Given that you take away that implication as well as others, I think I worded this in a way that makes it seem like I think there’s actually-in-reality some kind of “soul lottery”, when I agree that it is a thought experiment. I recently became aware of Peter Singer’s “Point of view of the universe” which, from my brief contact with the idea, gets at what I was trying to say here better than I did.
HoVY
Karma: 40
I agree with them, and for me I very rarely get sick or fevers, and when I do they’re usually pretty minor, so I wouldn’t click on something about fevers. But I am really interested in ways to improve sleep, as well as discussion on amino acids and which are essential and which are “less essential”
I think “if you disagree even after we hash out our differences, you can just not help” is pretty good and reasonable, and imo the level of alarm and worry I read in this post is not really warranted by the current constitution quotes. If the constitution said “if you disagree after we hash out our differences you can actively work against us” then I would totally agree with this essay, but allowing ai to be a conscientious objector seems fine to me. It’s not stopping you, you might just have to do what you want the hard way.
Scenario A: your friend gets $10
Scenario B: 89% odds your friend gets $10, 10% odds they get dollars50 (lesswrong fucks the formatting if I use another dollar sign on this line for some reason. I’m on mobile and don’t see an option to change any formatting settings), 1% odds they get nothing
Scenario C: 11% odds your friend gets $10, 89% odds they get nothing
Scenario D: 10% odds your friend gets $50, 90% odds they get nothing
I pick B and D in these, because if my friend gets nothing in any of those scenarios it doesn’t matter. I think it really is an issue where once the guaranteed value in A gets past a certain point, almost any odds of losing it become intolerable. Maybe human values aren’t linear?
edit: and if it’s a well-funded-but-not-saturated charity, I pick B and D too, although if we’re talking about a million and 5 million it’s a tough call.
A potential reframe: certainty has a lot of value. I would not pay $10 for a plane ticket with 10% odds that I actually get to go to the place, because I can’t plan around that effectively, even if the expected value is the same as a ticket that costs dollars100 and takes me with ~100% certainty
One-boxing does not violate “common sense best option”. More people would one box than would two box (although it’s pretty close to 50⁄50). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ol18JoeXlVI in the steelman for one boxing the math is favored by an expected utility approach anyways, as long as you think the genie has >50% probability of predicting you correctly. Plus, if two boxing is common sense, why ain’tcha rich?
For what it’s worth, I’d still pick A over B and D over C with that change. I think I kinda compress C and D to “the charity is pretty much not gonna get any money, but on the off chance it does, might as well make it 5x more” but with A and B I still would rather they be able to work with a million rather than risk not getting anything, even if B can be compressed to “they pretty much get a lot of money, with an off chance of 5x, and a fluke chance of nothing”.
I think it might be more a question of how bad is it to not get anything? If the charity was already well funded, maybe even so funded they don’t know what to do with all the money they already have, I’d pick B and D. Likewise if I was a billionaire in the original question, I’d pick B and D. But I’m not and the charity I had in mind is not super well funded, so the cost of no money is too high when comparing A and B.
If you like this you might also like planecrash https://glowfic.com/posts/4582
Watching Okja was a key part of me realizing how important animal rights are.
Knowing at the back of my mind that factory is farming is bad? I sleep
Watching a cgi mythical pig-like creature go through it? Real shit (aka look into things more and get a deeper understanding of the truth, inspect my values, then act accordingly)
As a nonaccomodationist vegan (who hasn’t heard that term before. It probably applies to me but there are plain readings of it which wouldn’t), I think you’re right that we do tend to be crazier. It’s a fringe view, and people get there for a whole host of reasons, many of which come with “baggage” in some form or other. Many have trauma which impacts them deeply in a lot of ways, some healthy (intolerance of harm), some unhealthy (see all the negative side effects of trauma). Others are simply contrarians who like being edgy or fringe. Others are looking for some extreme with which to view the world where they’re the hero/”good guy” and everyone else is evil. Those are the main crazy nonaccomodationist vegan archetypes I’ve seen and unpacked, but I’m sure there are others.
That doesn’t make it ok to exploit animals though.
Note that the reference is specifically in regards to older patients and for diagnosing a specific form of “crazy”. Does it generalize to all forms of “crazy”? I don’t know, I haven’t looked into it at all. I just was curious and wanted to read the citation, and thought it was worth noting.
From the conclusion: “Disorientation to time is a useful guide to the presence and severity of dementia or delirium in older hospital patients.”
“I was rolling my eyes about how they’d now found a new way of being the story’s subject”
That reads to me like it’s still rolling eyes at a status overreach, just a slightly different one than the one most people would roll their eyes at
Unfortunately I don’t have a super fleshed out perspective on this, and I stopped reading after looking at the causal graph so I could be totally missing something important (although I did skim the rest and search for the text “influen” to find things related to this thought). I know that’s not the best way to engage, feel free to downvote, take this with a grain of salt, and sorry in general for a lower effort comment.
The step in the graph from “I get higher reward on this training episode” → “I have influence through deployment” doesn’t really sit right with me. Is it only true for the final model (or few models) that actually get selected and deployed? It gives me a vibe from neutral connotation, to something with a more negative connotation. It definitely seems like one possible outcome from the selection process, but for some reason it just sits weird in my head and sounds to me like something someone who already thinks AI is going to turn power seeking would come up with even though it’s kind of a jump. I wish I could articulate this better, but I’m not trying to spend a ton of time teasing out my thoughts, I wasn’t gonna comment but I didn’t see anyone else saying something along these lines and it seemed worth putting it out there.
Obviously I could well be wrong, or missed something obvious, or I’m just biased the other way towards “llms are not that malicious”, but idk it just gave me a tiny note of discord
I haven’t read this yet, but the general idea reminds me of the living fossils https://thelivingfossils.substack.com/p/the-fossil-record-so-far
I didn’t know there was (going to be?) an epilogue to planecrash, but it didn’t leave me nearly as thirsty for more as hpmor did. With hpmor, I wanted to see what everyone would do next, as they’re still pretty young, whereas with planecrash, it felt like everything I was curious about was explored to my satisfaction. Sure, we don’t get a lot of specifics on the new society(s) on golarion, but that’s pretty fine with me. It would be interesting to see maybe what The Future holds, or where the language guy ends up, but the former feels right as a mystery, while the latter seemed pretty well foreshadowed
Yeah it’s strange. I wouldn’t be surprised if people attracted to lesswrong tend to have less robust theory of mind, like if we tend to be more autistic (I’m probably dipping my toes on the spectrum but haven’t been diagnosed. Many of my closest friends tend to be autistic), which then leads to a theory-of-mind version of the breakfast question (which to be clear looks like it’s a pretty racist meme, I’ve only seen it from that know your meme page, and I think the ties to race are gross. The point I’m trying to make is not race related at all), where if you ask “How would you feel if you were someone else?” people say “what do you mean? I’m not them, I’m me.”
I also posted it on the EA forum, and it did a lot better there https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/fcM7nshyCiKCadiGi/how-the-veil-of-ignorance-grounds-sentientism
a superintelligent AI would change its utility function to the simplest one, as described here. But I don’t see why it shouldn’t do that. What do you think about this?
I don’t think a superintelligent AI would change it’s utility function as you describe, I think the constraints of it’s existing utility function would be way too ingrained, and it would not want to change it in those ways. While I think the idea you’re putting forward makes sense and gets us closer to an “objective” morality, I think that you’re on the same path as Eliezer’s “big mistake” of thinking that a super intelligent ai would just want to have an ideal ethics, which isn’t a given (I think he talks about it somewhere in here https://www.readthesequences.com/Book-V-Mere-Goodness). For example, the current path of LLM ai is essentially just a conglomeration of human ethics based on what we’ve written and passed in to the training data, it tends not to be more ethical than us, and in fact early ai bots that learned from people interacting with them could easily become very racist.
By the way, have I convinced you to accept total hedonistic utilitarianism?
Well, I already thought that suffering is what roots ethics at the most basic level, so in a sense yes, but also I think that we do better at that using higher level heuristics rather than trying to calculate everything out, so in that sense I don’t think so?
Hey, just got around to reading your post after your comment on https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JL3PvrfJXg7RD7bhr/how-the-veil-of-ignorance-grounds-sentientism, and I think we are very much trying to point to the same thing! Thanks for sharing!
“Works” how, exactly? For example, what are your actual answers to the specific questions I asked about that variant of the scenario?
The thought experiment as I execute it requires me to construct a model of other minds, human or not, that is more detailed than what I would normally think about, and emotionally weight that understanding in order to get a deeper understanding of how important that is. To give an example, it’s possible for me to think about torture and be very decoupled with it and shrug and think “that sucks for the people getting tortured”, but if I think about it more carefully, and imagine my own mental state if I was about to be tortured, then the weight of how extremely fucked up it is becomes very crisp and clear.
Perhaps it was a mistake to use Rawl’s VOI if it also implies other things that I didn’t realize I was invoking, but the way I think of it, every sentient being is actually feeling the valence of everything they’re feeling, and from an impartial perspective the true weight of that is not different from ones own valenced experiences. And if you know that some beings experience extreme negative valence, one strategy to get a deeper understanding of how important that is, is to think about it as if you were going to experience that level of negative valence. No incoherent beings of perfect emptiness required, just the ability to model other minds based on limited evidence, imagine how you would personally react to states across the spectrum of valence, and the ability to scale that according to the distribution of sentient beings in the real world.
And this works on pebblesorters too, although it’s more difficult since we can’t build a concrete model of them beyond what’s given in the story + maybe some assumptions if their neurobiology is at all similar to ours. If an “incorrect” pebble stack gives them negative valence of around the same level that the sound of nails on a chalkboard does for me, then that gives me a rough idea of how important it is to them (in the fictional world). If pebblesorters existed and that was the amount of negative valence caused by an “incorrect” stack, I wouldn’t mess up their stacks any more than I go around scratching chalkboards at people (while wearing earplugs so it doesn’t bother me).
To go back to the master/slave example, if the master truly thought he was about to become a slave, and everything that entails, I’m not convinced he would stick to his guns on how it’s the right order of the universe. I’m sure some people would genuinely be fine with it, but I’m guessing if you actually had a mercenary trying to kidnap and enslave him, he’d start making excuses and trying to get out of it, in a similar way as the one claiming the invisible dragon in their garage will have justifications for why you can’t actually confirm it exists.
In other words, I’m trying to describe a way of making moral views pay rent about the acceptable levels of negative valence in the world. Neither my views, nor the thought experiment I thought I was talking about, depends on disembodied spirits.
Ok… it seems that you totally ignored the question that I asked, in favor of restating a summary of your argument. I guess I appreciate the summary, but it wasn’t actually necessary. The question was not rhetorical; I would like to see your answer to it.
I only see two questions in this line of conversation?
do you have a principled disagreement with all of the arguments for why nothing remotely like this is possible even in principle, or… are you not familiar with them?
I’m not familiar with the specific arguments you’re referring to, but I don’t think it’s actually possible for disembodied minds to exist at all, in the first place. So no I don’t have principled disagreements for those arguments, I have tentative agreement with them.
Another way to put it is that you are asking us (by extending what Rawls is asking us) to perform a mental operation that is something like “imagine that you could have been a chicken instead of a human”. When you ask a question like this, who are you talking to? It is obviously impossible for me—Said Achmiz, the specific person that I am, right now—to have turned out to be a chicken (or, indeed, anyone other than who I am). So you can’t be talking to me (Said Achmiz).
(bold added to highlight your question, which I’m answering) When I ask a question like that, I’m talking to you (or whoever else I’m talking to at the time).
The Metaethics Sequence (which contains a few posts that didn’t make it into R:AZ a.k.a. “The Sequences” as the term usually meant today) is what you’ll want to check out.
I’ll check it out! and yeah that’s where I read the sequences
I just came across this post after reading https://aella.substack.com/p/the-other-porn-land, what a coincedence