dr_s

Etho­dy­nam­ics of Omelas

It’s OK to be bi­ased to­wards humans

The benev­olence of the butcher

• dr_s 8 Sep 2023 10:35 UTC

  46 points

  29

  on: Bring back the Colosseums

  Counterpoint: while the “death” element is removed, the vast majority of videogames and virtually all of sports are some sublimation or simulation of this. Men have access to all manner of simulated warfare, up to and including actual violent combat such as boxing, kickboxing, wrestling and MMA. And of course, there are all sorts of actual wars across the globe, many of which make a reasonable use of volunteers or mercenaries. So if there really was this vast, widespread impulse to toss away one’s life for honour, why aren’t fighting leagues and gyms absolutely crowded with men brimming with this barely suppressed primal urge? Why isn’t every able-bodied male in the west rushing to Ukraine?

  Answer: because to actually do it is scary, and painful, and honestly a whole lot of fucking work. You gotta, like, train and shit. And there’s still a fair chance of meeting lots of people who are just Better Than You and will kick your ass on the regular, and accepting that takes humility and a sense of proportion. Plus, a non zero risk of physical injury and/​or death.

  Revealed preferences tell the actual story here. Men don’t want to fight. They want to win. And since not everyone can win, and winning is work, many men simply fold back to living boring peaceful lives, pretending that it’s society that is depriving them of their God-given right to die a glorious death in battle with its dastardly emasculating ways; then they keep seeking their glory fix vicariously. If they’re sane, usually they do so by rooting for this or that sports team, or playing videogames, and nothing else. If they’re not so sane, they support demented warmongering policies and raging strongmen and then send their own sons into the meatgrinder, since they’re now too old for it. But if they were younger, oh, they’d be there on the front lines, pinky swear!

  If you reintroduced the Coliseum, it’d be people desperate for money and the occasional guy with the actual agency to live out his dream fighting in it, and the aforementioned vast crowd of whiners with no self-awareness would be watching it on TV all the same, while ranting about how incompetent those gladiators are, and that they’d be much better, if only not for [insert convenient excuse here].

The pre­dic­tive power of dis­si­pa­tive adaptation

One bit of ob­ser­va­tion can un­lock many of op­ti­miza­tion—but at what cost?

Learn­ing as you play: an­thropic shadow in deadly games

• dr_s 30 Sep 2023 6:01 UTC

  37 points

  14

  in reply to: tailcalled’s comment on: EA Ve­gan Ad­vo­cacy is not truth­seek­ing, and it’s ev­ery­one’s problem

  putting pictures of free animals on packages containing factory farmed animal flesh

  Well, yes, that’s called marketing, it’s like the antithesis of truth seeking.

  The cure to hypocrisy is not more hypocrisy and lies but of opposite sign: that’s the kind of naive first order consequentialism that leads people to cynicism instead. The fundamental problem is that out of fear that people would reasonably go for a compromise (e.g. keep eating meat but less of it and only from free range animals) some vegans decide to just pile on the arguments, true or false, until anyone who believed them all and had a minimum of sense would go vegan instantly. But that completely denies the agency and moral ability of everyone else, and underestimates the possibility that you may be wrong. As a general rule, “my moral calculus is correct, therefore I will skew the data so that everyone else comes to the same conclusions as me” is a bad principle.

• dr_s 15 Jun 2023 13:23 UTC

  34 points

  30

  on: I still think it’s very un­likely we’re ob­serv­ing alien aircraft

  Bigfoot is arguably less plausible, a priori.

  Is it? A priori, Bigfoot is just some unknown small population of a large mammal living in a remote forest, possibly a living fossil of, e.g., a giant ground sloth species. That’s more possible than alien crafts. Not alien life, mind you, but crafts require interstellar travel to be plausible, and we have reason to doubt that. Even unmanned Von Neumann probes would have a very hard time arriving to their destination still functioning (never mind braking...), and non-inertial engines presume a violation of known physics so deep, it’s unbelievable we’ve missed all signs of it being possible until now.

• dr_s 21 Nov 2023 7:38 UTC

  31 points

  15

  in reply to: orthonormal’s comment on: OpenAI: Facts from a Weekend

  I keep being confused by them not revealing their reasons. Whatever they are, there’s no way that saying them out loud wouldn’t give some ammo to those defending them, unless somehow between Friday and now they swung from “omg this is so serious we need to fire Altman NOW” to “oops looks like it was a nothingburger, we’ll look stupid if we say it out loud”. Do they think it’s a literal infohazard or something? Is it such a serious accusation that it would involve the police to state it out loud?

• dr_s 20 Nov 2023 17:57 UTC

  30 points

  29

  in reply to: JenniferRM’s comment on: OpenAI: Facts from a Weekend

  Maybe I’m missing some context, but wouldn’t it be better for Open AI as an organized entity to be destroyed than for it to exist right up to the point where all humans are destroyed by an AGI that is neither benevolent nor “aligned with humanity” (if we are somehow so objectively bad as to deserve care by a benevolent powerful and very smart entity).

  The problem I suspect is that people just can’t get out of the typical “FOR THE SHAREHOLDERS” mindset, so a company that is literally willing to commit suicide rather than getting hijacked for purposes antithetic to its mission, like a cell dying by apoptosis rather than going cancerous, can be a very good thing, and if only there was more of this. You can’t beat Moloch if you’re not willing to precommit to this sort of action. And let’s face it, no one involved here is facing homelessness and soup kitchens even if Open AI crashes tomorrow. They’ll be a little worse off for a while, their careers will take a hit, and then they’ll pick themselves up. If this was about the safety of humanity it would be a no-brainer that you should be ready to sacrifice that much.

Good Bings copy, great Bings steal

• dr_s 21 Nov 2023 16:28 UTC

  28 points

  17

  in reply to: Michael Thiessen’s comment on: OpenAI: Facts from a Weekend

  I feel like, not unlike the situation with SBF and FTX, the delusion that OpenAI could possibly avoid this trap maps on the same cognitive weak spot among EA/​rationalists of “just let me slip on the Ring of Power this once bro, I swear it’s just for a little while bro, I’ll take it off before Moloch turns me into his Nazgul, trust me bro, just this once”.

  This is honestly entirely unsurprising. Rivers flow downhill and companies part of a capitalist economy producing stuff with tremendous potential economic value converge on making a profit.

AGI de­ploy­ment as an act of aggression

• dr_s 24 Dec 2023 6:49 UTC

  27 points

  18

  in reply to: Seth Herd’s comment on: AI Gir­lfriends Won’t Mat­ter Much

  I have seen this argument and am deeply sceptical this can happen, for the same reason why mobile F2P games rarely turn into relaxing and educational self contained experiences. Incentives are all aligned towards making AI girlfriends into digital crack and hooking up “whales” to bleed dry.

• dr_s 13 Jun 2023 22:27 UTC

  25 points

  20

  on: The Dial of Progress

  I think for progress, the One Dial theory is not true. I think the One Dial theory sounds suspiciously like a story people tell themselves to justify feeling clever about doing the kind of dumb shouty things they accuse the unwashed masses of doing, which makes the One Dial theory a bit closer to being true—but it still isn’t true for something as broad as “progress”. It wasn’t even completely true for COVID either, but that’s a narrower topic already; and I’m convinced it went as it did not due to people being too stupid to appreciate more than one dial, but due to elites on both sides assuming they were and dumbing down their messages down to the point of wrongness. For example “MASKS DON’T WORK” instead of “we have a limited supply of masks and healthcare workers need them most so private citizens should make the sacrifices of only using homemade ones for now”, followed by “MASKS WORK” instead of “we don’t have full evidence but odds are that masks help based on pure mechanistic principles and right now really every infection prevented counts”, with contrarians now going “MASKS DON’T WORK” instead of “masks probably do something but no one has done studies meeting our ridiculously high standards in the middle of a pandemic and also even if you do tell people to wear masks at this point we’ve got them so confused they probably stopped giving a shit”.

  For progress as a whole, though, we’ve absolutely turned the dial down on some things without affecting the others. These things weren’t always well chosen, but nevertheless, we didn’t stop all of technology when we slowed down nuclear power, or genetic engineering.

  Also, as a whole, I’m going to say that if we’re really a species that is fundamentally unable to see progress on anything than a One Dial, then perhaps we really should turn that dial to Boo Progress. Because there’s no way we could handle it if it gets more and more powerful and dangerous; nuclear weapons are already headache enough. So that way lies us inevitably blowing ourselves up, sooner or later.

• dr_s 3 Jul 2023 10:28 UTC

  23 points

  11

  in reply to: mishka’s comment on: Dou­glas Hofs­tadter changes his mind on Deep Learn­ing & AI risk (June 2023)?

  Yeah, there’s obviously SOME recursion there but it’s still surprising that such a relatively low bandwidth recursion can still work so well. It’s more akin to me writing down my thoughts and then rereading them to gather my ideas than the kind of loops I imagine our neurons might have.

  That said, who knows, maybe the loops in our brain are superfluous, or only useful for learning feedback purposes, and so a neural network trained by an external system doesn’t need them.

• dr_s 4 May 2023 8:55 UTC

  23 points

  13

  in reply to: jessicata’s comment on: Hell is Game The­ory Folk Theorems

  If a mathematical model doesn’t reflect at all the thing it’s supposed to represent, it’s not a good model. Saying “this is what the model predicts” isn’t helpful.

  There is absolutely zero incentive to anyone to put the temperature to 100 at any time. Even as deterrence, there is no reason for the equilibrium temperature to be an unsurvivable 99. It makes no sense, no one gains anything from it, especially if we assume communication between the parties (which is required for there to be deterrence and other such mechanisms in place). There is no reason to punish someone putting the thermostat lower than the equilibrium temperature either, since the lowest possible temperature is still comfortable. The model is honestly just wrong to describe any actual situation of interest.

  At the very least, the utility function is wrong: it’s not linear in temperature, obviously. It skyrockets around where temperatures exceed the survivable limit and then plateaus. There’s essentially no difference between 99 and 99.3, but there’s a much stronger incentive to go back below 40 as quickly as possible.

• dr_s 3 Feb 2021 9:57 UTC

  23 points

  in reply to: MalcolmOcean’s comment on: Tech­nolog­i­cal stag­na­tion: Why I came around

  I think there’s a case for two different sources: one external, the simple lack of any further low hanging fruit to exploit, and one internal, which is exactly this—the increasing inadequacy of our institutions to create the conditions for innovation, often caused paradoxically by the excessive focus on promoting innovation. “If scientists gave us all this cool stuff by working on their own, imagine how good they will be if we hire a lot more of them and pit them into a competition for funding with each other!” was a catastrophically stupid idea, assuming humans can be made to produce highly creative work on command and like clockwork. It led to short-termism, creating a humongous confusing, amorphous mass of tiny innovations, many of which non replicable or straight up bogus, and efficiently killing off any incentive to actually work on long term, solid, sweeping discoveries.

• dr_s 20 Aug 2023 21:10 UTC

  22 points

  16

  on: Steven Wolfram on AI Alignment

  I’d say these are sensible enough thoughts on the social and ethical aspects of alignment. But that’s already only one half of the process compared to the other side, the technical aspects, which include simply “ok, we’ve decided on a few principles, now how the hell do we guarantee the AI actually sticks to them?”.