It’s funny how a lot of things in the bliss attractor/”awakened ai” cluster seem very similar to stuff generated by e.g. a markov chain new-age bullshit generator
ErioirE
Karma: 365
I initially read this as a joke implying that your browsing history of encryption stuff might be too niche to be useful for matching against. I guess that’s me projecting
If wireheading is bad because it separates the reward signals from (evolved) behaviors and replaces them with less-intrinsically-useful ones that get Goodharted to (literal) death:
Would it be useful to use electrical stimulation on reward areas but instead of triggering it with a contrived condition we detect the body’s normal reward signal activation and amplify it by a set proportion? (obviously you’d have to make sure it didn’t feed back into itself in a loop etc.)
For example, if someone’s depression was a ~50% deficiency in “normal” reward signal activity, manually increasing it by a proportional amount would theoretically fix it.
Prediction: A system like this tested in rodents would show similar and potentially better behavioral results than drug based treatments like stimulants/antidepressants (depending on the exact areas of the brain targeted)
Question: would this get around problems that e.g. drugs have with gradual loss of efficacy due to tolerance build up? My limited understanding suggests it might, but I’m not confident.
I am not a neuroscientist, somebody poke holes in my hypothesis.
I’m surprised you frequent this site while still being Mormon because I had assumed the two were almost fundamentally mutually exclusive.
I am an ex-Mormon so yes I am biased etc etc.
I do agree that ward communities have a lot of positive attributes, I wish it was possible to create and sustain something secular like that. (Perhaps it is and I just haven’t seen examples of it anywhere)
How do you justify believing in the religion on epistemic grounds?
I left primarily because I could not tell myself I was intellectually honest while knowingly using a double standard for evidence for religion vs science & everything else.
The way I see it, the entire belief system of the Church is premised upon emotional evidence (see: a personal witness from the spirit), which I personally cannot justify as sufficient basis to inform my entire worldview (especially in light of how incredibly easy and convincing it is for our brains to fabricate stimuli matching our expectations).
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and anything unfalsifiable and impossible to replicate in a controlled setting does not count as extraordinary under any consistent standard I can think of.
I’m sorry if this seems like an attack on your beliefs as it wasn’t intended as so. I’m genuinely confused as to what sequence of events would result in someone passing through the inherent selection effects sufficient to end up here (and stay for any significant length of time) while being a believing Mormon. I do not have animosity to you personally.
There’s no kind way to inform someone that you think that they are fundamentally wrong about every belief they hold sacred and that they build their entire identity as an individual and a community upon
I grew up Mormon and remained so until my early 20s and this is very relatable. I do not explain my choices in depth to my family because any sufficiently detailed explanation would inevitably be interpreted as an attack on their beliefs.
Furthermore I’m not going to try to convince them of my point of view, not from fear of failure but fear of success: It would be devastating for their mental and emotional health.
It’s slightly disappointing and amusing whenever I have to admit my Mormon upbringing was correct about something.
While acknowledging the many harms alcohol does, I hope we can find alternatives that fill the niche of social lubricant with fewer side effects & less abuse potential.
Looking at the crippling social anxiety rampant among those near my age (28) and younger, we need all the help we can get.
In that vein :p, from what I’ve read nitrous oxide is both completely legal and almost completely harmless as long as it’s mixed with oxygen so you don’t suffocate (and if used frequently make sure you don’t become deficient in vitamin B12).
I’m not sure if/how much it helps with social things as my last experience with it was a dental procedure when I was a kid.
A crux of the discussion around this topic seems to be the exact definition of “purpose” being used.
Is the purpose of a system defined as:
The original intent of those who designed and/or implemented it
Or
The various intents of those incentivized to maintain the system in its realized form
Or
Some combination of those?
Many times the original intent of a system will have little resemblance to its results, (hence the popular appeal of POSIWID), but it can be true that:
1. Most systems are not deliberately designed to be bad
and
2. Many systems create unintended bad incentives ala Goodhart
and
3. Systems that create bad incentives are likely to have their purposes co-opted by those benefiting from the incentives, making it very difficult to iteratively improve said systems.
See: Unnecessarily complex tax code creates necessity for tax-help services and software. Subsequent movements to simplify tax code are resisted by entrenched interests who benefit from the complexity.
TL;DR: the Original Intended Purpose and the Intended Purposes of Current Proponents can be dramatically different, proportional to how well the system fulfilled its original intent and how strong of perverse incentives it created.
If they were easily noticed and mimicked, they’d become useless for the purpose.
This is a good example of something anti-inductive
First off, a meta-answer: Asking “what are non-obvious x” is potentially less useful at capturing less-obvious examples of x than asking for as many distinct examples as possible. I think it is likely that of those who have some [less obvious observations] many will assume they are more obvious than they are for others.
In my case, I have a built-in bias to assume that any piece of knowledge I obtained without apparent effort must also be obvious to most other people.
So, all the examples I can think of, most of which I think are obvious:Financial skills/credit score
Level of effort spent to save insignificant amounts of money (and the significance threshold is often OOM higher for wealthy vs poor)
“Sophisticated” vocabulary and hobbies (what counts as sophisticated probably varies a lot between different subcultures, and it’s easy to assume something is sophisticated that others do not. I’m not listing examples lest I out myself further :) )
Presence of Anti-work sentiment, Anti-capitalist sentiment, Anti-wealth sentiment. (It’s a lot easier to buy into a narrative like “all rich people are evil conniving bastards” if you have never gotten to know anybody wealthy and all your friends/family/coworkers are using the abstract idea of “the evil capitalists” as a convenient target upon which to place blame for all bad things)
IQ (e.g. general level of intelligence/problem solving/pattern recognition/critical thinking, not necessarily tested IQ)
Level of interest in Obviously Bad Deals e.g. lottery, gambling (with perhaps a distinction between skill-based and not, the person counting cards in blackjack is not getting an obviously bad deal if playing with people less skilled. The suckers playing with them, on the other hand...)
Who your friends are/who you spend time around
What you talk about/think about (needs specificity but I hope someone else will be able to give better examples than me)
What media you consume (Obviously LW is high status adjusts monocle and checks pocket-watch in a condescending manner)
Of the media you consume, how much is read/listened to vs watched?
Level of risk aversion (I’m curious about which ways this applies, because I can see plausible reasons why levels of risk aversion for different things might be either high-class or low-class depending on the details. I have not seen any research about this and I’m entirely speculating from lived experience)
Level of institutional/systemic knowledge, e.g. knowing there’s actually nothing stopping you from attending university classes you aren’t enrolled in.
General level of busyness (Is it high-class that you can afford lots of free time, or high class to always have another Important Meeting to attend? Or both? It’s interesting how context-dependent a lot of these things are.)
Level of agreeableness
I’m now questioning how many of these are generally considered high-class and how many of them I associate with high-class but are more just nerd-culture things that don’t entirely generalize.
All of these were off the top of my head in ~20 minutes, quality not guaranteed.
I resisted the temptation to have an LLM generate example ideas, I assume if you wanted LLM answers you would have already gotten them yourself.
Where I do think this would be a terrible idea is if the 7 year old is a prodigy, and if the 17 year olds hate math and don’t want to be there.
Exactly.
In a 12th-grade/early college class with generally friendly students: I imagine if there was some very young prodigy attending they would quickly become the beloved “class mascot” kind of micro-celebrity.
The Symbolic Representation of good software is often what is wanted. Not good software
Haha, yet more context I didn’t have much probability of understanding
I work in C# almost exclusively and so I’ve never used an LLM with the expectation that it would run the code itself. I usually explicitly specify what language and form of response I need “Generate a C# <class/method/LINQ statement> that does x y and z in this way with parameters a, b, and c”
I see.
Maybe.
However much I can at this inferential distance
It’s funny how things like matrices are critical for some types of coding (AI, Statistics, etc) but completely unnecessary for others. As a software developer who is not in AI or statistics they have never come up once, though perhaps I would’ve been able to spot potential use cases if I had that background.
Similar to how I frequently see use cases for SQL where inferior options are being used in the wild[1].- ^
To whom it may concern: Please Stop using Excel like that. It’s a crime against humanity, performance, and good data
- ^
Because it’s absurdly addictive, although it’s certainly possible to play it responsibly.
It was partly a joke, party serious because I personally have a difficult time self-regulating if I let myself play it.
As someone with coding expertise but very little knowledge of math terminology, and without looking up any of the terms mentioned:
I can tell there is a joke here. I cannot tell where the joke is, because I don’t have a solid enough understanding of what I can only assume are made up terms or terms related to matrix algebra (and/or whatever related fields are indicated. An annoying part of learning these sorts of things is when you don’t even know enough to be able to identify the precise field being used.)
Did you make up some of those terms to make this a trick question?
After posting this comment to record my confusion I will then allow myself to search for those terms and find out how good or bad my guesses are.
My penalty for being wrong is everyone gets to laugh at me proportional to how far off I am
Adrenaline junkies should not be involved in building AGI, any more than they should be commercial pilots or bus drivers. (Less, even.)
To follow the pattern of “Those with a large built-in incentive for X shouldn’t be in charge of X”:
Ambitious people shouldn’t be handed power
Kids shouldn’t decide the candy budget
Engineers shouldn’t play Factorio
Unfortunately with few exceptions those make up a large portion of the primary interested parties.
Best of luck keeping them away for long.
Not sarcasm. I hope we succeed. But incentives are stacked to make it difficult
This is made more difficult because a large portion of those running trials do not do the data management and/or analysis in-house, instead outsourcing those tasks to CROs (Contract Research Organizations). Inter-organization communication barriers certainly don’t make the disconnect any easier to resolve.
I was an observer for the conversations that (I suspect) contributed to your opinion here. My perspective is that it seems in large part differences in communication style preferences, rather than object-level disagreements. He seems to enjoy the catharsis of being able to emphatically state positions that are non-politically correct in general discourse, which is a sentiment I understand. I don’t recall him responding with anything I would classify as insults or vitriol, though those are to some degree subjective.
One person’s insult is another’s friendly banter, and I suspect he didn’t realize you took as the former what he had meant as the latter.
Would I be correct if I summarized your opinion as “He doesn’t treat controversial topics with enough tact and diplomacy” rather than specific factual or epistemic disagreements?
If his presence is the only thing stopping you from wanting to go, why not reach out to him? I suspect you’d be able to amicably smooth things over.
A related idea: For LessOnline would it be useful to start a norm where if a debate becomes excessively charged any participant could ask for it to be put on hold so that a time can be set aside to productively discuss it in a more structured setting? (i.e. with an impartial moderator mutually agreed upon.)
Has someone made Manifold markets for these predictions? (As of writing this comment I have not found any and I would rather not do it myself since I don’t typically keep tabs on those respective metrics.)
Any thoughts on the relative feasibility of engineering algae blooms (via things like nutrient seeding) for long-term carbon sequestration?