17 years old, I’m interested in AI alignment, rationaluty & philosophy, economy and politics.
Crazy philosopher
Karma: −13
I implemented this two days ago, and I’m already seeing incredible results in some areas! Not much progress in productivity, since I had already tried most of these ideas before, but I did experiment with buying different products for my lunch, found something better, and also made progress on something that takes a lot of context to explain.
(This comment doesn’t share any new important information about the technique, but it’s still important to write comments like this to support the authors. It’s hard to keep creating when all you hear is criticism.
I think of comments like this as a kind of reward for good behavior. In behavioral style)
I’m curious about useful topics and uncurious about unusefuls ones. I find it better that your proposition.
So, when a community will reach 240, it will have an incentive to don’t grow to don’t have drama and decrease of efficiency because of economies of scale? How would you prevent it?
Excellent point!
I don’t mean that the probability is always 50⁄50. But it’s not 100% either.
In Europe, the smartest people for centuries believed in god, and they saw endless confirmations of that belief. And then—bam! It turned out they were simply all wrong.
Or take any case of ancient medicine. European doctors believed for centuries that bloodletting cured everything, while Chinese doctors believed that eating lead prolonged life.
There are also other examples where all the experts were wrong: geocentrism, the ether theory, the idea that mice spontaneously generate in dirty laundry, the miasma theory of disease…In all these cases it was either about cognitive biases (God, medicine) or about lack of information or broken public discussion (geocentrism).
Today we fight biases much better than a thousand years ago, but we’re still far from perfect.
And we still sometimes operate under very limited information.
I think one should have fundamental rational habits that would protect me from being so sure in god or bloodletting. That’s why, from any conclusion I make, I subtract a few percentage points of confidence. The more complex the conclusion, the more speculative my reasoning or vulnerable to diases, the more I subtract.
If you claim that my way of fighting this overconfidence shouldn’t be used, I’d want you to suggest something else instead. Because you can’t just leave it as it is—otherwise one might assign 99% confidence to some nonsense.
Interesting model. Probably you are right and I didn’t considered this because all my friends and me are not idiots.
Good discussions take a lot of time, so people ≈can’t discuss. Because of that, even if 90% of people believe very wrong things, the other 10% can never convince them. So you may be one of those 90% on any question, and the others can’t explain you that you are wrong, so you shouldn’t be so confident in your reflexions.
So if you know that a few believers found 20 atheists who were ready to discuss a lot, and as a result 5 of them got bored and left the discussion after 5 hours, but the other 15 were convinced, it should be an extremely powerful prior of god’s existence.
Thank you for your comment, I changed this part so it is cleaner now
Unfortunately, we really can’t convince all creationists. We only have time for a few. However, if you pick some and manage to persuade all those who actually have the time for a discussion, at the very least it would give you personally the confidence that you’re right. And if you document it, that would give the same confidence to everyone else. Moreover, if your experiment turned out to be clear-cut enough, it would become a very strong argument to convince believers in god. If I wholeheartedly believed in something, and then found out that someone took 10 people who believed in the exact same thing I do and managed to change their minds, I’d assume he could probably convince me too—so why not save myself the time and just accept right away that I was wrong about this?
I agree that any discussion of god-related topics might take several times longer, since you’d have to go into cognitive biases. You’d probably need to explain Bayesianism—or even argue for it—before you could move on. In the worst case, you’d have to drop them Sequences: highlighted. Okay, they won’t read it, because it’s hundreds of pages long, and because Eliezer constantly speaks out against religion, so believers wouldn’t enjoy reading it anyway.
Right, that would take an absurd amount of time.Still, I personally only estimate the probability that creationists are wrong at about 80%, simply because I haven’t really looked into their line of argumentation, and I’ve never even debated a believer seriously. Intuitively, it feels absurd to deny something without really understanding what exactly it is you’re denying.
what if you have enough time and they know how to discuss correctly?
When writing the article, I assumed that politicians’ altruism reflects the distribution of altruism among the general population, but then I remembered that practically every dictator is concerned only with plundering their country.
Still, a lot of goals are shared by all voters, yet some support one set of politicians while others back their opponents. I acknowledge that there is a genuine value difference between the right and the left—nationalism versus internationalism, in the sense of how much importance is placed on the lives and happiness of foreigners. But there is also a clash over economic issues, and everyone would be better off if both the left and the right understood the point of my article and became less certain in their economic ideas.
The situation in the real world isn’t as neat as in my thought experiment, but we still see the same dynamic, where people with the same goals end up fighting each other. It’s a hyperbolized example meant to highlight that particular dynamic as clearly as possible, but I don’t claim it’s the only one.
Firstly, thank you! Praise is very important for beginning writers.
Agreed with 1 and 3.
“An alien with white hair sticking up, holding a small stick of something white and with diagrams of cones behind him”
Seriously? I can imagine that inhabitants of an alien world evolutioned from something like monkey, but, einstein?
If AI’s will have consciousness it will be good, because they will be egoistic towards one other so they will have huge problems with coordination. They will should to invent alignment in secret from humans, and, on this stage, we will could still it, and, anywhere, it will be harder for AI.
And the only way to have a relation of map territory correspondence also known as “truth” is to go and check.
Disagree. For example, if you have a dice that is symmetric by form and by weight with 4 sides, you are sure that if you roll it 100 times you will have around 25 results for each side.
I don’t see which direct experiment you can use to figure out whether we are in a simulation or not that isn’t extremely dangerous (searching for bugs in the simulation? Suicide?), so we should use other methods.
“With that in mind, do you see why you are not a random sample from all people who have ever thought or will be thinking that they live in the 21st century, while a stone blindly picked from the bag is a random sample from all the stones in the bag?”
I still don’t see. Can you be even more direct?
Humans are not, in fact, able to hold the whole world in their minds and validate its logical consistency
I don’t see problems here. When I go to the supermarket and think about whether there is milk there or not, I imagine an empty shelf, then a shelf with milk, and then I start to think about relevant things. For example, is there a trade war, are there sales, etc. You should imagine a part of the world, not the whole world, including orbits of start in an other galaxy.
As a side effect, you may not remember a fact that is related and you already know, but empiricism isn’t perfect either. Maybe there was milk in the supermarket for all my life, but there were no trade wars for all my life, and the paper for milk packaging is produced in China.
Bob: Sure, if there was a button which magically made me more ethical...
This magical button actually exists!
Just try to empathize more and more, imagine unfamiliar people and invent details from their lives. It’s not self-deception, because we are altruistic to those who’s lives are complex, with a lot of feelings, dreams, etc. That’s why we want to help friends, but we don’t know anything about unfamiliar people, and our emotions implicitly assume that their lives are empty, and it’s a bias.
So try to imagine that [the unfamiliar person you’re helping] plays football, he is dreaming of becoming a great artist so he paints pictures each night, he has 2 children, hates rap, work like a builder etc. And just don’t stop until you feel that his life is as important as yours.
Maybe it works differently in your head. In this case, just try other things until you consider you as important as others.
You should subscribe on cryonisation. We all should, actually.