It’s got to plan to make some paperclips before the heat death of the universe, right?
Yes, probably. Unless it finds out that it is a simulation or parallel universes exist and finds a way to escape this before heat death happens.
does this change the alignment challenge at all?
If we can’t make paperclip maximizer that actually makes paperclips how can we make humans assistant / protector that actually assists / protects human?
Great, we’re in agreement. I agree that a maximizer might consolidate power for quite some time before directly advancing its goals.
And I don’t think it matters for the current alignment discussion. Maximizer behavior is somewhat outdated as the relevant problem.
We get useful AGI by not making their goals time-unbounded. This isn’t particularly hard, particularly on the current trajectory toward AGI.
Like the other kind LEwer explained, you’re way behind on the current theories of AGI and it’s alignment. Instead of tossing around insults that make you look dumb and irritated the rest of us, please start reading up, being a cooperative community member, and helping out. Alignment isn’t impossible but it’s also not easy, and we need help, not heckling.
But I don’t want your help unless you change your interpersonal style. There’s a concept in startups: one disagreeable person can be “sand in the gears”, which is equivalent to a −10X programmer.
People have been avoiding engaging with you because you sound like you’ll be way more trouble than you’re worth. That’s why nobody has engaged previously to tell you why your one point, while clever, has obvious solutions and so doesn’t really advance the important discussion.
Demanding people address your point before you bother to learn about their perspectives is a losing proposition in any relationship.
You said you tried being polite and it didn’t work. How hard did you try? You sure don’t sound like someone who’s put effort into learning to be nice. To be effective, humans need to be able to work with other humans.
If you know how to be nice, please do it. LW works to advance complex discussions only because we’re nice to each other. This avoids breaking down into emotion driven arguments or being ignored because it sounds unpleasant to interact with you.
So get on board, we need actual help.
Apologies for not being nicer in this message. I’m human, so I’m ia bit rritated with your condescending, insulting, and egotistical tone. I’ll get over it if you change your tune.
But I am genuinely hoping this explains to you why your interactions with LW have gone as they have so far.
It’s true that your earlier comments were polite in tone. Nevertheless, they reflect an assumption that the person you are replying to should, at your request, provide a complete answer to your question. Whereas, if you read the foundational material they were drawing on and which this community views as the basics, you would already have some idea where they were coming from and why they thought what they thought.
When you join a community, it’s on you to learn to talk in their terminology and ontology enough to participate. You don’t walk into a church and expect the minister to drop everything mid-sermon to explain what the Bible is. You read it yourself, seek out 101 spaces and sources and classes, absorb more over time, and then dive in as you become ready. You don’t walk into a high level physics symposium and expect to be able to challenge a random attendee to defend Newton’s Laws. You study yourself, and then listen for a while, and read books and take classes, and then, maybe months or years later, start participating.
Go read the sequences, or at least the highlights from the sequences. Learn about the concept of steelmanning and start challenging your own arguments before you use them to challenge those of others. Go read ASX and SSC and learn what it looks like to take seriously and learn from an argument that seems ridiculous to you, whether or not you end up agreeing with it. Go look up CFAR and the resources and methods they’ve developed and/or recommended for improving individual rationality and making disagreements more productive.
I’m not going to pretend everyone here has done all of that. It’s not strictly necessary, by any means. But when people tell you you’re making a particular mistake, and point you to the resources that discuss the issue in detail and why it’s a mistake and how to improve, and this happens again and again on the same kinds of issues, you can either listen and learn in order to participate effectively, or get downvoted.
Nobody gave me good counter argument or good source. All I hear is “we don’t question these assumptions here”.
There is a fragment in Idiocracy where people starve because crops don’t grow because they water them with sports drink. And protagonist asks them—why you do that, plants need water, not sports drink. And they just answer “sports drink is better”. No doubt, no reason, only confident dogma. That’s how I feel
I have literally never seen anyone say anything like that here in response to a sincere question relevant to the topic at hand. Can you provide an example? Because I read through a bunch of your comment history earlier and found nothing of the sort. I see many suggestions to do basic research and read basic sources that include a thorough discussion of the assumptions, though.
What makes you think that these “read basic sources” are not dogmatic? You make the same mistake, you say that I should work on my logic without being sound in yours.
Of course some of them are dogmatic! So what? If you can’t learn how to learn from sources that make mistakes, then you will never have anything or anyone to learn from.
Yes, that one looks like it has a pleasant tone. But that’s one comment on a post that’s actively hostile toward the community you’re addressing.
I look forward to seeing your next post. My first few here were downvoted into the negatives, but not far because I’d at least tried to be somewhat deferential, knowing I hadn’t read most of the relevant work and that others reading my posts would have. And I had read a lot of LW content before posting, both out of interest, and to show I respected the community and their thinking, before asking for their time and attention.
I also should’ve mentioned that this is an issue near to my heart, since it took me a long time to figure out that I was often being forceful enough with my ideas to irritate people into either arguing with me or ignoring me, instead of really engaging with the ideas from a positive or neutral mindset. I still struggle with it. I think this dynamic doesn’t get nearly as much attention as it deserves; but there’s enough recognition of it among LW leadership and the community at large that this is an unusually productive discussion space, because it doesn’t devolve into emotionally charged arguments nearly as often as the rest of the internet and the world.
This community doesn’t mostly consider it unquestionable, many of them are just irritated with your presentation, causing them to emotionally not want to consider the question. You are either ignored or hated until you do the hard work of showing you’re worth listening to.
How can I put little effort but be perceived like someone worth listening? I thought announcing a monetary prize for someone who could find error in my reasoning 😅
I don’t think this is a good approach, and could easily backfire. The problem isn’t that you need people to find errors in your reasoning. It’s that you need to find the errors in your reasoning, fix them as best you can, iterate that a few times, then post your actual reasoning in a more thorough form, in a way that is collaborative and not combative. Then what you post may be in a form where it’s actually useful for other people to pick it apart and discuss further.
The fact that you specify you want to put in little effort is a major red flag. So is the fact that you want to be perceived as someone worth listening to. The best way to be perceived as being worth listening to is to be worth listening to, which means putting in effort. An approach that focuses on signaling instead of being is a net drain on the community’s resources and cuts against the goal of having humanity not die. It takes time and work to understand a field well enough for your participation to be a net positive.
That said, it’s clear you have good questions you want to discuss, and there are some pretty easy ways to reformat your posts that would help. Could probably be done in at most an extra hour per post, less as it becomes habitual.
Some general principles:
Whenever possible, start from a place of wanting to learn and collaborate and discover instead of wanting to persuade. Ask real questions, not rhetorical questions. Seek thought partners, and really listen to what they have to say.
If you do want to change peoples’ minds about something that is generally well-accepted as being well-supported, the burden of proof is on you, not them. Don’t claim otherwise. Try not to believe otherwise, if you can manage it. Acknowledge that other people have lots of reasons for believing what they believe.
Don’t call people stupid or blind.
Don’t make broad assumptions about what large groups of people believe.
Don’t say you’re completely certain you’re right, especially when you are only offering a very short description of what you think, and almost no description of why you think it, or why anyone else should trust or care about what you think.
Don’t make totalizing statements without a lot of proof. You seem to often get into trouble with all-or-nothing assumptions and conclusions that just aren’t justified.
Lay out your actual reasoning. What are your premises, and why do you believe them? What specific premises did you consider? What premises do you reject that many others accept, and why? And no, something like “orthogonality thesis” is not a premise. It’s the outcome of a detailed set of discussions and arguments that follow from much simpler premises. Look at what you see as assumptions, then drill down into them a few more layers to find the actual underlying assumptions.
Cite your sources. What have you done/read/studied on the topic? Where are you drawing specific claims from? This is part of your own epistemic status evaluation and those others will need to know. You should be doing this anyway for your own benefit as you learn, long before you start writing a post for anyone else.
You may lump the tone of this one under “dogmatic,” but the Twelve Virtues of Rationality really are core principles that are extraordinarily useful for advancing both individual and community understanding of pretty much anything. Some of these you already are showing, but pay more attention to 2-4 and 8-11.
Yes, probably. Unless it finds out that it is a simulation or parallel universes exist and finds a way to escape this before heat death happens.
If we can’t make paperclip maximizer that actually makes paperclips how can we make humans assistant / protector that actually assists / protects human?
Great, we’re in agreement. I agree that a maximizer might consolidate power for quite some time before directly advancing its goals.
And I don’t think it matters for the current alignment discussion. Maximizer behavior is somewhat outdated as the relevant problem.
We get useful AGI by not making their goals time-unbounded. This isn’t particularly hard, particularly on the current trajectory toward AGI.
Like the other kind LEwer explained, you’re way behind on the current theories of AGI and it’s alignment. Instead of tossing around insults that make you look dumb and irritated the rest of us, please start reading up, being a cooperative community member, and helping out. Alignment isn’t impossible but it’s also not easy, and we need help, not heckling.
But I don’t want your help unless you change your interpersonal style. There’s a concept in startups: one disagreeable person can be “sand in the gears”, which is equivalent to a −10X programmer.
People have been avoiding engaging with you because you sound like you’ll be way more trouble than you’re worth. That’s why nobody has engaged previously to tell you why your one point, while clever, has obvious solutions and so doesn’t really advance the important discussion.
Demanding people address your point before you bother to learn about their perspectives is a losing proposition in any relationship.
You said you tried being polite and it didn’t work. How hard did you try? You sure don’t sound like someone who’s put effort into learning to be nice. To be effective, humans need to be able to work with other humans.
If you know how to be nice, please do it. LW works to advance complex discussions only because we’re nice to each other. This avoids breaking down into emotion driven arguments or being ignored because it sounds unpleasant to interact with you.
So get on board, we need actual help.
Apologies for not being nicer in this message. I’m human, so I’m ia bit rritated with your condescending, insulting, and egotistical tone. I’ll get over it if you change your tune.
But I am genuinely hoping this explains to you why your interactions with LW have gone as they have so far.
No problem, tune changed.
But I don’t agree that this explains why I get downvotes.
Please feel free to take a look at my last comment here.
It’s true that your earlier comments were polite in tone. Nevertheless, they reflect an assumption that the person you are replying to should, at your request, provide a complete answer to your question. Whereas, if you read the foundational material they were drawing on and which this community views as the basics, you would already have some idea where they were coming from and why they thought what they thought.
When you join a community, it’s on you to learn to talk in their terminology and ontology enough to participate. You don’t walk into a church and expect the minister to drop everything mid-sermon to explain what the Bible is. You read it yourself, seek out 101 spaces and sources and classes, absorb more over time, and then dive in as you become ready. You don’t walk into a high level physics symposium and expect to be able to challenge a random attendee to defend Newton’s Laws. You study yourself, and then listen for a while, and read books and take classes, and then, maybe months or years later, start participating.
Go read the sequences, or at least the highlights from the sequences. Learn about the concept of steelmanning and start challenging your own arguments before you use them to challenge those of others. Go read ASX and SSC and learn what it looks like to take seriously and learn from an argument that seems ridiculous to you, whether or not you end up agreeing with it. Go look up CFAR and the resources and methods they’ve developed and/or recommended for improving individual rationality and making disagreements more productive.
I’m not going to pretend everyone here has done all of that. It’s not strictly necessary, by any means. But when people tell you you’re making a particular mistake, and point you to the resources that discuss the issue in detail and why it’s a mistake and how to improve, and this happens again and again on the same kinds of issues, you can either listen and learn in order to participate effectively, or get downvoted.
Nobody gave me good counter argument or good source. All I hear is “we don’t question these assumptions here”.
There is a fragment in Idiocracy where people starve because crops don’t grow because they water them with sports drink. And protagonist asks them—why you do that, plants need water, not sports drink. And they just answer “sports drink is better”. No doubt, no reason, only confident dogma. That’s how I feel
I have literally never seen anyone say anything like that here in response to a sincere question relevant to the topic at hand. Can you provide an example? Because I read through a bunch of your comment history earlier and found nothing of the sort. I see many suggestions to do basic research and read basic sources that include a thorough discussion of the assumptions, though.
What makes you think that these “read basic sources” are not dogmatic? You make the same mistake, you say that I should work on my logic without being sound in yours.
Of course some of them are dogmatic! So what? If you can’t learn how to learn from sources that make mistakes, then you will never have anything or anyone to learn from.
Yes, that one looks like it has a pleasant tone. But that’s one comment on a post that’s actively hostile toward the community you’re addressing.
I look forward to seeing your next post. My first few here were downvoted into the negatives, but not far because I’d at least tried to be somewhat deferential, knowing I hadn’t read most of the relevant work and that others reading my posts would have. And I had read a lot of LW content before posting, both out of interest, and to show I respected the community and their thinking, before asking for their time and attention.
Me too.
I also should’ve mentioned that this is an issue near to my heart, since it took me a long time to figure out that I was often being forceful enough with my ideas to irritate people into either arguing with me or ignoring me, instead of really engaging with the ideas from a positive or neutral mindset. I still struggle with it. I think this dynamic doesn’t get nearly as much attention as it deserves; but there’s enough recognition of it among LW leadership and the community at large that this is an unusually productive discussion space, because it doesn’t devolve into emotionally charged arguments nearly as often as the rest of the internet and the world.
How can I positively question something that this community considers unquestionable? I am either ignored or hated
This community doesn’t mostly consider it unquestionable, many of them are just irritated with your presentation, causing them to emotionally not want to consider the question. You are either ignored or hated until you do the hard work of showing you’re worth listening to.
How can I put little effort but be perceived like someone worth listening? I thought announcing a monetary prize for someone who could find error in my reasoning 😅
I don’t think this is a good approach, and could easily backfire. The problem isn’t that you need people to find errors in your reasoning. It’s that you need to find the errors in your reasoning, fix them as best you can, iterate that a few times, then post your actual reasoning in a more thorough form, in a way that is collaborative and not combative. Then what you post may be in a form where it’s actually useful for other people to pick it apart and discuss further.
The fact that you specify you want to put in little effort is a major red flag. So is the fact that you want to be perceived as someone worth listening to. The best way to be perceived as being worth listening to is to be worth listening to, which means putting in effort. An approach that focuses on signaling instead of being is a net drain on the community’s resources and cuts against the goal of having humanity not die. It takes time and work to understand a field well enough for your participation to be a net positive.
That said, it’s clear you have good questions you want to discuss, and there are some pretty easy ways to reformat your posts that would help. Could probably be done in at most an extra hour per post, less as it becomes habitual.
Some general principles:
Whenever possible, start from a place of wanting to learn and collaborate and discover instead of wanting to persuade. Ask real questions, not rhetorical questions. Seek thought partners, and really listen to what they have to say.
If you do want to change peoples’ minds about something that is generally well-accepted as being well-supported, the burden of proof is on you, not them. Don’t claim otherwise. Try not to believe otherwise, if you can manage it. Acknowledge that other people have lots of reasons for believing what they believe.
Don’t call people stupid or blind.
Don’t make broad assumptions about what large groups of people believe.
Don’t say you’re completely certain you’re right, especially when you are only offering a very short description of what you think, and almost no description of why you think it, or why anyone else should trust or care about what you think.
Don’t make totalizing statements without a lot of proof. You seem to often get into trouble with all-or-nothing assumptions and conclusions that just aren’t justified.
Lay out your actual reasoning. What are your premises, and why do you believe them? What specific premises did you consider? What premises do you reject that many others accept, and why? And no, something like “orthogonality thesis” is not a premise. It’s the outcome of a detailed set of discussions and arguments that follow from much simpler premises. Look at what you see as assumptions, then drill down into them a few more layers to find the actual underlying assumptions.
Cite your sources. What have you done/read/studied on the topic? Where are you drawing specific claims from? This is part of your own epistemic status evaluation and those others will need to know. You should be doing this anyway for your own benefit as you learn, long before you start writing a post for anyone else.
You may lump the tone of this one under “dogmatic,” but the Twelve Virtues of Rationality really are core principles that are extraordinarily useful for advancing both individual and community understanding of pretty much anything. Some of these you already are showing, but pay more attention to 2-4 and 8-11.
Nice. I also have an offer—begin with yourself.
I do, yes.