FlorianH

Karma: 183

FlorianH 3 Nov 2023 7:15 UTC
34 points
58
in reply to: O O’s comment on: The other side of the tidal wave
I think this time is different. The implications simply so much broader, so much more fundamental.

FlorianH 4 Nov 2023 17:03 UTC
12 points
11
in reply to: Shankar Sivarajan’s comment on: The other side of the tidal wave
That’s so correct. But still so wrong—I’d like to argue.
Why?
Because replacing the brain is simply not the same as replacing just our muscles. In all the past we’ve just augmented our brain, with stronger muscle or calculation or writing power etc. using all sorts of dumb tools. But the brain remained the crucial all-central point for all action.
We will have now tools that are smarter, faster, more reliable than our brains. Probably even more empathic. Maybe more loving.
Statistics cannot be extrapolated when there’s a visible structural break. Yes, it may have been difficult to anticipate, 25 years ago, that computers that calculate so fast etc., don’t quickly change society all that fundamentally (although quite fundamentally) already, so the ‘this time is different’ guys 25 years ago were wrong. But in hindsight, it is not so surprising: As long as machines were not so truly smart, we could not change the world as fundamentally as we now foresee. But this time, we seem to be about to get the truly smart ones.
The future is a miracle, we cannot truly fathom how exactly it will look. So nothing is absolutely sure indeed. But merely looking back to the period where mainly muscles were replaceable but not brains, is simply not a way to extrapolate into the future, where something qualitatively entirely new is about to be born.
So you need sth more tangible, a more reliable to rebut the hypothesis underlying the article. And the article beautifully, concisely, explains why we’re awaiting sth rather unimaginably weird. If you have sth to show where specifically it seems wrong, it’d be great to read that.

FlorianH 23 Apr 2024 16:50 UTC
11 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 11 Jun 2021 16:17 UTC
10 points
on: Electric heat pumps (Mini-Splits) vs Natural gas boilers
Few random thoughts from an energy economist; might be of some interest to you Steven and the odd reader:
1. Your COP assumptions seem very reasonable indeed I think.
2. I’m an energy engineer & economist studying practical energy and power systems. I see bias towards heat pumps all over the world, even in places where marginal implied GHG emissions with heat pumps seem higher than when directly heating with gas.
3. Do many heat-pump people you talk about have PV panels on the roof? Given tariff asymmetries between feeding-in and drawing power locally to/from the grid, there tends to exist a strong self-consumption incentive; it can be highly lucrative to consume your PV power rather than to sell it to the grid.
4. The largest share of your home electricity tariff is often not at all the “energy” component but based on transmission costs and other fees/taxes (so what @Gerald Monroe writes is not necessarily a reason not to expect high electricity price differences)

FlorianH 13 Feb 2023 8:45 UTC
9 points
8
in reply to: Henrik Karlsson’s comment on: Childhoods of exceptional people
But I doubt highly that most of the things are of a sort that is likely to lead many to be miserable. The two who are the most miserable in the sample are Russell and Woolf who were very constrained by their guardians; Mill also seems to have taken some toll by being pushed too hard. But apart from that?
Mind the potentially strong selection bias specifically here, though. Even if in our sample of ‘extra-successful’ people there were few (or zero) who were too adversely affected, this does not specifically invalidate a possible suspicion that the base rate of creating bad outcomes from the treatment is very high—if the latter have a small chance of ever getting to fame.
(This does not mean I disagree with your conclusions in general in any way; nice post!)

FlorianH 19 Oct 2023 16:02 UTC
8 points
7
on: Is Yann LeCun strawmanning AI x-risks?
Interesting thought. From what I’ve seen from Yan LeCun, he really does seem to consider AI X risk fears mainly as pure fringe extremism; I’d be surprised if he holds back elements of the discussion just to prevent convincing people the wrong way round.
For example Youtube: Yann LeCun and Andrew Ng: Why the 6-month AI Pause is a Bad Idea shows rather clearly his straightforward worldview re AI safety, and I’d be surprised if his simple dismissal—however surprising—of everything doomsday-ish was just strategic.
(I don’t know which possibility is more annoying)

FlorianH 3 Feb 2022 8:03 UTC
7 points
on: Reflections on six months of fatherhood
Like the post a lot!
Further to
When the mere struggle for survival does not provide enough of [challenge …] [...] we invent it for ourselves: through games and sports, through travel, through storytelling, through math and science. We run races, climb mountains, compose ballads, peer through telescopes.
I think a dark side is noteworthy here too: How once all is ‘good’ in our life, we are stunningly good at finding new as-if-life-threatening problems even if from the outside we’d have judged these purest luxury issues barely worth thinking about.
Maybe it depends a bit on the personal character—some manage to create somewhat more positively looking artificial challenges of the type you mention, and maybe others hurt themselves more by ‘identifying’ the new problems & crises.

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 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 5 Dec 2023 23:07 UTC
6 points
3
on: We’re all in this together
Your strong conclusion
The people currently taking actions that increase the probability that {the former is solved first} are not evil people trying to kill everyone, they’re confused people who think that their actions are actually increasing the probability that {the latter is solved first}.
rests on a few over-simplifications associated with
Almost all of what the future contains is determined by which of the two following engineering problems is solved first:
- How to build a superintelligent AI (if solved first, everyone dies forever)
- How to build an aligned superintelligent AI (if solved first, everyone gets utopia)
For example:
- Say, I’m too old to expect aligned AI to give me eternal life (or aligned AI simply might not mean eternal life/bliss for me, for whichever reason; maybe as it’s still better to start with newborns more efficiently made into bliss-enjoying automatons or whatever utopia entails), so for me individually, the intermediate years before superintelligence are the relevant ones, so I might rationally want to earn money by working on enriching myself, whatever the (un-)alignment impact of it
- Given the public goods nature of alignment, I might fear it’s unlikely for us to cooperate, so we’ll all freeride by working to enrich ourselves working on various things rather leaning towards building unaligned AI. With such a prior, it may be rational for any self-interested person—also absent confusion—to indeed freeride: ‘hopefully I make a bit of money for an enjoyable few or many years, before unaligned AGI destroys us with near-certainty anyway’.
- Even if technical alignment was not too difficult, standard Moloch-type effects (again, all sorts of freeriding/power seeking) might mean chances of unaligned users of even otherwise ‘aligned’ technology are overwhelming, again meaning most value for most people lies in increasing their material welfare for the next few years to come, rather than ‘wasting’ their resources towards an futile alignment project.
- Assume we’re natural humans, instead of perfectly patient beings (I know, weird assumption). So you’re eating the chocolate and drinking the booze, even if you know in the longer-term future it’s a net negative for you. You need not be confused about it, you need not even be strictly irrational from today’s point of view (depending on the exact definition of the term): As you might genuinely care more about the “you” in the current and coming few days or years, than about that future self that simply doesn’t yet feel too close to you—in other words, just the way it can be rational to care a bit more about yourself than about others, you might care a bit more about your ‘current’ self than about that “you” a few decades—or an eternity—ahead. So, the near-eternal utopia might mean a lot to you, but not infinitely much. It is easy to see that then, it may well remain rational for you to use your resources towards more mundane aims of increasing your material welfare for the few intermediate years to come—given that your own potential marginal contribution to P(Alignment first) is very small (<<1).
Hence, I’m afraid, when you take into account real-world complexities, it may well be rather perfectly rational for individuals to race on towards unaligned superintelligence; you’d require more altruism rather than only more enlightenment to improve the situation. In a messy world of 8 billions in capitalistic partly-zero-sum competition (or here even partly negative-sum competition), it simply isn’t simple to get cooperation even if individuals were approximately rational and informed—even if, indeed, we are all in this together.

FlorianH 12 Oct 2023 16:52 UTC
6 points
3
on: Soulmate Fermi Estimate + My A(ltr)u[t]istic Mating Strategy
A lot of sympathy for the challenge you describe. My possibly bit half-baked views on this:
1. If you take your criteria seriously, dating sites where you can answer questions and filter according to answers might help
2. Knowing that for a marriage to work you anyway need something rather close to radical acceptance, you might simply try to put your abstract criteria a bit into perspective, and focus more on finding a partner that accepts your ways very happily rather than sharing so much of them (there is also some danger in this; maybe the truth ‘lies in the middle’: do that partly, but of course also not too generously; I guess what I mean to say is, reading your text, I get the feeling you might be erring too much on the side of strict requirements, though it’s only a spontaneous guess)
3. ‘Red hair as a serious criterion—really?‘: I think the ¹⁄₆₂₅ sounds like a reasonable candidate for spurious correlation: there is such a large number of characteristics that persons have, that two of your favorite dates sharing one of them does not say much about the relevance of that individual characteristic, statistically speaking. That said, I can believe you simply have a sort of red-hair fetish/preference, but then, I’d for sure think if things fit more generally with a person, her having the ‘right’ hair color as well seems very unlikely to be a major relevant factors for long-term happiness with her.
And good luck!!

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 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 18 Oct 2023 15:23 UTC
4 points
2
in reply to: Richard_Ngo’s comment on: ricraz’s Shortform
World champion in Chess: “It’s really weird that I’m world champion. It must be a simulation or I must dream or..”
Joe Biden: “It’s really weird I’m president, it must be a simul...”
(Donald Trump: “It really really makes no sense I’m president, it MUST be a s..”)
David Chalmers: “It’s really weird I’m providing the seminal hard problem formulation. It must be a sim..”
...
Rationalist (before finding lesswrong): “Gosh, all these people around me, really wired differently than I am. I must be in a simulation.”
Something seems funny to me in the anthropic reasoning in these examples, and in yours too.
Of course we have one world champion in chess or anything, so a reasoning that means that world champion quasi by definition question’s his champion-ness, seems odd. Then, I’d be lying if I claimed I could not intuitively empathize with his wondering about the odds of exactly him being the world champion among 9 billions.
This leads me to the following, that eventually +- satisfies me:
Hypothetically, imagine each generation has only 1 person, and there’s rebirth: it’s just a rebirth of the same person, in a different generation.
With some simplification:
1. For 10 000 generations you lived in stone-age conditions
2. For 1 generation—today—you’re the hinge-of-history generation
3. X (X being: you won’t live anymore at all as AI killed everything; or you live 1 mio generations happily, served by AI, or what have you).
The 10 000 you’s didn’t have much reason to wonder about hinge of history, and so doesn’t happen to think about it. The one you, in the hinge-of-history generation, by definition, has much reasons to think about the hinge-of-history, and does think about it.
So, it has becomes a bit like a lottery game, which you repeat so many times until you naturally once draw the winning number. At that lucky punch, there’s no reason to think “Unlikely, it’s probably a simulation”, or anything.
I have the impression in the similar way, the reincarnated guy should not wonder about it, neither when his memory is wiped each time, and in the same vein (hm, am I sloppy here? that’s the hinge of my argument) neither you have to wonder too much.

FlorianH 16 Jun 2021 0:20 UTC
4 points
on: The value of low-conscientiousness people on teams
Easy to find possible evolutionary advantages in many traits, but often a simpler story fits just as well: random imperfection & variation. Here maybe too!
Some people are much less pretty than others (say, judged by the opinion of most). Any advantage from this diversity? Straightforward explanation (although diversity-benefit stories might easily be found too): it may just be variation, despite the regularly even very large costs to those on the lower tail of the distribution. Evolution would clearly like to get it right for us, but sometimes just doesn’t hit it quite so well. When considering genetic disabilities, skin problems, or so, this would probably be even more obviously the main explanation.
In analogy to the prettiness example, it seems only natural for there to be (even quite strong) variation around that optimum along the conscientiousness axis.
Psychological character traits are in each new human very subtly impacted by re-mixed genes and by experience; that variance is relatively large need not surprise. Moreover, evolution has very messily and with limited time at disposal shaped homo sapiens’ psychology, within an ever changing social and natural environment, and with interaction effects between different traits of which I guess many may have evolved rapidly in different phases, suggesting quite different levels of conscientiousness may have been useful at different places and times overall. Even if lower variance would be attainable after many millions of years of steady evolutionary pressure on a large interconnected population, our recent past, which has shaped our modern brain, has not had anything near that*.
In sum: not so sure we need to involve a story of evolution to have purposely selected some diversity here. It’s not impossible, but the principle of parsimony suggests: a bit like for so many of our character traits, large observed variability seems plausible also without special story.
*I once called this “Ad Hoc Evolutionary Adaptation” (though I believe the concept per se is not as new as I thought back then).

FlorianH 13 May 2024 20:27 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: What you really mean when you claim to support “UBI for job automation”: Part 1
Commenting on the basis of lessons from some experience doing UBI analysis for Switzerland/Europe:
The current systems has various costs (time and money, but maybe more importantly, opportunities wasted by perverse incentives) associated with proving that you are eligible for some benefit.
On the one hand, yes, and its a key reason why NIT/UBI systems are often popular on the right; even Milton Friedman already advocated for a NIT. That said, there are also discussions that suggest the poverty trap—i.e. overwhelmingly strong labor disincentives for poor, from outrageously high effective marginal tax rates from benefits fade-out/tax kicking-in—may be partly overrated, so smoothing the earned-to-net income function may not help as much as some may hope. And, what tends to be forgotten, is that people with special needs may not be able to live purely from a UBI, so not all current social security benefit mechanisms can usually be replaced by a standard UBI.
On the other hand, once you have a conditional welfare system that does not have crazily strong/large poverty traps, labor incentives might overall still be mostly stronger than under a UBI (assumed sufficiently generous to allow a reasonable life from it), once you also take into account the high marginal tax rates required to finance that UBI. This seems to hold in even relatively rich countries (we used to calculate it for Switzerland).
Of course, with AI Joblessness all this might change anyway, in line with the underlying topic of the post here.
Plus you need to pay the people who verify all this evidence.
This tends to be overrated; when you look at the stats, this staff cost is really small compared to the total traditional social security or the UBI costs (we looked at #s in Switzerland but I can only imagine it’s exactly similar orders of magnitudes in other developed countries).

FlorianH 11 May 2024 7:20 UTC
3 points
1
in reply to: Sable’s comment on: Let’s Design A School, Part 2.2 School as Education—The Curriculum (General)
I see there might be limits to what is possible.
On the other hand, I have the impression often the limits to what the students can learn (in economics) come more from us teaching in absurdly simplified cases too remote from reality and from what’s plausible so that the entire thing we teach remains a purely abstract empty analytical beast. While I only guess even young ones are capable of understanding the more subtle mechanisms—in their few individual steps often not really complicated! - if only we taught them with enough empathy for the students & for the reality we’re trying to model.
As you write, with as little math as absolutely necessary.

FlorianH 8 May 2024 20:10 UTC
3 points
1
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 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 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.