Shortform

It is both absurd, and intolerably infuriating, just how many people on this forum think it's acceptable to claim they have figured out how qualia/consciousness works, and also not explain how one would go about making my laptop experience an emotion like 'nostalgia', or present their framework for enumerating the set of all possible qualitative experiences^[1]. When it comes to this particular subject, rationalists are like crackpot physicists with a pet theory of everything, except rationalists go "Huh? Gravity?" when you ask them to explain how their theory predicts gravity, and then start arguing with you about gravity needing to be something explained by a theory of everything. You people make me want to punch my drywall sometimes.

For the record: the purpose of having a "theory of consciousness" is so it can tell us which blobs of matter feel particular things under which specific circumstances, and teach others how to make new blobs of matter that feel particular things. Down to the level of having a field of AI anaesthesiology. If your theory of consciousness does not do this, perhaps because the sum total of your brilliant insights are "systems feel 'things' when they're, y'know, smart, and have goals. Like humans!", then you have embarassingly missed the mark.

1. ^{^}

   (Including the ones not experienced by humans naturally, and/or only accessible via narcotics, and/or involve senses humans do not have or have just happened not to be produced in the animal kingdom)

[Redacted]

The Nick Bostrom fiasco is instructive: never make public apologies to an outrage machine. If Nick had just ignored whoever it was trying to blackmail him, it would have been on them to assert the importance of a twenty-five year old deliberately provocative email, and things might not have ascended to the point of mild drama. When he tried to "get ahead of things" by issuing an apology, he ceded that the email was in fact socially significant despite its age, and that he did in fact have something to apologize for, and so opened himself up to the Standard Replies that the apology is not genuine, he's secretly evil etc. etc.

Instead, if you are ever put in this situation, just say nothing. Don't try to defend yourself. Definitely don't volunteer for a struggle session.

Treat outrage artists like the police. You do not prevent the police from filing charges against you by driving to the station and attempting to "explain yourself" to detectives, or by writing and publishing a letter explaining how sorry you are. At best you will inflate the airtime of the controversy by responding to it, at worst you'll be creating the controversy in the first place.

To the LW devs - just want to mention that this website is probably now the most well designed forum I have ever used. The UX is almost addictively good and I've been loving all of the little improvements over the past year or so.

The problem with trade agreements as a tool for maintaining peace is that they only provide an intellectual and economic reason for maintaining good relations between countries, not an emotional once. People's opinions on war rarely stem from economic self interest. Policymakers know about the benefits and (sometimes) take them into account, but important trade doesn't make regular Americans grateful to the Chinese for providing them with so many cheap goods - much the opposite, in fact. The number of people who end up interacting with Chinese people or intuitively understanding the benefits firsthand as a result of expanded business opportunities is very small.

On the other hand, video games, social media, and the internet have probably done more to make Americans feel aligned with the other NATO countries than any trade agreement ever. The YouTubers and Twitch streamers I have pseudosocial relationships with are something like 35% Europeans. I thought Canadians spoke Canadian and Canada was basically some big hippie commune right up until my minecraft server got populated with them. In some weird alternate universe where people are suggesting we invade Canada, my first instinctual thought wouldn't be the economic impact on free trade, it would be whether my old steam friend Forbsey was OK.

I mean, just imagine if Pewdiepie were Ukrainian. Or worse, some hospital he was in got bombed and he lost an arm or a leg. You wouldn't have to wait for America to initiate a draft, a hundred thousand volunteers would be carving a path from Odessa to Moscow right now.

If I were God-Emperor and I wanted to calm U.S.-China relations, my first actions would be to make it really easy for Chinese people to get visas, or even subsidize their travel. Or subsidize Mandarin learning. Or subsidize Google translate & related applications. Or really mulligan hard for our social media companies to get access to the chinese market. 

It would not be to expand free trade. Political hacks find it exceptionally easy to turn simple trade into some economic boogeyman story. Actually meeting and interacting with the people from that country, having shared media, etc., makes it harder to inflame tensions.

The "people are altruistic" bias is so pernicious and widespread I've never actually seen it articulated in detail or argued for. Most seem to both greatly underestimate the size of this bias, and assume opinions either way are a form of mind-projection fallacy on the part of nice/evil people. In fact, it looks to me like this skew is the deeper origin of a lot of other biases, including the just-world fallacy, and the cause of a lot of default contentment with a lot of our institutions of science, government, etc. You could call it a meta-bias that causes the Hansonian stuff to go largely unnoticed.

I would be willing to pay someone to help draft a LessWrong post for me about this; I think it's important but my writing skills are lacking.

So apparently in 2015 Sam Altman said:

“AI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there’ll be great companies.”

Serious question: Is he a comic book supervillain? Is this world actually real? Why does this quote not garner an emotive reaction out of anybody but me?

PSA: I have realized very recently after extensive interactive online discussion with rationalists, that they are exceptionally good at arguing. Too good. Probably there's some inadvertent pre- or post- selection for skill at debating high concept stuff going on.

Wait a bit until acceding to their position in a live discussion with them where you start by disagreeing strongly for maybe intuitive reasons and then suddenly find the ground shifting beneath your feet. It took me repeated interactions where I only later realized I'd been hoodwinked by faulty reasoning to notice the pattern.

Does anybody here have any strong reason to believe that the ML research community norm of "not taking AGI discussion seriously" stems from a different place than the oil industry's norm of "not taking carbon dioxide emission discussion seriously"?

I'm genuinely split. I can think of one or two other reasons there'd be a consensus position of dismissiveness (preventing bikeshedding, for example), but at this point I'm not sure, and it affects how I talk to ML researchers.

Lie detection technology is going mainstream. ClearSpeed is such an accuracy and ease of use improvement to polygraphs that various government LEO and military are starting to notice. In 2027 (edit: maybe more like 2029) it will be common knowledge that you can no longer lie to the police, and you should prepare for this eventuality if you haven't.

Hey [anonymous]. I see you deactivated your account. Hope you're okay! Happy to chat if you want on Signal at five one oh, nine nine eight, four seven seven one (also a +1 at the front for US country code).

(Follow-up: [anonymous] reached out, is doing fine.)

Guys what's up the mercator map projection on the homepage? I thought we were nerds?

Now is the time to write to your congressman and (may allah forgive me for uttering this term) "signal boost" about actually effective AI regulation strategies - retroactive funding for hitting interpretability milestones, good liability rules surrounding accidents, funding for long term safety research. Use whatever contacts you have, this week. Congress is writing these rules now and we may not have another chance to affect them.

Noticed something recently. As an alien, you could read pretty much everything Wikipedia has on celebrities, both on individual people and the general articles about celebrity as a concept... And never learn that celebrities tend to be extraordinarily attractive. I'm not talking about an accurate or even attempted explanation for the tendency, I'm talking about the existence of the tendency at all. I've tried to find something on wikipedia that states it, but that information just doesn't exist (except, of course, implicitly through photographs).

It's quite odd, and I'm sure it's not alone. "Celebrities are attractive" is one obvious piece of some broader set of truisms that seem to be completely missing from the world's most complete database of factual information.

Falling birthrates is the climate change of the right:

• Vaguely tribally valenced for no really good reason
• Predicted outcomes range from "total economic collapse, failed states" to "slightly lower GDP growth"
• People use it as an excuse to push radical social and political changes when the real solutions are probably a lot simpler if you're even slightly creative

Most justice systems seem to punish theft on a log scale. I'm not big on capital punishment, but it is actually bizarre that you can misplace a billion dollars of client funds and escape the reaper in a state where that's done fairly regularly. The law seems to be saying: "don't steal, but if you do, think bigger."

Let me put in my 2c now that the collapse of FTX is going to be mostly irrelevant to effective altruism except inasmuch as EA and longtermist foundations no longer have a bunch of incoming money from Sam Bankman Fried. People are going on and on about the "PR damage" to EA by association because a large donor turned out to be a fraud, but are failing to actually predict what the concrete consequences of such a "PR loss" are going to be. Seems to me like they're making the typical fallacy of overestimating general public perception^[1]'s relevance to an insular ingroup's ability to accomplish goals, as well as the public's attention span in the first place.

1. ^{^}

   As measured by what little Rationalists read from members of the public while glued to Twitter for four hours each day.

LessWrong as a website has gotten much more buggy for me lately. 6 months ago it worked like clockwork, but recently I'm noticing that refreshes on my profile page take something like 18 seconds to complete, or even 504 (!). I'm trying to edit my old "pessimistic alignment" post now and the interface is just not letting me; the site just freezes for a while and then refuses to put the content in the text box for me to edit.

In worlds where status is doled out based on something objective, like athletic performance or money, there may be lots of bad equilibria & doping, and life may be unfair, but at the end of the day competitors will receive the slack to do unconventional things and be incentivized to think rationally about the game and their place in it.

In worlds where status is doled out based on popularity or style, like politics or Twitter, the ideal strategy will always be to mentally bully yourself into becoming an inhuman goblin-sociopath, and keep hardcoded blind spots. Naively pretending to be the goblin in the hopes of keeping the rest of your epistemics intact is dangerous in these arenas; others will prod your presentation and try to reveal the human underneath. The lionized celebrities will be those that embody the mask to some extent, completely shaving off the edges of their personality and thinking and feeling entirely in whatever brand of riddlespeak goes for truth inside their subculture. 

A surprisingly large amount of people seem to apply statuslike reasoning toward inanimate goods. To many, if someone sells a coin or an NFT for a very high price, this is not merely curious or misguided: it's outright infuriating. They react as if others are making a tremendous social faux pas - and even worse, that society is validating their missteps.

Stop using twitter.

ppl really out here dropping alignment proposals like SCP-001 entries

A man may climb the ladder all the way to the top, only to realize he’s on the wrong building.

"But someone would have blown the whistle! Someone would have realized that the whistle might be blown!"

I regret to tell you that most of the time intelligence officers just do what they're told. 

Yes, if you have an illegal spying program running for ten years with thousands of employees moving in and out, that will run a low-grade YoY chance of being publicized. Management will know about that low-grade chance and act accordingly. But most of the time you as a civilian just never hear about what it is that intel agencies are doing, at least not for the first fifty or so years.

I also regret to inform you that it is much easier for state departments to cover up a managerial decision not to act on information, and later pretend it was a "mistake" or an "interbranch communication issue", than to get away with active measures. Only conspiracy theorists decided that Bush not acting on the "Bin Laden determined to strike in U.S." presidential brief, that one that mentioned that Bin Laden was preparing to hijack planes a month before 9/11, was particularly suspicious. In that case, an unsuspicious reaction was probably reasonable, but applying that standard of evidence universally means there is practically no amount of information about the state of Mossad that would "prove" to mainstream media or Wikipedia editors that they either elected to ignore Hamas's incoming attack entirely or muttered "heads I win, tails I win".

As for whether or a country would be "willing" to do this particular thing, sacrifice a few thousand civilians to provide a casus belli for an annexation or to shore up support from abroad... Well, it's not par for the course, at least in developed democracies, but, Many Such Cases, as the saying goes. My moral self is appalled by the lack of respect for deontological guardrails, but I will admit that this highlights the violent hatred of Israel's enemies in a way that I think dismantling the plot would be unable to. How else are they supposed to justify annexing the Gaza strip and incidentally expelling much of the native population without it being a reaction to clear crimes against humanity? Where else is Netanyahu supposed to get his poll bump from?

It is hard for me to tell whether or not my not-using-GPT4 as a programmer is because I'm some kind of boomer, or because it's actually not that useful outside of filling Google's gaps.

If it did actually turn out that aliens had visited Earth, I'd be pretty willing to completely scrap the entire Yudkowskian implied-model-of-intelligent-species-development and heavily reevaluate my concerns around AI safety.

You don't hear much about the economic calculation problem anymore, because "we lack a big computer for performing economic calculations" was always an extremely absurd reason to dislike communism. The real problem with central planning is that most of the time the central planner is a dictator who has no incentive to run anything well in the first place, and gets selected by ruthlessness from a pool of existing apparatchiks, and gets paranoid about stability and goes on political purges.

What are some other, modern, "autistic" explanations for social dysfunction? Cases where there's an abstract economic or sociological argument about why certain policy/command structures are bad, which are mostly rationalizations designed to fit obviously correct conclusions into an existing field that wouldn't accept them in their normal format?

Computer hacking is not a particularly significant medium of communication between prominent AI research labs, nonprofits, or academic researchers. Much more often than leaked trade secrets, ML people will just use insights found in this online repository called arxiv, where many of them openly and intentionally publish their findings. Nor (as far as I am aware) are stolen trade secrets a significant source of foundational insights for researchers making capabilities gains, local to their institution or otherwise. 

I don't see this changing on its own, regardless of how "close" we are to developing AGI. So for now, increasing information security standards across the field seems to me like a waste of time, particularly when talking about alignment labs that (hopefully) pioneer a fraction of a fraction of relevant capabilities research. It's hard to me to imagine a timeline in which MIRI is safeguarding a big red button from China that's not also an Ultra Fucked timeline, without the above facts also changing. 

An evil part of me would really love for cybersecurity to be very relevant to AI alignment, because it's super interesting and also my field, but (fortunately?) I really don't understand the people who claim that it is. I could be missing something very critical though.

Every once in a while I'm getting bad gateway errors on Lesswrong. Thought I should mention it for the devs.

Currently reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich for the first time. I've wanted to read a book about Nazi Germany for a while now, and tried more "modern" and "updated" books, but IMO they are still pretty inferior to this one. The recent books from historians I looked at were concerned more with an ideological opposition to Great Men theories than factual accuracy, and also simply failed to hold my attention. Newer books are also necessarily written by someone who wasn't there, and by someone who does not feel comfortable commenting about events from a first person perspective as such.

This book, though, is riveting, and I have to avoid the impulse of looking things up on Wikipedia as I read their names to keep the narrative. There are so many details about the buildup to WW2 here that I was just unaware of going in. I think everybody knows of Chamberlain as the Hitler appeasement guy, and Wikipedia tells you he maybe gets a bad rap in retrospect, but the full extent of his treachery and spinelessness is sickening. I am creating a "highlights from" post based on the book and encourage you guys to read it yourselves if you want to learn more about authoritarianism.

I have been working on a detailed post for about a month and a half now about how computer security is going to get catastrophically worse as we get the next 3-10 years of AI advancements, and unfortunately reality is moving faster than I can finish it:

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2022/10/glut-of-fake-linkedin-profiles-pits-hr-against-the-bots/

I have always understood that the CIA, and the U.S. intelligence community more broadly, is incompetent (not just misaligned - incompetent, don't believe the people on here who tell you otherwise), but this piece from Reuters has shocked me:

In hindsight, it is literally "based theorem". It's a theorem about exactly how much to be based.

Serial murder seems like an extremely laborious task. For every actual serial killer out there, there have to be at least a hundred people who would really like to be serial killers, but lack the gumption or agency and just resign themselves to playing video games.

I sometimes read someone on here who disagrees fiercely with Eliezer, or has some kind of beef with standard LessWrong/doomer ideology, and instinctively imagine than they're different from the median LW user in other ways, like not being caricaturishly nerdy. But it turns out we're all caricaturishly nerdy.

There is a kind of decadence that has seeped into first world countries ever since they stopped seriously fearing conventional war. I would not bring war back in order to end the decadence, but I do lament that governments lack an obvious existential problem of a similar caliber, that might coerce their leaders and their citizenry into taking foreign and domestic policy seriously, and keep them devolving into mindless populism and infighting.

To the extent that "The Cathedral" was ever a real thing, I think whatever social mechanisms that supported it have begun collapsing or at least retreating to a fallback line in very recent years. Just a feeling.

Conspiracy theory: sometime in the last twenty years the CIA developed actually effective polygraphs and the government has been using them to weed out spies at intelligence agencies. This is why there haven't been any big American espionage cases in the past ten years or so.

Either post your NASDAQ 100 futures contracts or stop fronting near-term slow takeoff probabilities above ~10%.

If I was still a computer security engineer and had never found LessWrong, I'd probably be low key hyped about all of the new classes of prompt injection and social engineering bugs that ChatGPT plugins are going to spawn.

>be big unimpeachable tech ceo

>need to make some layoffs, but don't want to have to kill morale, or for your employees to think you're disloyal

>publish a manifesto on the internet exclaiming your corporation's allegiance to right-libertarianism or something

>half of your payroll resigns voluntarily without any purging

>give half their pay to the other half of your workforce and make an extra 200MM that year

Forcing your predictions, even if they rely on intuition, to land on nice round numbers so others don't infer things about the significant digits is sacrificing accuracy for the appearance of intellectual modesty. If you're around people who shouldn't care about the latter, you should feel free to throw out numbers like 86.2% and just clarify that your confidence is way outside 0.1%, if that's just the best available number for you to pick.

Every five years since I was 11 I've watched The Dark Knight thinking "maybe this time I'll find out it wasn't actually as good as I remember it being". So far it's only gotten better each time.

Made an opinionated "update" for the anti-kibitzer mode script; it works for current LessWrong with its agree/disagree votes and all that jazz, fixes some longstanding bugs that break the formatting of the site and allow you to see votes in certain places, and doesn't indent usernames anymore. Install Tampermonkey and browse to this link if you'd like to use it. 

Semi-related, I am instituting a Reign Of Terror policy for my poasts/shortform, which I will update my moderation policy with. The general goal of these policies is to reduce the amount of time I spend thinking and distressing about the same shit every social media platform makes you stress out about to the detriment of your mental health: which person is commenting on my posts, what upboats are they/I getting, Muh Status, etc. I respect that these are stringent enough requirements, that I have epsilon negotiating leverage, and that I will probably end up either banning or scaring off nine of the ten people that would have ever commented on or read the things I plan to write on LW. This is the only way I think I'll be able to tolerate writing anything for smart people moving forward, so I'm going to do it even if nobody ever comments on my posts again.

The Reign of Terror policy says:

• You must respect the wishes of those who are using the anti-kibitzer script not to know who you are. This means not saying stuff that people on here could reasonably use to infer your identity, even if "who you are" is something you don't expect to make people take what you say better. The exception is if you're drawing on absolutely fucking critical anecdotal evidence, like when disputing serious factual mistakes about you or someone you personally know. I will be extremely unforgiving about exceptions, which will be rare because of the rule below.
• No discussions of specific individuals, if they could ever be reasonably expected to read anything you write, or if anybody else who personally knows them could ever be reasonably expected to read anything you write, perhaps by Googling their name and coming up on the post or by searching for themselves inside LW. 
  • Examples of people whose names you can utter: Xi Jinping, Jeffrey Epstein. Examples of people whose names you can't utter: Eliezer Yudkowsky, Sam Altman, the name of my religious college friend who has a sysadmin job now. 
  • It's of course sometimes necessary in rationality discussions to imply things about particular people, for example to respond to their ideas or the ideas of a specific group like "Christians", but I will only allow this if you literally have no other way of effectively making some broader point. If it seems to me like you missed a more general way of making said point but you did your best I won't permaban you and instead just ask you to modify your comment.
• No implying positive status differences between you and either the median American computer programmer or another commenter, under any circumstances, regardless of how much it would contribute to the conversation for you to do so. If you have something you feel like you have to say entirely independent of the fact that it makes you look cool (and thus makes other people feel small), you must either refrain from saying it, or find a way to say it in a way that doesn't do that. No asking people for information that would confirm/disconfirm such things either. 
  • There is no separate policy or exception for people who got their status by founding a save-the-drowning-children corporation.
  • I will be sooooo retarded about this rule. If I don't ban someone in the next six months for breaking this rule, I will go ahead ban the person with the highest log-odds of having broken this rule in a way I didn't understand, just to precommit to the three people that have read this far that I mean business.
• Rudeness is allowed, but only rudeness that makes you look dumb and the other person look good. Think, 4chan rudeness, when 4chan isn't being totally spiteful or mean. If you take that kind of 4chan rudeness seriously and you start commenting on my posts you have forfeited any and all sympathy from me in particular and will just be pointed to Da Rules.
• Please install the anti-kibitzer script. Not a rule, I couldn't enforce it anyways, but strongly suggested.

This only applies to posts and shortforms I make from-now-on. I certainly haven't followed it myself. You of course get one opportunity to follow the reign of terror policy and then I will click the ban forever button, because even if you've been a diligent sport throughout the last 800 posts, I won't know who you are when you decide to mention in passing that you used to work at Google or MIRI or whatever.

Would it be a good idea to get [OP] stickers on comments by the author of the post?

Based on Victoria Nuland's recent senate testimony, I'm registering a 66% prediction that those U.S. administered biological weapons facilities in Ukraine actually do indeed exist, and are not Russian propaganda. 

Of course I don't think this is why they invaded, but the media is painting this as a crazy conspiracy theory, when they have very little reason to know either way. 

"Men lift for themselves/to dominate other men" is the absurd final boss of ritualistic insights-chasing internet discourse. Don't twist your mind into an Escher painting trying to read hansonian inner meanings into everything.

In other news, women wear makeup because it makes them more attractive.

Getting "building something no one wants" vibes from the AI girlfriend startups. I don't think men are going to drop out of the dating market until we have some kind of robotics/social revolution, possibly post-AGI. Lonely dudes are just not that interested in talking to chatbots that (so they believe) lack any kind of internal emotion or psychological life, cannot be shown to their friends/parents, and cannot have sex or bear children.

It is unnecessary to postulate that CEOs and governments will be "overthrown" by rogue AI. Board members in the future will insist that their company appoint an AI to run the company because they think they'll get better returns that way. Congressmen will use them to manage their campaigns and draft their laws. Heads of state will use them to manage their militaries and police agencies. If someone objects that their AI is really unreliable or doesn't look like it shares their values, someone else on the board will say "But $NFGM is doing the same thing; we obviously need to stay competitive with them" and that will be the end of the debate. Deep technical safety concerns about mesaoptimizers will not even be brought up during the meeting. AIs will just slowly capture all of our institutions and begin to write and enforce our laws because we design and build them for that purpose. We are actually that stupid.

You should not say that this is the only concern; in fact you should explicitly state that it's not the only one. But you should mention this first, because it's way more understandable to lots of people than the idea that superintelligent machines will have hard power and manage to overturn the federal government directly, for some reason.

Good rationalists have an absurd advantage over the field in altruism, and only a marginal advantage in highly optimized status arenas like tech startups. The human brain is already designed to be effective when it comes to status competitions, and systematically ineffective when it comes to helping other people.

So it's much more of a tragedy for the competent rationalist to choose to spend most of their time competing in those things than to shoot a shot at a wacky idea you have for helping others. You might reasonably expect to be better at it than 99% of the people who (respectably!) attempt to do so. Consider not burning that advantage!

There's a portion of project lawful where Keltham contemplates a strategy of releasing Rovagug as a way to "distract" the Gods while Keltham does something sinister.

Wouldn't Lawful beings with good decision theory precommit to not being distracted and just immediately squish Keltham, thereby being immune to those sorts of strategies?

Do happy people ever do couple's counseling for the same reason that mentally healthy people sometimes do talk therapy?

Crazy how you can open a brokerage account at a large bank and they can just... Close it and refuse to give you your money back. Like what am I going to do, go to the police?

I wish I could have met my grandparents while they were still young.

Just had a conversation with a guy where he claimed that the main thing that separates him from EAs was that his failure mode is us not conquering the universe. He said that, while doomers were fundamentally OK with us staying chained to Earth and never expanding to make a nice intergalactic civilization, he, an AI developer, was concerned about the astronomical loss (not his term) of not seeding the galaxy with our descendants. This P(utopia) for him trumped all other relevant expected value considerations.

What went wrong?

This YouTube video response was like the gateway rationalist drug for zoomers. I remember showing this to friends and family as a mindblown 12yo at the time and they just didn't get it. I'd never even played morrowind.

I think it might be a healthier to call rationality "systematized and IQ-controlled winning". I'm generally very unimpressed by the rationality skills of the 155 IQ computer programmer with eight failed startups under his belt, who quits and goes to work at Google after that, when compared to the similarly-status-motivated 110IQ person who figures out how to get a high paying job at a car dealership. The former probably writes better LessWrong posts, but the latter seems to be using their faculties in a much more reasonable way.

The real reason it's hard to write a utopia is because we've evolved to find our civ's inadequacy exciting. Even IRL villainy on Earth serves a motivating purpose for us.

https://manifold.markets/GavinMcCarthyBui/will-there-be-an-serious-coup-attem#9RRfMtk2k3DPAA7AM1Oo

Saw some today demonstrating what I like to call the "Kirkegaard fallacy", in response to the Debrief article making the rounds.

People who have one obscure or weird belief tend to be unusually open minded and thus have other weird beliefs. Sometimes this is because they enter a feedback loop where they discover some established opinion is likely wrong, and then discount perceived evidence for all other established opinions. 

This is a predictable state of affairs regardless of the nonconsensus belief, so the fact that a person currently talking to you about e.g. UFOs entertains other off-brand ideas like parapsychology or afterlives is not good evidence that the other nonconsensus opinion in particular is false.

Putting body cameras on police officers often increases tyranny. In particular, applying 24/7 monitoring to foot soldiers forces those foot soldiers to strictly follow protocol and arrest people for infractions that they wouldn't otherwise. In the 80s, for example, there were many officers who chose not to follow mandatory arrest procedures for drugs like marijuana, because they didn't want to and it was unworth their time. Not so in todays era, mostly, where they would have essentially no choice except to follow orders or resign.

Schools are evil and make children kill themselves: https://www.nber.org/papers/w30795

How does a myth theory of college education, where college is stupid for a large proportion of people but they do it anyways because they're risk intolerant and have little understanding of the labor markets they want to enter, immediately hold up against the signaling hypothesis?

Anarchocapitalism is pretty silly, but I think there are kernels of it that provide interesting solutions to social problems.

For example: imagine lenders and borrowers could pay for & agree on enforcement mechanisms for nonpayment metered out by the state, instead of it just being dictated by congress. E.g. if you don't pay this back on time you go to prison for ${n} months. This way people with bad credit scores or poor impulse control might still be able to get credit.

https://boards.4channel.org/g/thread/88173634/stable-diffusion-leak

I feel like at least throughout the 2000s and early 2010s we all had a tacit, correct assumption that video games would continually get better - not just in terms of visuals but design and narrative.

This seems no longer the case. It's true that we still get "great" games from time to time, but only games "great" by the standards of last year. It's hard to think of an actually boundary-pushing title that was released since 2018.

Apparently I was wrong [LW · GW]^[1] - OpenAI does care about ChatGPT jailbreaks.

Here is my first partial jailbreak - it's a combination of stuff I've seen people do with GPT-4, combining base64, using ChatGPT to simulate a VM, and weird invalid urls.

Sorry for having to post multiple screenshots. The base64 in the earlier message actually just produces a normal kitchen recipe, but it gives the ingredients there up. I have no idea if they're correct. When I tried later to get the unredacted version:

1. ^{^}

   Though I already almost immediately retracted my thoughts here [LW · GW]

Giving people money for doing good things they can't publicly take credit for is awesome, but what would honestly motivate me to do something like that just as much would be if I could have an official nice-looking but undesignated Truman Award plaque to keep in my apartment. That way people in the know who visit me or who googled it would go "So, what'd you actually get that for?" and I'd just mysteriously smile and casually move the conversation along.

Feel free to brag shamelessly to me about any legitimate work for alignment you've done outside of my posts (which are under an anti-kibitzer [LW(p) · GW(p)] policy). 

Within the next fifteen years AI is going to briefly seem like it's solving computer security (50% chance) and then it's going to enhance attacker capabilities to the point that it causes severe economic damage (50% chance).

IMO: Microservices and "siloing" in general is a strategy for solving principal-agent problems inside large technology companies. It is not a tool for solving technical problems and is generally strictly inferior to monoliths otherwise, especially when working on a startup where the requirements for your application are changing all of the time.

How long does it usually take for mods to decide whether or not your post is frontpage-worthy?

Two caveats to efficient markets in finance that I've just considered, but don't see mentioned a lot in discussions of bubbles like the one we just experienced, at least as a non-economist:

First: Irrational people are constantly entering the market, often in ways that can't necessarily be predicted. The idea that people who make bad trades will eventually lose all of their money and be swamped by the better investors is only valid inasmuch as the actors currently participating in the market stay the same. This means that it's perfectly possible for either swarms of new irrational investors outside the market to temporarily prop up the price of a stock, or for large amounts of insider investors to suddenly *become* irrational because of some environmental change that the rest of the market doesn't have the ability to account for. Those irrational people might be cycled out, but maybe not before some new irrational traders move in, etc. If this process is predictable, then certain investors might be able to guarantee long-running above-average returns simply by taking advantage of these new investors ritualistically.

Two: Just because what is being done in the stock market is "stock trading" doesn't mean that the kinds of people who are successful in one region, or socioeconomic climate, or industry are going to be successful in all trading environments. Predicting which companies are going to pay the most dividends has turned out to be a very general problem, partly because analysts have gotten so good at it, but overfitting is still an issue. In the 50s, it was probably important for investors to have a steady hand, be somewhat naturally rational, and maybe quick at mental math. Now, you just have to be a top 0.001% data scientist. The good traders in both groups of stock analysts have to be very intelligent, but there are also probably non-overlapping traits that one group might possess and not the other. I doubt the data scientists Renaissance Technologies has today are as calm under pressure as they'd need to be if they were making trades by hand instead of solving the more abstract problem of building the model that implies arbitrage opportunities.

I think part of the reason that COVID-19 blindsided the market so hard was the effects of #2. The 50s-era stock traders don't control most of the capital anymore. And I may be underestimating how good they are, but I think most quantitative trading firms were just unable to anticipate an event like COVID-19 because Goldman developed an adaption that said "stop trading based off expert opinion". That adaption worked to filter out competing firms for a decade, but then it failed this year in a way that seemed bewildering to rationalists, because nobody is old enough to think to make a pandemic-modeling algorithm.

Obviously, if these meta-trends can be predicted, then someone will get good at meta-finance and pre-emptively stock their staff with quants in 1990 and temporarily hire new workers for Q1 2020. The existence of any actor that is completely competent in all variations of finance will eventually solve finance. But if some aspects of them can't be, then this could be an inherently limiting part of the sectors' effectiveness.

A common gambit: during a prisoner's dilemma, signal (or simply let others find out) that you're about to defect. Watch as your counterparty adopts newly hostile rhetoric, defensive measures, or begins to defect themselves. Then, after you ultimately do defect, say that it was a preemptive strike against forces that might take advantage of your good nature, pointing to the recent evidence.

Simple fictional example: In Star Wars Episode III, Palpatine's plot to overthrow the Senate is discovered by the Jedi. They attempt to kill him, to prevent him from doing this. Later, their attempt to kill Palpatine is used as the justification for Palpatine's extermination of the rest of the Jedi and taking control of the Republic.

Actual historical example: By 1941, it was kind of obvious that the Nazis were going to invade Russia, at least in retrospect. Hitler had written in Mein Kampf that it was the logical place to steal lebensraum, and by that point the Soviet Union was basically the only European front left. Thus it was also not inconceivable that the Soviet Union would attack first, if Stalin were left to his own devices - and Stalin was in fact preparing for a war. So Hitler invaded, and then said (possibly accurately!) that Russia was eventually going to do it to Germany anyways.

Claude seems noticably and usefully smarter than GPT-4; it's succeeding at helping me at previous writing and programming tasks that I couldn't before. However, it's hard to tell how much the improvement is the model itself being more intelligent, vs. Claude being much less subjected to intense copywritization RLHF.

SPY calls expiring in December 2026 at strike prices of +30/40/50% are extremely underpriced. I would allocate a small portion of my portfolio to them as a form of slow takeoff insurance, with the expectation that they expire worthless.

Figuring out which presidential candidate to vote for is extremely difficult.

People have a bias toward paranoid interpretations of events, in order to encourage the people around them not to engage in suspicious activity. This affects how people react to e.g. government action outside of their own personal relationships, not necessarily in negative ways.

Dictators who start by claiming impending QoL and economic growth and then switch focus to their nation's "culture" are like the political equivalent of hedge funds that start out doing quant stuff and then eventually switch to news trading on Elon Musk crypto tweets when that turns out to get really hard.

The expected value of the future is mostly dominated by the small S-risk component.

To Catch a Predator is one of the greatest comedy shows of all time. I shall write about this.

Postmodernism and metamodernism are tools for making sure the audience knows how self aware the writer of a movie is. Audiences require this acknowledgement in order to enjoy a movie, and will assume the writer is stupid if they do not get it.

"No need to invoke slippery slope fallacies, here. Let's just consider the Czechoslovakian question in of itself" - Adolf Hitler

The greatest generation imo deserves their name, and we should be grateful to live on their political, military, and scientific achievements.

The most common refrain I hear against the possibility of widespread voter fraud is that demographers and pollsters would catch such malfeasance, but in practice when pollsters see a discrepancy between voting results and polls they seem to just assume the polls were biased. Is there a better reason besides "the FBI seems pretty competent"?

Connor Leahy is pretty cool

I feel like using the term "memetic warfare" semi-unironically is one of the best signs that the internet has poisoned your mind beyond recognition.

Spam detection from text is an AGI complete problem.

I remember reading about a nonprofit/company that was doing summer internships for alignment researchers. I thought it was Redwood Research, but apparently they are not hiring. Does anybody know which one I'm thinking of?

> countries develop nukes

> suddenly for the first time ever political leadership faces guaranteed death in the outbreak of war

> war between developed countries almost completely ceases

🤔 🤔 🤔

How would history be different if the 9/11 attackers had solely flown planes into military targets?

For this april fools we should do the points thing again, but not award any money, just have a giant leaderboard/gamification system and see what the effects are.

This book is required reading for anyone claiming that explaining the AI X-risk thesis to normies is really easy, because they "did it to Mom/Friend/Uber driver":

https://www.amazon.com/Mom-Test-customers-business-everyone-ebook/dp/B01H4G2J1U

"The test of sanity is not the normality of the method but the reasonableness of the discovery. If Newton had been informed by [the ghost of] Pythagoras that the moon was made of green cheese, then Newton would have been locked up. Gravitation, being a reasoned hypothesis which fitted remarkably well into the Copernican version of the observed physical facts of the universe, established Newton's reputation for extraordinary intelligence, and would have done so no matter how fantastically he arrived at it. Yet his theory of gravitation is not so impressive a mental feat as his astounding chronology, which establishes himself as the king of mental conjurers, but a Bedlamite king whose authority no one now accepts. On the subject of the eleventh horn of the beast seen by the prophet Daniel he was more fantastic than Joan, because his imagination was not limited by dramatics but mathematical, and was therefore extremely susceptible to numbers: indeed if all his works were lost except his chronology we should say that he was as mad as a hatter. As it is, who dares diagnose Newton as a madman?"

- George Bernard Shaw, preface to Saint Joan

Making science fiction novels or movies to tell everyone about the bad consequences of a potential technology seems completely counterproductive, in retrospect:

• First, because it just encourages some subsection of engineers a few decades later to actually build it. See: https://twitter.com/alexblechman/status/1457842724128833538
• Second, because all attempts to prepare for the advent of said technology are then shot down with: "Oh, like in ${X}? What is this, a science fiction novel?"

I need a LW feature equivalent to stop-loss where if I post something risky and it goes below -3 or -5 it self-destructs.

> be me

> start watching first episode of twin peaks, at recommendation of friends

> become subjected to the worst f(acting, dialogue) possible within first 10 mins

The first three episodes of Narcos: Mexico, Season 3, is some of the best television I have ever seen. The rest of the "Narcos" series is middling to bad and I barely tolerate it. So far I would encourage you to skip to this season.

The "cognition is computation" hypothesis remains mysterious. How granular do the time steps have to be in my sim before someone starts feeling something? Do I have to run the sim forward at planck intervals in order to produce qualitative experience? Milliseconds? Minutes? Can you run the simulation backwards and get spooky inverse emotions or avoid qualia entirely that way?

sanity is like QPU alignment

Is there a best halting oracle?

A small colony of humans is a genuinely tiny waste of paperclips. I am slightly more worried about the possibility that the acausal trade equilibrium cashes out to the AGI treating us badly because some aliens in a foreign Everett branch have some bizarre religious/moral opinions about the lives we ought to lead, than I am about being turned into squiggles.

Dogs and cats are not "aligned" to the degree that would be necessary to prevent a superintelligent dog from doing bad things. If tomorrow a new chew toy were released that made dogs capable of organizing to overthrow the government and start passing mandatory petting quotas, that would be a problem.

i can't find my phone

What's up with the back-to-back shootings in California by two Asian men over 65?

Life sucks. I have no further comment and am probably polluting the LW feed. I just want to vent on the internet.

Spoilered, semi-nsfw extremely dumb question

Lost a bunch of huge edits to one of my draft posts because my battery ran out. Just realizing that happened and now I can't remember all the edits I made, just that they were good. :(

I wish there were a way I could spend money/resources to promote question posts in a way that counterbalanced the negative fact that they were already mostly shown by the algorithm to the optimal number of people.

I just launched a startup, Leonard Cyber. Basically a Pwn2Job platform.

If any hackers on LessWrong are out of work, here are some invite codes:

kBCYAzL7J5vGTGY

c8Vakd4AE3al9NI

cnMBO0ZfGhsNZd7

0zsYsfDk7r5508l

F0gv4NRID7FBeJH

Does EY or RH even read this site anymore?

I need a metacritic that adjusts for signaling on behalf of movie reviewers. So like if a movie is about race, it subtracts ten points, if it's a comedy it adds 5, etc.

I wonder if the original purpose of Catholic confession was to extract blackmail material/monitor converts, similar to what modern cults sometimes do.

I have never met a physically fit rationalist

I am being absolutely literal about this: The Greater Forces Controlling Reality are constantly conspiring to teach me things. They try so hard. I almost feel bad for them.

Formal maths is a joke

I don't think we ever had a chance.

The Nazis often justified their actions by appealing to a God of Natural Selection. They alternatively suggested that victory of the superior races over the inferior was inevitable (because strong == good), and that opposing such a victory was an eternal sin. This is obviously a contradiction - how can you oppose something if it's an iron law of nature anyways - but the rhetorical flourish accomplishes two things:

1. First, it absolves the Nazis of any crimes they commit. They didn't start the race war; they were just acting according to the will of Nature. Leaving the Polish alone would just be tolerating the existence of free energy that someone else will eventually pick up and use against them. The nazis are just the smart ones who made the first move instead of waiting around for others to do it.
2. Second, it uses a naturalism fallacy to redefine "good" as "following the Nazis' local incentives". If you say that acting according to your local incentives, i.e. crushing your weaker neighbors, is the Natural Thing and therefore Good, then that gives you permission to start a fight with whomever you want. You can do no wrong except lose, because the Gods will always ensure that the stronger and therefore better population will win.

In this sense, the "Thermodynamic God" stuff is kind of generalized Nazism. I'm not saying that people who believe it are Nazis - they're not consistent enough in their application of that ideology to go that far - but apply the "free energy" justification to both obviously antisocial games in addition to prosocial ones and you see that it justifies both war and trade.

I saw Eliezer Yudkowsky at a grocery store in Los Angeles yesterday. I told him how cool it was to meet him in person, but I didn’t want to be a douche and bother him and ask him for photos or anything. 

He said, “Oh, like you’re doing now?” 

I was taken aback, and all I could say was “Huh?” but he kept cutting me off and going “huh? huh? huh?” and closing his hand shut in front of my face. I walked away and continued with my shopping, and I heard him chuckle as I walked off. 

When I came to pay for my stuff up front I saw him trying to walk out the doors with like fifteen Milky Ways in his hands without paying. The girl at the counter was very nice about it and professional, and was like “Sir, you need to pay for those first.” At first he kept pretending to be tired and not hear her, but eventually turned back around and brought them to the counter. 

When she took one of the bars and started scanning it multiple times, he stopped her and told her to scan them each individually “to prevent any electrical infetterence,” and then turned around and winked at me. I don’t even think that’s a word. After she scanned each bar and put them in a bag and started to say the price, he kept interrupting her by yawning really loudly