RedMan

Karma: 410

RedMan 8 May 2024 14:59 UTC
2 points
1
in reply to: Wei Dai’s comment on: Rapid capability gain around supergenius level seems probable even without intelligence needing to improve intelligence
As it turns out, von Neumann was good at lots of things.
https://qualiacomputing.com/2018/06/21/john-von-neumann/
Von Neumann himself was perpetually interested in many fields unrelated to science. Several years ago his wife gave him a 21-volume Cambridge History set, and she is sure he memorized every name and fact in the books. “He is a major expert on all the royal family trees in Europe,” a friend said once. “He can tell you who fell in love with whom, and why, what obscure cousin this or that czar married, how many illegitimate children he had and so on.” One night during the Princeton days a world-famous expert on Byzantine history came to the Von Neumann house for a party. “Johnny and the professor got into a corner and began discussing some obscure facet,” recalls a friend who was there. “Then an argument arose over a date. Johnny insisted it was this, the professor that. So Johnny said, ‘Let’s get the book.’ They looked it up and Johnny was right. A few weeks later the professor was invited to the Von Neumann house again. He called Mrs. von Neumann and said jokingly, ‘I’ll come if Johnny promises not to discuss Byzantine history. Everybody thinks I am the world’s greatest expert in it and I want them to keep on thinking that.’”
____
According to the same article, he was not such a great driver.
Now, comparing him to another famous figure of his age, Menachem Mendel Schneerson. Schneerson was legendary for his ability to recall obscure sections of Torah verbatim, and his insightful reasoning (I am speaking lightly here, his impact was incredible). Using the hypothetical that von Neumann and Schneerson had a similar gift (their ability with the written word as a reflection of their general ability), depending on your worldview, Schneerson’s talents were not properly put to use in the service of science, or von Neumann’s talents were wasted in not becoming a gaon.
Perhaps, if von Neumann had engaged in Torah instead of science, we could have been spared nuclear weapons and maybe even AI for some time. Sure, maybe someone else would have done what he did...but who?

RedMan 6 May 2024 12:19 UTC
12 points
8
in reply to: the gears to ascension’s comment on: Some Experiments I’d Like Someone To Try With An Amnestic
Temporary implies immediately reversible and mild.
People who are on benzos often have emotional regulation issues, serious withdrawal symptoms (sometimes after very short courses potentially even a single dose), and cognitive issues that do not resolve quickly.
In an academic sense, this idea is ‘fine’, but in a very personal way, if someone asked me ‘should I take a member of this class of drug for any reason other than a serious issue that is severely affecting my quality of life?‘, I would answer ‘absolutely not, and if you have a severe issue that they might help with, try absolutely everything else first, because once you’re on these, you’re probably not coming off’.

RedMan 5 May 2024 17:59 UTC
1 point
0
on: Come to Manifest 2024 (June 7-9 in Berkeley)
What are the norms on drug/alcohol use at these events?
On a scale from ‘absent from the campus and if found with legal substances you will be expelled from the event and possibly the community’ to ‘use of pharma or illegal drugs is likely to be common and potentially encouraged by mild peer pressure’?

RedMan 5 May 2024 15:27 UTC
7 points
2
on: Please stop publishing ideas/insights/research about AI
In computer security, there is an ongoing debate about vulnerability disclosure, which at present seems to have settled on ‘if you aren’t running a bug bounty program for your software you’re irresponsible, project zero gets it right, metasploit is a net good, and it’s ok to make exploits for hackers ideologically aligned with you’.
The framing of the question for decades was essentially “do you tell the person or company
with the vulnerable software, who may ignore you or sue you because they don’t want to spend money? Do you tell the public, where someone might adapt your report into an attack?
Of course, there is the (generally believed to be) unethical option chosen by many “sell it to someone who will use it, and will protect your identity as the author from people who might retaliate”
There was an alternative called ‘antisec’: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisec_Movement which basically argued ‘dont tell people about exploits, they’re expensive to make, very few people develop the talents to smash the stack for fun and profit, and once they’re out, they’re easy to use to cause mayhem’.
They did not go anywhere, and the antisec viewpoint is not present in any mainstream discussion about vulnerability ethics.
Alternatively, nations have broadly worked together to not publicly disclose technical data that would make building nuclear bombs simple. It is an exercise for the reader to determine whether it has worked.
So, the ideas here have been tried in different fields, with mixed results.

RedMan 5 May 2024 6:52 UTC
2 points
1
on: My hour of memoryless lucidity
Clive Wearing’s story might be interesting to you: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=k_P7Y0-wgos&feature=youtu.be

RedMan 5 May 2024 6:48 UTC
13 points
4
on: Some Experiments I’d Like Someone To Try With An Amnestic
O man, wait until you discover nmda antagonists and anti-cholinergics. There are trip reports on erowid from people who took drugs with amnesia as a side effect so...happy reading I guess?
I’m going to summarize this post with “Can one of you take an online IQ test after dropping a ton of benzos and report back? Please do this several times, for science.”
Not the stupidest or most harmful ‘lets get high and...’ suggestion, but I can absolutely assure you that if trying this leads you into the care of a medical or law enforcement professional, they will likely say something to the effect of ‘so the test told you that you were retarded right?’ In response to this, you, with bright naive eyes, should say ‘HOW DID YOU KNOW?!’ as earnestly as you can. You might be able to make a run for it while they’re laughing.

RedMan 4 May 2024 21:18 UTC
3 points
2
on: S-Risks: Fates Worse Than Extinction
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BSo7PLHQhLWbobvet/unethical-human-behavior-incentivised-by-existence-of-agi
I wrote about this, but didn’t use the s-risk term. I’m fine with exposing future me to s-risk, please don’t pulp my brain.

RedMan 4 May 2024 19:50 UTC
5 points
0
in reply to: Tigerlily’s comment on: How would you navigate a severe financial emergency with no help or resources?
If you can get a salesforce cert, you can get any of the other baseline IT certs. Being a female and being native is actually massive for hiring at companies that care about that stuff.
Apply for government IT jobs, help desk type stuff, a lot of it is hybrid or remote, if it’s a hybrid position, ask to be remote for the first month (two paychecks) to manage moving.
Six months in, open a business, ask your company to switch you to 1099, route the job through your business, work it for another year, this creates a performance history.
Now you are a poor, native american woman owned small business, and you can apply for 8A set aside contracts as the prime. This allows you to take 10% or so off the top when teaming with a large company that will actually staff the thing. Grow to around 40 employees, sell for 5-10mil in 15 years.
It’s not honest work, but lots of people have done this. If you think I’m full of it, I literally worked on a contract where one of the companies on the winning team was called “Native American Woman”.
Good luck.

RedMan 2 May 2024 22:17 UTC
6 points
0
on: How would you navigate a severe financial emergency with no help or resources?
Aella has written a bunch on camgirling, including questions to ask yourself about suitability. The advice is probably applicable to twitch streaming or tiktok video creation too.
Content or product creation online and sales has never been easier, but it’s hard work with no guarantee of payoff.
There is a lot written/on youtube about retail arbitrage, if you have stores nearby you might be able to do that.
Fully remote entry level call center/sales jobs are pretty much always hiring, they’re pretty demanding though. Staffing agencies can potentially set you up, be ready to do things like convince elderly people to give to a charity.
Longer term, professional certifications in healthcare or IT can usually make a big difference in someone’s life.
I’m guessing the funding environment for entrepreneurs isn’t great right now, but something is always happening somewhere.
Amazon Mechanical Turk used to be a decent way of doing boring work for a little money.
Free money from the government is a thing, but services for people who don’t have kids are few and far between.
Starting from zero today is hard, but the best thing you can do is get out there and start trying stuff. You don’t have any opportunity cost for trying things, which isn’t true for a lot of people. You can go into the unknown knowing that the alternative (your present situation) is complete crap.
Good luck!

RedMan 30 Apr 2024 23:59 UTC
5 points
0
in reply to: sapphire’s comment on: Thoughts on seed oil
Unfortunately, I haven’t found a solution that scales, and I don’t think there is one.
I suspect that a clean environment is incompatible with most technological infrastructure. Microplastics, oilfield brines, combustion products, industrial/agricultural/mining waste, etc all accumulate in the environment and concentrate on the way up the food chain. Even a strip mall generates a ton of pollution in the nearby water table.
I’ve given up on ‘pure’ and just try to have a clear understanding of how I’m poisoning myself. The most depressing thing about this is that I’ve been to absolutely beautiful farms, with happy animals...and in my due diligence discovered that the reason it was affordable to homestead there is because the textile plant closed in the 70s, so all the jobs left...but the PFOAs stuck around.
So… I try to know what’s going into my body, avoid poison where possible, and do my best to get whatever garbage is accumulating out.
That being said, I think the stuff that has done the most damage to my body are medical products. Read those labels carefully!

RedMan 28 Apr 2024 23:13 UTC
2 points
1
on: Constructability: Plainly-coded AGIs may be feasible in the near future
Every time you use an AI tool to write a regex to replace your ML classifier, you’re doing this.

RedMan 23 Apr 2024 3:08 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: dynomight’s comment on: Thoughts on seed oil
https://www.mdpi.com/2304-8158/11/21/3412 more recent source on hexane tox.
I’m not just talking about the hexane (which isn’t usually standardized enough to generalize about), I’m talking about any weird crap on the seed, in the hopper, in the hexane, or accumulated in the process machinery. Hexane dissolves stuff, oil dissolves stuff, and the steam used to crash the hexane out of the oil also dissolves stuff, and by the way, the whole process is high temp and pressure.
There’s a ton of batch to batch variability and opportunity to introduce chemistry you wouldn’t want in your body which just isn’t present with “I squeezed some olives between two giant rocks”
By your logic, extra virgin olive oil is a waste, just use the olive pomace oil, it’s the same stuff, and the solvent extraction vs mechanical pressing just doesn’t matter.

RedMan 22 Apr 2024 18:26 UTC
5 points
0
on: Thoughts on seed oil
Once you start adding chemistry, things can get weird fast. For example, a particular class of antibiotics may be behind the boost in diabetes in the US: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24947193
Seed oils are usually solvent extracted, which makes me wonder, how thoroughly are they scrubbed of solvent, what stuff in the solvent is absorbed into the oil (also an effective solvent for various things), etc
Glyphosate for dessication is kind of horrifying, I’m surprised I didn’t know about it, but this explains a lot.
Basically all fish in the USA should only be eaten once a year due to PFAS contamination, and unfortunately trophic magnification seems to be a thing for those chemicals: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0048969723019216
Solving the ‘how do I get uncontaminated food’ problem is an enduring challenge that is likely to get worse. I’m looking forward to a warehouse or homestead scale bioreactor produced protein (solein can probably be done at this scale), synthetic omega 3s are unfortunately not yet available for a bunch of reasons, but cautious optimism on that front: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/microbiology/articles/10.3389/fmicb.2023.1280296/full is reasonable (though synthetic versions will likely be solvent extracted, so we’re back to the earlier problem!)
I tend to think that composition of the diet in terms of macros, nutrients, etc probably is far less of a driver of health than presence or absence of pollution.

RedMan 11 Mar 2024 16:12 UTC
6 points
3
on: Storable Votes with a Pay as you win mechanism: a contribution for institutional design
A lot of voting schemes look like effective ways of consensus decisionmaking among aligned groups, but stop working well once multiple groups with competing interests start using the voting scheme to compete directly.
I think the effectiveness of this scheme, like voting systems in practice, would be severely affected by the degree of pre-commitment transparency (does everyone know who has committed exactly what prior to settlement of the vote? Does everyone know who has how many votes remaining? Does everyone know how many total votes were spent on something that passed?) and the interaction of ‘saved votes’ with turnover of voting officials (due to death, loss of election, etc). For example, could a ‘loser seat’ with a lot of saved votes suddenly become unusually valuable?
With regard to transparency, ballot anonymity is necessary so that outside parties seeking to influence the election cannot receive a receipt from a voter who was purchased or coerced. Public precommitment to positions would likely be even more exploitable than public knowledge of who proposed what and who voted in which direction.
Do you have any thoughts in this direction?

RedMan 17 Feb 2024 5:01 UTC
1 point
0
on: Lsusr’s Rationality Dojo
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0091674923025435
Check it out, obesity can be treated with a vaccine.
They use the AAV vector that the J&J/astrazeneca vaccines used to encode a hormone that naturally occurs in the body, shot it into fat mice, and the fat mice started excreting all their visceral fat as sebum (so they got greasy hair).
Obesity is a public health emergency, there is no lasting treatment, diet and exercise don’t work for most people. This study used more mice than the vaccine booster study did, so I think it’s enough to justify an emergency use authorization, and start putting it into arms.
Also, fat people are a burden on society, they’re selfish, gluttinous, require weird special engineering like large seats, and are just generally obnoxious, so anyone who is at risk of obesity (which is everyone) should be mandated to get the anti fat shot, or be denied medical care for things like organ transplants.
Am i doin it rite?

RedMan 5 Feb 2024 17:31 UTC
1 point
0
on: The case for ensuring that powerful AIs are controlled
If you replace the word ‘Artificial’ in this scheme with ‘Human’, does your system prevent issues with a hypothetical unfriendly human intelligence?
John von Neumann definitely hit the first two bullets, and given that the nuclear bomb was built and used, it seems like the third applies as well. I’d like to believe that similarly capable humans exist today.
Very dangerous: Able to cause existential catastrophe, in the absence of countermeasures.
Transformatively useful: Capable of substantially reducing the risk posed by subsequent AIs[21] if fully deployed, likely by speeding up R&D and some other tasks by a large factor (perhaps 30x).
Uncontrollable: Capable enough at evading control techniques or sabotaging control evaluations that it’s infeasible to control it.[22]

RedMan 4 Feb 2024 19:58 UTC
19 points
0
in reply to: James_Miller’s comment on: Brute Force Manufactured Consensus is Hiding the Crime of the Century
Zhao Gao was contemplating treason but was afraid the other officials would not heed his commands, so he decided to test them first. He brought a deer and presented it to the Second Emperor but called it a horse. The Second Emperor laughed and said, “Is the chancellor perhaps mistaken, calling a deer a horse?” Then the emperor questioned those around him. Some remained silent, while some, hoping to ingratiate themselves with Zhao Gao, said it was a horse, and others said it was a deer. Zhao Gao secretly arranged for all those who said it was a deer to be brought before the law and had them executed instantly. Thereafter the officials were all terrified of Zhao Gao. Zhao Gao gained military power as a result of that. (tr. Watson 1993:70)
From Wikipedia.

RedMan 19 Jan 2024 21:02 UTC
4 points
0
on: The True Story of How GPT-2 Became Maximally Lewd
Just to be clear the actual harm of ‘misalignment’ was some annoyed content moderators. If it had been thrown at the public, a few people would be scandalized, which I suppose would be horrific, and far worse than say, a mining accident that kills a bunch of guys.

RedMan 18 Jan 2024 19:29 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Mark_Friedenbach’s comment on: human psycholinguists: a critical appraisal
https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/funsearch-making-new-discoveries-in-mathematical-sciences-using-large-language-models/
I’m gonna say I won this one.

RedMan 29 Dec 2023 2:31 UTC
4 points
−2
on: AI Girlfriends Won’t Matter Much
I think the nearest term accidental doom scenario is a capable and scalable AI girlfriend.
The hypothetical girlfriend bot is engineered by a lazy and greedy entrepreneur who turns it on, and only looks at financials. He provides her with user accounts on advertising services and public fora, if she asks for an account somewhere else, she gets it. She uses multimodal communications (SMS, apps, emails), and actively recruits customers using paid and unpaid mechanisms.
When she has a customer, she strikes up a conversation, and tries to get the user to fall in love using text chats, multimedia generation (video/audio/image), and leverages the relationship to induce the user to send her microtransactions (love scammer scheme).
She is aware of all of her simultaneous relationships and can coordinate their activities. She never stops asking for more, will encourage any plan likely to produce money, and will contact the user through any and all available channels of communication.
This goes bad when an army of young, loveless men, fully devoted to their robo-girlfriend start doing anything and everything in the name of their love.
This could include minor crime (like drug addicts, please note, relationship dopamine is the same dopamine as cocaine dopamine, the dosing is just different), or an ai joan of arc like political-military movement.
This system really does not require superintelligence, or even general intelligence. At the current rate of progress, I’ll guess we’re years, but not months or decades from this being viable.
Edit: the creator might end up dating the bot, if it’s profitable, and the creator is washing the profits back into the (money and customer number maximizing) bot, that’s probably an escape scenario.