oops, thanks for the reminder
DanielFilan
Karma: 7,703
Sorry, it will be a bit before the video uploads. I’ll hide the link until then.
Proposal: merge with the separate tag “AI Control”
How would you rate the Book of Mormon as a book? What’s your favourite part?
I recently heard of the book How to leave the Mormon church by Alyssa Grenfell, which might be good. Based on an interview with the author, it seemed like it was focussed on nuts-and-bolts stuff (e.g. “practically how do you explore alcohol in a way that isn’t dangerous”) and explicitly avoiding a permanent state of having an “ex-mormon” identity, which strikes me as healthy (altho I think some doubt is warranted on how good the advice is, given that the author’s social media presence is primarily focussed on being ex-mormon). The book is associated with a website.
NB: I have a casual interest in high-demand religions, but have never been a part of one (with the arguable exception of the rationality/EA community).
My guess is this won’t work in all cases, because norm enforcement is usually yes/no, and needs to be judged by people with little information. They can’t handle “you can do any 2 of these 5 things, but no more” or “you can do this but only if you implement it really skillfully”. So either everyone is allowed to impose 80 hour weeks, or no one can work 80 hour weeks, and I don’t like either of those options.
I think this might be wrong—for example, my understanding is that there are some kinds of jobs where it’s considered normal for people to work 80-hour weeks, and other kinds where it isn’t. Maybe the issue is that the “kind of job” norms can easily operate on lets you pick out things like “finance” but not “jobs that have already made one costly vulnerability bid”?
Katja responds on substack:
I’m calling people who know where they are (i.e. are not confused) not in simulations, for the sake of argument. But this shouldn’t matter, except for understanding each other.
It sounds like you are saying that ~100x more people live in confused simulations than base reality, but I’m questioning that. The resources to run a brain are about the same whether it’s a ‘simulation’ or a mind in touch with the real world. Why would future civilization spend radically more resources on simulations than on minds in the world? (Or if the non-confused simulations are also relevantly minds in the world, then there are a lot more of them than the confused simulations, so we are back to quite low probability of being mistaken.)
(I plan on continuing the conversation there, not here)
I don’t think this argument quite works? Like, suppose each base civilization simulates 100,000 civilizations. 100 are confused and think they’re base civilizations, and the rest are non-confused and know they’re simulations being run by a base civilization. In this world, most civilizations are right about their status, but most civilizations who think they’re base civilizations are wrong.
Hmm I think somehow the problem is that the equals sign in your url is being encoded as an ASCII value with a % sign etc rather than being treated as a raw equals sign, weird.
For one particularly legible example, see this comment by janus.
Link should presumably be to this comment.
Oh—it could be that my peer score is artificially high due to using Metaculus back when there were fewer peers who were good at forecasting.
FWIW: in the debate, Rootclaim don’t really push the line that alleged evidence for zoonosis is a Chinese cover-up, but mostly take reports as-is, and accept that one of the first outbreaks was at the Huanan Seafood Market. I think in some cases they allege that some cases weren’t tracked or were suppressed, and maybe they say that some evidence is faked in passing, but it wasn’t core to their argument.
I think what is missing here is that this debate has been cited repeatedly in rationalist spaces, by people who were already quite engaged with the topic, familiar with the evidence, and in possession of carefully-formed views, as having been extremely valuable and informative, and having shifted their position significantly.
I’m not sure who you’re referring to and can’t think of examples, but in case it’s me, I wasn’t already very engaged with the topic or in possession of carefully-formed views.
Notes:
Yep, the tweet thread is just me jotting down thoughts etc while watching the debate.
I was 75-80% convinced when I tweeted that, which was before I had finished the debate. After watching the debate, I made a sketchy Bayesian calculation that got me to 96%, but I’ve since backed off to maybe 66%.
Basically: the key question for me is whether you think one of the first outbreaks of COVID happened at the Huanan Seafood Market. Rootclaim conceded this, and as far as I can tell if this is true then it’s dispositive evidence, but I have since began to doubt it.
One thing in favour of my judgements is that I’m at number 5 on Metaculus’ leaderboard of how accurate predictors were compared to their peers, altho that mostly comes from predictions made between 2016 and April 2020, when I burnt out from forecasting on Metaculus.
I’m currently in the Diamond league on Manifold, which is much less impressive, and in part driven by my prediction of which way the debate would go.
Isn’t there a transcript?
No transcript, but the judges have documents where they outline their reasoning:
Here’s one about how many users will know how to make a dialogue:
Here’s one about what the most common political affiliation will be:
Here’s a Manifold market on how many people will fill out the survey in 2024.
I got 13⁄18.
Thanks for finding this! Will link it in the transcript.