Hastings's Shortform

Nuclear power has gotten to a point where we can use it quite safely as long as no one does the thing (the thing being chemically separating the plutonium and imploding it in your neighbor's cities) and we seem to be surviving, as while all the actors have put great effort into being ready do do "the thing," no one actually does it. I'm beginning to suspect that it will be worth separating alignment into two fields, one of "Actually make AI safe" and another, sadder but easier field of "Make AI safe as long as no one does the thing." I've made some infinitesimal progress on the latter, but am not sure how to advance, use or share it since currently, conditional on me being on the right track, any research that I tell basically anyone about will immediately be used to get ready to do the thing, and conditional on me being on the wrong track (the more likely case by far) it doesn't matter either way, so it's all downside. I suspect this is common? This is almost but not quite the same concept as "Don't advance capabilities."

Diaper changes are rare and precious peace

Suffering from ADHD, I spend most of my time stressed that whatever I'm currently doing, it's not actually the highest priority task and something or someone I've forgotten is increasingly mad that I'm not doing their task instead.

One of the few exceptions is doing a diaper change. Not once in the past 2 years have I been mid-diaper-change and thought "Oh shit, there was something more important I needed to be doing right now."

A consistent trope in dath-ilani world-transfer fiction is "Well the theorems of agents are true in dath ilani and independent of physics, so they're going to be true here damnit"

How do we violate this in the most consistent way possible?

Well it's basically default that a dath ilani gets dropped in a world without the P NP distinction, usually due to time travel BS. We can make it worse- there's no rule that sapient beings have to exist in worlds with the same model of the peano axioms. We pull some flatlander shit- Keltham names a turing machine that would halt if two smart agents fall off the peano frontier and claims to have proof it never halts, and then the native math-lander chick says nah watch this and then together they iterate the machine for a very very long time- a non standard integer number of steps- and then it halts and Keltham (A) just subjectively experienced an integer larger than any natural number of his homeworld and (B) has a couterexample to his precious theorems 

I’m working on a theory post about the conjunction fallacy, and need some manifold users to bet on a pair of markets to make a demonstration more valid. I’ve put down 150 mana subsidy and 15 mana of boosts, anyone interested?

https://manifold.markets/HastingsGreer/pa-pa-b-experiment-statement-y?r=SGFzdGluZ3NHcmVlcg

https://manifold.markets/HastingsGreer/pa-pa-b-experiment-statement-x?r=SGFzdGluZ3NHcmVlcg

Lets examine an entirely prosaic situation: Carl, a relatively popular teenager at the local highschool, is deciding whether to invite Bob to this weekend's party.

some assumptions:

• While pondering this decision for an afternoon, Carls's 10^11 neurons fire 10^2 times per second, for 10^5 seconds, each taking in to account 10^4 input synapses, for 10^22 calculations (extremely roughly)
• If there was some route to perform this calculation more efficiently, someone probably would, and would be more popular

The important part of choosing a party invite as the task under consideration, is that I suspect that this is the category of task the human brain is tuned for- and it's a task that we seem to be naturally inclined to spend enormous amounts of time pondering, alone or in groups- see the trope of the 6 hour pre-prom telephone call. I'm inclined to respect that- to believe that any version of Carl, mechanical or biological, that spent only 10^15 calculations on whether to invite Bob, would eventually get shrecked on the playing field of high school politics.

What model predicts that optimal party planning is as computationally expensive as learning the statistics of the human language well enough to parrot most of human knowledge?