Open & Welcome Thread - Oct 2022

Hello, I always been an off and on reader to Lesswrong for several years and this site in particular (like only few others) seemed to have a mythical aura of quality control that felt very out of place for me yet still very stimulating to watch from outside. The reason I decided to join now is because I have very direct things to say and the world of now is pretty fit for what I want to share. Lesswrong on coincidence is also the perfect platform for what I want to say which mostly entails cybernetics, semiotics, anthropocene, coming automatocene , machine learning and very common sense AI views that is conspiciously absent from all human studies. Unlike what one could expect I guess I am hardly a rationalist thought, rather I feel more at ease with the term anti-rational but I promise to only engage with parts of the community that I could be constructive. I am also hopeful the community will accept me in the way that I observed other newcomers turning into succesful posters with positive engagement.

Take care, stay safe <3

New to the site, and glad to be here, so let me give my introduction. I've more or less always been a traditional rationalist, in the sense that I place a high value on knowledge of the truth for its own sake and optimizing my own cognitive processes. This has been something I've approached as a casual effort since childhood, but of course, rationality is a rigorous art that must be refined over many years, so I wouldn't say I have gotten particularly skilled at pursuing those ideals until relatively recently. So I came across this site, read a fairly diverse sample of the core materials as well as sweeping through the concepts page, and its content appears to overlap a lot with my objectives as a pursuant of rationality, as well as having quite a history. Eliezer and many of LW's other featured authors write in a style I find very engaging and easy to grasp, and with just one major forthcoming exception, I find myself in agreement with most everything said. I'm surprised I hadn't heard of it sooner.

About the one exception, here's something anyone talking to me should know up front: I am a mind-brain dualist. I have nothing to hide, and I presume we can at least get along. Don't worry, I'm not religious, nor a silly Chalmersite; rather in fact a fairly basic Cartesian, if I must approximate. I am also probably one of the world's most committed and obsessive dualists. My reasons for so being, of course, are perfectly Bayesian; I'm actually a researcher of afterlife phenomena, and I mention that because it's a big part of why I'm here. When one treads in such waters, an overabundance of rationality, both epistemic and instrumental, is necessary to find any measure of success. First off, the fact of the matter is that there is a very good reason why this stuff has a hard time getting widely noticed, and it's because there is so much bullshit mixed in with the good bits that anyone without mountains of patience and discernment will end up hopelessly lost. That poses a problem for me, as one who will passionately defend the integrity of the scientific method over any particular theoretical persuasion, and very much a naturalistic reductionist in principle. So I certainly make my dualism pay rent (and I gouge the living daylights out of it, as seen below), I've inspected it a thousand and one times for any sort of underlying bias or rationalization, and I always update it wherever I find faults and come out clear, so I think I'm doing better than most. But I just want to become as adept as I can be at criticizing my own thought processes and being absolutely sure I'm continuing down the right track. Second, without overt demonstrations of the efficacy of these metaphysical phenomena I study, they might as well not exist at all. While some of the extreme scientific skepticism such ideas generate is of the motivated sort, much of it is also absolutely justified, until the research bears indubitable results. To that end, I'm a thought leader in realizing the practical applications of the theories in my field, and it's made me a beyond-obsessive mental modification practitioner, in a "makes Tom Brady look adorable" kind of way. In essence, I need to turn myself into the equivalent of a paperclip maximizer for the exact sort of ability I'm pursuing. I've been working at this intensely for a few years, with surprisingly accelerated results, but I really do need to take advantage of every possible resource to get a leg up, and LW certainly looks to be one. The "tsuyoku naritai" self-improvement ethos propagated on this site aligns exactly with my intentions.

Despite my strong affinities for many of LW's core concepts, however, I wouldn't call myself much of a singularian. Mainly, it's just not in my purview; besides metaphysics, I study cognitive neuroscience and linguistics, and have never done programming. So I can't claim to disagree with how the site talks about AI the way I explicitly oppose materialism, but I'm not sure if I quite follow, either. It often just seems overhyped to me, especially the risk side (the benefits of having it seem fairly obvious, but still feel bounded). I'm undeniably a transhumanist, but my brand of futurism is more of a scientific-metaphysical bent; just as an example, my perfectly envisioned distant future would have human life expectancy artificially shortened (talk about Weirdtopia). Naturally from that, stuff like cryonics is just needless and misguided to me. My personal utility function assigns very little value to death itself (as distinguished from suffering), and my model of Fun Theory, which I've developed fairly extensively, is fully content to surf the wave, so to speak. That's not to say I'm a technological luddite, though; I just lack the expertise to foresee where exactly long-term advancement is going, or to comment on issues like AI alignment. But I'm the sort who'll take it all however it comes, because life in the sense I care about will go on regardless. And I had damn well better be a futurist, knowing I'll be around to see all of it. So we'll share common ground in terms of thinking 10 moves ahead of the average person, just working to different endpoints. That's not to say they aren't substantially compatible; there's no reason the far future couldn't be metaphysically empowered beyond imagination and develop superintelligences that do all the boring stuff for us!

All told, I probably won't be extremely active here as a contributor, excepting if in-depth exposition of some theoretical constructs I bring up is directly requested, but I'll definitely be reading and commenting and asking questions whenever I have them, in order to learn what I need to know to enhance my rationality practices. As always, the only thing a true scientist needs to actually change their mind is one piece of falsifying evidence that's stronger than all the other available evidence. And I go after the weird stuff because it's just so fascinating and enjoyable, but I also understand the monumental burdens such a choice places on me. After all, extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence, and no one demands it more than I do. And that's why I'm here: to get better every day at demanding more every day.

Hello! I am new to Lesswrong and I've heard from people online that this is where they dump their philosophical thoughts in. I didn't know if signing up was the right thing, but after I've seen how welcoming people are, I wanted to try it out for myself as well! I am a student that is interested in doing philosophy. I have had my doubts regarding sharing my ideas on certain topics, but I feel like this would be the best place to give those things out

Hello! 

I stumbled upon LW by chance when I was listening to Liv Boeree on youtube! My first impression is very positive. I'm looking forward to reading the different posts. 

Discovering your website is timely for me because I want to take a step back in life to think about useful/real/big problems to work on. I hold a PhD in computer Science and most of my work involve algorithmic reasoning. Recently, I started to get bored from developing 'dry' algorithms that are almost always useless in practice. I feel that I need a fresh start to work on interesting and useful problems. Currently, I'm trying to explore different subjects to have a better vision. However, this exploration is associated to a struggle to decide which area to focus on and which problem to tackle! If you have been in such a situation before of if you have suggestions I'll be more than grateful to you. 

Best,

Oops, sorry, I let our SSL certificate expire for like 20 minutes. Sorry for everyone who got a non-secure warning on the frontpage for the last 15 minutes or so, but should all be fixed now (I was tracking it as a thing to fix today, but didn't think about timezones when thinking about when to deal with it).

Tiny Feature Request:

I like that there's a "crossposted to the EA Forum; click to see $n$ comments" message on crossposts. I would like it even more though if it actually sent me to the post's comments section if I click it. (But maybe that's just me?)

I'm not new to reading LessWrong, but I am new to posting or commenting here. I plan to be more active in the future. I care about the cause of AI Alignment, and am currently in the process of shifting my career from low-level operations work at MIRI to something I think may be more impactful: 

I.e. supporting alignment researchers in their efforts to level up in research effectiveness, by offering myself as a conversational partner to help them think through their own up-leveling plans.

In that spirit, here's an offer I'd like to make to any interested alignment researchers who come across this comment.

The Offer
Free debugging-style conversations (could be just one, or recurring) aimed at helping you become a more effective researcher. How to sign up?

• Here’s my Calendly link: https://calendly.com/dcjones15/60min (Low pressure sign up; It’s fine to cancel later if you change your mind).
• DM'ing me also works great!

Questions you may have:

What would the conversation look like?

• I’ll mostly try to ask good questions to elicit your own thoughts and ideas.
• Help you get unstuck if you feel confused or averse to the subject.
• Make the occasional suggestion

Who am I, and why might I be a good person to talk to about this?

• I’ve been doing low-level operations work for MIRI for the past four years.
• I’m not a researcher, but I have thought a lot about improving my own intellectual processes over the years, and have had some good results with that.
• The few of these conversations I’ve had so far seemed good and productive, so the same may be true for you.

Why?

• Alignment researchers from various organizations have told me they don’t invest in leveling up as much as they endorse, and that when they try to level up, it’s aversive or difficult. I suspect just having someone to discuss it with can help a lot.
• I really enjoy conversations like this, and am hoping to one day be good enough at them to get paid to do it. So, I need lots of practice!

Does anyone know of work dealing with the interaction between anthropic reasoning and illusionism/elimitivism?

Let $A$ be a set, $f:A\to A$ and $g:A\to A$. We can now define a property for $f$ and $g$: $g\circ f^n=(g\circ f{)}^n$. Does a name for this property already exist?

Will it one day be possible for authors of posts to view analytics (such as view count etc.) on their posts? On EA Forum this is already implemented, I'm curious whether it's coming to LW too. I'd like it to.

Suppose you are the CCP, trying to decide whether to invade Taiwan soon. The normal-brain reaction to the fiasco in Ukraine is to see the obvious parallels and update downwards on "we should invade Taiwan soon."

But (I will argue) the big-brain reaction is to update upwards, i.e. to become more inclined to invade Taiwan than before. (Not sure what my all-things considered view is, I'm a bit leery of big-brain arguments) Here's why:

Consider this list of variables:

1. How much of a fight the Taiwanese military will put up
2. How competent the Chinese military is
3. Whether the USA will respond with military force or mere sanctions-and-arms-deliveries
    

These variables influence who would win and how long it would take / how costly it would be, which is the main variable influencing the decision of whether to invade.

Now consider how the fiasco in Ukraine gives evidence about those variables. In Ukraine, 
1. The Russians were surprisingly incompetent
2. The Ukrainians put up a surprisingly fierce resistance
3. The USA responded with surprisingly harsh sanctions, but stopped well short of actually getting involved militarily.

This should update us towards expecting the Chinese military to be more incompetent, the Taiwanese to put up more of a fight, and the USA to be more likely to respond merely with sanctions and arms deliveries than with military force.

However, the incompetence of the Russian military is only weak evidence about the incompetence of the Chinese military. 

The strength of Ukrainian resistance is stronger evidence about the strength of Taiwanese resistance, because there is a causal link: Ukrainian resistance was successful and thus will likely inspire the Taiwanese to fight harder. (If not for this causal link, the evidential connection would be pretty weak.)

But the update re: predicted reaction of USA should be stronger still, because we aren't trying to infer the behavior of one actor from the behavior of another completely different actor. It's the same actor in both cases, in a relevantly similar situation. And given how well the current policy of sanctions-and-arms-deliveries is working for the USA, it's eminently plausible that they'd choose the same policy over Taiwan. Generals always fight the last war, as the saying goes.

So, the big-brain argument concludes, our estimates of variable 1 should basically stay the same, our estimate of variable 2 should change to make invasion somewhat less appealing, and our estimate of variable 3 should change to make invasion significantly more appealing.

Moreover, variable 3 is way more important than variable 2 anyway. Militarily Taiwan has less of a chance against China than Ukraine had against Russia, much less. (Fun fact: In terms of numbers, even on Day 1 of the invasion the Russians didn't really outnumber the Ukrainians, and very quickly they were outnumbered as a million Ukrainian conscripts and volunteers joined the fight.) China, by contrast, can drop about as many paratroopers on Taiwan in a single day as there are Taiwanese soldiers.) By far the more relevant variable in whether or not to invade is what the USA's response will be. And if the USA responds in the same way that it did in Ukraine recently, that's great news for China, because economic sanctions and arms deliveries take months to have a significant effect, and Taiwan won't last that long.

So, all things considered, the events in Ukraine should update the CCP to be more inclined to invade Taiwan soon, not less.

Thoughts?
 

What's the GiveWell/AMF of AI Safety? I'd like to occasionally donate. In the past I've only done so for MIRI a few times. A quick googling fails to return anything useful in the top results which is odd given how much seems to be written in LW/EA and other forums on the subject every week.

I tried to find the link for the Searching for Outliers post by Ben Kuhn, but the google search results here are quite weird, listing benkuhn's profile page but not the post itself [LW · GW]. Any idea why?