While the decision to remove might have been correct, clearly Altman placed some value on people like us learning about his views and might have appreciated your efforts to inform more such people about this thinking in a way that's opaque to the traditional media.

Yes good point.  They might be doing this to set up a situation where they tell us to not build Dyson spheres.  If we accept that aliens are visiting us and observe that the universe is otherwise in a natural state we might infer that the aliens don't want us to disturb this state outside of our solar system.

I am unaware if Hanson has written about this.  Panspermia could happen by the first replicators happening in space perhaps on comets and then spreading to planets.  As Hanson has pointed out, if life is extremely rare it is strange that life would originate on earth when there are almost certainly super-earths on which you would think life would be much more likely to develop.  A solution to this paradox is that life did develop on such an Eden and then spread to earth billions of years ago from a star system that is now far away.  Our sun might have been very close to the other star system when life spread, or indeed in the same system at the time.

You have anticipated Robin Hanson's argument.  He believes that the only way that the aliens would be able to avoid having some splinter group changing the universe in obvious ways would be if they had a very stable and authoritarian leadership. 

Yes, and it could also be that I was so excited that the great Sam Altman might agree with me on an issue I greatly care about that I read something into what he said that wasn't there.

Do you remember my saying that the issue was as important as AGI and him agreeing with my statement?

What do you remember of the question I asked Altman and of his response?  

Were you in discussion room 1 to hear the question I asked of Altman about UFOs?  If not, you don't have a basis to say "at no point".

My claims mostly relate to what Sam Altman said, in response to my question, in discussion room 1 after Altman's official talk had ended.  Why are you so confident that I have said false things about what he stated?  Gwern was, I believe, just referring to what  Altman said in his official talk.  You should have a very high standard of proof before you accuse someone of saying "pretty false things".

I think people irrationally reject evidence that aliens are UFOs.  Pilots have reported that they feared disclosing what they had seen UFOs do because no one would believe them.  Ironically, If my version of what Altman said is true, we have a case here where I'm being falsely accused of spreading false information for accurately reporting that a hyper-high status person thinks UFOs are likely aliens.  Something about  UFOs causes normally rational people to jump to the conclusion that anyone offering evidence for the alien hypothesis is either lying, deluded, or a fool.

I believe he did in discussion Room 1 in response to my question.  This occurred after his formal talk was over.

Thanks.  Hanson, as best I recall, gave the 1/1000 Bayesian prior of aliens visiting us.

The US military claims that on multiple occasions they have observed  ships do things well beyond our capacities.  There are cases where a drone is seen by multiple people and recorded by multiple systems flying in ways well beyond our current technology to the point where it is more likely the drones are aliens than something built by SpaceX or the Chinese.  The aliens are not hiding, they are making it extremely obvious that they are here, it is just that we are mostly ignoring the evidence.  The aliens seem to have a preference for hanging around militaries and militaries have a habit of classifying everything of interest.  I don't understand why the aliens don't reshape the universe building things like Dyson spheres, but perhaps the aliens are like human environmentalists who like to keep everything in its natural state.  Hanson's theory is that life is extremely rare in the universe but panspermia might be true.  Consequently, even though our galaxy might be the only galaxy in 1 billion light years to have any life, our galaxy might have two advanced civilizations, and it would make sense that if the other civ is more than a million years in advance of us they would send ships to watch us.  Panspermia makes the Bayesian prior of aliens visiting us, even given that the universe can't have too much advanced life or we would see evidence of it, not all that low, perhaps 1/1,000.   I don't know why they don't use language to communicate with us, but it might be like humans sending deep sea probes to watch squids.  I think the purpose of the UFOs might be for the aliens to be showing us that they are not a threat.  If, say, we encounter the alien's home planet in ten thousands years and are technologically equal to the aliens because both of us have solved science, the aliens can say, "obviously we could have wiped you out when you were primitive, so the fact that we didn't is evidence we probably don't now mean you harm."

The second.

It wasn't recorded.  Actually I was the one who asked the question in the room discussion.  The evidence that UFOs seen by the military are aliens is fairly strong.   I've done three podcasts on the topic included one with Robin Hanson.  See https://soundcloud.com/user-519115521

Sam Altman also said that the government admitted that UFOs are real.  After the talk in the "room" discussions Sam expressed agreement that UFOs being aliens are potentially as important as AGI, but did not feel this was an issue he had time to work on.

No, but the goal wouldn't be to change someone's mind.  It would be to get them to stop bugging you.

Unlikely.  The Davidson Institute does not get asked to recruit such children, and they would be the easiest pathway to such recruitment in the US.

Make thousands of clones of John von Neumann.  Yes, first we will have to get some of his DNA and we will have to figure out exactly how to clone humans.  But the payoff, at least over a 30-year-time scale, seems much bigger than anything else proposed.  On a less ambitious but related front, identify profoundly gifted kids between, say, 8-16 and offer them free expert tutoring in return for some of that tutoring being about the importance and challenges of AI safety.  The Davidson Institute would be a good place to start to look for such kids.

Explain to your family that to properly evaluate homeopathy your entire family needs to understand statistics.  Give your parents some books on statistics and whenever they bug you to do something about homeopathy ask how much progress they have made with the stats books.  Start numerous conversations with your parents about statistics and work statistics into all the conversations they have with you.  When they want to watch TV suggest instead they watch a YouTube stats video.  Eventually, work out a truce.  

I don't think I'm a mouth-breather.

I have found that sleeping with tape over my mouth improves my sleep quality.  I know this sounds crazy, but if you do a quick Internet search you will find support for the practice.

I think it is somewhere in this podcast we did:

https://soundcloud.com/user-519115521/cochran-on-increasing-iq

Many worlds being true increases the likelihood that anthropic analysis can provide us with useful information about the type of existential risk we face.  For example, if civilizations such as ours are commonplace, the Fermi paradox makes it likely that we will face some kind of great filter that usually destroys civilizations such as ours.  If civilizations such as ours are rare, the odds of us facing such a great filter are much lower.  Many worlds being true, I think, means we should increase our estimate of living in a universe in which we are common.

I don't normally think about them, and if I needed to I would just find some image on the Internet.

Although I have Aphantasia, standardized tests indicated that I have high reading comprehension.  I wonder if my Aphantasia contributes to my reading very quickly.  I read fast enough that when one of my students asks me to read a paper in office hours if I read at my normal speed I figure she will think I didn't actually read her paper.

Based on reading the Reddit Aphantasia forum, some people with aphantasia can visualize when they dream, while others can't.  I have been actively trying to lucid dream for a while with a small amount of success although I have never tried WILD.  I will look into it.

As I have Aphantasia I never visualize when not dreaming.  Before I learned about Aphantasia, I would have been amazed to learn that anyone visualizes while they read.  I  am curious to the extent that visualizing helps learning to see what kind of handicap I faced as a student.  I have a PhD in economics.

I do with my son.

I co-authored a paper suggesting that we take advantage of AI's superhuman abilities in chess to create trustworthy and untrustworthy chess oracles to help develop strategies for dealing with possibly unfriendly oracles.  https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.02911

Providing one-on-one tutoring to highly intelligent children should be considered by the effective altruism community in part because many members of this community would themselves be qualified to be such tutors.

If you are considering New Hampshire, you should also look at Western Massachusetts.  Both offer the opportunity to drive to Boston, but without high city land prices.  Western Mass also has many colleges including University of Mass at Amherst.  Lyme disease, however, is a problem.

Thanks, I had forgotten the joy kids experience from having snow days.

I fear I might have lost my soul as I don't understand why NYC  having remote days instead of snow days is "evil".  Snow days are usually made up at the end of the school year, while I presume remote days will not be.  So why is it evil to extend summer vacation at the expense of having a few remote days?

What would you advise a college student to do if the student is unusually good at math and wants to contribute to creating an aligned AGI?  Beyond a computer science major/multivariable calculus/linear algebra/statistics what courses should this student take? 

Do you know of any air purifier that's effective and not noisy? 

My YouTube video about how a prophecy concerning Roman Emperor's Caracalla's assassination became self-fulfilling.

The prediction that the sun and stars we perceive will go out is absurd only because you are excluding the possibility that you are dreaming.  Because of what we label as dreams we frequently perceive things that quickly pop out of existence.

I'm confused since as a buyer if I believed the seller could predict with probability .75 I would flip a fair coin to decide which box to take meaning that the seller couldn't predict with probability .75.  If I can't randomize to pick a box I'm not sure how to fit in what you are doing to standard game theory (which I teach).

"Over the past few years, some people have updated toward pretty short AGI timelines. If your timelines are really short, then maybe you shouldn't sign up for cryonics, because the singularity – good or bad – is overwhelmingly likely to happen before you biologically die"  

But such a scenario means there is less value in saving for retirement and this should make it financially easier for you to sign up for cryonics.  Also, the sooner we get friendly AGI, the sooner people in cryonics will be revived meaning there is a lower risk that your cryonics provider will fail before you can be revived.  

Strongly agree.  I would be happy to help.  Here are three academic AI alignment articles I have co-authored. https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.02911  https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.10536 https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.00812

While not captured by the outside view, I think the massive recent progress in machine learning should give us much hope of achieving LEV in 30 years.  

Yes, the more people infected with the virus, and the longer the virus is in people the more time for a successful mutation to arise.

I did a series of podcasts on COVID with Greg Cochran and Greg was right early on.  Greg has said from the beginning that the risk of a harmful mutation is reasonably high because the virus is new meaning there are likely lots of potential beneficial mutations (from the virus's viewpoint) that have not yet been found.

https://soundcloud.com/user-519115521

From an AI safety viewpoint, this might greatly increase AI funding and drive talent into the field and so advance when we get a general artificial superintelligence.

Yes for high concentration of observers, and if high tech civilizations have strong incentives to grab galactic resources as quickly as they can  thus preventing the emergence of other high tech civilizations, most civilizations such as ours will exist in universes that have some kind of late great filter to knock down civilizations before they can become spacefaring.

Thanks, that's a very clear explanation. 

At the end of Section 5.3 the authors write "So far, we have assumed that we can derive no information on the probability of intelligent life from our own existence, since any intelligent observer will inevitably find themself in a location where intelligent life successfully emerged regardless of the probability. Another line of reasoning, known as the “Self-Indication Assumption” (SIA), suggests that if there are different possible worlds with differing numbers of observers, we should weigh those possibilities in proportion to the number of observers (Bostrom, 2013). For example, if we posit only two possible universes, one with 10 human-like civilizations and one with 10 billion, SIA implies that all else being equal we should be 1 billion times more likely to live in the universe with 10 billion civilizations. If SIA is correct, this could greatly undermine the premises argued here, and under our simple model it would produce high probability of fast rates that reliably lead to intelligent life (Fig. 4, bottom)...Adopting SIA thus will undermine our results, but also undermine any other scientific result that would suggest a lower number of observers in the Universe. The plausibility and implications of SIA remain poorly understood and outside the scope of our present work."  

I'm confused, probably because anthropic effects confuse me and not because the authors made a mistake.  But don't the observer selection effects the paper uses derive information from our own existence, and if we make use of these effects shouldn't we also accept the implications of SIA?  Should rejecting SIA because it results in some bizarre theories cause us to also have less trust in observer selection effects?

Not that I recall. 

In 2007 I wrote an article for Inside Higher Ed advocating that "institutions should empower graduating seniors to reward teaching excellence. Colleges should do this by giving each graduating senior $1,000 to distribute among their faculty. Colleges should have graduates use a computer program to distribute their allocations anonymously."

https://insidehighered.com/views/2007/09/07/beyond-merit-pay-and-student-evaluations

In an accident something from your car could hit you in the head even if you have an airbag.  For example, the collusion could cause your head to hit a side window