Can you think of any examples of successful social movements whose main medium of communication was something akin to a forum? Maybe something involving riots?
To be more object level, doing things requires making not perfect decisions but making them with conviction. A panopticon where peoples explicit goal is to be scout mindset (at best) or pedantically criticize at worst is not going to foment do-acracy. It also requires sub groups/committees, incentivizing doing, etc. I can flesh this out more if you aren’t getting the spirit of what I mean.
re crowding out, I think these forums are on net substitutes not complements for other forms of organization. I don’t have specific evidence here and am not that confident though.
edge_retainer
Karma: 42
It seems to me that the hardest part of getting ai right will be coordination and governance, not technical alignment. Under this view, I think the EA/LW forums are net negative. They are really bad at creating coordination environments and are actively crowding out similar but more coordination/governance environments from existing.
This has always seemed very likely to me. It seems way easier to create a world governed by a few rules of physics that would incentivize perceptrons than randomly stumble into complicated perceptron architecture via random physics.
Yes it just seemed like a relevant time to bring this up, we don’t discuss TT that much here so I figured I’d say my 2 cents if people then go look him up and watch his recent interviews.
Monied prediction markets will be an absolute disaster in the next few years and it will be obvious. There has never been a bigger incentive to spread fake news and manipulate the semantic labels of reality. Polymarket is especially unprofessional. Their social media accounts actively spread fake news!!!
TT has been pretty bad at predicting or having an accurate world model of this stuff as far as I can tell. People give him a lot of deference because he’s a math genius and tbf to him he does have an open mind to a certain extent but he seems to struggle to publicly speak about the implications of current trajectories beyond 6 months
Agree with parts of this but on the whole this comment seems pretty extreme.
> This presumes that it’s OK to become a parent under such circumstances. As part of my solution, am I allowed to suggest that it might not be?
You realize tfr would be like .2 if people actually behaved like this? I know this is a little tangential but I feel like this instantly can be thrown out with reductio ad absurdum.
> Something is wrong if kids are constantly hitting each other.
Strongly disagree. It is extremely normal and probably even beneficial for pre pubescent kids, especially boys, to get physical. Depends on the context of course, just slapping people in the face for no reason would imply something is wrong. ordinary pushing, grabbing, wrestling, toy conflict escalation, and sibling roughness are not by themselves evidence that anything wrong.
In general yes it seems to me you are way overindexing on your child being easy. Even an average kid will be way more problematic to many parents with your attitude and walk all over you.
I mean yea I get where he is coming from. A few things.
1. Not at all clear to me that success in pred markets has anything to do with running a good company/nonprofit.
2. Not at all clear to me success in pred markets means you would be good at predicting success of your company/nonproft
3. Even if it did, seems pretty easy for a bad faith actor to hire out or otherwise fake their prediction success. unless you really start gatekeeping what that means, like oh I personally know you and know you didn’t create 7 manifold accounts until you hit big to start with 100k mana, which would again just be a weird form of in groupism.
4. does this mean as a successful quant trader for a company I can say “trust me bro i made 15 mil on bond options”, or does this only apply to rat adjacent prediction markets?
and even if 1⁄2 were true, still not clear to me that would imply we should be encouraging people who have big dreams that they should first build credibility on manifold, because that’s a lot of time to spend on something just to signal? Unless you also just happen to think getting really good at prediction markets is actually a useful skill for running an ai charity?Don’t disagree really that it’s weird to put such a concrete number on a gut feeling in the title of your post asking for money, but I really don’t think we should selectively allow this handwaving for people who are diamond in manifold and start pushing community members to goodhart in this way. Like I’m overstating the case a bit. I obviously think you should somewhat update on claims based on the person. BUT, I really think ea/lw does this more than enough already, esp in the sense of like, is this person “successful in the ways EAs/LWs consider” (pred markets being an obvious one where almost know one outside of these communities cares but gives you a bunch of status in the community).
forcing people to develop a forecasting record to make claims about their non profit starts to get deep into concern trolling territory imo. Like I get where it comes from but this is mostly the type of thing that just reenforces the status quo.
Ok yea I think you are wildly undervaluing agentic harnesses, context engineering, etc.
For a fixed model and amount of inference we now have significantly better infra built around it and for me at least (and most other people I know who use these tools) they make a huge difference, even as the chatbot itself has only become slightly better in general common sense and much better at narrow domains.
Curious if you still stand by this? most of it seems directionally wrong at this point to me but not confident
I also want to separately add that part of my frustration here (and the “can-kicking” part i mention) is that I worry this is just going to be weaponized as a reason to keep EA and LW glued together, even as obvious cracks develop. That would be fine—if we had a democracy—but we don’t. So at some point glue is a weapon for those in the community with de facto control to keep trudging forward without having to account for the increasing differences in moral views of those within.
Actually, they are extremely well known outside of rationalist circles. Many subgroups of the Jewish and Buddist faiths are pretty much built upon these principles. My parents told me “don’t put all your chips on the table” and ~keep optionality open. Some might even argue this is the core principle that has led to “democracy”. And yes as you rightly mentioned these are clearly foundational principles behind LW and EA. That’s why I use the strong language of “circlejerk”. This is really unnecessarily reinventing common english phrases. Viatopia perhaps gives the idea a bit of an action relevant flavor so I guess it extends a bit beyond the others, still not particularly new or insightful.
“can you argue for this in a convincing and detailed way?”
I mean the argument is so underpowered it’s hard to even know where to start. I actually don’t even think the concept is coherent tbf but I’ll try.
Assuming you are coming from the view that:
you can take some sentient (or intelligent) being, and you keep the “essence” of that sentient being but make it smarter and give it more inference time, that then all sentient beings will start whipping, dabbing, and hitting the nae nae in synchronicity.
(Which I would say there is no coherent concept of self modification/enchancement that preserves the original essence so already meaningless but if I cast that aside. )
Then sure, take a sentient beings whose value function is completely determined. It can never change it’s mind, taughtologically. So it will never hit this convergent nirvana. it’s values are already fixed.
I must be confused because I don’t see how this could be any other way. And the funny thing is, even if i’m wrong about this, and somehow if you jack up the iq and inference to wazooh and the atoms start vibing out this still wouldn’t make their goals correct. You still haven’t solved the is ought problem.
CEV, Idealized reflection, viatopia are all obvious and just a can-kicking circlejerk. Anti realism is true and this changes nothing. The religious undertones that there is some sort of convergent nirvana once you think hard enough is not true. Cosmopolitianism is only better than heroin tiled rats if you assume certain axioms. You should listen to smarter wiser people, duh. We all know this already. How is this profound when applied to normative ethics.
edge_retainer’s Shortform
is there a term for ai related works ratio of increasing safety to capabilities?
is there a list of the types of ai work that have the best ratio?
e.g. you would expect governance to probably have the best ratio
i have used tons of personal photos w/ kelsey’s prompt, it has been extremely successful (>75% + never get’s it wrong if one of my friends can guess it too), I’m confident none of these photos are on the internet and most aren’t even that similar to existing photos. Creepily enough it’s not half bad at figuring out where people are indoors as well (not as good, but like it got the neighborhood in Budapest I was in from a photo of a single room, with some items on a table).
I’ve seen this take a few times about land values and I would bet against it. If society gets mega rich based on capital (and thus more or similarly inequality) I think the cultural capitals of the US (LA, NY, Bay, Chicago, Austin, etc.) and most beautiful places (Marin/Sonoma, Jackson hole, Park City, Aspen, Vail, Scotsdale, Florida Keys, Miami, Charleston, etc.) will continue to outpace everywhere else.
Also the idea that New York is expensive because that’s where the jobs are doesn’t seem particularly true to me. Companies move to these places as much because they are trying to attract talent as the other way around. I know lots of students who went to my T20 university and got remote jobs. Approximately 0 of them want to move to ugly bumfuck even if it’s basically free. The suburbs/exurbs maybe, but not rural Missouri.
Now if there is a large wealth redistribution, which seem extremely unlikely given the timelines and current politics, I would agree. Also thinking construction will get cheaper is pretty questionable. The cost of construction in the US has skyrocketed largely because of regulations, new tech won’t necessarily be able to fix this.
its a public externality, you don’t need a government division to run bathrooms, you just need to do 1. + provide a subsidy
Are you asking me to be more specific or trying to be condescending? Those orgs all seem much more conducive for coordinating yea