Philosophy PhD student. Interested in ethics, metaethics, AI, EA, disagreement/erisology. Former username Ikaxas
Vaughn Papenhausen
Karma: 736
Maybe obvious, but one thing I found especially helpful when learning German was texting people. It’s production, so it does train your word recall, but it’s like “training wheels” since you have more time and can look things up. Nowadays could probably get similar results by practicing with an LLM
I’m not sure if the claim that solitude is necessary for creative work, or just that it’s one good input for creative work. But to the extent the claim is that it’s necessary, I think I’m skeptical. A lot of my ideas come from reacting to other people’s ideas, whether in reading or podcasts or conversation. So it’s possible to get ideas without solitude. I’ve also definitely had the “shower thoughts” experience of course. But it’s definitely not the only source of good ideas for me (insofar as any of my ideas are any good).
Okay, I see better now where you’re coming from and how you’re thinking that social science could be hopeless and yet we can still build a cooperation machine. I still suspect you’ll need some innovations in social science to implement such a machine. Even if we assume that we have a black box machine that does what you say, you still have to be sure that people will use the machine, so you’ll need enough understanding of social science to either predict that they will, or somehow get them to.
But even if you solve the problem of implementation, I suspect you’ll need innovations in social science in order to even design such a machine. In order to understand what kind of technology or infrastructure would increase trust, asabiyah, etc, you need to understand people. And maybe you think the understanding we already have of people with our current social science is already enough to tell us what we’d need to build such a machine. But you sounded pretty pessimistic about our current social science. (I’m making no claim one way or the other about our current social science, just trying to draw out tensions between different parts of your piece.)
I like and agree with a lot in this essay. But I have to admit I’m confused by your conclusion. You dismiss social science research as probably not going anywhere, but then your positive proposal is basically more social science research. Doesn’t building “a Cooperation Machine that takes in atomized people and raw intelligence and produces mutual understanding and harmonious collective action” require being “better at organizing our social life in accordance with human flourishing than the Victorians, the Qing, or the pre-conquest Lakota” in exactly the way you claim social science is trying and failing to produce?
Yup. This is how I learned German: found some music I liked and learned to sing it. I haven’t learned much Japanese, but there’s a bunch of songs I can sing (and know the basic meaning of) even though I couldn’t have a basic conversation or use any of those words in other contexts
To my knowledge I am not dyslexic. If I correctly understand what subvocalizing is (reading via your inner monologue), I do it by default unless I explicitly turn it off. I don’t remember how I learned to turn it off, but I remember it was a specific skill I had to learn. And I usually don’t turn it off because reading without subvocalizing 1. Takes effort, 2. It’s less enjoyable, and 3. Makes it harder for me to understand and retain what I’m reading. I generally only turn it off when I have a specific reason why I have to read quickly, e.g. for a school assignment or reading group that I’ve run low on time to do.
EDIT: replied to wrong comment. Curse you mobile interface!
I suspect this is getting downvoted because it is so short and underdeveloped. I think the fundamental point here is worth making though. I’ve used the existence proof argument in the past, and I think there is something to it, but I think the point being made here is basically right. It might be worth writing another post about this that goes into a bit more detail.
This is pretty similar in concept to the conlang toki pona, which is a language explicitly designed to be as simple as possible. It has less than 150 words. (“toki pona” means something like “good language” or “good speech” in toki pona)
Quoting a recent conversation between Aryeh Englander and Eliezer Yudkowsky
Out of curiosity, is this conversation publicly posted anywhere? I didn’t see a link.
Putting RamblinDash’s point another way: when Eliezer says “unlimited retries”, he’s not talking about a Groundhog Day style reset. He’s just talking about the mundane thing where, when you’re trying to fix a car engine or something, you try one fix, and if it doesn’t start, you try another fix, and if it still doesn’t start, you try another fix, and so on. So the scenario Eliezer is imagining is this: we have 50 years. Year 1, we build an AI, and it kills 1 million people. We shut it off. Year 2, we fix the AI. We turn it back on, it kills another million people. We shut it off, fix it, turn it back on. Etc, until it stops killing people when we turn it on. Eliezer is saying, if we had 50 years to do that, we could align an AI. The problem is, in reality, the first time we turn it on, it doesn’t kill 1 million people, it kills everyone. We only get one try.
Am I the only one who, upon reading the title, pictured 5 people sitting behind OP all at the same time?
The group version of this already exists, in a couple of different versions:
Yeah, that is definitely fair
My model of gears to ascension, based on their first 2 posts, is that they’re not complaining about the length for their own sake, but rather for the sake of people that they link this post to who then bounce off because it looks too long. A basics post shouldn’t have the property that someone with zero context is likely to bounce off it, and I think gears to ascension is saying that the nominal length (reflected in the “43 minutes”) is likely to have the effect of making people who get linked to this post bounce off it, even though the length for practical purposes is much shorter.
Pinker has a book about writing called The Sense of Style
There seems to be a conflict between putting “self-displays on social media” in the ritual box, and putting “all social signalling” outside it. Surely the former is a subset of the latter.
My understanding was that the point was this: not all social signalling is ritual. Some of it is, some of it isn’t. The point was: someone might think OP is claiming that all social signalling is ritual, and OP wanted to dispel that impression. This is consistent with some social signalling counting as ritual.
I think the idea is to be able to transform this:
- item 1 - item 2 - item 3into this:
- item 3 - item 1 - item 2I.e. it would treat bulleted lists like trees, and allow you to move entire sub-branches of trees around as single units.
This isn’t necessarily a criticism, but “exploration & recombination” and “tetrising” seem in tension with each other. E&R is all about allowing yourself to explore broadly, not limiting yourself to spending your time only on the narrow thing you’re “trying to work on.” Tetrising, on the other hand, is precisely about spending your time only on that narrow thing.
As I said, this isn’t a criticism; this post is about a grab bag of techniques that might work at different times for different people, not a single unified strategy, but it’s still interesting to point out the tension here.
I actually think unilateral pause by a lab goes on this list. As in OpenAI or Anthropic going “hey everybody, we think it’s getting too dangerous to continue pushing the frontier, so we are pausing development of new frontier models. We’ll keep serving the models we have, but all of our R&D will be towards safety until we’ve solved it.” The hope being that this sends a costly signal to regulators that this is serious and other frontier labs should be stopped as well. It needn’t even be a bad business move—they could say “those other labs keep putting out smarter models, sure, but what good is it if they might get your company in legal trouble by going rogue? Our models are safer.” Or something like that.