Jisk, formerly Jacob. (And when Jacobs are locally scarce, still Jacob.)
LW has gone downhill a lot from its early days and I disapprove of most of the moderation choices but I’m still, sometimes, here.
It should be possible to easily find me from the username I use here, though not vice versa, for interview reasons.
I guess that disqualifies him as an intellectual? But when he does the same thing on purpose that the people he’s accusing do by accident—ignore any subtleties or higher-order effects and just go with the simple idea—I submit that it makes him part of the category he’s described. If you don’t want to be grouped with the people you’re insulting, stay well clear of behaving like them.
The greatest idiot of an intellectual I’ve ever read or heard a word from is Taleb himself. As with much of his writing, the concept has immense memetic value but no predictive value.
As someone with plenty of experience being full of contempt for just about everyone and (mostly) not being a bastard about it, I kind of think the most helpful lens is less philosophical per se and more practical and ~political. Namely, libertarianism and the knowledge problem.
The world is full of idiots. The country is full of idiots. The government is full of idiots. The corporations are full of idiots. The charities, the social media feeds, the buses and trains, they’re all full of idiots. Some of those are more true than they were twenty years ago but they were all true then too.
But they still know their own lives better than us. They do things that are objectively kind of terrible like get payday loans and buy tons of lottery tickets, but almost always it’s because the better options are blocked off to them or not as good as they look, even if it’s not possible to explain why to an outsider like us even if we were to poke our nose in and ask. (And they wanted to answer for some ungodly reason.)
Libertarianism mostly likes to talk about how the government should butt out and let people live their lives. And this is true, it should. But the same argument also applies to elitists. Yes, they’re doing a bunch of dumb shit, and probably if they were smarter they would change some of it and make their lives better, but you can’t just drop yourself into their lives and ‘fix’ things and expect it to work out. Some of it would make things worse, some of it would theoretically make things better but only if you changed their entire social sphere at once too, and some of it you wouldn’t notice you’d fucked up for years. And mostly that’s still true if “drop yourself into their lives” is replaced with “give insistent well-meaning advice” or “ruminate on how they’re idiots and if they just listened to you, the superior person, they’d be better”. (Okay, the practical issues prohibiting getting any positive impact from ruminating are mostly more obvious than this. But this too.)
Calibrating appropriately is hard. You do, sometimes, want to give advice once or twice. If you figure out when to do that and when to back off, tell me, please. What advice I could try to give there is neither specific nor wonderfully effective so I won’t bother.
But I think this is generally pretty effective at being, technically, contemptuous of most strangers you interact with but mostly keeping it from being something they notice or one of the top three things you notice when having a conversation with them, and that’s pretty good at not encouraging behaving contemptuously, and that’s pretty good at avoiding steeping in contempt until your standards for lack of contempt rise, and then apply to precisely seven people in the world none of whom is you. (Which I think is a risk here.) And that’s, I suspect, at least what you need short-term.
I think those are all more gift economies than they are market economies. I’ve never been part of a dojo long-term but there was ‘hey want a ride’ ‘sure I’ll pick up dinner’ at least a bit even with the one I was part of briefly. Buying and selling MtG was something you did with the store, not the other players, almost always. (Some people were aggressive value traders but they were almost their own subculture because no one really enjoyed dealing with them.) And for the kind of card trades that didn’t look at all at what book value was and just swapped what seemed good to them… Man, I guess that’s at least 40% market economy but it sure didn’t feel transactional. And it died pretty rapidly when the aggressive value traders who were indisputably a market economy showed up, which feels like that’s a sign the market economy part was fragile and noncentral?
I have never been part of a (non-children’s) sports league but I would guess they did a lot of ‘sure do you a favor’ the same way I’d expect from dojos. And I avoid Toastmasters* like it’s radioactive, so IDK.
I think there’s a very fuzzy distinction between ‘technically gift economy but not ~integrated enough to meaningfully be trading’ and ‘not a gift economy’. Probably a similar distinction exists at the low end of market economy, though I suspect on no direct evidence it’s less fuzzy.
(*Even if I witnessed some Master Toasts trading things or doing favors, I still wouldn’t know, because my experience is that a Master Toast emits primarily Simalacrum-Level-4 statements with the occasional S3 or S2 and so I couldn’t begin to guess whether their ‘favors’ were actually favors.)
Is any subculture not a gift economy? Smuggling in ‘small’ connotations to exclude things like ‘the gay community’ (though ca. 1960 maybe them too) or ‘goths,’ but I think it’s the default and it’s notable when a subculture deviates from it.
Possible places to find exceptions, highly monetizing and/or systematizing, many of which I suspect are as much gift economies as us:
Anglophone quant traders
Pro and semi-pro poker players
Crypto coin boosters
/r/WallStreetBets
C.S. Lewis is the usual author to cite for the other direction, and I’ve met both. More common among rationalist types. The Moon Is Harsh Mistress is possibly more effective than Rand.
if we needed correct internal computations for qualia (and not just correct behavior) would mean the overall system would falsely believe to have a quale (like being in pain), it would act, in all ways, like it was in pain, but actually, it wouldn’t be in pain.
To all appearances LLMs already do that and have for several years now. So, yes, that is clearly possible for a non-conscious thing to do.
Your definition of qualia is nonstandard, and defines it out of meaningfulness. More standard definitions generally include at least one synonym for ‘ineffable’ and I believe them to be entirely mysterious answers to mysterious questions.
This seems kind of silly, as a complaint. Many people would be disappointed by this; therefore, a good future won’t have it more than necessary as a tradeoff with other good things. The important puzzles where solving them is better on net than leaving them to be solved, will be solved; puzzles where humanity will get more out of never being told hints toward the answer than we lose from having the problems still exist, will not be solved. It’s possible that the latter category ends up empty and all that’s left is play, that solving Fun Theory doesn’t leave ‘real’ problems, but in a good future that will only happen if it’s worth it.
Oh, my mistake, technically you just made sweeping claims without attempting to justify them in the slightest. That is not literally equivalent to claiming they’re obvious. However, that is the same thing in practice. If you want to say “Ontologically speaking, any physical system exhibiting the same input-output pattern as a conscious being has identical conscious states.” and then never explain why you believe this to be true or defend it in any way, even when challenged—which you did—then you are, in every way that matters, claiming that it is obvious to every possible interlocutor. That no interlocutor’s doubts make it worth your time to explain yourself or defend your position. Let alone make an attempt to convince someone who has different priors, or different experiences.
(This is, of course, what people claiming something is obvious mean. That no one, or no one who counts, could possibly deny them. This is why good teachers of philosophy, mathematics, and science strongly discourage their students from getting in the habit of saying things are obvious; because that is almost never true.)
Also, I reread the parts of the Sequences about the zombie argument and I stand by what I said—they’re basically with me, that qualia are irrelevant. No useful definition of consciousness relies on qualia. If your definition of consciousness relies on qualia it is not useful, because it necessarily makes no empirical predictions. It is not quite as ridiculous as full epiphenomenal zombieism, but it is bad for the same reason.
As I recall the Sequences, they are very negative on qualia as a concept. Belief in quales is a belief which does not pay rent. I am generally unconvinced humans have qualia. I don’t see that I do. There appears to be no means of demonstrating them by experiment, and so presumptively they have no predictive power and so might as well not exist; if they exist, they’re irrelevant, and therefore unparsimonious.
It does seem plausible that an abruptly-stopping mind upload is conscious. It does not seem obvious; there’s a boundary condition and consciousness is very plausibly sensitive to boundary conditions and abrupt jumps according to many varieties of the theory. Most of your claims are of this nature; if you stop making the arrogant and unjustified claims that they’re obvious, there would be no reason to make further objections, because they’re perfectly plausible.
Then nothing can be obvious.
Indeed, that’s probably true in most contexts. “Obvious” rarely if ever has explanatory or didactic power and most people’s vocabularies would be better served by dropping it. I make use of ‘seems obvious’ much more than ‘is obvious’ because it is much more useful as a statement about my mind (conveys information about my reaction) than about the world (makes a universal claim which is enormously difficult to justify).
Different truths are obvious to different people.
And if it’s not obvious to everyone, it isn’t obvious. That’s what it means to claim something is obvious.
That’s not possible in principle. No matter what you empirically observe in a system, there is a possibility it’s not a quale (because perhaps you were mistaken about what constitutes a quale).
Then it’s not possible in principle for it to become obvious and you should stop trying to convince people it is.
I gave an example where it is not necessary.
No, you gave examples where it was still necessary. In none of your thought experiments is it clear that the variant emulation is conscious. In the ‘chocolate ice cream’ example I’d say it is very likely it is not conscious, because you can’t just make a small change like that and not have it propagate to larger ones, and making an arbitrary spot change without that will disrupt what’s going on in a way that probably, at least temporarily, disrupts consciousness. Compare to a concussion with loss of memory, or blackout drunkenness, during which most people will agree no consciousness is taking place.
It is not a necessary condition for the claim that this is true. It is very much necessary for the claim that it is obvious.
This is a matter of philosophy. No research results can help here, nor they are needed.
If no empirical results will make it clear—and your thought experiments certainly wouldn’t! - then it will never, ever be obvious.
It’s still not been common until much more recently than that. Five years at most, which is not a new normal. It hasn’t been working out that well for anyone except Trump himself and there’s a decent chance it explodes on his death (which will almost certainly be before ’32).
You don’t seem to understand the distinction between ‘mislead’ and ‘lie to the face.’ Or, you know, you’re lying to our face. Which would be a stupid plan, but maybe you’re doing it on purpose.
Even politicians lying to their audience’s faces is quite rare, in the USA. That it’s become meaningfully popular in the last 10 years is considered extremely notable and a sign of the decay and apocalypse of the United States, and to lesser degrees other Western countries. Bill Clinton got caught lying to Congress’s face about a trivial but embarrassing matter and “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” might as well be the words on his tombstone even though he suffered no real material consequences for it, because it’s very rare and no one will forget it.
Lying is hard. Being misinformed, or interpreting true fair information in a biased way to reach a biased conclusion, or writing the bottom line first, or quoting true statements in such a way as to give a deliberately misleading impression, are easy. Politicians do them all the time, and this is expected. Journalists did it a little until the Web revolution and now do it more than that, and this is, again, considered very notable and a sign of the decay of the industry. Scientists and experts do it a little, and almost always the first two types, but when they do even a little of the latter types this makes people riot and consider it very notable and a sign of the decay of the field.
Oh, fantastic, I just went looking. Thanks for investigating this!
It may not be a necessary condition, but if you want to present it as obvious, it is necessary. Anything short of an exact match is only allegedly the same until you have some research results that don’t currently exist to demonstrate strong reason to believe your lesser conditions are sufficient.
CAST is a great idea and seems like the most promising way forward with architectures similar to the ones we have, but I do not see any reason to believe we could, if we had a corrigibility meter, build an AI that implemented corrigibility with reasonable robustness within a year. Five years would probably be enough but at that point you’re looking for at least one, and maybe 2-3, major insights.
In particular, it looks like we’re close enough to being able to implement corrigibility that the largest obstacle involves being able to observe how corrigible an AI is.
That’s a wild claim to make without reference to specific papers or milestones. I’m not fully up on ‘superalignment’ progress but last I looked no one on the modern paradigm side was seriously attempting to study corrigibility, let alone making this kind of progress. And results like Golden Gate Claude and the ‘buggy code → evil’ transformation indicated it was probably just as hard and unnatural vs in the MIRI paradigm.
In the scenario where he knows that prophecy foretells an outcome incompatible with his success here, his major decision point is long-past; he has reason to do it anyway (presumably prophetic reason). I see nothing he could do which is obviously better, and the conversation may itself be part of the keyhole future path.
If he doesn’t, this is still far from an “approximately-worst option.” It’s still a really good trap unless Quirrell knows the Mirror is going to be the trap, knows Harry’s Cloak is the genuine article that will still hide him from the Mirror, and can trick and coerce Harry into coming with him, which is three different things Dumbledore has good reason to think he probably doesn’t know. The latter two are both achieved only through adventures Dumbledore doesn’t know about—Azkaban, and Harry using up his time-loop password on the first day. As Lucius told Draco—any plan that relies on three things going right for you is at the limit of possible plans, and the real limit is two.
Absolutely not. From my experience, not at all. I have turned down sex with someone I’d been on a date with, found attractive, and was generally interested in because they were, that day, boring me enough that the attraction couldn’t stick.
Other things like kinks and fantasies can get more flexible far easier than the appeal of a partner. Conversely, an intellectually appealing partner makes everything else more flexible, including beauty standards and what seems hot.