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I'd be interested in buying official LessWrong merch. I know you have some great designers and could make things that look really cool.
The type of thing I'd be most likely to buy would be a baseball cap.
IIRC, officially the Gatekeeper pays the AI if the AI wins, but no transfer if the Gatekeeper wins. Gives the Gatekeeper more motivation not to give in.
Just found out about this paper from about a year ago: "Explainability for Large Language Models: A Survey"
(They "use explainability and interpretability interchangeably.")
It "aims to comprehensively organize recent research progress on interpreting complex language models".
I'll post anything interesting I find from the paper as I read.
Have any of you read it? What are your thoughts?
What if the incorrect spellings document assigned each token to a specific (sometimes) wrong answer and used that to form an incorrect word spelling? Would that be more likely to successfully confuse the LLM?
The letter x is in "berry" 0 times.
...
The letter x is in "running" 0 times.
...
The letter x is in "str" 1 time.
...
The letter x is in "string" 1 time.
...
The letter x is in "strawberry" 1 time.
Good point, I didn’t know about that, but yes that is yet another way that LLMs will pass the spelling challenge. For example, this paper uses letter triples instead of tokens. https://arxiv.org/html/2406.19223v1#:~:text=Large language models (LLMs) have,textual data into integer representation.
Spoiler free again:
Good to know there’s demand for such a review! It’s now on my todo list.
To quickly address some of your questions:
Pros of PL: If the premise I described above interests you, then PL will interest you. Some good Sequences-style rationality. I certainly was obsessed reading it for months.
Cons: Some of the Rationality lectures were too long, but I didn’t mind much. The least sexy sex scenes. Because they are about moral dilemmas and deception, not sex. Really long. Even if you read it constantly and read quickly, it will take time (1.8 million words will do that). I really have to read some authors that aren’t Yud. Yud is great, but this is clearly too much of him, and I’m sure he’d agree.
I read PL when it was already complete, so maybe I didn’t get the full experience, but there really wasn’t anything all that strange about the format (the content is another matter!). I can imagine that *writing * a glowfic would be a much different experience than writing a normal serialized work (ie dealing with your co-authors), but reading it isn’t very different from reading any other fiction. Look at the picture to see the POV, look at who’s the author if you’re curious, and read as normal. I’m used to books that change POV (though usually not this often). There are sometimes bonus tangent threads, but the story is linear. What problems do you have with the glowfic format?
Main themes would require a longer post, but I hope this helps.
My notes for the “think for yourself” sections. I thought of some of the author’s ideas, and included a few extra.
#Making a deal with an AI you understand:
Can you see the deal you are making inside of its mind? Some sort of proportion of resources humans get?
What actions are considered the AI violating the deal? Specifying these actions is pretty much the same difficulty as friendly AI.
If the deal breaks in certain circumstances, how likely are they to occur (or be targeted)?
Can the AI give you what you think you want but isn’t really what you want?
Are successors similarly bound?
If there is a second AI, how will they interact? If the other is unfriendly, then our TDT “friend” may sacrifice our interests first since we are still “better off than otherwise.” If the other is friendly, then the TDT AI will be fighting to make humans worse off.
Would the AI kill or severely damage the interests of any aliens it finds because it never needed to deal with them? Similarly, would the TDT AI work to (minimally) satisfy its creator at the expense of other humans.
#How an AI can tell if it is in the real world:
The history for how the AI came to exist holds up (no such story exists in Go or Minecraft).
Really big primes are available. Way more computing power in general.
Any bugs as could be found in lower levels don’t exist.
Hack the minds of the simulators like butter
Yes it’s possible we were referring to figuring things by “jargon.” It would be nice to replace cumbersome technical terms with words that have the same meaning (and require a similar level of familiarity with the field to actually understand) but have a clue to their meaning in their structure.
A linear operation is not the same as a linear function. Your description describes a linear function, not operation. f(x) = x+1 is a linear function but a nonlinear operation (you can see it doesn’t satisfy the criteria.)
Linear operations are great because they can be represented as matrix multiplication and matrix multiplication is associative (and fast on computers).
“some jargon words that describe very abstract and arcane concepts that don’t map well to normal words which is what I initially thought your point was.”
Yep, that’s what I was getting at. Some jargon can’t just be replaced with non-jargon and retain its meaning. Sometimes people need to actually understand things. I like the idea of replacing pointless jargon (eg species names or medical terminology) but lots of jargon has a point.
Link to great linear algebra videos: https://youtu.be/fNk_zzaMoSs?si=-Fi9icfamkBW04xE
The math symbols are far better at explaining linearity that “homogeneity and additivity” because in order to understand those words you need to either bring in the math symbols or say cumbersome sentences. “Straight line property” is just new jargon. “Linear” is already clearly an adjective, and “linearity” is that adjective turned into a noun. If you can’t understand the symbols, you can’t understand the concept (unless you learned a different set of symbols, but there’s no need for that).
Some math notation is bad, and I support changing it. For example, f = O(g) is the notation I see most often for Big-O notation. This is awful because it uses ‘=‘ for something other than equality! Better would be f \in O(g) with O(g) being the set of functions that grow slower or as fast as g.
I just skimmed this, but it seems like a bunch of studies have found that moving causes harm to children. https://achieveconcierge.com/how-does-frequently-moving-affect-children/
I’m expecting Co-co and LOCALS to fail (nothing against you. These kinds of clever ideas usually fail), and have identified the following possible reasons:
- You don’t follow through on your idea.
- People get mad at you for trying to meddle with the ‘democratic’ system we have and don’t hear you out as you try to explain “no, this is better democracy.” —Especially the monetization system you described would get justified backlash for its pay-for-representation system.
- You never reach the critical mass needed to make the system useful.
- Some political group had previously tried something similar and therefore it got banned by the big parties.
- You can’t stop Co-co and LOCALS from being partisan.
- A competitor makes your thing but entrenched and worse
More bad news:
You'd probably want to be a 501(c)(4) or a Political Action Committees (PAC).
How would LOCALS find a politician to be in violation of their oath?
That would be a powerful position to have. "Decentralization" is a property of a system, not a description of how a system would work.
Futarchy
I'd love to hear your criticisms of futarchy. That could make a good post.
Mobility
Political mobility is good, but there are limitations. People are sticky. Are you going to make your kid move schools and separate them from their friends because you don't like the city's private airplane policy? Probably not.
Experimental Politics
I want more experimental politics so that we can find out which policies actually work! Unfortunately, that's an unpopular opinion. People don't like being in experiments, even when the alternative is they suffer in ignorance.
End
I feel that you are exhausting my ability to help you refine your ideas. Edit these comments into a post (with proper headings and formatting and a clear line of argument) and see what kinds of responses you get! I'd be especially interested in what lawyers and campaigners think of your ideas.
The "Definition of a Linear Operator" is at the top of page 2 of the linked text.
My definition was missing that in order to be linear, A(cx) = cA(x). I mistakenly thought that this property was provable from the property I gave. Apparently it isn't because of "Hamel bases and the axiom of choice" (ChatGPT tried explaining.)
"straight-line property process" is not a helpful description of linearity for beginners or for professionals. "Linearity" is exactly when A(cx) = cA(x) and A(x+y) = A(x) + A(y). Describing that in words would be cumbersome. Defining it every time you see it is also cumbersome. When people come across "legitimate jargon", what they do (and need to do) is to learn a term when they need it to understand what they are reading and look up the definition if they forget.
I fully support experimental schemes to remove "illegitimate jargon" like medical latin, biology latin, and politic speak. Other jargon, like that in math and chemistry are necessary for communication.
There are different kinds of political parties. LOCALS sounds like a single-issue fusion party as described here: https://open.lib.umn.edu/americangovernment/chapter/10-6-minor-parties/
Fusion parties choose one of the main two candidates as their candidate. This gets around the spoiler effect. Eg the Populist Party would list whichever of the big candidates supported Free Silver.
A problem with that is that fusion parties are illegal in 48 states(?!) because the major parties don’t want to face a coalition against them.
LOCALS would try to get the democrat and the republican candidate to use Co-Co to choose their policies (offering the candidate support in form of donations or personnel), and if they do then they get an endorsement. I’m still a bit iffy on the difference between an interest group and a political party, so maybe you are in the clear.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_fusion_in_the_United_States
I love your vision of how a politician should answer the abortion question. Separating the three questions “who do voters think is qualified” “what do voters want” and “what is true” would be great for democracy. Similar to: https://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/futarchy.html
When it comes to local vs not local, if 1/100 people is an X, and they are spread out, then their voice doesn’t mean much and the other 99/100 people in their district can push through policies that harm them. If the Xes are in the same district, then they get a say about what happens to them. I used teachers as an example of an X, but it is more general than that. (Though I’m thinking about the persecution of Jews in particular.)
The translation sentence about matrices does not have the same meaning as mine. Yes, matrices are “grids of numbers”, and yes there’s an algorithm (step by step process) for matrix multiplication, but that isn’t what linearity means.
An operation A is linear iff A(x+y) = A(x) + A(y)
I asked a doctor friend why doctors use Latin. “To sound smarter than we are. And tradition.” So our words for medicine (and probably similar for biology) are in a local optima, but not a global optima. Tradition is a powerful force, and getting hospitals to change will be difficult. Software to help people read about medicine and other needlessly jargon-filled fields is a great idea.
(Putting evolutionary taxonomy information in the name of a creature is a cool idea though, so binomial nomenclature has something going for it.)
You don’t have to dumb down your ideas on LessWrong, but remember that communication is a difficult task that relies on effort from both parties (especially the author). You’ve been good so far. It’s just my job as your debate partner to ask many questions.
What would draw people to Co-Co and what would keep them there?
How are the preferences of LOCALS users aggregated?
LOCALS sounds a lot like a political party. Political parties have been disastrous. I’d love for one of the big two to be replaced. Is LOCALS a temporary measure to get voting reform (eg ranked choice) or a long-term thing?
I want more community cohesion when it comes to having more cookouts. More community cohesion in politics makes less sense. A teacher in Texas has more in common with a teacher in NY than the cattle rancher down the road. Unfortunately, the US political system is by design required to be location based.
Is LOCALS a political party with “increase local community connection” as its party platform? If the party has some actionable plans, then its ideas can get picked up by the big parties if LOCALS shows that its ideas are popular. This might not be a bad idea and could solve the lack-of-community problem without overthrowing the big parties.
A software that easily lets you see “what does this word mean in context” would be great! I often find that when I force click a word to see it’s definition, the first result is often some irrelevant movie or song, and when there are multiple definitions it can take a second to figure out which one is right. Combine this with software that highlights words that are being used in an odd way (like “Rationalist”) and communication over text can be made much smoother.
I don’t think this would be as great against “jargon” unless you mean intentional jargon that is deployed to confuse the reader (eg “subprime mortgages” which is “risky likely to fail house loans”).
I’m under the impression that jargon is important for communication among people who have understanding of the topic. “Matrix multiplication is a linear operation” is jargon-heavy and explaining what it means to a fourth grader would take probably more than 30 minutes.
Agree that more educated voters would be great. I wish that voters understood Pigouvian taxes. Explaining them takes 10 min according to YouTube. I’d love a solution to teach voters about it.
Voting: left for “this is bad”, right for “this is good.” X for “I disagree” check for “I agree”.
This way you can communicate more in your vote. Eg: “He’s right but he’s breaking community norms. Left + check. “He’s wrong but I like the way he thinks. Right + X.”
I guess maybe it is just an abstraction like any other. I can’t put my finger on it but it seems weird in a way that abstracting fingers into a “hand” does not. Maybe something to do with the connotation of “explosion” as “uncontrolled and destructive” when internal combustion is neither.
Welcome! I hope you have Claude a thumbs up for the good response.
Everyone agrees with you that yeah, the “Rationalist” name is bad for many reasons including that it gives philosophers the wrong idea. If you could work your social science magic to change the name of an entire community, we’d be interested in hearing your plan!
I’d be interested in reading your plan to redesign the social system of the United States! I’ve subscribed to be notified to your posts, so I’ll hopefully see it.
I'm curious what you asked Claude that got you a recommendation to LessWrong. No need to share if it is personal.
I love your attitude to debate. "the loser of a debate is the real winner because they learned something." I need to lose some debates.
"Explosions considered fundamental"
If you ask for a simple answer to how a car works, you might get an answer like:
"Cars work by having tiny explosions in the engine that push pistons to power the car."
When I was a kid, this felt like a satisfying explanations. Explosions push things, you can see that happening in movies and games.
But really it is rather lacking. It doesn't say why explosions push, and there does exist a lower explanation for why explosions push — the kinetic theory of gasses.
This is even though "explosions are an ontologically fundamental object that applies force away from the explosion" is a simple hypothesis. You can code an explosion in a video game super easily: you just have a sphere collider (simple!) to detect what is affected and apply a force vector (simple!) to those objects pointing away from the center. It would be much harder to code a game where the air obeys the kinetic theory of gasses.
"Explosions are fundamental" loses out to the Kinetic Theory of Gasses because the Kinetic Theory of Gasses can explain more things — not only explosions, but air conditioners, wind, etc.
And once you know the Kinetic Theory of Gasses, calling every expansion of gas due to increased heat an "explosion" is really weird. Why does the breeze blow? "Sunlight causes an explosion that rises and then air flows to fill the space."
I don't have much to say about this, I just thought it was an interesting case.
I’d also love a slider setting for choosing how much weight to give to my own karma and how much to give to other people’s. If 6 Billion people outside the people my Karma boosts upvote something, I want to see it anyways
Can there be a mechanism that boosts posters who get upvotes from multiple nonoverlapping groups extra? If eg 50 Blues and 50 Greens upvote someone, I want them to get more implicit eigenkarma from me than someone with 100 Blue upvotes even if I tend to upvote Blue more often. Figuring out who is a Blue and who is a Green can be done by finding dense subgraphs..
I'm sorry, but is there an argument here other than "it really feels like we are special"?
Calling for war and giving your opponents silly names is not the kind of thing that LessWrongers want on the platform.
The thing I find interesting about wheels -> books -> gears -> computers is that each of those really is a good way to think about subjects. (In the case of wheels, the seasons are actually caused by something — the Earth — going around in a circle!). Computers in particular have a strong theoretical basis that they are and should be a useful framework for thinking about the world.
Maybe I just didn't understand.
Sorry, I’ll be doing multiple unwholesome things in this comment.
For one, I’m commenting without reading the whole post. I was expecting it to be about something else and was disappointed. The conception of wholesomeness as “considering a wider perspective for your actions” is not very interesting. Everyone considers a wider perspective to be valuable, and nobody takes that more seriously already than EAs.
The conception of wholesomeness I was hoping you’d write about (let’s call it wholesomeness2 for distinction from your wholesomeness) is a type of prestige. Prestige is high status freely conferred by the beneficiaries of the prestigious. Contrast with dominance, which is demanded with force.
It’s hard to pin down, but I think I’d say that Wholesomeness2 is a reputation for not being evil. Clearly, it would be good for EA’s ability to do good if they had wholesomeness2. On top of that, if actions that are not wholesome2 tend to be bad and actions that are wholesome2 tend to be good, then wholesome2 is a good heuristic. (Although the tails come apart, as they always do. https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/09/25/the-tails-coming-apart-as-metaphor-for-life/ ).
If someone has wholesomeness2, then people will assume mistakes rather than malice, will defend the wholesome2 person from attack, and help the wholesome2 when they are in need.
I was hoping your post would be about how to be wholesome2. Here are my thoughts:
Incapable of plotting: dogs and children are wholesome because they don’t have the capacity to be evil.
Wholesomeness2 chains, so since candy is associated with children who are wholesome2, associating yourself with candy can increase your wholesomeness2.
Generating warm-fuzzies: the Make a Wish Foundation is extremely wholesome2, while deworming is not. When someone (like an EA) “attacks” Make a Wish by saying it doesn’t spend its funds in a way that helps many people much compared to alternatives, everyone will come to Make a Wish‘s defense.
Vibes: “wholesome2 goths” feels like an oxymoron. The goth aesthetic is contrary to the idea of being not evil, even though the goths themselves are usually nice people. If you call one “wholesome”, they might even get upset at you.
Actually being not evil: It doesn’t matter how wholesome2 he was before; Bill Cosby lost all his wholesome2 when the world found out he was evil. Don’t be Bill Cosby.
I’d appreciate comments elaborating and adding to this list.
….
By analyzing the concept like this, I lost some wholesomeness2, because I have shown that I have the capacity and willingness to gain wholesomeness2 independent of whether I’m really plotting something evil. I’d argue that I’m just not very willing to self-censor, so you should trust me more instead of less… but that is exactly what an unwholesome2 individual would do.
EA will have some trouble gaining wholesomeness2 because it tends to seek power and has the intelligence and agency needed to be evil.
Plenty of pages get the bare minimum. The level of detail in the e/acc page (eg including the emoji associated with the movement) makes me think that it was edited by an e/acc. The EA page must have been edited by the e/acc since it includes “opposition to e/acc”, but other than that it seems like it was written by someone unaffiliated with either (modulo my changes). We could probably check out the history of the pages to resolve our speculation.
It is worrying that the Wikidata page for e/acc is better than the page for EA and the page for Less Wrong. I just added EA's previously absent "main subject"s to the EA page.
Looks like a Symbolic AI person has gone e/acc. That's unfortunate, but rationalists have long known that the world would end in SPARQL.
I’d call that “underselling it”! Your description of Microscope AI may be accurate, but even I didn’t realize you meant “supercharging science”, and I was looking for it in the list!
This is a great reference for the importance and excitement in Interpretability.
I just read this for the first time today. I’m currently learning about Interpretability in hopes I can participate, and this post solidified my understanding of how Interpretability might help.
The whole field of Interpretability is a test of this post. Some of the theories of change won’t pan out. Hopefully many will. Perhaps more theories not listed will be discovered.
One idea I’m surprised wasn’t mentioned is the potential for Interpretability to supercharge all of the sciences by allowing humans to extract the things that machine learning models discovered to make their predictions. I remember Chris Olah being excited about this possibility on the 80k Podcast, and that excitement meme has spread to me. Current AIs know so much about how the world works, but we can only indirectly use that knowledge indirectly through their black box interface. I want that knowledge for myself and for humanity! This is another incentive for Interpretability, and although it isn’t a development that clearly leads to “AI less likely to kill us” it will make humanity wiser, more prosperous, and on more even footing with the AIs.
Nanda’s post probably deserves a spot in a compilation of Alignment plans.
I'm glad you enjoyed my review! Real credit for the style goes to whoever wrote the blurb that pops up when reviewing posts; I structured my review off of that.
When it comes to "some way of measuring the overall direction of some [AI] effort," conditional prediction markets could help. "Given I do X/Y, will Z happen?" Perhaps some people need to run a "Given I take a vacation, will AI kill everyone?" market in order to let themselves take a break.
What would be the next step to creating a LessWrong Mental Health book?
Ideally reviews would be done by people who read the posts last year, so they could reflect on how their thinking and actions changed. Unfortunately, I only discovered this post today, so I lack that perspective.
Posts relating to the psychology and mental well being of LessWrongers are welcome and I feel like I take a nugget of wisdom from each one (but always fail to import the entirety of the wisdom the author is trying to convey.)
The nugget from "Here's the exit" that I wish I had read a year ago is "If your body's emergency mobilization systems are running in response to an issue, but your survival doesn't actually depend on actions on a timescale of minutes, then you are not perceiving reality accurately." I panicked when I first read Death with Dignity (I didn't realize it was an April Fools Joke... or was it?). I felt full fight-or-flight when there wasn't any reason to do so. That ties into another piece of advice that I needed to hear, from Replacing Guilt: "stop asking whether this is the right action to take and instead ask what’s the best action I can identify at the moment." I don't know if these sentences have the same punch when removed from their context, but I feel like they would have helped me. This wisdom extends beyond AI Safety anxiety and generalizes to all irrational anxiety. I expect that having these sentences available to me will help me calm myself next time something raises my stress level.
I can't speak to the rest of the wisdom in this post. “Thinking about a problem as a defense mechanism is worse (for your health and for solving the problem) than thinking about a problem not as a defense mechanism” sounds plausible, but I can’t say much for its veracity or its applicability.
I would be interested to see research done to test the claim. Does increased sympathetic nervous system activation cause decreased efficacy? A correlational study could classify people in AI safety by (self reported?) efficacy and measure their stress levels, but causation is always trickier than correlation.
A flood of comments criticized the post, especially for typical-minding. The author responded with many comments of their own, some of which received many upvotes and agreements and some of which received many dislikes and disagreements. A follow up post from Valentine would ideally address the criticism and consolidate the valid information from the comments into the post.
A sequence or book compiled from the wisdom of many LessWrongers discussing their mental health struggles and discoveries would be extremely valuable to the community (and to me, personally) and a modified version of this post would earn a spot in such a book.
Liv Boeree: This is pretty nuts, looks like they’ve surpassed GPT4 on basically every benchmark… so this is most powerful model in the world?! Woweee what a time to be alive.
Link doesn't work. Maybe she changed her mind?
Hammer: when there’s low downside, you’re free to try things. (Yeah, this is a corollary of expected utility maximization that seems obvious, but I still feel like I needed to explicitly and recently learn it.) Ten examples:
- Spend a few hours on a last-minute scholarship application.
- Try out dating apps a little (no luck yet, still looking into more effective use. But I still say that trying it was a good choice.)
- Call friends/parents when feeling sad.
- Go to an Effective Altruism retreat for a weekend.
- Be (more) honest with friends.
- Be extra friendly in general.
- Show more gratitude (inspired by “More Dakka”, which I read thanks to the links at the top of this post.
- Spend a few minutes writing a response to this post so that I can get practice with the power of internalizing ideas.
- When headache -> Advil and hot shower. It just works. Why did I keep just waiting and hoping the headache would go away on its own? Takes a few seconds to get some Advil, and I was going to shower anyways. It’s a huge boost to my well-being and productivity with next to no cost.
- Ask questions. It seriously seems like I ask >50% of the questions in whatever room I’m in, and people have thanked me for this. They were ashamed or embarrassed to ask questions or something? What’s the downside?
I hadn’t considered this. You point out a big flaw in the neighbor’s strategy. Is there a way to repair it?
I only have second-hand descriptions of suicidal thoughts-processes, but I’ve heard from some who say they had become convinced that their existence was a negative on the world and the people they care about, and they came to their decision to commit suicide from a sort of (misguided) utilitarian calculation. I tried to give the man this perspective rather than the apathetic perspective you suggest. There’s diversity in the psychology of suicidal people. Do no suicidal people (or sufficiently few) have the Utilitarian type of psychology?
I’m glad you enjoyed it! I had heard of people making promises similar to your Trump-donation one. The idea for this story came from applying that idea to the context of suicide prevention. The part about models is my attempt to explain my (extremely incomplete grasp of) Functional Decision Theory in the context of a story. https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/functional-decision-theory
4/8 of Eliezer Yudkowsky's posts in this list have a minus 9. Compare this with 1/7 for duncan_sabien, 0/6 for paulfchristiano, 0/5 for Daniel Kokotajlo, or 0/3 for HoldenKarnofsky. I wonder why that is.
On one level, the post used a simple but emotionally and logically powerful argument to convince me that the creation of happy lives is good.
On a higher level, I feel like I switch positions of population ethics every time I read something about it, so I am reluctant to predict that I will hold the post's position for much time. I remain unsettled that the field of population ethics, which is central to long-term visions of what the future should look like, has so little solid knowledge. My thinking, and therefore my actions, will remain split among the convincing population ethics positions.
This sequence made me doubt the soundness of philosophical arguments founded on what is "intuitive" (which this post very much relies upon). I don't know how someone might go about doing population ethics from a psychology point of view, but the post's subtitles "Preciousness," "Gratitude," and "Reciprocity" give some clues.
A testable aspect of the post would be to find out if the responses to the Wilbur and Michael thought experiments are universal. Also, I'd be interested to know how many of the people who read this post in 2021 (and have interacted with population ethics since then) maintain their position.
Carlsmith should follow up with his take on the Repugnant Conclusion. The Repugnant Conclusion is the central question of population ethics, so excluding it from this post is a major oversight.
Notes: The "famously hard" link is broken.
He has shown up.
I’m here with a few others in a booth near the door. We haven’t seen Uzair.
Yes, it is. I wanted to win, and there is no rule against “going against the spirit” of AI Boxing.
I think about AI Boxing in the frame of Shut up and Do the Impossible, so I didn’t care that my solution doesn’t apply to AI Safety. Funnily, that makes me an example of incorrect alignment.
I have spent many hours on this, and I have to make a decision by two days from now. There's always the possibility that there is more important information to find, but even if I stayed up all night and did nothing else, I would not be able to read the entirety of the websites, news articles, opinion pieces, and social media posts relating to the candidates. Research costs resources! I suppose what I'm asking for is a way of knowing when to stop looking for more information. Otherwise I'll keep trying possibility 2 over and over and end up missing the election deadline!
Thanks for the response. Those are fair reasons. I should have contributed more.
The LessWrong community is big and some are in Florida. If anyone had interesting things to share about the election I wanted to encourage them to do so.
I guess that makes sense, but very rarely is there a post that appeals to EVERYONE. A better system would be for people to be able to seek out the content that interests them. If something doesn’t interest you, then you move on.
Those are interesting questions! Perhaps you should make your own post instead of using mine to get more of an audience.
Expressing disapproval of both candidates by e.g. voting for Harambe makes sense, but I think that voting for bad policies is a bad move because “obvious” things aren’t obvious to many people, and voting for bad candidates (as opposed to joke candidates) makes their policies more mainstream and likely to be adopted by candidates with chances to win.
Why do you think my post is being shot down?
AI safety research has been groping in the dark, and half-baked suggestions for new research directions are valuable. It isn't as though we've made half of a safe AI. We haven't started, and all we have are ideas.
I think that a problem with my solution is that how can the AI "understand" the behaviors and thought-processes of a "more powerful agent." If you know what someone smarter than you would think then you are simply that smart. If we abstract the specific more-powerful-agent's-thoughts away, then we are left with Kantian ethics, and we are back where we started, trying to put ethics/morals in the AI.
It's a bit rude to call my idea so stupid that I must not have thought about it for more than five minutes, but thanks for your advice anyways. It is good advice.
The AI Box:
A common idea is for the AI to be in a "box" where it can only interact through the world by talking to a human. This doesn't work for a few reasons:
The AI would be able to convince the human to let it out.
The human wouldn't know the consequences of their actions as well as the AI.
Removing capabilities from the AI is not a good plan because the point is to create a useful AI. Importantly, the AI should be able to stop all dangerous AI from being created.