basic grasp on quantum mechanics, but if you're willing to accept "energy comes in discrete units" as a premise then you should be mostly fine.

My current understanding is that QM is not-at-all needed to make sense of stat mech. Instead, the thing where energy is equally likely to be in any of the degrees of freedom just comes from using a measure over your phase space such that the dynamical law of your system preservers that measure!

The Iowa Election Markets were roughly contemporaneous with Hanson's work. They are often co-credited.

Even if someone made a discovery decades earlier than it otherwise would have been, the long term consequences of that may be small or unpredictable. If your goal is to "achieve high counterfactual impact in your own research" (presumably predictably positive ones) you could potentially do that in certain fields (e.g., AI safety) even if you only counterfactually advance the science by a few months or years. I'm a bit confused why you're asking people to think in the direction outlined in the OP.

I meant that the idea that we should have "BSL-5" is the kind of silly thing that novice EAs propose that doesn't make sense because there literally isn't something significantly more restrictive

I mean, I'm sure something more restrictive is possible. But my issue with BSL levels isn't that they include too few BSL-type restrictions, it's that "lists of restrictions" are a poor way of managing risk when the attack surface is enormous. I'm sure someday we'll figure out how to gain this information in a safer way—e.g., by running simulations of GoF experiments instead of literally building the dangerous thing—but at present, the best available safeguards aren't sufficient.

I also think that "nearly all EA's focused on biorisk think gain of function research should be banned" is obviously underspecified, and wrong because of the details. 

I'm confused why you find this underspecified. Obviously policy about this should be careful and targeted, but I just meant "gain of function" in the common-use sense—e.g., the sense used in the 2014 ban on federal funding for such research.

Some of my considerations for college choice for my kid, that I suspect others may also want to think more about or discuss:

1. status/signaling benefits for the parents (This is probably a major consideration for many parents to push their kids into elite schools. How much do you endorse it?)
2. sex ratio at the school and its effect on the local "dating culture"
3. political/ideological indoctrination by professors/peers
4. workload (having more/less time/energy to pursue one's own interests)

Why aren't males way smarter than females on average? Males have ~13% higher cortical neuron density and 11% heavier brains...

Men are smarter than women, by about 2-4 points on average. Men are also larger, and so need bigger brains to compensate for their size anyways.