LessWrong 2.0 Reader

Indeed, I am insisting in the three posts that from our perspective, this is the crucial point: 
Fermi's paradox.

Now there is a whole ecosystem of concepts surrounding it, and although I have certain preferred models, the point is that uncertainty is really heavy.

Those AI-lions are cosmical lions thinking on cosmical scales.

Is it easy to detect an AI-Dragon you may meet in millions/billions of years?

Is it undecidable? Probably. For many reasons*

Is this [astronomical level of uncertainty/undecidability + the maximal threat of a death sentence] worth the gamble?

-> "Meeting a stronger AI" = "death"

-> Maximization = 0

-> AI only needs 1 stronger AI to be dead.

What is the likelihood for a human-made AI to not encounter [a stronger alien AI], during the whole length of their lifetime?


*(reachable but rare and far in space-time Dragons, but also cases where Dragons are everywhere and so advanced that lower technological proficiency isn't enough etc.).

Sounds plausible, but why does this differentially impact the generalizing algorithm over the memorizing algorithm?

Perhaps under normal circumstances both are learned so fast that you just don't notice that one is slower than the other, and this slows both of them down enough that you can see the difference?

Hence the advice to lost children to not accept random strangers soliciting them spontaneously, but if no authority figure is available, to pick a random adult and ask them for help.

I'm taking this post down, it was to set up an archive.org link as requested by Bostrom, and no longer serves that purpose. Sorry, this was meant to be discreet.

May I strongly recommend that you try to become a Dark Lord instead? 

I mean, literally. Stage some small bloody civil war with expected body count of several millions, become dictator, provide everyone free insurance coverage for cryonics, it will be sure more ethical than 10% of chance of killing literally everyone from the perspective of most of ethical systems I know.

In my experience, Americans are actually eager to talk to strangers and make friends with them if and only if they have some good reason to be where they are and talk to those people besides making friends with people.

A corollary of this is that if anyone at an [X] gathering is asked “So, what got you into [X]?” and answers “I heard there’s a great community around [X]”, then that person needs to be given the cold shoulder and made to feel unwelcome, because otherwise the bubble of deniability is pierced and the lemon spiral will set in, ruining it for everyone else.

However, this is pretty harsh, and I’m not confident enough in this chain of reasoning to actually “gatekeep” people like this in practice. Does this ring true to you?

I'm generally not a fan of increasing the amount of illegible selection effects.

On the privacy side, can lesswrong guarantee that, if I never click or Recommended, then recombee will never see an (even anonymized) trace of what I browse on lesswrong?

That doesn't seem like "consistently and catastrophically," it seems like "far too often, but with thankfully fairly limited local consequences."

I realized I hadn't given feedback on the actual results of the recommendation algorithm. Rating the recommendations I've gotten (from -10 to 10, 10 is best):

• My experience using financial commitments to overcome akrasia [LW · GW]: 3
• An Introduction to AI Sandbagging [LW · GW]: 3
• Improving Dictionary Learning with Gated Sparse Autoencoders [LW · GW]: 2
• [April Fools' Day] Introducing Open Asteroid Impact [LW · GW]: -6
• LLMs seem (relatively) safe [LW · GW]: -3
• The first future and the best future [LW · GW]: -2
• Examples of Highly Counterfactual Discoveries? [LW · GW]: 5
• "Why I Write" by George Orwell (1946) [LW · GW]: -3
• My Clients, The Liars [LW · GW]: -4
• 'Empiricism!' as Anti-Epistemology [LW · GW]: -2
• Toward a Broader Conception of Adverse Selection [LW · GW]: 4
• Ambitious Altruistic Software Engineering Efforts: Opportunities and Benefits [LW · GW]: 6

Big +1 to that. Part of why I support (some kinds of) AI regulation is that I think they'll reduce the risk of totalitarianism, not increase it.