Daphne_W

Karma: 200

Daphne_W 4 Apr 2021 6:09 UTC
26 points
in reply to: Gerald Monroe’s comment on: What are all these children doing in my ponds?
1. Real-world personal finance isn’t much of a red queen race. It costs an almost fixed amount of money to stay alive each year, and an almost fixed amount of money to raise a child to adulthood. If you make over $100k a year, you can comfortably raise at least one child and spend any excess money or effort on charity.
2. We’re probably not in a timeframe where evolution will matter. There are several existential risks and several technologies that render evolution obsolete that are likely to occur before most lesswrong readers would normally die. Having children for evolutionary purposes doesn’t seem like an effective strategy for promoting altruism.
3. We’re not at a stage of popularity where raising a child to hopefully agree with us to be charitable 25 years from now is a more viable memetic strategy than spending the years that would be spent child-rearing trying to coax people into taking off their earmuffs. Which in turn may be less efficient than just putting your nose to the grindstone and making a proof of concept child-saving robot to show off and use.
The camera crew and autobiography strategy is the one Peter Singer personally uses.

Daphne_W 2 Jul 2021 10:53 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Adam Zerner’s comment on: Precognition
You’re acting like wearing a mask is the only trade you can do to prolong your life. But there are many investments/interventions into your own longevity that are more effective per dollar that you probably haven’t taken yet.

Do you spend more than two hours per day doing exercise? Do you check your micronutrient blood levels regularly? Do you refuse to go outside in fear of traffic accidents or muggings or skin cancer? Have you moved to an area with little air pollutants and good access to medical/cryogenic emergency services? Have you read everything on the internet that has a better than 1:100 million chance per hour of reading of saving your life? Are you always accompanied by your personal full-time physician?

Before you get to $1 per 10^-10 chance to preserve your life for the singularity, there are a lot of interventions you can take, many of which are expensive or time-consuming. Opportunity cost ruins it for all but the richest of people.

And that’s just regarding your own life. Other people have a chance of post-singularity immortality too, so rather than a small chance of saving yourself, you could go for a much larger chance at saving someone else. EA charities can manage about $1 per 10^-4 chance to preserve a life for the singularity, and investing in friendly singularity research is almost certainly even more valuable given your long-termist argument for self-preservation.

Daphne_W 13 Jul 2021 7:13 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Adam Zerner’s comment on: Precognition
I was relying on your numbers that 1 microcovid = $0.01 at $10M per life, and that you believe lives should currently be valued at $10B. Have you changed your mind in either of these areas?

Going by your link, wearing a mask during that trip would be about 0.5 microcovid if you’re vaccinated. Where I live, a disposable mask is about $0.25. I would also not accept $10 to wear a mask when I’m alone for an hour per day for a year, so my discomfort is at least $0.03 per hour. I also care about my appearance, status and about the ease of communication of people seeing my lips move, which even for a grocery trip amounts to several cents per hour cost for wearing a mask.

So, for me, wearing a mask while going grocery shopping in SF for an hour would cost upwards of $0.30. If you already have a rotating set of non-disposable masks so the material costs are negligible on the margin, I would still rate the discomfort and social effects at upwards of $0.05, which means you would have to value your life at at least $100M, or $600M when including disposable or one-time investment material costs. Again, there are lots of trades that should be more valuable than this, including ordering your groceries to be delivered to avoid traffic accidents.

Daphne_W 5 Apr 2022 8:16 UTC
18 points
on: What an actually pessimistic containment strategy looks like
Are you aware of Effective Altruism’s AI governance branch? I didn’t look into it in detail myself, but there are definitely dozens of people already working on outreach strategies that they believe to be the most effective. FHI, CSER, AI-FAR, GovAI, and undoubtedly more groups have projects ongoing for outreach, political intervention, etc. with regards to AI Safety. If you want to spend your marginal time on stuff like this, contact them.
It does appear true that the lesswrong/rationalist community is less engaged with this strategy than might be wise, but I’m curious if those organisations would say if people currently working on technical alignment research should switch to governance/activism, and what their opinion is on activism. 80,000 hours places AI technical research above AI governance in their career impact stack, though personal fit plays a major part.

Daphne_W 5 Apr 2022 10:31 UTC
16 points
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: MIRI announces new “Death With Dignity” strategy
As fictional characters popular among humans, what attitude is present in them is evidence for what sort of attitude humans like to see or inhabit. As author of those characters, Yudkowsky should be aware of this mechanism. And empirically, people with accurate beliefs and positive attitudes outperform people with accurate beliefs and negative attitudes. It seems plausible Yudkowsky is aware of this as well.
“Death with dignity” reads as an unnecessarily negative attitude to accompany the near-certainty of doom. Heroism, maximum probability of catgirls, or even just raw log-odds-of-survival seem like they would be more motivating than dignity without sacrificing accuracy.
Like, just substitute all instances of ‘dignity’ in the OP with ‘heroism’ and naively I would expect this post to have a better impact(/be more dignified/be more heroic), except insofar it might give a less accurate impression of Yudkowsky’s mood. But few people have actually engaged with him on that front.

Daphne_W 12 Apr 2022 7:34 UTC
1 point
in reply to: gbear605’s comment on: Clippy’s modest proposal
I’m not well-versed enough to offer something that would qualify as proof, but intuitively I would say “All problems with making a tiling bot robust are also found in aligning something with human values, but aligning something with human values comes with a host of additional problems, each of which takes additional effort”. We can write a tiling bot for a grid world, but we can’t write an entity that follows human values in a grid world. Tiling bots don’t need to be complicated or clever, they might not even have to qualify as AGI—they just have to be capable of taking over the world.
All of that said, I strongly encourage the most possible caution with this post. Creating a “neutral” AGI is still a very evil act, even if it is the act with the highest expected utility.
Q5 of Yudkowsky’s post seems like an expert opinion that this sort of caution isn’t productive. What I present here seems like a natural result of combining awareness of s-risk with the low probability of good futures that Yudkowsky asserts, so I don’t think security from obscurity offers much protection. In the likely event that the evil thing is bad, it seems best to discuss it openly so that the error can be made plain for everyone and people don’t get stuck believing it is the right thing to do or worrying that others believe it is the right thing to do. In the unlikely event that it is good, I don’t want to waste time personally gathering enough evidence to become confident enough to act on it when others might have more evidence readily available.

Daphne_W 12 Apr 2022 7:35 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Mitchell_Porter’s comment on: Clippy’s modest proposal
That’s the gist of it.

Daphne_W 12 Apr 2022 7:50 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Evan R. Murphy’s comment on: Clippy’s modest proposal
Both that and Q5 seem important to me.
Q5 is an exploration of my uncertainty in spite of me not being able to find faults with Clippy’s argument, as well as what I expect others’ hesitance might be. If Clippy’s argument is correct, then the section you highlight seems like the logical conclusion.

Daphne_W 12 Apr 2022 16:46 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Evan R. Murphy’s comment on: Clippy’s modest proposal
That’s a fair point—my model does assume AGI will come into existence in non-negative worlds. Though I struggle to actually imagine a non-negative world where humanity is alive a thousand years from now and AGI hasn’t been developed. Even if all alignment researchers believed it was the right thing to pursue, which doesn’t seem likely.

Daphne_W 13 Apr 2022 13:46 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Evan R. Murphy’s comment on: Clippy’s modest proposal
That’s not a middle ground between a good world and a neutral world, though, that’s just another way to get a good world. If we assume a good world is exponentially unlikely, a 10 year delay might mean the odds of a good world rise from 10^-10 to 10^-8 (as opposed to pursuing Clippy bringing the odds of a bad world down from 10^-4 to 10^-6 ).

If you disagree with Yudkowsky about his pessimism about the probability of good worlds, then my post doesn’t really apply. My post is about how to handle him being correct about the odds.

Daphne_W 14 Apr 2022 7:40 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Connor Leahy’s comment on: On infinite ethics
This is where things go wrong. The actual credence of seeing a hypercomputer is zero, because a computationally bounded observer can never observe such an object in such a way that differentiates it from a finite approximation. As such, you should indeed have a zero percent probability of ever moving into a state in which you have performed such a verification, it is a logical impossibility. Think about what it would mean for you, a computationally bounded approximate bayesian, to come into a state of belief that you are in possession of a hypercomputer (and not a finite approximation of a hypercomputer, which is just a normal computer. Remember arbitrarily large numbers are still infinitely far away from infinity!). What evidence would you have to observe for this belief? You would need to observe literally infinite bits, and your credence to observing infinite bits should be zero, because you are computationally bounded! If you yourself are not a hypercomputer, you can never move into the state of believing a hypercomputer exists.
Sorry, I previously assigned hypercomputers a non-zero credence, and you’re asking me to assign it zero credence. This requires an infinite amount of bits to update, which is impossible to collect in my computationally bounded state. Your case sounds sensible, but I literally can’t receive enough evidence over the course of a lifetime to be convinced by it.
Like, intuitively, it doesn’t feel literally impossible that humanity discovers a computationally unbounded process in our universe. If a convincing story is fed into my brain, with scientific consensus, personally verifying the math proof, concrete experiments indicating positive results, etc., I expect I would believe it. In my state of ignorance, I would not be surprised to find out there’s a calculation which requires a computationally unbounded process to calculate but a bounded process to verify.
To actually intuitively give something 0 (or 1) credence, though, to be so confident in a thesis that you literally can’t change your mind, that at the very least seems very weird. Self-referentially, I won’t actually assign that situation 0 credence, but even if I’m very confident that 0 credence is correct, my actual credence will be bounded by my uncertainty in my method of calculating credence.

Daphne_W 1 May 2022 17:35 UTC
1 point
in reply to: TekhneMakre’s comment on: Narrative Syncing
Well, it’s better, but in I think you’re still playing into [Alec taking things you say as orders], which I claim is a thing, so that in practice Alec will predictably systematically be less helpful and more harmful than if he weren’t [taking things you say as orders].
There seems to be an assumption here that Alec would do something relatively helpful instead if he weren’t taking the things you say as orders. I don’t think this is always the case: for people who aren’t used to thinking for themselves, the problem of directing your career to reduce AI risk is not a great testbed (high stakes, slow feedback), and without guidance they can just bounce off, get stuck with decision paralysis, or listen to people who don’t have qualms about giving advice.
Like, imagine Alec gives you API access to his brain, with a slider that controls how much of his daily effort he spends not following orders/doing what he thinks is best . You may observe that his slider is set lower than most productive people in AI safety, but (1) it might not help him or others to crank it up and (2) if it is helpful to crank it up, that seems like a useful order to give.
Anna’s Scenario 3 seems like a good way to self-consistently nudge the slider upwards over a longer period of time, as do most of your suggestions.

Daphne_W 2 May 2022 8:50 UTC
1 point
in reply to: TekhneMakre’s comment on: Narrative Syncing
There definitely seem to be (relative) grunt work positions in AI safety, like this, this or this. Unless you think these are harmful, it seems like it would be better to direct the Alec-est Alecs of the world that way instead of risking them never contributing.
I understand not wanting to shoulder responsibility for their career personally, and I understand wanting an unbounded culture for those who thrive under those conditions, but I don’t see the harm in having a parallel structure for those who do want/need guidance.

Daphne_W 3 May 2022 7:47 UTC
1 point
in reply to: omegastick’s comment on: How confident are we that there are no Extremely Obvious Aliens?
Unlike what you would expect with black holes, we can see that the Boötes void contains very little mass by looking for gravitational lensing and the movement of surrounding galaxies.

Daphne_W 3 May 2022 8:23 UTC
7 points
in reply to: romeostevensit’s comment on: How confident are we that there are no Extremely Obvious Aliens?
1:10^12 odds against the notion, easily. About as likely as the earth being flat.
1. Dark matter does not interact locally with itself or visible matter. If it did, it would experience friction (like interstellar gas, dust and stars) and form into disk shapes when spiral galaxies form into disk shapes. A key observation of dark matter is that spiral galaxies’ rotational velocity behaves as one would expect from an ellipsoid.
2. The fraction of matter that is dark does not change over time, nor does the total mass of objects in the universe. Sky surveys do not find more visible matter further back in time.
3. The fraction of matter that is dark does not change across space, even across distances that have not been bridgable since the inflation period of the big bang. All surveys show spherical symmetry.
4. By the laws of thermodynamics, computation requires work. High-entropy energy needs to be converted into low-entropy energy, such as heat. We do not see dark matter absorb or emit energy.
I can imagine no situation where something that is a required part of computational processes could ever present itself to us as dark matter, and no mistake in physics thorough enough to allow it.

Daphne_W 7 May 2022 11:47 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Ilio’s comment on: How confident are we that there are no Extremely Obvious Aliens?
#1 - Caution doesn’t solve problems, it finds solutions if they exist. You can’t use caution to ignore air resistance when building a rocket. (Though collapse is not necessarily expected—there’s plenty of interstellar dust).
#4 - I didn’t know about Landauer’s principle, though going by what I’m reading, you’re mistaken on its interpretation—it takes ‘next to nothing’ times the part of the computation you throw out, not the part you read out, where the part you throw out increases proportional to the negentropy you’re getting. No free lunch, still, but one whose price is deferable to the moment you run out of storage space.
That would make it possible for dark matter to be part of a computation that hasn’t been read out yet, though not necessarily a major part: I’m not sure the below reasoning is correct, but The Landauer limit with the current 2.7K universe as heat bath is 0.16 meV per bit. This means that the ‘free’ computational cycle you get from the fact that you only need to pay at the end would, to a maximally efficient builder, reward them with 0.16 meV extra for every piece of matter that can hold one bit. We don’t yet have a lower bound for the neutrino mass, but the upper bound is 120 meV. If the upper bound is true, that would mean you would have to cram 10^3 bits in a neutrino before using it as storage nets you more than burning it for energy (by chucking it into an evaporating black hole).
I don’t have data for #2 and #3 at hand. It’s the scientific consensus, for what that’s worth.

Daphne_W 7 May 2022 11:50 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Mitchell_Porter’s comment on: How confident are we that there are no Extremely Obvious Aliens?
Before learning about reversible computation only requiring work when bits are deleted I would have treated each of my points as roughly independent with about 10^1.5 , 10^4 , 10^4 , 10^2.5 odds against respectively. The last point is now down to 10^1.5 .
Dumping waste information in the baryonic world would be visible.

Daphne_W 14 May 2022 22:06 UTC
2 points
in reply to: A.R. Stone’s comment on: What DALL-E 2 can and cannot do
Sorry that automation is taking your craft. You’re neither the first nor the last this will happen to. Orators, book illuminators, weavers, portrait artists, puppeteers, cartoon animators, etc. Even just in the artistic world, you’re in fine company. Generally speaking, it’s been good for society to free up labor for different pursuits while preserving production. The art can even be elevated as people incorporate the automata into their craft. It’s a shame the original skill is lost, but if that kept us from innovating, there would be no way to get common people multiple books or multiple pictures of themselves or CGI movies. It seems fair to demand society have a way to support people whose jobs have been automated, at least until they can find something new to do. But don’t get mad at the engine of progress and try to stop it—people will just cheer as it runs you over.

Daphne_W 28 May 2022 16:13 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Ryan Kidd’s comment on: SERI ML Alignment Theory Scholars Program 2022
~~Hey, it’s now officially no longer May 27th anywhere, and I can’t find any announcements yet. How’s it going?~~
Edit: Just got my acceptance letter! See you all this summer!

Daphne_W 6 Jun 2022 7:35 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: mukashi’s comment on: AGI Ruin: A List of Lethalities
- Solve protein folding problem
- Acquire human DNA sample
- Use superintelligence to construct a functional model of human biochemistry
- Design a virus that exploits human biochemstry
- Use one of the currently available biochemistry-as-a-service providers to produce a sample that incubates the virus and then escapes their safety procedures (e.g. pay someone to mix two vials sent to them in the mail. The aerosols from the mixing infect them)