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I said Estevéz because he is the less famous aspect of the person, not because I super-finetuned the analogy.
Updating the trust into your therapist seems to be a legitimate interest even if he is not famous for his psychiatric theory or practice. Suppose for example that an influential and controversial (e.g. White-supremacist) politician spent half his week being a psychiatrist and the other half doing politics, but somehow doing the former anymously. I think patients might legitimately want to know that their psychiatrist is this person. This might even be true if the psychiatrist is only locally active, like the head of a KKK chapter. And journalists might then find it inappropriate to treat the two identities as completely separate.
I assume there are reasons for publishing the name and reasons against. It is not clear that being a psychiatrist is always an argument against.
Part of the reason is, possibly, that patients often cannot directly judge the quality of therapy. Therapy is a credence good and therapists may influence you in ways that are independent of your depression or anorexia. So having more information about your psychiatrist may be helpful. At the same time, psychiatrists try to keep their private life out of the therapy, for very good reasons. It is not completely obvious to me where journalists should draw the line.
Estevéz. If I recall this correctly, Scott thought that potential or actual patients could be influenced in their therapy by knowing his public writings. (But I may mistemember that.)
Suppose Carlos Irwin Estévez worked as a therapist part-time, and he kept his identities separate such that his patients could not use his publicly known behavior as Sheen in order to update about whether they should believe his methods work. Should journalists writing about the famous Estevéz method of therapy keep his name out of the article to support him?
What is that reason you are referring to?
Thanks for giving a useful example.
For most people I guess it would be better to delete the phrase "I'm such a fool" from the evaluation, in order to avoid self-blame that becomes a self-image.
The "Snake cult of consciousness" theory sounds extremely fascinating. Qt the same time, it also sounds like the explanations why the pyramids were built by aliens. For laypeople, it is hard to distinguish between Important insights and clever nonsense.
Thank you very much. Why would liability for harms caused by AIs discourage the publishing of the weights of the most powerful models?
Okay, maybe I should rephrase my question: What is the typical AI safety policy they would enact if they could advise president, parliament and other real-world institutions?
https://laneless.substack.com/p/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics Isn't this the substack of the original author?
By now there are several AI policy organizations. However, I am unsure what the typical AI safety policy is that any of them would enforce if they had unlimited power. Is there a summary of that?
I don't really understand why Substack became so popular, compared to eg WordPress. Is Substack writing easier to monetize?
So your timelines are the same as in 2018?
Thanks for the article recommendations.
Did you take such things into account when you made the decision, or decisions?
Almost all the blogs in the world seem to have switched to Substack, so I'm wondering if I'm the only one whose browser is very slow in loading and displaying comments from Substack blogs. Or is this a firefox problem?
I think the "stable totalitarianism" scenario is less science-fiction than the annihilation scenario, because you only need an extremely totalitarian state (something that already exists or existed) enhanced by AI. It is possible that this would come along with random torture. This would be possible with a misguided AI as well.
I don't fully understand your implicatioks of why unpredictable things should not be frightening. In general, there is a difference between understanding and creating. The weather is unpredictable but we did not create it; where we did and do create it, we indeed seem to be too careless. For human brains, we at least know that preferences are mostly not too crazy, and if they are, capabilities are not superhuman. With respect to the immune system, understanding may be not very deep, but intervention is mostly limited by understanding, and where that is not true, we may be in trouble.
Do you think there could be an amount of suffering at the end of of a life that would outweigh 20 good years? (Including that this end could take very long.)
Thanks. What are the things that AI will, in 10, 20 or 30 years, have "trouble with", and want are the "relevant skills" to train your kids in?
The post's starting point is "how fast AI is advancing and all the uncertainty associated with that (unemployment, potential international conflict, x-risk, etc.)". You don't need concrete high-p-of-doom timelines for that, or even expect AGI at all. It is not necessary for "potential international conflict", for example.
Could you please briefly describe the median future you expect?
A minor point regarding the EU's institutions:
- The European Parliament does not have "population-proportional membership from each country", but: "the seats are distributed according to "degressive proportionality", i.e., the larger the state, the more citizens are represented per MEP. As a result, Maltese and Luxembourgish voters have roughly 10x more influence per voter than citizens of the six largest countries." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Parliament)
- The Council of the EU does not have "one vote per country", but its rules usually prescribe a more complicated majority rule and sometimes unanimity.
I completed the survey!
I'd still like to ask those questions (or a similar set of questions) somewhere. If someone has an idea where and how that could make sense, feel free to answer that as a comment to mine.
I would not like if the question "If you are an American, what party are you registered with?" were one of very few politics questions. It is too country-specific.
In which sense do you need the answer to be "representative"?
I think willingness-to-pay questions are in general not very reliable, because they are hypothetical. Moreover, they might give the survey a marketing flavor.
Deletion suggestions:
- Seems redundant: "Religious Background What is your family's religious background, as of the last time your family practiced a religion?"
- Maybe one of the aliens questions is enough.
- P(Pastafarianism)
- "Best Virtue
Which of the twelve virtues of rationality do you think the LessWrong community scores highest on at the moment?"
I don't really understand the question. Same for "worst virtue". - The willingness-to-pay for the sequences, hpmor and the codex. This could just be asked outside of the survey.
- ideas for LW April Fools’ Day (I think you don't need a centralized question for that.)
- "Tax Opinion": I think it's not useful to answer "higher" or "lower"
- "Great stagnation": seems to specific
I have a research idea in mind - I would like to know how by how certain expectations shape peoples' decisions. In addition to certain questions already in the survey, the question suggestions for this are:
- Were you surprised by the capabilities of chatgpt?
2. Self-rate your knowledge of
Global income and wealth distributions
AI
Geopolitics
Climate change
Practical ethics
Animal suffering
Effective interventions to help the poor
3. Self-rate your social skills on a scale from 0 to 10
4. Suffering of poor people that live today touches me emotionally: 0 to 10 scale
5. Suffering of animals that live today touches me emotionally: 0 to 10 scale
6. Whether people 10,000 years in the future exist touches me emptionally: 0 to 10 scale
7. Whether humanity will go extinct within the next 100 years touches me emptionally: 0 to 10 scale.
8. I rate my expectations as:
- insert "Noisy to well-calibrated" scale
- insert "Biased towards optimism to biased towards pessimism" scale
9. I believe that the median human's life in 2040 compared to today will be (your median expectation):
- better than today
- worse than today
- doesn't apply because humans will be extinct
- other answer:
10. I do not have more children than I have because:
Lack of a partner
Unwilling partner
This is my ideal family size
More are planned or expected
I don't have time
Personal finance reasons
Personal Biology reasons
It is more important to help others who exist
I think the future is not livable
I think they would be born into a short life and/or suffer
Later is better
Other reasons:
11. My overall happiness:
(0 to 10 scale)
12. I expect to live to an age of:
13. I save a relevant amount of money or other resources for old age:
- No, because I do not expect to live long enough
- No, because I expect an age of abundance
- No, but I think I should
- No, for other reasons
- Yes
Maybe that is a question for the Open Thread or just a general forum question instead of a survey question?
"Concentration of power is problematic but it's also necessary for things getting done."
Sure some amount of power may be productive, but very high concentration of power can be problematic, for example as it puts people on the powerful person's Mercy.
"Fear of concentration of power on individual people is one core feature of the Great Stagnation."
I assume "feature" in this cases means correlate, not cause.
"As far as Musk's retweeting goes, it's impact is not very large compared to the the effects of projects like Starship."
This is hard to compare. Influencing opinions is relevant.
I would also say that Musk's tweets are informative in forming expectations about what he might use control of strategically important technologies for in the future. In general, I would prefer if a person did not have infinite power to determine the ability of societies to act, and I guess there is an amount of power lower than infinite at which this becomes problematic.
Measurement would be an exaggeration.
I see fandom. I hardly see people discussing that Elon Musk retweets and promotes very problematic things, which seem like he builds his political worldviews on very low-quality sources. And I hardly see people noticing that such concentration of power can in itself be a problem.
Still waiting for a change of the general attitude in certain rationality etc circles concerning Elon Musk, a change that would also take into account what kind of news sources Musk promotes on X.
This reminds me of General Equilibrium Theory. This was once a fashionable field, were very smart people like Ken Arrow and Gérard Debreu proved the conditions for the existence of general equilibrium (demand = supply for all commodities at once). Some people then used the proofs to dismiss the idea of competitive equilibrium as an idea that could direct economic policy, because the conditions are extremely demanding and unrealistic. Others drew the opposite conclusion: Look, competitive markets are great (in theory), so actual markets are (probably) also great!
Many people seem to think that cooling effect is a completely new finding. That is a bit misleading - for example, https://www.economist.com/business/2018/10/27/sulphur-emissions-rules-for-shipping-will-worsen-global-warming and https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2018/11/03/shipping-regulators-plan-to-cut-greenhouse-gas-emissions are from 2018.
Still, over time it should become more likely to meet Bf, not less; there are more people in general, and more documentary filmmakers, adventurers, tourists, infrared cameras, planes etc
Except if they died out. However, someone should at some point also find bones.
Why do nuclear-energy fan articles often mention France as a positive example without discussing the drastic reduction of French nuclear power generation in 2022?
Yes, the statement that switching off coal-fired power plants etc. is only true at the margin. However, for the OP's question, it seems that the sign of "marginal social benefit - marginal social cost" seems crucial.
In the recent Econtalk podcast with Tyler Cowen, Cowen explicitly and strictly demands a mathematical model of AI risk, claiming something like that does not exist.
At the same time, he sees "Hayekian" arguments as a kind of benchmark. As far as I know, there is no mathematical benchmark model of the classical Hayek argument.
The same is true for Cowen's demand for loyalty to the US constitution. There is no mathematical model for that.
All claims and demands of Cowen are asymmetrical. The doomers are emotional, he says. The non-doomers are just reasonable.
Yes, I misremembered - but the CO2-based calculation is not driving the main results; instead, it is an extension calculated for one sector (electric power generation). See these two paragraphs from the introduction:
"We then turn to the estimation of damages by industry. We find that the ratio of GED/VA is greater than one for seven industries (stone quarrying, solid waste incineration, sewage treatment plants, oil- and coal-fired power plants, marinas, and petroleum-coal product manufacturing). This indicates that the air pollution damages from these industries are greater than their net contribution to output. Several other industries also have high GED/VA ratios. We also present the overall size of GED by industry. Five industries stand out as large air polluters: coal-fired power plants, crop production, truck transportation, livestock production, and highway- street-bridge construction.
In order to explore the robustness of our results to certain assumptions in the integrated assessment model, we conduct a sensitivity analysis. The analysis shows that the level of GED is sensitive to assumptions about the value of mortality risks, how this value varies by age, and the adult mortality dose-response function for particulate matter. A final analysis examines the fossil fuel electric generating industry in detail. It presents a more detailed calculation of GED for coal-fired power plants and it includes the impact of carbon dioxide (CO 2)."
The 184 bn $ (in 2011) do not include CO2 (see first paragraph of section B)
Concerning positive externalities: Yes, the authors note that this is not part of the calculation. But it is completely unclear what the relevance of this is. Every economic action may have a positive externality, but why exactly should this favor fossil energy sources in particular? And why should I assume these externalities to be so large that they are relevant=
One thing of which it might be helpful if powerful beings could learn it: "It's in general not okay to enforce your wishes on others. "
However, ethics is complicated and you will probably find many cases where enforcing your wishes on others is actually okay.
Moreover, if the learning dataset is humanity's behavior, then it's probably a problem that enforcing takes place all the time.
As far as I remember (but it is a while ago that I read that paper), the paper I linked to does not include CO2 externalities but focuses on the effects of local air pollution on the United States itself. So no, if anything the negative externalities derived in the paper are too low, and net value added would be even lower if climate change was taken into account. What is your criticism of how the benefits of the industries are calculated?
I have not read the book. Nonetheless, I would like to point out two things:
- As presented, the argument seems to suggest that there are no other potential sources of energy (except via the word "cheap").
- According to Muller, Mendelsohn, Nordhaus (2011): Environmental Accounting for Pollution in the United States Economy, American Economic Review, the air pollution of "solid waste combustion, sewage treatment, stone quarrying, marinas, and oil and coal-fired power plants" has external costs that exceed the value added of these sectors even before taking climate change into account.
Typical fiction has probably framed thinking about the development of intelligence in non-humans in bad ways.
- C3PO from Star Wars seems like a nervous language nerd.
- Data from Star Trek mostly seems like a human with a built-in calculator.
- The Planet of the Apes suggests that getting intelligence means getting a draw from a human-population IQ distribution.
- All other artificial intelligences can be outsmarted. Otherwise the movie would not work.
- Data, C3PO etc never have wifi.
Here is the coverage on the "most frequently quoted online media product in Germany": Spiegel.de
I mention this mainly to note that even if you get close to a consensus among experts, a newspaper website may still write a paragraph about it that gives the imporeesion that the distribution of expert opinion is completely unclear: "However, there is also disagreement in the research community. Meta's AI chief scientist Yann LeCun, for example, who received the Turing Award together with Hinton and Bengio, has not wanted to sign any of the appeals so far. He sometimes describes the warnings as “AI doomism”" (linking to a twitter thread by LeCun).
To be clear, the statement and its coverage are very impressive.
Exactly! Thank you so much.
That also looks interesting, but the one I am referring to was older, and I remember one thing in the long list was "it is allowed to move to another city because your friends live there" or something like that, other things treated issues of "it's allowed to pay someone else to do X because you don't like to do it" etc.
I remember once coming across a website or blog article with a title that was something like "Things that are actually allowed" or something like that. On it was a list of things that should go without saying that you "may" do them, but many people don't realize this and therefore get in their own way. I can't find this webpage again - if anyone has the url that would be very helpful.
I sometimes read claims like "doing strength training for more than [insert small number of times per week] is useless, see scientific evidence". Another impression is: people doing lots of exercise per week get big muscles. How do these observations relate to reality? What is the fitness production function, or the optimal schedule, if one really wanted to become something like a Schwarzenegger? (I don't. This is just curiosity.)
Maybe an FAQ for the intersection of #1, #2 and #3, "depressed/anxious because of AI", might be a good thing to be able to link to, though?
"Institutions" in this case are basically gatekeepers who try to enforce quality of content as judged by insiders, which in turn reduces the content that wastes time. This is very similar to what editors of journals or newspapers do. However, whether people want to engage with the "misconceptions" etc. could be made their own ("self-nudging") choice by choosing a Karma visibility threshold for comments and posts. Whether average users interact more or less with low-Karma comments and posts could be influenced by changing the standard threshold.
The Metaculus definition is very interesting as it is quite different from what M. Y. Zuo suggested to be the natural interpretation of "human-level intelligence".
I like the PASTA suggestion, thanks for quoting that! However, I wonder whether that bar is a bit too high.