Fwiw: Reading all comments here (though still w/o working link to hendryck’s article), I’m rather convinced we’re mainly circling around questions of definition.
OP leogao = caring in the actual natural sense
Rest: some special definition that I don’t fully understand but so far doesn’t seem super interesting (to me) and leads to indeed “batshit insane” result when read from natural meaning of “degree of caring” instead of hendrycks seemingly different concept
Thx, though I cannot read it (I don’t have X and I don’t want to make an X account).
Can you give the link? If what you’re saying is implied by his theory yes it would be wholly insane, but I have hard time believing it
Ignore if you DO mind sharing/no time writing. Else: I’d be curious to read more about why you say “I’m also psychopathic, under any reasonable definition of the term.”: anything on, say, (i) how you realize this, (ii) how that makes you feel about it, (iii) experience of whichever sort related to it.
[No particular reason I ask, just find it a fascinating topic. And pbly a bit because I think humans in general are quite ‘rather psychpathic’ in many ways anyway, if one thinks about what we find ‘standard’ moral and empathic vs. how we actually behave in so many domains and/or particular situations slightly outside of the usual daytoday life; just a bit the way the series you criticize also flagged it in the first post].
A better answer than what you write to be the common answer is, imho an obvious candidate when thinking about it 10 sec: severe atrocities that do not actually bring you much advantage in the war at all. So it’s ‘wasteful harm’ as opposed to ‘well targetted harm’. Surely in practice, as none uses that definition very strictly, sometimes we call this or that warcrime that doesn’t fit perfectly, and the other way round. But I think the gist of a natural definition would be mostly that.
Not convinced about “wars not being early-endable anymore”—it seems like an interesting idea but neither specifically fit intuition about “warcrime” nor common usage of the term.
Substantially agree with a lot. And not crucial, but just for epistemic humility & precision how I’d phrase it:
The following sentence I bold-emphasize sounds like it remains a wholly open question, even if other things you write seem very plausible, not so unnatural, and maybe underappreciated indeed.
If you gave me a perpetual UBI starting tomorrow, I would quit my job, and spend my days with my family, my friends, and doing my hobbies. And I would be much happier than I am today! I would consider my life better, more full of meaning. Because I find the meaning outside of my job, in my free time. I just wish I had more of that free time.
So I do not wish your bet to be put on the test so much—or at least not exactly how you describe it. You don’t know that other self within you that never had the chance to become realized. You might think it’s true. Maybe not least because, of course, you regularly do already now experience this self partly in shorter term non-work, and who knows, you might even still as adult have enjoyed some prolonged non-work time—and wholly enjoyed it, just how I might. All this does not make me convinced you’d be “much happier” than you are today. For numerous reasons related to the human mind within today’s world. Your cheap talk [meant here in a technical, not denigrating sense] doesn’t change this.
For people with psychopathic or narcissistic traits. I’m not here to moralize or to tell you you’re broken. I think that factory farming is an abomination akin to slavery but at a massively greater scale and that the cuts to USAID are crimes against humanity worse than many wars. Most people are oblivious to that or contribute to it. The median serial killer vanishes in the statistical noise among the horrors of this world. Many of my psychopathic friends are actually doing better than average despite their traits, or perhaps precisely thanks to what they had to learn to make these traits work for them. If they donate $100 to an ACE top charity, they’re suddenly among the crème de la crème of the least harmful humans alive.
So if that fucked-up ne’er-do-well that’s the median person deserves my honesty and respect, so do you.
Amazing passage; don’t actually know any details about Psychopathy-empirics but in general still couldn’t agree more.
Glad you agree. Your last sentence in my opinion is clearly slightly too general even when we talk about the agility of only the “typical” economist you invoke, but on the particular case of transformative AI, yes, there is that resistance, often, and it’s in large paet, in my opinion, related to the history I pointed out in my post I linked.
Thanks for pointing out two interesting papers. Then:
probably less than a dozen economists who are taking the transformative AI seriously at all.
I’d say clearly: Nope (I let you think about it yourself why this statement is obviously orders of magnitude false; I reckon you’ll realize).
but a good chunk of this is doubtless because Acemoglu (who was a giant in the field long before he got a Nobel) published a piece “The Simple Macroeconomics of AI” [..]
I’d say instead: There’s well reason to doubt the magnitude of the impact of that single paper. My disappointment about the indeed huge share of economists who dismiss e.g. labor market effects, well antedates Acemoglu’s mid-2024 paper, and even now many who dismiss the labor market effects simply do so due to basic professional deformation. (Somewhat speculatively I’d in fact be more inclined to believe it’s rather because of the same deformation that Acemoglu himself ends up with his analysis where he does)
I wrote a bit more about What economists get wrong about AI, and why, in How Econ 101 makes us blinder on trade, morals, jobs with AI – and on marginal costs.
Key factors imho clearly include that we don’t realize good old brain augmentation isn’t the same as brain replacement. Stated somewhat differently, we’re swayed by our pride of having been for 200 years the only ones having reliably and rightly pointed out to a largely ignorant public that ‘machines yield better jobs overall rather than to make workers redundant’, so we’re now struggling to see that clearly that this time, this time IS different. And one can also say our ignorance as a profession is the wrath of us having blindly followed empirical observation and having—once again—elevated it to a fundamental law, without clearly realizing how contingent past developments between machines and jobs were on various subtle tastes and consumer psychology and machine limits etc.
Political Violence Is Never Acceptable
Nor is the threat or implication of violence. Period. Ever. No exceptions.
It is completely unacceptable. I condemn it in the strongest possible terms.
It is immoral, and also it is ineffective. It would be immoral even if it were effective. Nothing hurts your cause more.
All sympathy for trying to support peacekeeping. However esp. on LW I’d expect—hope—it to be more successful if done without excessively strong rethoric and with instead more sober careful dissecting of pros and cons. The entire quoted start seems overly generalized claim: In addition to finding this claim obviously misguided, I find the entire rest of the long post didn’t bring arguments to actually even half-justify this strong claim; and the linked posts to where structurally the arguments seem to partly be outsourced aren’t doing it either.
Obviously, there could be situations where political violence—and even private, unilateral only—political violence could be acceptable in nearly everyone’s moral taste. Imho for good reasons. Think of being gifted with a chance of violently and terminally sabotaging an extraordinarily evil dictator, in a situation where chances are good enough that what follows is more reasonable than him. Note, “Unlikely to happen?” is of course not a rebuttal to the scenario, when OP claims that even if it would work, it would be immoral. So, OP sounds like crazy advice to me. And isn’t being “effective”—effective for your cause I guess? - by definition not hurting your cause.
Civil Disobedience [I love the book] might more often than not backfire, and may sometimes not be absolutely (whatever absolutely though means) justified even if its proponents think it would be, but it doesn’t mean even in potential cases where it would be having moral clear net pluses & work out it would quasi by definition be wrong.
but using intelligence + willpower to avoid obvious mistakes cost me the opportunity to develop wisdom
I didn’t get it but it sounds interesting. Can you elaborate?
CC does speed my coding up on absolute net level, but indeed, in addition to a first step of crazy speedup gain, there’s a second, countering effect:
CC makes 10-fold* speed gain with first elements in a new project
As because of CC I’m not as fully intimate with my code, over time, as project code grows, not knowing all of the code so well inside-out, this lack of close familiarity with the code base reduces efficiency in growing, debugging and communicating about the code. Eventually reducing overall speed anything from 2-5 fold*
*Numbers wholly made up; I cannot quantitatively pin down the effect; it depends too much on specifics
Implicitly I read you as most notably as (and please permit simplification and glossing over many additional points an subtleties, in order for me to later get to my biggest concern): “Look, China has been rather benign on a world stage, suggesting this may rather likely well stay so.”
But: To strictly derive, benign, kind intents, you’d have to claim that Chinese policy would have been unsmart for an ultimately self-serving regime or elite or population. Else your observation has very little epistemic content other than maybe to confirm: they were smart.
So: Would China, or, say, Xi Jinping or its ruling elite, or whaterver the relevant entity, really have had much to gain from aggressing countries in the meantime? Or, say, from aggressing them more than they did[1] in the past?
My “concern”: MAYBE RATHER NOT!?
Thinking about how much China was able to cumulatively grow, amass power and influence over the past decades, it seems to me rather really difficult to claim they did ‘much wrong’ in terms of pursuing an aim of becoming wealthy, powerful, important on the world scene.
Suggests: Non-aggression[2] fully paid off. That is of course an interesting lesson you could say. That it’ll also have to pay off, in a narrow material or so sense, once you have AGI, is, nevertheless, is simply not implied.
Sadly, this imho rather invalidates much of what I see the core intended positive conclusion from your post. I’d love to get relief of worries from your argument, but I think there’s no deep foundation for it.
Of course, this doesn’t proof it’s better for the US to be the one to unlock AGI. I have a lot of sympathy with anyone telling: Look, China was (rather) not aggressive so far and we might have not more to worry about it than, say, the (currently particularly nuts) US first getting AGI. But I also have, despite the super sad and dangerous state and development of democracies as of late, remaining sympathy for anyone defending the idea of furthering regimes who at least very officially have some core western values ChristianKI pointed out in a separate comment here, even if we’ve always been super duper bad in fully adhering to them. I therefore am worried if we end up simply dismissing the latter as “China Derangement Syndrome”—or at least worried if we’d end up automatically dismissing all forms of such argument as CDS—even if the term you coin can be useful to describe quite some of the exaggerated negative pictures about China.
I’m not in any way sanguine about to which degree some more or less regularly reported quarrels about, say, South China sea things etc. are important or exactly not here; idk much about them at all.
Again, simply to the degree that this describes the state of China’s history well; other commenters have more to say on that than I.
OP is worried about some comments in particular, maybe for that specific subset it’s warranted. But yes, it could become a nuisance if too common
Intriguing conjecture; sounds partly plausible
A) Could it not nevertheless be that we have legal personhood limited to those incumbent legal persons officially “owning”/representing the digital minds?
B) One nuance: Reading “legal personhood” I interpret it in two ways:
The way I read you most explicitly mean: right to have contracts enforced etc. Yes we might naturally want to extend (well, depends on A) )
Right we attribute to digital minds essentially because we’d see them/their state of mind as intrinsically valuable. Here, I’d think this makes sense iif we put enough probability onto them being sentient.
Some sympathy with the idea, but on net, reluctant to ask for additional voting complexity given the two leavers we already have.
Maybe a terse prelude, “Mind: throwaway short-form fwiw; don’t read if you like only polished things” (or whatever smarter thing one can put in such type of vein), could help a bit to manage expectations and limit downvoting just because one rightly chipped in a quick thought indeed?
In geopolitics just as well as in all types of world modelling: A ton of things are trivial to reliably ‘model’ or infer (even for an uneducated dummy), and a ton are hopelessly too complex and erratic to plausibly say anything intelligible about even with the best ‘modelling’ or knowledge/intuition. Then there’s a large mass of questions in between these two extremes where better knowledge or epistemic approaches/modelling may help you to moderately or maybe sometimes even importantly improve your predictions.
One can debate how large that subpart of the in between section is where significant extra sophistication is currently really helpful. But that geopolitical predictions per se would be impossible, feels almost trivially wrong.
Interesting how you introduce a sort of ‘let’s not just be about semantics’ while in the end, the disagreement boils down to essentially exactly that.
I think you’re completely right with what you point out, but I think this is not about having to convince SH about the ‘existence of free will’, rather about what terminology to best use in which discussion with whom.
I remain highly sympathetic to SH’s framing, as
0. SH is simply always right on everything. Ok, small joke to start (though—gosh—isn’t he kind of so so amazingly right in most things? My personal opinion; still always surprising me, though I appreciate quite some smart people seem to not like him).
Retributive justice—as in really within jurisprudence or so—questions are essentialy when we discuss free will, and here’s where most people are stupidly confused while SH’s exposition and interpretation is spot on about it—as I have the impression you mostly agree
In our daily usual interactions the same applies even much more broadly. I instinctively hate you if you do something bad and I think you’re somehow evil in a way that’s beyond ’that unfortunate creature is just suffering the tumor—or, as you put it, it’s tumor all the way down to even that more usual seeming creature still! - and this is absolutely impossible to see and rmbr for 95% of people or so → It’s exactly SH’s framing that’s an ideal summary as to why we’re wholly wrong in our instincts.
With point 2. said, I do agree that emphasizing the nuances you point out—and which whom I’m convinced SH rather fully agrees—might, for quite some people, make the whole free-will-not-in-the-way-you-instinctively-mean less of a non-starter, and thus be a fruitful addition to the discourse. What I dislike though is some of the nuances in your framing/wording, that makes it initially sound as if you’d try to rebut more than you actually, substantively do.
Challenge accepted, thanks—and I think easily surmounted:
Your Fakeness argument—I’ll call it “Sheer Size Argument” makes about as much sense as for a house cat seeing only the few m^3 around it, to claim the world cannot be the size of Earth—not to speak of the galaxy.
Who knows!
Or to make the hopefully obvious point more explicitly: Given we are so utterly clueless as to why ANY THING is at all instead of NOTHING, how would you have any claim to ex ante know about how large the THING that is has to be? It feels natural to claim what you claim, but it doesn’t stand the test at all. Realize, you don’t have any informed prior about potential actual size of universe beyond what you observe, unless your observation directly suggested a sort of ‘closure’ that would make simplifying sense of observations in a sort of Occam Razor way. But the latter doesn’t seem to exist; at least people suggesting Many Worlds suggest it’s rather simpler to make sense of observations if you presume Many Worlds—judging from ongoing discussions that later claim in turn seems to be up for debate, but what’s clear: The Sheer Size Argument is rather mute in actual thinking about what the structure of the universe may or may not be.
Besides thinking that in the end most people simply don’t pay attention to this anyway, so it doesn’t matter that much whether and how he appears in live debates:
My hunch is that it’s reasonably okay to appear like that because the one thing modern people are fed up about and skeptical against, is the well thought-through professionalized elite trained to sell the bullshit in the superficially most convincing way. So maybe a person who simply is a bit more casual or cheap-fun seeming in their appearance, might not hurt. It’s an empirical question and I have no proof, of course, but if I had to bet, I’d put a substantial weight on that hypothesis.