I want everyone to be able to achieve world they would really like; guess the best way to do that is to help people learn, build one’s strengths, build small-scale and large-scale projects, and also to cooperate.
Any gift must be accepted with gratitude and, if possible, with grace.
As of 2024-12-21, I have signed no contracts I cannot mention exist. I finally got to adding this notice thanks to the one in the-gears-to-ascension’s bio.
The AI industry is different—more like biology labs testing new pathogens: The biolab must carefully monitor and control conditions like air pressure, or the pathogen might leak into the external world.
This looks like a cached analogy, because given previous paragraph this would fit more: “the AI industry is different, more like testing planes; their components can be internally tested, but eventually the full plane must be assembled and fly, and then it can damage the surroundings”.
Same goes for AI: If we don’t keep a watchful eye, the AI might be able to escape—for instance, by exploiting its role in shaping the security code meant to keep the AI locked inside the company’s computers.
This seems very likely to happen! We’ve already seen that AIs improving code can remove its essential features, so it wouldn’t be surprising for some security checks to disappear.
Based on this, I’ve decided to upvote this post weakly only.
I suggest additional explanation.
The bigger the audience is, the more people there are who won’t know a specific idea/concept/word (xkcd’s comic #1053 “Ten Thousand” captures this quite succinctly), so you’ll simply have to shorten.
I took logarithm of sentence length and linearly fitted it against logarithm of world population (that shouldn’t really be precise since authors presumably mostly cared about their society, but that would be more time-expensive to check).
Relevant lines of Python REPL
>>> import math
>>> wps = [49, 50, 42, 20, 21, 14, 18, 12]
>>> pop = [600e6, 700e6, 1e9, 1.4e9, 1.5e9, 2.3e9, 3.5e9, 6e9]
>>> [math.log(w) for w in wps]
[3.8918202981106265, 3.912023005428146, 3.7376696182833684, 2.995732273553991, 3.044522437723423, 2.6390573296152584, 2.8903717578961645, 2.4849066497880004]
>>> [math.log(p) for p in pop]
[20.21244021318042, 20.36659089300768, 20.72326583694641, 21.059738073567623, 21.128730945054574, 21.556174959881517, 21.97602880544178, 22.515025306174465]
>>> 22.51-20.21
2.3000000000000007
>>> 3.89-2.48
1.4100000000000001
>>> 2.3/1.41
1.6312056737588652
>>> [round(math.exp(26.41 - math.log(w)*1.63)/1e9, 3) for w,p in zip(wps,pop)] # predicted population, billion
[0.518, 0.502, 0.667, 2.234, 2.063, 3.995, 2.652, 5.136]
>>> [round(math.exp(26.41 - math.log(w)*1.63)/1e9 - p/1e9, 3) for w,p in zip(wps,pop)] # prediction off by, billion
[-0.082, −0.198, −0.333, 0.834, 0.563, 1.695, −0.848, −0.864]
Given the gravity of Sam Altman’s position at the helm of the company leading the development of an artificial superintelligence which it does not yet know how to align—to imbue with morality and ethics—I feel Annie’s claims warrant a far greater level of investigation than they’ve received thus far.
Then there’s a bit of shortage of something public… and ratsphere-adjacent… maybe prediction markets?
I can create (subsidize) a few, given resolution criteria.
Cooperation: you need to cooperate with yourself to do anything. Please do so iff you are building ASI;
Defection: it ain’t no defection if you’re benefitting yourself and advancing your goals;
Inquiry: a nice way of making others work for your amusement or knowledge expansion;
Koan: if someone is not willing to do research for you, you can waste their time on pondering a compressed idea.
This concludes my April the 1st!
I claim that I exist, and that I am now going to type the next words of my response. Both of those certainly look true. As for whether these beliefs are provable, I do not particularly care; instead, I invoke the nameless:
Every step of your reasoning must cut through to the correct answer in the same movement. More than anything, you must think of carrying your map through to reflecting the territory.
My black-box functions yield a statement “I exist” as true or very probable, and they are also correct in that.
After all, If I exist, I do not want to deny my existence. If I don’t exist… well let’s go with the litany anyways… I want to accept I don’t exist. Let me not be attached to beliefs I may not want.
What’s useful about them? If you are going to predict (the belief in) qualia, on the basis of usefulness , you need to state the usefulness.
There might be some usefulness!
The statement I’d consider is “I am now going to type the next characters of my comment”. This belief turns out to be true by direct demonstration, it is not provable because I could as well leave the commenting to tomorrow and be thinking “I am now going to sleep”, not particularly justifiable in advance, and it is useful for making specific plans that branch less on my own actions.
I object to the original post because of probabilistic beliefs, though.
I don’t think there is a universal set of emojis that would work on every human, but I totally think that there is a set of such emojis (or something similar) that would work on any given human at any given time, at least a large percentage of the time, if you somehow were able to iterate enough times to figure out what it is.
Probably something with more informational content than emojis, like images (perhaps slightly animated). Trojan Sky, essentially.
The core idea behind confidentiality is to stop social pressure (whether on the children or the parents).
Parents have a strong right to not use genomic engineering technology, and if they do use it then they have a strong right to not alter any given trait.
How to prevent all the judgements better than to make information sharing completely voluntary?
Important, and would be nice even if passed as-is! Admittedly, there’s some space to have even stronger ideas, like...
“Confidentiality of genomic interventions. Human has natural right for details of which aspects of their genome were custom-chosen, if any, to be kept confidential” (probably also prohibit parents/guardians from disclosing that, since knowledge cannot be sealed back into the box).
A nice scary story! How fortunate that it is fiction...
… or is it? If we get mind uploads, someone will certainly try to gradient-ascent various stimulus (due to simple hostility or Sixth Law of Human Stupidity), and I do believe the underlying fact that a carefully crafted image could hijack mental processes to some point.
It’s 16:9 (modulo possible changes in the venue).
I have seen your banner and it is indeed one of the best choices out there! For announcing the event I preferred another one.
Hi! By any chance, do you have HPMOR banners (to display on screen, for instance)?
I get the impression that you’re conflating two meanings of «personal» - «private» and «individual». The fact that I might feel uncomfortable discussing this in a public forum doesn’t mean it «only works for me» or that it «doesn’t work, but I’m shielded from testing my beliefs due to privacy». There are always anonymous surveys, for example. Perhaps you meant something else?
I meant to say that private values/things are unlikely to coincide between different people, though now I’m a bit less sure.
Moreover, even if I were to provide yet another table of my own subjective experience ratings, like the ones here, you likely wouldn’t find it satisfactory — such tables already exist, with far more respondents than just myself, and you aren’t satisfied. Probably because you disagree with the methodology — for instance, since measuring «what people call pleasurable» is subject to distortions like the compulsions mentioned earlier.
I was unfamiliar with those, thanks for pointing! I have an idea to estimate if “optimization-power” could replace existing currencies, and those surveys’ data seems like it might be useful.
Seeing you know the exact numbers, I wonder if you could connect with those other families? It’s harder to get the best outcome if players do not cooperate and do not even know the wishes of others. Adding that this would be a valuable socializing opportunity would be somewhat hypocritical from me but it’s still so.
Upvoted as a good re-explanation of CEV complexity in simpler terms! (I believe LW will benefit from recalling the long understood things so that it has a chance on predicting future in greater detail.)
In essence, you prove the claim “Coherent Extrapolated Volition would not literally include everything desirable happening effortlessly and everything undesirable going away”. Would I be wrong to guess it argues against position in https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AfAp8mEAbuavuHZMc/for-the-sake-of-pleasure-alone?
That said, current wishes of many people include things they want being done faster and easier; it’s just the more you extrapolate the less fraction wants that level of automation—just more divergence as you consider higher scale.
And introspectively, I don’t see any barriers to comparing love with orgasm, with good food, with religious ecstasy, all within the same metric, even though I can’t give you numbers for it.
Why not? It’d be interesting to hear valuations from your experience and experiments, if that wasn’t very personal.
(On the other hand, if it IS too personal, then who would choose to write the metric down for an automatic system optimizing it by their whims?)
The follow-up post has a very relevant comment:
Can you just give every thief a body camera?
Well of course this is illegal under current US laws, however this would help against being unjustly accused as in your example of secondary crime. It would also be helpful against repeat offences for a whole range of other crimes.
I’d maintain that those problems already exist in 20M-people cities and will not necessarily become much worse. However, by increasing city population you bring in more people into the problems, which doesn’t seem good.
Is there any engineering challenge such as water supply that prevents this from happening? Or is it just lack of any political elites with willingness + engg knowledge + governing sufficient funds?
That dichotomy is not exhaustive, and I believe going through with the proposal will necesarily make the city inhabitants worse off.
Humans’ social machinery is not suited to live in such large cities, as of the current generations. Who to get acquainted with, in the first place? Isn’t there lots of opportunity cost to any event?
Humans’ biomachinery is not suited to live in such large cities. Being around lots and lots of people might be regulating hormones and behaviour to settings we have not totally explored (I remember reading something that claims this a large factor to lower fertility).
Centralization is dangerous because of possibly-handmade mass weapons.
Assuming random housing and examining some quirk/polar position, we’ll get a noisy texture. It will almost certainly have a large group of people supporting one position right next to group thinking otherwise. Depending on sizes and civil law enforcement, that may not end well.
After a couple hundred years, 1) and 2) will most probably get solved by natural selection so the proposal will be much more feasible.
Browsing through recent rejects, I found an interesting comment that suggests an automatic system “build a prior on whether something is true by observing social interactions around it vs competing ideas”.
@timur-sadekov While it will fail most certainly, I do remember that the ultimate arbiter is experiment, so I shall reserve the judgement. Instead, I’m calling for you to test the idea over prediction markets (Manifold, for instance) and publish the results.