Commander Zander
My spelling peculiarities:
I prefer not to capitalize the pronoun i.
I prefer to always use a instead of an.
I avoid gendered words. Eg i use steelmind/strawmind instead of steelman/strawman.
Unusually appropriate calendar alignment: January 6 has become a anniversary of infamous unrest in the USA. Curiously, the tonally-analogous Feast of Fools scene in Hunchback of Notre Dame (novel) is also on January 6.
I’m no expert; I’ve never been there. I merely talked to someone from Seattle a couple weeks ago.
I see. I at first assumed your ‘effectively dead’ meant ‘biologically alive, but certain to die soon’.
Thank you for the info!
I think it’s indeed humor & indeed singling out a company.
It sounds like the core idea is a variant of the Intelligence Manhattan Project idea, but with a focus on long term international stability & a ban on competitors.
Perhaps the industry would be more likely to adopt this plan if GUARD could seek revenue the way corporations currently do: by selling stock & API subscriptions. This would also increase productivity for GUARD & shorten the dangerous arms race interval.
I think this sounds fun! The versions of this i’d be most likely to use would be:
Puzzling over scenarios of satisfying complexity. There could be numerical details, selection bias, unreliable narrator obstacles, cases where users with different values might disagree, etc. Even if the scenario-poster is arguably wrong about the right answer, that could still be interesting.
Scenarios that you puzzle over & then read a comment section about. Scenarios that you remember & talk about with friends later.
User-submitted anecdotes from their real lives. This is oddly similar to Reddit’s ‘Am I the Asshole’ threads, but with a focus on becoming more clearheaded & unbiased. Users could sometimes ask for testable predictions about what will happen next, then report back later. So if the pictured scenario came from real life, Maria might ask users how many times Jake will be late in the next 6 months.
Philosophy-esque thought experiments.
Scenarios that do indeed benefit my thinking or expand my perspective. Perhaps by improving my mental statistics skills, or exposing me to perspectives of people with very different lives, or demonstrating little-known math subtleties like Simpson’s paradox. One failure mode for this would be scenarios like the more boring HR-training courses, where the story doesn’t contain any knowledge you don’t already know.
Imperial Radch series by Ann Leckie
Very well-crafted world. Some might dislike the robotic narrator, some might enjoy it as a fun layer in a complex plot puzzle. High scifiosity.
Southern Reach trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer
Surreal & unusual novels. Good tone & imagery. Unlike Radch, i think this is more about style & perspective than a style layer over a intricate, hidden plot layer.
Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer
I read a lot of scifi, but i haven’t gotten this obsessed with a book since Green Mars! Like Radch, a unreliable narrator presents a intricate world. Set on Earth four centuries in the future, it follows the political, technological, & dialectic trajectories of a culture that has mutated in strange & fascinating ways from today. Try it for the economics of future aircraft & the vivid soliloquies. Avoid it if you dislike books that frontload worldbuilding & characters, where the plot is confusing until the end. I love it & i have another post about it here.
This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone
I found this short book very fun & cool. About spies in a extraordinarily spectacular time-travel war. Does feature some very confusing plot points that i still don’t understand.
I quite like the Arguman format of flowcharts to depict topics. In a live performance, participants might sometimes add nodes to the flowchart, or sometimes ask for revision to another participant’s existing node. For example, asking for rewording for clarity.
Perhaps the better term would be tree, not flowchart. Each node is a response to its parent. This could perhaps be implemented with bulleted lists in a Google Doc.
It’s nice for the event to output a useful document.
I call all those examples opinions.
Sure, opinions come to people from a few different sources. I speculate that interpersonal transmission is the most common, but they can also originate in someone’s head, either via careful thought or via a brief whim.
People don’t have opinions—opinions have people.
Often, one hears someone express a strange, wrong-seeming opinion. The bad habit is to view this as that person’s intentional bad action. The good habit is to remember that the person heard this opinion, accepted it as reasonable, & might have put no further thought into the matter.
Opinions are self-replicating & rarely fact-checked. People often subscribe to 2 contradictory opinions.
Epistemic status: I’m trying this opinion on. It’s appealing so far.
I like it! In addition, I suppose you could use a topic-wide prior for those groups that you don’t have much data on yet.
This is totally delightful!
Personally I’d rather have the public be fascinated with how chatbots think than ignorant of the topic. Sure, non experts won’t have a great understanding, but this sounds better than likely alternatives. And I’m sure people will spend a lot of time on either future chatbots, or future video games, or future television, or future Twitter, but I’m not convinced that’s a bad thing.
The regulation you mention sounds very drastic & clumsy to my ears. I’d suggest starting by proposing something more widely acceptable, such as regulating highly effective self modifying software that lacks security safeguards.
Basing ethical worth off of qualia is very close to dualism, to my ears. I think instead the question must rest on a detailed understanding of the components of the program in question, & the degree of similarity to the computational components of our brains.
Excellent point. We essentially have 4 quadrants of computational systems:
Looks nonhuman, internally nonhuman—All traditional software is in this category
Looks nonhuman, internally humanoid—Future minds that are at risk for abuse (IMO)
Looks humanoid, internally nonhuman—Not a ethical concern, but people are likely to make wrong judgments about such programs.
Looks humanoid, internally humanoid—Humans. The blogger claims LaMDA also falls into this category.
Okay, i found a solution that seems to work: https://www.greaterwrong.com/users/commander-zander?show=posts&format=rss
And you can get a link that includes comments too by changing the mode on this page: https://www.greaterwrong.com/users/commander-zander?show=posts