Adele Lopez

• Adele Lopez 12 Feb 2020 5:19 UTC

  13 points

  on: What are the risks of hav­ing your genome pub­li­cly available?

  There’s an up­per limit to how rel­a­tively bad it can be due to the fact that you are shed­ding copies of your genome in pub­lic all the time.

• Adele Lopez 28 Sep 2019 6:49 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: interstice's comment on: Honor­ing Petrov Day on LessWrong, in 2019

  Yes, lol :)

• Adele Lopez 27 Sep 2019 4:46 UTC

  16 points

  in reply to: lionhearted's comment on: Honor­ing Petrov Day on LessWrong, in 2019

  I no­ticed af­ter play­ing a bunch of games of a mafia-type game with some ra­tio­nal­ists that when peo­ple made edgy jokes about be­ing in the mob or what­ever, they were more likely to end up ac­tu­ally be­ing in the mob.

• Adele Lopez 22 Sep 2019 21:07 UTC

  6 points

  on: Novum Or­ganum: Introduction

  What sched­ule are you go­ing to post­ing these at? I’ve been ea­gerly look­ing for­ward to the next in­stal­l­ment!

• Adele Lopez 12 Sep 2019 4:58 UTC

  4 points

  on: Look­ing for an­swers about quan­tum im­mor­tal­ity.

  [Note: po­ten­tial info haz­ard, but prob­a­bly good to read if you already read the ques­tion.]

  [Epistemic sta­tus: this stuff is all su­per spec­u­la­tive due to the na­ture of the sce­nar­ios in­volved. Based on my un­der­stand­ing of physics, neu­ro­science, and con­scious­ness, I haven’t seen any­thing that would rule this pos­si­bil­ity out.]

  All I want to know is, is this stuff just be­ing pul­led out of his butt? Like, an ex­tremely un­likely hy­po­thet­i­cal that nonethe­less car­ries huge nega­tive util­ity? I’d be okay with that, as I’m not a util­i­tar­ian. Or have these sce­nar­ios ac­tu­ally been con­sid­ered plau­si­ble by AI the­o­rists?

  FWIW, I’ve thought about this a lot and in­de­pen­dently came up with and con­sid­ered all the sce­nar­ios men­tioned in the Turchin ex­cerpt. It used to re­ally re­ally freak me out, and I be­lieved it on a gut level. Avoid­ing this kind of out­come was my main mo­ti­va­tion for ac­tu­ally get­ting the in­surance for cry­on­ics (the part I was pre­vi­ously cry­ocras­ti­nat­ing on). How­ever, I now be­lieve that QI is not an s-Risk and don’t feel per­son­ally wor­ried about the pos­si­bil­ity any­more.

  One thing to note is that this is a po­ten­tial prob­lem in any suffi­ciently large uni­verse, and doesn’t de­pend on a many-wor­lds style in­ter­pre­ta­tion be­ing cor­rect. Teg­mark has a list of var­i­ous mul­ti­verses, which are differ­ent and af­fect what sce­nar­ios we might face. I do be­lieve in many-wor­lds (as a broad cat­e­gory of in­ter­pre­ta­tions) though.

  Lots of the com­ments here seem con­fused about how this works, so I’ll re­cap. If I’m at the point of death where I’m still con­scious, the next mo­ment I’ll ex­pe­rience will be (in ex­pec­ta­tion) what­ever con­scious state has the high­est prob­a­bil­ity mass in the mul­ti­verse, which is also a valid next con­scious mo­ment from the pre­vi­ous mo­ment. Note that this next con­scious mo­ment is not nec­es­sar­ily in the fu­ture of the pre­vi­ous mo­ment. If the mul­ti­verse con­tains no such mo­ments, then we would just die the nor­mal way. If the mul­ti­verse in­cludes lots of hu­mans do­ing an­ces­tor simu­la­tions, you po­ten­tially could end up in one of those, etc… The key is that out of all con­scious be­ings in the mul­ti­verse who feel like this just hap­pened to them, those are (tau­tolog­i­cally) the ones hav­ing the sub­jec­tive ex­pe­rience of the next valid con­scious mo­ment. And it’s valid to care about these po­ten­tial be­ings, and is AFAICT the rea­son I care about my fu­ture selves (who do not ex­ist yet) in the nor­mal sense.

  Re­gard­ing cry­on­ics, it seems like the best way to pre­serve a sig­nifi­cant amount of in­for­ma­tion about my last con­scious mo­ment. To what­ever ex­tent in­for­ma­tion about this is lost, a civ­i­liza­tion that cares about this could op­ti­mize for like­li­hood of be­ing a valid next con­scious mo­ment. I think this is the main ac­tion­able thing you can do for this. Of course, this only passes the buck to the fu­ture, since there is still the in­evitable heat death of the uni­verse to con­tend with.

  Another thing that seems es­pe­cially plau­si­ble for sud­den deaths Aranyosi’s 1 sce­nario. In this case, the high­est prob­a­bil­ity mass next con­scious mo­ment will be a mo­ment based on the mo­ment from a few sec­onds be­fore, but with a “false” mem­ory of hav­ing sur­vived a sud­den death. This has rel­a­tively high prob­a­bil­ity be­cause peo­ple some­times re­port hav­ing kind of ex­pe­rience when they have a close call. But this again sim­ply passes the buck to the fu­ture, where you’re most likely to die from a grad­ual de­cline.

  How­ever, I think that by far, the most likely situ­a­tion is com­mon to death by ag­ing, ill­ness, or heat death of the uni­verse. At the last mo­ment of con­scious­ness, the only next con­scious mo­ments that will be left will be in highly im­prob­a­ble wor­lds. But which world you are most likely to “wake up” in is still de­ter­mined by Oc­cam’s ra­zor. Peo­ple seem to imag­ine that these im­prob­a­ble wor­lds will be ones where your con­scious­ness re­mains in a similar state to the one you died in, but I think this is wrong.

  Think care­fully about what things are ac­tu­ally hap­pen­ing to sup­port a con­scious ex­pe­rience. Some min­i­mal set of neu­rons would need to be kept func­tional—but be­yond that, we should ex­pect en­tropy to effect things which are not causally up­stream of the func­tion­al­ity of this set of neu­rons. Since strokes hap­pen of­ten, and don’t always cause loss of con­scious­ness, we can ex­pect them to even­tu­ally oc­cur for ev­ery non-es­sen­tial (for con­scious­ness) re­gion of the brain. Be­cause peo­ple can ex­pe­rience nerve dam­age to their sen­sory neu­rons with­out los­ing con­scious­ness, we can ex­pect that the abil­ity to ex­pe­rience phys­i­cal pain will de­cay. Emo­tional pain doesn’t seem to be that qual­i­ta­tively differ­ent from phys­i­cal pain (e.g. is also miti­gated by NSAIDs), so I ex­pect this will be true for pain in gen­eral.

  So most of your body and most of your mind will still de­cay as nor­mal, only the ab­solutely es­sen­tial neu­ronal cir­cuitry (and what­ever else, per­haps blood cir­cu­la­tion) to in­duce a valid next con­scious mo­ment will mirac­u­lously sur­vive. Anes­the­sia works by globally re­duc­ing synapse ac­tivity. So the ini­tial stages this would likely feel like go­ing un­der anes­the­sia, but where you never quite go out. Be­cause anes­thet­ics stop pain (re­mem­ber this is still true if ap­plied lo­cally), and be­cause by de­fault, we do not ex­pe­rience pain, I’m now pretty sure that given QI be­ing real: in­finite agony is very un­likely.

• Adele Lopez 23 Aug 2019 20:10 UTC

  LW: 4 AF: 2

  AF

  in reply to: Lanrian's comment on: Soft take­off can still lead to de­ci­sive strate­gic advantage

  Yeah, I think the en­g­ineer in­tu­ition is the bot­tle­neck I’m point­ing at here.

Op­ti­miza­tion Provenance

• Adele Lopez 23 Aug 2019 18:31 UTC

  4 points

  on: Ac­tu­ally updating

  This rings re­ally true with my own ex­pe­riences; glad to see it writ­ten up so clearly!

  I think that lots of med­i­ta­tion stuff (in par­tic­u­lar The Mind Illu­mi­nated) is point­ing at some­thing like this. One of the goals is to train all of your sub­minds to pay at­ten­tion to the same thing, which leads to in­creas­ing your abil­ity to have an in­ten­tion shared across sub­minds (which feels re­lated to Romeo’s post). Any­way, I think it’s re­ally great to have mul­ti­ple differ­ent frames for ap­proach­ing this kind of goal!

• Adele Lopez 23 Aug 2019 18:05 UTC

  LW: 5 AF: 3

  AF

  on: Thoughts from a Two Boxer

  I think peo­ple make de­ci­sions based on ac­cu­rate mod­els of other peo­ple all the time. I think of New­comb’s prob­lem as the limit­ing case where Omega has ex­tremely ac­cu­rate pre­dic­tions, but that the solu­tion is still rele­vant even when “Omega” is only 60% likely to guess cor­rectly. A fun illus­tra­tion of a com­puter pro­gram ca­pa­ble of pre­dict­ing (most) hu­mans this ac­cu­rately is the Aaron­son or­a­cle.

• Adele Lopez 23 Aug 2019 17:22 UTC

  LW: 15 AF: 7

  AF

  on: Soft take­off can still lead to de­ci­sive strate­gic advantage

  This post has caused me to up­date my prob­a­bil­ity of this kind of sce­nario!

  Another is­sue re­lated to the in­for­ma­tion leak­age: in the in­dus­trial rev­olu­tion era, 30 years was plenty of time for peo­ple to un­der­stand and repli­cate leaked or stolen knowl­edge. But if the slower team man­aged to ob­tain the lead­ing team’s source code, it seems plau­si­ble that 3 years, or es­pe­cially 0.3 years, would not be enough time to learn how to use that in­for­ma­tion as skil­lfully as the lead­ing team can.

• Adele Lopez 29 Jul 2019 3:10 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: James_Miller's comment on: What sup­ple­ments do you use?

  Is there a rea­son not to take it if you’re younger than 40?

• Adele Lopez 13 May 2019 4:19 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Said Achmiz's comment on: Co­her­ent de­ci­sions im­ply con­sis­tent utilities

  Pre­sum­ably, any agent which we man­age to build will be com­putable. So to the ex­tent our agent is us­ing util­ity func­tions, they will be con­tin­u­ous.

  If an agent is only ca­pa­ble of com­putable ob­ser­va­tions, but has a dis­con­tin­u­ous util­ity func­tion, then if the uni­verse is in a state where the util­ity func­tion is dis­con­tin­u­ous, the agent will need to spend an in­finite amount of time (or as long as the uni­verse state re­mains at such a point) de­ter­min­ing the util­ity of the cur­rent state. I think it might be pos­si­ble to use this to cre­ate a more con­crete ex­ploit.

• Adele Lopez 13 May 2019 1:35 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Samuel Hapák's comment on: Co­her­ent de­ci­sions im­ply con­sis­tent utilities

  I think you’re right that this is part of where the in­tu­ition comes from. But it’s still ir­ra­tional in a con­text where you ac­tu­ally know the prob­a­bil­ities ac­cu­rately enough.

• Adele Lopez 13 May 2019 1:27 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Said Achmiz's comment on: Co­her­ent de­ci­sions im­ply con­sis­tent utilities

  For con­ti­nu­ity, it’s rea­son­able to as­sume this be­cause all com­putable func­tions are con­tin­u­ous. See the­o­rem 4.4 of https://​​eccc.weiz­mann.ac.il/​​re­sources/​​pdf/​​ica.pdf

  Edit: I re­al­ized that the con­ti­nu­ity as­sump­tion is differ­ent (though re­lated) from as­sum­ing the util­ity func­tion is con­tin­u­ous. My guess is that com­putabil­ity is still a good jus­tifi­ca­tion for this, but I’d have to check that that ac­tu­ally fol­lows.

• Adele Lopez 15 Dec 2018 18:29 UTC

  6 points

  on: What is ab­strac­tion?

  Ab­strac­tion can be un­der­stood as a re­la­tion­ship be­tween mod­els. You can have a model of what it means to “brush your teeth”, and you can have mod­els of what it means to “pre­pare tooth­brush”, etc… The mod­els of the sub­tasks can be com­posed into a model of the whole se­quence, and the ab­strac­tion re­la­tion­ship tells you how this model is a re­al­iza­tion of the ab­stract “brush your teeth” model. Similarly, we can have a model of what an “an­i­mal” is, and mod­els for “dogs”, “hu­mans”, “cats”. The ab­strac­tion re­la­tion­ship tells you how each of these mod­els are re­al­iza­tions of the “an­i­mal” model. Re­mov­ing prop­er­ties is an easy way to cre­ate mod­els with this re­la­tion­ship, but it’s not the only way. For ex­am­ple, you can also re­place con­tin­u­ous time with dis­crete time.

  You can chain this re­la­tion­ship to cre­ate a hi­er­ar­chy, and for hu­mans, the most con­crete mod­els we typ­i­cally use are the ones that are “mod­el­ing” our raw sen­sory ex­pe­riences. I think that ad­e­quately ex­plains why peo­ple use it this way, but that this isn’t what ab­strac­tion is.

• Adele Lopez 24 Nov 2018 7:01 UTC

  LW: 3 AF: 1

  AF

  in reply to: lbThingrb's comment on: Topolog­i­cal Fixed Point Exercises

  Awe­some! I was hop­ing that there would be a way to do this!

• Adele Lopez 24 Nov 2018 6:25 UTC

  4 points

  AF

  in reply to: JacobKopczynski's comment on: Di­ag­o­nal­iza­tion Fixed Point Exercises

  Cur­ry­ing doesn’t pre­serve sur­jec­tivity. As a sim­ple ex­am­ple, you can eas­ily find a sur­jec­tive func­tion $2\times 2\to 2$, but there are no sur­jec­tive func­tions $2\to 2^2$.

• Adele Lopez 22 Nov 2018 4:17 UTC

  LW: 14 AF: 3

  AF

  on: Iter­a­tion Fixed Point Exercises

  Ex 6:

  If at any point $f^n\left(b\right)=f^{n-1}\left(x\right)$, then we’re done. So as­sume that we get a strict in­crease each time up to $n=|P|$. Since there are only $|P|$ el­e­ments in the en­tire poset, and $f$ is mono­tone, $f^{n+1}\left(x\right)$ has to equal $f^n\left(x\right)$.

  Ex 7:

  For a limit or­di­nal $\alpha$, define $f^{\alpha }\left(x\right)$ as the least up­per bound of $f^n\left(x\right)$ for all $n<\alpha$. If $\alpha >|L|$, then the set $f^n\left(x\right)$ for $n<\alpha$ is a set of size $\alpha$ that maps into a set of size $L$ by tak­ing the value of the el­e­ment. Since there are no in­jec­tions be­tween these sets, there must be two or­di­nals $n<m$ such that$f^n\left(x\right)=f^m\left(x\right)$. Since $f$ is mono­tone, that im­plies that for ev­ery or­di­nal $l>n$, $f^l\left(x\right)=f^n\left(x\right)$and thus is a fixed point. Since $n<\alpha$ this proves the ex­er­cise.

  Ex 8:

  Start­ing from $x$, we can cre­ate a fixed point via iter­a­tion by tak­ing $\alpha >|L|$, and iter­at­ing $\alpha$ times as demon­strated in Ex 7. Call this fixed point $f_x$. Sup­pose there was a fixed point $k$ such that $x\le k$ and $k\le f_x$. Then at some point $f^n\left(x\right)\le f^n\left(k\right)=k$, but $f^{n+1}\left(x\right)\ge f^{n+1}\left(k\right)=k$, which breaks the mono­ton­ic­ity of $f$ un­less $k=f_x$. So $f_x$ gen­er­ated this way is always the small­est fixed point greater than $x$.

  Say we have fixed points $x_i$. Then let $x$ be the least up­per bound of $x_i$, and gen­er­ate a fixed point from $f_x$. So $f_x$ will be greater than each el­e­ment of $x_i$ since $f$ is mono­tone, and is the small­est such fixed point as shown in the above para­graph. So the poset of fixed points is semi-com­plete with up­per bounds.

  Now take our fixed points $x_i$ again. Now let $x$ be the great­est lower bound of $x_i$, and gen­er­ate a fixed point $f_x$. Since $x\le x_i$ and $f$ is mono­tonic, $f^{\alpha }\left(x\right)\le f^{\alpha }\left(x_i\right)=x_i$, and so $f_x$ is a lower bound of $x_i$. It has to be the great­est such bound be­cause $x$ it­self is already the great­est such bound in our poset, and $f$ is mono­tonic.

  Thus the lat­tice of fixed points has all least up­per bounds and all great­est lower bounds, and is thus com­plete!

• Adele Lopez 22 Nov 2018 2:21 UTC

  LW: 13 AF: 2

  AF

  on: Di­ag­o­nal­iza­tion Fixed Point Exercises

  Ex 8: (in Python, us­ing a re­ver­sal func­tion)

  def f(s):
  re­turn s[::-1]
  
  dlmt = ’”“”‘
  code = “””def f(s):
  re­turn s[::-1]
  
  dlmt = ’{}’
  code = {}{}{}
  code = code.for­mat(dlmt, dlmt, code, dlmt)
  print(f(code))”″”
  code = code.for­mat(dlmt, dlmt, code, dlmt)
  print(f(code))

• Adele Lopez 21 Nov 2018 18:42 UTC

  LW: 13 AF: 3

  AF

  in reply to: Davidmanheim's comment on: Topolog­i­cal Fixed Point Exercises

  You can use 1d-Sperner to deal with all the cases effec­tively.