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Suppose they don't? I have at least one that AFAICT doesn't do anything worse than take researchers/resources away from AI alignment in most bad-ends and even in the worst case scenario "just" generates a paperclipper anyway. Which, to be clear, is bad, but not any worse than the current timeline.
(Namely, actual literal time travel and outcome pumps. There is some reason to believe that an outcome pump with a sufficiently short time horizon is easier to safely get hypercompute out of than an AGI, and that a "time machine" that moves an electron back a microsecond is at least energetically within bounds of near-term technology.
You are welcome to complain that time travel is completely incoherent if you like; I'm not exactly convinced myself. But so far, the laws of physics have avoided actually banning CTCs outright.)
What I meant by #2 is “a crowd of people who are trying to be more X, but who, currently, aren’t any more X than you (or indeed very X at all, in the grand scheme of things)”, not that they’re already very X but are trying to be even more X.
Fair. Nevertheless, if the average of the group is around my own level, that's good enough for me if they're also actively trying. (Pretty much by definition of the average, really...)
Empirically, it seems rather hard, in fact.
Well, either that, or a whole lot of people seem to have some reason for pretending not to be able to tell…
... Okay, sorry, two place function. I don't seem to have much trouble distinguishing.
(And yes, you can reasonably ask how I know I'm right, and whether or not I myself are good enough at the relevant Xs to tell, etc etc, but... well, at some point that all turns into wasted motions. Let's just say that I am good enough at distinguishing to arrive at the extremely obvious answers, so I'm fairly confident I'll at least not be easily mislead.)
Actually, no, I explicitly want both 1 and 2. Merely being more X than me doesn't help me nearly as much as being both more X and also always on the lookout for ways to be even more X, because they can give me pointers and keep up with me when I catch up.
And sure, 3 is indeed what often happens.
... First of all, part of the whole point of all of this is to be able to do things that often fail, and succeed at them anyway; being able to do the difficult is something of prerequisite to doing the impossible.
Secondly, all shounen quips aside, it's actually not that hard to tell when someone is merely pretending to be more X. It's easy enough that random faux-philosophical teenagers can do it, after all :V. The hard part isn't staying away from the affective death spiral, it's trying to find the people who are actually trying among them -- the ones who, almost definitionally, are not talking nearly as much about it, because "slay the Buddha" is actually surprisingly general advice.
The thing is -- and here I disagree with your initial comment thread as well -- peer pressure is useful. It is spectacularly useful and spectacularly powerful.
How can I make myself a more X person, for almost any value of X, even values that we would assume entirely inherent or immutable? Find a crowd of X people that are trying to be more X, shove myself in the middle, and stay there. If I want to be a better rationalist, I want friends that are better rationalists than me. If I want to be a better forecaster, I want friends that are better forecasters than me. If I want to be a more effective altruist, earn more to give more, learn more about Y academic topic, or any other similar goal, the single most powerful tool in my toolbox -- or at least the most powerful tool that generalizes so easily -- is to make more friends that already have those traits.
Can this go bad places? Of course it can. It's a positive feedback cycle with no brakes save the ones we give it. But...
... well, to use very familiar logic: certainly, it could end the world. But if we could harness and align it, it could save the world, too.
(And 'crowds of humans', while kind of a pain to herd, are still much much easier than AI.)
That, and the fact that when making decisions, it's *really important* to have non-subjective reasons -- or if you have subjective reasons, you still have objective reasons why they matter, like "if I don't like someone on a personal level, I really shouldn't spend the rest of my life with them" in dating.
So people are used to a mode of thought where a subjective opinion means "you're not done explaining"/"you haven't spent enough mental effort on the problem," and they engage the -- honestly, very productive, very healthy -- same mechanisms they use when justifying a command decision. It just happens to be mis-applied in this case.
I'd like to point out that technically speaking, basically all neural nets are running the exact same code: "take one giant matrix, multiply it by your input vector; run an elementwise function on the result vector; pass it to the next stage that does the exact same thing." So part 1 shouldn't surprise us too much; what learns and adapts and is specialized in a neural net isn't the overall architecture or logic, but just the actual individual weights and whatnot.
Well, it *does* tell us that we might be overthinking things somewhat -- that there might be One True Architecture for basically every task, instead of using LSTM's for video and CNNs for individual pictures and so on and so forth -- but it's not something that I can't see adding up to normality pretty easily.
I was kind of iffy about this post until the last point, which immediately stood out to me as something I vehemently disagree with. Whether or not humans naturally have values or are consistent is irrelevant -- that which is not required will happen only at random and thus tend not to happen at all, and so if you aren't very very careful to actually make sure you're working in a particular coherent direction, you're probably not working nearly as efficiently as you could be and may in fact be running in circles without noticing.
As someone who does a whole lot of pull-based learning, I'm going to chime in and say that using it as your main method of learning is probably not the best idea. tl;dr: Learning on the job is powerful, but it overfits by nature; while there's probably more than a little confirmation bias from us ivory tower types, it's almost certainly drowned out by "everything comes back to math and logic" and "the truth is all of a piece".
There is a fairly natural divide, IMO, between "engineering fields" and "theoretical fields" - fields that are directly aimed at solving actual problems, and fields that are more about exploring what is possible and figuring out what is true in general. Pull-based learning is tempting in engineering fields for all the reasons you list - most of being able to solve a real world problem is precisely knowing about all the little fiddly bits of reality, and there is not yet a good way of predicting which fiddly bits you need to know while sitting in your armchair (metaphorically speaking.) In that regard you can get pretty damn far learning only what you "need to know", to the point of finishing a number of fairly large projects...
... but your knowledge is fundamentally grounded in air, and it's not always obvious how your experience generalizes. To generalize knowledge you need to build an abstract model, and the skill of building abstract models is very, very theoretical (almost by definition!). In particular, using pull-based learning as a primary tool reminds me of trying to learn physics without first learning math as a fundamental. Certainly, you can make use of what other people have done, and when they start pulling out integrals and Lagrangians and group symmetries you can go look that up and learn it then - but that won't let you make your own generalizations, or (as Darmani says) contribute to pushing the boundaries on your own.
Personally, I find pull-based learning most useful as the first/last step in a loop. You do some project, and midway through you find there's a whole bunch of stuff you wish you knew better and learn just enough to get it done. But then you go off and take a course in the dangling ends you discovered, and maybe explore a few branches off that tree too, before you come back to doing some new project challenging enough to force you to learn on the job again - and also enough to make you use your new skills, judge which of them are most important, and generally see them in a new light/in practice. To use the Pokemon metaphor, it's like, after losing against the Elite Four, you boot up someone else's save file right before the Elite Four in a totally different version, and try to pick up general "anti-Elite Four" tricks in general rather than "oh, this particular Elite Four has a Ghost specialist, Ice specialist, Fire specialist, and Steel/Psychic specialist, in that order", which doesn't generalize to other games.
All of your advice seems designed for a longer post published outside LW. None of them seem appropriate for a ~1k word short published in the same place as and three days after both the last chapter of Inadequate Equilibria and "Hero Licensing," both of which I mention in the text.
With the partial exception of the first, but I have been using "linkhyrule5" as an alias and "link" as a nickname for the better part of two decades now, and have not been led to believe that it was particularly hard to decypher. Illusion of transparency, yes, but also evidence to the contrary.
A final note, a postscript that doesn't belong in the main article:
The correct word for the final concept is not "arrogance," because arrogance has, as I note in the first sentence, long since been conflated with the other two, with "hubris" and "pride". It is, nonetheless, what I believe many people mean, when they say "arrogance", and so it is the word I use here. And because it is something to be discarded, its linguistic affinity to "hubris" and "pride" mean those related concepts are thrown out with the bathwater.
A better word for the last concept, for "the state of being in the habit of mockery", would be useful - though not for this particular point.
There we go. No wonder I couldn't find it, it wasn't on LessWrong, and also a lot older than three years. Thanks!
So there's a post that was written, geez, about three years back, about the estimated risk of a catastrophe from an anthropic perspective. I forget most of the logic (or I'd've found it myself), but one of the conclusions was that from the perspective of an observer who requires a "miracle" to exist, miracles seem to occur at approximately evenly spaced intervals. Does anyone remember which post I'm talking about?
As dxu notes, Hermione is likely to use it more than he is. And if Harry does go out, he'll do it with Hermione, and can borrow her Cloak.
It's not "Harry will never use the Cloak again", it's "it's Hermione's now because she'll get the most use out of it."
On the contrary.
The best way to keep yourself safe, now that Hogwarts no longer has literally Lord Voldemort in it, is to sit in the tallest tower of Hogwarts and never leave. Anyone that manages to get past the wards is not going to be stopped by the Cloak, Hallow or not.
Nah. There are better ways to keep yourself safe than invisibility, whereas Hermione will be running around adventuring. Sure, it's very hard to kill her, but if she needs to, say, rescue a hostage or something, that won't necessarily be relevant.
Yes - but achieve what?
He just... wants immortality. And then... that's it. No real idea of what he wants to do with it.
... You know, if I had had to predict which character would end up as a magical girl, Voldemort would've been at the bottom of my list...
He could have spent that hour sending a Patronus to Lucius, though.
Didn't think of it, though.
All he really has to do is convince Lucius to be a rock for about five minutes while he would have been summoned. Heal anything with transfigurative healing + the Stone.
Pack of cards?
About ten chapters ago.
But it does not serve as a solution to say, for example, "Harry should persuade Voldemort to let him out of the box" if you can't yourself figure out how.
It's a shame that nobody's going along this line of thought. It would be cool to see a full, successful AI-Box experiment out there as a fanfiction.
(I'd do it myself, but my previous attempts at such have been.... eheh. Less than successful.)
Was it?
I really don't think the alternative was better than the canonical "Harry gets her out of there at a reasonably low cost considering all the myriad ways he has of making tons of money".
I mean, given that his opponent turned out to be Quirrell, maybe, but otherwise...
Which earlier mistakes were these?
To be fair to Harry, neither of those are good examples - Voldemort's plan also had Hermione in Azkaban thinking she had murdered Draco Malfoy for two weeks, which would have had... unpleasant effects on her mental health, and there's a pretty sharp limit to how much you can count "going along with a hostage situation at gunpoint" as "meddling." A mistake, yes, intentional meddling, no.
Don't think the curse actually enforces oaths, just ensures that you're telling the truth at the time you said it.
Besides, Voldemort, from his point of view, isn't harming Hermione - since, after all, he just went ridiculously out of his way to make sure she wouldn't care.
I would guess that the True Patronus would fail in that case, because it is no longer true that "the only thing wrong with this body is that it's dead."
Something about that line reminded me of a very, very old quote:
Beneath the moonlight glints a tiny fragment of silver, a fraction of a line...
(black robes, falling)
...blood spills out in litres, and someone screams a word.
We've got the robes and the moonlight and the context, but... Harry's naked, so that can't be Harry falling and Hermione screaming. I ... don't think Harry would scream for Voldemort at this point.
... So. That was a thing.
Let's see here. My current best guess for Voldy's extremely redundant anti-apocalypse plan looks something like this:
1) Kill Harry Potter. 2) Thoroughly kill Harry Potter with thirty-odd Death Eaters. 3) Have Harry Potter kill himself 4) Convince Harry Potter that if all else fails and he somehow manages to, I don't know, stab himself in the Resurrection Stone and set off a chain reaction that throws his other 108 Horcruxes into the Sun, he'll kill himself anyway 5) If he doesn't kill himself, ensure that Hermione Granger is around to keep him sane.
Extremely confused.
Worried for Harry, worried for Harry's morality, which immediately leads into "wait what exactly did they do to me*"?
...
Seriously, EY? You split it up into two chapters just for that? -.-
It is if the poison's effect is to make the person a complete drooling moron.
Google Bahl's Stupefaction, and then Idiot Ball.
General prophecy shenanigans. There are now two different prophecies orbiting Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres, one of which certainly seems to imply that he's going to survive to destroy the world. Obvious, predictable solutions are likely to fail.
You can retract your entire post in the bottom-right corner.
Be stupid?
There's no excuse for letting Harry have his stuff back, after all.
On a side note - Blood Fort sacrifice, hm? *amused*
"Fal-Tor-Pan" similarly, though I had to Google that one.
Partially, blindness due to not wanting to be bored again. Friendship is magic and alicorn princesses :p.
Partially, because he's not sure that he can kill Harry.
If your prediction is lower than 50%, what you're really saying is, "Of all the hypotheses I that have been elevated to my attention, this one is most likely; however, I am so uncertain that I am more likely to be wrong than right."
Or in other words, to paraphrase Eliezer, I'm fairly sure that random person's name isn't Klein, but I'm very sure it's not Ktlzybplq.
I think it's mostly because of Trelawney's prophecy. The second Hermione died, Trelawney blurts out: "HE IS HERE. THE ONE WHO WILL TEAR APART THE VERY STARS IN HEAVEN. HE IS HERE. HE IS THE END OF THE WORLD."
Which, y'know. Is a tad ominous.
... oh dear gods I wish I had not made that connection.
Um. I really really hope that's not indicative of how horrible what he did to Snape was...
He doesn't actually know that ritual, though. Quirrell does stuff with his wand and Harry knows better than to just blindly copy whatever off his memory.
The resurrection ritual, as near as I can tell, requires only going to that obelisk, placing flesh on the slab, and saying "X, X, X so wisely hidden", where "X" is whatever you you have - blood, flesh, bone, vitreous humors of the eye, whatever.
Pretty much. It's not mass producible, is the problem here.
It's a start, and a pretty good start at that, but it's not done.
Nnnnot quite. Remember, for Harry, part of defeating death is mass true resurrection. And the only method of resurrection Harry knows of requires a finite amount of his own life-force. (I suppose that may not apply to Muggles, though.)
Also, he needs the body, which doesn't usually exist for anyone dead too long ago...
Presumably, the body was repaired to true health - which also means that the brain was restored to its original state, that is, functional.
At that point, a Muggle can be revived by simply restarting her heart. A witch, apparently, requires a bit of magic.
While I'm not at all sure this is all real (we did end the last chapter with Harry staring into the Mirror, after all), Quirrell's continued NOPE-ing over Trelawney's star prophecy remains utterly hilarious.
It's like he thinks that his own life depends on Hermione Granger being alive, somehow.
For I would never want you to be deprived of Hermione Granger's counsel and restraint, not ever while the stars yet live.
snickers
Further speculation along this line: Even if this is a dream, what has Harry gained from this vision?
- A reasonably non-Dark way of resurrecting Hermione. (!)
- Insight into the Dark Lord's motives, assuming that this is all things he "might have" said.
- A hint into how he might be killed.
Meta-level evidence for this: Eliezer doesn't usually post two chapters, short or not, in one day.
Not wasting his readers time speculating about a "dream" would be a good motive for that.
Random note of confusion - Why is the mirror blank? Harry should be seeing his CEV right now, since he's unCloaked in front of the mirror.
Also, the Cloak is Harry's, yes? If Harry claims the Cloak right now, while Quirrell's wearing it, will that trigger resonance?
Meh. The big Dath Bey Yewoonen prophecy may not apply to this one, but Harry will certainly consider this to be "death" for his purposes - and Harry does not intend to leave anyone dead.
And what magic can do, an immortal rational wizard can undo...
... Huh.
... Is it just me, or is Harry Potter now in the same room as the Elder Wand and the Philosopher's Stone?
... Well, there's a great big Dark Lord in the way, but.
Right, but the Mirror (in theory) has no power over anything not reflected in it, and Harry's still invisible.