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Well I asked this https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/X9Z9vdG7kEFTBkA6h/what-could-a-policy-banning-agi-look-like [LW · GW] but roughly no one was interested--I had to learn about "born secret" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Born_secret from Eric Weinstein in a youtube video.
FYI, while restricting compute manufacture is I would guess net helpful, it's far from a solution. People can make plenty of conceptual progress given current levels of compute https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sTDfraZab47KiRMmT/views-on-when-agi-comes-and-on-strategy-to-reduce [LW · GW] . It's not a way out, either. There are ways possibly-out. But approximately no one is interested in them.
localdeity on On PrivilegeI grew up knowing "privilege" to mean a special right that was granted to you based on your job/role (like free food for those who work at some restaurants) or perhaps granted by authorities due to good behavior (and would be taken away for misusing it). Note also that the word itself, "privi"-"lege", means "private law": a law that applies to you in particular.
Rights and laws are social things, defined by how others treat you. To say that your physical health is a privilege therefore seems like either a category error, or a claim that other people treated you better in a way that gave you your better physical health, which then raises questions like "What made you deserve that treatment?" or perhaps "Is it really because of how other people treated you, or other reasons like genetics or having made healthier life choices?". The latter may then lead to "Yeah, but you grew up being taught better and/or in a situation where healthy choices were more affordable, which are probably partly caused by wealth and are privilege", both of which might be counter-argued in the specific person's case or in general, and so on. Social justice arguments ensue.
"Advantage" seems like a more neutral term, one that doesn't inherently imply fairness-laden claims about how you got it. I would recommend it.
wassname on Instruction-following AGI is easier and more likely than value aligned AGIThat's true, they are different. But search still provides the closest historical analogue (maybe employees/suppliers provide another). Historical analogues have the benefit of being empirical and grounded, so I prefer them over (or with) pure reasoning or judgement.
jblack on Is There Really a Child Penalty in the Long Run?Yes, that was my first guess as well. Increased income from employment is most strongly associated with major changes, such as promotion to a new position with changed (and usually increased) responsibilities, or leaving one job and starting work somewhere else that pays more.
It seems plausible that these are not the sorts of changes that women are likely to seek out at the same rate when planning to devote a lot of time in the very near future to being a first-time parent. Some may, but all? Seems unlikely. Men seem more likely to continue to pursue such opportunities at a similar rate due to gender differences in child-rearing roles.
annasalamon on Stephen Fowler's ShortformI don't know the answer, but it would be fun to have a twitter comment with a zillion likes asking Sam Altman this question. Maybe someone should make one?
jblack on LLMs could be as conscious as human emulations, potentiallyI don't expect this to "cash out" at all, which is rather the point.
The only really surprising part would be that we had a way to determine for certain whether some other system is conscious or not at all. That is, very similar (high) levels of surprisal for either "ems are definitely conscious" or "ems are definitely not conscious", but the ratio between them not being anywhere near "what the fuck" level.
As it stands, I can determine that I am conscious but I do not know how or why I am conscious. I have only a sample size of 1, and no way to access a larger sample. I cannot determine that you are conscious. I can't even determine for certain when or whether I was conscious in the past, and there are some time periods for which I am very uncertain. I have hypotheses regarding all of these uncertainties, but there are no prospects of checking whether they're actually correct.
So given that, why would I be "what the fuck" surprised if some of my currently favoured hypotheses such as "ems will be conscious" were actually false? I don't have anywhere near the degree of evidence required to justify that level of prior confidence. I am quite certain that you don't either. I would be very surprised if other active fleshy humans weren't conscious, but still not "what the fuck" surprised.
o-o on "If we go extinct due to misaligned AI, at least nature will continue, right? ... right?"Additionally, the AI might think it's in an alignment simulation and just leave the humans as is or even nominally address their needs. This might be mentioned in the linked post, but I want to highlight it. Since we already do very low fidelity alignment simulations by training deceptive models, there is reason to think this.
thomas-kwa on Do you believe in hundred dollar bills lying on the ground? Consider hummingMy prior is that solutions contain on the order of 1% active ingredients, and of things on the Enovid ingredients list, citric acid and NaNO2 are probably the reagents that create NO [1], which happens at a 5.5:1 mass ratio. 0.11ppm*hr as an integral over time already means the solution is only around 0.01% NO by mass [1], which is 0.055% reagents by mass, probably a bit more because yield is not 100%. This is a bit low but believable. If the concentration were really only 0.88ppm and dissipated quickly, it would be extremely dilute which seems unlikely. This is some evidence for the integral interpretation over the instantaneous 0.88ppm interpretation-- not very strong evidence; I mostly believe it because it seems more logical and also dimensionally correct. [2]
[1] https://chatgpt.com/share/e95fcaa3-4062-4805-80c3-7f1b18b12db2
[2] If you multiply 0.11ppmhr by 8 hours, you get 0.88ppmhr^2, which doesn't make sense.
emrik-1 on Fund me please - I Work so Hard that my Feet start Bleeding and I Need to Infiltrate UniversityIt's a reasonable concern to have, but I've spoken enough with him to know that he's not out of touch with reality. I do think he's out of sync with social reality, however, and as a result I also think this post is badly written and the anecdotes unwisely overemphasized. His willingness to step out of social reality in order to stay grounded with what's real, however, is exactly one of the main traits that make me hopefwl about him.
I have another friend who's bipolar and has manic episodes. My ex-step-father also had rapid-cycling BP, so I know a bit about what it looks like when somebody's manic.[1] They have larger-than-usual gaps in their ability to notice their effects on other people, and it's obvious in conversation with them. When I was in a 3-person conversation with Johannes, he was highly attuned to the emotions and wellbeing of others, so I have no reason to think he has obvious mania-like blindspots here.
But when you start tuning yourself hard to reality, you usually end up weird in a way that's distinct from the weirdness associated with mania. Onlookers who don't know the difference may fail to distinguish the underlying causes, however. ("Weirdness" is a larger cluster than "normality", but people mostly practice distinguishing between samples of normality, so weirdness all looks the same to them.)
I was also evaluated for it after an outlier depressive episode in 2021, so I got to see the diagnostic process up close. Turns out I just have recurring depressions, and I'm not bipolar.
I read the paper, and overall it's an interesting framework. One thing I am somewhat unconvinced about (likely because I have misunderstood something) is its utility despite the dependence on the world model. If we prove guarantees assuming a world model, but don't know what happens if the real world deviates from the world model, then we have a problem. Ideally perhaps we want a guarantee akin to what's proved in learning theory, for example, that the accuracy will be small for any data distribution as long as the distribution remains the same during training and testing.
But perhaps I have misunderstood what's meant by a world model and maybe it's simply the set of precise assumptions under which the guarantees have been proved. For example, in the learning theory setup, maybe the world model is the assumption that the training and test distributions are the same, as opposed to a description of the data distribution.