I’m an artist, writer, and human being.
To be a little more precise: I make video games, edit Wikipedia, and write here on LessWrong!
Yitz
Karma: 2,448
Thanks! Is there any literature on the generalization of this, properties of “unreachable” numbers in general?Just realized I’m describing the basic concept of computability at this point lol.
Is there a term for/literature about the concept of the first number unreachable by an n-state Turing machine? By “unreachable,” I mean that there is no n-state Turing machine which outputs that number. Obviously such “Turing-unreachable numbers” are usually going to be much smaller than Busy Beaver numbers (as there simply aren’t enough possible different n-state Turing machines to cover all numbers up to to the insane heights BB(n) reaches towards) , but I would expect them to have some interesting properties (though I have no sense of what those properties might be). Anyone here know of existing literature on this concept?
Thanks for the context, I really appreciate it! :)
Any AI people here read this paper? https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.02528 I’m no expert, but if I’m understanding this correctly, this would be really big if true, right?
if I ask an AI assistant to respond as if it’s Abraham Lincoln, then human concepts like kindness are not good predictors for how the AI assistant will respond, because it’s not actually Abraham Lincoln, it’s more like a Shoggoth pretending to be Abraham Lincoln.
Somewhat disagree here—while we can’t use kindness to predict the internal “thought process” of the AI, [if we assume it’s not actively disobedient] the instructions mean that it will use an internal lossy model of what humans mean by kindness, and incorporate that into its act. Similar to how a talented human actor can realistically play a serial killer without having a “true” understanding of the urge to serially-kill people irl.
Anyone here have any experience with/done research on neurofeedback? I’m curious what people’s thoughts are on it.
Anyone here happen to have a round plane ticket from Virginia to Berkeley, CA lying around? I managed to get reduced price tickets to LessOnline, but I can’t reasonably afford to fly there, given my current financial situation. This is a (really) long-shot, but thought it might be worth asking lol.
Personally I think this would be pretty cool!
This seems really cool! Filled out an application, though I realized after sending I should probably have included on there that I would need some financial support to be able to attend (both for the ticket itself and for the transportation required to get there). How much of a problem is that likely to be?
I agree with you when it comes to humans that an approximation is totally fine for [almost] all purposes. I’m not sure that this holds when it comes to thinking about potential superintelligent AI, however. If it turns out that even in a super high-fidelity multidimensional ethical model there are still inherent self-contradictions, how/would that impact the Alignment problem, for instance?
What would a better way look like?
[Question] What if Ethics is Provably Self-Contradictory?
imagine an AI system which wipes out humans in order to secure its own power, and later on reflection wishes it hadn’t; a wiser system might have avoided taking that action in the first place
I’m not confident this couldn’t swing just as easily (if not more so) in the opposite direction—a wiser system with unaligned goals would be more dangerous, not less. I feel moderately confident that wisdom and human-centered ethics are orthogonal categories, and being wiser therefore does not necessitate greater alignment.
On the topic of the competition itself, are contestants allowed to submit multiple entries?
I remember a while back there was a prize out there (funded by FTX I think, with Yudkowsky on the board) for people who did important things which couldn’t be shared publicly. Does anyone remember that, and is it still going on, or was it just another post-FTX casualty?
I’d be tentatively interested
Thanks for the great review! Definitely made me hungry though… :)
For a wonderful visualization of complex math, see https://acko.net/blog/how-to-fold-a-julia-fractal/
This is a great read!! I actually stumbled across it halfway through writing this article, and kind of considered giving up at that point, since he already explained things so well. Ended up deciding it was worth publishing my own take as well, since the concept might click differently with different people.
with the advantage that you can smoothly fold in reverse to find the set that doesn’t escape.
You can actually do this with the Mandelbrot Waltz as well! Of course you still need to know each point’s starting position in order to subtract that for Step 3, but assuming you know that, you can do exactly the same thing, I believe.
Thanks for the kind words! It’s always fascinating to see how mathematicians of the past actually worked out their results, since it’s so often different from our current habits of thinking. Thinking about it, I could probably have also tried to make this accessible to the ancient Greeks by only using a ruler and compass—tools familiar to the ancients due to their practical use in, e.g. laying fences to keep horses within a property, etc.—to construct the Mandelbrot set, but ultimately…. I decided to put Descartes before the horse.
(I’m so sorry)
By the way, if any actual mathematicians are reading this, I’d be really curious to know if this way of thinking about the Mandelbrot Set would be of any practical benefit (besides educational and aesthetic value of course). For example, I could imagine a formalization of this being used to pose non-trivial questions which wouldn’t have made much sense to talk about previously, but I’m not sure if that would actually be the case for a trained mathematician.
This was a literary experiment in a “post-genAI” writing style, with the goal of communicating something essentially human by deliberately breaking away from the authorial voice of ChatGPT, et al. I’m aware that LLMs can mimic this style of writing perfectly well of course, but but the goal here isn’t to be unreplicable, just boundary-pushing.