Shortform

or present their framework for enumerating the set of all possible qualitative experiences (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)

Strongly agree. If you want to explain qualia, explain how to create experiences, explain how each experience relates to all other experiences.

I think Eliezer should've talked more about this in The Fun Theory Sequence [LW · GW]. Because properties of qualia is a more fundamental topic than "fun".

And I believe that knowledge about qualia may be one of the most fundamental types of knowledge. I.e. potentially more fundamental than math and physics.

Seems weird for your blob of matter to react so emotionally to the sounds or shapes that some blobs have emitted bout other blobs.  Why would you expect anyone to have a coherent theory of something they can't even define and measure?

It seems even weirder for you to take such reporting at face value about having any relation to a given blob's "inner life", as opposed to a variance in the the evolved and learned verbal and nonverbal signaling that such behaviors actually are.

On this forum, or literally everywhere? Because for example I keep seeing people arguing with absolute conviction, even in academic papers, that current AIs and computers can't possibly be conscious and I can't figure out how they could ever know that of something that is fundamentally unfalsifiable. I envy their secret knowledge of the world gained by revelation, I guess!

Huh, interesting. Could you make some examples for what people seem to claim this, and if Eliezer is among them, where he seems to claim this? (Would just interest me.)

Attentional Schema Theory. That's the convincing one. But still very rudimentary. 

But you know if something is poorly understood. The guy who thought it up has a section in his book on how to make a computer have conscious experiences. 

But any theory is incomplete as the brain is not well understood. I don't think you can expect a fully formed theory right off the bat, with complete instructions for making a feeling thinking conscious We aren't there yet.

I’m pretty interested in this as an exercise of ‘okay yep a bunch of those problems seem real. Can we make conceptual or mechanism-design progress on them in like an afternoon of thought?’

Good post, it's underappreciated that a society of ideally rational people wouldn't have unsubsidized, real-money prediction markets.

unless you've actually got other people being wrong even in light of the new actors' information

Of course in real prediction markets this is exactly what we see. Maybe you could think of PMs as they exist not as something that would exist in an equilibrium of ideally rational agents, but as a method of moving our society closer to such an equilibrium, subsidized by the bets of systematically irrational people. It's not a perfect such method, but does have the advantage of simplicity. How many of these issues could be solved by subsidizing markets?

Discord Message

What discord is this, sounds cool.

<3. Thanks for letting us know.

That's very brave

Ditto here; kudos to everyone involved in creating such an excellent forum design!

I find LW.com hard to use (because I have yet to find a way to disable the mouseovers, which quickly deplete my orienting response, about which I can explain more if asked) but LW is better than most sites in that alternative interfaces can be created. In particular, I use greaterwrong.com as my interface and am pretty satisfied with it (though it was slow for a lot of the last 2 months).

But I strongly upvoted parent because it is good reminder to me of the cognitive diversity in the human population.

I wrote somewhere that this is the only forum that looks to me the result of Intelligent Design, and not an accident. It's the only one that looks like I AM trying to intelligently design the forum MYSELF, including going back in time after discovering problems and fixing them (or just thinking in advance for five minutes on each aspect "how can I hack this / what are the vulnerabilities of this system of rules /how trolls can use it"). The point is not only that, unlike many other sites, I don’t think every five minutes “why can’t X be here”, the point is that I look somewhere and see in advance that something is provided that I don’t I had time to think, and some kind of protection was made against the exploitation of vulnerabilities in the system of rules or even involuntary errors in human psychology.

They do the same thing with "child pornography": that's mostly teenagers sexting. And a girl was convicted for it too, charged with distributing child pornography of herself: link.

Haven't looked too closely at this, but my initial two thoughts:

1. child consent is tricky.
2. likely many are foreign children, which may or may not be in the 75 million statistic

It is good to think critically, but I think it would be beneficial to present more evidence before making the claim or conclusion

The other day I was trying to think of information leaks that a competent conspiracy couldn't prevent, regarding this. I just thought of one small one: people will sometimes randomly die or have their homes raided. If the slavery is common, then sometimes the slaves will be discovered during these events. Even if the escapees wanted to silence the story out of shame, cops would probably gossip to the press.

So you can probably tally such events, crunch the numbers, and get a decent conspiracy-resistant estimate.

But surely most people realize that it would be very hard for an organized child rape cabal to spread word about their offerings to customers without someone alerting police.

Epstein seemed to run something like an organized child rape cabal and most people involved in it didn't go to prison.

Do not assume good faith on Twitter. Ever.

Not because all people online are bad, but because Twitter is a "dark forest". If there are 999 good people and 1 bad person, it's the bad person who will take your tweet, maybe modify it a little, put it into most outrageous possible context, write an article about why you are the worst person ever, and share it on all social networks. And that's the lucky case. In the unlucky case, the story will uncritically be accepted by journalists, then added to Wikipedia, you will get fired, and for the rest of your life, random people on the street will keep yelling at you.

Twitter should be legally required to show you this as a warning every time you are making a tweet.

EDIT:

This was written before I learned the details. Now the analogy with not talking to police seems even better: indeed, every word you say is a potential new incriminating evidence against you (and if it is not, it will simply be ignored), and the worst outcome is that the new evidence will hurt you in a way the old evidence could not.

Question: If I get in trouble with the police, I know I need to find a lawyer. If I get in trouble with an internet mob, and I understand the need to defer to a more experienced person's advice to navigate the minefield, and I am willing to pay them, whose services exactly should I find? Is there an obvious answer, such as "lawyer" in case of legal trouble?

Very strongly agree and endorse this message.

I'm not above giving into incentives, and if the incentives are such that you should not apologise for wrongdoing, then so be it.

Does this generalize to "just ignore Twitter (and other blathering by "the masses") for most things"?  Outside of a pretty small group, I haven't heard much handwringing, condemnation nor defense of Bostrom's old messages or his recent apology.  

I personally think that personal honor is better supported by a thoughtful apology when something is brought to one's attention, than by simply ignoring it.  Don't engage in a back-and-forth, and don't expect the apology to convince the more vocal part of the 'verse.  But do be honest and forthright with yourself and those who you respect enough to value their opinions.

From what I can tell (and I haven't looked that deeply, as I don't particularly care), Professor Bostrom has done this pretty well, and I don't expect him to suffer much long-term harm from his early mistakes.

IMO I disagree with the implication that Nick Bostrom shouldn't have apologized, since for once the Twitter machine is actually right to criticize the apology.

From titotal's post on why Bostrom's apology isn't good, there are several tests that he failed at:

Okay, let's go over the rules for an apology to be genuine and sincere. I'll take them from here.

1. Acknowledge the offense.
2. Explain what happened.
3. Express remorse.
4. Offer to make amends. Notably missing from this list is step 5: Go off on an unrelated tangent about eugenics.

Link below:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/KB8XPfh7dJ9uJaaDs/does-ea-understand-how-to-apologize-for-things [EA · GW]

Disclaimer: This is a rare action for me to take, and just because I think the Twitter sphere is somewhat right does not equal that any of their conclusions are automatically right, nor does this mean I will care much about what Twitter thinks.

This doesn't seem like an either-or question.  Freer trade and more individual interactions seem complementary to me.

The "people are extraordinarily more altruistic-motivated than they actually are" bias is so pernicious and widespread I've never actually seen it articulated in detail or argued for.

I haven't seen it articulated, or even mentioned.  What is it?  It sounds like this is just the common amnesia (or denial) of the rampant hypocrisy in most humans, but I've not heard that phrasing.  

would it be fair to replace the first "are" (and maybe the second) with something that doesn't imply essentialism or identity?  "people are assumed to be" or "people claim to be" followed by "more altruistic than their behavior exhibits"?

I'm not sure to what extent this is helpful, or if it's an example of the dynamic you're refuting, but Duncan Sabien recently wrote a post that intersects with this topic:

Also, if your worldview is such that, like. *Everyone* makes awful comments like that in the locker room, *everyone* does angle-shooting and tries to scheme and scam their way to the top, *everyone* is looking out for number one, *everyone* lies ...

... then *given* that premise, it makes sense to view Trump in a positive light. He's no worse than everybody else, he's just doing the normal things that everyone does, with the *added layer* that he's brave enough and candid enough and strong enough that he *doesn't have to pretend he doesn't.*

Admirable! Refreshingly honest and clean!

So long as you can't conceive of the fact that lots of people are actually just ..................... good. They're not fighting against urges to be violent or to rape, they're not biting their tongues when they want to say scathing and hurtful things, they're not jealous and bitter and willing to throw others under the bus to get ahead. They're just ... fundamentally not interested in any of that.

(To be clear: if you are feeling such impulses all the time and you're successfully containing them or channeling them and presenting a cooperative and prosocial mask: that is *also* good, and you are a good person by virtue of your deliberate choice to be good. But like. Some people just really *are* the way that other people have to *make* themselves be.)

It sort of vaguely rhymes, in my head, with the type of person who thinks that *everyone* is constantly struggling against the urge to engage in homosexual behavior, how dare *those* people give up the good fight and just *indulge* themselves ... without realizing that, hey, bro, did you know that a lot of people are just straight? And that your internal experience is, uh, *different* from theirs?

Where it connects is that if someone sees [making the world a better place] like simply selecting a better Nash Equilibria, they absolutely will spend time exploring solutionspace/thinking through strategies similar to Goal Factoring [? · GW] or Babble and Prune [? · GW]. Lots of people throughout history have yearned for a better world in a lot of different ways, with varying awareness of the math behind Nash Equilibira, or the transhumanist and rationalist perspectives on civilization (e.g. map & territory & biases & scope insensitivity [LW · GW] for rationalism, cryonics/anti-aging for transhumanism).

But their goal here is largely steering culture away from nihilism (since culture is a Nash Equilibria) which means steering many people away from themselves, or at least the selves that they would have been. Maybe that's pretty minor in this case e.g. because feeling moderate amounts of empathy and living in a better society are both fun, but either way, changing a society requires changing people, and thinking really creatively about ways to change people tears down lots of chesterton-Schelling fences [LW · GW] and it's very easy to make really big damaging mistakes in the process (because you need to successfully predict and avoid all mistakes as part of the competent pruning process, and actually measurably consistently succeeding at this is thinkoomph not just creative intelligence).

Add in conflict theory to the mistake theory I've described here, factor in unevenly distributed intelligence and wealth in addition to unevenly distributed traits like empathy and ambition and suspicion-towards-outgroup (e.g. different combinations of all 5 variables), and you can imagine how conflict and resentment would accumulate on both sides over the course of generations. There's tons of examples in addition to Ayn Rand and Wokeness [LW(p) · GW(p)].

It's worth separating what people actually believe about how altruistic other people are from what they pretend to believe about the altruism of other people. 

If you ask someone whether they believe that there's a chance that their partner would cheat on them, they are most likely to tell you that their partner would cheat on them. The same person might take a few signs that point in the direction of their partner cheating as a huge problem.

I would also expect that beliefs differ a lot between people.

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.

I'm not looking to write a post about this, but I'd be happy to go back and forth with you in the comments about it (no payment required). Maybe that back and forth will help you formulate your thoughts.

For starters, I'm not sure if I understand the bias that you are trying to point to. Is it that people assume others are more altruistic than they actually are? Do any examples come to your mind other than this [LW(p) · GW(p)]?

Related: Saving the world sucks [LW · GW]

People accept that being altruistic is good before actually thinking if they want to do it. And they also choose weird axioms for being altruistic that their intuitions may or may not agree with (like valuing the life of someone in the future the same amount of someone today).

"The x are more y than they actually are" seems like a contradiction?

I was surprised by this quote. On following the link, the sentence by itself seems noticeably out of context; here's the next part:

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

On what Altman would do if he were President Obama: “If I were Barack Obama, I would commit maybe $100 billion to R&D of AI safety initiatives.” Altman also shared that he recently invested in a company doing "AI safety research" to investigate the potential risks of artificial intelligence.

I think in general believing something before you have intuition around it is unreliable or vulnerable to manipulation, even if there seems to be a good System 2 reason to do so. Such intuition is specialized common sense, and stepping outside common sense is stepping outside your goodhart scope [LW · GW] where ability to reliably reason might break down.

So it doesn't matter who you are arguing with, don't believe something unless you understand it intuitively. Usually believing things is unnecessary regardless, it's sufficient to understand them to make conclusions and learn more without committing to belief. And certainly it's often useful to make decisions without committing to believe the premises on which the decisions rest, because some decisions don't wait on the ratchet of epistemic rationality.

I'm on board with this. it's a common failure of reasoning in this community and humanity in general imo - people believing each other too early because of confident sounding reasoning. I've learned to tell people I'll get back to them after a few nights' sleep when someone asks me what my update is about a heavily philosophical topic.

Note also that they may be taking positions which are selected for being easy to argue - they're the ones they were convinced by, of course.  Whether you think that has correlation with truth is up to you - I think so, but it's not a perfect enough correlation for it to be enough.

I don't know exactly what you mean by "acceding" to a position in a discussion - if you find the arguments strong, you should probably acknowledge that - this isn't a battle, it's a discussion.  If you don't find yourself actually convinced, you should state that too, even if your points of disagreement are somewhat illegible to yourself (intuition).  And, of course, if you later figure out why you disagree, you can re-open the discussion next time it's appropriate.

Where does he say this? (I skimmed and didn’t see it.)

Link here: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/sb-1047-our-side-of-the-story

I can’t decide what the epistemic status of that post is, but in the same spirit, here’s how to tell the difference between a brown bear and a grizzly. Climb a tree. A brown bear will climb up after you and eat you, while a grizzly will knock down the tree and eat you.

I believe the intended message of the "fight back, lay down, goodnight" maxim is "Thou shalt not generalize your experience with black bears to grizzlies!" I don't expect there is much danger of someone asking "if not friend, why friend shaped?" of polar bears; they just fill out the Rule of Three. 

It's a lot like the "red touches yellow, he's a friendly fellow; red touches black, you're dead, Jack" mnemonic for snakes: people are very likely to encounter the (relatively) harmless one, and you really want them not to learn the wrong lessons from that.

↑ comment by jbash · 2024-08-25T15:13:15.234Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Your snake mnemonic is not the standard one and gives an incorrect, inverted result. Was that intentional?

This is a coral snake, which is dangerously venomous:

 

This is a king snake, which is totally harmless unless you're a vole or something:

I guess the point of the official party line is to avoid kids going and trying to scare polar bears.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"

Upton Sinclair

I'm not sure the "ML Research Community" is cohesive enough (nor, in fact, well-defined enough) to have very strong norms about this.  Further, it's not clear that there needs to be a "consensus reasoning" even if there is a norm - different members could have different reasons for not bringing it up, and once it's established, it can be self-propagating: people don't bring it up because their peers don't bring it up.

I think if you're looking for ways to talk to ML researchers, start small, and see what those particular researchers think and how they react to different approaches.  If you find some that work, then expand it to more scalable talks to groups of researchers.

I don't expect AI researchers to achieve AGI before they find one or more horrible uses for non-general AI tools, which may divert resources, or change priorities, or do something else which prevents true AGI from ever being developed.

Because of it's low chance of existential risk or a singularity utopia. Here's the thing, technologies are adopted first at a low level and at early adopters, then it becomes cheaper and better, than it more or less becomes very popular. No technology ever had the asymptotic growth or singularity that ML/AI advocates claim to have happened. So we should be very skeptical about any claims of existential risks.

On climate change, we both know it will be serious and that it is not an existential risk or a civilization collapse disaster.

I think best way to look at it is climate change way before it was mainstream

The European wars of religion during the 16th to early 18th century were plausibly caused or at least strongly fanned by the invention of the printing press.

I don't mean to be obtuse, but how could we tell whether this is true or not?

That would also explain why the culture was so heavily concentrated in tumblr (where the way to express anger and disagreement with a post is to share the post to all your followers with your comment tacked on to the end) and later twitter (same, but now the platform also notices you engage with stuff that makes you angrily reply and shows you more of it).

I think the new communication systems could be a catalyst, but that stopping at this conclusion obscures the actual cause of cancel culture. I think the answer is something like what Kaczynski said about oversocialization, and that social media somehow worsens the social dynamics responsible. I think it's an interesting question how exactly these dynamics work socially and psychologically, so for me, "it's the new communication systems" is not a conclusion but a possible first step in finding the answer

I think it's possible to beat such lie detectors by considering the question in such a way that you get the answer you want. "Did you kill that man?" "No" (mental framing: the knife killed him/he killed himself by annoying me/I'm a different person today/My name is not "you" so it's technically false, etc)

Lie detection technology must be open sourced. It could fix literally everything. Just ask people "how much do you want to fix literally everything", "how much did you think about ways to do better [LW · GW] and avoid risk", "do you have the skills for this position or think you can get them" etc, so many profoundly incredible things are downstream of finding and empowering the people who give good answers.

Do you have any source for the technology being an improvement in accuracy over polygraphs?

This also annoyed me after first noticing how neat it is that I can see my house on the map.

the the

should be

with the

Where is the "How much do you agree with this, separate from whether you think it's a good comment?" button when you actually need it?

Analyzing or talking about status factors is low-status.  You do see information about awards for beauty, much like you can see some information about fiances, but not much about their expenditures or lifestyle.

Part of the issue is like that celebrity, as wikipedia approaches the word, is broader than just modern TV, film, etc. celebrity and instead includes a wide variety of people who are not likely to be exceptionally attractive but are well known in some other way. There's individual preferences in terms of who they think are attractive, but many politicians, authors, radio personalities, famous scientists, etc. are not conventionally attractive in the way movie stars are attractive and yet these people are still celebrities in a broad sense. However, I've not dug into the depths of wikipedia to see if, for example, this gap you see holds up if looking at pages that more directly talk about the qualities of film stars, for example.

I think there's also a "it's obvious to everyone, so archaeologists of the future won't find any mention of it because no one has had to explain it to anyone" factor. (I heard that archaeologists and historians know much less about everyday life than about significant events, although the former was obviously encountered much more often)

I wonder what is the optimal population size, because it seems to me that most people say either "more" or "less" (and yes, it seems strongly correlated with the political tribe), but no one ever gives an exact number. I suspect there is no optional number; that the people who say "more" or "less" will keep saying that regardless.

Too bad that more nuanced views, such as "let's have more good and competent people, but fewer evil and incompetent people" are definitely outside the Overton window. :D

Yeah. It's really weird.

And relatedly, I'm not sure about capital punishment, but it seems obvious to at least attempt to make fines proportionate to net worth or something. Ie. Bill Gates shouldn't get the same sized speeding ticket as John Doe on welfare.

This feels like it'd be political policy that is low hanging fruit. I suspect that it isn't because of EMH reasons, but I don't understand the reasons why it isn't.

Theft of any amount over a hundred or so dollars is evil and needs to be punished. Let's say you punish theft of $100 by a weekend in jail. Extrapolate that on a linear scale and you'll have criminals who non-violently stole $20,000 doing more than double the jail time that a criminal who cold-cocked a stranger and broke his jaw would get. Doesn't really make sense.

With billion dollars you can probably hire better lawyers.

Do other crimes, for example murder, follow a similar pattern? Like, at some moment they might execute you, but what are they going to do if you kill 10 times more people?

Can they cancel you more if you post 10 times more offensive tweets?

Maybe everything is (sub-)logarithmic, because that's how people think.

In which case, a group of rationalist criminals should precommit that if they get caught, they will randomly choose one of them, who will accept the blame for everything.

Marvelous. I didn’t talk about this because I thought that the problem was not on the side of LessWrong, since in my country a lot of things have been slowing down, blocking, denying access, and so on, and at least from three sides at the same time: the state / providers, others countries / companies and those who do not want problems.

The performance problems have also been annoying me, though I don't think it's been 6 months since they've gotten worse (I think it's been more like 4 weeks based on my read of the logs, which have sadly overlapped with some time period where it's been hard for me or others to focus on fixing them). I've really hated it, and if I didn't have COVID right now, would probably be trying to fix them right now.

Not sure what's up about the editor. I don't think I've experienced many additional problems here, though we have been rolling out a new editor, so new bugs aren't that surprising. A bug report via Intercom would be greatly appreciated.

Have you reported this to the staff?

Keep a diary. Human memory is unreliable and often fills in the gaps by the best guess -- if you believe something now, your memory will try to convince you that you have always believed it (unless you have dramatic evidence to the contrary), because it is easier than tracking your beliefs over time. (Also it protects you from the emotional pain of knowing that you have changed your mind.) A diary may show you that the past was not as you remember it.

At least this is how it works for me. I have no dramatic conversions in my past; my opinions have changed fluently. So absent hard evidence it is easy for me to imagine that a 13 years old me (the earliest I can remember having actual opinions on things) was basically just like me today, only in a younger body, minus all the experience and professional skills. But when I found my old diary, I screamed in horror and quickly destroyed the evidence.

The parts of my personality that stay mostly unchanged for a long time are values and preferences. As far as I remember, I was interested in math and later in computers, I was interested in truth and helping others. (I have some evidence for that, such as doing math olympiad, or getting in trouble because I asked too much.) My beliefs, however... let's just say that before 30 I was quite stupid. Yeah, I didn't feel that way. Most stupid people don't.

Most companies don't threaten their employees with physical violence. According to another Boeing whistleblower Sam Salehpour, that seems to happen at Boeing.

Being a defense contractor, I would expect Boeing corporate to have better relationships with the kind of people you would hire for such a task than corporations. 

I mean, sure, but I've been updating in that direction a weirdly large amount.

This sort of begs the question of why we don't observe other companies assassinating whistleblowers.

There's truth in what you're saying. At the same time, I feel like people have an instinctive desire for clarity over riddlespeak. I think it's the same instinct that makes people favor 4k televisions over standard definition. I think it's possible to make a twitter-like medium that discourages hardcoded blind spots.

I did, 3-6 months ago.

I did, two years ago.

I don't use twitter very much, mostly reading links and threads someone points to from some other medium.  I pretty much never publicly tweet.  I presume I'm not your target for this advice, but for clarity are you worried about consumption (wasting time, developing biased views) or production (producing bias or over-simple models)?

Most importantly, do you have a "do more of X" to augment your "do less/none of Y (Y: twitter)"?  

The Antarctic Treaty (and subsequent treaties) forbid colonization.  They also forbid extraction of useful resources from Antarctica, thereby eliminating one of the main motivations for colonization.  They further forbid any profitable capitalist activity on the continent.  So you can’t even do activities that would tend toward permanent settlement, like surveying to find mining opportunities, or opening a tourist hotel.  Basically, the treaty system is set up so that not only can’t you colonize, but you can’t even get close to colonizing.

Northern Greenland is inhabited, and it’s at a similar latitude.

(Begin semi-joke paragraph) I think the US should pull out of the treaty, and then announce that Antarctica is now part of the US, all countries are welcome to continue their purely scientific activity provided they get a visa, and announce the continent is now open to productive activity.  What’s the point of having the world’s most powerful navy if you can’t do a fait accompli once in a while?  Trump would love it, since it’s simultaneously unprecedented, arrogant and profitable.  Biggest real estate development deal ever!  It’s huuuge!

We arguably have already colonized Antarctica. See Wikipedia.

A similar point would be: There is no permanent deep sea settlement (an underwater habitat), although this would be much easier to achieve than a settlement on Mars.

Surely you cannot change the climate of Antarctica without changing the climate of Earth as a whole.

I thought we had a bunch of treaties which prevented that from happening? 

I don't know, but I expect the fraction is high enough to constitute significant empirical evidence towards the Will quantum randomness affect the 2028 election? question (since quantum randomness affects the weather, the wind speed affects bullet trajectories, and the whether or not one of the candidates in the 2024 election was assassinated seems pretty influential on the 2028 election).

Not sure, but it seems to me that in the vast majority of Everett branches in which shots were fired at Trump, either they all missed or at least one of them scored a hit solid enough to kill or seriously injure Trump. The outcome that happened in our branch (graze his cheek & ear) is pretty unlikely. I don't think there are any implications of this, it's just interesting.

Is the "percent of everett branches" a literal question, or just a clever way of saying "prior probability at the moment of gunfire"?  Taken literally, there's an infinitesimal fraction of branches that contain humans, a tiny fraction of those contain Trump, a trivial slice of THOSE have him in the public eye enough to get shot at, only a few of which have that event and that shooter present, etc...

It's a lot like saying "what're the chances that this week's lottery would be EXACTLY 11,23,44,46, 51, 60"?  It depends on when you ask the question, and what your reference set is.  The reference set of everett branches is near-infinite (I haven't seen a formal treatment arguing that it's truly infinite, nor what kind of infinity), so any given set of similar-in-some-ways branches is infinitesimal.   At a human probability level, the chances that Trump died are now 0 (or at least near-zero; you can never be truly certain).  

Chances of being injured in head but not brain damaged are rather small, I think less than 10 per cent. So in 90 per cent of branches where shots were fired in his head directions, he is seriously injured or dead.
However, climbing to roof without Secret Service reaction was also a very unlikely event. May be only 10 per cent chance of success.

Combining, I get 9 per cent of him being dead or seriously injured yesterday. 

Nate Silver alludes to this question too.

It's worth keeping the actions of Mossad and those of Netanyahu are different. Pentagon leaks suggest that senior Mossad leadership was supporting protests against Netanyahu's policies. Former Mossad leaders also spoke out.  

That they are action to give Netanyahu a poll bump and can do that without internal leaks that undermine the project seems to me unlikely. 

Imagine, that the CIA would have warned Trump of a terror attack and Trump didn't act. Do you think that would be kept secret in the same way that Bush administration inaction would be kept secret?

Why not both?  For me, age and curmudgeonliness makes me reject it for not being "enough better".  I'm not sure what my standards are, but I recognize that what I've tried so far isn't perfect, but is probably somewhat faster than search and modify.  Just not ENOUGH to get me to invest the time in getting as good at it as I am at more traditional semi-plagiarism.  

You can test the latter hypothesis by trying it (more) :)

A lot of cosmological-type facts have this effect. That's why people are so occupied by them. 

If that turned out to be the case, my preliminary conclusion would be that the hard physical limits of technology are much lower than I'd previously believed.

I agree with your characterization of the problem with central planning, and that we don't hear much about the economic calculation problem anymore, but... "we lack a big computer for performing economic calculations" was not an absurd reason to dislike communism, it was literally true.

All digital computers ever possessed by or within the Soviet Union had, in total, less FLOP/s than a single A100 GPU; it's harder to get numbers for memory but the ratio is pretty stable over time. Their techniques were also enormously less efficient than modern optimization software (MILP, SMT, etc. etc.); in benchmarks this is a bigger deal than hardware progress. Amazon routinely solves planning problems which were fundamentally intractable for any 20th century government, and has enormously more data with which to solve them.

That said, I think the real real problem with central planning is that it's... central. The price mechanism plus decentralized decisionmaking turns out to be a fantastic combination for eliciting (and arguably developing) preferences, and once you get past problems like "almost everyone is starving because our economy was based on subsistence agriculture and then wrecked by invasion" that can be solved by "grow grain, make steel, pour concrete" you'd still be screwed even if your socialist central planners were implausibly competent and benevolent. You can get around that somewhat by allowing markets (post-Deng China), or elicit preference with 'shadow prices' (a regular cause of purges among Soviet economists), but in practice you keep running into the problems caused the ways that dictators take and keep power.

We have large centralized companies. For better or worse those companies don't use big computers to make economic calculations that output the company decisions at the top level. 

Our political system also doesn't use big computer models to decide on economic policy. Before we had the computational capacity we might have thought that we will do that once we have it, but it turns out we don't.

Do we have a good idea of how prominent AI research labs compare to the resources that go into Five Eyes AI models for intelligence analysis and for Chinese government pursuits?

Today, I also got errors.

Looking forward to your post!

I understand, though I'd still like to see that post, especially as it relates to some of the more advanced attacks. Unfortunately yeah it's already happening, though not much has come of it so far.

I don't think I agree with the premise, but it's a really weird comparison.  "advantage over the field" is kind of meaningless for altruism, where the goal really should be cooperation with the field in improvements for (subsets of) people.  Tech startups ALSO benefit from this attitude, in that you're trying to align your company to provide more utility to customers, though it also includes more explicit competition among companies and individuals.

Tech startups (and lucrative employment in non-startups) ARE a much bigger arena, so the competitive parts have much stronger competition.  I guess to that extent, I agree - altruism is easier, if you care about relative rank rather than absolute results.  I don't know the altruism world enough to know how much status competition there is, but the local food and employment charities I've been involved with don't seem immune at all.  

What theorem?

But any person who has managed or owned a restaurant will tell you that the actual two biggest things making your hamburger expensive are labor and real estate, not complying with food service codes.

FWIW, this seems wrong, having run a large construction project which involved navigating various food and restaurant licenses. The food service codes are the thing that make the real estate much more expensive, and a large fraction of the labor cost gets spent complying with the food service codes.

See also: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uBs6RJYtQbxZCRxSk/adam_scholl-s-shortform?commentId=Rumcr7vGaTAzdB4CA [LW(p) · GW(p)] 

My cousin had a small restaurant, and one of the reasons he gave up was complying with all kinds of regulations. There was always some small detail that was wrong, and he typically did not get fined, he was just told to fix it before the next review. But it took a lot of his time. It was usually some stupid thing, such as painting the walls incorrectly, or using a wrong kind of screw on the roof, i.e. not even related to the food.

Also, one of the reasons it is difficult to build small kindergartens (like for 10 kids total) is that they are required to have a kitchen, which is required to have a certain area and inventory, which at this scale becomes the most expensive part of the kindergarten. But if you invite guests to your home, cooking for 10 people in your kitchen is easy, even if would completely fail the kindergarten regulations.

(Not in USA. Your local regulations may differ.)

Back in May, when the Crowdstrike bug happened, people were posting wild takes on Twitter and in my signal groupchats about how Crowdstrike is only used everywhere because the government regulators subject you to copious extra red tape if you try to switch to something else.

Here’s the original claim:

Microsoft blamed a 2009 antitrust agreement with the European Union that they said forced them to sustain low-level kernel access to third-party developers.[286][287][288] The document does not explicitly state that Microsoft has to provide kernel-level access, but says Microsoft must provide access to the same APIs used by its own security products.[287]

This seems consistent with your understanding of regulatory practices (“they do not give a rats ass what particular software vendor you use for anything”), and is consistent with the EU’s antitrust regulations being at fault—or at least Microsoft’s cautious interpretation of the regulations, which indeed is the approach you want to take here.

Once your conspiracy gets large enough, chances are some member will be able to take care of the legal issues if they arise, by whatever means necessary.

(It's like starting a company: the critical part is growing to the point where you can afford ramen and a good lawyer. You want to get there as fast as possible. Afterwards you can relax and keep growing slowly, if you wish.)

Once the usage of AI editors becomes mainstream, the programming languages themselves may start evolving in a direction of no longer being legible for an unaided human, because why not. Complaining about not being able to understand the source code will sound similar to complaining about not being able to read the binary code today. Like "yeah, but you are not supposed to do that, that's what the algorithm is for".

I don't understand why you wouldn't just follow normal responsible disclosure practices here, e.g. just disclose this to Google and then leave it to them. 

I know some pretty senior people in security for 2 FAANG companies, and passing acquaintance at others, and currently work in the Security org at a comparable company.  All of them have reporting channels for specific threats, and none (that I know) are ignorant of the range of AI-enabled attacks that are likely in the near future (shockingly many already).   The conversations I've had (regarding products or components I do know pretty well) have convinced me that everything I come up with is already on their radar (though some are of the form "Yeah, that's gonna happen and it's gonna suck.  Current strategy is to watch for it and not talk much about it, in order not to encourage it").

Without disclosing some details, there's probably no way to determine whether your knowledge or theory is something they can update on.  I'm happy to pass on any information, but I can't see why you'd trust me more than more direct employees of the future victims.

Sounds like the sort of thing I'd forward to Palisade research.

For a significant fee, of course

Works with most crimes tbh.

Injections don't deal with the model itself, it would be just like any other input prompt security protocol. Heck, I surely hope ChatGPT doesn't execute code with root permission.

Seems like a lot of ways for that to go wrong.  Especially if many of your customers (big advertisers) leave voluntarily as well.  

Hmm.  Can't upvote+disagree for shortform entries.  I like hearing about others' preferences and experiences in cultural and artistic realms, so thanks for that.  I'm not sure I exactly disagree - the movie was very good, but not in my top-10 - I need to re-watch it, but previous re-watches have been within epsilon of my expectations - still good, but no better nor worse than before.

Can you identify the element(s) that you expect to age badly, or you think you overvalued before, and which surprised you by still being great?  Or just the consistency of vision and feel through all the details?

Also, if you are even a little bit of a Batman or superhero connoisseur, I highly recommend Birdman (2014).

I have no clue whether any of my previous comments on your posts will qualify me for perma-ban, but if so, please do so now, to save the trouble of future annoyance since I have no intention of changing anything.  I am generally respectful, but I don't expect to fully understand these rules, let alone follow them.  

I have no authority over this, but I'd hope the mods choose not to frontpage anything that has a particularly odd and restrictive comment policy, or a surprisingly-large ban list.

Here's an analysis by Dr. Robert Malone about the Ukraine biolabs, which I found enlightening:

https://rwmalonemd.substack.com/p/ukraine-biolab-watchtower?r=ta0o1&s=w&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

I glean that "biolab" is actually an extremely vague term, and doesn't specify the facility's exact capabilities at all.  They could very well have had an innocuous purpose, but Russia would've had to treat them as a potential threat to national security, in the same way that Russian or Chinese "biolabs" in Mexico might sound bad to the US, except Russia is even more paranoid.

It seems like "biological weapons facility" is a quite subjective term. The US position is that their own army labs that produced anthrax that was used after 9/11 are not a "biological weapons facility" because while they do produce anthrax that could be used militarily, it's not produced with the intent of military use.

Based on those definitions it's plausible that the Ukrainian labs produce viruses that can be weaponized but that the US just doesn't see them as a "biological weapons facility" because they believe the intent for offensive use isn't there.

Glenn Greenwalds reporting is good on this. https://rumble.com/vx2iq7-the-white-houses-game-playing-denials-of-bio-labs-in-ukraine.html is the freely accessible video version, there's also a written version on his substack behind a paywall.

If you make exact predictions like that you should define what you mean with your terms.

It's like Fauci's dance saying that there's no gain-of-function research in the paper he mailed around with gain-of-function in the filename. The US government doesn't use commonsense definitions for words when it comes to biosafety.

I'm registering a 90% predicition those facilities do not exists, as in "how the hell would the US have been dumb enough to plant biological weapons facilities in a remote country outside their sphere of influence and where Russia has (used to have until recently) a lot of weight..."

I wonder how a historian could answer this question. Even if it was true, someone would have to be stupid enough to write it down explicitly. On the other hand, most people were illiterate, so maybe writing itself was effectively a secret code for clergy. But even then... the priests doing this would not necessarily have to realize this; they could do it primarily to absolve the sins, and only use the blackmail as an afterthought. Also, the mere possibility of blackmail is already a power.

As an argument against this, there is the concept of a "confessional secret" that is taken very seriously by Catholics. Revealing the secret would cost the priest his job at the very least; often it would also be punished by prison, historically sometimes by death. There are officially no exceptions: no matter the crime, not even if the Pope commanded you to reveal the secret. It is even considered a sin if the priest thinks too much about the contents of the confession afterwards. -- That said, I do know whether these rules were there from the very beginning, or maybe only started a few centuries later.

Woman also wear expensive designer handbags that men don't care at all but other women do care about. 

If a woman has the choice to wear an outfit that makes her more attractive to men but makes her lose status with other women who believe that it looks slutty, she usually doesn't maximize attractiveness to men.

Arbitrary motivations endorsed on reflection can be found in all sorts of activities. An unusual motivation can be as genuine as any other, it's not always a usual motivation clad in self-deception. People get to decide their values.

Have you read this article on the topic? https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2013/01/no_self-respecting_woman_would.html

I found it to be very interesting and entertaining, the sort of reading which is enjoyable even to those who disagree with it. I can't write anything on the topic myself which isn't objectively worse than the link I've provided.

I agree: the capabilities of AI romantic partners probably aren't the bottleneck to their wider adoption, considering the success of relatively primitive chatbots like Replika at attracting users. People sometimes become romantically attached to non-AI anime/video game characters despite not being able to interact with them at all! There doesn't appear to be much correlation between the interactive capabilities of fictional-character romantic partners and their appeal to users/followers.

I disagree. There's a lot of low-hanging fruit in the AI waifu space[1]. Lack of internal emotion or psychological life? Just simulate internal monologue. Lack of long-term memory? Have the AI waifu keep a journal. Lack of visuals? Use a LoRA fine-tuned diffusion model alongside the text chat.

I'd be building my own AI waifu startup if we didn't face x-risks. It seems fun (like building your own video game), and probably a great benefit to its users.

Also, lonely men will not be the only (or even primary) user demographic. Women seem to read a lot of erotica. I expect that this is an untapped market of users, one that pandering to will not make your startup look low status either.

[1]: Not using the word "girlfriend" here because I'd like to use a more gender-neutral term, and "waifu" seems pretty gender-neutral to me, and to one target demographic of such services.

I wonder if we will ever have a sexbot revolution. The urge to regulate other people's sexuality seems too strong. I can imagine a future where people spend most of their time in virtual reality that allows them to do almost anything... except, if they want some sexual experience, a stern robotic voice reminds them that this would violate the Terms of Service.

Yep.

What impact did it have on your life in general?

For example, I can imagine someone getting a 10x income in a completely invisible way, such as making some smartphone games anonymously, selling them on the app store, putting all the extra money in a bank account, while living exactly the same way as before: keeping their day job, keeping the same spending habits, etc. Such kind of income increase would obviously have no impact, as it is almost epiphenomenal.

Also, if you 10x your income by finding a job that requires you to work 16 hours a day, 7 days a week, the impact on dating will be negative, as you will now have no time to meet people. Similarly, if the better paying work makes you so tired that you just don't have any energy left for social activities in your free time, etc.

But if we imagine a situation like "you have the same kind if 9-5 job that takes the same amount of your energy, except somehow your salary is now 10x what it used to be (and maybe you have a more impressive job title)"...

I guess you could buy some signals of wealth, such as more expensive clothes, car, watches. (This won't happen automatically; you have to actually do it.) You could get some extra free time by paying people to do something that you previous spent your own time doing, such as cooking and cleaning. More free time means more opportunities to meet people. (Again, this won't happen automatically.) Finally, having more money allows you to visit places that were previously too expensive for you. Some women might prefer such places, because being there automatically filters the kind of men they meet. (This also won't happen automatically.) I guess the obvious question is whether you did any of this.

Finally, the way having more money can dramatically improve your dating life is if you wisely invest the money in index funds, get enough passive income, and quit your job. Suddenly you have 16 hours a day to socialize, and basically you can optimize your life to meet more women. You could even do some non-obvious thing, such as choose a low-paying job that comes with a 90% female workplace. If that doesn't help, I would be surprised.

You have to adopt the lifestyles associated with a high income. The lifestyles necessary are eating significantly healthier, working out frequently, and dressing nicely. Secondly, high income in an engineering field (given the priors this seems likely), does not mean you have the ability to converse effectively in social settings. It is a skill to communicate well with women. Typically a high income was associated with an ability to manipulate social groups for your own gain, now it's more closely associated with understanding the world at a deep level. Income is a means to an end but it is not the end itself. 

To date effectively, and meet women, one needs to establish trust. This means meeting somebody through your social network (friends), or in an institution of high trust, such as a secret meeting of only elite people etc. Also, women enjoy being dominated. If you go down on the social strata you will find it much easier to date than to date a peer or superior. Aella once wrote "a woman just wants to be railed by a man she respects", so be worthy of respect in all the ways that are not income. 

Seems like there'd be a lot of adversarial pressure on how that signal gets used. Have you heard of the Nobel Peace Prize?

I can think of quite a few institutions that certify people as being "good" in some specific way, e.g.

• Credit Reporting Agencies: This person will probably repay money that you lend to them
• Background Check Companies: This person doesn't have a criminal history
• Professional Licensing Boards: This person is qualified and authorized to practice in their field
• Academic Institutions: This person has completed a certain level of education or training
• Driving Record Agencies: This person is a responsible driver with few or no traffic violations
• Employee Reference Services: This individual has a positive work history and is reliable

Is your question "why isn't there an institution which pulls all of this information about a single person, and condenses it down to a single General Factor of Goodness Score"?

I think defining "good person" is very hard, and that it's very hard to prevent people from gaming this metric, and very hard to judge people correctly (imagine a group of 4th graders trying to judge which one of their teachers is more intelligent, for instance. My point is that judging something which is above yourself is difficult as you judge relatively to your own standards which aren't as universal as you assume)

For now, what society considers a "good person" is mostly somebody who they have no dirt on, which ends up being somebody who is harmless and uninteresting. Because we focus on avoiding negatives rather than on cultivating positives, most people who try really hard to become "good people" just become pathetic instead (for instance the Nice Guy stereotype).
I'm reminded of the quote "If a tree is to grow into heaven, it's roots must grow into hell", and I think that's a less naive take on goodness in man than what society is currently promoting

There are. The prestigious universities are examples. (lc and I are Americans.)

I think that mutual reputation affirming services with a specific context could be a good thing for society. Like, we have weak forms of this with LinkedIn, and very narrow forms with the institutions that Faul Sname mentions. But I think we could have better, slightly more general forms, that were deliberately designed to be at least reasonably resistant to adversarial pressure (as Ben Pace highlights). 

For example, I could see how it would be very useful to increasing the legibility of potential work candidates if their former supervisors and colleagues had some way to leave verified but anonymous reviews for them through the facilitation of some organization. This organization would accept payment and, with the permission of the target individual, would supply a report about the opinions of that individual collected from their former colleagues to a potential new job's recruiters. The individual could select which of their former employments should be included.

There would certainly be adversarial pressure to rig this system in favor of candidates, but also the work-reputation-management company would have reason to want to maintain the accuracy and fairness of their reports. Their reputation for being accurate is what would make them valuable, after all! 

I think a similar sort of thing could be done for dating, at least insofar as being a convenient way to be able to give a prospective romantic interest some third party verification that previous people you've dated assert that you weren't threatening or abusive. I imagine this would work as a sort of improved dating service, where you met people through the service (old school OkCupid matching kinda stuff) and then went on dates, and then filled out a small questionnaire afterwards. It would give people incentive to be polite and friendly even if they decided they didn't like the person they matched with. Everyone using the service would have a reputation to maintain.

In government, I think there's a lot of value to being able to assign limited conditional representation approval to other citizens. Like, "Bob can vote for me on all issues categorized as environmental. Alice can vote for me on all judicial appointments. All other votes I will fill out myself until futher notice."

I've heard multiple different proposals for how such a governance system might work. For a relatively recent and well-developed take on this idea, see here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4KjiZeAWc7Yv9oyCb/tackling-moloch-how-youcongress-offers-a-novel-coordination [LW · GW] 

How would AI or gene editing make a difference to this?

I'm generally considered a happy person and I did couple's counseling at a time when my partner was also happy. That was in the context of getting early marriage advice and was going generally well. I'm not sure about talk therapy. I'm generally of the opinion that talking with people helps with resolving all kinds of issues.  

What is that reason you are referring to?

That does sound crazy.  Literally - without knowing some details and something about the person making the claim, I think it's more likely the person is leaving out important bits or fully hallucinating some of the communications, rather than just being randomly targeted.  

That's just based on my priors, and it wouldn't take much evidence to make me give more weight to possibilities of a scammer at the bank stealing account contents and then covering their tracks, or bank processes gone amok and invoking terrorist/money-laundering policies incorrectly.

Going to police/regulators does sound appropriate in the latter two cases.  I'd start with a private lawyer first, if the sums involved are much larger than the likely fees.

An attorney rather than the police, I think.

Among other things I suppose they're not super up on that to efficiently colonise the universe [...] watch dry paint stay dry. [LW · GW]

It depends on person 1's motivation. If his or her motivation is selfish, then I agree with you, but if the motivation is altruistic, that makes the utility of money linear, and startups are a potent way to maximize expected money.

A hobbyhorse of mine is that "utopia is hard" is a non-issue. Most sitcoms, coming-of-age stories and other "non-epic" stories basically take place in Utopia (i.e. nobody is at risk of dying from hunger or whatever, the stakes are minor social games, which is basically what I expect the stakes in real-life-utopia to be most of the time). 

It seems like "Utopia fiction is hard" problem only comes up for particular flavors of nerds who are into some particular kind of "epic" power fantasy framework with huge stakes. And that just isn't actually what most stories are about.

One more reason is that humans have "pleasure to kill" drive, which can't be implemented in real life, but easily implemented in fiction and games. From the point of view of this drive, DOOM is utopia.

I think there's a related problem that humans are evolved to fight and compete with each other, and a LOT of us/them seem to object to engineering of human nature/behavior.  It's not clear that there IS a path to be found between people defecting and ruining the utopia and people losing their identity/individualism as they're modified to cooperate better.

This is related to a possible pet theory of mine, which postulates that to a large extent, utopia in quite a lot of conceptions (but not all) is fundamentally boring to us, and it's not exciting to have all your problems solved, so it's disliked disproportionately to dystopias. This especially is exacerbated by our need to remain the main character, and to have an interesting life.

It's also why I think people don't have the same aversion to written dystopias/apocalypses, because they contain conflict, and in particular inequalities large enough such that the main characters (which is a big driver of human behavior) to essentially run roughshod over the NPCs/non-main characters, so it's a natural fit.

I agree. Until faced directly with adversity or trouble, it is easy to find the possibility of danger or threat thrilling. The obvious reasoning be that as self-aware creatures we have simply grown tired of following life to survive and instead seek out experiences that make us feel alive, such as the adrenaline-inducing experiences that are far too common in our society.

Seems like the question is whether the average cop is better or worse than the written law. If better, remove the cameras. If worse, keep the cameras on.

Any cite or evidence that this is the case? My understanding is that body cams are controlled by union rules and only used for investigations.

Officers still have the ability like always, to selectively enforce laws against the under classes.

How does putting people in prison get the creditors paid?  I guess if it's a paid work prison, but I don't think you'll have many supporters for a system with that kind of indenture.  AnCap is an awesome thought experiment, and a nice way to point out that there is no underlying moral justification for governments.  But the consequentialist argument is VERY strong - as un-justified equilibria go, modern liberal democratic states have pretty good results.  They're starting to sag under their own weight and may not last much longer without a major reboot, but hey, the Singularity might get here first.

Looks legit, but is this leak of any real interest? Like, Stable Diffusion is set to be released as open source, right? So this just speeds things along slightly that were already going to happen.

As a self appointed great prophet, sage and heretic I am working to reveal that a focus on AI alignment is misplaced at this time.   As a self appointed great prophet, sage and heretic I expect to be rewarded for my contribution with my execution, which is part of the job that a good heretic expects in advance, is not surprised by,  and accepts with generally good cheer.  Just another day in the office.  :-)

Does "seem like it's solving computer security" look like helping develop better passively secure systems, or like actively monitoring and noticing bad actions, or both or something else?

It varies but usually not long. My uninformed guess is that your recent post was deliberately not frontpaged because it's a political topic that could attract non-rationalists to comment and flame in an unproductive manner.

In what way do prediction markets provide significant evidence on this type of question?

Those seem like pretty low bars for "popular and mainstream".

I'd analogize it more to traders who make money during a bull market, except in this case the bull market is 'industrialization'. Yeah, turns out even a dictator like Stalin or Xi can look like 'a great leader' who has 'mastered the currents of history' and refuted liberal democracy - well, until they run out of industrialization & catchup growth, anyway.

This is another case of "people arguing about scope of a fuzzy problem RATHER than how to define/measure the problem or analyze cost/benefit of mitigations".  Almost everyone deeply involved in this has a political/culture-war preference, and it seems to be the case that proposed changes seem to shift results in one direction or another, SEPARATELY from whether it reduces fraud.

In fact, it's ludicrous to believe that zero fraud happens, as it's ludicrous to believe that most outcomes are driven by fraud (as opposed to non-fraudulent bullshit reasons like advertising and vote friction).  Most anti-fraud proposals ALSO raise barriers to technically-non-fraudulent-but-distasteful-to-some participation, and without being willing to discuss numbers and impact, there can be no resolution.

To your actual question, I believe that watchers would notice very extreme cases of fraud at the state and national levels, though they likely miss some at local levels (where natural variance is much more possible), and they probably can't detect (and won't have sufficient evidence to convince anyone) minor or incremental cases of fraud or illegal manipulation.

Controversially, an honest statistician will acknowledge that there's lots of noise in the methodology.  And honest democracy-proponents acknowledge that close races are ... close and it's not too critical for legitimacy which side wins the coinflip.  So even if fraud or biased rulings change an outcome, if it's hard to detect, it probably doesn't matter.

I think a similar type of financial fraud is often detectable via violations of Benford's law. Or more generally, it's hard to fake the right distribution. As another case of that principle, you'd expect the discrepancy between polls and results to fall within a predictable distribution if they were sampling from the same space.

Weak-downvoted, but I'm unsure about it: feels like a statement trying to establish status of a person but in a way unrelated to truth.

also known as propaganda

Probably even worse than that: given any AGI spam detector, there is probably an AGI of similar capability that can generate spam indistinguishable from non-spam text.

Really powerful AGIs can probably generate spam that looks even more like things you want to read (but lead you into a conversion funnel) than actual things you want to read.

I don't have a direct answer for you, though I imagine the resource mentioned at https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MKvtmNGCtwNqc44qm/announcing-aisafety-training [LW · GW] might well turn up what you're looking for :)

“They launched a long-range missile,” General John Hyten, the outgoing vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff told CBS News. “It went around the world, dropped off a hypersonic glide vehicle that glided all the way back to China, that impacted a target in China.”

When asked if the missile hit the target, Hyten said, “Close enough.”

https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/17/politics/john-hyten-china-hypersonic-weapons-test/index.html

Civilian planes still, right?  Probably not much different.

I think Jim Babcock suggested having a leaderboard on every tag page, for who has the most points in that tag. So there's lots of different ladders to climb and be the leader of!

This makes me sad.  Season one and the first 2/3 of season 2 were transformative and amazing for me and my nerdy college-age-at-the-time peer group.  The end of that season and the followup movies were rather less so.  I intellectually understand that it's no longer innovative or particularly interesting, and it hasn't aged very well either in terms of investigative technology nor mountain-town isolation and creepiness.  Being local and contemporary likely helped a whole lot as well.  Still, I visit Snoqualmie Falls and have brunch at the lodge there a few times a year, and the connection to twin peaks makes me smile a bit wider than just the beauty and power of nature would.

Anyway, I look forward to hearing a review from your perspective if you decide to stick with it. 

That sounds more like "cognition is mysterious", regardless of computation substrate.  How do you think these things work in the brain?  How many neurons or neural connections are needed to feel something?  If you chemically speed up or slow down the signal propagation, is that still viable?

The answer is: we don't know.  The precise constraints and effects have not been tested, nor even explored enough to hypothesize.  However, we DO know that a chemical processor in human heads has cognition (or at least mine does; I don't want to overreach and assume yours or others'), and it's very difficult to see why a digital computation COULDN'T have the same.  

That's not to say it's automatic, nor that all computations are conscious.  That part is unknown.  Possibly unknowable (given I can't even prove your consciousness to myself).

That is a very context dependent question.

Your safest bet is to just arrange meeting her in a context where sex is a possibility (for example: "hey, do you want to go for coffee then stop at your place afterwards sometime?"). The desire to have sex isn't something you can forecast far in advance, it can quickly change just like the weather.

You can have sexual conversation and establish the general desire for her to have you as a sexual partner. Essentially like saying she likes a particular restaurant but doesn't schedule going there days or even hours in advance, she's just open to going there when and if she feels the desire.

As far as how to be good at sexual talk in general, unfortunately it takes careful practice. You just have to risk being akward or turning her off (within reasonable limits, don't immediately test saying something too crazy). Trial and error within reasonable bounds.

Happened to someone else once :)

If you simply want to people to invest more into answering a question post, putting out a bounty for the best answer would be a way to go about it.

The mandatory sign-up is a major obstacle to new users. I'm not going to create an account on a website until it has already proven value to me.

A strategy that may serve some of that purpose is to look at the delta between Rotten Tomatoes' critic score ("Tomatometer", looks like it means journalists) and audience score.  Depending on your objective, maybe looking at the audience score by itself is ideal.

Interesting observation. I'm don't have strong feelings about how fit rationalists are compared to the population. I have met various fit rationalists though.

• A few come to mind in the local rationalist community in Portland.
• I remember one guy on the LW Slack being really into weightlifting.
• Over the years, somehow I've managed to meet up with four rationalists who are really into basketball. Perhaps because I've expressed interest in basketball in my writing. It still feels like a somewhat large coincidence though, given the small amount of LessWrongers who I presume to be into basketball. Anyway, each of these people have been extremely fit. 2-3 of them have played at the college level.
• jefftk [LW · GW] strikes me as being relatively fit. I vaguely recall posts indicating he spends a lot of time running, biking, dancing, and doing a decent amount of other outdoor activities. Similar with so8res [LW · GW].
• Once upon a time I was pretty fit. Hopefully I can become fit again.

Meta: I disapprove of this being downvoted.

They value different things, but this is not uniformly less effort on any physical activity. More than one person from my very rationalist workplace climbs v8 boulders. 

Where you live.

Is this intended to imply something about rationalists? Maybe you should get out more.

BMI 20 here, and people who have just met me sometimes say unprompted that I look athletic.

I suspect there's a True Scotsman argument embedded in the measurement behind this for one or more of "people you've met", "physically fit" and "rationalist".  

I know of a number of people who are reasonably healthy and trim (but I don't know if that's "physically fit"), and who have heard of Eliezer Yudkowsky and at least some topics discussed on LW (but I don't know if they are "rationalists").

I have.

(What is your criterion for "physically fit"?)

First season of Game of Thrones was released in 2011, and first book was written in 1996, I think we got rrrrreally desensitized here.

↑ comment by lc · 2024-09-04T20:37:01.279Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

As Russian, I feel strong deja vu. 

1. Upset people do not vote to not "lend legitimacy".
2. People who vote vote for authoritarian candidate.
3. Fast-forward 15 years, authoritarian candidate get "elected" for fifth time, opposition is de-facto illegal, political persecution level is higher than in any period of history except literal Stalin terror and Civil War.

When thinking on this, you seriously do not think that one candidate will be better than the other? Your world view doesn't bring you to a view where one is even a slightly better candidate?

to solve alignment?

Man, I keep preventing myself from saying "parts of e/acc are at least somewhat fascist", because that's not a very useful thing to say in discourse, and prevents Thermodynamic-God-ism (or e/acc in general) from developing into a more sophisticated & fleshed out system of thought. I think this kind of post works if it's phrased in a way that encourages more cooperation in the future (with the risk of this running a "cooperate with defection-rock" situation), but it only works if it encourages such cooperation.

I prefer the term "fascist" to "national socialist" because nazism was a really specific thing, bound to German conceptions of race at the time. Although—"fascism" is also really associated with Italy at that specific time.

I think the more general problem is violation of Hume's guillotine. You can't take a fact about natural selection (or really about anything) and go from that to moral reasoning without some pre-existing morals.

However, it seems the actual reasoning with the Thermodynamic God is just post-hoc reasoning. Some people just really want to accelerate and then make up philosophical reasons to believe what they believe. It's important to be careful to criticize actual reasoning and not post-hoc reasoning. I don't think the Thermodynamic God was invented and then people invented accelerationism to fulfill it. It was precisely the other way around. One should not critique the made up stuff (besides just critiquing that it is made up) because that is not charitable (very uncertain on this). Instead, one should look for the actual motivation to accelerate and then criticize that (or find flaws in it).

The above seems like a strawman or weakman argument. Consider instead Nietzsche's Critique of Utilitarianism:

Thus Nietzsche thinks utilitarians are committed to ensuring the survival and happiness of human beings, yet they fail to grasp the unsavory consequences which that commitment may entail. In particular, utilitarians tend to ignore the fact that effective long-run utility promotion might require the forcible destruction of people who either enfeeble the gene pool or who have trouble converting resources into utility—incurable depressives, the severely handicapped, and exceptionally fastidious people all seem potential targets.