Could you please link me when grant applications are open instead?
Considering AI Safety as a career and would go for it if I can have some time where I’m not worried about rent.
Cedar
Karma: 163
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Hna2P8gcTyRgNDYBY/race-along-rashomon-ridge
This feels related. This also talks about paths in hyperparameter space, but instead of linear paths it talks about paths consisting of optimal models between two optimal models.
Thanks Thomas! I really appreciate this!
Yooo! That sounds amazing. Please do let me know once that report is up!
Beautiful! Thank you for the link and references. That makes a lot of sense!
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That’s not how the story went in my mind.
It felt obvious to me that once the probes are starting to make each other into paperclips, some sort of natural selection would take over where probes that prioritize survival over paperclip making would murder the rest and survive. And there’d be a new cycle of life.
I kinda like the term “cheerleading” instead of narrative syncing. Kinda like “I define a cheer and y’all follow me and do the cheer”.
Shameless plug here: I’m trying to get into alignment but struggling to get motivated emotionally. If any of you wants to do mutual cheerleading over a discord chat or something, please PM me. also PM me if you just want to hang out and chat and figure out whether you want information or cheerleading. I’d be glad to help with that too by rubber duckie-ing with you.
I’m doing this because I mistook my need for cheerleading as a need for information a while ago and had a very confusing 1-hour chat with a rationalist where he kept trying to give me information and I kept trying to look for inclusion/acceptance signals. I learned a lot both by listening to him and by reflecting upon that experience but I fear I’ve ended up wasting his time and I kinda feel sad about that. This is why I’m putting my email here.
I find it a very very useful summary of simulacrum levels and some of the things that happen in immoral mazes, and using normal people words have the added advantage that I can linkdrop with less fear of exposing my rationalist cultism.
Just to make sure we’re on the same page, we seem to be both agreeing that
Good virtual signaling is possible and should be attempted
Moloch worship is possible, should be avoided, and may be the reason for why many people hate / avoid / devaluate virtual signaling.
And you seem to be saying, yes Moloch is real, yes things can go very bad. But we should still be trying to build good norms and standards to accurately signal virtues.
Does my summary feel fair and correct?
I agree with you in terms of virtual signaling being a proper and good thing with a real function. However, I think many people’s objection against it is related to the higher order effects of goodharting and Moloch-worship (escalating virtual signalling in a game that always ends in a race to the bottom towards things like public self flagellation and self immolation). I was looking for it in the article but I didn’t find it, so I figured I’d mention it here.
I would like to add my own modification to 19(valuing time). The actually important here is something like integral of mood over time. If you gain time but you aren’t happy in it(content and curious and excited happy, not addiction -chasing happy), time is worth very little. So if going to visit your friends takes a lot of time but makes you happy over the week, do it anyways.
Got any tips on how to make good things addictive? I went through college and paid all my attention to graduating (instead of playing the infinite game), and now my life is dominated by anxieties and addictions.
Really need tips on how to make brain focus on solving hard problems again. I miss those days.
I was trying to point attention to this fact
A systematic way of finding the local minima of a loss function
But I thought about it a bit and i realized that I misunderstood the question, so I deleted my answer
Reflecting upon my experience, I have decided to wholeheartedly agree with you on being literal with young children. I think establishing a strong connection between language and objective reality is useful even when sometimes language is used to make illusions and manipulate.
I agree with you in terms of the fair and respectful systems grounding. My own experience with mazey-ness has been that they cause me intense anxiety and distress, and I’d imagine having that earlier in childhood being a very bad thing.
In terms of mazey organizations being common… I feel like it really depends on where you are and where you’re from. In the social-economic section of China where I come from, for example, asking fake questions, sacrificing your own standards to fit in, manipulation, and “measure effort by who self-flagellates the hardest” are so common that they’re just the assumed backdrop for every conversation about career stuff and academic stuff. And I think it has a certain momentum on you that persists even when you leave. For example, I find myself having a tendency to be attracted by vaguely shiny and prestigious things, and that’s accounted for me landing in a sell-side quant position (VERY mazey) and a PhD program (somewhat mazey).
But yes all in all I agree that if surviving without bullshit is at all possible, developing a strong bullshit allergy is an awesome thing to do for your kids.
My objection to makeup is that it’s sorta a zero sum game, where if everybody spends 1hr a day on makeup, the world isn’t really a better place since beauty is a relative thing.
I agree that, in a society where everybody is judged by their made-up looks, innate beauty would matter less, and that’s good.
However, people will start competing on effort spent on makeup, which to me feels like a really bad thing. Imagine everybody having to spend 2 hours on make-up every day before heading out. I think that’s what some women already have to deal with in their workplaces and I’d rather not everybody’s lives be like that.
Yes please!
Thank you so much! I didn’t know 80k does advising! In terms of people with knowledge on the possibilities… I have a background and a career path that doesn’t end up giving me a lot of access to people who know, so I’ll definitely try to get help at 80k.
Also worth bearing in mind as a general principle that if almost everything you try succeeds, you’re not trying enough challenging things. Just make sure to take negative outcomes as useful information (often you can ask for specific feedback too). There’s a psychological balance to be struck here, but trying at least a little more than you’re comfortable with will generally expand your comfort zone and widen your options.
This was very encouraging! Thank you.
My parents really cared about making things fair and giving expectations of fairness, and I really enjoyed it. It contributed to many of my qualities I care about (commitment to objective reality, attempt at consistency, integration of different parts of the self).
But sometimes I wonder if the opposite would be better, especially for surviving in maze-ey environment a la moral mazes.
For
to(a,b), is there a way to specify other confidence intervals?E.g. let’s say I have the 25, 50, 75 percentiles, but not the 5 and 95 percentiles?