Double

• Double 14 Apr 2022 2:17 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: How Com­mon Are Science Failures?

  Come back! I don’t know what you are referencing!

• Double 24 Apr 2022 2:24 UTC

  1 point

  on: What Is Sig­nal­ing, Really?

  This sentence is a HUGE RED FLAG: “it shattered my illusion that I mostly avoid thinking about class signals, and instead convinced me that pretty much everything I do from waking up in the morning to going to bed at night is a class signal.”

  If signaling can explain everything, then it is in the same category as Freudian psychoanalysis—unfalsifiable and therefore useless.

  The idea that signaling explains everything leads to the idea that “people who say that they don’t bother with signaling and don’t use the symbols available to them are REALLY just signaling that they are the kind of person who can afford to not care about signaling.”

  This is not the conclusion of a respectable theory; this is mental gymnastics. Having a theory that can explain anything is identical to having no clue.

  I’ll admit that this post is the extent of my knowledge of signaling, so others might have fleshed-out the theory to the point that it can make predictions, but this essay was too much representativeness heuristic and not enough evidence.

• Double 24 Apr 2022 19:13 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: How Com­mon Are Science Failures?

  Thanks. That fits the first three criteria well, but there is still controversy about many of the results, so maybe not the fourth one yet.

• Double 4 Jul 2022 4:10 UTC

  3 points

  0

  on: We Need a Con­soli­dated List of Bad AI Align­ment Solutions

  The AI Box:

  A common idea is for the AI to be in a “box” where it can only interact through the world by talking to a human. This doesn’t work for a few reasons:
  
  The AI would be able to convince the human to let it out.

  The human wouldn’t know the consequences of their actions as well as the AI.

  Removing capabilities from the AI is not a good plan because the point is to create a useful AI. Importantly, the AI should be able to stop all dangerous AI from being created.

We Need a Con­soli­dated List of Bad AI Align­ment Solutions

• Double 5 Jul 2022 1:10 UTC

  3 points

  −3

  in reply to: Thomas Kwa’s comment on: We Need a Con­soli­dated List of Bad AI Align­ment Solutions

  I think that a problem with my solution is that how can the AI “understand” the behaviors and thought-processes of a “more powerful agent.” If you know what someone smarter than you would think then you are simply that smart. If we abstract the specific more-powerful-agent’s-thoughts away, then we are left with Kantian ethics, and we are back where we started, trying to put ethics/​morals in the AI.

  It’s a bit rude to call my idea so stupid that I must not have thought about it for more than five minutes, but thanks for your advice anyways. It is good advice.

• Double 5 Jul 2022 1:14 UTC

  4 points

  0

  in reply to: shminux’s comment on: We Need a Con­soli­dated List of Bad AI Align­ment Solutions

  AI safety research has been groping in the dark, and half-baked suggestions for new research directions are valuable. It isn’t as though we’ve made half of a safe AI. We haven’t started, and all we have are ideas.

Florida Elections

• Double 13 Aug 2022 23:36 UTC

  0 points

  0

  in reply to: ponkaloupe’s comment on: Florida Elections

  Those are interesting questions! Perhaps you should make your own post instead of using mine to get more of an audience.

  Expressing disapproval of both candidates by e.g. voting for Harambe makes sense, but I think that voting for bad policies is a bad move because “obvious” things aren’t obvious to many people, and voting for bad candidates (as opposed to joke candidates) makes their policies more mainstream and likely to be adopted by candidates with chances to win.

  Why do you think my post is being shot down?

• Double 14 Aug 2022 21:58 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: JBlack’s comment on: Florida Elections

  I guess that makes sense, but very rarely is there a post that appeals to EVERYONE. A better system would be for people to be able to seek out the content that interests them. If something doesn’t interest you, then you move on.

• Double 14 Aug 2022 22:13 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: ponkaloupe’s comment on: Florida Elections

  Thanks for the response. Those are fair reasons. I should have contributed more.

  The LessWrong community is big and some are in Florida. If anyone had interesting things to share about the election I wanted to encourage them to do so.

[Question] If you know you are un­likely to change your mind, should you be lazier when re­search­ing?

[Question] AI Box Ex­per­i­ment: Are peo­ple still in­ter­ested?

Gate­keeper Vic­tory: AI Box Reflection

• Double 11 Sep 2022 23:00 UTC

  0 points

  0

  in reply to: simon’s comment on: Gate­keeper Vic­tory: AI Box Reflection

  Yes, it is. I wanted to win, and there is no rule against “going against the spirit” of AI Boxing.

  I think about AI Boxing in the frame of Shut up and Do the Impossible, so I didn’t care that my solution doesn’t apply to AI Safety. Funnily, that makes me an example of incorrect alignment.

• Double 2 Oct 2022 0:53 UTC

  1 point

  0

  on: Evanston, IL – ACX Mee­tups Every­where 2022

  I’m here with a few others in a booth near the door. We haven’t seen Uzair.

• Double 2 Oct 2022 1:00 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Double’s comment on: Evanston, IL – ACX Mee­tups Every­where 2022

  He has shown up.

• Double 11 Jan 2023 3:04 UTC

  3 points

  on: Against neu­tral­ity about cre­at­ing happy lives

  On one level, the post used a simple but emotionally and logically powerful argument to convince me that the creation of happy lives is good.

  On a higher level, I feel like I switch positions of population ethics every time I read something about it, so I am reluctant to predict that I will hold the post’s position for much time. I remain unsettled that the field of population ethics, which is central to long-term visions of what the future should look like, has so little solid knowledge. My thinking, and therefore my actions, will remain split among the convincing population ethics positions.

  This sequence made me doubt the soundness of philosophical arguments founded on what is “intuitive” (which this post very much relies upon). I don’t know how someone might go about doing population ethics from a psychology point of view, but the post’s subtitles “Preciousness,” “Gratitude,” and “Reciprocity” give some clues.

  A testable aspect of the post would be to find out if the responses to the Wilbur and Michael thought experiments are universal. Also, I’d be interested to know how many of the people who read this post in 2021 (and have interacted with population ethics since then) maintain their position.

  Carlsmith should follow up with his take on the Repugnant Conclusion. The Repugnant Conclusion is the central question of population ethics, so excluding it from this post is a major oversight.

  Notes: The “famously hard” link is broken.

  What links here?

  • Raemon's comment on The 2021 Re­view Phase by Raemon (20 Jan 2023 20:54 UTC; 8 points)
  • Raemon's comment on High­lights and Prizes from the 2021 Re­view Phase by Raemon (27 Jan 2023 23:35 UTC; 2 points)

• Double 1 Feb 2023 19:26 UTC

  4 points

  0

  on: Vot­ing Re­sults for the 2021 Review

  ⁴⁄₈ of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s posts in this list have a minus 9. Compare this with ¹⁄₇ for duncan_sabien, ⁰⁄₆ for paulfchristiano, ⁰⁄₅ for Daniel Kokotajlo, or ⁰⁄₃ for HoldenKarnofsky. I wonder why that is.

Don’t Jump or I’ll...