Yeah, profound isolation is definitely my #1 problem. Apart from that, I couldn’t say. I have the problem, not the solution.
PlaidX
Karma: 858
I only read/participate in lesswrong, and I still hate it. It feels ugly and neurotic in here.
Maybe it’s just that I see reflections of my own ugly neuroses.
One reason is that if you attempt to be an optimized world-saving robot, your mental health will deteriorate.
Mine did, at least. Now I’m in therapy. Take your mental health seriously, don’t think you can sweep it under the rug.
Rolf’s original formulation of this gambit fell a few steps short of making sense, but it was rethought by norman noman and others in that thread into something that does, I think.
In the new formulation, there’s no first mover advantage anymore, nor is it a one-way “deterrence”. It’s a cooperation between the rogue AI and the friendly AI (and presumably many many other rogue and friendly AIs, all simulating each other)
I’m on the fence as to whether the world really works this way, but it seems to work in cartoon form:
TL;DR Entities chasing each other in spirals through their minds may eventually meet and shake hands, but logic alone does NOT give you the ability to do this. You need access to each other’s source code.
It seems to me what “superrationality” is grasping towards is the idea that if both players can predict each other’s actions, it provides pragmactic grounds for cooperation. All the other crap, (the skewed payoff matrix, hofstader’s “sufficiently logical” terminology, even the connotations of the word “superrationality” itself) are red herrings.
This all hinges on the idea that your decision CAN affect their decision, through their mental emulation of you, and vice versa. If it’s one-sided, we have newcomb’s problem, except it collapses to a normal prisoner’s dilemma, since although omega knows if you’ll cooperate, you have no way of knowing if omega will cooperate, and thus he has no incentive to base his behavior on your decision, even though he knows it. He’s better off always defecting.
This is a point that a lot of people here seem to get confused about. They think “but, if I could predict omega’s actions, he’d have an incentive to conditionally cooperate, and so I’D have an incentive to cooperate, and we’d cooperate, and that’d be a better outcome, ergo that must be more rational, and omega is rational so he’ll act in a way I can predict, and specifically he’ll conditionally cooperate!!1”
But I think this is wrong. The fact that the world would be a better place if you could predict omega’s actions, (and the fact that omega knows this) doesn’t give omega the power to make you capable of predicting his actions, any more than it gives him the power to make your mom capable of predicting his actions, or to make a ladybug capable of predicting his actions, or another superintelligence capable of predicting his actions (although possibly it could to start with). He’s in another room.
The fact that he knows what you’re going to do means there’s already been some information leakage, since even a superintelligence can’t extrapolate from the fact that your name is jeff what decision you’ll make in a complicated game. He apparently knows quite a bit about you.
And if you knew ENOUGH about him, including his superhuman knowledge of yourself, and were smart enough to analyze the data (good luck), you’d be able to predict his actions too. But it seems disingenuous to even call that the prisoner’s dilemma.
gets out the ladder and climbs up to the scoreboard
5 posts without a tasteless and unnecessary torture reference
replaces the 5 with a 0
climbs back down
Northern europe is really nice, though...
The red sword is strictly worse than the blue sword. Beyond that I’m too lazy to figure it out.
The asch conformity experiment, it should be noted, makes people say they see a line as slightly longer than it actually is.
Except for veteran officers and military historians, almost nobody has any experience that is even remotely relevant to predicting the outcome of a war.
I don’t think that’s a very good guess, but it’s as good as any I’ve seen. I tried to phrase my belief statement to include things like this within its umbrella.
Here is one of many detailed accounts, this one is from Dr. José Maria de Almeida Garrett, professor at the Faculty of Sciences of Coimbra, Portugal
I was looking at the place of the apparitions, in a serene, if cold, expectation of something happening, and with diminishing curiosity, because a long time had passed without anything to excite my attention. Then I heard a shout from thousands of voices and saw the multitude suddenly turn its back and shoulders away from the point toward which up to now it had directed its attention, and turn to look at the sky on the opposite side.
It must have been nearly two o’clock by the legal time, and about midday by the sun. The sun, a few moments before, had broken through the thick layer of clouds which hid it, and shone clearly and intensely. I veered to the magnet which seemed to be drawing all eyes, and saw it as a disc with a clean-cut rim, luminous and shining, but which did not hurt the eyes. I do not agree with the comparison which I have heard made in Fatima—that of a dull silver disc. It was a clearer, richer, brighter colour, having something of the luster of a pearl. It did not in the least resemble the moon on a clear night because one saw it and felt it to be a living body. It was not spheric like the moon, nor did it have the same colour, tone, or shading. It looked like a glazed wheel made of mother-of-pearl. It could not be confused, either, with the sun seen through fog (for there was no fog at the time), because it was not opaque, diffused or veiled. In Fatima it gave light and heat and appeared clear-cut with a well-defined rim.
The sky was mottled with light cirrus clouds with the blue coming through here and there, but sometimes the sun stood out in patches of clear sky. The clouds passed from west to east and did not obscure the light of the sun, giving the impression of passing behind it, though sometimes these flecks of white took on tones of pink or diaphanous blue as they passed before the sun.
It was a remarkable fact that one could fix one’s eyes on this brazier of heat and light without any pain in the eyes or blinding of the retina. The phenomenon, except for two interruptions when the sun seemed to send out rays of refulgent heat which obliged us to look away, must have lasted about ten minutes.
The sun’s disc did not remain immobile. This was not the sparkling of a, heavenly body, for it spun round on itself in a mad whirl. Then, suddenly, one heard a clamour, a cry of anguish breaking from all the people. The sun, whirling wildly, seemed to loosen itself from the firmament and advance threateningly upon the earth as if to crush us with its huge and fiery weight. The sensation during those moments was terrible.
During the solar phenomenon, which I have just described in detail, there were changes of colour in the atmosphere. Looking at the sun, I noticed that everything around was becoming darkened. I looked first at the nearest objects and then extended my glance further afield as far as the horizon. I saw everything an amethyst colour. Objects around me, the sky and the atmosphere, were of the same colour. An oak tree nearby threw a shadow of this colour on the ground.
Fearing that I was suffering from an affection of the retina, an improbable explanation because in that case one could not see things purple-colored, I turned away and shut my eyes, keeping my hands before them to intercept the light. With my back still turned, I opened my eyes and saw that the landscape was the same purple colour as before.
The impression was not that of an eclipse, and while looking at the sun I noticed that the atmosphere had cleared. Soon after I heard a peasant who was near me shout out in tones of astonishment: “Look, that lady is all yellow!”
And in fact everything, both near and far, had changed, taking on the colour of old yellow damask. People looked as if they were suffering from jaundice, and I recall a sensation of amusement at seeing them look so ugly and unattractive. My own hand was the same colour. All the phenomena which I have described were observed by me in a calm and serene state of mind, and without any emotional disturbance. It is for others to interpret and explain them.
Mmm, < .01%, it wasn’t something I would’ve dignified with enough thought to give a number. Even as a kid, although I liked the idea of aliens, stereotypical flying saucer little green men stuff struck me as facile and absurd. A failure of the imagination as to how alien aliens would really be.
In hindsight I had not considered that their outward appearance and behavior could simply be a front, but even then my estimate would’ve been very low, and justifiably, I think.
It certainly wasn’t high… I went through most of my life never giving the idea a thought, stumbled onto the miracle of fatima one day, and said “well, clearly this wasn’t a flying saucer, but what the heck was it?”
But the rabbit hole just kept going down. It is not a particularly pleasant feeling to me, as someone who used to think he had a fairly solid grip on the workings of the world.
Yes.
I agree with you entirely, and this is a great source of puzzlement to me, and to basically every serious investigator. They hide in the shadows with flashing lights. What could they want from us that they couldn’t do for themselves, and if they wanted to influence us without detection, shouldn’t it be within their power to do it COMPLETELY without detection?
I have no answers to these questions.
This is what spurred me to give consideration to the idea initially, but what makes me confident is sifting through simply mountains of reports. To get an idea of the volume and typical content, here’s a catalog of vehicle interference cases in Australia from 1958 to 2004. Most could be explained by a patchwork of mistakes and coincidences, some require more elaborate, “insanity or hoax” explanations, and if there are multiple witnesses, insanity falls away too. But there is no pattern that separates witnesses into a “hoax” and a “mistake” group, or even that separates them from the general population.
Flying saucers are real. They are likely not nuts-and-bolts spacecrafts, but they are actual physical things, the product of a superior science, and under the control of unknown entities. (95%)
Please note that this comment has been upvoted because the members of lesswrong widely DISAGREE with it. See here for details.
If people suck so badly at judging whether going to war in Afghanistan is a good idea that they might as well flip a coin, how do you expect them to be able to meaningfully judge the integrity of intelligence of a politician?
I also regret contact with the basilisk, but would not say it’s the only information I wish I didn’t know, nor am I entirely sure it was a good idea to censor it.
When it was originally posted I did not take it seriously, it only triggered “severe mental trauma” as others are saying, when I later read someone referring to it being censored, and some curiosity regarding it, and I updated on the fact that it was being taken that seriously by others here.
I do not think the idea holds water, and I feel I owe much of my severe mental trauma to an ongoing anxiety and depression stemming from a host of ordinary factors, isolation chief among them. I would STRONGLY advise everyone in this community to take their mental health more seriously, not so much in terms of basilisks as in terms of being human beings.
This community is, as it stands, ill-equipped to charge forth valiantly into the unknown. It is neurotic at best.
I would also like to apologize for whatever extent I was a player in the early formation of the cauldron of ideas which spawned the basilisk and I’m sure will spawn other basilisks in due time. I participated with a fairly callous abandon in the SL4 threads which prefigure these ideas.
Even at the time it was apparent to anyone paying attention that the general gist of these things was walking a worrisome path, and I basically thought “well, I can see my way clear through these brambles, if other people can’t, that’s their problem.”
We have responsibilities, to ourselves as much as to each other, beyond simply being logical. I have lately been reexamining much of my life, and have taken to practicing meditation. I find it to be a significant aid in combating general anxiety.
Also helpful: clonazepam.