Open & Welcome Thread - May 2022

I've become a bit discouraged by the lack of positive reception for my forecasting newsletter on LessWrong, to which I've been publishing [? · GW] it since April 2020. For example, I thought that Forecasting Newsletter: Looking back at 2021 [LW · GW] was excellent. It was very favorably reviewed by Scott Alexander here. I poured a bunch of myself into that newsletter. It got 18 karma.

I haven't bothered crossposting it to LW this month, but it continues in substack and on the EA forum [? · GW].

I visited New York City for the first time in my life last week. It's odd coming to the city after a lifetime of consuming media that references various locations within it. I almost feel like I know it even though I've never been. This is the place where it all happens, where everyone important lives. It's THE reference point for everything. The heights of tall objects are compared to The Statue of Liberty. The blast radius of nuclear bombs are compared to the size of Manhattan. Local news is reported as if it is in the national interest for people around the country to know.

The people were different than the ones I'm accustomed to. The drivers honk more and drive aggressively. The subway passengers wear thousand-dollar Balenciaga sneakers. They are taller, better looking, and better dressed than the people you're used to.

And everywhere there is self-reference. In the cities I frequent, paraphernalia bearing the name of the city is confined to a handful of tourist shops in the downtown area (if it exists at all). In New York City, it is absolutely everywhere. Everywhere the implicit experience for sale is the same: I was there. I was part of it. I matter.

I felt this emotion everywhere I went. Manhattan truly feels like the center of the country. I found myself looking at the cost of renting an apartment in Chinatown or in Brooklyn, wondering if I could afford it, wondering who I might become friends with if I moved there, and what experiences I might have that I would otherwise miss.

I also felt periodic disgust with the excess, the self-importance, and the highly visible obsession with status that so many people seem to exhibit. I looked up at the empty $200 million apartments in Billionaire's row and thought about how badly large cities need a land value tax. I looked around at all the tourists in Times Square, smiling for the camera in front large billboards, then frowning as they examined the photo to see whether it was good enough to post on Instagram. I wondered how many children we could cure of malaria if these people shifted 10% of their spending towards helping others.

This is the place where rich people go to compete in zero-sum status games. It breeds arrogant, out-of-touch elites. This is the place where talented young people go to pay half their income in rent and raise a small furry child simulator in place of the one they have forgotten to want. This is, as Isegoria so aptly put it, an IQ grinder, that disproportionately attracts smart and well educated people who reproduce at below replacement rate.

The huge disparities between rich and poor are omnipresent. I watched several dozen people (myself included) walk past a homeless diabetic with legs that were literally rotting away. I briefly wondered what was wrong with society that we allowed this to happen before walking away to board a bus out of the city.

I'm sure all these things have been said about New York City before, and I'm sure they will be said again in the future. I'll probably return for a longer visit sometime in the future.

There's been some discussion recently [EA · GW] about there perhaps being a surplus of funding in EA, and not enough good places to apply funds to. I have lots of thoughts on this that I'd like to talk more about at some point, but for now I want to propose an idea that seems pretty obvious and non-controversial to me: give $1M to people like Scott Alexander and Robin Hanson.

Scott has a day job as a psychiatrist. Robin as a university professor. Those day job hours (and slack) could be spent doing other things though. If they were wealthy enough, I assume (but am not sure) they would quit their jobs and have more hours to spend doing cool things. And they both have incredible track records of doing cool things.

Scott and Robin are just the two people that come to my mind first and that I see as the most non-controversial. But I think there are many more examples. Zvi [LW · GW] and Kaj Sotala [LW · GW] also come to mind. Iirc they both have day jobs.

A related idea is that even people who are currently being paid to do work on ie. AI safety, I assume there is still room to spend money to improve their productivity. Ie. by hiring a maid for them, maybe it frees up X hours a week, and having the extra hours + slack would improve their productivity by enough.

In the spirit of doing low status things with high potential, I am working on a site to allow commissioning of fringe erotica and am looking to hire a second web developer.

The idea is to build a place where people with niche interests can post bounties for specific stories. In my time moonlighting as an erotic author, I've noticed a lack of good sites to do freelance erotic writing work. I think the reason for this is that most people think porn is icky, so despite there being a huge market for extremely niche content, the platforms currently available are pretty abysmal. This is our opportunity.

We're currently in beta and can pay a junior-level wage, with senior-level equity. If you're a web developer who wants to join a fully remote startup, please reach out. 

As with my other startups, I began this project with the goal of generating wealth to put towards alignment research.

I notice that I am confused by not seeing discourse about using AI alignment solutions for human alignment. It seems like the world as we know it is badly threatened by humans behaving in ways I'd describe as poorly aligned, for an understanding of "alignment" formed mostly from context in AI discussions in this community.

I get that AI is different from people -- we assume it's much "smarter", for one thing. Yet every "AI" we've built so far has amplified traits of humanity that we consider flaws, as well as those we consider virtues. Do we expect that this would magically stop being the case if it passed a certain threshhold?

And doesn't alignment, in the most general terms, get harder when it's applied to "smarter" entities? If that's the case, then it seems like the "less smart" entities of human leaders would be a perfect place to test strategies we think will generalize to "smarter" entities. Conversely, if we can't apply alignment findings to humans because alignment gets "easier" / more tractable when applied to "smarter" entities, doesn't that suggest a degenerate case of minimum alignment difficulty for a maximally "smart" AI?

A cancelled connecting flight has suddenly left me in San Francisco for the next 24 hours (i.e. until late on Sunday 15th). I could just stay in my hotel room and prepare for the next stage of my journey, but I hear there are people interested in AI safety somewhere nearby. If anyone has suggestions or even wants to meet up, message me... 

What information is required to determine a system's consciousness (or lack thereof)? Consider voting in this poll with what you think.

(You can view the results without voting.)

There's something I never understood in HPMoR.

Tag suggestion: "Air Quality". There's a bunch of things in a cluster of space around here, you could imagine one or more tags. Carbon [LW · GW] dioxide, air particulate pollution, and aerosolized respiratory pathogens. The last one  may seem a bit of an odd duck, but the techniques [LW · GW] for dealing with it are often the same as the others.

Idea: Various people on LW say in their user profile something like "I enjoy talking to random people. Book a time on my calendar!" It'd be cool to compile a list of such opportunities. This can also be done for other online communities like Hacker News.

Has the humanity ever been proactive instead of reactive about global risks?

I just had a go at using GPT-J to solve the alignment problem. This was its output: 

https://pastebin.com/iTHAZsdV 

Not actually a solution, but interesting to see its attempts. 

Should I write a post about this? Have there been any more successful attempts to use language models to solve the problem? 

How is ""Depression is just contentment with a bad attitude" false exactly?

I'm not trying to claim its true or sport defend flat earth style. I truly believe it's different.

But back in Covid and even early aftermath I remember so often thinking "There's no reason to go out because we're all so happy at home that out likely wont be any better" which I eventually noticed is awfully similar to "There's no reason to go out because I'm so unhappy out that out likely won't be any better." Seemed like a possible window into others' lived experience.

Not really a rationality question but this is the highest concentration I know of people who have known people with depression, and also people who can answer potentially emotionally charged questions rationally.