Is anyone from LW going to the Worldcon (World Science Fiction Convention) in Seattle next year?
ETA: I will be, I forgot to say. I also notice that Burning Man 2025 begins about a week after the Worldcon ends. I have never been to BM, I don’t personally know anyone who has been, and it seems totally impractical for me, but the idea has been in the back of my mind ever since I discovered its existence, which was a very long time ago.
surplus physical energy is a wonderful thing.
It is indeed. I imagine the causal connections differently. Strenuous movement cultivates the energy; the body demands food as necessary to refuel. I don’t get high energy simply from eating.
One reason is just that eating food is enjoyable. I limit the amount of food I eat to stay within a healthy range, but if I could increase that amount while staying healthy, I could enjoy that excess.
Ah. I eat to sustain myself. Given that I must, I make it reasonably enjoyable, but it’s a chore I’d just as soon do without.
I’m missing something here. Why would I want a bigger liver? I mean, from this account, liver size is obviously something that the body is controlling. You list various interventions to make it bigger, which predictably have bad effects. But why would I want to change something that my body is already managing perfectly well?
The only reason I could find was this:
Athletes have higher resting metabolic rates than non-athletes; their bodies use more energy, even when they’re not exercising. That means they can eat more without getting fat.
Is that it? Why not just[1]...not eat more? These are athletes. They eat to sustain themselves in the pursuit of athletic excellence. They can already “just” not eat more. If they couldn’t, they would not be athletes.
I agree there are people, notably Eliezer, who can’t “just” not eat more without being as unable to function as if they were starving. I can’t see a larger liver burning up more energy helping with that.
If anyone’s hackles rise at a sentence beginning “Why not just—”, you’re quite right. No problem can be solved by “just”...whatever it is. If it could, it would not be a problem.
Or briefly, intelligence is good for everything.
some of which still strikes me as completely unbelievable (like leaving water in the sun to absorb energy)
Ultraviolet disinfection?
Just a speculation, generated by nailing the custom to the wall and seeing what hypothesis accretes around it.
Rather, I am pointing out that #1 is the case. No-one means the words that an AI produces. This is the fundamental reason for my distaste for AI-generated text. Its current low quality is a substantial but secondary issue.
If there is something flagrantly wrong with it, then 2, 3, and 4 come into play, but that won’t happen with standard average AI slop, unless it were eventually judged to be so persistently low quality that a decision were made to discontinue all ungated AI commentary.
You and the LW team are indirectly responsible, but only for the general feature. You are not standing behind each individual statement the AI makes. If the author of the post does not vet it, no-one stands behind it. The LW admins can be involved only in hindsight, if the AI does something particularly egregious.
Both. I do not want to have AI content added to my post without my knowledge or consent.
In fact, thinking further about it, I do not want AI content added to anyone’s post without their knowledge or consent, anywhere, not just on LessWrong.
Such content could be seen as just automating what people can do anyway with an LLM open in another window. I’ve no business trying to stop people doing that. However, someone doing that knows what they are doing. If the stuff pops up automatically amidst the author’s original words, will they be so aware of its source and grok that the author had nothing to do with it? I do not think that the proposed discreet “AI-generated” label is enough to make it clear that such content is third-party commentary, for which the author carries no responsibility.
But then, who does carry that responsibility? No-one. An AI’s words are news from nowhere. No-one’s reputation is put on the line by uttering them. For it is written, the fundamental question of rationality is “What do I think I know and how do I think I know it?” But these AI popovers cannot be questioned.
And also, I do not personally want to be running into any writing that AI had a hand in.
(Oh, hey, you’re the one who wrote Please do not use AI to write for you)
I am that person, and continue to be.
I would like to be able to set my defaults so that I never see any of the proposed AI content. Will this be possible?
Against hard barriers of this kind, you can point to arguments like “positing hard barriers of this kind requires saying that there are some very small differences … that make the crucial difference between [two things]. … And can epsilon really make that much of a difference?”
Sorites fallacy/argument by the beard/heap paradox/continuum fallacy/fallacy of grey/etc.
A word has to be real already to get into a dictionary.
Now, replace one neuron with a functionally identical unit, one that takes the same inputs and fires the same way. The behavior of the person remains the same, and they still say, “Wow, it feels so strange to see and to think.” This remains true if you replace more neurons – even the entire brain – with functionally equivalent units. The person will still say the same thing.
The argument is circular — this is the very thing you are claiming to prove.
Anyway, I expect the argument is familiar to people on LessWrong already. Somewhere on the web (that I couldn’t find) there’s a presentation by Dennett a long time ago in which he dramatises the same argument.
The number of programs of length at most n increases exponentially with n. Therefore any probability measure over them must decrease at least exponentially with length. That is, exponential decay is the least possible penalisation of length.
This is also true of the number of minimal programs of length at most n, hence the corresponding conclusion. (Proof: for each string S, consider the minimal program that writes S and halts. These programs are all different. Their sizes are no more than length(S)+c, where c is the fixed overhead of writing a program with S baked into it. Therefore exponentiality.)
I’ve written “at most n” instead of simply “n”, to guard against quirks like a programming language in which all programs are syntactically required to e.g. have even length, or deep theorems about the possible lengths of minimal programs.
No, I just threw that in. But there is the VHEM, and apparently serious people who argue for anti-natalism.
Short of those, there are also advocates for “degrowth”.
I suspect the reason that Zvi declined to engage with such arguments is that he thinks they’re too batshit insane to be worth giving house room, but these are a few terms to search for.
Look up anti-natalism, and the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. And random idiots everywhere saying “well maybe we all deserve to die”, “the earth would be better off without us”, “evolution made a huge mistake in inventing consciousness”, etc.
“Let’s summon the Torment Nexus, as seen in classic horror novel ‘Don’t Summon The Torment Nexus’!”
I’ve had a few lucid dreams, only by accident. No aftereffects. My difficulty is staying asleep. I always start waking up before I’ve had a good chance to explore the dream world.
Intent.
I don’t know what’s with this “legally defined” and “arbitrary label”. If someone adopts a stray cat as a companion, legal definitions are not involved. The law is not involved. “Pet” is not an arbitrary label, it is a word with an ordinary meaning that everyone knows. You may disagree with my acceptance of livestock and rejection of maltreating pets, but your faux-naïf framing is not an argument.
You use the word “torture” a lot, but torture has a specific meaning: suffering deliberately inflicted in order to coerce or punish someone, or as an end in itself. (“The purpose of torture is torture.” — O’Brien, in “1984”.) This is not the reason for the suffering of livestock, which is a side-effect of the intention of making food. No farmer, on discovering that the conditions of his animals are more humane than he thought they were, will deliberately go out with a cattle prod to make up the loss of the suffering he thought he was inflicting. If market conditions change to make crops a more profitable use of his land, he will switch without a thought of all the animal suffering he is missing out on.
Growing slower than logarithmic does not help. Only being bounded in the limit gives you, well, a bound in the limit.
“Bounded utility solves none of the problems of unbounded utility.” Thus the title of something I’m working on, on and off.
It’s not ready yet. For a foretaste, some of the points it will make can be found in an earlier unpublished paper “Unbounded Utility and Axiomatic Foundations”, section 3.
The reason that bounded utility does not help is that any problem that arises at infinity will already practically arise at a sufficiently large finite stage. Repeated plays of the finite games discussed in that paper will eventually give you a payoff that has a high probability of being close (in relative terms) to the expected value. But the time it takes for this to happen grows exponentially with the lengths of the individual games. You are unlikely to ever see your theoretically expected value, however long you play. The infinite game is non-ergodic; the game truncated to finitely many steps and finite payoffs is ergodic only on impractical timescales.
Infinitude in problems like these is better understood as an approximation to the finite, rather than the other way round. (There’s a blog post by Terry Tao on this theme, but I’ve lost the reference to it.) The problems at infinity point to problems with the finite.