frontier64(weir)

Karma: 368

frontier64 23 Nov 2023 3:54 UTC
8 points
−9
in reply to: aphyer’s comment on: OpenAI: The Battle of the Board
This comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of how OpenAI and most companies operate. The board is a check on power. In most companies they will have to approve of high level decisions: moving to a new office space or closing a new acquisition. But they have 0 day to day control. If they tell the CEO to fire these 10 people and he doesn’t do it, that’s it. They can’t do it themselves, they can’t tell the CEO’s underlings to do it. They have 0 options besides getting a new CEO. OpenAI’s board had less control even than this.

Tweeting “Altman is not following our directions and we don’t want to fire him, but we really want him to start doing what we ask” is a sure fire way to collapse your company and make you sound like a bunch of incompetent buffoons. It’s admitting that you won’t use the one tool that you actually do have. I’m certain the board threatened to fire Sam before this unless he made X changes. I’m certain Sam never made all of those X changes. Therefore they can either follow through on their threat or lose. Turns out following through on their threat was meaningless because Sam owns OpenAI both with tacit power and the corporate structure.

frontier64 16 Nov 2023 22:10 UTC
3 points
1
in reply to: Dan Weinand’s comment on: Loudly Give Up, Don’t Quietly Fade
It’s about asking the right questions to get the right info. I feel like your example actually disproves your point. In my perspective asking for someone’s top 5 movies of the year is going to much more accurately predict if they liked Oppenheimer than asking if they liked Oppenheimer directly. The direct question will imply that you have some interest in Oppenheimer and are probably expecting them to either like it or at least have a strong opinion of it. Their inference will then affect the accuracy of their answer.

There haven’t been many good movies released in 2023 so if someone doesn’t include Oppenheimer in their top 5 list then they probably didn’t like the movie and you know your question didn’t bias them towards any particular opinion.

frontier64 8 Nov 2023 22:15 UTC
−5 points
−2
on: What is democracy for?
Any scrutiny of the misleading Facebook ads that presumably swayed voters was quickly shut down, by the argument that it was somehow patronising to suggest that voters had been led astray.
You’re referring to these ads? The scrutiny was shut down because these ads aren’t misleading. The UK did, and continued to, send the EU £350 million a week.
But that’s just you and me disagreeing. How do we determine the truth? Are the ads actually misleading and I’m wrong? Who says what’s correct and what’s incorrect?
I agree very much with the instrumentalist view of democracy. However, your suggestions for independent overseers is generically naive. The corruption in the government most clearly comes from the un-elected, ostensibly independent government employees who remain throughout multiple changes of the elected leaders. The point is that any supposedly independent group is either A) not going to have much skin in the game and won’t care; or B) going to be controlled by shady interest groups regardless of their stated independence.
You said that, “a diverse panel of the world’s top economists unanimously agreed that the gold standard is a bad idea.” Ok, be that as it may, Ludwig Mises, one of the most famous economists in history was in favor of the gold standard, as well as many other famous economists including multiple federal reserve chairmen. Does that make your comment wrong? No, but these sorts of decisions matter and there’s no way to pick an impartial arbiter so just letting everybody have a say is the next best thing.

frontier64 6 Nov 2023 19:46 UTC
6 points
0
in reply to: lc’s comment on: Does bulemia work?
In my experience the best way to sate hunger is to have multiple gallon jugs of water lying around and drinking too much water when you feel hungry. I know this is a little off topic, but it’s likely a better solution than bulimia.

I have a family member who used to vomit daily. I never noticed any negative effects on him from it, apart from the rapid weight loss; which I guess is the point. I guess the general disgust other people felt around him when he went off to go throw up was a pretty negative effect. Also his weight loss looked unhealthy. He had twig arms, still had a lot of stomach fat, and was generally much more irritable than usual.

frontier64 6 Nov 2023 19:40 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: M. Y. Zuo’s comment on: The 6D effect: When companies take risks, one email can be very powerful.
He might be thinking of whistleblower protections? But really, I’ve done a bit of research into this just now and I don’t see any legal protections for not following company policy on e-mails. I would err on side of listen to company policy unless you want to get fired.

frontier64 6 Nov 2023 19:07 UTC
3 points
2
in reply to: AnthonyC’s comment on: The 6D effect: When companies take risks, one email can be very powerful.
There’s rules about discovery that definitely make the auto-delete practices helpful. Deleting suspicious records based on their content is fraudulent and can land you in jail or with bigger damages if you’re ever caught. But having a standard policy of deleting all messages after X amount of days is protected until you have positive knowledge that there’s impending litigation.

frontier64 6 Nov 2023 19:04 UTC
1 point
−2
in reply to: CronoDAS’s comment on: The 6D effect: When companies take risks, one email can be very powerful.
I agree. I further recommend sticking to in person unless you have no reason to believe that your calls are automatically recorded or being tapped. Records of WHO you called are pretty easy to get too so if you have a history of only 1 call per week with your engineering team but all of a sudden have 20 calls with them in one day right after knowledge of a big incident occurred that can be used against you.

frontier64 4 Nov 2023 21:16 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: interstice’s comment on: Saying the quiet part out loud: trading off x-risk for personal immortality

Also I don’t see why you think cryonics doesn’t make sense as alternative option.

I was responding to this point. The “cryonics is better than nothing” argument doesn’t make cryonics an alternative option to immortality by friendly AI. If Bob thinks cryonics has a 10% chance of making him immortal and thinks AI will have a 20% chance of making him immortal and an 80% chance of destroying the world, then the superhuman AI route is more likely to lead to Bob’s immortality than cryonics.

frontier64 3 Nov 2023 21:39 UTC
1 point
0
on: Saying the quiet part out loud: trading off x-risk for personal immortality
I think a lot of people haven’t fully considered how amazing immortality is. Your 7th observation is probably very accurate too. Socially sophisticated people want others to believe they’re fighting for the greater good rather than their own self interest. That doesn’t mean they’re necessarily lying.

frontier64 3 Nov 2023 20:00 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Insub’s comment on: Saying the quiet part out loud: trading off x-risk for personal immortality
I think the point of the statement is: wait until the probability of you dying before you next get an opportunity to push the button is > 1-P then push the button.

frontier64 3 Nov 2023 19:43 UTC
2 points
2
in reply to: interstice’s comment on: Saying the quiet part out loud: trading off x-risk for personal immortality
If you think cryonics has a very high likelihood of working then sure. I don’t think the arguments that cryonics is likely to work are that good though. I don’t think Eliezer has even made arguments to that effect. They were mostly “hey doing cryonics is better than not doing it because not doing cryonics is just death!”

frontier64 12 Oct 2023 2:23 UTC
−29 points
−36
in reply to: shminux’s comment on: Sam Altman’s sister, Annie Altman, says Sam has (severely) abused her
My theory is that after FTX money dried up, admins have decided to take advantage of LessWrong’s popularity in AI safety circles and run a discreet blackmail operation. It started with the post about the disgruntled ex-employees of the weird world-touring office company. That was the test and first warning shot: “Donate to us or we’ll make sure there’s popular LW posts that ruin your reputation.” There were a few AI celebrities who got the message and donated to Lightcone. Those with less cunning however failed to donate in a timely fashion. Thus we’re now seeing a string of posts lampooning their characters and attempting to cancel them.

I think there is a nonzero probability that this theory is true, in whole or in part, and thus believe my claims ought to receive greater attention and further investigation.

frontier64 11 Oct 2023 15:27 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: jsteinhardt’s comment on: Related Discussion from Thomas Kwa’s MIRI Research Experience

If Nate yells at a staff member, that staff member no longer does ops work for Nate

Has anyone claimed at this point that Nate yelled at them?

frontier64 11 Oct 2023 14:16 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Yonatan Cale’s comment on: I’m a Former Israeli Officer. AMA
Why would you have less confidence that many Palestinians want to kill Israelis when the stated goal of their government is to wipe out all Jews? At least publicly, the Israeli government does not have a policy of wiping out all Arabs.

frontier64 1 Oct 2023 15:42 UTC
10 points
−2
in reply to: Erich_Grunewald’s comment on: EA Vegan Advocacy is not truthseeking, and it’s everyone’s problem
e.g. 12 (ETA: 14) bees are worth 1 human

This is a misrepresentation of what the report says.

The report:

Instead, we’re usually comparing either improving animal welfare (welfare reforms) or preventing animals from coming into existence (diet change → reduction in production levels) with improving human welfare or saving human lives.

I don’t think he’s misrepresenting what the report says at all. Trevor gets the central point of the post perfectly. The post’s response to the heading “So you’re saying that one person = ~three chickens?” is, no, that’s just the year to year of life comparison, chickens have shorter lives than humans so the life-to-life comparison is more like ¹⁄₁₆. Absolutely insane. From the post:

Then, humans have, on average, 16x this animal’s capacity for welfare; equivalently, its capacity for welfare is 0.0625x a human’s capacity for welfare.

And elsewhere people say that capacity for welfare is how one should do cause prioritization. So the simple conclusion is one human life = 16 chicken lives. The organization is literally called “Rethinking Priorities” i.e. stop prioritizing humans so much and accept all our unintuitive, mostly guess-based math that we use to argue how animal welfare can trump your own welfare. The post uses more words than that sure but tradeoffs between animal and human lives is the central point of the post and really the whole sequence. If I sound angry it’s because I am. Saying that a human life is comparable to a certain number of animal lives is very close to pure evil on top of being insane.

You further say:

The report says that, conditional on hedonism, valence symmetry, the animals being sentient, and other assumptions, the intensity of positive/negative valence that a bee can experience is 7% that of the positive/negative intensity that a human can experience.

And no, the report really doesn’t say that. The report says that somehow, people should still mostly accept Rethinking Priotities’ conclusions even if they disagree with the assumptions:

“I don’t share this project’s assumptions. Can’t I just ignore the results?” We don’t think so. First, if unitarianism is false, then it would be reasonable to discount our estimates by some factor or other. However, the alternative—hierarchicalism, according to which some kinds of welfare matter more than others or some individuals’ welfare matters more than others’ welfare—is very hard to defend. (

Second, and as we’ve argued, rejecting hedonism might lead you to reduce our non-human animal estimates by ~⅔, but not by much more than that.

So, skepticism about sentience might lead you to discount our estimates, but probably by fairly modest rates.

In response to someone commenting in part:

saving human lives is net positive

The post author’s reply is:

This is a very interesting result; thanks for sharing it. I’ve heard of others reaching the same conclusion, though I haven’t seen their models. If you’re willing, I’d love to see the calculations. But no pressure at all.

My takeaway from the whole thing is that you’re running a motte and bailey where
- Motte = We’re just doing an analysis of the range of positive to negative experience that animals can feel as compared to a human
- Bailey = We’re doing the above and also range of positive to negative experience is how we should decide allocation of resources between species.

frontier64 28 Sep 2023 4:50 UTC
1 point
0
on: Petrov Day Retrospective, 2023 (re: the most important virtue of Petrov Day & unilaterally promoting it)
This was fun thank you!

There must be a hiccup in the data because you show < 30 total group b pickers in the first chart, but say there are 40 group b pickers in the “unilaterally make your virtue the focus” chart.

frontier64 27 Sep 2023 16:03 UTC
3 points
in reply to: lc’s comment on: lc’s Shortform
Theft of any amount over a hundred or so dollars is evil and needs to be punished. Let’s say you punish theft of $100 by a weekend in jail. Extrapolate that on a linear scale and you’ll have criminals who non-violently stole $20,000 doing more than double the jail time that a criminal who cold-cocked a stranger and broke his jaw would get. Doesn’t really make sense.

frontier64 27 Sep 2023 15:46 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Ruby’s comment on: Ruby’s Shortform Feed
I got it both messages. Only clicked on the first. I guess other admins besides you were working on this and didn’t say anything to you?

frontier64 26 Sep 2023 16:11 UTC
3 points
0
on: Open Thread – Autumn 2023
What are the odds that there is a more secretive Petrov day event going on LW today?

frontier64 25 Sep 2023 19:44 UTC
2 points
0
on: “X distracts from Y” as a thinly-disguised fight over group status / politics
I don’t think you really explain why section 3 doesn’t mean that the two AI risk theories are in fact competing for public attention. You kind of bring it up, explain how it creates tension between AI killeveryoneism and AI misuse, say it’s kind of bad, and then move on. I don’t see anything explaining away the effect that your group status theory has. You explain why it’s kind of of morally annoying, but you don’t explain why either AI killeveryone-ists or AI misuse-ists should stop competing against each other for public attention .