The post originally had several positive karma then got downvoted. The need for “epistemic legibility” is noted.
you haven’t spoken with XX who have trouble finding a desireable partner
Haven’t spoken with? Who said I’m not in this category lol
burmesetheater
Karma: 66
More plausible model for why in present day so many are overweight:
--cheap calories that taste good widely available with very low effort to obtain
--tasty food is, other things equal, an easy exploit to reward / motivation loops, so it tends to get used in exactly this way which results in excess calorie consumption and of course this is habit forming. there is probably also a lower threshold to “get into” food vs something else in this class like drugs since eating is already universal and not taboo or otherwise particularly regulated.
--fewer obligatory opportunities for caloric expenditure to balance intake possibly mostly as a result of modern transport and trend toward less need for physical labor in general
Maybe this is off-base, and it may not apply to the lithium hypothesis, but it seems there are a lot of really implausible ideas for why obesity is common which are motivated by a desire to not blame the obese person. Common perceptions of agency might infer that the above model blames the consumer, but the intention is exactly the opposite; since it’s predictable that humans in the above environment will tend to act this way, who can blame them?
First bullet, those are good points. It is an interesting question how one would good data on this sort of thing and how accurate that data would be.
Second, this isn’t the intention, it’s to show that the story sounds bizarre. It’s not a political comment.
What am I supposed to do now? Chargeback?
If you want your money back, sure. The alternative is to fight a company experienced at not giving refunds.
As for warning the community, this kind of thing happens all over the place all the time in all kinds of industries. Complaints to BBB and Yelp tend to be famously ineffective although possibly will demonstrate good citizenship to those who don’t know better. Overall, this post is a bit confusing—it’s like someone from a completely different society was suddenly transported to modern USA. What are you asking / telling us?
This is fundamentally misframed. For example, there’s no reason not to support—in some cases—mandatory abortion if you support mandatory vaccination. The main benefits of abortion aren’t to the user, they’re to the potential conscious entity who mercifully wasn’t forced to endure a predictably sub-par life and to society. Abortion isn’t really about personal (bodily) autonomy, that’s just a useful political expedient.
edit: is this being downvoted because people think it’s anti-abortion? To put this comment in more context, it’s assumed that abortion has great utility for reducing S-risk (the mundane kind, if that’s a reserved AI danger term) and is also associated with positive social trends. With this in mind, if you compare abortion to vaccination, it makes sense to mandate abortions in at least some cases. It shouldn’t matter, but if it’s still not clear I am very pro abortion.
once the cat is out of the bag it’s out
Since this was not clear, that’s correct. The intention is not to encourage non-contribution to the open internet, including open source projects.
It is a problem in 2022 when someone seriously proposes opt-out as a solution to anything. Our world does not “do” opt-out. Our concept of “opting out” of the big-data world is some inconsequential cookie selection with a “yes” and a buried “no” to make the user feel good. We are far past the point of starting conversations. It’s not productive, or useful, when it’s predictably the case that one’s publicly accessible data will end up used for AI training by major players anyway, many of whom will have no obligation to follow even token opt-out and data protection measures.
Conversations can be good, but founding one on a predictably dead-end direction does not seem to make much sense.
This isn’t a suggestion to do nothing, it’s a suggestion to look elsewhere. At the margin, “opting out” does not affect anything except the gullible user’s imagination.
Productive for what, exactly? There’s a lot of assumed context missing from the post, including your gender, and the gender you’re targeting. It’s also not completely clear what kind of relationship you want, but we’ll assume it’s serious and long-term.
First: you’re XY, looking for XX. In this case, @swarriner’s post is applicable to most of the distribution. But since you’re here, we’ll assume the girl you’re looking for is intellectually gifted, data oriented, and may or may not be slightly on the spectrum. Even in this case, pictures are still worth 1000 words, but a lengthy profile probably won’t hurt (it may not help that much, though.) If you’re going for someone in the bulk of the distribution, a long profile will most likely hurt, not help. In short, make sure you have good pictures, and don’t rely on your own judgement or that of biased parties to assess whether the pictures are good.
Second: You’re XY looking for XY. In this case a long profile is probably pretty useful, but your pictures still need to be good.
Third: NB for one, the other or both. In this case a long description is probably generally useful. Don’t know enough about this case.
Fourth: You’re XX looking for anything. A long profile isn’t necessary, just some pictures and a short signal that you’re smart and nerdy. The pictures don’t need to be that good.
edit: what went wrong here? why is this controversial? anyone can explain?
Disagree. Data public (and private) will be used by all kinds of actors under various jurisdictions to train AI models and only a fraction of these predictably will pay any heed to an opt-out (and only a fraction of those who do may actually implement it correctly). So an opt-out is not only a relatively worthless token gesture, the premise of any useful upside appears to be based on the assumption that one can control what happens to information one has publicly shared on the internet. It’s well evidenced that this doesn’t work very well.
Here’s another approach: if you’re worried about what will happen to your data, then maybe do something more effective, like not put it out in public.
If your response to that idea is ‘what, what, that sounds horrible and terrifying and we should absolutely positively not do that’ then you seem like a normal human to me.
Or maybe it’s dull, boring and dumb like most other things in school. How you perceive the threat of mass shootings, or anything else, is not one-size-fits-all. School tends to be a ways down on the list of one’s influences at any age and if one’s dearer influences consider shootings to be a very unlikely cause of problems to one’s health, as is objectively the case, one might simply think the school is making a silly waste of time...business as usual.
So maybe a more direct problem is parents and other influences who may or may not be distributed unequally by political beliefs, who promote the idea that shooting is a direct threat to the life and limb of some individual. Does this include the OP?
To generalize this problem, the world is stuffed with terrifying threats, and would-be threats that tend to be a problem to process serenely at any age. Who is responsible? Maybe humans who “decide” to create new humans practically autonomously as a result of a biological process rewarding fitness to reproduce above practically all else.
Destructive alignment issues in our species are more mundane. Several leaders in the 20th century killed outright very large numbers of people for completely banal reasons like political ambition. Actually, your intuition that 9/11 events happen “all the time” is only off in a temporal sense; the number of humans unambiguously killed by the coordinated actions of relatively few other unaligned humans in the last 100 years is so great that it is probably enough to have at least one 9/11 a day during that time. Humans are generally unaligned on several levels from personal to egregoric and the only reason this is lately becoming a problem in a species-risk sense is because only now are we getting some powerful technology. A more probable version of the scenario in this post is a suicidal leader triggering a large scale nuclear war through use of their own arsenal either through deception or after taking steps to reduce the possibility of refusal. Of course it would be a great irony if now that global thermonuclear war is actually tested, the opposing forces are unable to make use of their deterrent.
and have the best forecasters
With forecasters from both sides given equal amounts of information, these institutions might not even reliably beat the Metaculus community. If one is such a great forecaster then they can forecast that jobs like this might not be, among other things, that fulfilling.
I don’t know if we’ve gotten to the point where they can fool the professionals at not getting fooled
Quite a few professionals (not at not getting fooled) still believe in a roughly 0% probability of a certain bio-related accident a couple three years ago thanks in large part to a spun story. Maybe the forecasters at the above places know better but none of the entities who might act on that information are necessarily incentivized to push for regulation as a result. So it’s not clear it would matter if most forecasters know AI is probably responsible for some murky disaster while the public believes humans are responsible.
Well, there’s a significant probability COVID isn’t a “natural” pandemic, although the story behind that is too complicated without an unambiguous single point of failure which hinders uptake among would-be activists.
If there’s an AI failure will things be any different? There may be numerous framings of what went wrong or what might be addressed to fix it, details sufficient to give real predictive power will probably be complicate and it’s a good bet that however interested “the powers that be” are in GOF, they’re probably much MUCH more interested in AI development. So there can be even more resources to spin the story in favor of forestalling any pressure that might build to regulate.
Nuclear regulation also might not be a good example of a disaster forcing meaningful regulation because the real pressure was against military use of nuclear power and that seems to have enjoyed general immunity against real regulation. So it’s more like if an AI incident results in the general public being banned from buying GPUs or something while myriad AI labs still churn toward AGI.
Anyone can try, this seems way out in a practically invisible part of the tail of obstacles to not being destroyed by AGI, if it’s even an obstacle at all.
Most probably just haven’t identified it as salient / don’t understand it / don’t take it seriously, and besides there tend to be severely negative social / audience ramifications associated with doomsday forecasting.
One way to maybe shed some light on this is to sort the latest Top500 results by location (maybe with extra work to get the specific locations inside the country, if required). There is a very long tail but most of it should correlate with investment in top infrastructure. Of course certain countries (US, China) might have undeclared computing assets of significant power (including various private datacenters), but this probably doesn’t change the big picture much.
A stupid AI that can generate from thin air things that have both useful predictive power and can’t be thought of by humans, AND that can reliably employ the fruits of these ideas without humans being suspicious or having a defense...isn’t that stupid. This AI is now a genius.
What might an irate e-chimp do if their human handler denied it a banana?
Who cares? For one, if we’re talking about an AI and not a chimp em this is an obvious engineering failure to create something with all the flaws of an evolved entity with motivational pressures extraneous and harmful to users. Or in other words this is a (very) light alignment problem that can be foreseen and fixed.
How much real power does the AI have access to, and what can humans do about it?
To reframe your question, even relatively small differences in human intelligence appear to be associated with extraordinary performance differences in war: consider the Rhodesian Bush War, or the Arab-Israeli conflict. Both sides of each conflict are relatively well-supplied and ideologically motivated to fight. In both cases there is also a serious intellectual giftedness gap (among other things) between the competing populations and the more intelligent side is shown to win battles easily and with very lopsided casualties—although in the case of Rhodesia the more intelligent population eventually lost the war due to other externalities associated with the political realities of the time.
If humanity is aligned, and the less-smart-than-human AI doesn’t have access to extraordinary technology or other means to grant itself invulnerability and / or quickly kill a critical mass of humans before we can think our way around it, it should be the case that humans win easily. It is difficult to imagine a less-intelligent-than-human AI reliably obtaining such hedges without human assistance.
So, to be clear, you don’t think confidently naming people by first name as destroying the world can be parsed emotionally by them?
Mentions of AI companies / AI personalities on LW will intrinsically tend to be adversarial, even if the author spares a polemic or use of terms like “so and so is working to destroy the world” because misaligned AI destroying the world is clearly THE focus of this community. So it can be argued that to be meaningful, a policy of no names would need to be applied to practically any discussion of AI as even if some AI content is framed positively by the author, the community at large will predictably tend to see it in existential risk terms.
That’s one issue. Personally, the calculus seems pretty simple: this well-behaved community and its concerns are largely not taken seriously by “the powers” who will predictably create AGI, there is little sign that these concerns will be taken seriously before reaching AGI, and there is almost no reason to think that humanity will pause to take a break and think “maybe we should put this on hold since we’ve made no discernible progress toward any alignment solutions” before someone trains and runs an AGI. So a conclusion that could be drawn from this is, we might as well have nice uncensored talks about AI free from petty rules until then.
This seems like a case of making a rule to fix a problem that doesn’t exist.
Are people harassing individual AI labs or researchers? The tendency for reasonable people who are worried about AI safety should be to not do so, since it predictably won’t help the cause and can hurt. So far there does not seem to be any such problem of harassment discernible from background noise.
Naming individual labs and / or researchers is interesting, useful, and keeps things “real.”
You know, one can find a desirable partner after having had trouble finding one. Just finding a parter is not very hard as XX. Please think more carefully about what has (and hasn’t) been said before strawmanning.