Don’t know if this is where it comes from, but I always thought of “sequences” as an elaboration on the idea of rationality as a martial art; the term has some significance in theatrical swordplay, and it could also be compared to the Japanese kata.
Gastogh
Karma: 428
I read the first half, skimmed the second, and glanced at a handful of the slides. Based on that, I would say it’s mostly introductory material with nothing new for those who have read the sequences. IOW, a summary of the lecture would basically be a summary of a summary of LW.
To me it seems like a joke.
This would explain why some people recommend starting sentences with “I think...” etc. to reduce conflicts.
In a model-sharing mode that does not make much sense. Sentences “I think X” and “X” are equivalent.
I think it does make sense, even in model-sharing mode. “I think” has a modal function; modal expressions communicate something about your degree of certainty in what you’re saying, and so does leaving them out. The general pattern is that flat statements without modal qualifiers are interpreted as being spoken with great/absolute confidence.
I also question the wisdom of dividing interpersonal communication into separate “listener-handling” and “model-sharing” modes. Sharing anything that might reasonably be expected to have an impact on other people’s models is only not “listener-handling” if we discount “potentially changing people’s models” as a way of “handling” them. Which doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense to me.
Seconded. Granted, my sample size is pretty minuscule, but still.
And as an extra reason why LW folks might be interested in Rajaniemi’s books, the second book of the series, The Fractal Prince, mentions something called “extrapolated volition” being at the heart of one of the cultures in the novels’ setting.
Why do you think that having Asperger’s gives you immunity to revulsion at the quality of a review?
Are there other values that, if we traded them off, might make MFAI much easier?
I don’t understand this question. Is it somehow not trivially obvious that the more values you remove from the equation (starting with “complexity”), the easier things become?
Sign me up for the interest list as well. On a related note: given the number of upvotes for the others who have expressed interest, the writeup might warrant a Discussion-level post when the time comes; if it does end up working anywhere near as well as Rhinehart’s personal experiences, I feel we shouldn’t risk the finding being buried in the comments of this thread.
Also, in case you don’t share his misgivings about providing brand names, such a list would be appreciated. Part of the reason is that Rhinehart says he lives in one of the largest metropolitan areas in the world, and if he says some things are “hard to get” and have to be obtained from small suppliers, I might end up having to import them.
I mostly steer clear of AI posts like this, but I wanted to give props for the drawing of unsurpassable elegance.
Why are we causing them to think of LW in terms of identity in the first place, instead of, say, a place to learn about and discuss some interesting ideas?
Some possibilities:
There have been deliberate efforts at community-building, as evidenced by all the meetup-threads and one whole sequence, which may suggest that one is supposed to identify with the locals. Even relatively innocuous things like introduction and census threads can contribute to this if one chooses to take a less than charitable view of them, since they focus on LW itself instead of any “interesting idea” external to LW.
Labeling and occasionally hostile rhetoric: Google gives dozens of hits for terms like “lesswrongian” and “LWian”, and there have been recurring dismissive attitudes regarding The Others and their intelligence and general ability. This includes all snide digs at “Frequentists”, casual remarks to the effect of how people who don’t follow certain precepts are “insane”, etc.
The demographic homogeneity probably doesn’t help.
I always was rather curious about that other story EY mentions in the comments. (The “gloves off on the application of FT” one, not the boreanas one.) It could have made for tremendously useful memetic material / motivation for those who can’t visualize a compelling future. Given all the writing effort he would later invest in MoR, I suppose the flaw with that prospect was a perceived forced tradeoff between motivating the unmotivated and demotivating the motivated.
What’s even more interesting is that if this idea has any actual basis in reality… then it offers the possibility of coming up with approaches to counter it: promoting the idea that waking up from cryo will involve being enmeshed in a community rightaway.
Do we expect that to really be the case, though?
This may be somewhat besides the point of the OP, but “cryonics” + “social obligations” in the context of the old headache about the popularity of cryonics reminded me of this:
The laws of different countries allow potential donors to permit or refuse donation, or give this choice to relatives. The frequency of donations varies among countries.
There are two main methods for determining voluntary consent: “opt in” (only those who have given explicit consent are donors) and “opt out” (anyone who has not refused is a donor). Opt-out legislative systems dramatically increase effective rates of consent for donation.[1] For example, Germany, which uses an opt-in system, has an organ donation consent rate of 12% among its population, while Austria, a country with a very similar culture and economic development, but which uses an opt-out system, has a consent rate of 99.98%.[1][2]
~ Wikipedia on organ donation
I voted No, but then I remembered that under the terms of the experiment as well as for practical purposes, there are things far more subtle than merely pushing a “Release” button that would count as releasing the AI. That said, if I could I’d change my vote to Not sure.
No suicide note has surfaced, PGP-signed or otherwise. No public statements that I’ve been able to find have identified witnesses or method.
Some of this information has been released since the posting of the parent, but because the tone of the post feels like it was jumping a gun or two, I wanted to throw this out there:
There are good reasons why the media might not want to go into detail on these things, especially when the person in question was young, famous and popular. The relatively recent Bridgend suicide spiral was (is?) a prime example of such neglected media ethics, but the effect itself is nothing new.
Also: some things are always bound to get out via the social grapevine, but the lack of detailed official statements within a day or two is hardly even weak evidence for anything. I’ll bet the “possibility that this was not a natural event” also occurred to the police, and immediately publishing relevant details of what might have become a criminal investigation just seems plain dumb.
I’m not sure how literally I’m supposed to take that last statement, or how general its intended application is. It just doesn’t seem practicable.
I’m assuming you wouldn’t drop everything else that’s going on in your life for an unspecified amount of time in order to personally force a stranger to stay alive, all just as a response to them stating that it would be their preference to die. Was this only meant to apply if it was someone close to you who expressed that desire, or do you actually work full-time in suicide prevention or something?
If they really can’t even see that someone can care, then it certainly sounds as though the problem is in their understanding rather than your explanations. The viewpoint of “I don’t care what happens if it doesn’t involve me in any way” doesn’t seem in any way inherently self-contradictory, so it’d be a hard position to argue against, but that shouldn’t be getting in the way of seeing that not everyone has to think that way. Things like these three comments might have a shot at bridging the empathic gap, but if that fails… I got nothing.
This may seem like nitpicking, but I promise it’s for non-troll purposes.
In short, I don’t understand what the problem is. What do you mean by falling flat? That they don’t understand what you’re saying, that they don’t agree with you, or something else? Are you trying to change their minds so that they’d think less about themselves and more about the civilization at large? What precisely is the goal that you’re failing to accomplish?
Wanting to kill a specific person may be a requirement for fueling the spell, sure, but I don’t see why that necessarily entails everyone else being immune to what is essentially a profoundly lethal effect. Once a bullet is in the air, it doesn’t matter what motivated the firing of the gun.
The bit about nobody mentioning collateral damage sounds like an argument from silence. I’ll tentatively grant you the point about “no possible defense”, but to me it seems like Moody could well have been talking about deliberate, cold-blooded murder rather than all possible circumstances. I mean, by the time of the “no possible defense” line he’s already name-dropped the Monroe Act, which is nothing if not a big, fat exception.
Sure, but not optimizing for a particular identity can easily be just as harmful. This goes especially for social situations; consider being gay and not optimizing for a non-gay facade in an emphatically anti-gay environment.
Given that, the obvious follow-up question is how to tell the good identities from the bad, and I think the post does well in identifying some of the bad types. This, for example:
...seems well on the mark and I see a lot of myself in it. Could do without the superlative (“The worst thing you can possibly do!”), but otherwise it seems sound.