DeepMind isn’t doing safety engineering; they’re doing standard AI. It doesn’t matter if Elon Musk is interested in AI safety, if, after his deliberations, he invests in efforts to develop unsafe AI. Good intentions don’t leak value into the consequences of your acts.
Discredited
Karma: 169
You are never going to catch up, and neither is anyone else.
-- Gian-Carlo Rota
Bob will accept that some phrase X is meaningful if there is a test that can be performed whose outcome value depends on truth value of X. If there is such a test, then we can construct a further test of asking someone who has performed the original test what the outcome of the test was. Since the people who set up tests are usually honest, this test would also be a test of X (provided the original test exists).
If I ask an honest peasant how long the emperor’s nose is, but I also suspect no one has ever seen the emperor, how much do I learn from her statement? What if she says, “I have never seen the emperor, but other people tell me his nose is 5cm”? How many people has she talked to? Has any of them seen the emperor?
I don’t know how to answer those questions, and yet your example is even less clear. You think no one has seen the emperor and you’re not sure if he can be seen. 5cm? Well she is honest.
Do you choose that rephrasing because you don’t see how MIRI’s work could be harmful or because there is nothing CFAR can do in that case?
Mirror of the Bonobo Conspiracy webcomic: #569: Easy once you know
Richard Jeffrey!
The man on the left is Hans Reichenbach.
No, I don’t dislike that Brienne et al. ran the experiment. They can spend their time how they like, and quantitative self-help is admirable. But we didn’t get to the quantitative part yet, so I’m very confused that this post was so well received. It reflects a problem more severe than community standards falling because individuals are unwilling to bear the cost of speaking out; individuals are actively encouraging low standards. Or that’s how it seemed before people responded to me. Now my probability mass is mostly split between my values being weird or some cynical explanations about unconscious motivations producing exceptional support/inclusion toward this one post. At this point my complaining has exceeding my gripe, so whatever, ignore me.
If adopting a weird sleep schedule has a high cost for the experimenter, that also offsets any potential payoff of adopting one on the experiment’s basis. The experiment so far hasn’t yielded any valuable results, because we already knew that a mild polyphasic schedule can be maintained (siestas), and that only running on naps is difficult (college students). Sleep deprivation is interesting and cognitive test results are fun to read; other than that novelty I don’t see the VoI, because we already know with confidence what to expect from the test: slowed reactions and limited attention, with more extreme impairment for more deviant sleep schedules.
All this post says is that some people can maintain a polyphasic sleep cycle. Why is it being upvoted? At first I guessed the votes were just coming from the clique that participated, but the number keeps rising. Does a picture of a rooster elevate a comment in the open thread to a post in Main?
For Snape, I was specifically thinking of the scene in Dumbledore’s office where Harry reveals that he knows about the prophecy and Snape reacts without hesitation as though he hadn’t heard of it. Snape was also a double agent during the war, and continues to maintain close relationships with Dumbledore and Lucius Malfoy. His actions do seem crude, awkward, uncontrolled or mostly defensive in other scenes such as in the bullying arc or his conversation with Quirrell in the forbidden forest in Chapter 77. But then, one can act with false impulsiveness too.
I suppose the characters are in a cold war and in the shadow of a hot war. That circumstance makes “offensive” deception in one’s social presentation more useful.
Quirrell, Dumbledore, Snape, Harry, and (increasingly) Draco have something in common. They are all creepy. These characters are intentionally inauthentic—acting as though they posses the specific beliefs, preferences, and abilities that they want others to attribute to them.
I feel unusually strong revulsion about this kind of deception—more than toward someone hiding their faults to manage their appearance, much more than toward someone being tactful and withholding or biasing sensitive claims to avoid conflict.
When I try to unpack “creepy”, my mind suggests it has components of outrage at violations of close interpersonal social norms, distrust of unfamiliar thought patterns, fear of people with motivations that need to be hidden, and a special kind of disgust related to fears of idols, photographs, glassy eyed dolls, humanoid robots, and other simulacra. - the disgust toward an exemplar that doesn’t fall clearly in or out of the human-mind category, toward a soul that has been captured in the depiction of a face and deprived of its intelligence and agency.
Are very intelligent people generally creepy like that? If I were a standard deviation smarter, would my peer group consist of people strategically concealing their identities and mutually modelling their mutual modelling up to the nth order of meta? Or is that inauthenticity just an abnormal personality type that doesn’t correlate much with intelligence, but does fit nicely into a rationalist literary drama?
Ha, thanks. Fixed.
Big tube in the air rests on pylons / support towers. Maybe goes along a highway. Vehicle inside the tube has batteries for running a compressor. It pumps air away from its front to reduce air resistance, pumps below for suspension and behind. High subsonic speed (~700 mi/hr, 1100 km/hr). Accelerated by occasional linear induction motors on the tube, like a maglev train. Vehicle estimated to cost millions, tube estimated to cost billions. Conventional rails cost tens of billions. That’s all from the abstract, much more inside.
Adding to the laundry list of explanations and trivializations, gender skew!
“Taking up a serious religion changes one’s very practice of rationality by making doubt a disvalue.” ~ Orthonormal
Another unsatisfying Nash equilibrium in traffic control I’d like to see analyzed from a modern decision theory perspective is Braess’s Paradox.
Previous LW discussion here.
I’m sorry to drop references without a summary, but this will have to do at the moment: “Lost thoughts: Implicit semantic interference impairs reflective access to currently active information”
An argument that halts in disagreement (or fails to halt in agreement) because the interlocutors are each waiting for another to provide a skillful assessment of their own inexpertly-referenced media sounds a lot like a software process deadlock condition in computer science. Maybe there’s a more specific type of deadlock, livelock, resource starvation, …, in the semantic neighborhood of your identified pattern.
Dropping references, while failing to disclaim your ability to evaluate the quality and relevance of topical media, could be called a violation of pragmatic expectations of rational discourse, like Grice’s prescriptive maxims.
Maybe a telecommunications analogy would work, making reference to amplifiers \ repeaters \ broadcast stations that degrade a received signal if they fail to filter \ shape it to the characteristics of the retransmission channel.
“Rhetorical reenactment” sounds like “historical reenactment” and hints at the unproductive, not-directly-participatory role in the debate of the people sharing links.