LessWrong 2.0 Reader

Also astronomers: anything heavier than helium is a "metal". 

That makes sense. I think I may have misjudged your post, as I expected that you would classify that kind of approach as a "duct tape" approach.

In the general case I agree it's not necessarily trivial; e.g. if your program uses the whole range of decimal places to a meaningful degree, or performs calculations that can compound floating point errors up to higher decimal places. (Though I'd argue that in both of those cases pure floating point is probably not the best system to use.) In my case I knew that the intended precision of the input would never be precise enough to overlap with floating point errors, so I could just round anything past the 15th decimal place down to 0.

The sum of two numbers should have a precision no higher than the operand with the highest precision. For example, adding 0.1 + 0.2 should yield 0.3, not 0.30000000000000004.

I would argue that the precision should be capped at the lowest precision of the operands. In physics, if you add to lengths, 0.123m+0.123456m should be rounded to 0.246m.

Also, IEEE754 fundamentally does not contain information about the precision of a number. If you want to track that information correctly, you can use two floating point numbers and do interval arithmetic. There is even an IEEE standard for that nowadays. 

Of course, this comes at a cost. While monotonic functions can be converted for interval arithmetic, the general problem of finding the extremal values of a function in some high-dimensional domain is a hard problem. Of course, if you know how the function is composed out of simpler operations, you can at least find some bounds. 

Or you could do what physicists do (at least when they are taking lab courses) and track physical quantities with a value and a precision, and do uncertainty propagation. (This might not be 100% kosher in cases where you first calculate multiple intermediate quantities from the same measurement (whose error will thus not be independent) and continue to treat them as if they were. But that might just give you bigger errors.) Also, this relies on your function being sufficiently well-described in the region of interest by the partial derivatives at the central point. If you calculate the uncertainty of $f(x,y)=xy$ for $x=0.1\pm 1$, $y=0.1\pm 1$ using the partial derivatives you will not have fun.

Hm, maybe.

Sometimes it can be a win-win situation. For example, if the call leads to you identifying a problem they're having and solving it in a mutually beneficial way.

But often times that isn't the case. From their perspective, the chances are low enough where, yeah, maybe the cold call just feels spammy and annoying.

I think that cold calls can be worthwhile from behind a veil of ignorance though. That's the barometer I like to use. If I were behind a veil of ignorance, would I endorse the cold call? Some cold calls are well targeted and genuine, in which case I would endorse them from behind a veil of ignorance. Others are spammy and thoughtless, in which case I wouldn't endorse them.

(Surely cryonics doesn't matter given a realistic action space? Usage of cryonics is extremely rare and I don't think there are plausible (cheap) mechanisms to increase uptake to >1% of population. I agree that simulation arguments and similar considerations maybe imply that "helping current humans" is either incoherant or unimportant.)

If step 5 is indeed grounded in the spatial attention being on other people, this should be testable! For example, people who pay less spatial attention to other people should feel less intense social emotions - because the steering system circuit gets activated less often and weaker. And I think that is the case. At least ChatGPT has some confirming evidence, though it's not super clear and I haven't yet looked deeper into it.  

Whoops! You're right! Will do.

I like the rough thoughts way though. I'm not here to like read a textbook.

I agree that 0.7% is the number to beat for people who mostly focus on helping present humans and who don't take acausal or simulation argument stuff or cryonics seriously. I think that even if I was much more optimistic about AI alignment, I'd still think that number would be fairly plausibly beaten by a 1-year pause that begins right around the time of AGI. 

What are the mechanisms people have given and why are you skeptical of them?