LessWrong 2.0 Reader

Supposing that r/WSB is actually responsible (in part) for spiking $GME (do they really make up enough volume?), I find it fascinating how they're resolving coordination problems and creating common knowledge. 

One post last night was titled something like "upvote if you aren't selling before ($1000/$5000/some number I forget)!". At first this seemed like classic Reddit karma-whoring / circle-jerking, but then I realized that this actually creates some degree of common knowledge: by upvoting, you weakly signal support to others - and to yourself via consistency pressure - that you won't defect by selling early. And they know you know ..., because you've all seen and upvoted the same post. You know this is true for many people, because there are so many upvotes.

There's the diamond / paper hands dichotomy, honoringcooperators and looking down on defectors. There's the "IF HE'S IN I'M IN" meme going on with one of the original traders, u/DeepFuckingValue, expressing the sentiment that given u/DFV's (apparent) multi-million ongoing stake in $GME, the other users will follow their lead by not selling. 

I'm sure there's other things I've missed. But this was one of my first thoughts when I learned about this hilarious situation.

I realized that you might be able to make them 'smarter', but because the animal still has finite I/O - it has no thumbs, it cannot speak, it doesn't have the right kind of eyes for tool manipulation - it wouldn't get much benefit.

I'm fairly skeptical of this claim. It seems to me that even moderate differences in animal intelligence in E.G dogs leads to things like tool use and better ability to communicate things to humans.

Do we know of materials that could make a good dyson sphere?

It seems that I can still modify my votes, despite voting being over?

Yeah, that's fair - it's certainly possible that the things that make intelligence relatively hard for evolution may not apply to human engineers. OTOH, if intelligence is a bundle of different modules that all coexistent in humans and of which different animals have evolved in various proportions, that seems to point away from the blank slate/"all you need is scaling" direction.

My friends circle has less universal distaste for the idea of efficiency, and it seems to be quite contextual in popular media ("If you can be one thing, be efficient." -- Wayne, Letterkenny).  

I think it's not popular in far-mode discussions because it's explicitly about tradeoffs.  Acknowledging that there are competing desires kind of sucks when you want to signal wholehearted support for whatever harebrained idea your friends or parents are supporting now.  It's extremely popular in near-mode planning - nobody I know argues in favor of waste (OK, that's not true - we'll argue any side of any issue, just for drill.  But when we're trying to actually do something, efficiency is accepted as important.)

At market open, the instability I was seeing appears to have passed. That did not last long. I'll keep checking it.

Hmmm, this is a good point -- but here's a counter that just now occurred to me:

Let's disambiguate "intelligence" into a bunch of different things. Reasoning, imitation, memory, data-efficient learning, ... the list goes on. Maybe the complete bundle has only evolved once, in humans, but almost every piece of the bundle has evolved separately many times.

In particular, the number 1 thing people point to as a candidate X for "X is necessary for TAI and we don't know how to make AIs with X yet and it's going to be really hard to figure it out soon" is data-efficient learning.

But data-efficient learning has evolved separately many times; AlphaStar may need thousands of years of Starcraft to learn how to play, but dolphins can learn new games in minutes. Games with human trainers, who are obviously way out of distribution as far as Dolphin's ancestral environment is concerned.

The number 2 thing I hear people point to is "reasoning" and maybe "causal reasoning" in particular. I venture to guess that this has evolved a bunch of times too, based on how various animals can solve clever puzzles to get pieces of food.

(See also: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GMqZ2ofMnxwhoa7fD/the-octopus-the-dolphin-and-us-a-great-filter-tale [LW · GW] )

Your paragraph that outlines your position mixes multiple different things into the concept of reason.

There's the intelligence of individual scientists or engineers, there are conceptual issues and there's the quality of institutions.

An organizations that's a heavily disfunctional immoral maze is going to innovate less new technology then an organization with access to the same resources but with a better organizational setup. 

When it comes to raw intelligence that a lot of the productive engineers have an IQ that far exceeds that of the average population.

Conceptual insights like the idea of running controlled trials heavily influence the medical technology that can be developed in our society. We might have had concepts that would have allowed us to produce a lot more vaccines against COVID-19 much earlier

I suppose by 'the universe' I meant what you would call the inflationary multiverse, that is including distant regions we are now out of contact with. I personally tend not to call regions separated by mere distance separate universes.

"and the only impact of our actions with infinite values is the number of black holes we create."

Yes, that would be the infinite impact I had in mind, doubling the number would double the number of infinite branching trees of descendant universes.

Re simulations, yes, there is indeed a possibility of influencing other levels, although we would be more clueless, and it is a way for us to be in a causally connected patch with infinite future.