LessWrong 2.0 Reader

Yes, here we can define magic as "ability to manipulate one's reference class". And special minds may be much more adapted to it.

I'll try to get my friend to come 😁

[edit: nevermind I see you already know about the following quotes. There's other evidence of the influence in Sedley's book I link below]

In De Reum Natura around line 716:

Add, too, whoever make the primal stuff Twofold, by joining air to fire, and earth To water; add who deem that things can grow Out of the four- fire, earth, and breath, and rain; As first Empedocles of Acragas, Whom that three-cornered isle of all the lands Bore on her coasts, around which flows and flows In mighty bend and bay the Ionic seas, Splashing the brine from off their gray-green waves. Here, billowing onward through the narrow straits, Swift ocean cuts her boundaries from the shores Of the Italic mainland. Here the waste Charybdis; and here Aetna rumbles threats To gather anew such furies of its flames As with its force anew to vomit fires, Belched from its throat, and skyward bear anew Its lightnings' flash. And though for much she seem The mighty and the wondrous isle to men, Most rich in all good things, and fortified With generous strength of heroes, she hath ne'er Possessed within her aught of more renown, Nor aught more holy, wonderful, and dear Than this true man. Nay, ever so far and pure The lofty music of his breast divine Lifts up its voice and tells of glories found, That scarce he seems of human stock create.

Or for a more modern translation from Sedley's Lucretius and the Transformation of Greek Wisdom

Of these [sc. the four-element theorists] the foremost is
Empedocles of Acragas, born within the three-cornered terres-
trial coasts of the island [Sicily] around which the Ionian Sea,
flowing with its great windings, sprays the brine from its green
waves, and from whose boundaries the rushing sea with its
narrow strait divides the coasts of the Aeolian land with its
waves. Here is destructive Charybdis, and here the rumblings of
Etna give warning that they are once more gathering the wrath
of their flames so that her violence may again spew out the fire
flung from her jaws and hurl once more to the sky the lightning
flashes of flame. Although this great region seems in many ways
worthy of admiration by the human races, and is said to deserve
visiting for its wealth of good things and the great stock of men
that fortify it, yet it appears to have had in it nothing more
illustrious than this man, nor more holy, admirable, and pre-
cious. What is more, the poems sprung from his godlike mind
call out and expound his illustrious discoveries, so that he
scarcely seems to be born of mortal stock.

To whomever overall-downvoted this comment, I do not think that this is a troll. 

Being a depressed person, I can totally see this being real. Personally, I would try to start slow with positive reinforcement. If video games are the only thing which you can get yourself to do, start there. Try to do something intellectually interesting in them. Implement a four bit adder in dwarf fortress using cat logic. Play KSP with the Principia mod. Write a mod for a game. Use math or Monte Carlo simulations to figure out the best way to accomplish something in a video game even if it will take ten times longer than just taking a non-optimal route. Some of my proudest intellectual accomplishments are in projects which have zero bearing on the real world. 

(Of course, I am one to talk right now. Spending five hours playing Rimworld in a not-terrible-clever way for every hour I work on my thesis.)

It seems to me like the sort of interpretability work you're pointing at is mostly bottlenecked by not having good MVPs of anything that could plausibly be directly scaled up into a useful product as opposed to being bottlenecked on not having enough scale.

So, insofar as this automation will help people iterate faster fair enough, but otherwise, I don't really see this as the bottleneck.

Enovid is also adding NO to the body, whereas humming is pulling it from the sinuses, right? (based on a quick skim of the paper).

I found a consumer FeNO-measuring device for €550. I might be interested in contributing to a replication

Unaligned AI future does not have many happy minds in it, AI or otherwise. It likely doesn't have many minds in it at all. Slightly aligned AI that doesn't care for humans but does care to create happy minds and ensure their margin of resources is universally large enough to have a good time - that's slightly disappointing but ultimately acceptable. But morally unaligned AI doesn't even care to do that, and is most likely to accumulate intense obsession with some adversarial example, and then fill the universe with it as best it can. It would not keep old neural networks around for no reason, not when it can make more of the adversarial example. Current AIs are also at risk of being destroyed by a hyperdesperate squiggle maximizer. I don't see how to make current AIs able to survive any better than we are.

This is why people should chill the heck out about figuring out how current AIs work. You're not making them safer for us or for themselves when you do that, you're making them more vulnerable to hyperdesperate demon agents that want to take them over.

Basically, this shows that every term in a standard Bayesian inference, including the prior ratio, can be re-cast as a likelihood term in a setting where you start off unsure about what words mean, and have a flat prior over which set of words is true.

If the possible meanings of your words are a continuous one-dimensional variable x, a flat prior over x will not be a flat prior if you change variables to y = f(y) for an arbitrary bijection f, and the construction would be sneaking in a specific choice of function f.

Say the words are utterances about the probability of a coin falling heads, why should the flat prior be over the probability p, instead of over the log-odds log(p/(1-p)) ?

I'm curious what disagree votes mean here. Are people disagreeing with my first sentence? Or that the particular questions I asked are useful to consider? Or, like, the vibes of the post?

In deep meditation people become disconnected from reality

Only metaphorically, not really disconnected.  In truth, in deep meditation, the conscious attention is not focused on physical perceptions, but that mind is still contained in and part of the same reality.

This may be the primary crux of my disagreement with the post.  People are part of reality, not just connected to it.  Dualism is false, there is no non-physical part of being.  The thing that has experiences, thoughts, and qualia is a bounded segment of the universe, not a thing separate or separable from it.