Previously Kat Woods and Katherine Savoie.
KatSpartz
Karma: 2,597
“if moon-landing denial and chemtrails are both believed by an average of 15% of people, and the believers in these theories perfectly overlap, that would mean 15% believe in a deranged conspiracy theory, whereas if they’re perfectly disjoint, it would mean 30% do.”
Fair enough. But that would apply equally to each era, so wouldn’t change the results.
Good point!
Are you talking about polygamy? Or serial monogamy?
I’d be bery surprised if 85% of societies were polyamorous. Polygamy is indeed quite common, and same with serial monogamy.
Would love to read the study you’re referring to if you have a link?
I dunno. I tried really hard for 7 years and it didn’t work. I think that there’s decent flexibility in what can work for people if they put in enough work, but there are also limits.
To take an extreme example to illustrate it, I don’t think anybody could be happy in a relationship where their partner had tortured and killed their children, no matter how much work they put in.
I totally agree that there can be a healthy amount of jealousy that makes you feel loved or is expressed because you love the person. That’s been a fun thing getting used to in monogamy. :)
But yeah, it’s a totally different level than the feeling you get when your partner is constantly falling in love with and having sex with other people. Some of the most intensely negative emotions of my life.
It’s such a different feeling that I’d almost call them totally different feelings, but I do think it’s just the intensity dialed up. Like, the difference between having a nice massage compared to being crushed to death. Both are “pressure” but one is pleasant and the other is doing genuine damage.
Thank you for sharing this! I’ve been considering doing this exact challenge and it helped me have a better sense of the pros and cons.
It’s important for people to share the successes and the failures of this sort of challenge, and of course, people disproportionately write about when it works than when it doesn’t.
Quick response dashed off without sources:
Trees actually have a cluster of cells at the base of their root system that seems to act in very brain like ways. If you damage it or cut it off, suddenly the tree starts acting “dumbly”, like it’s brain damaged.
Trees actually do a ton of really complex things that certainly look like they’re communicating with other trees and plants, via signals sent along their root systems (I vaguely recall it was electrochemical signalling, much like in brains?). They stop doing such things when they get “brain damage” to their root cluster that seems to do signal coordination.
If you watch videos of vines growing but sped up, they look very much like worms, tapping around, “looking” for where they should grow. And they have a little cluster of cells at their tip that act as sensors. If you cut the sensor tip off, they stop “looking” and look like a drunk man, stumbling around blindly. It’s like you cut off their eyes.
Plants are actually able to sense a ton of different things, and they have reactions to them. It’s just that we can’t see the reactions because they either a) happen on too slowly for us to see them or b) happen chemically, so we can’t see them. For example, you know the famous study showing that when a giraffe eats a particular type of tree leaves, the tree releases a chemical that goes through the air and “warns” other trees in the area, and they start developing tannins which make their leaves bitter tasting to the giraffe? I thought that was a neat one-off trick. It’s actually super duper common across plants. We’re just starting to scratch the surface of all of the things they’re doing we can’t see with our normal senses.
They’ve done some really clever experiments to show that some plants at least, can learn and remember things.
Again, I don’t put crazy high odds. I’d probably put the odds that an oak tree is conscious at about the same probability I put on a worm being conscious.
I recommend reading The Hidden Life of Trees for an infodump about all of the crazy things trees do if you’re curious about this sort of thing.
Yeah, cow’s milk is good. I actually did say that in the post, but it was kinda hidden at the end of the bullet point of me recommending beef in general.
Fair enough. There are some for profits where profit and impact are more related than others.
But it’s also quite likely your evals are not actually evaluating anything to do with x-risks or s-risks, and so it just feels like it’s making progress, but isn’t.
I’m assuming here people are trying to prevent AI from killing everyone. If you have other goals, this doesn’t apply.
there are an extremely large number of NGOs with passionate people who do not remotely move the needle on whatever problem they are trying to solve. I think it’s the modal outcome for a new nonprofit
I’d say this is the same thing for AI for-profits from the perspective of AI notkilleveryoneism. Probably, the modal outcome is slightly increasing the odds AI kills everyone. At least the non-profits the modal outcome is not doing anything, rather than making things worse.
Sure, but you get feedback for whether it helps customers with their immediate problems. You don’t get feedback on whether it helps with AI safety.
It’s the direction vs speed thing again. You’ll get good at building widgets that sell. You won’t get good at AI notkilleveryoneism.
Such a good post! I think it’d be be received well on the EA Forum too. Obviously applicable to EA in a million different ways.
Can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to stare into the abyss of a crucial consideration or study result showing that maybe the thing I’d been working on didn’t help or was even maybe net negative.
Don’t know much about accumulated heavy metals, but they’re really low on the food chain, so they’re a priori going to have less of those than those higher up the food chain.
You can see their nutritional profile here. Sky high in B12, great at omega-3s and iron.
I also predict they’ll be good at a wide variety of things we don’t know we need yet, since they’re as close to a “whole food” as you can get. You’re eating almost the whole animal, instead of just a part of it.
Thank you for writing this! Gave me a great concept I’m going to use going forward.
The Grok suggesting organ harvesting of illegals surprised me, so I tried to replicate it.
It did not replicate.
It gave really reasonable answers, including trying to help countries of origin to be more prosperous and stable and making merit-based paths to legal status.
I mean, it still said stuff like using covert operations to stabilize countries, which is pretty dark arts, but very far away from organ harvesting and public executions.
I think that when robotics becomes sufficiently anthropomorphic the AI backlash will really come into full swing.
Imagine Sydney Bing threatening users but it’s a robot in your house.
The visceral reaction is going to be way stronger than all the papers we could publish.
Agreed about populism. Populism is “us the pure majority against the corrupt elites”, which can apply to all sorts of ideologies.
There’s right wing populism (e.g. “us the poor working class against the corrupt East coast elites”) and left wing populism (e.g. “us the poor majority against the corrupt corporate giants”, think the Occupy movement). There’s also populism in Latin America that’s more focused on fighting political clientelism, etc.
I think you could easily change the article to say “MAGA” instead of “populism” and get the same point across, though it’s not that big of a deal.
“The dominant ideologies are not necessarily those with the best ideas—they are those with the best survival strategies.”
I’d add that it’s: idologies that survive and reproduce.
In your framework, spreading=reproducing.
Self-sealing and retention=surviving.
If an idea is open to revision or people changing their minds, it will likely “die” quickly. It needs to spread and then have self-protection mechanisms so the ideology doesn’t die when exposed to contradictory ideas.
If it’s not even close to stat sig different (p=0.11 for pre-2010 vs now) and the data is crazy noisy.
Either way, it’s very unlikely to be an “explosion” by any metric.