swarriner

Karma: 608

swarriner 19 Feb 2023 23:25 UTC
14 points
−9
on: A Way To Be Okay
(this comment is copied to the other essay as well)

I respect the attempt, here, and I think a version of the thesis is true. Letting go of control and trying to appreciate the present moment is probably the best course of action given that one is confronted with impending doom. I also recognize that reaching this state is not just a switch one can immediately flip in one’s mind; it can only be reached by way of practice.

With these things in mind, I am still not okay. More than anything I find myself craving ignorance. I envy my wife; she’s not in ratspaces whatsoever and as far as I know has no idea people hold these beliefs. I think that would be a better way to live; perhaps an unpopular opinion on the website where people try not to live in ignorance. It’s hard not to be resentful sometimes. I resent the AI researchers, the site culture, and I especially resent certain MIRI founders and their declarations of defeat.

I think that means I need to disconnect, once and for all. I’ve been toying with the idea that I need to disconnect from the LW sphere completely and frankly I think it’s overdue. Dear reader; if you aren’t going to go solve alignment, I suggest you consider following suit. I might hand around a bit to view replies to this comment but… Yeah. Thanks for all the food for thought over the years LW, I’m not sure if it was worth it.

swarriner 19 Feb 2023 23:25 UTC
11 points
−4
on: Another Way to Be Okay
(this comment is copied to the other essay as well)

I respect the attempt, here, and I think a version of the thesis is true. Letting go of control and trying to appreciate the present moment is probably the best course of action given that one is confronted with impending doom. I also recognize that reaching this state is not just a switch one can immediately flip in one’s mind; it can only be reached by way of practice.

With these things in mind, I am still not okay. More than anything I find myself craving ignorance. I envy my wife; she’s not in ratspaces whatsoever and as far as I know has no idea people hold these beliefs. I think that would be a better way to live; perhaps an unpopular opinion on the website where people try not to live in ignorance. It’s hard not to be resentful sometimes. I resent the AI researchers, the site culture, and I especially resent certain MIRI founders and their declarations of defeat.

I think that means I need to disconnect, once and for all. I’ve been toying with the idea that I need to disconnect from the LW sphere completely and frankly I think it’s overdue. Dear reader; if you aren’t going to go solve alignment, I suggest you consider following suit. I might hand around a bit to view replies to this comment but… Yeah. Thanks for all the food for thought over the years LW, I’m not sure if it was worth it.

swarriner 9 Jan 2023 14:32 UTC
25 points
11
in reply to: DragonGod’s comment on: Wolf Incident Postmortem
It’s the “Boy who cried wolf” fable in the format of an incident report such as what might be written in the wake of an industrial disaster. Whether the fictional report writer has learned the right lessons I suppose is an exercise left for the reader.

swarriner 29 Dec 2022 21:27 UTC
3 points
−1
on: Effective ways to find love?
My advice would be this:

Trying to meet people for the sole purpose of dating them is a spiritually toxic endeavor, with online dating being particularly bad. I had a handful of girlfriends before meeting my wife, none of whom came to me through online dating or trying to get dates with people I didn’t know.

I contend that the best path to a relationship is through community, broadly defined. What you want is to be around people with whom you can cultivate compatibility. The online dating/cold approach model relies on being able to quickly discern compatibility, which I think most people are kind of bad at.

My definition of community in this context is any circumstance that lets you repeatedly interact with people in a non-targeted way. For meeting my wife, that was a weekly bar trivia night. For past partners it was a mix of extracurricular activity groups and friends-of-friendgroups. These environments accomplish a handful of things at once; they establish shared background and positive memories, they let you display and observe positive traits that are difficult to signal on a dating profile or on a date (e.g. patience or thoughtfulness), and ideally they’re intrinsically worth existing in for their own sake. That last one is important because, to use my first example, even if I hadn’t met my wife playing that bar trivia game, I still would have had fun going and I made other friends along the way.

You can’t just show up and expect things to fall in your lap, of course. You do want to be improving yourself and putting your best foot forwards. Not all communities are created equal so once in a while you need to step back and evaluate if you need new opportunities in your life. And obviously, you still have to be ready to actually ask someone out eventually.

It’s not easy, necessarily, but it did work for me.

swarriner 7 Dec 2022 17:00 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Phosphorous’s comment on: The Parable of the Crimp
You’re not wrong. Learning to crimp really does enable climbers to perform feats that others cannot, and plenty of them suffer injuries like the one I’ve linked to and decide to heal and keep going. My addendum isn’t “never do something hard or risky,” it’s “pain is a warning; consider what price you are willing to pay before you go pushing through it.”

swarriner 7 Dec 2022 14:42 UTC
8 points
2
on: The Parable of the Crimp
Addendum: Crimp grips are a major cause of climbing injuries. It’s sheer biomechanics. The crimp grip puts massive stress on connective tissues which aren’t strong enough to reliably handle them.
The moral of the addendum: choose your impossible challenges wisely; even if you can overcome them the stress and pain might have been a warning from the beginning. If nothing else it should be a warning to get some good advice about prevention or you may find yourself unable to pursue your goal for weeks at a time.

swarriner 5 Dec 2022 17:37 UTC
2 points
−2
on: How should I judge the impact of giving $5k to a family of three kids and two mentally ill parents?
It’s going to be tricky. You may already be too close to the situation to judge impartially, and a case study is going to be difficult to use as evidence against population-level surveys of well-being, especially for your implied time horizon. You could attempt to benchmark against previous work, e.g. see what the literature has to say about the effects of poverty on diet, educational attainment, etc. in first-world cities, but your one new data point still won’t generalize and it wouldn’t be doing the heavy lifting in your argument for localism at that point.

swarriner 24 Nov 2022 19:11 UTC
9 points
5
in reply to: Yoav Ravid’s comment on: Here’s the exit.
Unless I’m very much mistaken, emergency mobilization systems refers to autonomic responses like a pounding heartbeat, heightened subjective senses, and other types of physical arousal; i.e. the things your body does when you believe someone or something is coming to kill you with spear or claw. Literal fight or flight stuff.

In both examples you give there is true danger, but your felt bodily sense doesn’t meaningfully correspond to it; you can’t escape or find the bomb by being ready for an immediate physical threat. This is the error being referred to. In both cases the preferred state of mind is resolute problem-solving and inability to register a felt sense of panic will likely reduce your ability to get to such a state.

swarriner 20 Nov 2022 16:07 UTC
7 points
5
in reply to: ponkaloupe’s comment on: Is Crypto built on a foundation of ignorance about Information Asymmetry?
I think I see your point but I’m not sure how to answer the question as you posed it so let me make an analogy:

Imagine I come to you and say “I have a revolutionary new car design that will revolutionize the market and break the chokehold of big auto! Best of all, it’s completely safe; the locks are unpickable and the windows are unbreakable, so no one will ever be able to mug you in your car!”

You would be wise to ask “Okay, but what about in a crash? Is it safe there?” and the truth would be no, not really. Actually people who get caught in crashes with this car are in more danger. And car crashes are so much more common than people being mugged in their car that if you do the math my new car substantially increases your risk exposure.

So when I’m talking about the status quo, I’m talking about the risk landscape that the technology needs to be robust against. Normal currency is subject to a lot of social engineering attacks and very few technical ones, so crypto is solving the wrong problem because as thousands of stolen Bored Apes can attest, you can still be easily tricked into giving the wrong people your wallet details. Although the normal currency world is far from perfect it does at least have recourse sometimes, like transaction reversals or legal redress.

swarriner 18 Nov 2022 20:30 UTC
5 points
3
on: Is Crypto built on a foundation of ignorance about Information Asymmetry?
I’d say that’s a good point but perhaps doesn’t exhaustively cover all the problems. The way I’ve come to think about crypto which I think is roughly congruent is that the things crypto is good for (decentralization, security against hacking) are not major vectors of attack by bad actors under the status quo, and the things it isn’t robust against definitely are. (social engineering, obfuscation of value)

swarriner 2 Nov 2022 17:39 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Bill H’s comment on: Conversations on Alcohol Consumption
This can be true but it varies a decent amount with expectations I think. As my friends get older and more of us have kids to think about it’s becoming more normalized to have a mix of sobriety levels at what would have once been drunk parties.

swarriner 31 Oct 2022 21:34 UTC
3 points
2
on: Why Aren’t There More Schelling Holidays?
Any industry with public exposure is going to run into problems. Take retail; having the store open at all possible profitable hours is much more important than having a full complement of staff at any given moment. My job is only adjacent to retail but even so, having a whole team go on vacation would put the supply chain on pause. That move might technically be possible with advance planning but it would have major impacts on throughput.

I think any sector that relies on moving physical matter (including people) through space is a bad candidate because you’re often dealing with a cap on the amount of effective capacity your capital has, so having a team of people go dark will lead to underutilization. Consider maintenance jobs, shipping, manufacturing, food, emergency services, transport, and I’m sure a dozen others.

swarriner 20 Oct 2022 21:25 UTC
2 points
0
on: Rough Sketch for Product to Enhance Citizen Participation in Politics
The thing you’ve outlined sounds to me like news media, sort of, as well as implicitly leaning on existing news media. The amount of information entailed is comparable; having up-to-date info on over 3000 United States counties is a far from trivial endeavor.^[1]
It’s different of course in that existing news media isn’t remotely incentivized to support this kind of work, instead being caught in the tar pit of getting eyeballs and ad dollars, as well as being an arena which monied interests know they need to optimize for. Of course if the tool you’re describing became well-known, it would also become subject to competitive pressures from without.
And in practice, the number of people who would get value from it is probably not all that much different from the number of people who already are already immersed in activism. You get marginal gains from more efficient allocation of some of the ones who are just kind of being pulled along by their social networks.
Could a GPT-X in principle maybe help scrape through every local paper, every town council pdf, and output useful insight that current activist communities don’t already have access to if they’re sufficiently motivated? I think eventually yes, but by the time AI is that powerful there might be more important things to worry about.
1. ^
  If you want to offer info at the town level, it gets even worse. There are nearly 20,000 incorporated towns cities and villages, although 3/4s are under 5k population.

swarriner 14 Oct 2022 15:09 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Alex Flint’s comment on: So, geez there’s a lot of AI content these days
Yes, that’s my point. I’m not aware of a path to meaningful contribution to the field that doesn’t involve either doing research or doing support work for a research group. Neither is accessible to me without risking the aforementioned effects.

swarriner 14 Oct 2022 14:42 UTC
7 points
1
in reply to: Alex Flint’s comment on: So, geez there’s a lot of AI content these days
I feel like you mean this in kindness, but to me it reads as “You could risk your family’s livelihood relocating and/or trying to get recruited to work remotely so that you can be anxious all the time! It might help on the margins ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ”

swarriner 7 Oct 2022 21:13 UTC
41 points
13
on: So, geez there’s a lot of AI content these days
AI discourse triggers severe anxiety in me, and as a non-technical person in a rural area I don’t feel I have anything to offer the field. I personally went so far as to fully hide the AI tag from my front page and frankly I’ve been on the threshold of blocking the site altogether for the amount of content that still gets through by passing reference and untagged posts. I like most non-AI content on the site, been checking regularly since the big LW2.0 launch, and I would consider it a loss of good reading material to stop browsing, but since DWD I’m taking my fate in my hands every time I browse here.

I don’t know how many readers out there are like me, but I think it at least warrants consideration that the AI doomtide acts as a barrier to entry for readers who would benefit from rationality content but can’t stomach the volume and tone of alignment discourse.

swarriner 6 Oct 2022 14:32 UTC
1 point
1
on: Calibration Gaming
Aside from double-counting, here’s a problem; you should have just set your starting priors on the false and true statements as x and 1-x respectively, where x is the chance your whole ontology is screwed up, and you’d be equally well calibrated and much more precise. You’ve correctly identified that the perfect calibration on 90% is meaningless, but that’s because you explicitly introduced a gap between what you believe to be true and what you’re representing as your beliefs. Maybe that’s your point; that people are trying to earn a rationalist merit badge by obfuscating their true beliefs, but I think at least many people treat the exercise as a serious inquiry into how well-founded beliefs feel from the inside.

swarriner 19 Jul 2022 0:08 UTC
8 points
0
on: All AGI safety questions welcome (especially basic ones) [monthly thread]
Is there a strong theoretical basis for guessing what capabilities superhuman intelligence may have, be it sooner or later? I’m aware of the speed & quality superintelligence frameworks, but I have issues with them.

Speed alone seems relatively weak as an axis of superiority; I can only speculate about what I might be able to accomplish if, for example, my cognition were sped up 1000x, but it find it hard to believe it would extend to achieving strategic dominance over all humanity, especially if there are still limits on my ability to act and perceive information that happen on normal-human timescales. One could shorthand this to “how much more optimal could your decisions be if you were able to take maximal time to research and reflect on them in advance,” to which my answer is “only about as good as my decisions turned out to be when I wasn’t under time pressure and did do the research”. I’d be the greatest Starcraft player to ever exist, but I don’t think that generalizes outside the domain of [tactics measured in frames rather than minutes or hours or days].

To me quality superiority is the far more load-bearing but much muddier part of the argument for the dangers of AGI. Writing about the lives and minds of human prodigies like Von Neumann or Terry Tao or whoever you care to name frequently verges on the mystical; I don’t think even the very intelligent among us have a good gears-level model of how intelligence is working. To me this is a double-edged sword; if Ramanujan’s brain might as well have been magic, that’s evidence against our collective ability to guess what a quality superintelligence could accomplish. We don’t know what intelligence can do at very high levels (bad for our ability to survive AGI), but we also don’t know what it can’t do, which could turn out to be just as important. What if there are rapidly diminishing returns on the accuracy of prediction as the system has to account for more and more entropy? If that were true, an incredibly intelligent agent might still only have a marginal edge in decision-making which could be overwhelmed by other factors. What if the Kolmogorov complexity of x-risk is just straight up too many bits, or requires precision of measurement beyond what the AI has access to?

I don’t want to privilege the hypothesis that maybe the smartest thing we can build is still not that scary because the world is chaotic, but I feel I’ve seen many arguments that privilege the opposite; that the “sharp left turn” will hit and the rest is merely moving chess pieces through a solved endgame. So what is the best work on the topic?

swarriner 6 Jul 2022 19:49 UTC
1 point
1
on: Deep neural networks are not opaque.
This feels important but after the ideal gas analogy it’s a bit beyond my vocabulary. Can you (or another commenter) distill a bit for a dummy?

swarriner 27 Jun 2022 17:39 UTC
11 points
−8
on: Are long-form dating profiles productive?
Epistemic status: intuition and some experience, no sources.

Long-form profiles are mostly a waste of time. The two key weaknesses are 1) the primacy of photos and 2) adversarial communication
1. Tinder made millions by realizing that many, many users make snap decisions based on photos and the rest doesn’t produce as strong of results. That’s not to say no one reads the profiles and decides on them, but at least a minority do (and some will just stay anchored to their impression of the photos while reading anyways).
2. Dating is a “lemon market,” where everyone playing wants to attract the highest-quality partner they can relative to their own status. That means when you write a long-form profile, you’re incentivized to fluff it up and present yourself in the best possible light, and when you’re reading a profile you need to take that into account when trying to evaluate quality. And even if you’re honest, other readers will probably still apply the critical lens. This doesn’t degrade the value of the long-form profile signal to zero, but it does discount the return on your time investment.
Now that I’m happily engaged I tend to think my pessimism on the value of online dating full stop was well-warranted and there’s no substitute for in-person socializing, particularly in a group/community space where the adversarial presentation dynamics are reduced. If my current mind was thrown back in time to when I was 18 I’d skip online dating altogether and just get into more clubs and study groups and stuff in college.