Scattered thoughts on how the rationalist movement has helped me:

On the topic of rationalist self-improvement [LW · GW], I would like to raise the point that simply feeling as though there's a community of people who get me and that I can access when I want to has been hugely beneficial to my sense of happiness and belonging in the world.

That generates a lot of hedons for me, which then on occasion allow me to "afford" doing other things I wouldn't otherwise, like spend a little more time studying mathematics or running through Anki flashcards. There's a part of me that feels like I'm not just building up this knowledge for myself, but for the future possible good of "my people". I might tie together stuff in a way that other people find interesting, or insightful, or at least enjoy reading about, and that's honestly fricking awesome and blows standard delayed-gratification "self improvement" tactics outta the water 10/10 would recommend.

Also there's the whole thing that Ozy who is rat-almost-maybe-adjacent wrote the greatest summary of the greatest dating advice book I ever read, and I literally read that effortpost every day for like 8 months while I was learning how to be a half-decent romantic option, and holy SHIT is my life better for that. But again - nothing specific to the rationalist techniques themselves there; the value of the community was pointing me to someone who thinks and writes in a way my brain sees and says "mmm yes tasty good word soup i liek thanke" and then that person happened to write a post that played a big role in helping me with a problem that was causing me a ton of grief.

TLDR rationalists > rationalism

AI development is a tragedy of the commons

Per Wikipedia:

In economic science, the tragedy of the commons is a situation in which individual users, who have open access to a resource unhampered by shared social structures or formal rules that govern access and use, act independently according to their own self-interest and, contrary to the common good of all users, cause depletion of the resource through their uncoordinated action.

The usual example of a TotC is a fishing pond: Everyone wants to fish as much as possible, but fish are not infinite, and if you fish them faster than they can reproduce, you end up with less and less fish per catch.

AI development seems to have a similar dynamic: Everyone has an incentive to build more and more powerful AIs, because there is a lot of money to be made in doing so. But more and more powerful AIs being made increases the likelihood of an unstoppable AGI being made.

There are some differences, but I think this is the underlying dynamic driving AI development today. The biggest point of difference is that, whereas one person's overfishing eventually causes a noticeable negative effect on other fishers, and at the least does not improve their own catches, one firm building a more powerful AI probably does improve the economic situation of the other people who leverage it, up until a critical point.

Are there other tragedies of the commons that exhibit such non-monotonic behavior?

Would AGI still be an x-risk under communism?

1-bit verdict

Yes.

2-bit verdict

Absolutely, yes.

Explanation

An artificial general intelligence (AGI) is a computer program that can perform at least as good as an average human being can across a wide variety of tasks. The concept is closely linked to that of a general superintelligence, which can perform better than even the best human being can across a wide variety of tasks.

There are reasons to believe most, perhaps almost all, general superintelligences would end up causing human extinction. AI safety is a crossdisciplinary field of mathematics, economics, computer science, and philosophy which tackles the problem of how to stop such superintelligences.

AI alignment is a subfield of AI safety which studies theoretical conditions under which superintelligences aligned with human values can emerge. Another branch, which might be called AI deterrence, aims instead to make the production of unaligned superintelligences less likely in the first place.

One of the primary reasons why someone might want to create a superintelligence, even while understanding the risks involved, is because of the vast economic value such a program could generate. It makes sense then from a deterrence lens to look into the question of how this profit motive might be curtailed before catastrophe. Why not communism?

Unfortunately, this is almost certainly a bad move. Communism at almost every scale has to date never been able to escape the rampant black markets that appear due to the distortion of price signals. There is no reason to suspect such black markets wouldn't have just as strong a profit motive to create stronger and stronger AGIs. Indeed, because black markets are already illegal, this may worsen the problem: Well funded teams of people producing AGI outside of the eyes of the broader public is likely to generate less pushback and to be better equipped to avoid deterrence oriented legislation than a clear market team such as OpenAI is.

Metcalfe's (revised!) law states that the value of a communications network grows at about $n\log n$.

I frequently give my friends the advice that they should aim to become pretty good at 2 synergistic disciplines (CS and EE for me, for example), but I have wondered in the past why I don't give them the advice to become okay at 4 or 5 synergistic disciplines instead.

It just struck me these ideas might be connected in some way, but I am having trouble figuring out exactly how.