LessWrong 2.0 Reader

Note that I agree with your sentiment here, although my concrete argument is basically what LawrenceC wrote as a reply to this post [LW(p) · GW(p)].

Ryan, this is kind of a side-note but I notice that you have a very Paul-like approach to arguments and replies on LW.

Two things that come to notice:

1. You have a tendency to reply to certain posts or comments with "I don't quite understand what is being said here, and I disagree with it." or, "It doesn't track with my views", or equivalent replies that seem not very useful for understanding your object level arguments. (Although I notice that in the recent comments I see, you usually postfix it with some elaboration on your model.)
2. In the comment I'm replying to, you use a strategy of black-box-like abstraction modeling of a situation to try to argue for a conclusion, one that usually involves numbers such as multipliers or percentages. (I have the impression that Paul uses this a lot, and one concrete example that comes to mind is the takeoff speeds essay. I usually consider such arguments invalid when they seem to throw away information we already have, or seem to use a set of abstractions that don't particularly feel appropriate to the information I believe we have.

I just found this interesting and plausible enough to highlight to you. Its a moderate investment of my time to find out examples from your comment history to highlight all these instances, but writing this comment still seemed valuable.

Relevant: My Taxonomy of AI-risk counterarguments [LW · GW], inspired by Zvi Mowshowitz's The Crux List [LW · GW].

This is a really well-written response. I'm pretty impressed by it.

Thanks for posting Mako. I even mention Effective Altruism/Longtermism at one point in the video!

If your acceptable lower limit for basically anything is zero you wont be allowed to do anything, really anything. You have to name some quantity of capabilities progress that’s okay to do before you’ll be allowed to talk about AI in a group setting.

"The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero."

Looks relevant to me on a skim! I'd probably want to see some arguments in the submission for why this is useful tooling for mech interp people specifically (though being useful to non mech interp people too is a bonus!)

Originally I felt happy about these, because “mostly agreeing” is an unusually positive outcome for that opening. But these discussions are grueling. It is hard to express kindness and curiosity towards someone yelling at you for a position you explicitly disclaimed. Any one of these stories would be a success but en masse they amount to a huge tax on saying anything about veganism, which is already quite labor intensive.

The discussions could still be worth it if it changed the arguer’s mind, or at least how they approached the next argument. But I don’t get the sense that’s what happens. Neither of us have changed our minds about anything, and I think they’re just as likely to start a similar fight the next week.

May I ask what your motivation was when you decided to spend your time on the aforementioned discussions? Were you hoping to learn something or to persuade the other, or both?

It sounds to me as though the solution here is to be more cautious before spending time arguing. Sometimes (often) it is IMO wiser to cut your losses and stop replying.

In the war example, wars are usually negative sum for all involved, even in the near-term. And so while they do happen, wars are pretty rare, all things considered.

Meanwhile, the problem with AI development is that that there are enormous financial incentives for building increasingly more powerful AI, right up to the point of extinction. Which also means that you need not some but all people from refraining from developing more powerful AI. This is a devilishly difficult coordination problem. What you get by default, absent coordination, is that everyone races towards being the first ones to develop AGI.

Another problem is that many people don't even agree that developing unaligned AGI likely results in extinction. So from their perspective, they might well think they're racing towards a utopian post-scarcity society, while those who oppose them are anti-progress Luddites.

A simplistic model of your metabolism is that you have two states:

1. The anabolic state which builds muscle and creates new cells.
2. The catabolic state which tears down dysfunctional structures and recycles your cells.

A common theme in scientific anti-aging is that you need to balance both states and that the modern life leads us to spend too long in the anabolic state (in a state of abundance, well fed, moderate temperature and not physically stressed). Anabolic interventions can lead to good outcomes in the short-term and quick results, but can potentially be bad long-term.

Cycling in this context would mean something like doing it every other day or every other week (what is optimal? probably no one knows). It could also mean timing it when you don't do fasts for those people who do alternate day fasting or other longer fasts. Fasting and calorie restriction would be typically catabolic activities.