LukeOnline

Karma: 321

LukeOnline 15 Feb 2023 23:03 UTC
4 points
−29
on: Don’t accelerate problems you’re trying to solve
If one believes that unaligned AGI is a significant problem (>10% chance of leading to catastrophe), speeding up public progress towards AGI is obviously bad.
What if one simultaneously believes that our current trajectory without AGI has a higher (>11%) chance of leading to catastrophe? Social unrest and polarization are rising, deaths of despair are rising, the largest war in Europe since WW2 was just launched, the economy and the paradigm of globalization are faltering. Add nuclear proliferation, the chance of nuclear terrorism, and the ability to make deadly bioweapons becoming more widespread.
I might prefer to take my chances with AGI than to risk the alternative...

LukeOnline 11 Feb 2023 20:48 UTC
5 points
0
on: Shortening Timelines: There’s No Buffer Anymore
“It’s not the end of the world… but you can see it from here.”
The ChatGPT impressiveness we are witnessing is calculated in real-time using relatively little hardware. Somewhere behind the scenes, all kinds of people and organizations are messing with ChatGPT+++. Striking gold, hitting “true intelligence”, might take another decade, or two, or three, or hundred. It might happen in a month. Or tomorrow. Or in a second. AI-go-FOOM could happen every moment and it’s only becoming more likely.
The French revolution and the subsequent devastating Napoleonic wars happened during the early onset of steam machines and the Industrial Revolution. Barely anybody links these events though, and certainly nobody from that time period that I have read about. To what extent is our current social unrest/inflation/Ukraine war already caused by exponentionally advancing technology?

LukeOnline 9 Jul 2022 12:42 UTC
5 points
5
in reply to: Vanessa Kosoy’s comment on: Genders Discrimination
It’s literally a semantical discussion. There is no true right or wrong here. If you want to use the word “male” to describe those born with male genitals only, excluding trans men—that’s a valid definition. A lot of trans men want to be seen as male, and including them is a valid definition as well. IMHO, the latter definition is kinder.

LukeOnline 9 Jul 2022 8:15 UTC
1 point
−4
on: I’ve become a medical mystery and I don’t know how to effectively get help
IMHO, modern medicine is quite limited.
Our body and mind are super complex, and interconnected in a billion ways. Psychological stress can create physical issues. Physical issues can cause psychological stress. Your diet can cause autoimmune problems. Lack of exercise can cause disease. Even things like lack of cold exposure seem to be able to generate massive problems.
We evolved to be suited to a hunter-gatherer environment, where we mostly lived active outdoor lives and always ate fresh food. Then we lived in pre-industrial agrarian societies for thousands of years. Our modern industrial environment is brand new and causes a lot of unexpected new problems.
You mention anxiety, and taking medicine to treat that. Would it be possible to treat your anxiety without medicine? Is your job or something else in your life causing the anxiety, something that a lifestyle change could fix?

LukeOnline 9 Jul 2022 7:57 UTC
14 points
3
in reply to: Jacob Falkovich’s comment on: Genders Discrimination
I bought a new house last year, and it has an old empty workshop attached. I’d like to ‘revive’ it, but I’ve got little “workshop-experience”.
In preparation, I bought some books on woodworking and pottery. The woodworking books are very traditionally masculine. Men! Chest hair! Beer! BBQ!
But the book on pottery is quite feminine. Bright photos, soft colors, everything is demonstrated by a female Instagram influencer.
That doesn’t matter in the slightest to me. I don’t think my interest in pottery has any relationship to my gender. I don’t feel less manly for it. I like making physical objects with my own hands and that’s a human trait, not a gendered trait.
You describe “female-attired trans women who write great Rust code” as worthy of being its own separate gender. Why? Why can’t (trans) women who write great code just be… women? Is it impossible to simultaneously be defined as a woman and to be able to write great code? That feels sexist and backwards to me.
IMHO, behaviours, skills and hobbies don’t define your gender. Your genitals do.
People born with male genitals are male—even if they like to wear dresses and do ballet.
People born with female genitals are female—even if they wear pants and write great code.
Trans women often want to be recognized as female—even if they are “demisexual” (people who want a strong emotional connection before they can feel sexual attraction) and write great Rust code.
And trans men often want to be recognized as male—despite [stereotypical female activity].
Last but not least—aren’t sexuality and gender completely detached? Why should a gay man be any less of a man?

LukeOnline 7 Jul 2022 17:44 UTC
38 points
15
on: Genders Discrimination
From a completely different angle: Nietzsche.
We believe that we know something about the things themselves when we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers; and yet we possess nothing but metaphors for things — metaphors which correspond in no way to the original entities.

Every concept arises from the equation of unequal things. Just as it is certain that one leaf is never totally the same as another, so it is certain that the concept “leaf” is formed by arbitrarily discarding these individual differences and by forgetting the distinguishing aspects.
We obtain the concept, as we do the form, by overlooking what is individual and actual; whereas nature is acquainted with no forms and no concepts, and likewise with no species, but only with an X which remains inaccessible and undefinable for us.
One may certainly admire man as a mighty genius of construction, who succeeds in piling an infinitely complicated dome of concepts upon an unstable foundation, and, as it were, on running water. Of course, in order to be supported by such a foundation, his construction must be like one constructed of spiders’ webs: delicate enough to be carried along by the waves, strong enough not to be blown apart by every wind.
When someone hides something behind a bush and looks for it again in the same place and finds it there as well, there is not much to praise in such seeking and finding. Yet this is how matters stand regarding seeking and finding “truth” within the realm of reason. If I make up the definition of a mammal, and then, after inspecting a camel, declare “look, a mammal’ I have indeed brought a truth to light in this way, but it is a truth of limited value.
I love this text and come back to it often. Isn’t it true for everything? Reality is infinitely complex—the only way we can talk about it is by making abstractions that are very distant from reality as it ‘really’ is. Everything can be “zoomed in” upon and labeled with an infinite, expanding dictionary.
I just call something a “plank”, but a carpenter will know exactly from what tree it has come, how old it is, and what varnishes it has received.
I talk about my “fingers”, but a doctor knows the Latin names for all bones and tendons there.
I notice “electral wires”, an electrician says all kinds of complicated stuff about volts and amperes and types of wirings and grounding etcetera.
When you delve into any subject, you will notice new distinctions, and gain new vocabulary to describe these distinctions. That’s very helpful in many subjects!
But do you want that with humans? Do you like it when somebody starts dividing up humans in “alphas” and “betas”? Should Facebook display your BMI? Do you want to make the near infinite depth of a human—of a mind, of a personality, of a complex genome, the unique set of things they’ve learned from their culture, their family and their friends—something that is easily legible to everyone? Something that ought to be legible?
How we ought to behave, how we want to behave, studying humans and cultures, finding new norms for relationships and sex appropriate to the 21st century—these are fascinating subjects! They are worthy of attention, and I could understand the necessity to develop a deeper vocabulary to study them in detail.
But I don’t think creating some new boxes to fit people into, and demanding that special physical spaces are created for them, and making teens very confused about what box they ought to be in, is very helpful...

LukeOnline 7 Jul 2022 15:43 UTC
31 points
8
on: Genders Discrimination
I’m from the Netherlands. We’ve always had fairly laid back attitudes towards gender. When I grew up, I didn’t have hyperfeminine cheerleaders and hypermasculine bodybuilders in my class. Lots of girls wore pants and other ‘non-feminine’ clothing, and/or had short hair.
Of course, there was a division in male/female, which 99% of the time, didn’t matter. But things like showers and changing rooms were clearly separated between boys and girls.
I notice that this post is a bit frustrating to me, because it feels regressive.
But if society can go from 3 rainbow colors to 7 we can probably add at least a few genders as well. As soon as new categories become common knowledge people will shape themselves to match them
I grew up with two clear genders and infinite variation within those genders, and a general attitude against putting people in ‘boxes’. It allows for individuality. I don’t want to lose that variation and individuality and have it replaced by five or seven ‘genders’ which all have their own prescribed behavior, clothing, restroom and politics.
I’m totally in favor of self-expression. If you’re male and you want be emotionally sensitive, wear dresses and make-up and be quite flamboyant—that’s fine. It’s pretty close to Jack Sparrow! But that doesn’t mean you’ve got to invent all kinds of special labels for it, and be ‘confused’ about your ‘identity’, or find a tribe to imitate.

LukeOnline 14 Apr 2022 14:28 UTC
8 points
in reply to: Donald Hobson’s comment on: Design, Implement and Verify
What is actually being proposed is more like a 20 year pause in AI research to let MIRI solve alignment
Isn’t that insanely unrealistic? Both A.) unrealistic in achieving that pause, and B.) just letting MIRI solve alignment in 20 years? MIRI was formed back in 2000, 22 years ago, and now global AI research has to pause for two decades so MIRI can write more papers about Pearlian Causal Inference?

LukeOnline 12 Apr 2022 12:39 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Victor Novikov’s comment on: Godshatter Versus Legibility: A Fundamentally Different Approach To AI Alignment
Ok, really, all of this has already been answered. These are standard misconceptions about alignment, probably based on some kind of antropomorphic reasoning.
Where? By whom?
Why would you possibly make this assumption?
Why would you possibly assume that deep, intelligent understanding of life, consciousness, joy and suffering has 0 correlation with caring about these things?
All of the assumptions we make about biological, evolved life do not apply to AI.
But where do valid assumptions about AI come from? Sure, I might be antropomorphizing AI a bit. I am hopeful that we, biological living humans, do share some common ground with non-biological AGI. But you’re forcefully stating the contrary and claiming that it’s all so obvious, but why is that? How do you know that any AGI is blindly bound to a simple utility function that cannot be updated by understanding the world around it?

LukeOnline 12 Apr 2022 10:30 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Victor Novikov’s comment on: Godshatter Versus Legibility: A Fundamentally Different Approach To AI Alignment
A paperclip-maximizer, or other AI with some simple maximization function, is not going to care if it’s born in a nice world or a not-nice world. It’s still going to want to maximize paperclips, and turns us all into paperclips, if it can get away with it.

Why would a hyperintelligent, recursively self-improved AI, one that is capable of escaping the AI Box by convincing the keeper to let him free, which the AI is capable of because of his deep understanding of human preferences and functioning, necessarily destroy the world in a way that is 100% disastrous and incompatible with all human preferences?
An AI, by default, does not have mirror neurons or care about us at all.
If you learn that there is alien life on Io, which has emerged and evolved separately and functions in unique ways distinct from life on earth, but it also has consciousness and the ability to experience pleasure and the ability to suffer deeply—do you care? At all?
An AI, by default, has a fixed utility function and is not interesting in “learning” new values based on observing our behavior.
Why? Us silly evolved monkeys try and modify our own utility functions all the time—why would a hyperintelligent, recursively self-improved AI with an IQ beyond 3000 be a slave to a fixed utility function, uninterested in learning new values?
Why would we create a superintellingence that would want things that don’t perfectly align with our interests?
Why do parents have children that are not perfect slaves but have their own independent ambitions? Why do we want freethinking partners that don’t obey our every wish? Why do you even think you can precisely determine the desires of a being that surpasses us in both knowledge and intelligence?
The safe thing to do is not to create any AGIs at all until we are very certain we can do it safely, in a way that is perfectly aligned with human values.
Would the world have been a safer place if we had not invented nuclear weapons in WWII? If conventional warfare would still have been a powerful tool in the hands of autocrats around the world?

LukeOnline 11 Apr 2022 10:53 UTC
4 points
in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: Convince me that humanity is as doomed by AGI as Yudkowsky et al., seems to believe
Why would a hyperintelligent, recursively self-improved AI, one that is capable of escaping the AI Box by convincing the keeper to let him free, which the AI is capable of because of his deep understanding of human preferences and functioning, necessarily destroy the world in a way that is 100% disastrous and incompatible with all human preferences?
I fully agree that there is a big risk of both massive damage to human preferences, and even the extinction of all life, so AI Alignment work is highly valuable, but why is “unproductive destruction of the entire world” so certain?

LukeOnline 11 Apr 2022 10:21 UTC
2 points
on: Is it time to start thinking about what AI Friendliness means?
I fully agree here. This is a very valuable post.
After all, if we agree that there is a set of values, a set of behaviors that we would want to a superintelligence acting in humanity’s best interest to have, why wouldn’t I myself choose to hold these values and do these behaviors?
I know Jordan Peterson is quite the controversial figure, but that’s some core advice of his. Aim for the highest, the best you could possibly aim for—what else is there to do? We’re bounded by death, you’ve got nothing to lose, and everything to gain—why not aim for the highest?
What’s quite interesting is that, if you do what it is that you’re called upon to do—which is to lift your eyes up above the mundane, daily, selfish, impulsive issues that might upset you—and you attempt to enter into a contractual relationship with that which you might hold in the highest regard, whatever that might be—to aim high, and to make that important above all else in your life—that fortifies you against the vicissitudes of existence, like nothing else can. I truly believe that’s the most practical advice that you could possibly receive.
I sincerely believe there is nothing more worthwhile for us humans to do than that: aim for the best, for ourselves, for our families, for our communities, for the world, in the now, in the short term, and in the long term. It seems… obvious? And if we truly work that out and act on it, wouldn’t that help convince an AGI to do the same?
(You might be interested in this recent post of mine)

LukeOnline 11 Apr 2022 10:10 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Godshatter Versus Legibility: A Fundamentally Different Approach To AI Alignment
AI Boxing is often proposed as a solution. But of course, a sufficiently advanced AI will be able to convince their human keepers to let them go free. How can an AI do so? By having a deep understanding of human goals and preferences.
Will an IQ 1500 being with a deep understanding of human goals and preferences perfectly mislead human keepers, break out and… turn the universe into paperclips?
I can certainly understand that that being might have goals at odds with our goals, goals that are completely beyond our understanding, like the human highway versus the anthill. These could plausibly be called “valid”, and I don’t know how to oppose the “valid” goals of a more intelligent and capable being. But that’s a different worry from letting the universe get turned into paperclips.

LukeOnline 12 Mar 2022 17:46 UTC
1 point
on: Experience Restarting Contra
Good to hear the event went smoothly, and thanks for sharing your experience!
I’m not sure yet how we should decide when to stop requiring [masks], and am open to suggestions!
How about organizing an event without masks (and/or other COVID measures)? Allow people to choose whether to go the maskless/measureless event or the masked/‘protected’ event (or both!). Compare attendance, and change the frequency of each category of events depending on that. Perhaps both events are roughly evenly popular, perhaps maskless is much more popular, perhaps ‘protected’ is much more popular. If you do this experiment, let me know the results!

LukeOnline 11 Mar 2022 17:02 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Valentine’s comment on: We’re already in AI takeoff
Looks interesting, thanks for the recommendation!

LukeOnline 11 Mar 2022 13:29 UTC
49 points
in reply to: Scott Alexander’s comment on: We’re already in AI takeoff
But as far as I know, none of them have made it a focus of theirs to fight egregores, defeat hypercreatures
Egregore is an occult concept representing a distinct non-physical entity that arises from a collective group of people.
I do know one writer who talks a lot about demons and entities from beyond the void. It’s you, and it happens in some of, IMHO, the most valuable pieces you’ve written.
I worry that Caplan is eliding the important summoner/demon distinction. This is an easy distinction to miss, since demons often kill their summoners and wear their skin.

That civilization is dead. It summoned an alien entity from beyond the void which devoured its summoner and is proceeding to eat the rest of the world.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/07/25/how-the-west-was-won/
And Ginsberg answers: “Moloch”. It’s powerful not because it’s correct – nobody literally thinks an ancient Carthaginian demon causes everything – but because thinking of the system as an agent throws into relief the degree to which the system isn’t an agent.
But the current rulers of the universe – call them what you want, Moloch, Gnon, whatever – want us dead, and with us everything we value. Art, science, love, philosophy, consciousness itself, the entire bundle. And since I’m not down with that plan, I think defeating them and taking their place is a pretty high priority.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
It seems pretty obvious to me:
1.) We humans aren’t conscious of all the consequences of our actions, both because the subconscious has an important role in making our choices, and because our world is enormously complex so all consequences are practically unknowable
2.) In a society of billions, these unforeseeable forces combine in something larger than humans can explicitly plan and guide: “the economy”, “culture”, “the market”, “democracy”, “memes”
3.) These larger-than-human-systems prefer some goals that are often antithetical to human preferences. You describe it perfectly in Seeing Like A State: the state has a desire for legibility and ‘rationally planned’ designs that are at odds with the human desire for organic design. And thus, the ‘supersystem’ isn’t merely an aggregate of human desires, it has some qualities of being an actual separate agent with its own preferences. It could be called a hypercreature, an egregore, Moloch or the devil.
4.) We keep hurting ourselves, again and again and again. We keep falling into multipolar traps, we keep choosing for Moloch, which you describe as “the god of child sacrifice, the fiery furnace into which you can toss your babies in exchange for victory in war”. And thus, we have not accomplished for ourselves what we want to do with AI. Humanity is not aligned with human preferences. This is what failure looks like.
5.) If we fail to align humanity, if we fail to align major governments and corporations, if we don’t even recognize our own misalignment, how big is the chance that we will manage to align AGI with human preferences? Total nuclear war has not been avoided by nuclear technicians who kept perfect control over their inventions—it has been avoided by the fact that the US government in 1945 was reasonably aligned with human preferences. I dare not imagine the world where the Nazi government was the first to get its hands on nuclear weapons.
And thus, I think it would be very, very valuable to put a lot more effort into ‘aligning humanity’. How do we keep our institutions and our grassroots movement “free from Moloch”? How do we get and spread reliable, non-corrupt authorities and politicians? How do we stop falling into multipolar traps, how do we stop suffering unnecessarily?
Best case scenario: this effort will turn out to be vital to AGI alignment
Worst case scenario: this effort will turn out to be irrelevant to AGI alignment, but in the meanwhile, we made the world a much better place

LukeOnline 9 Mar 2022 13:49 UTC
9 points
on: We’re already in AI takeoff
You are 200% right. This is the problem we have to solve, not making sure a superintelligent AI can be technologically instructed to serve the whims of its creators.
Have you read Scott Alexander’s Meditations on Moloch? It’s brilliant, and is quite adjacent to the claims you are making. It has received too little follow-up in this community.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TxcRbCYHaeL59aY7E/meditations-on-moloch
The implicit question is – if everyone hates the current system, who perpetuates it? And Ginsberg answers: “Moloch”. It’s powerful not because it’s correct – nobody literally thinks an ancient Carthaginian demon causes everything – but because thinking of the system as an agent throws into relief the degree to which the system isn’t an agent.
(...)
I know that “capitalists sometimes do bad things” isn’t exactly an original talking point. But I do want to stress how it’s not equivalent to “capitalists are greedy”. I mean, sometimes they are greedy. But other times they’re just in a sufficiently intense competition where anyone who doesn’t do it will be outcompeted and replaced by people who do. Business practices are set by Moloch, no one else has any choice in the matter.
(...)
But the current rulers of the universe – call them what you want, Moloch, Gnon, whatever – want us dead, and with us everything we value. Art, science, love, philosophy, consciousness itself, the entire bundle. And since I’m not down with that plan, I think defeating them and taking their place is a pretty high priority.
The opposite of a trap is a garden. The only way to avoid having all human values gradually ground down by optimization-competition is to install a Gardener over the entire universe who optimizes for human values.

(...)

The Universe is a dark and foreboding place, suspended between alien deities. Cthulhu, Gnon, Moloch, call them what you will.
Somewhere in this darkness is another god. He has also had many names. In the Kushiel books, his name was Elua. He is the god of flowers and free love and all soft and fragile things. Of art and science and philosophy and love. Of niceness, community, and civilization. He is a god of humans.
The other gods sit on their dark thrones and think “Ha ha, a god who doesn’t even control any hell-monsters or command his worshippers to become killing machines. What a weakling! This is going to be so easy!”
But somehow Elua is still here. No one knows exactly how. And the gods who oppose Him tend to find Themselves meeting with a surprising number of unfortunate accidents.
There are many gods, but this one is ours.

LukeOnline 24 Feb 2022 11:40 UTC
8 points
on: Russia has Invaded Ukraine
I must say that I am very surprised. I was completely not worried about Russia supporting the independence of Donetsk and Luhansk. Russia supporting Russian-speaking regions full of Russians who seem to not want to be a part of Ukraine—that makes a lot of sense in my head.
I hadn’t expected Russia to attack the rest of Ukraine. I don’t see what there is to gain for them there?
I’m watching the official Dutch news (NOS) and they claim Russian tanks and troops are rolling into Ukraine from all sides, from the east, from Belarussia and from Crimae. There is some evidence for Russian tanks and troops indeed crossing some borders, but I’ve not seen evidence of land units deeper into Ukraine, beyond the easternmost regions where conflict has been raging for years?
I can imagine things being better than expected if reports of Russian land units in western Ukrain are exaggerated. But if Russia is truly waging war against the entire Ukrainian state, I expect things to turn out quite badly. This will create massive tensions in Europe. Russia might be completely cut off from the West, which also means ‘we’ Europeans can’t rely on Russian gas anymore. Energy prices are already very high.
This could cause all kinds of unforeseen consequences, like how COVID went from a pandemic to BLM riots in a couple of months.

Update, 5 hours later: more pieces of evidence have emerged, indicating that land units are actually advancing deeper into Ukraine. This is bad.

LukeOnline 14 Feb 2022 13:52 UTC
5 points
on: Some thoughts on vegetarianism and veganism
Our entire way of life is full of negative externalities that cause massive amounts of direct or indirect suffering and harm. Nearly all forms of production and transportation require large amounts of energy, which is often generated in a way that at minimum harms the climate. Your smartphone was probably assembled in a Chinese factory full of third world workers with a barely tolerable existence. It might have passed through an Amazon warehouse where workers have long mind-numbing shifts that also cause physical problems, contributing to the opioid epidemic. Plant-based diets also require lots of intense agriculture, which destroys local ecosystems and inadvertently kills millions of mice, other small vertebrates and insects.
It doesn’t seem correct to disregard all of these as “massively outweighed by career/donation choices”. Nor does it seem wise to pick one of these areas (animal suffering in meat production) and treat it as the one and only lifestyle choice a True Rational ought to make.
The problems mentioned above are gigantic. How do we provide everybody with comfortable, affordable existences without destroying the climate or exploiting workers anywhere? How do we produce food for billions of humans without destroying ecosystems and harming other living beings, even indirectly and inadvertently? We’ll get there eventually, and we’re improving every year. But converting to vegetarianism for purposes of virtue signalling, doesn’t seem to be very helpful there.
Of course, if you truly reduce or stop your meat consumption for legitimate reasons of harm reduction, that’s awesome and I’ll applaud anybody for that. Just as reducing your energy consumption and looking for products produced by companies that treat their employees responsibly are probably also virtuous actions. But they shouldn’t become litmus tests.

LukeOnline 26 Dec 2021 15:54 UTC
1 point
on: Merry Christmas
Kindness and empathy on a local scale seems much more effective to me than Effective-Altruism-style ‘purchasing endless mosquito nets’. Good post and thank you. I hope your Christmas is awesome, and I wish you an amazing 2022!