Where in Nigeria?
oge
Karma: 369
Malnutrition is the visible surface symptom of “these are uncivilised, backwards people caught in a series of petty tribal wars”.
I agree.
Could you tell me how you came about the list of African backward values? I currently live in an African country; I’d like the names of all the values I’d need to instil to avoid seeing preventable suffering around me.
(FYI I’d thought that having a public list of salaries and paying higher taxes, a la Norway, would be mostly sufficient to fix things)
Perhaps put these files up on the Internet Archive (http://archive.org/upload/) so they’re preserved “forever”
Hey, turchin, do you mind explaining how you came about your final goals i.e. infinite evolution?
I’m looking for a way to test which final goal is more right. My current best guess for my final goal is, “avoiding pain and promoting play” and I’ve heard someone say, alternatively “beauty in the universe and eyes to see it.” It would be neat if these different goals are reconcilable in some way.
I would love to hear your opinion since I have many loved ones currently planning to have kids. Do you mind DMing me your opinion?
Hi SquirrellInHell, how would you respond to the comment left on the original post that having kids is likely net bad for the kids but net good for the world?
Instead, the process you describe of “overthinking your motivations” and acting on abstract reasoning has led me to believe that having kids actually harms the kids. I’m not sacrificing their lives to the altruism of letting them improve the lives of everyone else.
Hey Duncan, where can I sign up for this?
Hey Ray, would you mind posting the notes from the unconference? With the CFAR hackathon coming up, the notes might give me ideas of hacks to work on.
Hear! Hear!!
Ping
Thanks for writing this Gordon. I was struck by this paragraph:
By making clever choices in the company we keep and the cultures we engage, as adults we can insulate ourselves from the fullness of the world
I’d never considered that my cleverness in avoiding aversive stimuli could hurt me in the long run.
Haha, I’d have advised gworley to drop everything before the 8th paragraph (“It’s in this spirit that I advise you, act into fear. ”) since it could have been summarized by a paragraph-long disclaimer.
Lovely story, Stuart. I like how you captured certain aspects of thinking I hadn’t seen articulated before e.g.
a being moving their attention/power towards different abilities as needed
that feeling of slowly becoming the part of a community
the feeling of noticing that a statement is likely not true
Hi Villiam, your idea sounds like an academic community around rationality. You can think of the discussions as like the events at a conference or workshop where half-baked ideas are thrown about. And you can think of the “final” tome of knowledge as the proceedings of the journal: when an idea has been workshopped enough, it is revised and then published in the journal as Currently Definitive Knowledge.
This framing suggests having a rotating board of editors and a formal peer review system as is common in academic journals.
Hi Anna, could you please explain how CFAR decided to focus on AI safety, as opposed to other plausible existential risks like totalitarain governments or nuclear war?
I agree re: consciousness being too broad a term.
I use the term in the sense of “having an experience that isn’t directly observable to others” but as you noted, people use it to mean LOTS of different other things. Thanks for articulating that thought.
My understanding is that if the creature is conscious at all, and it acts observably like a human with the kind of experience we care about, THEN it likely has the kind of experiences we care about.
Do you think it is likely that the creatures will NOT have the experiences we care about?
(just trying to make sure we’re on the same page)
Sorry about that. The link should be fixed now
Haha, I live in Lagos too. One day we’ll have a proper meetup :)