I don’t think I was advocating for either. I apologize if I came off as saying people should try psychedelics and meditation.
Kenny
Karma: −246
Pain, like money, is a measurable metric compared to skill level which is a much more abstract set of metrics to be measured on. We generally use tests and competitions to measure skill level, but during the personal growth period where those options aren’t accessible, people tend to equate suffering as a result of learning to measure progress. Like you said, it’s not very reliable since there is really no correlation between pain and skill level. Also your speed of learning can change how much time/enjoyment/suffering you go through as you learn, but ultimately real progress can only be measured by putting those knowledge and skills to work. That’s why grades don’t really matter after finishing school. There are better and more practical measures of your ability than some tests somebody came up with.
Psychedelics, woo, and meditation are very separate stuff. They are often used in conjunction with each other due to popularity and the context some of these things are discussed along with each other. Buddhism has incorporated meditation into its woo while other religions have mostly focused on group based services in terms of talking about their woos.
I like how some commenters have grouped psychedelics and meditation separate of the woo stuff, but it was a bit surprising to me to see Eliezer dismissing psychedelics along with woo in the same statements. He probably hasn’t taken psychedelics before. Meditation is quite different as in it’s more of a state of mind as opposed to an altered mentality. With psychedelics there is a clear distinction between when you are tripping and when you aren’t tripping. With meditation, it’s not so clear when you are meditating and when you aren’t. Woo is just putting certain ideas into words, which has nothing to do with different mindset/mentalities.
I probably misunderstood your comment and the original post too. Sorry about that. I find most of the stuff on this site pretty confusing. I was trying to talk about specific things that you guys have mentioned, but it probably is out of context.
Animals have civilizations, they are mostly limited to regional ecosystems. We just don’t deal with animal civilizations on the same level as human-exclusive civilization concept.
The allegory is a story with many different points presented. I should’ve explained the aspect I was talking about. I was referring to the overall relationship between the different elements: the cave, outside the cave, the people inside the cave and the stuff they were doing inside the cave. The outside is the larger set, the cave is a subset, and the people are the individual elements, or leaf nodes. The sets themselves don’t interact directly with the leaf nodes, but they determine the relationships that leaf nodes form by just the set of leaf nodes themselves. They would have their own relationship graph. You have 3 different types of scenarios where the relationship between the sets significantly changes the relationships of the leaf nodes. 1. all leaf nodes exist within the smaller set. 2 Some leaf nodes are inside the smaller set and some outside, which breaks down to whether outside leaf nodes also form sets of their own. 3. All leaf nodes are outside of the smaller set (i.e. in the allegory, that’s when the cave people went outside, which marks the end of the allegory). You can think of these 3 different scenarios as separate, or you can think of them as one snapshot of a temporal progression. This pattern can be imposed on human civilization to explain the relationships within it.
I wouldn’t say that it explains the moral machinery. It’s more of an observation science than an inferential or inductive/deductive process. The “just” is denoting the subset nature of moral machinery existing within the overarching concept of human civilization and development. The allegory of the cave concept is also a paradigm from which you can think about the set theory perspective of human civilization.
The moral machinery is just an manifestation of social hierarchy and societal structure that took civilizations thousands of years to distill into its current form. You can point to the perpetual process at any given time in history and study what came before and what happened after. As individuals, we make up the atomic elements of such hierarchy, so for us personally it’s merely a exercise in understanding the underlying fundamental concepts behind the allegory of the cave.
First have a better idea of what you want to get out of reading. Entertainment: fictions. Knowledge: non-fictions. Current event update: news. Social discussions: social media (e.g. LW, Reddit, Facebook, etc.). Once you know what you are looking for exactly, or what kind of experience you are looking for, then you don’t end up wasting your time on doing things that you don’t consider productive.
When you take a break, I assume you just want some bite-sized, easily digestible content. News aren’t really good with that stuff since it’s mostly repetitive and mostly inconsequential in your own daily life.
A fun thing to do is to come up with questions yourself. What do you really want to learn about? What are you interested in finding out? Then come up with an approach to answering those questions for yourself or at least a guideline for how you want to look for information. This will make your break from work reading more fulfilling.
Before the internet, people are pretty much limited to whatever is available in their local libraries and more. With internet, we are still only looking around places that are more easily accessible, but other sources and sites are only a few clicks and searches away.
Mindless indulgence is never as satisfying as mindful indulgence, but there is nothing wrong with mindless indulgence if you don’t really have anything to look for. It’s more about how many years you’ve spent mindlessly wandering around as opposed to whether you are actively researching something at the present, which essentially may lead to questions like yours/this because of existential dissatisfaction.
If you had the choice of not having sex but get to have your donated sperm fertilized vs having sex but never be able to have your own biological children, what would you choose?
Alignment is always contextual in regards to the social norms at the time. We’ve not had AI for that long so people assume that the alignment problem is a solve it once for all type of thing instead of an ever changing problem.
It’s very similar in nature as in how they test new technologies for mass adoption. Things have been massively adopted before their safety is thoroughly researched, but you can only do so much before the demand for their necessity and people’s impatience push for their ubiquity, like asbestos and radiation. When we fail to find alternatives for the new demands, it will be massively adopted regardless of their consequences. AI can be thought of as just an extension of computers, specialized to certain tasks. The technology itself is fundamentally the same, how it’s been used is mostly what’s been changing because of the improved efficiency. The technology, computer, has seen mass adoption already, but it’s no longer the same computers as people were using 30 or even 20 years ago. Most new technologies are even as close to multipurpose as the computer, so we are dealing with an unprecedented type of mass adoption event in human history where the technology itself is closely tied to how it’s been used and its ever changing nature of the type of computations people at the time decide to use them for.
This is all you can do in such type of scenarios:
observational study draws inferences from a sample to a population where the independent variable is not under the control of the researcher because of ethical concerns or logistical constraints.
Correlations and causation don’t really work the same way as controlled scenarios, which makes it hard for rationalists who have little exposure outside of their expertise and way of thinking.
Observational studies, for lacking an assignment mechanism, naturally present difficulties for inferential analysis.
That can be said about any period in life. It’s just a matter of perspective and circumstances. The best years are never the same for different people.
Most people remember their childhoods as a period of joy and their college years as some of the best of their lives.
This seems more anecdotal, and people becoming jaded as they grow older is a similar assertion in nature
Social deduction games
with clear final objectives: Mafia, Tank Tactics, Neptune’s Pride. These games have clear winning conditions, thus final objectives for the players. The meta objectives are open ended, which gives the players a more opened way to play the game. These games have very little rules and mechanics to limit how the game would be played.
with ambiguous final objectives: Petrov Day, Reddit’s The Button. These games have no clear winning conditions, thus the final objectives are open ended. They are the same as above, with little rules and open ended playing styles for the players. The main difference is that there is no final objective, which in turn may change how players play them open endedly, but the overall playing style is more or less the same. They usually call these social experiments for the lack of clearly defined final objectives.
rules can be directly changed: Nomic and variants. These are basically social deduction games that break the 4th wall. The open endedness have been applied to not just the gameplay but also to directly modifying the game to various extent. If the rules can be followed arbitrarily, then the game moves closer to simulating real life.
No rules, no objectives: Real life. This is Nomic where everything is arbitrary. The actual limitations we are dealing with are the constraints of reality and the survival of the players themselves in the real world.
No rules, no objectives, nothing is real: Simulation theory, the Matrix. This is basically the turtles all the way down concept to however many levels you wish to go.
Single player games vs multiplayer games. Single player games are the most restrictive form of gaming. NPCs are limited because mainly they can’t play the meta and anything beyond that. You can follow the similar breakdown above for single player games too, but they wouldn’t be as interesting for the lack of multiplayer component to form the meta and beyond.
Yes doubts are useless if you don’t look to answer them yourself. Most of the time, they can’t be fully confirmed based on your own investigation because the collective knowledge is a lot more exhaustive than your own ability and time spent on looking at a few sources for answer. We all more or less share the same access to the same information that are available to us. Like they say about a new startup idea, it’s probably been done already. Only very rarely you see something brand new that’s not done before, and usually those are very domain specific because there just aren’t enough people looking into that specific subject.
It takes time for new research and findings to make it into textbooks and curriculum despite the fact universities are churning out new research all the time. What we learn in school are knowledge that have already been distilled and organized into digestible forms that allow students to easily pick them up. If you want to learn things outside of what school provides, you have to do your own novel research, just like the research they do in universities and research labs. They have monetary incentives to drive the work and keep the cogs churning. Most people don’t really have the time and dedication to produce the same quality of work from their own research and investigations.
Society is structured in a way where people either work or relax. When people do work, they are incentivized to put in the minimum amount of effort for the maximum amount of pay and corporate hierarchy status. The incentives therefore aren’t directly aligned with quality but with resources gains of the individuals and the corporations they form. The pace that modern society is advancing at definitely is very sub-optimal, which is only limited by our own human conditions.
Having doubts is crucial for better investigations. How you address those doubts and to what extend you address them dictate the success and practicality of your investigations. Some doubts are more easily solvable than others, but doubts are usually not really the direct focus of your investigations but of supplementary materials that can potentially change the course of of your methodology. It can affect how you value your work and what areas you think would be worthwhile to focus on in your future work.
I firmly believe that having doubts is better than not having them. It’s one of the core component of thinking outside of the box so to speak. Everything in moderation suggests that there can be a breaking point in having too many unrelated doubts that would hinder your own progress as you get lost in the sea of possibilities. Doubts essentially guide us in whether we think of our own pursuits as something that’s fruitful or futile. How we deal with the importance of certain doubts vs others is an art in and of itself.
Definitely eye tracking, else people wouldn’t have given me so much shit about my picture folder. I mean I don’t even block my front facing camera on my phone anymore. Well good for them with their camera technology.
It takes extra resource to grow up and learn all the stuff that you’ve learned like K-12 and college education. You can’t guarantee that the new person will be more efficient in using resources to grow than the existing person.
Why not? Each model is basically its own hypothesis.
Feels like I would expose my motivation system too much, and make myself vulnerable to possible manipulation.
Definitely. You should take precautions when people make themselves known as your adversary, either implicitly or explicitly each would amount to different counter strategies of course.
Personally, I’ve separated internally and externally influenced pride. Over time I’ve found that the externally influenced pride is of little to no value since people are very different from each other. Unless your sole focus is on social status and standings, then external influence is not a really good pathway/guideline for your own growth and personal journey. My proudest moments always correlate to the amount of effort I put into each and my own ability to find solutions and answers to questions that I have. How much you value internal vs external influences depend on your own circumstance and the thought patterns you’ve developed both consciously and subconsciously as a result of such circumstance. It’s nice to hear what others have to say about themselves and what motivate them as they are inspirations for your own journey if they align with your personal path in life.
He’s written so many fictional stuff, which made the EA community quite confusing coming off as research focused work.