LessWrong 2.0 Reader

Do you have a specific verse where you feel like Lucretius praised him on this subject? I only see that he praises him relative to other elementaists before tearing him and the rest apart for what he sees as erroneous thinking regarding their prior assertions around the nature of matter, saying:

"Yet when it comes to fundamentals, there they meet their doom. These men were giants; when they stumble, they have far to fall:"

(Book 1, lines 740-741)

I agree that he likely was a precursor to the later thinking in suggesting a compository model of life starting from pieces which combined to forms later on, but the lack of the source material makes it hard to truly assign credit.

It's kind of like how the Greeks claimed atomism originated with the much earlier Mochus of Sidon, but we credit Democritus because we don't have proof of Mochus at all but we do have the former's writings. We don't even so much credit Leucippus, Democritus's teacher, as much as his student for the same reasons, similar to how we refer to "Plato's theory of forms" and not "Socrates' theory of forms."

In any case, Lucretius oozes praise for Epicurus, comparing him to a god among men, and while he does say Empedocles was far above his contemporaries saying the same things he was, he doesn't seem overly deferential to his positions as much as criticizing the shortcomings in the nuances of their theories with a special focus on theories of matter. I don't think there's much direct influence on Lucretius's thinking around proto-evolution, even if there's arguably plausible influence on Epicurus's which in turn informed Lucretius.

a little-known outtake from the scene

Source?

My apologies... I'm new here and I'm probably misunderstanding the page layout or missing a major point, but... If the outtake conversation is real, can someone post a link to the source? Thanks!

I added this to my comment just before I saw your reply: Maybe it changes moment by moment as we consider different decisions, or something like that? But what about when we're just contemplating a philosophical problem and not trying to make any specific decisions?

I mostly offer this in the spirit of "here's the only way I can see to reconcile subjective anticipation with UDT at all", not "here's something which makes any sense mechanistically or which I can justify on intuitive grounds".

Ah I see. I think this is incomplete even for that purpose, because "subjective anticipation" to me also includes "I currently see X, what should I expect to see in the future?" and not just "What should I expect to see, unconditionally?" (See the link earlier about UDASSA not dealing with subjective anticipation.)

I'm assuming the recent protests about the Gaza war: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/04/24/us/columbia-protests-mike-johnson

I'm not sure who you've spoken to, but at least among the people who I talk to regularly who I consider to be doing "serious AI policy work" (which admittedly is not everyone who claims to be doing AI policy work), I think nearly all of them have thought about ways in which regulation + regulatory capture could be net negative. At least to the point of being able to name the relatively "easy" ways (e.g., governments being worse at alignment than companies).

I don't disagree with this; when I say "thought very much" I mean e.g. to the point of writing papers about it, or even blog posts, or analyzing it in talks, or basically anything more than cursory brainstorming. Maybe I just haven't seen that stuff, idk.

I'm not sure who you've spoken to, but at least among the AI policy people who I talk to regularly (which admittedly is a subset of people who I think are doing the most thoughtful/serious work), I think nearly all of them have thought about ways in which regulation + regulatory capture could be net negative. At least to the point of being able to name the relatively "easy" ways (e.g., governments being worse at alignment than companies).

I continue to think people should be forming alliances with those who share similar policy objectives, rather than simply those who belong in the "I believe xrisk is a big deal" camp. I've seen many instances in which the "everyone who believes xrisk is a big deal belongs to the same camp" mentality has been used to dissuade people from communicating their beliefs, communicating with policymakers, brainstorming ideas that involve coordination with other groups in the world, disagreeing with the mainline views held by a few AIS leaders, etc.

The cultural pressures against policy advocacy have been so strong that it's not surprising to see folks say things like "perhaps our groups are no longer natural allies" now that some of the xrisk-concerned people are beginning to say things like "perhaps the government should have more of a say in how AGI development goes than in status quo, where the government has played ~0 role and ~all decisions have been made by private companies."

Perhaps there's a multiverse out there in which the AGI community ended up attracting govt natsec folks instead of Bay Area libertarians, and the cultural pressures are flipped. Perhaps in that world, the default cultural incentives pushed people heavily brainstorming ways that markets and companies could contribute meaningfully to the AGI discourse, and the default position for the "AI risk is a big deal" camp was "well obviously the government should be able to decide what happens and it would be ridiculous to get companies involved– don't be unilateralist by going and telling VCs about this stuff."

I bring up this (admittedly kinda weird) hypothetical to point out just how skewed the status quo is. One might generally be wary of government overinvolvement in regulating emerging technologies yet still recognize that some degree of regulation is useful, and that position would likely still push them to be in the "we need more regulation than we currently have" camp.

As a final note, I'll point out to readers less familiar with the AI policy world that serious people are proposing lots of regulation that is in between "status quo with virtually no regulation" and "full-on pause." Some of my personal favorite examples include: emergency preparedness (akin to the OPPR), licensing (see Romney), reporting requirements, mandatory technical standards enforced via regulators, and public-private partnerships.

This is particularly weird because your indexical probability then depends on what kind of bet you're offered. In other words, our marginal utility of money differs from our marginal utility of other things, and which one do you use to set your indexical probability? So this seems like a non-starter to me...

It seems pretty weird to me too, but to steelman: why shouldn't it depend on the type of bet you're offered? Your indexical probabilities can depend on any other type of observation you have when you open your eyes. E.g. maybe you see blue carpets, and you know that world A is 2x more likely to have blue carpets. And hearing someone say "and the bet is denominated in money not time" could maybe update you in an analogous way.

I mostly offer this in the spirit of "here's the only way I can see to reconcile subjective anticipation with UDT at all", not "here's something which makes any sense mechanistically or which I can justify on intuitive grounds".

thanks oli, and thanks for editing mine! appreciate the modding <3

As you would expect, I strongly favor (1) over (2) over (3), with (3) being far, far worse for ‘eating your whole childhood’ reasons.

Is this actually true? China has (1) (affirmative action via "Express and objective (i.e., points and quotas)") for its minorities and different regions and FWICT the college admissions "eating your whole childhood" problem over there is way worse. Of course that could be despite (1) not because of it, but does make me question whether (3) ("Implied and subjective ('we look at the whole person').") is actually far worse than (1) for this.

Hmm, while I don't think olives in general are unhealthy in the slightest (you can overload on salt if you focus on them too much because they are brined, but that's reasonable to expect), there is definitely a meaningful distinction between the two types of processing we're referencing. Nixtamalization isn't isolating a part of something, it's rendering nutrients already in the corn more available. Fermenting olives isn't isolating anything, (though extracting olive oil is), it's removing substances that make the olive inedible. Same for removing tannins from acorns. Cooking is in main part rendering substances more digestible.

We often combine foods to make nutrients more accessible, like adding oil to greens with fat-soluble vitamins. I do think there's a useful intuition that leaving out part of an edible food is less advantageous than just eating the whole thing, because we definitely do want to get sufficient nutrients, and if we're being sated without enough of the ones we can't generate we'll have problems.

This intuition doesn't happen to capture my specific known difficulty with an industrially processed additive, though, which is a mild allergy to a contaminant on a particular preservative that's commonly industrially produced via a specific strain of mold. (Being citric acid, there's no plausible mechanism by which I could be allergic to the substance itself, especially considering I have no issues whatsoever with citrus fruits.) In this case there's rarely a 'whole food' to replace - it's just a preservative.