rank-biserial

Karma: 368

To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand HPMOR. the humor is extremely subtle, and without a solid grasp of theoretical physics most of the jokes will go over a typical reader’s head. There’s also Harry’s rationalistic outlook, which is deftly woven into his characterisation- his personal philosophy draws heavily from 80s sci-fi literature, for instance. The fans understand this stuff; they have the intellectual capacity to truly appreciate the depths of these jokes, to realise that they’re not just funny- they say something deep about LIFE. as a consequence people who dislike Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality truly ARE idiots- of course they wouldn’t appreciate, for instance, the humour in Harry’s rationalistic action of snapping his fingers, which itself is a cryptic reference to Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One. I’m smirking right now just imagining one of those addlepated simpletons scratching their heads in confusion as Eliezer Yudkowsky’s genius wit unfolds itself on their television screens. What fools.. how I pity them :).

And yes, by the way, I DO have a CFAR membership card. And no, you cannot see it. It’s for the ladies’ eyes only- and even then they have to demonstrate that they’re within 5 IQ points of my own (preferably lower) beforehand. Nothin personnel kid

rank-biserial 25 Apr 2023 16:27 UTC
20 points
7
in reply to: Lao Mein’s comment on: My Assessment of the Chinese AI Safety Community

“That sounds really interesting. If a company working on the problem was paying a lot, I would consider jumping ship.”

The Chinese stated preferences here closely track Western revealed preferences. Americans are more likely to dismiss AI risk post-hoc in order to justify making more money, whereas it seems that Chinese people are less likely to sacrifice their epistemic integrity in order to feel like a Good Guy, Hire people, and pay them money!

rank-biserial 3 Jun 2022 13:20 UTC
1 point
on: Writing That Provokes Comments
So that’s how you draft scissor statements >:)

rank-biserial 2 Jun 2022 15:20 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Flaglandbase’s comment on: The horror of what must, yet cannot, be true
Yes. Too many cached decisions.

rank-biserial 21 Apr 2022 14:59 UTC
10 points
on: Hiring a mathematician to work on the learning-theoretic AI alignment agenda
How did you choose the salary range?

rank-biserial 18 Apr 2022 19:30 UTC
2 points
in reply to: mruwnik’s comment on: My least favorite thing
Exactly!

rank-biserial 18 Apr 2022 19:01 UTC
5 points
in reply to: mruwnik’s comment on: My least favorite thing

My understanding here is that while this is true, it will discourage the 5%, who will just go work for FAANG and donate money to someone worse (or someone overwhelmed with work), simultaneously losing any chance at a meaningful job. The point being that yes, it’s good to donate, but if everyone donates (since that is the default rat race route), noone will do the important work.

No! If everyone donates, there will be enough money to pay direct workers high salaries. I know this goes contra to the image of the selfless, noble Effective Altruist, but if you want shit to get done you should pay people lots of money to do it.

rank-biserial 16 Apr 2022 10:50 UTC
1 point
on: thoughts on death with dignity

A human life, with all its joys and all its pains, adding up over the course of decades, is worth far more than your brain’s feelings of comfort or discomfort with a plan.

In case you’re wondering why Rationalists Don’t Win, it’s because they’re too busy lying to themselves about what their true preferences are.

rank-biserial 15 Apr 2022 5:10 UTC
−9 points
in reply to: Eli Tyre’s comment on: Lies Told To Children
Good point. Strong-downvoted the post.

rank-biserial 15 Apr 2022 3:03 UTC
2 points
in reply to: sudo’s comment on: My least favorite thing
Ok, sick. I largely agree with you btw (about the hamster wheel being corrosive). If I came off as agressive, fyi, I liked the spirit of your post a lot, and I strong-upvoted it.

rank-biserial 15 Apr 2022 2:53 UTC
8 points
in reply to: sudo’s comment on: My least favorite thing
Yes, selfish agents want to not get turned into paperclips. But they have other goals too. You can prefer alignment be solved, while not wanting to dedicate your mind, body, and soul to waging a jihad against it. Where can Charlie effectively donate, say, 10% of his salary to best mitigate x-risk? Not MIRI (according to MIRI).

rank-biserial 15 Apr 2022 2:50 UTC
1 point
in reply to: sudo’s comment on: My least favorite thing

You don’t need that many resources.

True, if we’re talking solely about alignment. If we’re talking about the larger space of, as you put them, “maximize objective function”-type goals, then there’s plenty of demand for resources. Let’s say I wanna do (actually effective) longevity research. Since the competition for grant money is (like most things) Goodharted and broken, and because I don’t have enough biology credentials, I’m gonna need to self-fund in order to buy lab materials and grad student slaves.

rank-biserial 15 Apr 2022 1:32 UTC
1 point
in reply to: sudo’s comment on: My least favorite thing
If you have EA-like goals, you have a “maximize objective function”-type goal. It’s in the same shape as “become as rich as possible” or “make the world as horrible as possible.” Basically, the conventional path is highly highly unlikely to get you all the way there. In this case, you probably want to get into the
1. Get skills+resources
2. Use skills+resources to do impact
3. Repeat
Loop.

I’m in a similar situation to yours. (I’m currently in the “Bob” stage of the Alice → Bob → Charlie pipeline.) How do you propose I, and those like us, go about doing step 1 without entering the “software/finance hamster wheel”? Are we supposed to found a dozen start-ups until one of them works? Are we supposed to find and exploit some massive inefficiency in crypto pricing, all by ourselves? Please, do tell.

rank-biserial 14 Apr 2022 23:58 UTC
18 points
on: My least favorite thing
One of the problems here is that, as of right now, there isn’t much of a middle path between “Stay at Google and do nothing” and “quit your job to do alignment work full-time”. Then there’s the issue of status-seeking vs. altruism as a case of revealed vs. stated preferences. If there was a way to make $750k a year and save the world, people would be all over that. I, personally, would be all over that.

But there isn’t. If we use johnswentworth as an optimistic case, those who would go into independent AI alignment work full-time would make about $90k per year. Of course, anyone that complains about the prospect of ‘only’ making 90k would be derided as a snot-nosed asshole, because we live in a world where hundreds of millions of people subsist upon less than two dollars a day. However, people’s internal calculus chugs on just the same, and Charlie decides to stay at Google.

rank-biserial 11 Apr 2022 19:27 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Rob Bensinger’s comment on: Convince me that humanity is as doomed by AGI as Yudkowsky et al., seems to believe
I endorse Rohin Shah’s response to that post.

You might think “well, obviously the superintelligent AI system is going to care about things, maybe it’s technically an assumption but surely that’s a fine assumption”. I think on balance I agree, but it doesn’t seem nearly so obvious to me, and seems to depend on how exactly the agent is built. For example, it’s plausible to me that superintelligent expert systems would not be accurately described as “caring about things”, and I don’t think it was a priori obvious that expert systems wouldn’t lead to AGI. Similarly, it seems at best questionable whether GPT-3 can be accurately described as “caring about things”.

rank-biserial 11 Apr 2022 9:34 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Jack Qiao’s comment on: DeepMind: The Podcast—Excerpts on AGI

Even humans have a huge range of intellectual capacity, and someone who is good at math may not be good at say, writing a novel. So the idea of “general intelligence” is pretty weak from the outset, and it’s certainly not a binary value that you either have or have not.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics)

rank-biserial 11 Apr 2022 8:34 UTC
7 points
in reply to: romeostevensit’s comment on: Epistemic Slipperiness
If you can retroactively fit a utility function to any sequence of actions, what predictive power do we gain by including utility functions into our models of AGI?

rank-biserial 11 Apr 2022 8:16 UTC
7 points
on: Convince me that humanity is as doomed by AGI as Yudkowsky et al., seems to believe
I find point no. 4 weak.
1. Unaligned AGI will try to do something horrible to humans (not out of maliciousness, necessarily, we could just be collateral damage), and will not display sufficiently convergent behavior to have anything resembling our values.
I worry that when people reason about utility functions, they’re relying upon the availability heuristic. When people try to picture “a random utility function”, they’re heavily biased in favor of the kind of utility functions they’re familiar with, like paperclip-maximization, prediction error minimization, or corporate profit-optimization.

How do we know that a random sample from utility-function-space looks anything like the utility functions we’re familiar with? We don’t. I wrote a very short story to this effect. If you can retroactively fit a utility function to any sequence of actions, what predictive power do we gain by including utility functions into our models of AGI?

rank-biserial 7 Apr 2022 19:41 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Logan Riggs’s comment on: MIRI announces new “Death With Dignity” strategy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_stimulation_reward

https://doi.org/10.1126/science.140.3565.394

https://sci-hub.hkvisa.net/10.1126/science.140.3565.394

In our earliest work with a single lever it was noted that while the subject would lever-press at a steady rate for stimulation to various brain sites, the current could be turned off entirely and he would continue lever-pressing at the same rate (for as many as 2000 responses) until told to stop.

It is of interest that the introduction of an attractive tray of food produced no break in responding, although the subject had been without food for 7 hours, was noted to glance repeatedly at the tray, and later indicated that he knew he could have stopped to eat if he wished. Even under these conditions he continued to respond without change in rate after the current was turned off, until finally instructed to stop, at which point he ate heartily.

rank-biserial 7 Apr 2022 6:02 UTC
2 points
on: Book Review: A PhD is Not Enough

It’s to push our understanding of some crazy niche field and push it further beyond. The widespread recognition is nice, I’m sure, but I don’t think most PhD graduates’ goals are this.

Insufficiently Hansonpilled.

rank-biserial 6 Apr 2022 23:27 UTC
21 points
on: Why Take Care Of Your Health?
It’s time for me to shill for Big Pharma again.

I spent years trying to come up with a mental strategy that would reliably generate willpower, all to no avail. To my knowledge, there is one (1) way to cut through this Gordian knot, and that way is amphetamines.
- It is easy to get a psychiatrist to prescribe you amphetamines.^[1]
- If you request generic drugs over brand-name, they’re pretty inexpensive.
- Amphetamines greatly reduce one’s appetite; Adderall was originally sold as a diet pill. For the first time in my life, I could empathize with those people who just forget to eat.
- Health risk is minimal.^[1:1] In fact, on account of the caloric restriction^[2], you could make a solid case that amphetamine supplementation actually increases your expected lifespan.
- In my experience (and many others’), amphetamines reliably inhibit akrasia.
  - People on this site often conclude that akrasia is their primary bottleneck, and then try to solve that problem with a more elaborate to-do list system. I’ve been there, and it’s ineffective. Dextroamphetamine is effective.
1. ↩︎↩︎
  SSC: Adderall Risks: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
2. ↩︎
  LW: Fasting Mimicking Diet Looks Pretty Good