No disagreement with the broad statements, but I note that your words do not particularly register the point that good conversation itself might be a turnon and lack thereof a turnoff? IE your post presents a puzzle: what’s with the banter → sex thing? I’m suggesting that many people might want to talk first as an inherent preference. Sure, there might be ways around that, but you weren’t asking for something with no loopholes, you were asking about the banter → sex thing.
abramdemski
Karma: 21,051
Not really an experienced player of the relevant games, but I personally have turned down an obvious sex invitation with someone who I was otherwise interested in because too little conversation (and don’t regret this choice). I am not very interested in sex with someone who I can’t have a good conversation with. I feel like a lot of the intrigue of an intimate encounter is conversational intimacy. I’ve never experienced the chat at party → sex pipeline, however. Only [chat online for multiple months]->sex.
I also don’t believe that insider trading is immoral. Insider trading increases the accuracy of the stock prices available to the public, which is the public good that equity trading provides. For this reason, prediction markets love insider trading. The reason it’s illegal is to protect retail investors, but why do they get privileged over everyone else? Another reason insider trading is immoral is that it robs the company of proprietary information (if you weren’t a limb of The Company, you wouldn’t know the merger is happening). That’s fair, but in that case doing it officially for The Company should be allowed, and it’s not. In this example ChatGPT arguably helped steal information from LING, but did so in service of the other company, so I guess it’s kind of an immoral case—but would be moral if LING is also insider-trading on it.
The problem with insider trading, in my view, is that someone with an important role in the company can short the stock and then do something really bad that tanks the value of the company. The equilibrium in a market that allows insider trading involves draconian measures within the companies themselves to prevent this sort of behavior (or else, no multi-person ventures that can be publicly traded).
This is an instance of the more general misalignment of prediction markets: whenever there’s something on a prediction market that is quite improbable in ordinary circumstances but could be caused to happen by a single actor or a small number of people, there’s profit to be made by sewing chaos.
all the relationships between components, etc, I made “explicit”
Is there a typo here? “are made explicit” perhaps?
or that there is some set of rules such that following those rules (/modifying the expression according to those rules) is guaranteed to preserve (something like) the expression’s “truth value”?
That’s correct. More generally (since the concept also applies to noun phrases) guaranteed to preserve its “value” whatever type that may be. This “value” is something like what-it-points-at, semantic reference.
Yep, will fix.
(Also it’s kinda iffy that weak disjunction is a stronger statement than strong disjunction...)
Yeah! I’m just going with what Wikipedia said there (unless I’ve made an error), but I had the same thought.
Fixed!
Not sure exactly what you’re getting at? I suppose you’re imagining extending the sequence to ordinal values? We can do this, sure, and still can have the same issue with sup/inf not being well-defined.
Fixed!
I think for Yablo’s Paradox, real truth values are adequate; you just assign 1⁄2 to everything.
Sahil’s version of FGF makes many empirical predictions. In the spring of this year, we’re going to focus on listing them, so there’ll be a better answer to your question. In the context of the OP, one such prediction is that sim-Abram will have difficulty engaging in the outside world, even with some contact with real-Abram (but obviously this prediction isn’t very near-term).
With respect to your specific concern, I have a similar worry that Sahil’s FGF won’t be readily falsified by practical autonomy experiments. Full FOOM-level autonomy requires AI to replace the whole global economy; anything less will still involve “dependence on humans”.
However, it also seems plausible to me that Sahil’s FGF would make some falsifiable prediction about near-term performance on Vending-Bench 2.
Thanks, fixed!
Interestingly, this is one of the issues where libertarians and progress studies people, who usually get along well, would disagree. Libertarians would say that if you can afford it, by all means, work just one day a week. Progress studies people would point out that GDP growth decreased by, say, 1% over 100 years will leave people in the resulting economy almost three times poorer.
I think this model is mistaken, and overly worships GDP as a measure of value. You’re defining non-job value-production out of existence. For example, if someone stays at home and does dishes, laundry, and raises children, this doesn’t count. If instead a nanny and a maid are hired, this counts for GDP. If someone contributes to Wikipedia in their spare time, this doesn’t count. If they’re paid to write crappy ad-copy instead, this counts for GDP. Writing a video game counts if you sell it, but doesn’t count if you give it away for free. Etc.
The libertarian view seems deeply superior here, because it trusts people’s own sense of what is valuable, rather than accepting a numerical proxy.
Yeah, in my mind it is some existential risk such as the AI safety problem, and absorbing the skills of a bunch of really skilled people seems necessary to solve the problems. The thing that initially interested me here was the idea of a memory thief becoming a different person every time they absorbed someone’s memories, but somehow continuing to do it anyway. I wrote this quickly (first draft in about one hour), and wasn’t sure what the ending would be as I was writing. My initial idea was to try and write a plausible emotional arc where she started out angry at the memory thief, but as she faced the identity confusion of the situation, plausible individual steps took her to anger with her original-body-self who still had the life new-self remembered working so hard for. However, the mysterious twist ending seemed better. I wasn’t really sure if it “landed” well but two test readers said it worked for them & was better as a mystery.
The usual definition of numbers in lambda calculus is closer to what you want; numbers are iterators, which given a zero z and a function f, iterate f some number of times. I played around with defining numbers in lambda calculus plus an iota operator. (iota [p]) returns a term t such that (p t) = true, if such a term exists. (“true” is just ) This allows us to define negative numbers as the things that inverse-iterate, define imaginary numbers, etc, all in one simple formalism.
iota plus lambda allows for higher-order logic already ( is just ; is just ) so there are definitely questions of consistency. However, it feels like some suitable version of this could be a really pleasing foundation close to what you had in mind.
Angle-quotes seem better in this respect (like nested parentheses, they aren’t ambiguous (because the parentheses have a visually obvious direction, begin-paren vs end-paren, so we can match parentheses to their mates unambiguously)). However, they’re extremely uncommon in American English so I’d feel very weird using them, and also I don’t know how to type them conveniently.
Ideally, I’d want to use multiple sizes of angle-quotes, similarly to the multiply-sized parentheses available in Latex.
Of course, nested … I’m not sure what to call them … whatever this is:
To quote a thing,
a thing
works fine. (At least, it works fine if I edit my stuff on greaterwrong.com instead of lesswrong.com.)
As they said,
It isn’t magic. It’s witchcraft.
We shouldn’t forget that.
I’ve recently decided that colons can end a sentence. If I said
Here’s a picture:
[the picture]
then in my mind it is OK to not have a period anywhere. So, colons can apparently end sentences. Therefore, we can correct the earlier-quoted eample by changing the comma to a colon:
As they said:
It isn’t magic. It’s witchcraft.
We shouldn’t forget that.
I like this fine.
I find single to be too ambiguous, because single quotes can be used interchangeably with double quotes. In my mind the proper use of single quotes is to avoid ambiguity when there’s one quotation inside of another. However, maybe that’s rare enough that your suggestion is ok? I find that I like ‘scare quotes’ if and only if it is very clear to the reader. The reason “”“scare quotes””” appeals to me is that it is very “”“loud”””—like someone doing air-quotes with a really big hand gesture, plus doing a voice for emphasis.
Any thoughts on ‴scare quotes‴? Or perhaps “”scare quotes”″?
Does that include a dislike of “”“scare quotes”””?
Seems to me like both.