quetzal_rainbow

Karma: 2,115

quetzal_rainbow Mar 29, 2025, 6:06 AM
14 points
0
in reply to: Richard_Ngo’s comment on: ricraz’s Shortform
In some sense this is a core idea of UDT: when coordinating with forks of yourself, you defer to your unique last common ancestor. When it’s not literally a fork of yourself, there’s more arbitrariness but you can still often find a way to use history to narrow down on coordination Schelling points (e.g. “what would Jesus do”)
I think this is wholly incorrect line of thinking. UDT operates on your logical ancestor, not literal.
Say, if you know enough science, you know that normal distribution is a maxentropy distribution for fixed mean and variance, and therefore, optimal prior distribution under certain set of assumptions. You can ask yourself question “let’s suppose that I haven’t seen this evidence, what would be my prior probability?” and get an answer and cooperate with your counterfactual versions which have seen other versions of evidence. But you can’t cooperate with your hypothetical version which doesn’t know what normal distribution is, because, if it doesn’t know about normal distribution, it can’t predict how you would behave and account for this in cooperation.
Sufficiently different versions of yourself are just logically uncorrelated with you and there is no game-theoretic reason to account for them.

quetzal_rainbow Mar 24, 2025, 8:59 AM
3 points
1
on: Solving willpower seems easier than solving aging
I’m quite skeptical about “easier” due to usual Algernon argument.
Roughly, conceptually, animal activity can be divided into 3 phases:
1. Active, when animal is looking for food or mate or something.
2. Sleep (which seems to be a requirement for Earth animals design).
3. Passive phase in-between when animal doesn’t do anything particular, but it shouldn’t sleep because of predators (the main problem with sleep as an evolutionary adaptation).
Large herbivores have very short sleep phase and active/passive phase are not very meaningfully different, because food doesn’t hide from them and is not very energy-dense, and they should always look out for predators. Large predators have very long sleep phase, short active phase and don’t have passive phase—because their search for food is very energy-intense and they don’t need to look out for predators.
Humans seem to be comfortably between these two extremes, but I think that unproductive phase in your day is just what it is—unproductive phase, meant only for you to be alert about predators (and fellow tribesmen). You can probably extend your productive phase somewhat by doing known things, like healthy diet, normal sleep, exercise, but it is likely that you have strong biological limit on what you can productively do per day which you can’t cross without degradation in quality of life.
I don’t think caffeine and amphetamines help here. They just forcefully redistribute activity—if you have ADHD, you are going to work instead of doing whatever you feel like and if you are night owl, you can function better at morning.
You can play on difference between “activity which requires you to be biologically active” and “meaningful activity”, like, I don’t think watching TV with family is very energetically demanding. Although, it seems to be a time organization problem?
I think that actual solution to “lack of biological willpower” is something like “large bionanotech system which resets organism in the way like sleep resets it” and honestly, I think if you can develop such systems you are not far from actual aging treatment.

quetzal_rainbow Mar 18, 2025, 7:44 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: Lukas_Gloor’s comment on: AI #107: The Misplaced Hype Machine
“The best possible life” for me pretty much includes “everyone who I care about is totally happy”?
And parents certainly do dangerous risky things to provide better future for their children all the time.

quetzal_rainbow Mar 16, 2025, 4:14 PM
21 points
9
on: quetzal_rainbow’s Shortform
When we should expect “Swiss cheese” approach in safety/security to go wrong:

quetzal_rainbow Mar 2, 2025, 11:07 AM
11 points
14
on: Maintaining Alignment during RSI as a Feedback Control Problem
I think the general problem with your metaphor is that we don’t know “relevant physics” of self-improvement. We can’t plot “physically realistic” trajectory of landing in “good values” land and say “well, we need to keep ourselves in direction of this trajectory”. BTW, MIRI has a dialogue with this metaphor.
And most of your suggestions are like “let’s learn physics of alignment”? I have nothing against that, but it is the hard part, and control theory doesn’t seem to provide a lot of insight here. It’s a framework at best.

quetzal_rainbow Mar 1, 2025, 9:39 AM
2 points
0
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: On Eating the Sun
Yes, that’s why it’s compromise—nobody will totally like it. But if Earth is going to exist for trillions of years, it will radically change too.

quetzal_rainbow Feb 23, 2025, 5:05 PM
7 points
2
in reply to: RedMan’s comment on: Joseph Miller’s Shortform
My honest opinion is that WMD evaluations of LLMs are not meaningfully related to X-risk in the sense of “kill literally everyone.” I guess current or next-generation models may be able to assist a terrorist in a basement in brewing some amount of anthrax, spraying it in a public place, and killing tens to hundreds of people. To actually be capable to kill everyone from a basement, you would need to bypass all the reasons industrial production is necessary at the current level of technology. A system capable to bypass the need for industrial production in a basement is called “superintelligence,” and if you have a superintelligent model on the loose, you have far bigger problems than schizos in basements brewing bioweapons.

I think “creeping WMD relevance”, outside of cyberweapons, is mostly bad, because it is concentrated on mostly fake problem, which is very bad for public epistemics, even if we forget about lost benefits from competent models.

quetzal_rainbow Feb 23, 2025, 11:16 AM
33 points
4
in reply to: RedMan’s comment on: Joseph Miller’s Shortform
Well, I have bioengineering degree, but my point is that “direct lab experience” doesn’t matter, because WMDs in quality and amount necessary to kill large numbers of enemy manpower are not produced in labs. They are produced in large industrial facilities and setting up large industrial facility for basically anything is on “hard” level of difficulty. There is a difference between large-scale textile industry and large-scale semiconductor industry, but if you are not government or rich corporation, all of them lie in “hard” zone.
Let’s take, for example, Saddam chemical weapons program. First, industrial yields: everything is counted in tons. Second: for actual success, Saddam needed a lot of existing expertise and machinery from West Germany.
Let’s look at Soviet bioweapons program. First, again, tons of yield (someone may ask yourself, if it’s easier to kill using bioweapons than conventional weaponry, why somebody needs to produce tons of them?). Second, USSR built the entire civilian biotech industry around it (many Biopreparat facilities are active today as civilian objects!) to create necessary expertise.
The difference with high explosives is that high explosives are not banned by international law, so there is a lot of existing production, therefore you can just buy them on black market or receive from countries which don’t consider you terrorist. If you really need to produce explosives locally, again, precursors, machinery and necessary expertise are legal and widespread sufficiently that they can be bought.
There is a list of technical challenges in bioweaponry where you are going to predictably fuck up if you have biological degree and you think you know what you are doing but in reality you do not, but I don’t write out lists of technical challenges on the way to dangerous capabilities, because such list can inspire someone. You can get an impression about easier and lower-stakes challenges from here.

quetzal_rainbow Feb 22, 2025, 5:39 PM
16 points
3
in reply to: Joseph Miller’s comment on: Joseph Miller’s Shortform
The trick is that chem/bio weapons can’t, actually, “be produced simply with easily available materials”, if we talk about military-grade stuff, not “kill several civilians to create scary picture in TV”.

quetzal_rainbow Feb 21, 2025, 4:21 PM
3 points
0
in reply to: Mo Putera’s comment on: Mo Putera’s Shortform
It’s very funny that Rorschach linguistic ability is totally unremarkable comparing to modern LLMs.

quetzal_rainbow Feb 20, 2025, 2:54 PM
6 points
0
in reply to: Ruby’s comment on: Why do we have the NATO logo?
The real question is why does NATO have our logo.
This is LGBTESCREAL agenda

quetzal_rainbow Feb 18, 2025, 8:31 PM
5 points
1
on: Abstract Mathematical Concepts vs. Abstractions Over Real-World Systems
I think there is an abstraction between “human” and “agent”: “animal”. Or, maybe, “organic life”. Biological systematization (meaning all ways to systematize: phylogenetic, morphological, functional, ecological) is a useful case study for abstraction “in the wild”.

quetzal_rainbow Feb 16, 2025, 8:20 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: EniScien’s comment on: EniScien’s Shortform
EY wrote in planecrash about how the greatest fictional conflicts between characters with different levels of intelligence happen between different cultures/species, not individuals of the same culture.

quetzal_rainbow Feb 16, 2025, 6:43 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: Noosphere89’s comment on: Introduction to Expected Value Fanaticism
I think that here you should re-evaluate what you consider “natural units”.

Like, it’s clear due to Olbers’s paradox and relativity that we live in causally isolated pocket where stuff we can interact with is certainly finite. If the universe is a set of causally isolated bubbles all you have is anthropics over such bubbles.

quetzal_rainbow Feb 16, 2025, 7:20 AM
18 points
1
on: It’s been ten years. I propose HPMOR Anniversary Parties.
I think it’s perfect ground for meme cross-pollination:
“After all this time?”
“Always.”

quetzal_rainbow Feb 15, 2025, 4:23 PM
6 points
0
on: Introduction to Expected Value Fanaticism
I’ll repeat myself that I don’t believe in Saint Petersburg lotteries:
my honest position towards St. Petersburg lotteries is that they do not exist in “natural units”, i.e., counts of objects in physical world.
Reasoning: if you predict with probability p that you encounter St. Petersburg lottery which creates infinite number of happy people on expectation (version of St. Petersburg lottery for total utilitarians), then you should put expectation of number of happy people to infinity now, because E[number of happy people] = p * E[number of happy people due to St. Petersburg lottery] + (1 - p) * E[number of happy people for all other reasons] = p * inf + (1 - p) * E[number of happy people for all other reasons] = inf.
Therefore, if you don’t think right now that expected number of future happy people is infinity, then you shouldn’t expect St. Petersburg lottery to happen in any point of the future.
Therefore, you should set your utility either in “natural units” or in some “nice” function of “natural units”.

quetzal_rainbow Feb 10, 2025, 9:10 PM
3 points
0
on: Notes on Occam via Solomonoff vs. hierarchical Bayes
I think there is a reducibility from one to another using different UTMs? I.e., for example, causal networks are Turing-complete, therefore, you can write UTM that explicitly takes description of initial conditions, causal time evolution law and every SI-simple hypothesis here will correspond to simple causal-network hypothesis. And you can find the same correspondence for arbitrary ontologies which allow for Turing-complete computations.

quetzal_rainbow Feb 9, 2025, 3:06 PM
7 points
3
in reply to: Michael Roe’s comment on: How AI Takeover Might Happen in 2 Years
I think nobody really believes that telling user how to make meth is a threat to anything but company reputation. I would guess this is a nice toy task which recreates some obstacles on aligning superintelligence (i.e., superintelligence will probably know how to kill you anyway). The primary value of censoring dataset is to detect whether model can rederive doom scenario without them in training data.

quetzal_rainbow Feb 9, 2025, 12:52 PM
8 points
9
in reply to: Michael Roe’s comment on: How AI Takeover Might Happen in 2 Years
i once again maintain that “training set” is not mysterious holistic thing, it gets assembled by AI corps. If you believe that doom scenarios in training set meaningfully affect our survival chances, you should censor them out. Current LLMs can do that.

quetzal_rainbow Feb 9, 2025, 8:31 AM
5 points
0
on: quetzal_rainbow’s Shortform
There is a certain story, probably common for many LWers: first, you learn about spherical in vacuum perfect reasoning, like Solomonoff induction/AIXI. AIXI takes all possible hypotheses, predicts all possible consequences of all possible actions, weights all hypotheses by probability and computes optimal action by choosing one with the maximal expected value. Then, it’s not usually even told, it is implied in a very loud way, that this method of thinking is computationally untractable at best and uncomputable at worst and you need to do clever shortcuts. This is true in general, but approach “just list out all the possibilities and consider all the consequences (inside certain subset)” gets neglected as a result.
For example, when I try to solve puzzle from “Baba is You” and then try to analyze how I would be able to solve it faster, I usually come up to “I should have just write down all pairwise interactions between the objects to notice which one will lead to solution”.