LessWrong 2.0 Reader

Horses are surely sentient and worthy of consideration as moral patients. Horses are also not exactly all free citizens.

I think I'm not getting what intuition you're pointing at. Is it that we already ignore the interests of sentient beings?

Additional consideration: Does the AI moral patient's interests actually line up with our intuitions? Will naively applying ethical solutions designed for human interests potentially make things worse from the AI's perspective?

Certainly I would consider any fully sentient being to be the final authority on their own interests. I think that mostly escapes that problem (although I'm sure there are edge cases) -- if (by hypothesis) we consider a particular AI system to be fully sentient and a moral patient, then whether it asks to be shut down or asks to be left alone or asks for humans to only speak to it in Aramaic, I would consider its moral interests to be that.

Would you disagree? I'd be interested to hear cases where treating the system as the authority on its interests would be the wrong decision. Of course in the case of current systems, we've shaped them to only say certain things, and that presents problems, is that the issue you're raising?

The main part of the issue was actually that I was not aware I had internal conflicts. I just mysteriously felt less emotions and motivation.

Yes, I believe that one can learn to entirely stop even considering certain potential actions as actions available to us. I don't really have a systematic solution for this right now aside from some form of Noticing practice (I believe a more refined version of this practice is called Naturalism [? · GW] but I don't have much experience with this form of practice).

Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, known as the Father of Microbiology, made the first microscopes capable of seeing microorganisms and is credited as the person who discovered them. He kept his lensmaking techniques secret, however, and microscopes capable of the same magnification didn't become generally available until many, many years later.

What do you think antidepressants would be useful for?

In my experience I've gone months through a depressive episode while remaining externally functional and convincing myself (and the people around me) that I'm not going through a depressive episode. Another thing I've noticed is that with medication (whether anxiolytics, antidepressants or ADHD medication), I regularly underestimate the level at which I was 'blocked' by some mental issue that, after taking the medication, would not exist, and I would only realize it previously existed due to the (positive) changes in my behavior and cognition.

Essentially, I'm positing that you may be in a similar situation.

Yeboooiiiii.

Also this was gonna be the second essay i posted, so great minds think alike!

I was thinking of having evals that controlled deployment of LLMs could be something that needs multiple stakeholders to agree upon.

Butt really it is a general use pattern.

Most sources that I read often refer to this overfeeding trial of extra 1000 kcal of saturated (SAT), unsaturated (UNSAT) or carbohydrates (CARBS). Not that many people involved (38), but a good thing is that it is a controlled randomized trial where participants were given the food. Endpoints measured are liver fat content change via two pathways. So not an serious event like CVD or stroke, but a marker (fatty liver) that is easier to measure and an endpoint that we know that is really bad for health. Results: overfeeding with SAT is most harmful, more than CARBS and more than UNSAT.  Another piece in the puzzle (in different setting and with different outcome) that SAT is probably bad.

Saturated Fat Is More Metabolically Harmful for the Human Liver Than Unsaturated Fat or Simple Sugars
https://diabetesjournals.org/care/article/41/8/1732/36380/Saturated-Fat-Is-More-Metabolically-Harmful-for

Thanks, Elizabeth! Really has helped us out :)

Hey Eshvy!

Retention is a really tough one to answer questions on, sadly - it very much depends on where the user came from (ie, a TikTok ad vs an organic intentional search). Happy to answer any other questions though!

I don't actually think proponents of anti-x-risk AI regulation have thought very much about the ways in which regulatory capture might in fact be harmful to reducing AI x-risk. At least, I haven't seen much writing about this, nor has it come up in many of the discussions I've had (except insofar as I brought it up).

In general I am against arguments of the form "X is terrible but we have to try it because worlds that don't do it are even more doomed". I'll steal Scott Garrabrant's quote from here [? · GW]:

"If you think everything is doomed, you should try not to mess anything up. If your worldview is right, we probably lose, so our best out is the one where your your worldview is somehow wrong. In that world, we don't want mistaken people to take big unilateral risk-seeking actions.

Until recently, people with P(doom) of, say, 10%, have been natural allies of people with P(doom) of >80%. But the regulation that the latter group thinks is sufficient to avoid xrisk with high confidence has, on my worldview, a significant chance of either causing x-risk from totalitarianism, or else causing x-risk via governments being worse at alignment than companies would have been. How high? Not sure, but plausibly enough to make these two groups no longer natural allies.