In principle I suppose one could build very large walls around it to reduce heat exchange with the rest of Earth and a statite mirror (or few slowly orbiting ones) to warm it up. That would change the southern hemisphere circulation patterns somewhat, but could be arranged to not affect the overall heat balance of the rest of Earth.
This is very unlikely to happen for any number of good reasons.
Only the first point “Good and evil are objectively real” is a necessary part of moral realism. Sometimes the first half of the third (“We have an objective moral obligation to do good and not do evil”) is included, but by some definitions that is included in what good and evil mean.
All the rest are assumptions that many people who believe in moral realism also happen to hold, but aren’t part of moral realism itself.
Research companies work best when there’s plenty of infrastructure that can supply stuff they need to do the research. Including, to mention one recent case, electricity. It also helps to be in an area where there is stable government that can protect the research site from civil or military unrest, and too much (or too unpredictable) corruption. You also want it to be a place where your researchers are happy to live while they do their research, and where you can relatively easily recruit other skilled workers.
China does meet these requirements, but it is not exactly lacking in bureaucracy so I’m not sure why it made the list. If you’re doing research involving human trials of some sort, you also want to be able to communicate well with the participants so extensive knowledge of the language and culture will be very useful.
All that said, plenty of organizations do carry out research all over the world, not just in rich countries with a lot of bureaucracy.
Yes, it definitely does depend upon local conditions. For example if your grid operator uses net metering (and is reliable) then it is not worthwhile at any positive price. This statement was in regard to my disputed upstream comment “Even now at $1000/kW-hr retail it’s almost cost-effective here [...]”.
Batteries are primarily used for intra-day time shifting, not weekly. I agree that going completely off grid costs substantially more than being able to use your own generated power for 80-90% of usage. That’s why I focused on the case where home owners remain grid-connected in my top-level comment:
With smart meters and cheaper home battery systems the incentives starts to shift toward wealthier solar enthusiasts buying batteries and selling excess power to the grid at peak times (or consuming it themselves), lowering peak demand at no additional capital or maintenance cost to the grid operators.
The only mention I made regarding completely off-grid power systems was about the counterfactual scenario of $150/kW-hr battery cost, which I have not assumed anywhere else. I didn’t say that it would be marginally cost effective to go completely off grid with such battery prices, just that it would be substantially more cost-effective than buying all my power from the grid. The middle option of 80-90% reduced but not completely eliminated grid use is still cheaper than either of the two extremes, and likely to remain so for any feasible home energy storage system.
That’s what I was referring to regarding $700 kW/hr. At $1000/kW-hr it’s (just barely) not worth even buying batteries to shift energy from daytime generation to night consumption, while at $700/kW-hr it definitely is worthwhile. Do you need the calculation for that?
At $150/kW-hr and assuming a somewhat low 3000 cycle lifetime, such batteries would cost $0.05 per cycled kW-hr which is very much cost-effective when paired with the extremely low cost but inconveniently timed nature of solar power. It would drop the amortized cost of a complete off-grid power system for my home to half that of grid power in my area, for example.
Even now at $1000/kW-hr retail it’s almost cost-effective here to buy batteries to time-shift energy from solar generation to time of consumption. At $700/kW-hr it would definitely be cost-effective to do daily load-shifting with the grid as a backup only for heavily cloudy days.
Pumped hydro is already underway in this region, though it’s proving more expensive and time-consuming to build than expected. Have there been some recent advances in compressed air energy storage? The information I read 2-3 years ago did not look promising at any scale.
How do you construct a maximizer for 0.3X+0.6Y+0.1Z from three maximizers for X, Y, and Z? It certainly isn’t true in general for black box optimizers, so presumably this is something specific to a certain class of neural networks.
Battery costs should be lower by now than they are.
For example, in Australia wholesale cell prices are on the order of $150/kW-hr, while installed battery systems are still more than $1000/kW-hr. The difference isn’t just packaging, electrical systems, and installation costs. Packaging doesn’t cost anywhere near that much, installation costs are relatively flat with capacity, and so are electrical systems (for given peak power). Yet battery system costs from almost all suppliers are almost perfectly linear with energy capacity.
I don’t know why there isn’t an alternative decent-quality supplier that would eat their lunch on large-capacity systems with moderate peak power. Such a thing should be still very highly profitable with a much larger market. It could be that there just hasn’t been enough time for such a market to develop, or supply issues, or something else I’m missing?
It’s not cheaper in reality. Net metering is effectively a major subsidy that goes away pretty much everywhere that solar generation starts to make up a significant fraction of the supply.
Electricity companies don’t want to pay all that capital expense, so it makes sense for them to shift it onto consumers up until home solar generation starts approaching daytime demand. After that point, they can discontinue the net metering and push for “smart meters” that track usage by time of day and charge or pay variable amounts applicable for that particular time, and/or have separate “feed in” credits that are radically smaller per kWh than consumption charges (in practice often up to 85% less).
With smart meters and cheaper home battery systems the incentives starts to shift toward wealthier solar enthusiasts buying batteries and selling excess power to the grid at peak times (or consuming it themselves), lowering peak demand at no additional capital or maintenance cost to the grid operators.
In principle the endgame could involve no wholesale generators at all, just grid operators charging fees to net consumers and paying some nominal amount to net suppliers, but I expect it to not converge to anything as simple as that. Economies of scale will still favour larger-scale operations and local geographic and economic conditions will maintain a mixture of types and scales of generation, storage, distribution, and consumption. Regulation, contracts, and other conditions will also continue to vary greatly from place to place.
Yes, that was a pretty terrible take. Markets quite clearly do not price externalities well, and never have done. So long as any given investor rates their specific investment as being unlikely to tip the balance into doom, they get the upside of directly financially benefiting from major economic growth due to AI, and essentially the same downside risk as if they didn’t invest. Arguments like “short some markets, or go long volatility, and then send those profits to Somalia to mitigate suffering for a few years before the whole world ends” are obviously not even trying to seriously reflect the widespread investment decisions that affect real markets.
While this is almost certainly not relevant to any real life metaphorical application of loop detection, I’ll just go ahead and mention that there is a very common cycle detection algorithm in CS that goes like:
Keep two “pointers”. Move one a single step at a time. Move the other two steps at a time. If they are ever equal, then you’re in a loop.
This avoids the need to remember all previous steps, but it doesn’t really seem as useful in the metaphor.
If you replace it with “quantum chromodynamics”, then it’s still very problematic but for different reasons.
Firstly, there’s no obvious narrowing to equally causal factors (“motion of the planet” vs “motion of the planets”) as there is in the original statement. In the original statement the use of plural instead of singular covers a much broader swath of hypothesis space, and that you haven’t ruled out enough to limit it to the singular. So you’re communicating that you think there is significant credence that motion of more than one planet has a very strong influence on life on Earth.
Secondly, the QCD statement is overly narrow in the stated consequent instead of overly broad in the antecedent: any significant change in quantum chromodynamics would affect essentially everything in the universe, not just life on Earth. “Motion of the planet … life on Earth” is appropriately scoped in both sides of the relation. In the absence of a context limiting the scope to just life on Earth, yes that would be weird and misleading.
Thirdly, it’s generally wrong. The processes of life (and everything else based on chemistry) in physical models depend very much more strongly on the details of the electromagnetic interaction than any of the details of colour force. If some other model produced nuclei of the same charges and similar masses, life could proceed essentially unchanged.
However, there are some contexts in which it might be less problematic. In the context of evaluating the possibility of anything similar to our familiar life under alternative physical constants, perhaps.
In a space of universes which are described by the same models to our best current ones but with different values of “free” parameters, it seems that some parameters of QCD may be the most sensitive in terms of whether life like ours could arise—mostly by mediating whether stars can form and have sufficient lifetime. So in that context, it may be a reasonable thing to say. But in most contexts, I’d say it was at best misleading.
I don’t think anybody would have a problem with the statement “The motion of the planet is the strongest governing factor for life on Earth”. It’s when you make it explicitly plural that there’s a problem.
Ah, that does make it almost impossible then. Such a utility function when paused must have constant value for all outcomes, or it will have incentive to do something. Then in the non-paused state the otherwise reachable utility is either greater than that (in which case it has incentive to prevent being paused) or less than or equal (in which case its best outcome it to make itself paused).
Are you looking for a utility function that depends only upon external snapshot state of the universe? Or are you considering utility functions that evaluate history and internal states as well? This is almost never made clear in such questions, and amphiboly is rife in many discussions about utility functions.
Yes, both of these credences should obey the axioms of a probability space.
This sort of thing is applied in cryptography with the concept of “probable primes”, which are numbers (typically with many thousands of decimal digits) that pass a number of randomized tests. The exact nature of the tests isn’t particularly important, but the idea is that for every composite number, most (at least 3⁄4) of the numbers less than it are “witnesses” such that when you apply a particular procedure using that number, the composite number fails the test but primes have no such failures.
So the idea is that you pick many random numbers, and each pass gives you more confidence that the number is actually prime. The probability of any composite number passing (say) 50 such tests is no more than 4^-50, and for most composite numbers it is very much less than that.
No such randomized test is known for parity of the googolth digit of pi, but we also don’t know that there isn’t one. If there was one, it would make sense to update credence using the results of such tests using probability axioms.
What is the difference between “deciding your behaviour” and “deciding upon interventions to you that will result in behaviour of its choosing”?
If showing you a formal proof that you will do a particular action doesn’t result in you doing that action, then the supposed “proof” was simply incorrect. At any rate, it is unlikely in most cases that there exists a proof that merely presenting it to a person is sufficient to ensure that the person carries out some action.
In more formal terms: even in the trivial case where a person could be modelled as a function f(a,b,c,...) that produces actions from inputs, and there do in fact exist values of (a,b,c,...) such that f produces a chosen action A, there is no guarantee that f(a,b,c,...) = A whenever a = “a proof that f(a,b,c,...) = A” for all values of b,c,… .
It may be true that f(a,b,c,...) = A for some values of b,c,… and if the superintelligence can arrange for those to hold then it may indeed look like merely presenting the proof is enough to guarantee action A, but would actually be a property of both the presentation of the proof and all the other interventions together (even if the other interventions are apparently irrelevant).
There are many things that people believe they will be able to simply ignore, but where that belief turns out to be incorrect. Simply asserting that deciding to ignore the proof will work is not enough to make it true.
As you broaden the set of possible interventions and time spans, guarantees of future actions will hold for more people. My expectation is that at some level of intervention far short of direct brain modification or other intuitively identity-changing actions, it holds for essentially all people.
...How does someone this idiotic ever stay in a position of authority? I would get their statements on statistics and probability in writing and show it to the nearest person-with-ability-to-fire-them-who-is-not-also-a-moron.
Maybe the nearest person-with-ability-to-fire-them-who-is-not-also-a-moron could give them one last chance:
“I have a red die and a blue die, each with 20 sides. If I roll the red one then you only keep your job if it rolls a 20. For the blue one you only get fired if it comes up 1.
“I’m going to roll the red one unless you can explain to me why you should want me to roll the blue one instead.”
But probably not.
I’m not sure what work “to the best of personal ability” is doing here. If you execute to 95% of the best of personal ability, that seems to come to “no” in the chart and appears to count the same as doing nothing?
Or maybe does executing “to the best of personal ability” include considerations like “I don’t want to do that particular good very strongly and have other considerations to address, and that’s a fact about me that constrains my decisions, so anything I do about it at all is by definition to the best of my ability”?
The latter seems pretty weird, but it’s the only way I can make sense of “na” in the row “had intention, didn’t execute to the best of personal ability, did good”.
Thanks for making this!
I found it a challenge to deduce strategies over many plays, rather than following the advice “not intended to be replayed”. The first playthrough was pretty much meaningless for me, especially given the knowledge that both time and history could affect the results. I just viewed it as one step of information gathering for the real game.
The suboptimal zones weren’t obviously suboptimal from a single pass, even Dragon Lake that always yields nothing. For all I knew, it could have yielded 5000 food with quite a low probability (and still be always optimal), or lesser amounts of food at specific combinations of time and day, or only when matching some rule based on the previous results of foraging in other zones.
After many runs I did settle on a strategy, and mentally scored myself by looking at the source to see whether there was anything that I should have spotted but didn’t. As it happened, my final strategy was almost optimal though I stayed on the rats for a few more hours than ideal.