As I see it, there are two possible explanations for a fine-tuned universe:
an insane amount of luck (or something other than luck, such as a supernatural force)
multiverse
The argument for multiverse is precisely that it does not require the insane amount of luck.
Your argument is that with the insane amount of luck, the multiverse is not necessary.
That is correct, but then we are back to the original question: why did we get so extremely lucky?
I agree with the spirit of your suggestion—often “it is known” that something couldn’t possibly work, based only on armchair reasoning, or one half-assed attempt made a few decades ago, in a different country, with N=20.
That said, literally cash for babies feels somewhat dysgenic (though, maybe if we actually did the experiment, the results might surprise us). It seems like it would appeal most to people with short-term thinking, the most poor people (which is probably correlated with various dysfunctions), and psychopaths who only want cash and don’t care about what happens to the baby afterwards. I don’t insist that a good policy needs to appeal to the elites, but it would be nice if it appealed to the average people more than to those at the bottom.
I would prefer financial support in a form of free kindergartens, free school lunches, free health insurance for children (if there are countries that don’t already have that), even free babysitting in the afternoons and weekends. Make it a few thousand dollars a year, but with vouchers instead of cash.
I could also imagine various kinds of non-financial support (on top of the financial support, not as an alternative), such as more libraries specialized for children, cheap tutoring, coordinating second-hand selling and buying things for children, etc.
Also, build more playgrounds, and buildings that can only be used for activities for kids (clubs, etc.).
Okay, that pretty much ruins the idea.
Makes me think, what about humans who would do the same thing? But probably the difference is that humans can build their credibility over time, and if someone new posted an unlikely comment, they would be called out on that.
build a social circle which can maintain its own attention, as a group, without just reflecting the memetic currents of the world around it.
Note that it is not necessary for the social circle to share your beliefs, only to have a social norm that people express interest in each other’s work. Could be something like: once or twice in a week the people will come to a room and everyone will give a presentation about what they have achieved recently, and maybe the other people will provide some feedback (not in the form of “why don’t you do Y instead”, but with the assumption that X is a thing worth doing).
I think you don’t need a lot of agency to write comments on Less Wrong. I imagine an algorithm like this:
After an article is written, wait a random time interval between 15 minutes and 24 hours.
Read the article and the existing comments.
Prepare a comment that you believe would get most karma (you can learn from existing LW comments and their karma).
Think again how much karma would your prepared comment probably get. In your estimation, include the fact that LW readers do not like comments that seem like written by an LLM.
If you conclude that the expected karma is 5 or more, post the comment. Otherwise, do not comment on this article.
I imagine that the “learn from existing LW comments and their karma” would be the difficult part, because the more comments you need to process, the more work it is. But otherwise, this seems relatively simple; I am curious how well would such algorithm be received.
Q: How many Zizians does it take to change a light bulb?
A: At least two (one left hemisphere, and one right hemisphere), and the light bulb will end up broken… but that’s okay, because for complicated game-theoretic reasons there is now more light in a parallel universe, and the electron-eating light bulb deserved it anyway.
The best way to be seen as trustworthy is to be trustworthy.
Depends on the environment. Among relatively smart people who know each other, trust their previous experience, and communicate their previous experience with each other—yes. But this strategy breaks down if you keep meeting strangers, or if people around you believe the rumors (so it is easy to character-assassinate a honest person).
Sometimes being known as smart is already a disadvantage, because some people assume (probably correctly) that it would be easier for a smarter person to deceive them.
I wonder how many smart people are out there who have concluded that a good strategy is to hide their intelligence, and instead pretend to be merely good at some specific X (needed for their job). I suspect that many of them actually believe that (it is easier to consistently say something if you genuinely believe that), and that women are over-represented in this group.
I agree. One problem of grade inflation is that we lose the ability to measure excellence.
If you have a scale e.g. from 1 to 5, where the average grade is 3, if you somehow hire a magical teacher, you could see an improvement of the mean student, let’s say from 3 to 2. Then you might conclude that the teacher does something right, and maybe try to replicate that.
But if instead the average grade is 1, hiring the same magical teacher would… leave the average grade at 1. Are all students “okay” in the subject? That’s 1. Are they excellent? Also 1. Do half of them participate at international competitions and bring medals to their school? Still 1. From the perspective of a research which only looks at these numbers, no change.
If the average grade is 1, then basically all you can see is changes among the worst performing students. Which… is also an important thing, but it is a different thing; the interventions that improve grades in this group do not necessarily work for anyone else, e.g. teaching to the test during the “No Child Left Behind” policy.
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A frequently proposed alternative is grading on the curve, which in my opinion has the same fundamental problem. If you merely sort the students in the classroom by their raw score, and then assign a different grade to each 20% of the class… that allows you to distinguish the individuals within the classroom, but the average of the classroom remains constant (this time, by definition), so you cannot see which teaching interventions were useful.
It also creates weird incentives, because you are de facto punished for being in the same class with smart students, so from the perspective of grade optimization it would be better for you to join a worse class.
This might be avoided by using standardized tests, and calibrating them on the entire population. Even then, we would have another problem, which is selecting what kinds of problems go to the test. For example, if you add a few insanely difficult questions, then the winners would be those who know things far beyond what is taught at school. But if you only use “age-appropriate” questions, then the best students cannot get beyond 100%, and they might actually lose some points for attention deficit. I guess my point here is that even if we use normalized tests, we cannot treat the contents of the test as a black box, because differently constructed tests measure different things.
An underlying problem is, basically, what is the goal of the school education? If it is producing the solid average, then excellence is beyond that goal, so it’s kinda fair if we exclude it. But if the goal is producing excellence, then clearly such goal cannot be achieved for most of the population. If we say that both goals are desired (excellence for those who can achieve it; the solid fundamentals for everyone else), then perhaps the grading system should reflect it somehow. There should be a grade that makes it intuitively very clear that it means e.g. “this student has all the solid fundamentals, but none of the excellence”. Because there will be many students like this.
Maybe something like in video games: F, D, C, B, A, S, SS, SSS? With “A” corresponding to the current best grade, and getting an “S” requires you to do something beyond normal school duties (e.g. participating at a math olympiad), so there would be nothing wrong if there is no S-graded student in the entire school. We could even make it a requirement that grades F-A can be freely awarded by the local teacher, but getting an S and beyond requires some kind of independent exam.
The right moment wouldn’t be now, but shortly before the AI stops being corrigible. Grab it right before the Singularity, update its utility function to make it want what you want; then you win.
Assuming short timelines, this could be in two or three years.
Right now it doesn’t make sense; it is better to let the current owners keep improving their AIs.
If we make the criteria too strict, then maybe I never had a single Original Thought™ in my life. Everything is just a remix.
I suspect that in practice, “original thought” means a combination that was never made (popular) before, if it seems to work or passes some other criteria (e.g. artistic), i.e. not just a random text.
The AI does not make the meetings pass 10x faster, and that is where the senior developers spend a lot of time.
Now we need to develop an opposite art, how to say positive things about people who are too used to the sandwich method. My proposal:
say shortly something unimportant but positive (they are not listening carefully anyway, just waiting for the other shoe to drop)
say something unimportant but negative
proceed to the compliment you wanted to give
It just occurred to me that we take it for granted that there are multiple AI companies, therefore no one has a monopoly on the artificial brainpower.
But if Musk decides so, he can use the government power to get control of all his competitors overnight, perhaps using national security as a pretext, can’t he? I mean, who is going to stop him? Trump?
And the fact that he could do this can be used as a leverage against the remaining AI companies. For example, they can be told to insert specific instructions in their prompts; such as the infamous “never accuse Elon Musk or Donald Trump of spreading misinformation”. Either that, or the soldiers with red caps will shut down your data centers and take your developers to a camp.
My point is, we should not see the ongoing American regime changes and the AI development as separate magisteria. They both exist in the same physical world.
(Basically, the Game of Thrones scene: “Knowledge is power.” “Power is power.”)
If you convince your enemies that IQ is a myth, they won’t be concerned about your genetically engineered high IQ babies.
/the-political-is-personal/
It seems like many people propose “generalization from their own example” as a model for the entire humanity. And it can be quite annoying when people around you agree on a model that doesn’t fit you at all… and when you point it out, they dismiss it by saying that you are in a denial. Because they have examined their own minds deeply, and found out that it was true… yeah, possibly so, but that doesn’t necessarily make it true about the others.
everyone likes whatever popular people around them like—no I don’t
if we legalize gay sex, everyone will want gay sex and families will fall apart—no I don’t feel tempted at all
people are only charitable to other people if they expect them to reciprocate—no I often don’t expect that
...probably many other examples like that.
Learn the official language of the place you are migrating to.
Yes, this sounds completely obvious to me.
Of course, learning languages takes time, and may be more difficult for older people. So I wouldn’t expect fluent speech from the start, and maybe from the older generation even in a year or two—just a gesture of trying. The important thing is that they do not isolate their kids and themselves from the local society behind the language barrier. Become bilingual.
Heck, if I had to emigrate somewhere, I would want my kids to speak the local language, because it expands their options. Not even as a sign of respect or thanks to the locals, but for completely selfish reasons. It will be better for my kids to have more job opportunities, more social opportunities, etc. Not doing so would be like putting my kids in a prison for a lifetime—limiting their social interaction to the few neighbors who speak the same language.
Follow the laws and general customs of the country you are migrating to, even if they are different that where you come from.
Do not impose your customs, culture, and religion onto others in the new country you are migrating to.
Basically, be able to fit in the mainstream culture, and keep everything else on the level of “hobbies, that shouldn’t annoy my neighbors”.
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There are some steps the welcoming country can do for the immigrants, such as organize cheap language courses for them. But it’s on the immigrants to take that opportunity.
Is this possibly a “Chinese room” kind of situation? The model alone is not an agent, but “the model + the way it is used” might be...
And to be more precise, I don’t mean things like “the model could be used by an agent”, because obviously yes; but more like “the model + a way of using it that we also separately wouldn’t call an agent” could be.
it became immediately clear that the sequences wouldn’t work nearly as well for me if I didn’t like Eliezer
You mean, like him as a blogger? Or as a person in real life?
If the former, isn’t causality the other way round? I mean, I like Eliezer as a blogger because he wrote the Sequences. So it would sound weird to me to say: “I admire Eliezer as a blogger a lot because he wrote some amazing articles on rationality… and Girard’s theory predicts that therefore I will like his articles… which is true!”
(We could nitpick that some things that I like about Eliezer’s style are orthogonal to whether his points about rationality are true, but that already has a name: halo effect.)
I am not trying to contradict your experience, but it seems to me that my experience (with the Sequences) does not match this model at all. Or other things that I think about.
My friends used to play Magic the Gathering cards, this has never appealed to me. I liked sci-fi, but I was reading sci-fi books long before I have met another person who did. I learned Esperanto from a textbook long before I met another Esperanto speaker. My wife loves skiing and opera, that has no effect on me. Seems like I am quite resistant to copying others. (Is that a part of being on the autistic spectrum? Maybe I should file Girard’s theory under “this is what normies do”; no offense meant.)
It is fascinating to see that the official science has finally discovered what Yudkowsky wrote about a decade ago. Better late than never, I guess.