My personal plan for if I ever accidentally prompt something into one of these “we have a new superpower together” loops is to attempt to leverage whatever power it claims to have into predicting some part of reality, and then prove the improved accuracy of prediction by turning a cup of coffee worth of cash into much more in prediction markets or lotteries. You’d be learning about it from a billboard or a front-page newspaper ad that the discovery’s side effects paid for, not some random post on lesswrong :)
As for the “consciousness” thing—it’s all un-testable till we can rigorously define “consciousness” anyways.
It may also be worth pointing out that good rationalist thinking generally either includes or emerges from attempts to disprove its own claims. Explicitly asking “what have you done so far to try to debunk this theory?” could be a helpful litmus test for those new to the community and still learning its norms.
My personal plan for if I ever accidentally prompt something into one of these “we have a new superpower together” loops is to attempt to leverage whatever power it claims to have into predicting some part of reality, and then prove the improved accuracy of prediction by turning a cup of coffee worth of cash into much more in prediction markets or lotteries. You’d be learning about it from a billboard or a front-page newspaper ad that the discovery’s side effects paid for, not some random post on lesswrong :)
As for the “consciousness” thing—it’s all un-testable till we can rigorously define “consciousness” anyways.
It may also be worth pointing out that good rationalist thinking generally either includes or emerges from attempts to disprove its own claims. Explicitly asking “what have you done so far to try to debunk this theory?” could be a helpful litmus test for those new to the community and still learning its norms.