is
Gunnar_Zarncke
Karma: 4,245
Some people will misunderstand you whatever you do. That doesn’t mean that you can’t or shouldn’t communicate more precisely with everybody else. Some people will notice.
Sounds a bit like E Prime
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime
I have used this in writing for good results. I have not tried to use it in spoken communication but I predict it to take more effort to get started there.
None of the HCQ studies listed on that page seem to have results even though at least some of them are past study completion date.
I liked the previous title—Msg Len—better, but I agree that it was maybe a bit too much ;-)
Maybe roles—or something like that—are the connecting element.
Disclaimer: I’m not too familiar with either AF or CAIS being just an LW regular.
I have been thinking about the unsolved principal-agent-problem (PAP) for quite a while. Both for theoretical reasons as a solution to the AI alignment problem as well as practically as I work as a CTO of a growing company and we have a growing number of agents that need alignment ;-)
It appears that companies have mostly found relatively reliable ways to solve the PAP in practice. Methods are taught and used by MBAs. There is no mathematical theory that explains PAP—it seems more like engineering to me. Social engineering if you want. In my own management, I want to apply evidence-based methods and I hoped to find clear proven methods. I read management advice with an eye on possible mathematical principles. I don’t claim I have found any but I am building an intuition of what it could be.
Key elements are roles and processes. You will hear that a lot that you need to have them. But what is that actually, a role? Or a process? Where does it come from? How is it established? I have established a few processes in our growing startup always wondering what I’m doing. Always trying to notice and make explicit what caused the change, noticing phase transitions in growth, how with a growing number of agents existing rules stop to work (or start to work or rather being efficient compared to the alternatives). A lot of why this works is based on common knowledge and creating it—or using it.
What does that mean for the box inversion? I tried to apply the intuitions I have built to the box inversion hypothesis. My proposal is that it could be something like roles. When an agent delegates something to a sub-agent (as in the AF) then “delegating” means expectation to conform to a role. While in the CAIS it is the other way around: A lot of participants find themselves in roles of the system and pushing against that.
Not sure any of this makes sense and for sure that is no hidden analogy to physics or something like that. Just my 2ct.
The evolution of memes only predicts successful memes to multiply, not that they become dumb. Actually, it implies many niches (in the communication network structure) where memes of certain types and specialization survive. Smarter people presumably prefer smarter memes.
My own habit is to ignore memes—I see them as low information mind candy. But your answer prompted me to discuss this with my son (16) who is consuming a lot of memes. I asked him what useful memes he knows and the ensuing discussion led to the following insights:
Memes are user-generated headlines. They give a succinct catchy summary of facts or circumstances—just without being accompanied by the actual thing they describe.
They have a very wide range of topics. And while they are often humorous, they can and do present useful and even scientific facts. Over time he has shown me quite a few of these. There were some about Elon Musk, relativistic speeds, psychological insights. I guess you can come up with nerd jokes that actually require quite a bit of background knowledge—and can prompt looking into it (see nerd sniping).
Memes can—at least in the case of my son—lead to a follow-up if they seem valuable. He gave the example of Trump and Covid-19 where he just googled the keywords and learned what the meme was about.
This will not lead me to consume more memes but I could imagine that they become part of the education or news-feed of the next generation. And not necessarily in the worst of ways.
of all these projects, running ads on Y seems like it would increase our profits the most.
In companies, you could call this measurement neglect. VCs often push startups to measure more. The C level may know and want it. But there are indeed often more immediate things that occupy everybody.
I think it would be super valuable to be able to quantify the effect. Are there stats on the amount of measurement a company does to its success?
I looked at two major channels on our Slack. The general channel and the main developer channel. The former is more social the latter more formal as you can see from the stats (the categories I tracked were the same):
#general:
up-vote (multiple kinds): 60
food: 17
social (graces and teams): 11
smileys: 12
custom (mostly company-specific): 37
insights:
lightbulb: 1
exclamation mark: 1
question mark: 0
trend (up/down): 4
checkmark: 1
other: 24
dev channel:
up-vote (multiple kinds): 62
food: 0
social (graces and teams): 1
smileys: 0
custom (mostly company-specific): 1
insights:
lightbulb: 6
exclamation mark: 1
question mark: 2
trend (up/down): 0
checkmark: 12
other: 15
Based on this sample I would say if custom reactions are not implemented the most valuable reactions are those under ‘insights’:
lightbulb: is used for surprising or insightful information
exclamation mark: is used to warn about something that requires attention
question mark: flags open questions that should be answered
trend (up/down): information about a general positive/negative trend
checkmark: Different from an up-vote; indicates that something was completed and does not need further attention
Has anybody looked at what icons are actually used regularly on the Slacks they are on? Slack allows custom emoticons and the LW Slack has some for agreement and such. Unfortunately, I am no longer on the two LW Slack that I know of but somebody else might look up which are used frequently. I will look at our company Slack though. Would be nice if there were an add-on out there that makes it easy to get an emoticon usage report. Anybody heard of such a thing?
Thank you for the update.
Any news about treatments and prophylacticals?
For what it is worth: We have cycled thru used cars pretty quickly. I think we had six cars from before the first was born to after the fourth (and last) was born. Since then the car has been the same (a used Renault Espace 7 seats, all back seats removable).
Linkpost: Choice Explains Positivity and Confirmation Bias
For those interested, here is a more accessible explanation of the paper on unsupervised translation with monoligual corpora:
https://yashuseth.blog/2019/03/03/how-can-unsupervised-neural-machine-translation-work/
Making bets is good exercise too. If you can’t find other people to bet with you can also make public predictions.
I was fascinated by Robin Hanson’s Our Brave New Merged World:
As jobs will less force people to move, people will move areas less often, and the areas where people live will be less set by jobs. As life at work will be less social, people will have to get more of their socializing from elsewhere. Some of this will come from remote socializing, but much will still probably come from in-person socializing. So people will choose where they live more based on family, friends, leisure activities, and non-work social connections. Churches, clubs, and shared interest socializing will increase in importance. People will also pick where to live more based on climate, price, and views. Beach towns will boom, and the largest cities will lose. [emphasis mine]
He mostly seems to consider remote work versus non-work social connections. Global online communities are both like work and like non-work. I am not sure what to make out of it. But I guess the tensions that mingyuan points out are exactly those that occur in such a brave new merged world. I would guess that the solution is not a single place X. I would guess it is rather multiple places that are connected by something that doesn’t yet exist.
This is super cool. I always wanted a programming language that would track error bounds for me. So when I write $F = m*a$ and I have an $m = 100\pm 1kg$ and and $a = 9\pm 1m/s^2$ it would track this in calculations and let me extract the propagated bounds like $F.max$. I had only uniform and Gauss distributions in minds but allowing arbitrary distributions is of course way more powerful. Also less efficient but I guess many common cases could be optimized.
I like the metaphor. I agree that pressing the Try-Harder-Button is not going to help. But I want to offer the readers another way out too.
You write (and I agree):
Imagine it’s 2 weeks from now, and you never got round to doing the task. Are you surprised that this happened? Often my intuitions are well-calibrated when I phrase the question like this—on some level I know that I procrastinate on things and forget them all the time.
Following one or more of the points on your list is a way to avoid the surprise. But there is another one, and you might want to have it in your toolkit: Accept that things will slip. Yes, really. Some things will not get done, and that is OK. At least it can be OK for you. If it happens, you will not be surprised and not feel guilt.
You should use this if your problem is more that you really have more things on your plate than you can manage. Clearly it is difficult to be well-calibrated on it. It is a good tool to have though.
I think something like Neuralink is needed to make AGI workable for humans. Otherwise we are just there. Tools, services and assistants are not natural enough.
See my old post here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TbFMq8XkJAYa3EELw/when-does-technological-enhancement-feel-natural-and
The universe is not actually infinite.
And even if it were, there could be other things out there that could stop an FAI.
And even if there are not, people could still choose to die with a certain probability over time that leads to a finite average.
And even if not it could turn out that we might want to value life years lived with a subjective weight that falls over time causing the average to be finite.