The “callings” method reminds me of sortition: instead of electing government representatives, they are selected randomly (I’m sure an intelligent implementation wouldn’t be pure random selection of every person in the district, there would be some filters and a way to opt out), with experts that they can consult. I actually think it would be way better than our current methods, and you highlight some of the benefits
HoVY
Karma: 67
Ah I see, good point. Well, in that world, setting aside the epistemic question of how could we know it’s actually a positive valence hedonium shockwave, if I had good reason to believe it was a true hedonium shockwave I would still be overall quite happy about it. It would be much more bittersweet than my original interpretation, and now I understand much better why the adults of the story are upset, but… idk, there’s so much intense suffering on earth that I’d rather have hedonium even if it means that “me” doesn’t go on.
Going back to the epistemic question, I think it would be impossible to know that the shockwave is hedonium with our current understanding of consciousness. So if all I can properly know is we’re all gonna get wiped out by some kind of tiling mechanism or superentity, then it goes back to being extremely sad (with the elimination of extreme suffering on earth as a silver lining, except that it could also be an antihedonium shockwave which would be far worse).
I know that’s a controversial take, if it makes you feel better I don’t think anyone should initiate a hedonium shockwave because it’s impossible to know that it will actually work, and so Eliezers reasoning about why the ends don’t justify the means applies (“for the good of the tribe don’t do what’s best for the tribe”). We are way too limited epistemologically (biases, blindspots, etc) to do it right, and the problem requires so much care that I don’t think any mind, even a superintelligent ai or alien, would be able to overcome that issue.
Maybe I’m also naive but I’d like the hedonium shockwave too. I think what’s sad about this story is not the girl’s perspective (she may be wrong about the exact reasons why she’ll be happy after it hits, but she won’t be upset about it when it does), but how her parents and others are so upset by it. This is a small glimpse into the universe tho, I’m sure others in-universe are happy about it.
Imo, the main downside of wireheading is that you dramatically limit your ability to spread joy/peace/bliss/good/etc, and dramatically limit your ability to reduce suffering/bad/etc. But if the entire universe is getting hit with a hedonium shockwave then that’s not a proplem.
Well said. The unfortunate fact of the matter is that I really really don’t trust most governments, and especially not the US government to implement this tech sanely. There are too many short sighted, or flat out unjust laws on the books.
To me, a canary in the coal mine is drug laws. A free society does not outlaw them, at most it limits availability and creates strong incentives to stop using them (incentives like free rehab and a support network, mandatory risk education, etc, not incentives like “we’ll imprison you for having this drug”).
“People have a tool they want to use, whether that be cryptocurrency or forecasting, and then try to solve problems with it because they really believe in the solution”
there’s one cryptocurrency that avoids this trap, Monero.
It’s a good question, and it reminds me of a point from a recent veritasium video, where in networks of prisoners dilemna’s you can get really good results if cooperators (tit-for-tat ish) also have a rule of “cutting contact” with defectors who defect too often. It’s been a while since I watched the video, and I haven’t really thought deeply about it’s implications, and networks of bots playing prisoners dilemna games are very different from human social networks, so take this comment with a nice helping of salt. I’ll edit this comment with the video link if I find it
edit: around 24 minutes in to here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYlon2tvywA
edit: according to the liberation pledge site, https://www.theliberationpledge.com/, it’s also the strategy used by the campaign to end foot binding in china. Whether that’s actually true, or they made it up, or distorted the reality, or what, I have no idea. They don’t cite sources on it and I haven’t bothered to look it up.
It does seem to be a strategy that depends on you having something others want. In the prisoners dilemna case, your cooperation. In the foot binding case, a daughter or son to marry. In the gpl case, high quality software. In the liberation pledge case, good company (in my experience, I’m not a very social person anyways nor am I the life of the party, so it’s primarily had an impact on my family, who I’m pretty sure eat way more vegan food than they would if I didn’t have such a strict approach).
There’s a related dynamic where someone is an Alice in at least one area (usually many), but then they over-update and think they’re better at epistemology/insight/etc than they really are and become an Alex in other areas.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-dilbert-afterlife comes to mind as a case study of this (at least if I’m remembering one of the points Scott makes right), and in my opinion @Said Achmiz is an example of this (edit: albeit not a late stage one). They have noticed things/problems most people missed, then update to an overly strong prior on “I don’t understand this thing”->”something is actually wrong here” or “I think X even though others don’t”->”X is true”. Which to be fair, most people have an overly strong prior on “I don’t understand this thing”->”I’m just going to accept it and assume it’s for good reason and maybe even perpetuate/enforce it” or “I think X even though others don’t”->”X must be wrong”, and the art is figuring out how to gracefuly notice and then navigate confusion
Exactly.
I feel this way about animal rights. Look up footage from factory farms. Look up the statistics about how many animals are factory farmed. Look up the science on animal sentience. Look up how to eat a healthy diet without animal products. I won’t get into the arguments beyond that but we’re so terrible to animals that I think we should not do any animal agriculture at all, and I took the liberation pledge, so I don’t eat at tables where people are eating animal products.
Not to mention, increasing spending on wars I don’t want and cutting funding for some of the worthwhile things the US gov does
I just came across this post after reading https://aella.substack.com/p/the-other-porn-land, what a coincedence
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.
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 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)
I know you didn’t ask for solutions, but I would highly recommend this sequence: https://www.lesswrong.com/s/ZbmRyDN8TCpBTZSip it might have some good pointers on how to change. I thought of it because it analyzed people changing similarly deeply ingrained patterns, albeit not ones related to violence afaik.