This is not true. Some people are significantly less robust to the effects of psychedelics. Even a meditation retreat was enough to make me go off the rails— I would never take psychedelics. But some people can’t feel anything at those retreats and seem like psychedelics just open them up a bit. The same predispositions that lead people to develop schizophrenia and bipolar make them vulnerable to destabilization from psychedelics.
Holly_Elmore
Karma: 982
TOMORROW: the largest AI Safety protest ever!
Instead of “I’m anxious,” try “I feel threatened”
Protest against Meta’s irreversible proliferation (Sept 29, San Francisco)
Virtue signaling is sometimes the best or the only metric we have
For years, I’ve been worried that we were doomed to die by misaligned AGI because alignment wasn’t happening fast enough or maybe because it wouldn’t work at all. Since I didn’t have the chops to do technical alignment and I didn’t think there was another option, I was living my life for the worlds where disaster didn’t happen (or hadn’t happened yet) and trying to make them better places. The advent of AI Pause as an option— something the public and government might actually hear and act on— has been extremely hopeful for me. I’ve quit my job in animal welfare to devote myself to it.
So I’m confused by the reticence I’m seeing toward Pause from people who, this time last year, were reconciling themselves to “dying with dignity”. Some people think the Pause would somehow accelerate capabilities or make gains on capabilities, which at least make sense to me as a reason not to support it. But I’ve gotten responses that make no sense to me like “every day we wait to make AGI, more galaxies are out of our reach forever”. More than one person has said to me that they are worried that “AGI will never get built” if a pause is successful. (For the record I think is is very unlikely that humanity will not eventually make AGI at this point unless another catastrophe sets back civilization.) This is sometimes coming from the same people who were mourning our species’ extinction as just a matter of time before the Pause option arose. I keep hearing comparisons to nuclear power and ridicule of people who were overcautious about new technology.
What gives? If you’re not excited about Pause, can you tell me why?
I feel you so much on depersonalization seeming super awesome until you realize you’re cut off from life itself in many ways. I’m still mad how much the outside world seems to appreciate when you’re half-dead inside...
If you found yourself interested in advocacy, the largest AI Safety protest ever is happening Saturday, October 21st!
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/abBtKF857Ejsgg9ab/tomorrow-the-largest-ai-safety-protest-ever
As someone who fatefully discovered dissociation/depersonalization/derealization (https://mhollyelmoreblog.wordpress.com/2016/06/25/dissociation/) around 10 only to have shit hit the fan in my 20s, I think I can articulate what’s lost when you lose touch with emotions. At first it feels great to ride above the pain, for me social pain in particular, and only come back down when it’s safe, like at home with my family. But eventually you can’t come back down to experience even essential things like interest, excitement, most of all love and connection. I feel that I was slowly bleeding out the entire time I was away from my body, never fully replenishing what was lost, and after years I was just empty and shriveled. I had my first real depression at the end of college and I felt mostly numb but also miserable and heavy. There was a deep sense of loss for I didn’t know what. Now I know what I was craving was a sense of being embodied, of feeling real and being connected to the world.
Healing sucks immensely because years of dissociating from emotion makes them very intense and when you come back and your coping skills extremely weak. But coming back to your body and your feelings is really the only way to come back to life. Being estranged from them is actively rejecting the reality of your experience and dividing yourself. It’s the autoimmune disease of the soul. Someone who’s checked out of a major part of their experience is not only missing the experience, but engaged in a civil war to keep it that way. You may be safe from barbed emotions when you’re dissociated, but eventually you’re not able to rest even in your own experience. It’s a torture that’s difficult to describe to someone who hasn’t experienced it to understand but I hope I’ve given some insight.
My problem is less internal confusion about pain equaling effort and more of a need to credibly perform painful effort to others. I fear that if I’m happy and relaxed and don’t perform well, it will seem as though I didn’t care about my collaborators or that I cavalierly stole my employer’s money. On the flip side, I seem to think that I can purchase the right to be lazy/not expose myself to criticism by making myself suffer— conspicuously, so those to whom I am responsible see it.
I don’t think my fears of not suffering when I’m “supposed to” are entirely baseless. When your boss thinks pain is the unit of effort, it’s at the very least your unit of evaluation. But I think most of that is in my head, and that I superstitiously believe the pain of effort and self-flagellation can protect me from the pain of judgment.
Yeah, it felt like Eliezer was rounding off all of the bad faith in the post to this one stylistic/etiquette breach, but he didn’t properly formulate the one rule that was supposedly violated.
I think if rationalists are interested in Buddhism as part of their quest to find truth, they should know that it has, at the very least, deathist origins.
Strongest upvote. My life story is very similar— what I thought was just discipline totally handling my emotional and personality issues was actually an internally (and sometimes outwardly) abusive system that imploded after enough major life stressors.
I’ve written about the self-righteousness and judgment that came ultimately from not respecting my own vulnerabilities and needs here:
https://mhollyelmoreblog.wordpress.com/2018/12/06/self-righteousness-imo/
My model there is that I had a strong internal critic that I thought was protecting me from sucking and being unlovable. I liked to turn that critic on others (self-righteousness) because it gave me a break and made me feel safe, like at least I was better than them. But the real problem was how overpowered the critic was and that it had access to my feelings of self-love and self-acceptance at all.
You could share the events with your friends and family who may be near, and signal boost media coverage of the events after! If you want to donate to keep me organizing events, I have a GoFundMe (and if anyone wants to give a larger amount, I’m happy to talk about how to do that :D). If you want to organize future events yourself, please DM me. Even putting the pause emoji ⏸️ in your twitter name helps :)
Here are the participating cities and links:
October 21st (Saturday), in multiple countries
I think there are less extreme positions here. Like “competent adults can make their own decisions, but they can’t if they become too addicted to certain substances.” I do think manipulation by others can rise to the level of drugs and is an exceptional case, not proof that a lot of people are fundamentally incapable of being free.
Would it be acceptable to regard practices like self-reflective tarot and circling and other woo-adjacent stuff as art rather than an attempt at rationality? I think it is a danger sign when people are claiming those highly introspective and personal activities as part of their aspiring to rationality. Can we just do art and personal emotional and creative discovery and not claim that it’s directly part of the rationalist project?
Thank you for writing this so there’s common knowledge that it’s okay to write this way on LW, or that it would be okay with the many upvoters. I certainly got the feeling that posts have to be well-researched dissertations or persuasive arguments on here sometimes.
I agree with your assessment of the situation a lot, but I disagree that there is all that much controversy about this issue in the broader public. There is a lot of controversy on lesswrong, and in tech, but the public as a whole is in favor of slowing down and regulating AI developments. (Although other AI companies think sharing weights is really irresponsible and there are anti-competitive issues with llama 2’s ToS, which why it isn’t actually open source.) https://theaipi.org/poll-shows-overwhelming-concern-about-risks-from-ai-as-new-institute-launches-to-understand-public-opinion-and-advocate-for-responsible-ai-policies/
The public doesn’t understand the risks of sharing model weights so getting media attention to this issue will be helpful.
But one thing that has completely surprised me is that these LLMs and other systems like them are all feed-forward. It’s like the firing of the neurons is going only in one direction. And I would never have thought that deep thinking could come out of a network that only goes in one direction, out of firing neurons in only one direction. And that doesn’t make sense to me, but that just shows that I’m naive.
What was the argument that being feed-forward limited the potential for deep thought in principle? It makes sense that multi-directional nets could do more with fewer neurons but Hofstader seemed to think there were things that feed-forward system fundamentally couldn’t do.
Western Buddhism tends to be more of a bag of wellness tricks than a religion, but it’s worth sharing that Buddhism proper is anti-life. It came out of a Hindu obsession with ending the cycle of reincarnation. Nirvana means “cessation.” The whole idea of meditation is to become tolerant of signals to action so you can let them pass without doing the things that replicate them or, ultimately, propagate any life-like process. Karma is described as a giant wheel that powers reincarnation and gains momentum whenever you act unconsciously. The goal is for the wheel to stop moving and the way is to unlearn your habit of kicking it. When the Buddha became enlightened under the Bodhi tree, it wasn’t actually complete enlightenment. He was “enlightened with residues”— he stopped making new karma but he was still burning off old karma. He achieved actual cessation when he died. To be straight up enlightened, you stop living. The whole project of enlightenment is to end life.
It’s a sinister and empty philosophy, IMO. A lot of the insights and tools are great but the thrust of (at least Theravada) Buddhism is my enemy.