I took the survey.
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Karma: 6,662
After Eliezer Yudkowsky was conceived, he recursively self-improved to personhood in mere weeks and then talked his way out of the womb.
I seem to recall that we have WordOfGod that the Love Shield does not exist in the MoR universe due to its preposterousness (for basically the exact reason you describe). I’m not sure exactly where I think I’m remembering that from, but if the memory is correct, then I suppose it was probably on LW or in the Author’s Notes. Anyone remember?
I would say that spite-voting isn’t a large enough problem to need a technical solution unless somebody’s being hugely egregious, and if someone’s being hugely egregious, there are admins that can step in, right?
There are admins that can step in, but I’m not sure if they have in past egregious cases. Aside from Will Newsome, I think there have been other significant instances of mass downvoting (at least PJ Eby, maybe others), and (correct me if I’m mistaken) I don’t recall anything being directly done about either in the end, except the removal of voting buttons from userpages after Will brought it up. That was an improvement, but it’s still clearly possible, and if someone were sufficiently motivated, it would be pretty easily scriptable.
I try not to think (primarily) in terms of convenience, because from everything I’ve heard, it seems like adult cases of gender dysphoria don’t go away and only get worse over time, eventually outweighing almost anything else. Conditional on the hypothesis that I do in fact have a transgender brain, I’d expect that if I decided to avoid transitioning now for instrumental reasons, I’d only end up regretting it later.
I did have some thoughts along those lines… e.g. at one point I was mildly wishing to be taller (I’m 5′6″) for social impressiveness reasons, though now I’m quite happy about my height and my generally not-very-masculine build. And when I was just starting to seriously wonder about this, or possibly even before then, I already had a general sense that I’d probably want to transition at some point, but I hoped I could put it off until after the singularity and put it out of my mind until then. Of course, that didn’t work out, it didn’t go away and after a few months it got to the point where I was almost constantly preoccupied by it. At that point the instrumental considerations didn’t seem that compelling.
Anyway, given my current state of information I’m still satisfied that I’m making the right decision at the moment, but thanks for sharing your experience!
Yeah, I wouldn’t have proposed hard limits, I was thinking more of an automatic (i.e. not involving manually poking around in the database) means of allowing the administrators to check on large-scale suspicious voting and reverse it if necessary. (And, as I said, I’m by no means worried about my 16 precious votes (though I’d be starting to get concerned by 160), but this incident reminded me of the general problem and I wanted to check if I had missed any changes to how such things are handled.)
I might support just making all votes public; since on LW they (are supposed to) mean “more/less of this” rather than “I like/don’t like you” or “I agree/disagree”, I’m not sure I see any reason why that information should not be associated with the people whose opinions they represent, since that is relevant information as well. (Though of course some people prefer going in the other direction to make things consistent, hence the anti-kibitzer. But if the anti-kibitzer can be opt-in, perhaps so should not seeing other people’s votes.)
But then, I vaguely remember that having been discussed before, so I’ll see if I can locate said discussion(s) before attempting to start another one.
If you don’t mind me asking, what were the observations that lead you to locate and consider that hypothesis in the first place, and how did you come to reject it?
For my part, I’ve been trying always to hug the query as tightly as possible; when I can get myself to stop thinking abstractly and verbally about whether or not I’m “transgender” and instead wonder perceptually and at the object level about individual, separable questions such as “Have I ever been happy about becoming more masculine?” (if not, I don’t have to, whether or not I am “transgender”), “Do I feel more comfortable being referred to and addressed as male or female?” (if the latter, I can continue going by my new name and pronouns, whether or not I am “transgender”), “Am I happy about the changes I’m undergoing/anticipating; do I feel better overall?” (~7 weeks HRT so far; if so, I can continue as long as it continues to enhappy me, whether or not blahblahblah), “Do I prefer speaking in a female voice?” (since voice feminization is just a matter of training anyway and doesn’t remove manvoice, I am free to develop a female speaking (and preferably singing) voice and use it as much or as little as I find I want to), etc., the answers are always pretty unambiguous, particularly since I would have no problem with myself turning out to be genderfluid (which I had assumed I’d be for a long while, though I didn’t learn the word until this year) or bigender or otherwise nonbinary. But apparently I’m not, at least given what I know so far; not since I started letting myself think about such things have I woken up feeling any desire to be or present as more male that day than I have to, never have I felt like tying back (let alone cutting off) my long beautiful hair since I got it permanently straightened (it has more of a scruffy-male-hobo look when it’s not straightened), ne’er since I got my current one pair of girl jeans have I felt like wearing guy clothes, except when going out (I’m not able to pass yet), and I always change back as soon as I get back home, and the feeling is just kind of like “Well, why the hell wouldn’t I?”. Same with things like body hair, once I got rid of it for the first time, I’ve never felt the need to consider whether I want to let it grow back, it doesn’t even feel like a question. And as for HRT itself, at this point I don’t think I could stop if I tried, I don’t think I could even try to stop if I tried, because I just don’t have any desire to at any level. My understanding is that cis males generally would not appreciate the breast growth and diminished sex drive.
How far would you have gotten using a process like that?
Does LW have any system in place for detecting and dealing with abuses of the karma system? It looks like someone went through around two pages of my comments and downvoted all of them between yesterday and today; not that this particular incident is a big deal, I’m only down 16 points, but I’d be concerned if it continues, and I know this sort of thing has happened before.
Streamline, from their newest album, also seems fairly transhumanist, and in a more hopeful way than most of their songs.
Also, by the unholy power of confirmation bias, I hereby declare that Testament is about humanity’s recklessness and apathy in the face of existential risks, and Tomorrow Never Comes is about our final desperate and ultimately futile efforts to stave off doomsday after having waited too long to act.
Apparently, many humans have a superpower whereby they can force themselves to do things they do not already feel pull-motivated to do, as though lifting themselves by their own bootstraps. I’m very jealous of this power and also very frustrated that most people who do have it are also unfamiliar with the typical mind fallacy and are confused about free will and think they understand their power but can only “explain” it in terms that sound to me like childish platitudes by now and certainly don’t have any technical content, so of course they usually don’t believe me or don’t understand when I say that I cannot even imagine what the fuck that ability would feel like. (Actually, worse, usually they think they understand and believe me but they clearly don’t, because the next minute they’re right back to the childish platitudes and the free will confusion and the acting like sentences like “Put one foot in front of the other” are somehow magically supposed to move me.) Urgh.
A well-designed optimization agent probably isn’t going to have some verbal argument processor separate from its general evidence processor. There’s no rule that says she either has to accept or refute humans’ arguments explicitly; as Professor Quirrell put it, “The import of an act lies not in what that act resembles on the surface, but in the states of mind which make that act more or less probable.” If she knows the causal structure behind a human’s argument, and she knows that it doesn’t bottom out in the actual kind of epistemology that would be neccessary to entangle it with the information that it claims to provide, then she can just ignore it, and she’d be correct to do so. If she wants to kill all humans, then the bug is her utility function, not the part that fails to be fooled into changing her utility function by humans’ clever arguments. That’s a feature.
But she won’t be searching for reasons not to kill all humans, and she knows that any argument on our part is filtered by our desire not to be exterminated and therefore can’t be trusted.
Roughly true, but downvoted for being basic (by LW standards) to the point of being an applause light. Good Rationality Quotes are ones we can learn from, not just agree with.
For starters, if she can prove she’s friendly, then she can operate openly without causing nearly as much justified concern—which, in the early stages, will be helpful. Whatever her purposes are, if the restrictions of being friendly don’t interfere as much as they help, that’s a win.
If her current utility function is even a little bit different from Friendliness, and she expects she has the capacity to self-modify unto superintelligence, then I’d be very surprised if she actually modified her utility function to be closer to Friendliness; that would constitute a huge opportunity cost from her perspective. If she understands Friendliness well enough to know how to actually adjust closer to it, then she knows a whole lot about humans, probably well enough to give her much better options (persuasion, trickery, blackmail, hypnosis, etc.) than sacrificing a gigantic portion of her potential future utility.
Query, a unicorn pony of ata.
Awesome, thank you!!
Could I use that as my Facebook profile picture?
lesswrong.{com,net,org} are registered to Trike, and I seem to recall that they manage its hosting and technical administrative aspects as well.
“No. You have just fallen prey to the meta-Dunning Kruger effect, where you talk about how awesome you are for recognizing how bad you are.”
— Horatio__Caine on reddit
I would like very very much to read that sequence. Might it be written at some point?
It’s anthropomorphism to assume that it would occur to advanced aliens to try to understand us empathetically rather than causally/technically in the first place, though.
I was going to raise exactly that issue and suggest that solution. What complaints would you expect, though? I don’t know if I’d really expect any non-trans LWers to be insulted at the mere suggestion that the question is worth asking.
I’d have liked having that option too.