I’m glad you like the idea. That was a good catch that I didn’t capture of the true meaning of linear very well. I was a little rushed before. That said, your definition isn’t correct either. Though it is true that linear functions have that property, that is merely the additivity property of a linear function which is just the distributive property of multiplication used on a polynomial. I also didn’t see where the linked text you provided even defines linearity or contains the additivity rule you listed. That was a linear algebra textbook chapter though, and I am still glad you showed me it because it reminded me of how I was great at math in college, but not at all because of the textbooks (which were very expensive!). I have rather good reading comprehension and college math textbooks might as well be written in another language. I learned the math 100% from the lectures and used the text books only to do the problems in the back and got an A in all 3 Calculus classes I took. I am pretty sure I could write a much easier to understand math textbook and I know it is possible because the software that teaches math isn’t nearly as confusingly worded as the textbooks.

This is how I would keep it as simple as possible and capture more of the original meaning:

Multiplying grids of numbers is a straight-line property process.

That said, point taken regarding math jargon being very challenging to descriptively reword as I suspect it will get a lot harder as the concepts get more complex. The point in my process isn’t to perfectly define the word but to use a descriptive enough word replacement that one’s brain more easily grabs onto it than it does with, for example, Latin terms of absurd length for anatomy like “serratus posterior inferior” which is a muscle I had trouble with recently. Just off the top of my head, I would just call that the lower ribcage stabilizer instead. That gives one a much better idea of where it is and what it does and would be much easier to remember and accurately label on a diagram for a quiz. However, with such abstract concepts like math deals with, this will certainly be very challenging.

//There are different kinds of political parties. LOCALS sounds like a single-issue fusion party as described here: https://open.lib.umn.edu/americangovernment/chapter/10-6-minor-parties/

Fusion parties choose one of the main two candidates as their candidate. This gets around the spoiler effect. Eg the Populist Party would list whichever of the big candidates supported Free Silver.

A problem with that is that fusion parties are illegal in 48 states(?!) because the major parties don’t want to face a coalition against them.

LOCALS would try to get the democrat and the republican candidate to use Co-Co to choose their policies (offering the candidate support in form of donations or personnel), and if they do then they get an endorsement. I’m still a bit iffy on the difference between an interest group and a political party, so maybe you are in the clear.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_fusion_in_the_United_States //

Thank you for that information. I did not know anything about fusion parties, so you had me worried for a minute. I then looked up what “cross-endorsement” is and this in not remotely like anything I had in mind. Consider the name “Liaisons for Organizing Community Action and Leadership Strategies”. Besides being a clever acronym, it is very descriptive of the intended purpose of the organization. The group will have three main missions: 1. Developing leadership through an in house program (This is where future candidates sworn to uphold democracy will come from), 2. Organizing community actions such as referendums, planning and fundraising various local charity projects, organizing voting initiatives, lobbying local government and local businesses for various reasons, planning other various political strategies for the community, etc. 3. Maintaining the Township-Talks portion of Co-Co for their political district chapter. Other than #3, I plan to keep locals and Co-Co as completely separate organizations with separate agendas. LOCALS will be a nonprofit organization (Probably) while Co-Co will be a for profit corporation (Most Likely). As I mentioned before, I am not yet solid on structural organization, but I do know that they will be separate organizations. This is important because if they were the same organization, LOCALS might very ambiguously be considered a political party which I not only don’t want but absolutely can’t have for the plan to work.

To explain this, I will need to explain how part of the Township-Talks (the political section) portion of Co-Co will work which will be the main part that the LOCALS chapter manages. There will be a page/section for each current representative for each office within the LOCALS chapter political district. A person, bot, or combo will be assigned to each representative to collect information and post it there. Upcoming/past votes and voting records will be collected and posted there along with an AI generated synopsis of what the issue they are voting on is about. There will be tools that the representatives can use to talk to the public and hold town hall meetings online if they so wish. The representatives can also submit to make corrections for information about them, but they won’t directly be in charge of this information. The LOCALS chapter will research and populate this information into Co-Co will then take the information collected by LOCALS, compare it to the data collected from users via surveys and other sources, and then use an algorithm to score every single office holder/representative with a “democracy score” that indicates how well they are doing the will of the people. This way, LOCALS will simply be doing the nonprofit work of researching all of the available officeholders and merely using Co-Co as a tool to upload their research to for the public to view. Co-Co will then do the rest of the data collection and algorithmic sorting and figuring on its own to rate how the officeholders are doing and get the information to the constituents of the political district. There will also be a section for candidates during elections as well which will somewhat overlap with the officeholders because we expect incumbents to run for office again.

All this said, LOCALS will not be directly putting up any candidates. The only thing LOCALS will be doing is training candidates, getting them to swear oaths to uphold democracy according to a specific set of rules enshrined within the open source Co-Co algorithm that calculates the will of the people, and optionally putting up one or more assets with the LOCALS trust as collateral in case they violate their oath.

Now this next part is where I worry things might get somewhat sticky legally, but I am more certain that it is legal than not. There will be a monetization feature as well for any officeholder or candidate willing to swear the oath to uphold democracy via township talks data that can be where in exchange for a standardized low monthly user fee (like $10), a township talks user can answer special additional polls related to upcoming votes, propose legislative changes, and get more interactive time with the officeholder they are subscribed to. Besides those extra privileges, the algorithm that calculates what the officeholder should do according to the will of the people in Co-Co will be weighted heavier for the subscribers of the officeholder. Co-Co will receive a small portion of the funds, the rest will go directly to the officeholder as income. Importantly, this won’t be the only way to get beneficially weighted by the algorithm. There will be civics and local politics education courses that once completed have that effect, uploading proof of local charity work or donations will have that effect, and participating in online town halls and debates will also have that effect. I will likely add other ways to get further weighted as well (all of this in general rather than officeholder specific). In this way, users will build capital towards having more of a democratic influence in their community thus we have “stakeholder democracy” as I call it. The problem with plain democracy is that the fentanyl junkie gets the same vote as Mother Theresa and Albert Einstein. The most competent and virtuous people are the ones who ought to be in charge of decisions, so I had the idea to weakly integrate meritocracy and virtue ethics into the process while also getting the officeholders decentrally paid by their active constituents for their work so that the results are skewed towards good faith individuals and competent decision makers. I also figure that most politicians live off bribes these days, so rather than expecting the bribing to stop, why not have the option for the constituents to very weakly and decentrally bribe the officeholders to do what they want? It is not much different than campaign funding except it happens while in office, and the officeholder just gets to keep the money and use it however he or she wishes. As part of this process, the officeholder would sign a multi-lateral contract that incurs strong financial penalties if they don’t do what they promised and would be forced to pay back the fees to the subscribers.

Finally, besides for officeholders, as I mentioned before, candidates will get similar pages and they will be able to raise campaign funds via Township Talks also so long as they are sworn to uphold stakeholder democracy. It would work the same way as with the officeholder subscriptions. Subscribe to your candidate, and if they win, you get further weighted in the algorithm for any issues they vote on. I would make this a significant weighting because it is riskier considering the candidate might lose.

Anyway, LOCALS will neither directly run nor fund candidates. Instead, they will train leaders who will then run independently from LOCALS as candidates who will be certified by LOCALS under the democrat and primary tickets. What you are calling a fusion party involves a literal political party running a candidate say, the Libertarian party, under both the Libertarian ticket and the Republican ticket at the same time. So, for instance, if the Libertarian party nominated Donald Trump, then Donald Trump would be both the Libertarian and Republican party candidate. Absolutely nothing like that is even happening here. LOCALS doesn’t even have a ticket, doesn’t seek ballot access, or technically even field candidates. LOCALS merely trains and certifies candidates who they hand pick for their leadership program and who swear to uphold democracy according to a specific set of rules, agree to campaign in a certain fashion, and may optionally choose to put one or more assets up for collateral with the LOCALS trust that would be lost if they break their oath. This would make 2 types of LOCALS certified candidates: 1. a LOCALS certified candidate, and 2. a LOCALS certified Trust candidate. In this manner, rather than running candidates (which I improperly said for simplicity sake in the earlier response), all they will be doing is hand picking and training leaders and helping them enforce self-imposed rules. The self-imposed part is important. If the problem were officeholders didn’t have enough freedom in how they vote and run their campaigns and offices, we would have a problem. Because the problem is that they have too much, we can create candidates that work based on self-imposed rules without breaking/changing any laws or rewriting any constitutions. That realization is what got the gears turning for this whole idea. There is also a precedent in both major parties for hijacking them. With the GOP we had/have “the Tea Party wing” and “the MAGA wing”, and for the Dems we have “The Squad” (originally known as “Justice Democrats”). Upon seeing these in party rebels take over from the primaries, I said to myself “why not both parties?” If LOCALS can get LOCALS certified candidates to win both primaries for a single office, that office is guaranteed to go to a LOCALS certified candidate. It’s also easier and cheaper to win in the primaries because there is less turnout and less funding, and if Co-Co takes off, Co-Co can organize voter turnout for the LOCALS certified candidates.

//I love your vision of how a politician should answer the abortion question. Separating the three questions “who do voters think is qualified” “what do voters want” and “what is true” would be great for democracy. Similar to: https://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/futarchy.html//

I love how you were able to grok that from the few context clues that I gave you. That’s exactly what I was thinking. American elections are not democratic because they are too ambiguous to functionally achieve democracy in quite a few ways. The voter has to somehow figure out which candidate is trustworthy (won’t back stab or sell out later or is just lying to begin with), competent, supports their values and interests, and has a reasonable chance of winning all at the same time (assuming such a candidate exists, which usually isn’t the case). I harp on people confusing elections with democracy all the time. Sure, an election happens in that situation, but nothing remotely close to the will of a majority of people is happening because of the election. I liken it to voting on who gets to punch you in the face. Logically, the democracy part can only happen after the election. The election should only be about who is competent and trustworthy and the issues sorted out later by the constituents via data science. It doesn’t even make sense for the candidate to promise what they will do ahead of time because circumstances change and decisions should change with them. All this seems obvious to me, but most other people don’t generally seem to understand what democracy actually is. They think democracy is elections. I always like to point out that we could have democracy entirely without elections if we switched to sortition instead. I am not saying we should, though I doubt it could be worse than what we have now, but the point is that democracy doesn’t even require elections. I also don’t want to do the stupid form of democracy like the article you linked referenced which is why I designed a system as a stakeholder democracy to weight the process towards merit, virtue, and participation.

//When it comes to local vs not local, if 1/100 people is an X, and they are spread out, then their voice doesn’t mean much and the other 99/100 people in their district can push through policies that harm them. If the Xes are in the same district, then they get a say about what happens to them. I used teachers as an example of an X, but it is more general than that. (Though I’m thinking about the persecution of Jews in particular.)//

Yes, Claude chided me often about protecting political minorities as well. As I told him, this is less of a concern in a local community sovereignty setup in modern times where mobility is cheap and easy because of the ability to vote with one’s feet than it would be in literally any other known system. I am actually hoping that people do just that and move wherever they like the politics. I am a big fan of intentional communities, and if people move based on political preferences, then they will naturally self sort into intentional communities. The gain in social capital from living in a community of people who share your beliefs and policy preferences is enormous! Regarding Jews, I think they are protected under federal law anyway. However, for political rather than racial/ethnic minorities which is I believe what we are discussing now, voting with one’s feet still applies. Suppose you hate gun control and 95% of the community is for it, you can just move to another community that loves guns. People already do it now. Are you a wing nut and your community hates private airplanes? Just move one community over where they either like them or don’t care. Problem solved. That’s why I am very serious about making sovereignty as localized as possible. If literally every neighborhood were sovereign, you wouldn’t have to go very far to escape a bad policy. I have also toyed with the idea of creating a way to use Co-Co and/or LOCALS to grease mobility even further for people.

The fact of the matter is, no matter what type of government is chosen, the risk of becoming a disgruntled political minority is always a possibility. That being the case, the only real insurance against this is, in fact, radical decentralization of political districts coupled with local sovereignty. This actually fits well with social contract theory which is the main theory that political science is based on. Social contracts are implicitly agreed to by staying within the jurisdiction. If the jurisdiction is too difficult to escape, then the implicit contract is violated. Perhaps most importantly, it would be very beneficial to have lots of different communities trying lots of different things. That’s how we could really advance the social sciences. We need the data, but we don’t want to do anything too widespread because of the risk profile involved. Single community testing is perfect. If it works one place, others will likely try it too. If it fails miserably, that's unfortunate, but at least others will avoid it like a hot stove. The risk profile for localism makes a lot more sense for empirically testing, implementing, and improving social policies in an iterative manner.

Speaking of empiricism, I also think that lack of empiricism in politics is one reason why the U.S. and western civilizations appear to be having a political mental health crisis. Being passionate about abstractions reported in the news regarding far off places is not good for mental health. People in California should be a lot more worried about the homeless guys shooting fentanyl in camps on the streets than what is happening in Ukraine or Gaza. We can’t even know if the information regarding that stuff is accurate. It could be almost 100% BS. Being spoon fed your worldview by provably dishonest media organizations that are probably at least partially controlled by various intel agencies and special interests both foreign and domestic isn’t conducive to a stable, healthy worldview. Furthermore, when you are trying to politically control the entire nation, the stakes are too high and we get strong political hatred like we see now. That’s why I want to stop people from focusing on and controlling what happens in Ukraine or Gaza (which is absurd!) or even across the nation in other states and start worrying about controlling the literal streets they live on instead. We’re experiencing a megalomania crisis where everyone thinks that modern tech coupled with sham democracy allows them to control not only the entire country, but the entire world! Control your own neighborhood people! Then you can start worrying about the neighboring communities. Don’t even try to control the world. You can’t and shouldn’t anyway. It would be unethical even if you could. However, if the people can organize to be sovereign at the community level, the federal government will automatically get weaker and have fewer teeth. They can’t control every individual neighborhood. We do the feds a huge favor by not caring enough about our neighborhoods and focusing on national/international politics instead. It’s much easier to control a power vacuum caused by a confusopoly.

That said, I realize what a logistical nightmare that many districts with strong sovereignty might be, but we have AI and other software now. Coordinating communities to collaborate and trade is part of what Co-Co will be programmed to do. I think we are set for solving logistics problems. I don’t have all the answers yet, but I know that people could figure out a way to seamlessly integrate things with modern tech, and figuring out how to do so should create jobs anyway.

I'm under the impression that an AGI would be monitored *during* training as well. So you'd effectively need the system to turn "evil" (utility function flipped) during the training process, and the system to be smart enough to conceal that the error occurred. So it'd need to happen a fair bit into the training process. I guess that's possible, but IDK how likely it'd be.

Sure, but I'd expect that a system as important as this would have people monitoring it 24/7.

Paperclipping seems to be negative utility, not approximately 0 utility.

My thinking was that an AI system that *only* takes values between 0 and + ∞ (or some arbitrary positive number) would identify that killing humans would result in 0 human value, which is its minimum utility.

I read Eliezer's idea, and that strategy seems to be... dangerous. I think that "Giving an AGI a utility function which includes features which are not really relevant to human values" is something we want to avoid unless we absolutely need to.

How come? It doesn't seem *too* hard to create an AI that only expends a small amount of its energy on preventing the garbage thing from happening.

I have much more to say on this topic and about the rest of your comment, but it's definitely too much for a comment chain. I'll make an actual post containing my thoughts sometime in the next week or two, and link it to you.

Please do! I'd love to see a longer discussion on this type of thing.

EDIT: just thought some more about this and want to clear something up:

Modern machine learning systems often require a specific incentive in order to explore new strategies and escape local maximums. We may see this behavior in future attempts at AGI, And no, it would not be flipped with the reward function/model- I'm highlighting that there is a really large variety of sign flip mistakes and most of them probably result in paperclipping.

I'm a little unsure on this one after further reflection. When this happened with GPT-2, the bug managed to flip the reward & the system still pursued instrumental goals like exploring new strategies:

Bugs can optimize for bad behavior

One of our code refactors introduced a bug which flipped the sign of the reward. Flipping the reward would usually produce incoherent text, but the same bug also flipped the sign of the KL penalty. The result was a model which optimized for negative sentiment while preserving natural language. Since our instructions told humans to give very low ratings to continuations with sexually explicit text, the model quickly learned to output only content of this form. This bug was remarkable since the result was not gibberish but maximally bad output. The authors were asleep during the training process, so the problem was noticed only once training had finished. A mechanism such as Toyota’s Andon cord could have prevented this, by allowing any labeler to stop a problematic training process.

So it definitely seems *plausible* for a reward to be flipped without resulting in the system failing/neglecting to adopt new strategies/doing something weird, etc.