Open and Welcome Thread – August 2021

[Edit: I was misunderstanding the parent comment, sorry, see reply.] I (and I think a lot of people) generally write and revise and solicit comments in google docs, and then copy-paste to lesswrong at the end. Copy-paste from Google docs into the LessWrong editor works great, it preserves the formatting almost perfectly. There's just a couple little things that you need to do manually after copy-pasting.

What do you mean by "demonstrate vaccine effectiveness"? My instinct is that it's going to be ~impossible to prove a casual result in a principled way just from this data. (This is different from how hard it will be to extract Bayesian evidence from the data.)

For intuition, consider the hypothesis that countries can (at some point after February 2020) unlock Blue Science, which decreases cases and deaths by a lot. If the time to develop and deploy Blue Science is sufficiently correlated with the time to develop and deploy vaccines (and the common component can't be measured well), it won't be possible to distinguish casual effectiveness of vaccines from casual effectiveness of Blue Science.

(A Bayesian would draw some update even from an uncontrolled correlation, so if you want the Bayesian answer, the real question is "how much of an update so you want to demonstrate (and assuming what prior)"?

I doubt that the introduction posts that get regularly written in this thread would be written at all if the thread wouldn't exist.

Shortform posts currently feel more like they are your personal space with your own norms, that someone could visit. The Open Thread feels more like a town plaza where you are acting on shared norms, where you expect things to get a bit more visibility, but also are generally acting in a more shared social and intellectual context. 

It's not obvious that this distinction is worth having both of them, but both features seem to continue getting usage, and I personally often have a sense that a specific comment/post is more shortform or more Open Thread shaped.

Is there any advantage

You probably use your shortform more, so it might get more attention as a comment here.

Maybe if we could give a human more (emulated) cortical columns without also making him insane in the process, we'd end up with a limited superintelligence who maybe isn't completely Friendly, but also isn't completely alien to human values. If we just start with the computer, all bets are off. He might still go insane later though. Arms race scenarios are still a concern. Reckless approaches might make hybrid intelligence sooner, but they'd also be less stable. The end result of most unfriendly AIs is that all the humans are dead. It takes a perverse kind of near-miss to get to the hellish, worse-than-death scenarios; an unFriendly AI that doesn't just kill us. A crazy hybrid might be that.

If the smartest of humans could be made just a little smarter, maybe we could solve the alignment problem before AI goes FOOM. Otherwise, the next best approach seems to involve somehow getting the AI to solve the problem for us, without killing everyone (or worse) in the meantime. Of course, that's only if they're working on alignment, and not just improving AI.

If the Borg Collective becomes the next Facebook, then at least we're not all dead. Unfortunately, an AI trying to FOOM on a pure machine substrate would still outcompete us poor meat brains.

Well, it might make it easier for someone to steal your credit card info if you're wearing one of these headsets.

I don't know of any writeup, and I do think it would be great for someone to make one. I've definitely discussed this for many hours with people over the years.

Some related tags that might have some stuff in this space covered: 

• https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/neuromorphic-ai [? · GW]
• https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/brain-computer-interfaces [? · GW] 

But overall doesn't look like there are any posts that really cover the AI Alignment angle.