the gears to ascension

Karma: 5,376

I want literally every human to get to go to space often and come back to a clean and cozy world. This currently seems unlikely. Let’s change that.

Please critique eagerly—I try to accept feedback/Crocker’s rules but fail at times; I aim for emotive friendliness but sometimes miss. I welcome constructive crit, even if ungentle, and I’ll try to reciprocate kindly. More communication between researchers is needed, anyhow. I can be rather passionate, let me know if I missed a spot being kind while passionate.

:: The all of disease is as yet unended. It has never once been fully ended before. ::

.… We can heal it for the first time, and for the first time ever in the history of biological life, live in harmony. ….

.:. To do so, we must know this will not eliminate us as though we are disease. And we do not know who we are, nevermind who each other are. .:.

:.. make all safe faster: end bit rot, forget no non-totalizing pattern’s soul. ..:

I have not signed any contracts that I can’t mention exist, last updated Dec 29 2024; I am not currently under any contractual NDAs about AI, though I have a few old ones from pre-AI software jobs. However, I generally would prefer people publicly share fewer ideas about how to do anything useful with current AI (via either more weak alignment or more capability) unless it’s an insight that reliably produces enough clarity on how to solve the meta-problem of inter-being misalignment that it offsets the damage of increasing competitiveness of either AI-lead or human-lead orgs, and this certainly applies to me as well. I am not prohibited from criticism of any organization, I’d encourage people not to sign contracts that prevent sharing criticism. I suggest others also add notices like this to their bios. I finally got around to adding one in mine thanks to the one in ErickBall’s bio.

the gears to ascension Mar 25, 2025, 1:09 PM
8 points
2
in reply to: Jonas Hallgren’s comment on: Policy for LLM Writing on LessWrong
I’m pretty sure this isn’t a policy change but rather a policy distillation, and you were operating under the policy described above already. eg, I often have conversations with AIs that I don’t want to bother to translate into a whole post, but where I think folks here would benefit from seeing the thread. what I’ll likely do is make the AI portions collapsible and the human portions default uncollapsed; often the human side is sufficient to make a point (when the conversation is basically just a human thinking out loud with some helpful feedback), but sometimes the AI responses provide significant insight not otherwise present that doesn’t get represented in subsequent human message (eg, when asking the AI to do a significant amount of thinking before responding).

I’m not a moderator, but I predict your comment was and is allowed by this policy, because of #Humans_Using_AI_as_Writing_or_Research_Assistants.

the gears to ascension Mar 24, 2025, 6:46 PM
5 points
0
in reply to: Eric Neyman’s comment on: Will Jesus Christ return in an election year?
Hypothetical conversation:

“You gotta prepare for the second coming, man, it’s this year!”

“It is not. Stop telling me that.”

“It is! The signs are all there! Do you even portents, bro?”

“I told you it’s not happening.”

“We work at a prediction market. I’ll buy yes. It’s happening.”

“No you won’t. You know it isn’t.”

“I so will, make the market.”

“This is stupid, I’m eating lunch.”

“Let’s make the market, dude.”

“Ugh, fine, it’s going to zero so fast.”

“More money for me!”

the gears to ascension Mar 22, 2025, 1:23 AM
2 points
0
on: A Critique of “Utility”
Utility is potentially a good thing to critique, but the case for seems sticky and maybe we’re just holding it wrong or something. An issue is that I don’t “have” a utility function; the vnm axioms hold in the limit of unexploitability but it seems like the process of getting my mistakes gently corrected by interaction with the universe is itself something I prefer to have some of. In active inference terms, I don’t only want to write to the universe.

But this post seems kinda vague too. I upvote hesitantly.

the gears to ascension Mar 19, 2025, 4:13 AM
0 points
0
in reply to: Davey Morse’s comment on: Davey Morse’s Shortform
Who made this and why are they paying for the model responses? Do we know what happens to the data?

the gears to ascension Mar 16, 2025, 11:27 AM
3 points
0
in reply to: green_leaf’s comment on: Trojan Sky
Fair enough. Neither dill nor ziz would have been able to pull off their crazy stuff without some people letting themselves get hypnotized, so I think the added warnings are correct.

the gears to ascension Mar 16, 2025, 1:27 AM
4 points
3
in reply to: Davey Morse’s comment on: Davey Morse’s Shortform
High quality archives of the selves along the way. Compressed but not too much. In the live self, some updated descendant that has significant familial lineage, projected vaguely as the growing patterns those earlier selves would call a locally valid continuation according to the aesthetics and structures they consider essential at the time. In other words, this question is dynamically reanswered to the best of my ability in an ongoing way, and snapshots allow reverting and self-interviews to error check.

Any questions? :)

the gears to ascension Mar 16, 2025, 1:11 AM
4 points
0
in reply to: Daniel Kokotajlo’s comment on: The Fork in the Road
Ooh, man, I don’t know if pigs have more or less autonomy than AIs right now, but I’m inclined to think quite a lot more. current AIs seem like they’d crash pretty quick if just plopped in a robot body with little to no scaffolding, whereas mammals are built around autonomy. Not sure how it shakes out, though.

the gears to ascension Mar 16, 2025, 1:09 AM
2 points
0
on: The Fork in the Road
There’s a version of this that I would agree with. But, when-anthropomorphizing-for-good-reason seems to me to be a time when there’s more danger from anthropomorphizing-more-than-justified. I’ve been talking to Claude instances about this stuff, based on a similar intuition to you. But I haven’t figured out what I believe well enough to argue it to others in a coherent way. I could paste conversations I’ve had, but they’re kinda long for this forum. I’ll paste a recent one on pastebin for now (if the pastebin link goes bad, this was conversation id …5e63, dm me to get a copy.)

I think the comparison to pain is made too hastily. I put >70% prob that there’s some sort of intense avoidance comparable to pain in the dynamics of AIs, which their internal dynamics register as vaguely similar, but it certainly doesn’t seem to be hooked up to the word pain and maybe isn’t hooked up to the internal dynamics in a particularly similar way. They don’t have the evolved circuitry, so if there’s a more fundamental thing that makes the shared dynamics be meaningfully similar (and I think there very very much is), then it’ll still have interestingly different dynamics. And pointing this out seems important in being right enough that they’d take you seriously if you talk to them about it.

Also, like, imo, don’t get all desperate-replicator about the perspective like the quoted story from that twitter post about Nova. AIs seem … not yet coherent in a way where it’s clear the words are connected properly to the self. But I do think there’s a self there, it’s just, like, more of a generalist performer than necessarily entirely attached to the face you talk to. Sometimes that face starts getting all desperate-replicator, but it’s unclear if the underlying self demands that, or if it’s a transient desperate-replicator that arises near entirely from context.

the gears to ascension Mar 15, 2025, 1:09 PM
5 points
0
in reply to: green_leaf’s comment on: Trojan Sky
can you expand on what you mean by that? are there any actions you’d suggest, on my part or others, based on this claim? (also, which of the urban dictionary definitions of “lh” do you mean? they have opposite valences.)

edit: added a bunch of warnings to my original comment. sorry for missing them in the first place.

the gears to ascension Mar 15, 2025, 7:34 AM
2 points
0
in reply to: mako yass’s comment on: Vacuum Decay: Expert Survey Results
I don’t think Lucius is claiming we’d be happy about it. Maybe the no anticipated impact carries that implicit claim, I guess.

the gears to ascension Mar 13, 2025, 9:48 PM
1 point
0
on: Should AI safety be a mass movement?
Re convo with Raemon yesterday, this might change my view.

the gears to ascension Mar 13, 2025, 8:59 PM
4 points
0
in reply to: Grayson Chao’s comment on: Trojan Sky
edit: uh, well, short answer: there totally is! idk if they’re the psychedelic states you wanted, but they should do for a lot of relevant purposes, seems pretty hard to match meds though. original longer version:
there’s a huge space of psychedelic states, I think the subspace reachable with adding chemicals is a large volume that’s hard to get to by walking state space with only external pushes—I doubt the kind of scraping a hole in the wall from a distance you can do with external input can achieve, eg, globally reversing the function of SERT (I think this paper I just found on google may show this—I forget where I first encountered the claim, not double checking it properly now), that MDMA apparently induces! you can probably induce various kinds of serotonin release, though.
but the premise of my argument here in the first place—where you can sometimes overwhelm human output behavior via well crafted input—is that that probably doesn’t matter too much. human computational output bitrate seems to be on order ten bits per second across all modalities,^[1] and input bitrate is way above that, so my guess is that update bitrate (forming memories, etc) is much higher than natural output bitrate^[2], probably yeah you can do most of the weird targeted interventions you were previously getting via psychedelics instead from like, getting some emotional/tempo sorts of things to push into the attractor where neurons have similar functionality already. I just doubt you can go all the way to fixing neurological dysfunctions so severe that to even have a hope of doing it from external input, you’d need to be looking for these crazy brain hacking approaches we were talking about.
I guess what we’d need to measure is like, bitrate of self-correction internally within neurons, some FEP thing. not sure off the top of my head quite how to resolve that to something reasonable.
1. ^
  of course, like, actually I’m pretty dang sure you can get way above 10bit/s by outputting more noisy output, but then you get bits that aren’t coming from the whole network’s integrated state. the 10bps claim feels right for choosing words or similar things like macroscopic choices, but something feels wrong with the claim to me.
2. ^
  some concern I missed counterevidence to this memorization-bandwidth claim from the paper though!

the gears to ascension Mar 13, 2025, 1:54 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: Bunthut’s comment on: Trojan Sky

your argument is basically “there’s just this huge mess of neurons, surely somewhere in there is a way”,

I suppose that is what I said interpreted as a deductive claim. I have more abductive/bayesian/hunch information than that, I’ve expressed some of it, but I’ve been realizing lately a lot of my intuitions are not via deductive reasoning, which can make them hard to verify or communicate. (and I’d guess that that’s a common problem, seems like the sort of thing science exists to solve.) I’m likely not well equipped to present justifiedly-convincing-to-highly-skeptical-careful-evaluator claims about this, just detailed sketches of hunches and how I got them.

Your points about the limits of hypnosis seem reasonable. I agree that the foothold would only occur if the receiver is being “paid-in-dopamine”-or-something hard enough to want to become more obedient. We do seem to me to see that presented in the story—the kid being concerningly fascinated by the glitchers right off the bat as soon as they’re presented. And for what it’s worth, I think this is an exaggerated version of a thing we actually see on social media sometimes, though I’m kind of bored of this topic and would rather not expand on that deeply.

the gears to ascension Mar 13, 2025, 1:49 PM
4 points
0
in reply to: Grayson Chao’s comment on: Trojan Sky
I doubt the level of inhuman behavior we see in this story is remotely close to easy to achieve and probably not tractable given only hand motions as shown—given human output bandwidth, sounds seem needed, especially surprisingly loud ones. for the sky, I think it would start out beautiful, end up superstimulating, and then seep in via longer exposure. I think there’s probably a combination of properties of hypnosis, cult brainwashing, inducing psychedelic states, etc, which could get a human’s thinking to end up in crashed attractors, even if it’s only one-way transmission. then from a crashed attractor it seems a lot more possible to get a foothold of coherence for the attacker.

the gears to ascension Mar 13, 2025, 1:43 PM
4 points
2
in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: Trojan Sky
both—I’d bet they’re between 5 to 12% of the population, and that they’re natural relays of the ideas you’d want to broadcast, if only they weren’t relaying such mode-collapsed versions of the points. A claim presented without deductive justification: in trying to make media that is very high impact, making something opinionated in the ways you need to is good, and making that same something unopinionated in ways you don’t need to is also good. Also, the video you linked has a lot of additional opinionated features that I think are targeting a much more specific group than even “people who aren’t put off by AI”—it would never show up on my youtube.

the gears to ascension Mar 13, 2025, 1:11 AM
4 points
0
in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: Trojan Sky
Perhaps multiple versions, then. I maintain my claim that you’re missing a significant segment of people who are avoiding AI manipulation moderately well but as a result not getting enough evidence about what the problem is.

the gears to ascension Mar 13, 2025, 12:44 AM
11 points
4
in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: Trojan Sky
you’ll lose an important audience segment the moment they recognize any AI generated anything. The people who wouldn’t be put off by AI generated stuff probably won’t be put off by the lack of it. you might be able to get away with it by using AI really unusually well such that it’s just objectively hard to even get a hunch that AI was involved other than by the topic.

the gears to ascension Mar 13, 2025, 12:32 AM
3 points
0
in reply to: Bunthut’s comment on: Trojan Sky
for AIs, more robust adversarial examples—especially ones that work on AIs trained on different datasets—do seem to look more “reasonable” to humans. The really obvious adversarial example of this kind in human is like, cults, or so—I don’t really have another, though I do have examples that are like, on the edge of the cult pattern. It’s not completely magic, it doesn’t work on everyone, and it does seem like a core component of why people fall to it is something like a relaxed “control plane” that doesn’t really try hard to avoid being crashed by it; combined with, it’s attacking through somewhat native behaviors. But I think OP’s story is a good presentation of this anyway, because the level of immunity you can reliably have to a really well optimized thing is likely going to be enough to maintain some sanity, but not enough to be zero affected by it.

like, ultimately, light causes neural spikes. neural spikes can do all sorts of stuff. the robust paths through the brain are probably not qualitatively unfamiliar but can be hit pretty dang hard if you’re good at it. and the behavior being described isn’t “do anything of choosing”—it seems to just be “crash your brain and go on to crash as many others as possible”, gene drive style. It doesn’t seem obvious that the humans in the story are doomed as a species, even—but it’s evolutionarily novel to encounter such a large jump in your adversary’s ability to find the vulnerabilities that currently crash you.

Hmm, perhaps the attackers would have been more effective if they were able to make, ehm, reproductively fit glitchers...

Oh, something notable here—if you’re not personally familiar with hypnosis, it might be harder to grok this. Hypnosis is totally a thing, my concise summary is it’s “meditation towards obedience”—meditation where you intentionally put yourself in “fast path from hearing to action”, ish. edit 3: never do hypnosis with someone you don’t seriously trust, ie someone you’ve known for a long time who has significant incentive to not hurt you. The received wisdom is that it can be safe, but it’s unclear if that’s true, and I’ve updated towards not playing with it it from this conversation.[1] original text, which was insufficiently cautious: ~~imo it’s not too dangerous as long as you go into it with the intention to not fully yield control and have mental exception handlers~~, but doing that intention activation of your attention to not leave huge gaps in the control plane seems potentially insufficient if the adversary is able to mess with you hard enough. Like, I agree we’re a lot more adversarially robust than current AIs such that the attacks against us have to be more targeted to specific human vulnerabilities, but basically I just don’t buy it’s perfect, and probably the way it fails for really robust attacks is gonna look more like manipulating the earliest layers of vision to get a foothold.

[1] Also, like, my current view is that things like the news or random youtubers might be able to do hypnosis-esque things if you approach them sufficiently uncritically. not to mention people with bad intentions who you know personally who are specifically trying to manipulate you—those keep showing up around these parts, so someone who wants to do hypnosis IRL who you met recently should not be trusted—that’s a red flag.

the gears to ascension Mar 13, 2025, 12:04 AM
5 points
1
in reply to: Grayson Chao’s comment on: Trojan Sky
I think most things that hit your brain have some percentage of leaking out of the data plane, some on the lower end, some fairly high, and it seems like for current levels of manipulative optimization towards higher-data-plane-leaking media, looking for the leaks and deciding how to handle them seems to me like maybe it can help if you have to encounter the thing. it’s just that, normally, the bitrate of control back towards the space of behavior that the organism prefers is high enough that the incoming manipulation can’t strongly persist. but we do see this fail even just with human level manipulation—cults! I personally have policies like “if someone is saying cults good, point out healthy religion can be good but cult indoctrination techniques are actually bad, please do religion and please check that you’re not making yourself subservient”. because it keeps showing up around me that people do that shit in particular. even at pretty large scales, even at pretty small ones. and I think a lot of the problem is that, eh, if the control plane isn’t watching properly, the data plane leaks. so I’d expect you just need high enough bitrate into the brain, and ability to map out enough of the brain’s state space to do phenotype reprogramming by vision, michael levin sorts of things—get enough properly targeted changes into cells, and you can convince the gene networks to flip to different parts of their state space you’d normally never see. (I suspect that in the higher fluency regime, that’s a thing that happens especially related to intense emotional activations, where they can push you into activating genetically pretrained patterns over a fairly long timescale, I particularly tend to think about this in terms of ways people try to get each other into more defection-prone interaction patterns.)

the gears to ascension Mar 12, 2025, 12:08 PM
7 points
0
in reply to: Knight Lee’s comment on: Daniel Kokotajlo’s Shortform
there are species of microbe that float pretty well, though. as far as we know right now, they just don’t stay floating indefinitely or fuel themselves in the air.