FlorianH

Karma: 176

FlorianH 8 May 2024 20:10 UTC
2 points
0
on: Let’s Design A School, Part 2.2 School as Education—The Curriculum (General)
Would really really love to replace curricula by what you describe, kudos for proposing a reasonably simple yet consistent high-level plan that at least to my mostly uneducated eyes seems rather ideal!
Maybe unnecessary detail here but fwiw, in economics in the Core Civilizational Requirements,
an understanding of supply and demand, specialization and trade, and how capitalism works
I’d try to make sure to provoke them with enough not-so-standard market cases to allow them develop intuitions of where what intervention might be required/justified for which reasons (or from which points of view) and where not. I teach that subject, and deplore how our teaching tends to remain on the surface of things without opportunity to really sharpen students’ minds w.r.t. the slightly more intricate econ policy questions where too shallow a demand-supply thinking just isn’t much better than no econ at all.

FlorianH 25 Apr 2024 18:39 UTC
6 points
1
on: social lemon markets
Assuming you’re the first to explicitly point out that lemon market type of feature of ‘random social interaction’, kudos, I think it’s a great way to express certain extremely common dynamics.
Anecdote from my country, where people ride trains all the time, fitting your description, although it takes a weird kind of extra ‘excuse’ in this case all the time: It would often feel weird to randomly talk to your seat neighbor, but ANY slightest excuse (sudden bump in the ride; info speaker malfunction; grumpy ticket collector; one weird word from a random person in the wagon, … any smallest thing) will an extremely frequently make the silent start conversation, and then easily for hours if the ride lasts that long. And I think some sort of social lemon market dynamics may help explain it indeed.

FlorianH 23 Apr 2024 16:50 UTC
10 points
0
on: Funny Anecdote of Eliezer From His Sister
Funny is jot the only adjective this anecdote deserves. Thanks for sharing this great wisdom/reminder!

FlorianH 21 Apr 2024 19:23 UTC
1 point
1
in reply to: Suzie. EXE’s comment on: Suzie. EXE’s Shortform
I would not search for smart ways to detect it. Instead look at it from the outside—and there I don’t see why we should have large hope for it to be detectable:
Imagine you create your simulation. Imagine you are much more powerful than you are, to make the simulation as complex as you want. Imagine in your coolest run, your little simulatees start wondering: how could we trick Suzie so her simulation reveals the reset?!
I think you agree their question will be futile; once you reset your simulation, surely they’ll not be able to detect it: while setting up the simulation might be complex, reinitialize at a given state successfully, with no traces within the simulated system, seems like the simplest task of it all.
And so, I’d argue, we might well expect it to be also in our (potential) simulation, however smart your reset-detection design might be.

FlorianH 17 Apr 2024 18:31 UTC
4 points
7
on: An ethical framework to supersede Utilitarianism
My impression is, what you propose to supersede Utilitarianism with, is rather naturally already encompassed by utilitarianism. For example, when you write
If someone gains utility from eating a candy bar, but also gains utility from not being fat, raw utilitarianism is stuck. From a desire standpoint, we can see that the optimal outcome is to fulfill both desires simultaneously, which opens up a large frontier of possible solutions.
I disagree that typical concepts of utilitarianism—not strawmans thereof—are in anyway “stuck” here at all: “Of course,” a classical utilitarian might well tell you, “we’ll have to trade-off between the candy bar and the fatness it provides, that is exactly what utilitarianism is about”. And you can extend that to also other nuances you bring: whatever, ultimately, we desire or prefer or what-have-you most: As classical utilitarians we’d aim exactly at that, quasi by definition.

FlorianH 12 Apr 2024 21:37 UTC
3 points
1
on: “How the Gaza Health Ministry Fakes Casualty Numbers”
Thanks for the link to the interesting article!

FlorianH 9 Apr 2024 0:42 UTC
2 points
0
on: What does it take to transfer the knowledge to action?
If I understand you correctly, what you describe seems a bit atypical, or at least not similar in all other people, indeed.
Fwiw, pure speculation: Maybe you learned very much from working on/examining advanced/codes type codes. So you learned to understand advanced concepts etc. But you mostly learned to code on the basis of already existing code/solutions.
Often, instead, when we systematically learn to code, we may learn bit by bit indeed from the most simple examples, and we don’t just learn to understand them, but—a bit like when starting to learn basic math—we constantly are challenged to put the next element learned directly into practice, on our own. This ensures we master all that knowledge in a highly active way, rather than only passively.
This seems to suggest there’s a mechanistically simple yet potentially tedious path, for you to learn to more actively create solutions from scratch: Force yourself to start with the simplest things to code actively, from scratch, without looking at the solution first. Just start with a simple problem that ‘needs a solution’ and implement it. Gradually increase to more complexity. I guess it might require a lot of such training. No clue whether there’s anything better.

FlorianH 4 Apr 2024 22:30 UTC
2 points
1
on: On Leif Wenar’s Absurdly Unconvincing Critique Of Effective Altruism
The irony in Wenar’s piece is: In all he does, he just outs himself as… an EA himself :-). He clearly thinks its important to think through net impact and to do the things that do have great overall impact. Sad he caricatures the existing EA ecosystem in such an uncompelling and disrespectful way.
Fully agree with your take of him being “absurdly” unconvincing here. I guess nothing is too blatant to be printed in this world, as long as the writer makes bold & enraging enough claims on a popular scapegoat and has a Prof title from a famous uni.
I can only imagine (or hope), the traction the article got, which you mention (though I have not seen it myself), being mainly limited to usual suspects for whom EA anyway, quasi by definition, is simply all stupid, if not outright evil.

FlorianH 15 Mar 2024 23:44 UTC
4 points
3
on: Are AIs conscious? It might depend
Unconvinced. Bottom line seems to be an equation of Personal Care with Moral Worth.
But I don’t see how the text really supports that: Just because we feel more attached to entities we interact with, it doesn’t inherently elevate their sentience i.e. their objective moral worth.
Example: Our lesser emotional attachment or physical distance to chickens in factory farms does not diminish their sentience or moral worth, I’d think. Same for (future) AIs too.
At best I could see this equation to +- work out in a perfectly illusionist reality, where there is no objective moral relevance. But then I’d rather not invoke the concept of moral relevance at all—instead we’d have to remain with mere subjective care as the only thing there might be.

FlorianH 13 Mar 2024 15:16 UTC
1 point
0
on: Why I like Zulip instead of Slack or Discord
This page also provides a neat summary of Zulip advantages; mostly in the similar direction as here: https://stackshare.io/stackups/slack-vs-zulip

FlorianH 13 Mar 2024 15:11 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: RomanHauksson’s comment on: Why I like Zulip instead of Slack or Discord
Interesting and good to hear, as I was thinking of using it for a class too (also surprised; I don’t remember the slightest hint of counter-intuitiveness when I personally used Zulip with its threads).

FlorianH 3 Mar 2024 12:08 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Shiroe’s comment on: How is Chat-GPT4 Not Conscious?
Thanks, corrected

FlorianH 28 Feb 2024 23:55 UTC
6 points
4
on: How is Chat-GPT4 Not Conscious?
This discussion could be made more fruitful by distinguishing between phenomenal consciousness (sentience) and access/reflective consciousness (‘independent cognition’ in the author’s terminology). The article mainly addresses the latter, which narrows its ethical implications for AI.
“[ChatGPT] would therefore be conscious by most definitions” should be caveated; the presence of advanced cognition may (arguably) be convincingly attributed to ChatGPT by the article, but this does not hold for the other, ethically interesting phenomenal consciousness, involving subjective experience.

FlorianH 26 Feb 2024 22:57 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Ben Pace’s comment on: Ben Pace’s Shortform Feed
Maybe “I’m interested in the hypothesis/possibility...”

FlorianH 21 Jan 2024 20:22 UTC
1 point
0
on: What Software Should Exist?
File explorer where I don’t type all of D:/F1/F2/F3/F4/X to get/open folder or file X, but I type (part of) F2 and F4 and it immediately (yes, indexing etc.) offers me X as a result (and maybe the few others that fit the pattern)
If I have an insane amount of subfolders/files, maybe it indexes better those with recent or regular access.
Extension: A version on steroids might index even file-seek results of files and index on (my or so) most common searched words. Find if that’s a bit too extravagant.
Useful in traditional file structures, as we then type/think/remember less. Plus, it might encourage a step towards more tag-based file organization which I feel might be useful more generally, though that’s just a potential side-effect and not the basic aim.

FlorianH 11 Jan 2024 23:41 UTC
3 points
0
on: An even deeper atheism
Love the post. One relevant possibility that I think would be worthy of consideration w.r.t. the discussion about human paperclippers/inter-human compatibility:

Humans may not be as much misaligned as our highlty idiosyncratic value theories might suggest, if a typical individual’s value theory is really mainly what she uses to justify/explain/rationalize her today’s local intuitions & actions, yet without really driving the actions as much as we think. A fooming human might then be more likely to simply update her theories, to again become compatible what underlying more basic intuitions dictate to her. So the basic instincts that make us today locally have often reasonably compatible practical aims, might then still keep us more compatible than our individual exicit and more abstract value theories, i.e. rationalizations, would seem to suggest.

I think there are some observatiins that might suggest sth in that direction. Give the humans a new technology , and initially some will call it the devil’s tool to be abstained from—but ultimately we all converge to using it, updating our theories, beliefs.

Survey persons on whether it’s okay to actively put in acute danger one life for the sake of saving 10, and you have people stronlgy diverge on the topic, based on their abstract value theories. Put them in the corrsponding leadership position where that moral question becomes an regular real choice that has to be made, and you might observe them act much more homogenously according to the more fundamental ad pragmatic instincts.

(I think Jonathan Haidt’s Righteous mind wluld also support some of this)

In this case, the Yudkowskian AI alignment challenge may keep a bit more of its specialness in comparison to the human paperclipper challenge.

FlorianH 4 Jan 2024 17:20 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: M. Y. Zuo’s comment on: What should a non-genius do in the face of rapid progress in GAI to ensure a decent life?
You had suggested the issues with free-riding/insufficient contributions to public goods, might not be so much of a problem. The linked post suggests otherwise, as it beautifully highlights some of the horrors that come from these issues. It’s point is, even if humans are not all bad as of themselves, within the larger societies, there tend to arise strong incentives, for the individual, to act in the disinterest of society.

FlorianH 4 Jan 2024 16:46 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: M. Y. Zuo’s comment on: What should a non-genius do in the face of rapid progress in GAI to ensure a decent life?
Meditations On Moloc

FlorianH 4 Jan 2024 16:20 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: M. Y. Zuo’s comment on: What should a non-genius do in the face of rapid progress in GAI to ensure a decent life?
Absolutely! That’s why we have free-rider problems/insufficient contribution to public goods, all over the world. The thing you can do in society’s best interest, is not typically in your own (material) best interest, unless you’re a perfect altruist.

FlorianH 2 Jan 2024 19:10 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: cousin_it’s comment on: What should a non-genius do in the face of rapid progress in GAI to ensure a decent life?
The actions you suggest might represent a laudable contribution to a public good, but it doesn’t directly answer the (self-concerned) question the OP raises. Given the largeness of the world and the public goods nature of the projects you mention, his own action will only marginally change the probability of a a better structure of society in general. That may still be worth it from a fully altruistic standpoint, but it has asymptotically 0 probability to improve his personal material welfare.
(If I may, an analogy: One could compare it to a situation where I’m living in Delhi and I wonder what I can do to save myself from the effects of climate change that makes the summers even more unbearable in future, and you tell me “consider not flying; plant trees in the city or in the country...”. I see people or small countries get such type of advice in reality also, but it is not truly to the point.)