March 2022 Welcome & Open Thread

On Feb 19th I came from London to visit my parents in Lviv (first time since September). On 24th I woke up to Russian attack, general mobilization order and prohibition to leave the country.

Failure #1: didn't take possibility and impact of total Russian attack in consideration when planning the trip.

I mentioned to a coworker that countries moving embassies out of Kyiv is a costly signal. Nevertheless I looked at it and went into cached thought [LW · GW]: the war is localized to parts of Donbas.

Failure #2: on morning of 24th it was possible to leave the country. I didn't. Looking back - it feels like I was in the freeze mode from Fight/Flight/Freeze triad. I got out of stupor and doomscroling by end of day. By that time males of my age were prohibited to leave the country.

Bonjour !

Been reading lesswrong for years but never posted: I feel like my cognitive capacities are nowhere near the average in this forum.

I would love to exchange ideas and try to improve my rationality with less “advanced” people, wondering if anyone would have recommendations.

Been thinking that something like the changemyview subreddit might be a good start?

Thanks

I'm completely new to this community, other than having several close friends teach me things they learned here over the years. For some reason Youtube doesn't seem to show me things I find intellectually interesting anymore, so I want to read more blogs. Books too. Reading The Dispossed right now.

Anyways, hi! It already feels so warm here.

*Moving my introduction here because I accidentally posted it in the wrong Open Thread.

Introducing myself-

Hi, I’m Karolina. I stumbled across this community after googling “techno feudalism”. A moderator of a Discord server I belong to says that the US will become techno-feudalist society, and I was trying to understand what he means. I’m not super interested in techno feudalism, though. I created an account here because I saw a lot of interesting topics under the “Concepts” tab.

I would describe myself as “down to earth”. Most of my thoughts revolve around my general welfare and the welfare of people who I’m close to. My fiance and I are planning a wedding for this summer, and we want to start having kids as soon as we’re married, so I think a lot about pregnancy and motherhood. I wonder what our kids will be like and hope that I’ll be a good mom.

So that brings me to why I’m here. I don’t think about things too deeply. I wonder if I have a tendency to accept what people say without question. People who I interact with online have told me that I don’t understand the agendas of politicians and the mainstream media. I want to understand why I think about things the way I do. I want to improve my critical thinking skills and learn how to think in a “deeper” way.

Hi! I'm Kelvin, 26, and I've been following LessWrong since 2018. Came here after reading references to Eliezer's AI-Box experiments from Nick Bostrom's book.

During high school I participated in a few science olympiads, including Chemistry, Math, Biology and Informatics. Was the reserve member of the Brazilian team for the 2012 International Chemistry Olympiad.

I studied Medicine and later Molecular Science at the University of São Paulo, and dropped out in 2015 to join a high-frequency trading fund based on Brazil. Had a successful career there, and rose up to become one of the senior partners.

Since 2020 I'm co-founder and CEO of TickSpread, a crypto futures exchange based on batch auctions. We are interested in mechanism design, conditional and combinatorial markets, and futarchy.

I'm also personally very interested in machine learning, neuroscience, and AI safety discussions, and I've spent quite some time studying these topics on my own, despite having no professional experience on them.

I very much want to be more active on this community, participating in discussions and meeting other people who are also interested in these topics, but I'm not totally sure where to start. I would love for someone to help me get integrated here, so if you think you can do that please let me know :)

Does anyone remember a post/article on HS students who were allowed to allocate money to charities of their choice? I can't seem to find it.

Hi. I'm new to LW but really enjoy the culture which is fostered here. I've been reading AC10 and Marginal Revolution, etc for years so I feel like ive already been heavily influenced by the LW community. A week ago I posted "America's Invisible Graveyard: Understanding the Moral Implications of Western sanctions [LW · GW]" which got a fare amount of pushback over how it was written as well as a lot of great comments. 

In particular, people reacted poorly to my last sentence calling for us to feel shame over western sanctions. Our contemporary political climate prob is overly abscessed with shaming, and I fully understand why LW has guidelines which limit specific types of shaming. Still I think shaming has its place. I myself was shamed for posting an article which didn't meet the guidelines of LW. This is not to say those guidelines are wrong, but I would like to hear better reasons for why particular types of shaming are out of bounds while others are welcomed. This all made me think of an old TCowen post about shame "Who should be shamed, and who not? - Marginal REVOLUTION".

Anyways just wanted to say hello, and that I look forward to learning from you all. 

-Ezra

Someone on reddit made the following argument to me about why physicalism (= the claim that the laws of physics are causally closed) is not true (paraphrased). (I'm posting this as a fun logic puzzle; I know the solution.)

Take a person in a room. Suppose the room is sufficiently isolated to be modeled as independent from the rest of the universe. The person is about to write either "0" or "1" on a piece of paper. But first, she runs a computer simulation that perfectly simulates the entire room down to every atom. (Has to be possible if physicalism is true! All is atoms!) This simulation will compute absolutely everything about the future of the room, including what the person writes down. It then outputs just this (i.e., either "1" or "0") to the person. The person sees the answer and writes down the opposite on the paper. This shows that the program doesn't work, which means such a program is impossible, which means physicalism is false.

I imagine a lot of people reading this will spot the flaw immediately, but if you don't, care to figure it out?

For complicated reasons, I need an example of two sets $(X,Y)$ that optimize the following criteria:

• Simple to understand, including for non-mathematicians
• There exists an (approximately) one-to-one mapping $\phi :X\to Y$
• $\phi$ should not feel totally artificial, like don't map $R$ to $R^2$. Should probably be continuous if the sets have a topology.
• $X$ and $Y$ should be as intuitively different as possible

My current favorite is Cartesian to polar coordinates, $X=R^2$ and $Y=[0,360)\times R_{\ge 0}$, which scores well on #1-3, but the spaces feel more similar than I'd like. Any better ideas?

What are some good introductions / explanations / discussions on ideas around "agents capable of self-modification may trade with each other by modifying their own utility functions"?

Hello! I've been reading some posts here for some time and I decided to write my first post now.

However, I'm unfamiliar with the posting interface and I mistakenly hit publish prematurely. Then I tried to delete the post an create it again but, because of the moderation needed for the first post I don't know if the post is in a limbo or actually waiting for moderation.

I don't see anything in my profile page [LW · GW] and but the direct link to the new post [LW · GW] works (privately).

Should I ask for some admin's help?

Hello, does anyone happen to know any good resources related to improving/practicing public speaking? I'm looking for something that will help me enunciate better/ mumble less/ fluctuate tone better. A lot of stuff I see online appears to be very superficial.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rEpzKiiAhZiFaRwoH/what-are-some-of-the-advantages-of-robotics [LW · GW] looks borderline. It's easy to downvote it, but I'm insure about whether it should be deleted as spam.

It looks like an article that could have been written by GPT-3 and it does have a link for SEO promotion. 

LessWrong Cult

When typing 'lesswrong' into google, the first suggestion is 'lesswrong cult'.

Is that something we should attempt to change? I believe that you can ask Google to remove those predictions.

I posted this as a shortform, but I figured I might as well add it here too.

Testing something.

A deleted comment:

A retracted comment:

(The order is flipped)

This is a crosspost of my comment [LW(p) · GW(p)] on the post Brave Little Humans. The open thread seems better for visibility and general discussion related to the metacrisis.


AI doom seems to fit the category "races to the bottom with unintended consequences" (and it isn't the only existential risk in that category). As such, its desperate urgency is downstream from the metacrisis (or the meaning crisis as John Vervaeke called it). Resolving or mitigating the metacrisis would give much-needed breathing room for studying AI alignment and exacerbating the metacrisis would seem to increase AI risk further.

I personally happened to fall into studying the metacrisis rather than AI, and it is my estimate that the metacrisis is more solvable and has aspects to it that seem relevant to understanding cognitive agency and intelligence in general. The linkage is such that I believe both problems merit attention and may benefit from cross pollination.

I'm subscribed to So8res's posts and over the last ~2 days have been getting messages that "So8res has created a new post: X" where X was a 7-year old post.