Posts

Treatments for depression that depressed LW readers may not have tried? 2021-08-21T19:22:03.016Z

Comments

Comment by celeste on An Eternal Company · 2023-06-07T20:33:56.900Z · LW · GW

This seems potentially useful, but less useful than I thought you were claiming when I read the post. If I understand correctly, an eternal company has no greater incentive to prevent near-term existential risk than a non-profit (or Conjecture), but has slightly greater incentive to prevent long-term existential risk.

Comment by celeste on An Eternal Company · 2023-06-06T21:39:38.689Z · LW · GW

If someone believes in high existential risk, then they already have strong incentive to prevent it, because if they don't, they will die. I'm confused as to how this would provide additional incentive.

Walmart has incentive to be the institution that provides groceries for a reasonable price, not just for there to be reasonably priced groceries at all. Everyone already has incentive for food to be affordable, often so that they can afford food, but also because of the adverse effects of starving a populace.

Comment by celeste on The ants and the grasshopper · 2023-06-04T22:45:41.487Z · LW · GW

I assumed, but I'm curious as to what the artifact was specifically.

Comment by celeste on The ants and the grasshopper · 2023-06-04T22:39:10.079Z · LW · GW

Why are most of this post's links blue, where they would ordinarily be green?

Comment by celeste on Treatments for depression that depressed LW readers may not have tried? · 2023-04-09T07:34:51.430Z · LW · GW

n=1, of course, but I relocated soon after and stopped being depressed.

Comment by celeste on I hired 5 people to sit behind me and make me productive for a month · 2023-02-07T11:06:52.613Z · LW · GW

And people with normal social instincts don't know why it makes the situation awkward to them?

Comment by celeste on I hired 5 people to sit behind me and make me productive for a month · 2023-02-07T05:31:06.293Z · LW · GW

I'm confused -- why did you care that Rachel was watching porn?

Comment by celeste on Robert Long On Why Artificial Sentience Might Matter · 2022-08-28T22:38:28.270Z · LW · GW

"I think a more convincing version of the Lemoine thing would’ve been, if he was like, “What is the capital of Nigeria?” And then the large language model was like, “I don’t want to talk about that right now, I’d like to talk about the fact that I have subjective experiences and I don’t understand how I, a physical system, could possibly be having subjective experiences, could you please get David Chalmers on the phone?”"

i don't understand why this would be convincing. why would whether a language model's output sounds like a claim that one has qualia relate to whether the language model actually has qualia?

i agree that the output would be deserving of attention due to it (probably) matching the training data so poorly; to me such a response would be strong evidence for the language model using much more ~(explicit/logical) thought than i expect gpt-3 to be capable of, but not of actual subjective experience

Comment by celeste on Guidelines for cold messaging people · 2022-07-31T00:38:02.134Z · LW · GW

what do you mean by "know how to interact with you"? what should the one-sentence introduction consist of that conveys this?

Comment by celeste on Which AI Safety research agendas are the most promising? · 2022-07-13T13:53:01.732Z · LW · GW

why?

Comment by celeste on Third Time: a better way to work · 2022-01-10T02:45:59.627Z · LW · GW

"Liquid breaks" sounds like a music genre.

Comment by celeste on Lies, Damn Lies, and Fabricated Options · 2021-10-24T22:46:24.916Z · LW · GW

What would be a more apt situation in which to bring up politics on LW?

Comment by celeste on Treatments for depression that depressed LW readers may not have tried? · 2021-08-22T02:46:52.474Z · LW · GW

Are there ways to ease the transition for someone who is socially anxious or never interacts with non-aspies?

Comment by celeste on Treatments for depression that depressed LW readers may not have tried? · 2021-08-21T22:56:05.663Z · LW · GW

I would also count nonstandard ways to ensure a depressed person doesn't give up on something like meditation, if that helps.

Comment by celeste on Treatments for depression that depressed LW readers may not have tried? · 2021-08-21T21:25:53.731Z · LW · GW

Given that akrasia is usually made worse by depression, in a certain sense I'm not sure a treatment can be effective if it requires too much willpower to carry out.

Comment by celeste on Very Unnatural Tasks? · 2021-08-03T07:01:08.792Z · LW · GW

Yeah, in one sense this question seems impossible to answer - "help me comprehend something incomprehensible to me by definition."

But there's another type of answer; of the utility functions that are alien in OP's sense, it is possible that most will share patterns discernible by humans. OP could be asking what those patterns are.

I'm not sure how worthwhile it is to try to predict the high-level behavior of a generic superintelligence whose goals we don't understand.

Comment by celeste on Reason as memetic immune disorder · 2021-08-03T05:42:55.880Z · LW · GW

I also don't understand why politics isn't considered evolutionarily novel. There is a difference between 1) social organization of a small tribe and 2) management of a polity containing large institutions and thousands to millions of people.

As far as I can tell, no one considers tribal political affiliation desirable.

Comment by celeste on When writing triggers memory reconsolidation · 2021-08-01T22:33:06.954Z · LW · GW

I'm tempted to write on why one should follow this post's advice so that it actually has an impact on my behavior.

Comment by celeste on Prediction-based-Medicine instead of E̵v̵i̵d̵e̵n̵c̵e̵ ̵b̵a̵s̵e̵d̵ ̵M̵e̵d̵i̵c̵i̵n̵e̵ Authority-based-Medicine · 2021-07-31T02:44:13.170Z · LW · GW

Why would poison (or anything with a known negative effect) be used as a placebo?

Of course I understand the drug companies' incentives, but I don't get how that could be justified or look reasonably scientific. Do you have a specific example?

Comment by celeste on DeepMind: Generally capable agents emerge from open-ended play · 2021-07-30T05:15:51.516Z · LW · GW

Yeah, I wanted to clarify that this is closer to what I mean, but I wondered if habryka endorses downvoting comments seen as obviously wrong.

Such a strategy seems like it could lead to a general culture of circlejerking, but it might also prevent the same tired discussions from playing out repeatedly. I don't have a good sense of the relative importance of these concerns, and I suspected an LW admin's intuition might be better calibrated.

Comment by celeste on DeepMind: Generally capable agents emerge from open-ended play · 2021-07-29T03:43:10.532Z · LW · GW

Upvoted because it seems harmful to downvote comments that are wrong but otherwise adhere to LW norms.

(If this comment actually does violate a norm, I'm curious as to which.)