I value not getting trampled by a hippo very highly too, but the likelihood that I find myself near a hippo is low. And my ability to do anything about it is also low.
Ericf
Karma: 893
I’d say its only the first one. The other 3 are all general anti-doing-stuff arguments, and dredging, on net, is better on all those metrics than the alternative of not-dredging and continuing the status quo. That said, I personally have no idea what the balance of direct environmental damage is between different amounts and methods of dredging.
Historically, American unions have had an adversarial relationship with the owners, and the government has usually sided with the owners. Some (ie Sarah Taber) have informed speculation that this is a consequence of the systems created for the American version of Slavery. One specific note: in the ?70s?, the Union at General Motors asked for access to all the company Financials and a dedicated seat on the board of governers. Essentially, to be made partners in the company. GM’s owners refused and conceded additional wages and benefits instead.
I don’t know what the history in Europe is, but my understanding is that Union membership is a much higher % of workforce, and the government supports unions (because when 50% of your voters are in Union households, the political parties don’t put anti-unions planks in thier platforms)
Conversely, if FDR wants a chicken in every pot, and then finds out that chickens don’t exist, he would change his values to want a beef roast in every pot, or some such.
How could it possibly deduce that without reference to some real world effect? There is no reason a-priori to prefer one sort to another. That involves valuing coming to the conclusion using fewer calculations (of what kind?), less time (or maybe more time, or more consistent amount of time is better?), or less risk of error. And the same applies for any other change: knowing which version is better requires both a measurement system, and an evaluation of each thing. And for any novel problem, the answer -by definition- won’t be available for lookup.
The goals of an AGI are not uniformly drawn from all possible goals.
Naive comments on AGIlignment
The argument as presented is:
System failures exist
Here is one example of a system failure
And the counterargument is: No, 2 is not an example of a system failure Therefore, I am not updating my prior for 1. because no new evidence has been presented
One option for a country or company (not useful for single brain ethics, though) is rule by committee. Specifically, a small (5-7) number of individuals who are selected by different methods to represent different interests, who then talk amongst themselves and decide on policy.
For a company, that could be:
The Founder, who serves until they chose to retire, and select someone else to take thier place
A Fiduciary, elected by stockholders in a one stock=one vote system, reaffirmed annually
The Union rep, selected by the employees, with or without a formal Labor Union, seven until voluntary retirement or a vote of no confidence by the employees
An Outsider, where an NGO devoted to Ethics selects representatives for many different companies, and explicitly represent humanity as a whole/all living things
The CEO, hired by the other members for a fixed length contract.
Conjecture:
They are doing thier own taxes, and owe money, so they want to file at the deadline. and
For some reason, they need to have the current balance in thier paypal/ETH account to not change until after filing? Or
They are on some quarterly system as an S-corp and want to book revenue in a different quarter because they already filed for this quarter assuming 0 additional income and would have to amend the paperwork if they got new income. And thier quarters line up with Tax day?
Also, too, what is near-term? Supply chain disruptions are currently causing shortages, but new shipments from India and other exporters should arrive within a month or two, which probably isn’t long enough for people to literally starve to death (since wheat isn’t literally 100% of calories, I’d Fermi estimate that a poor resident of North Africa could physically survive for about 3 months with zero wheat consumption by being hungry and eating a little bit more of whatever other food is available)
I could extract a lot of value with an oracle that could only answer yes/no (or option 1⁄2) questions. In the limit of the operator’s patience, one bit at a time is unlimited bits.
Punching up vs punching down is the distinction there. Natzis want to (and have done) kill off the “weak” and “Jewish” Communists want to (and have done) take away all the money from (which is only marginally better than killing) people who currently have wealth (and therefore power). Killing and eating the Rich isn’t an end in itself, the way it is for Natzis, it’s a threat to get what the Communists want, which is control of the wealth/property.
Are you specifically against a communist revolution, or just a member of team “advocating violence is wrong, no matter the cause?”
Footnote 3 really gets my goat
My 2 cents:
If you have high quality people working on a project, and you are already paying them “plenty of money,” you can increase thier productivity by spending money to make sure they aren’t wasting any of thier 24 hours/day doing things they don’t want to do. People are reluctant to spend “thier own” money to hire a driver/maid/personal secretary/errand boy full time, but those are things that can be provided as an in-lind transfer. We know it works, because that’s what Hollywood does: the star actors and directors have legions of assistants who anticipate and fulfil thier needs so the talent can focus on the task.
There are two additional activities that can help:
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Games are a great way to practice acting with uncertainty, and experiencing “I made the best decision and still lost” in a low-stakes environment. Poker is not ideal, since you often don’t have all the information, even in hindsight, to know if you made the best play—look for games where you make choices, then have the random outcome / hidden information / simultaneous choice reveal. Any cooperative board game (eg Pandemic) is great for this, since they are specifically callibrated to not be always winnable, and they are simple enough to do hindsight analysis and know if you made the best possible choices (at least in the endgame).
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Ask someone else “what would you do (or would have done) in this situation?” Especially for big decisions, an actual outside view is far better than attempting to take the outside view from within your own head.
For a more in-depth discussion, you can listen to this podcast episode: https://lrcast.com/limited-resources-226-rotty-and-application-of-tools/
(ROTTY stands for Results Oriented Thinking—learning too much from the result of a decision without considering the counterfactuals)
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It sounds like you could benefit from the “time management technique” of e-mail batching
Specifically, you set aside specific times each day when you will check your inbox/messages. Depending on your job role, that might be “every hour, on the hour” or “when I start work, get back from lunch, and right before I leave” or something in-between. Then after attending to anything there, you turn off your e-mail and other messaging applications, and do your productive work until the next check-in time.
Let the rest of your team know that asynchronous communications won’t be attended to immediately, and to call/use the one synchronous app if something needs immediate response (and do the same: don’t send an e-mail or Skype message if you need or expect or “anticipate” a reply within 5 minutes.
Mine (3.5 yrs) says “show me” when she wants to show something to her mom or me. Usually with an exasperated sigh between trying to describe the thing and just deciding we need to come see it.
I have more discrimination between types of thing.
Play short or tricky points in isolation, get it right, then repeat the correct thing to ingrain it.
Then play the whole piece once, regardless of if it’s a W or L. Then if time remains, go back to #1.
That is what happened… which means I had one word on the left, one on the right, and two rows of number buttons below them. Not a good look.
In theory, a place could have a situation where the only testing was happening to confirm already symptomatic patients, so small numbers, but high fatality rate, as all the mild cases gonindetected. Then it moves, over a few weeks, to a mass testing regime, resulting in a lot more tests performed, finding a lot more cases, but the actual peak in cases/population was a few weeks ago.