Double

Karma: 211

Double Aug 7, 2024, 10:57 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: Benjamin Kost’s comment on: Open & Welcome Thread—August 2020
There are different kinds of political parties. LOCALS sounds like a single-issue fusion party as described here: https://open.lib.umn.edu/americangovernment/chapter/10-6-minor-parties/

Fusion parties choose one of the main two candidates as their candidate. This gets around the spoiler effect. Eg the Populist Party would list whichever of the big candidates supported Free Silver.

A problem with that is that fusion parties are illegal in 48 states(?!) because the major parties don’t want to face a coalition against them.

LOCALS would try to get the democrat and the republican candidate to use Co-Co to choose their policies (offering the candidate support in form of donations or personnel), and if they do then they get an endorsement. I’m still a bit iffy on the difference between an interest group and a political party, so maybe you are in the clear.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_fusion_in_the_United_States

I love your vision of how a politician should answer the abortion question. Separating the three questions “who do voters think is qualified” “what do voters want” and “what is true” would be great for democracy. Similar to: https://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/futarchy.html

When it comes to local vs not local, if ¹⁄₁₀₀ people is an X, and they are spread out, then their voice doesn’t mean much and the other ⁹⁹⁄₁₀₀ people in their district can push through policies that harm them. If the Xes are in the same district, then they get a say about what happens to them. I used teachers as an example of an X, but it is more general than that. (Though I’m thinking about the persecution of Jews in particular.)

Double Aug 7, 2024, 9:39 PM
1 point
0
in reply to: Benjamin Kost’s comment on: Open & Welcome Thread—August 2020
The translation sentence about matrices does not have the same meaning as mine. Yes, matrices are “grids of numbers”, and yes there’s an algorithm (step by step process) for matrix multiplication, but that isn’t what linearity means.

An operation A is linear iff A(x+y) = A(x) + A(y)

https://orb.binghamton.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?filename=4&article=1002&context=electrical_fac&type=additional#:~:text=Linear operators are functions on,into an entirely different vector.

I asked a doctor friend why doctors use Latin. “To sound smarter than we are. And tradition.” So our words for medicine (and probably similar for biology) are in a local optima, but not a global optima. Tradition is a powerful force, and getting hospitals to change will be difficult. Software to help people read about medicine and other needlessly jargon-filled fields is a great idea.

(Putting evolutionary taxonomy information in the name of a creature is a cool idea though, so binomial nomenclature has something going for it.)

You don’t have to dumb down your ideas on LessWrong, but remember that communication is a difficult task that relies on effort from both parties (especially the author). You’ve been good so far. It’s just my job as your debate partner to ask many questions.

Double Aug 7, 2024, 1:00 AM
1 point
0
in reply to: Benjamin Kost’s comment on: Open & Welcome Thread—August 2020
What would draw people to Co-Co and what would keep them there?

How are the preferences of LOCALS users aggregated?

LOCALS sounds a lot like a political party. Political parties have been disastrous. I’d love for one of the big two to be replaced. Is LOCALS a temporary measure to get voting reform (eg ranked choice) or a long-term thing?

I want more community cohesion when it comes to having more cookouts. More community cohesion in politics makes less sense. A teacher in Texas has more in common with a teacher in NY than the cattle rancher down the road. Unfortunately, the US political system is by design required to be location based.

Is LOCALS a political party with “increase local community connection” as its party platform? If the party has some actionable plans, then its ideas can get picked up by the big parties if LOCALS shows that its ideas are popular. This might not be a bad idea and could solve the lack-of-community problem without overthrowing the big parties.

Double Aug 7, 2024, 12:01 AM
1 point
0
in reply to: Benjamin Kost’s comment on: Open & Welcome Thread—August 2020
A software that easily lets you see “what does this word mean in context” would be great! I often find that when I force click a word to see it’s definition, the first result is often some irrelevant movie or song, and when there are multiple definitions it can take a second to figure out which one is right. Combine this with software that highlights words that are being used in an odd way (like “Rationalist”) and communication over text can be made much smoother.

I don’t think this would be as great against “jargon” unless you mean intentional jargon that is deployed to confuse the reader (eg “subprime mortgages” which is “risky likely to fail house loans”).

I’m under the impression that jargon is important for communication among people who have understanding of the topic. “Matrix multiplication is a linear operation” is jargon-heavy and explaining what it means to a fourth grader would take probably more than 30 minutes.

Agree that more educated voters would be great. I wish that voters understood Pigouvian taxes. Explaining them takes 10 min according to YouTube. I’d love a solution to teach voters about it.

Double Aug 6, 2024, 11:46 PM
4 points
3
in reply to: Benjamin Kost’s comment on: Open & Welcome Thread—August 2020
Voting: left for “this is bad”, right for “this is good.” X for “I disagree” check for “I agree”.

This way you can communicate more in your vote. Eg: “He’s right but he’s breaking community norms. Left + check. “He’s wrong but I like the way he thinks. Right + X.”

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HALKHS4pMbfghxsjD/lesswrong-has-agree-disagree-voting-on-all-new-comment

Double Aug 6, 2024, 1:43 AM
1 point
0
in reply to: Seth Herd’s comment on: Double’s Shortform
I guess maybe it is just an abstraction like any other. I can’t put my finger on it but it seems weird in a way that abstracting fingers into a “hand” does not. Maybe something to do with the connotation of “explosion” as “uncontrolled and destructive” when internal combustion is neither.

Double Aug 6, 2024, 1:38 AM
2 points
1
in reply to: Benjamin Kost’s comment on: Open & Welcome Thread—August 2020
Welcome! I hope you have Claude a thumbs up for the good response.

Everyone agrees with you that yeah, the “Rationalist” name is bad for many reasons including that it gives philosophers the wrong idea. If you could work your social science magic to change the name of an entire community, we’d be interested in hearing your plan!

I’d be interested in reading your plan to redesign the social system of the United States! I’ve subscribed to be notified to your posts, so I’ll hopefully see it.

Double Aug 5, 2024, 1:13 AM
1 point
0
in reply to: Benjamin Kost’s comment on: Open & Welcome Thread—August 2020
I’m curious what you asked Claude that got you a recommendation to LessWrong. No need to share if it is personal.
I love your attitude to debate. “the loser of a debate is the real winner because they learned something.” I need to lose some debates.

Double Aug 5, 2024, 1:08 AM
7 points
0
on: Double’s Shortform
“Explosions considered fundamental”
If you ask for a simple answer to how a car works, you might get an answer like:
”Cars work by having tiny explosions in the engine that push pistons to power the car.”
When I was a kid, this felt like a satisfying explanations. Explosions push things, you can see that happening in movies and games.
But really it is rather lacking. It doesn’t say why explosions push, and there does exist a lower explanation for why explosions push — the kinetic theory of gasses.
This is even though “explosions are an ontologically fundamental object that applies force away from the explosion” is a simple hypothesis. You can code an explosion in a video game super easily: you just have a sphere collider (simple!) to detect what is affected and apply a force vector (simple!) to those objects pointing away from the center. It would be much harder to code a game where the air obeys the kinetic theory of gasses.
“Explosions are fundamental” loses out to the Kinetic Theory of Gasses because the Kinetic Theory of Gasses can explain more things — not only explosions, but air conditioners, wind, etc.
And once you know the Kinetic Theory of Gasses, calling every expansion of gas due to increased heat an “explosion” is really weird. Why does the breeze blow? “Sunlight causes an explosion that rises and then air flows to fill the space.”
I don’t have much to say about this, I just thought it was an interesting case.

Double Jul 20, 2024, 4:52 AM
1 point
0
in reply to: Double’s comment on: EigenKarma: trust at scale
I’d also love a slider setting for choosing how much weight to give to my own karma and how much to give to other people’s. If 6 Billion people outside the people my Karma boosts upvote something, I want to see it anyways

Double Jul 20, 2024, 4:51 AM
1 point
0
on: EigenKarma: trust at scale
Can there be a mechanism that boosts posters who get upvotes from multiple nonoverlapping groups extra? If eg 50 Blues and 50 Greens upvote someone, I want them to get more implicit eigenkarma from me than someone with 100 Blue upvotes even if I tend to upvote Blue more often. Figuring out who is a Blue and who is a Green can be done by finding dense subgraphs..

Double May 22, 2024, 4:42 AM
1 point
0
on: Against Computers (infinite play)
I’m sorry, but is there an argument here other than “it really feels like we are special”?
Calling for war and giving your opponents silly names is not the kind of thing that LessWrongers want on the platform.
The thing I find interesting about wheels → books → gears → computers is that each of those really is a good way to think about subjects. (In the case of wheels, the seasons are actually caused by something — the Earth — going around in a circle!). Computers in particular have a strong theoretical basis that they are and should be a useful framework for thinking about the world.
Maybe I just didn’t understand.

Double Mar 12, 2024, 7:16 PM
5 points
0
on: Acting Wholesomely
Sorry, I’ll be doing multiple unwholesome things in this comment.

For one, I’m commenting without reading the whole post. I was expecting it to be about something else and was disappointed. The conception of wholesomeness as “considering a wider perspective for your actions” is not very interesting. Everyone considers a wider perspective to be valuable, and nobody takes that more seriously already than EAs.

The conception of wholesomeness I was hoping you’d write about (let’s call it wholesomeness2 for distinction from your wholesomeness) is a type of prestige. Prestige is high status freely conferred by the beneficiaries of the prestigious. Contrast with dominance, which is demanded with force.

It’s hard to pin down, but I think I’d say that Wholesomeness2 is a reputation for not being evil. Clearly, it would be good for EA’s ability to do good if they had wholesomeness2. On top of that, if actions that are not wholesome2 tend to be bad and actions that are wholesome2 tend to be good, then wholesome2 is a good heuristic. (Although the tails come apart, as they always do. https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/09/25/the-tails-coming-apart-as-metaphor-for-life/ ).

If someone has wholesomeness2, then people will assume mistakes rather than malice, will defend the wholesome2 person from attack, and help the wholesome2 when they are in need.

I was hoping your post would be about how to be wholesome2. Here are my thoughts:

Incapable of plotting: dogs and children are wholesome because they don’t have the capacity to be evil.

Wholesomeness2 chains, so since candy is associated with children who are wholesome2, associating yourself with candy can increase your wholesomeness2.

Generating warm-fuzzies: the Make a Wish Foundation is extremely wholesome2, while deworming is not. When someone (like an EA) “attacks” Make a Wish by saying it doesn’t spend its funds in a way that helps many people much compared to alternatives, everyone will come to Make a Wish‘s defense.

Vibes: “wholesome2 goths” feels like an oxymoron. The goth aesthetic is contrary to the idea of being not evil, even though the goths themselves are usually nice people. If you call one “wholesome”, they might even get upset at you.

Actually being not evil: It doesn’t matter how wholesome2 he was before; Bill Cosby lost all his wholesome2 when the world found out he was evil. Don’t be Bill Cosby.

I’d appreciate comments elaborating and adding to this list.

….

By analyzing the concept like this, I lost some wholesomeness2, because I have shown that I have the capacity and willingness to gain wholesomeness2 independent of whether I’m really plotting something evil. I’d argue that I’m just not very willing to self-censor, so you should trust me more instead of less… but that is exactly what an unwholesome2 individual would do.

EA will have some trouble gaining wholesomeness2 because it tends to seek power and has the intelligence and agency needed to be evil.

Double Mar 12, 2024, 5:08 PM
4 points
0
in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Double’s Shortform
Plenty of pages get the bare minimum. The level of detail in the e/acc page (eg including the emoji associated with the movement) makes me think that it was edited by an e/acc. The EA page must have been edited by the e/acc since it includes “opposition to e/acc”, but other than that it seems like it was written by someone unaffiliated with either (modulo my changes). We could probably check out the history of the pages to resolve our speculation.

Double Mar 11, 2024, 5:57 AM
10 points
2
on: Double’s Shortform
It is worrying that the Wikidata page for e/acc is better than the page for EA and the page for Less Wrong. I just added EA’s previously absent “main subject”s to the EA page.
Looks like a Symbolic AI person has gone e/acc. That’s unfortunate, but rationalists have long known that the world would end in SPARQL.

Double Jan 7, 2024, 6:23 AM
1 point
in reply to: Neel Nanda’s comment on: A Longlist of Theories of Impact for Interpretability
I’d call that “underselling it”! Your description of Microscope AI may be accurate, but even I didn’t realize you meant “supercharging science”, and I was looking for it in the list!

Double Jan 1, 2024, 11:40 PM
3 points
on: A Longlist of Theories of Impact for Interpretability
This is a great reference for the importance and excitement in Interpretability.

I just read this for the first time today. I’m currently learning about Interpretability in hopes I can participate, and this post solidified my understanding of how Interpretability might help.

The whole field of Interpretability is a test of this post. Some of the theories of change won’t pan out. Hopefully many will. Perhaps more theories not listed will be discovered.

One idea I’m surprised wasn’t mentioned is the potential for Interpretability to supercharge all of the sciences by allowing humans to extract the things that machine learning models discovered to make their predictions. I remember Chris Olah being excited about this possibility on the 80k Podcast, and that excitement meme has spread to me. Current AIs know so much about how the world works, but we can only indirectly use that knowledge indirectly through their black box interface. I want that knowledge for myself and for humanity! This is another incentive for Interpretability, and although it isn’t a development that clearly leads to “AI less likely to kill us” it will make humanity wiser, more prosperous, and on more even footing with the AIs.

Nanda’s post probably deserves a spot in a compilation of Alignment plans.

Double Dec 20, 2023, 5:40 AM
1 point
0
in reply to: Valentine’s comment on: Here’s the exit.
I’m glad you enjoyed my review! Real credit for the style goes to whoever wrote the blurb that pops up when reviewing posts; I structured my review off of that.
When it comes to “some way of measuring the overall direction of some [AI] effort,” conditional prediction markets could help. “Given I do X/Y, will Z happen?” Perhaps some people need to run a “Given I take a vacation, will AI kill everyone?” market in order to let themselves take a break.
What would be the next step to creating a LessWrong Mental Health book?

Double Dec 19, 2023, 6:13 AM
4 points
0
on: Here’s the exit.
Ideally reviews would be done by people who read the posts last year, so they could reflect on how their thinking and actions changed. Unfortunately, I only discovered this post today, so I lack that perspective.
Posts relating to the psychology and mental well being of LessWrongers are welcome and I feel like I take a nugget of wisdom from each one (but always fail to import the entirety of the wisdom the author is trying to convey.)

The nugget from “Here’s the exit” that I wish I had read a year ago is “If your body’s emergency mobilization systems are running in response to an issue, but your survival doesn’t actually depend on actions on a timescale of minutes, then you are not perceiving reality accurately.” I panicked when I first read Death with Dignity (I didn’t realize it was an April Fools Joke… or was it?). I felt full fight-or-flight when there wasn’t any reason to do so. That ties into another piece of advice that I needed to hear, from Replacing Guilt: “stop asking whether this is the right action to take and instead ask what’s the best action I can identify at the moment.” I don’t know if these sentences have the same punch when removed from their context, but I feel like they would have helped me. This wisdom extends beyond AI Safety anxiety and generalizes to all irrational anxiety. I expect that having these sentences available to me will help me calm myself next time something raises my stress level.
I can’t speak to the rest of the wisdom in this post. “Thinking about a problem as a defense mechanism is worse (for your health and for solving the problem) than thinking about a problem not as a defense mechanism” sounds plausible, but I can’t say much for its veracity or its applicability.
I would be interested to see research done to test the claim. Does increased sympathetic nervous system activation cause decreased efficacy? A correlational study could classify people in AI safety by (self reported?) efficacy and measure their stress levels, but causation is always trickier than correlation.
A flood of comments criticized the post, especially for typical-minding. The author responded with many comments of their own, some of which received many upvotes and agreements and some of which received many dislikes and disagreements. A follow up post from Valentine would ideally address the criticism and consolidate the valid information from the comments into the post.
A sequence or book compiled from the wisdom of many LessWrongers discussing their mental health struggles and discoveries would be extremely valuable to the community (and to me, personally) and a modified version of this post would earn a spot in such a book.

Double Dec 7, 2023, 11:27 PM
1 point
0
on: Gemini 1.0
Liv Boeree: This is pretty nuts, looks like they’ve surpassed GPT4 on basically every benchmark… so this is most powerful model in the world?! Woweee what a time to be alive.
Link doesn’t work. Maybe she changed her mind?