Theoretical AI alignment (and relevant upskilling) in my free time.
Heather A. Cam
Karma: 2,108
RETRACED (see Guive’s reply below)
Consider Evacuating from NYC
Obligatory sentence on how weird this is.
As you know, Middle Eastern countries are fighting again. One of them, Israel, is alleged to have the Samson Option in their back pocket: If Israel is existentially threatened in some way, its nuclear weapons will spread the pain to more cities.
New York City, of course, has a large rationalist community, clustered in Overcoming Bias NYC. It also has a large Jewish diaspora population, which is notably culturally different from Israel’s population. (Please keep the comments extra-civil here.)
What I’m saying is, conditional on Samson, NYC may be targeted.
(I may write a longer better-evidenced version of this, actually if you reply asking an obvious question, that may lead me to reply with explanations I use in the full post. Also the full post would be like “Consider Evacuating from large/capital cities in general”, just mentioning NYC because it’s my closest seemingly-likely-nuke-target city.)
Am up to hear what y’all’s cruxes/flinches-away are about this, so I can have my mind changed and/or edit for broader LW audience.
There’s a conspiracybrained answer that “they’re pushing down the futures”, but like… who? With what money?
However, there’s also a mass-human-ignorance answer that “the traders put more stock in the Trump Iran Deal Imminent press release cycle than they should”.
Or like, maybe they expect a bloody ground invasion to restore Hormuz and production capacity… that also wraps up everything within a year?
Am interested in others’ thoughts here (possible leading-indicators to look for, alternative hypotheses, etc), that’s what this thread is for!
Yep. I also wonder what (if any) kinds of short-term signals we may be able to see ahead of time on the relative strengths of these factors. Or, I guess, the economic/political “price-to-pay” factor is easy to measure, but “what kind of offers are the oil execs making him back there?” is hard to measure.
My crux here would be “Imagine whoever’s in charge of (keeping oil broadly available within the nation, with export controls). Do they have the motivation (or, uh, the Revealed amount of strategic foresight) to do this? Or might they know-a-guy who could get richer by selling more-expensive oil to fewer people?” (See comments on that 2nd link, for more discussion of the obvious and less-obvious nuances.)
Note: this is listed on LW as a global event, meaning I keep getting notified for it despite the event being in-person (not online) and far away from me. Please fix!
One key question to model: How long until certain operational minimums are tripped in the US? (Explanation: Refineries and other facilities can’t run with a too-small nonzero amount of oil.)
How do I post a new Question again? Like specifically tagged as a Question, rather than a shortform or blogpost
To me this is an even bigger good-reason-for people to move to less-corporate-controlled hardware and software. (I’m wondering how e-waste will be treated if shipping slows from the oil thing...)
EA global, like many other effective altruism branded “networking events”, is (at least in my head) the losers’ bracket of the effective altruism job market.
Can… uh… at least partly confirm 🙃
Can confirm that cultural messaging around drugs made me delay useful mental health treatment.
(Some) left straw-view: Meds are a way for The System to enslave you and destroy your creativity/individuality/humanity.
(Some) libertarian straw-view: You’re a strong smart Galt-like ubermensch already, why would you need drugs as a crutch?
Conservative depressingly-common view: All this is fake, mental health is fake, you’re just a whiny pussy who can’t handle real life, bootstrap yourself.
All these views intersected into a rarely-explicit “I don’t need medicine for my brain!” that hampered my life trajectory.
Then again, drug effects can have complex interactions with one’s thinking, so who knows? Maybe I would’ve been more productive in high school and gotten into a better college… and then proceeded to work on the wrong things! (This is what some rationalists think happened with rats/EA as a whole, or OpenPhil, or therabouts something something moderation vs extremism yadda yadda)
I think lots of humans are also just starved for compliments in general, outside of contexts like “You are a waiter and the social script tells the table to thank you” or “You are someone’s spouse”. The classic example in my mind is “male vs female socialization” and its consequences, e.g. as discussed in this screenshotted tumblr post or this other one. Men often, in some sense, get “too few” wanted compliments, and women get inundated with too many unwanted ones. “It’s like one person dying of dehydration watching another one drown”. Then, of course, classic nightmarish social/cultural/internet incentives layer atop this dynamic and make it worse.
Widespread chronic human under-complimented-ness seems relatively easy to explain, from the supply-side. How often does the average person hand out unsolicited compliments, outside of well-known contexts like the restaurant example above? I’d hazard a guess of “too little”. People could easily be “well-put-together” and still suffering from this, just as “feeling full” and “having proper nutrition” aren’t the same.
I’m curious to see if I’m in this data, so I can help make it more accurate by providing info.
From the MIRI announcement:
Our big ask for you is: If you have any way to help this book do shockingly, absurdly well— in ways that prompt a serious and sober response from the world — then now is the time.
sober response from the world
sober response
Uh… this is debatably a lot to ask of the world right now.
Something else I just realized: Georgism is a leftish idea that recognizes some (but not all) leftish ideas I’ve discussed or referenced above, and its modern form is currently rationalist-adjacent. Progress!
Ah, sorry yeah I think it was a mistake on my part to mostly make the post a verbatim Discord reply. Lots of high-context stuff that I didn’t explain well.
This specific part is (in my usage/interpretation; if you click the link, the initial context was an Emmett Shear tweet) basically a shorthand for one or more “basic” leftist views, along the lines of these similar-but-somewhat-distinct claims:
Capitalism more-reliably rewards power-maximizers than social-utility-maximizers.
Under capitalism and similar incentive-structures, we’d expect conflict theory to predict entities’ wealth better than mistake theory.
General outcomes, under capitalism and similar incentive-structures, are downstream of “brute power” (from guns to monopolies) far more than the things we’d “want” to reward (innovation, good service, helping people, etc).
In hindsight, I over-updated on my previous success with a poorly-written angry short post with a clickbait title and lots of inline links criticizing the rationality community. Oops.
I said “one of the best movies about”, not “one of the best movies showing you how to”.
The punchline is “alignment could productively use more funding”. Many of us already know that, but I felt like putting a mildly-opinionated spin on what kind of things, at the margin, may help top researchers. (Also I spent several minutes editing/hedging the joke)
E.g. in the full post I’d add a “for those who can’t evacuate” section. For NYC in particular, my best informed-non-leaving advice would be “hide in the subway tunnels”. Obviously global tier-1 cities have different configurations here, and I don’t know a ton about most of them.