alexey

Karma: 112

alexey Nov 10, 2023, 12:23 AM
1 point
0
in reply to: tailcalled’s comment on: Contra Nora Belrose on Orthogonality Thesis Being Trivial
The quoted section more seems like instrumental convergence than orthogonality to me?
The second part of the sentence, yes. The bolded one seems to acknowledge AIs can have different goals, and I assume that version of EY wouldn’t count “God” as a good goal.
Another more relevant part:
Obviously, if the AI is going to be capable of making choices, you need to create an exception to the rules—create a Goal object whose desirability is not calculated by summing up the goals in the justification slot.
Presumably this goal object can be anything.
But in order to accept that, one needs to accept the orthogonality thesis.
I agree that EY rejected the argument because he accepted OT. I very much disagree that this is the only way to reject the argument. In fact, all four positions seem quite possible:
1. Accept OT, accept the argument: sure, AIs can have different goals, but this (starting an AI without explicit goals) is how you get an AI which would figure out the meaning of life.
2. Reject OT, reject the argument: you can think “figure out the meaning of life” is not a possible AI goal.
3. and 4. EY’s positions at different times.
In addition, OT can itself be a reason to charge ahead with creating an AGI: since it says an AGI can have any goal, you “just” need to create an AGI which will improve the world. It says nothing about setting an AGI’s goal being difficult.

alexey Nov 6, 2023, 9:44 PM
1 point
0
on: Contra Nora Belrose on Orthogonality Thesis Being Trivial
In fact it seems that the linked argument relies on a version of the orthogonality thesis instead of being refuted by it:
For almost any ultimate goal—joy, truth, God, intelligence, freedom, law—it would be possible to do it better (or faster or more thoroughly or to a larger population) given superintelligence (or nanotechnology or galactic colonization or Apotheosis or surviving the next twenty years).
Nothing about the argument contradicts “the true meaning of life”—which seems in that argument to be effectively defined as “whatever the AI ends up with as a goal if it starts out without a goal”—being e.g. paperclips.

alexey Oct 15, 2023, 4:35 PM
3 points
0
on: I compiled a ebook of `Project Lawful` for eBook readers
Is the story currently complete?

alexey Oct 14, 2023, 5:06 PM
4 points
0
on: Actually, “personal attacks after object-level arguments” is a pretty good rule of epistemic conduct
The issue with the first justification is that no one has actually claimed that the existence of such a rule is obvious or self-evident. Publicly holding a non-obvious belief does not obligate the holder to publicly justify that belief to the satisfaction of the author.
However, Yudkowsky also called the rule “straightforward” and said that
violating it this hugely and explicitly is sufficiently bad news that people should’ve been wary about this post and hesitated to upvote it for that reason alone
That is, he expected majority of EA Forum members (at least) to also consider is a “basic rule”.

alexey Aug 22, 2023, 4:11 PM
1 point
0
in reply to: alexgieg’s comment on: Autogynephilia discourse is so absurdly bad on all sides

That right there shows autogynephilia isn’t a universal explanation.

Do any prominent pro-AGP people claim it is? Even when I see them described by their opponents, the claim is that there are two clusters of trans women and AGP people are one of them, so aroace trans women could belong to the other cluster without contradicting that theory.

alexey Jul 7, 2023, 9:27 AM
7 points
0
in reply to: Bezzi’s comment on: Intelligence Officials Say U.S. Has Retrieved Craft of Non-Human Origin
There are similar claims in Russia as well, for what it’s worth.

alexey May 2, 2023, 1:32 PM
5 points
0
on: “a dialogue with myself concerning eliezer yudkowsky”
and author intentionally cropped
The author is visible in the next screenshot, unless you meant something else (also, even if he wasn’t, the name is part of the URL).

alexey Mar 21, 2023, 11:46 PM
1 point
0
in reply to: Taran’s comment on: There are (probably) no superhuman Go AIs: strong human players beat the strongest AIs
If I were going to play chess against Magnus Carlsen I’d definitely study his games with a computer, and if that computer found a stunning refutation to an opening he liked I’d definitely play it.
Conditionally on him continuing to play the opening, I would expect he has a refutation to that refutation, but no reason to use the counter-refutation in public games against the computer. On the other hand, he may not want to burn it on you either.

alexey Mar 5, 2023, 1:17 PM
2 points
1
in reply to: lc’s comment on: What fact that you know is true but most people aren’t ready to accept it?
is obviously different than what you said, though
To me it doesn’t seem to be? “condoned by social consensus” == “isn’t broadly condemned by their community” in the original comment. And
because the “social consensus” is something designed by people, in many cases with the explicit goal of including circles wider than “them and their friends”
doesn’t seem to work unless you believe a majority of people are both actively designing the “social consensus” and have this goal; majority of people who design the consensus having this as a goal is not sufficient.

alexey Nov 6, 2022, 8:25 PM
3 points
0
in reply to: JacobW38’s comment on: What does it mean for an AGI to be ‘safe’?
It’s explicitly the second:
But if they can do that with an AGI capable of ending the acute risk period, then they’ve probably solved most of the alignment problem. Meaning that it should be easy to drive the probability of disaster dramatically lower.

alexey Oct 24, 2022, 6:00 PM
1 point
0
in reply to: Aorou’s comment on: Why Do AI researchers Rate the Probability of Doom So Low?
You might have confused “singularity” and “a singleton” (that is, a single AI (or someone using AI) getting control of the world)?

alexey May 1, 2022, 11:52 AM
3 points
in reply to: lsusr’s comment on: Moses and the Class Struggle
Cairo is a problem too, then (it was founded after Arthur lived).

alexey Jul 16, 2020, 8:16 AM
1 point
on: DARPA Digital Tutor: Four Months to Total Technical Expertise?
It’s also interesting that apparently field experts only did about as well as the traditional students:
Differences between Fleet and ITTC participants were generally smaller and neither consistently positive nor negative.
Does experience not help at all?

alexey Oct 8, 2018, 4:32 PM
3 points
on: Leto among the Machines
I don’t believe the original novels imply the humanity nearly went extinct and then banded together, that was only in “the junk Herbert’s son wrote”. Or that Strong AI was developed only a short time before the Jihad started.
Neither of these are true in the Dune Encyclopedia version, which Frank Hebert at least didn’t strongly disapprove of.
There is still some Goodhart’s-Law-ing there, to quote https://dune.wikia.com/wiki/Butlerian_Jihad/DE:
After Jehanne’s death, she became a martyr, but her generals continued exponentially with more zeal. Jehanne knew her weaknesses and fears, but her followers did not. The politics of Urania were favored. Around that time, the goals of the Jihad were the destruction of machine technology operating at the expense of human values; but by this point they would have be replaced by indiscriminate slaughter.

alexey Sep 23, 2017, 12:10 PM
0 points
on: Intrinsic properties and Eliezer’s metaethics

Whereas I can look at a regular triangle and see its ∆-ness from outside the simulation, I cannot do the same (let’s suppose) for keys of the right shape to open lock L.

Why suppose this and not the opposite? If you understand L well enough to see if a key opens it immediately, does this make L-openingness intrinsic, so intrinsicness/extrinsicness is relative to the observer?

And on the other hand, someone else needs to simulate a ruler to check for ∆-ness, so it is an extrinsic property to him.

Namely, goodness of a state of affairs is something that I can assess myself from outside a simulation of that state.

I certainly would consider this much more difficult than merely checking whether a key opens a lock. I could after spending enough time understand the lock well enough for this, but even considering a complete state of affairs e.g. on Earth?

alexey Sep 22, 2017, 8:34 PM
5 points
in reply to: pepe_prime’s comment on: 2017 LessWrong Survey
I’ve taken the survey.

alexey Apr 27, 2017, 3:58 PM
0 points
on: What conservatives and environmentalists agree on

Most leftists … believe we can all agree on what crops to grow (what social values to have [2])

Whose slogan is “family values”, again?

and pull out and burn the weeds of nostalgia, counter-revolution, and the bourgeoisie

Or the weeds of revolution, hippies, and trade unions...

Conservatives view their own society the way environmentalists view the environment: as a complex organism best not lightly tampered with. They’re skeptical of the ability of new policies to do what they’re supposed to do, especially a whole bunch of new policies all enacted at once.

Bunch of new policies like War on Drugs, for example?

alexey Apr 2, 2016, 9:14 AM
26 points
in reply to: Huluk’s comment on: Lesswrong 2016 Survey
I’ve taken the survey.

alexey Feb 13, 2016, 6:26 PM
0 points
on: The AI That Pretends To Be Human
Second AI: If I just destroy all humans, I can be very confident any answers I receive will be from AIs!

alexey Jul 30, 2015, 4:43 AM
2 points
on: Astronomy, Astrobiology, & The Fermi Paradox I: Introductions, and Space & Time

The amount of line emission from a galaxy is thus a rough proxy for the rate of star formation – the greater the rate of star formation, the larger the number of large stars exciting interstellar gas into emission nebulae… Indeed, their preferred model to which they fit the trend converges towards a finite quantity of stars formed as you integrate total star formation into the future to infinity, with the total number of stars that will ever be born only being 5% larger than the number of stars that have been born at this time.

Is this a good proxy for total star formation, or only large star formation? Is it plausible that while no/few large stars are forming, many dwarfs are?