JenniferRM

Karma: 8,445

JenniferRM 14 Nov 2024 2:36 UTC
5 points
0
in reply to: Jan_Kulveit’s comment on: Jan_Kulveit’s Shortform
I already think that “the entire shape of the zeitgeist in America” is downstream of non-trivial efforts by more than one state actor. Those links explain documented cases of China and Russia both trying to foment race war in the US, but I could pull links for other subdimensions of culture (in science, around the second amendment, and in other areas) where this has been happening since roughly 2014.
My personal response is to reiterate over and over in public that there should be a coherent response by the governance systems of free people, so that, for example, TikTok should either (1) be owned by human people who themselves have free speech rights and rights to a jury trial, or else (2) should be shut down by the USG via taxes, withdrawal of corporate legal protections, etc...
...and also I just track actual specific people, and what they have personally seen and inferred and probably want and so on, in order to build a model of the world from “second hand info”.
I’ve met you personally, Jan, at a conference, and you seemed friendly and weird and like you had original thoughts based on original seeing, and so even if you were on the payroll of the Russians somehow… (which to me clear I don’t think you are) ….hey: Cyborgs! Neat idea! Maybe true. Maybe not. Maybe useful. Maybe not.
Whether or not your cyborg ideas are good or bad can be screened off from whether or not you’re on the payroll of a hostile state actor. Basically, attending primarily to local validity is basically always possible, and nearly always helpful :-)

JenniferRM 22 Oct 2024 4:12 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: lsusr’s comment on: Dagger of Detect Evil
Thank you for the response <3
″...I would like to prove to the Court Philosopher that I’m right and he’s wrong.”
This part of the story tickles me more, reading it a second time.
I like to write stories that mean different things to different people …this story isn’t a puzzle at all. It is a joke about D&D-style alignment systems.
And it kinda resonates with this bit. In both cases there’s a certain flexibility. The flexibility itself is unexpected, but reasonable safe… which is often a formula for comedy? It is funny to see the flexibility in Phil as he “goes social”, and also funny to see it in you as you “go authorial” :-)

JenniferRM 20 Oct 2024 18:55 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Multicore’s comment on: Monthly Roundup #23: October 2024
It is true that there are some favorable properties that many systems other than the best system has compared to FPTP.
I like methods that are cloneproof and which can’t be spoofed by irrelevant alternatives, and if there is ONLY a choice between “something mediocre” and “something mediocre with one less negative feature” then I guess I’ll be in favor of hill climbing since “some mysterious force” somehow prevents “us” from doing the best thing.
However, I think cloning and independence are “nice to haves” whereas the condorcet criterion is probably a “need to have”
((The biggest design fear I have is actually the “participation criterion”. One of the very very few virtues of FPTP is that it at least satisfies the criterion where someone showing up and “wasting their vote on a third party” doesn’t cause their least preferred candidate to jump ahead of a more preferred candidate. But something similar can happen in every method I know of that reliably selects the Condorcet Winner when one exists :-(
Mathematically, I’ve begun to worry that maybe I should try to prove that Condorcet and Participation simply cannot both be satisfied at the same time?
Pragmatically, I’m not sure what it looks like to “attack people’s will to vote” (or troll sad people into voting in ways that harm their interests and have the sad people fight back righteously by insisting that they shouldn’t vote, because voting really will net harm their interests).
One can hope that people will simply “want to vote” because it make civic sense, but it actually looks like a huge number of humans are biased to feel like a peasant, and to have a desire to be ruled? Or something? And maybe you can just make it “against the law to not vote” (like in Australia) but maybe that won’t solve the problems that could hypothetically “sociologically arise” from losing the participation criterion in ways that might be hard to foresee.))
In general, I think people should advocate for the BEST thing. The BEST thing I currently know of for picking an elected civilian commander in chief is “Ranked Pairs tabulation over Preference Ballots (with a law that requires everyone to vote during the two day Voting Holiday)”.

JenniferRM 16 Oct 2024 19:49 UTC
6 points
0
on: Monthly Roundup #23: October 2024
Regarding approval ratings on products using stars...
...I’d like to point out that a strategic voter using literal “star” voting should generally always collapse down to “5 stars for the good ones, 0 stars for everyone else”.
This is de facto approval voting, and a strategic voter doing approval voting learns to restrict their approval to ONLY the “electable favorite”, which de facto gives you FPTP all over gain.
And FPTP is terrible.
Among the quoted takes, this was the best, about the sadness of the star voting systems, because it was practical, and placed the blame where it properly belongs: on the designers and maintainers of the central parts of the system.
Nobe: On Etsy you lose your “star seller” rating if it dips below 4.8. A couple of times I’ve gotten 4 stars and I’ve been beside myself wondering what I did wrong even when the comment is like “I love it, I’ll cherish it forever”
If you look at LessWrong, you’ll find a weirdly large number of people into Star Voting but they don’t account for “the new meta” that it would predictably introduce. (Approval voting also gets some love, but less.)
My belief is that LW-ers who are into these things naively think that “stars on my ballot would be like a proxy for my estimate of the utility estimate, and utility estimates would be the best thing (and surely everyone (just like me) would not engage in strategic voting to break this pleasing macro property of the aggregation method (that arises if everyone is honest and good and smart like I am))”.
Which makes sense, for people from LessWrong, who are generally not cynical enough about how a slight admixture of truly bad faith (or just really stupid) players, plus everyone else “coping with reality” often leads to bad situations.
Like the bad situation you see on Etsy, with Etsy’s rating system.
...
Its weird to me that LW somehow stopped believing (or propagating the belief very far?) that money is the unit of caring.
When you propagate this belief quite far, I think you end up with assurance contracts instead of voting. for almost all “domestic” or “normal” issues.
And when you notice how using money to vote in politics is often considered a corrupt practice, its pretty natural to get confused.
You wouldn’t let your literal enemy in literal war spend the tiny amount it would (probably) cost to bribe your own personal commander in chief to be nice to your enemy while your enemy plunders your country at a profit relative (to the size of the bribe)...
...and so then you should realize that your internal political system NEEDS security mindset, and you should be trying to get literally the most secure possible method to get literally the best possible “trusted component” in your communal system for defending the community.
The reason THIS is necessary is that we live in a world of hobbesian horror. This is the real state of affairs on the international stage. There are no global elected leaders who endorse globally acceptable moral principles for the entire world.
(((Proposing to elect such a person democratically over all the voters in China, India, Africa, and the Middle East swiftly leads reasonable and wise Americans to get cold feet. I’m not so crazy as to propose this… yet… and I don’t want to talk about multi-cultural “fully collective” extrapolated volition here. But I will say that I personal suspect “extrapolated volition and exit rights” is probably better than “collective extrapolated volition” when it comes to superintelligent benevolence algorithms.)))
In lots of modern spy movies, the “home office” gets subverted, and the spy hero has to “go it alone”.
That story-like trope is useful for symbolically and narratively explaining the problem America is facing, since our constitution has this giant festering bug in the math of elections, and its going to be almost impossible for us to even patch the bug.
The metaphorical situation where “the hero can’t actually highly trust the home office in this spy movie” is the real situation for almost all of us because “ameicans (and people outside of America) can’t actually highly trust America’s president selected by America’s actual elections”… because in the movie, the home office was broken because it was low security, and in real life out elections are broken because they have low security… just like Etsy’s rating systems are broken because they are badly designed.
Creating systemic and justified trust is the EXACT issue shared across all examples: random spy movies, each US election, and Etsy.
A traditional way to solve this is to publicly and verifiably selecting a clear single human leader (assuming we’re not punting, and putting AI in charge yet) to be actually trusted.
You need someone who CAN and who SHOULD have authority over your domestic intelligence community, because otherwise your domestic intelligence community will have no real public leader and once you’re in that state of affairs, you have no way to know they haven’t gone entirely off the rails into 100% private corruption for the pure hedonic enjoyment of private power over weak humans who can’t defend themselves because they gain sexual enjoyment from watching humans suffer at their hands.
Biden was probably against that stuff? I think that’s part of why he insisted on getting out of Afghanistan?
But our timeline got really really really lucky that an actually moral man might have been in the whitehouse for a short period of history from 2020 to 2024. But that was mostly random.
FPTP generates random presidents.
Approval voting collapses down to FPTP under strategy and would (under optimization pressure) also generate random presidents.
Star voting collapses down to approval voting under strategy and would (under optimization pressure) also generate random presidents.
I’ve thought about this a lot, and I think that the warfighting part of a country needs an elected civilian commander in chief, and the single best criteria for picking someone to fill that role is the Condorcet Criterion and from there I’m not as strongly certain, but I think the most secure way to hit that criterion with a practical implementation that has quite a few other properties include Schulze and Ranked Pair ballot tabulation…
...neither of which use “stars”, which is a stupid choice for preference aggregation!!
Star voting is stupid.

JenniferRM 13 Oct 2024 19:37 UTC
11 points
1
on: Momentum of Light in Glass
Years ago I heard from someone, roughly, that “optics is no longer science, just a field of engineering, because there are no open questions in optics anymore, we now ‘merely’ learn the ‘science’ of optics to become better engineers”.
(This was in a larger discussion about whether and how long it would take for anything vaguely similar to happen to “all of physics”, and talking about the state of optics research was helpful in clarifying whether or not “that state of seeming to be fully solved” would count as a “fully solved” field for other fields for various people in the discussion.)
In searching just now, I find that Stack Exchange also mentions ONLY the Abraham-Minkowki question as an actual suggestion about open questions in optics… and it is at −1, with four people quibbling with the claim! <3
Thank you for surprising me in a way that I was prepared to connect to a broader question about the the sociology of science and the long run future of physics!

JenniferRM 13 Oct 2024 18:29 UTC
5 points
0
on: Values Are Real Like Harry Potter
I hit ^f and searched for “author” and didn’t find anything, and this is… kind of surprising.
For me, nothing about Harry Potter’s physical existence as a recurring motif in patterns of data inscribed on physical media in the physical world makes sense without positing a physically existent author (and in Harry’s case a large collection of co-authors who did variational co-authoring in a bunch of fics).
Then I can do a similar kind of “obtuse intest in the physical media where the data is found” when I think about artificial rewards signals in digital people… in nearly all AIs, there is CODE that implements reinforcement learning signals...
...possibly ab initio, in programs where the weights, and the “game world”, and the RL schedule for learning weights by playing in the game world were all written at the same time...
...possibly via transduction of real measurements (along with some sifting, averaging, or weighting?) such that the RL-style change in the AI’s weights can only be fully predicted by not only knowing the RL schedule, but also by knowing about whatever more-distant-thing as being measured such as to predict the measurements in advance.
The code that implements the value changes during the learning regime, as the weights converge on the ideal is “the author of the weights” in some sense...
...and then of course almost all code has human authors who physically exist. And of course, with all concerns of authorship we run into issues like authorial intent and skill!
It is natural, at this juncture to point out that “the ‘author’ of the conscious human experience of pain, pleasure, value shifts while we sleep, and so on (as well as the ‘author’ of the signals fed to this conscious process from sub-conscious processes that generate sensoria, or that sample pain sensors, to create a subjective pain qualia to feed to the active self model, and so on)” is the entire human nervous system as a whole system.
And the entire brain as a whole system is primarily authored by the human genome.
And the human genome is primarily authored by the history of human evolution.
So like… One hypothesis I have is that you’re purposefully avoiding “being Pearlian enough about the Causes of various Things” for the sake of writing a sequence with bite-sized chunks, than can feel like they build on each other, with the final correct essay and the full theory offered only at the end, with links back to all the initial essays with key ideas?
But maybe you guys just really really don’t want to be forced down the Darwinian sinkhole, into a bleak philosophic position where everything we love and care about turns out to have been constructed by Nature Red In Tooth And Claw and so you’re yearning for some kind of platonistic escape hatch?
I definitely sympathize with that yearning!
Another hypothesis is that you’re trying to avoid “invoking intent in an author” because that will be philosophically confusing to most of the audience, because it explains a “mechanism with ought-powers” via a pre-existing “mechanism with ought-powers” which then cannot (presumably?) produce a close-ended “theory of ought-powers” which can start from nothing and explain how they work from scratch in a non-circularly way?
Personally, I think it is OK to go “from ought to ought to ought” in a good explanation, so long as there are other parts to the explanation.… So minimally, you would need two parts, that work sort of like a proof by induction. Maybe?
First, you would explain how something like “moral biogenesis” could occur in a very very very simple way. Some catholic philosophers, call this “minimal unit” of moral faculty “the spark of conscience” and a technical term that sometimes comes up is “synderesis”.
Then, to get the full explanation, and “complete the inductive proof” the theorist would explain how any generic moral agent with the capacity for moral growth could go through some kind of learning step (possibly experiencing flavors of emotional feedback on the way) and end up better morally calibrated at the end.
Together the two parts of the theory could explain how even a small, simple, mostly venal, mostly stupid agent with a mere scintilla of moral development, and some minimal bootstrap logic, could grow over time towards something predictably and coherently Good.
(Epistemics can start and proceed analogously… The “epistemic equivalent of synderesis” would be something like a “uniform bayesian prior” and the “epistemic equivalent of moral growth” would be something like “bayesian updating”.)
Whether the overall form of the Good here is uniquely convergent for all agents is not clear.
It would probably depend at least somewhat on the details of the bootstrap logic, and the details of the starting agent, and the circumstances in which development occurs? Like… surely in epistemics you can give an agent a “cursed prior” to make it unable to update epistmically towards a real truth via only bayesian updates? (Likewise I would expect at least some bad axiological states, or environmental setups, to be possible to construct if you wanted to make a hypothetically cursed agent as a mental test of the theory.)
So...
The best test case I could come up with for separately out various “metaphysical and ontology issues” around your “theory of Thingness” as it relates to abstract data structures (including ultimately perhaps The Algorithm of Goodness (if such a thing even exists)) was this smaller, simpler, less morally loaded, test case...
(Sauce is figure 4 from this paper.)
Granting that the Thingness Of Most Things rests in the sort of mostly-static brute physicality of objects...
...then noticing and trying to deal with a large collection of tricky cases lurking in “representationally stable motifs that seem thinglike despite not being very Physical” that almost all have Physical Authors...
...would you say that the Lorenz Attractor (pictured above) is a Thing?
If it is a Thing, is it a thing similar to Harry Potter?
And do you think this possible-thing has zero, one, or many Authors?
If it has non-zero Authors… who are the Authors? Especially: who was the first Author?

JenniferRM 8 Oct 2024 16:15 UTC
18 points
0
on: [Intuitive self-models] 4. Trance
There’s a long time contributor to lesswrong who has been studying this stuff since at least 2011 in a very mechanistic way, with lots of practical experimental data. His blog is still up, and still has circa-2011 essays like “What Trance Says About Rationality”.

JenniferRM 4 Oct 2024 18:00 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Is cybercrime really costing trillions per year?
What I’d prefer is to have someone do data science on all that content, and find the person inside of wikipedia who is least bad, and the most good, according to my preferences and ideals, and then I’d like to donate $50 to have all their votes count twice as much in every vote for a year.
Remember the OP?
The question is “How could a large number of venal idiots attacking The Internet cost more damage than all the GDP of all the people who create and run The Internet via market mechanisms?”
I’m claiming that the core issue is that The Internet is mostly a public good, and there is no known way to turn dollars into “more or better public goods” (not yet anyway) but there are ways to ruin public goods, and then charge for access to an unruined simulacrum of a public good.
All those votes… those are a cost (and one invisible to the market, mostly). And they are only good if they reliably “generate the right answer (as judged from far away by those who wish Wikipedia took its duties as a public goods institution more seriously and coherently)”.

JenniferRM 2 Oct 2024 16:13 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Is cybercrime really costing trillions per year?
Are you a wikipedian? Is there some way that I could find all the wikipedians and just appeal to them directly and fix the badness more simply? I like fixing things simply when simple fixes can work… :-)
(However, in my experience, most problems like this are caused by conflicts of interest, and it has seemed to me in the past that when pies are getting bigger, people are more receptive to ideas of fair and good justice, whereas when pies are getting smaller people’s fallenness becomes more prominent.
I’m not saying Jimbo is still ruining things. For all I know he’s not even on the board of directors of Wilkipedia anymore. I haven’t checked. I’m simply saying that there are clear choices that were made in the deep past that seem to have followed a logic that would naturally help his pocketbook and naturally hurt natural public interests, and these same choices seem to still be echoing all the way up to the present.

JenniferRM 1 Oct 2024 20:50 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Shankar Sivarajan’s comment on: Is cybercrime really costing trillions per year?
I’m with Shankar and that meme: Stack Exchange used to be good, but isn’t any more.
Regarding Wikipedia, I’ve had similar thoughts, but they caused me to imagine how to deeply restructure Wikipedia so that it can collect and synthesize primary sources.
Perhaps it could contain a system for “internal primary sources” where people register as such, and start offering archived testimony (which could then be cited in “purely secondary articles”) similarly to the way random people hired by the NYT are trusted to offer archived testimony suitable for inclusion in current Wikipedia stuff?
This is the future. It runs on the Internet. Shall this future be democratic and flat, or full of silos and tribalism?
The thing I object to, Christian, is that “outsiders” are the people Wikipedia should properly be trying to serve but Wikipedia (like most public institutions eventually seem to do?) seems to have become insular and weird and uninterested in changing their mission to fulfill social duties that are currently being neglected by most institutions.
Wikipedia seem, to me, from the outside, as someone who they presumably are nominally “hoping to serve by summarizing all the world’s trustworthy knowledge” to not actually be very good at governance, or vetting people who can or can’t lock pages, or allocating power wisely, or choosing good operating policies.
Some of it I understand. “Fandom” used to be called “Wikia” and was (maybe still is?) run by Jimbo as a terrible and ugly “for profit, ad infested” system of wikis.
He naturally would have wanted wikipedia to have a narrow mandate so that “the rest of the psychic energy” could accumulate in his for-profit monstrosity, I think? But I don’t think it served the world for this breakup and division into subfields to occur.
And, indeed, I think it would be good for Wikipedia to import all the articles across all of Fandom that it can legally import as “part of RETVRNING to inclusionism” <3

JenniferRM 30 Sep 2024 18:11 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Shankar Sivarajan’s comment on: Is cybercrime really costing trillions per year?
I think it would require *not just throwing money* at it, but also *actually designing sensible political institutions* to help aggregate and focus people’s voluntary interest in creating valuable public goods that they (as well as everyone) can enjoy, after they are created.
For example, I would happily give Wikipedia $100 if I could have them switch to Inclusionism and end the rule of the “Deletionist” faction.
((Among other things, I think that anyone who ever runs for any elected political office, and anyone nominated or appointed by an elected official should be deemed Automatically Politically Notable on Wikipedia.
They should be allowed by Wikipedia (in a way that follows a named policy) to ADD material to their own article (to bulk it up from a stub or from non-existence), or to have at least ~25% of the text be written by themselves if the article is big, but not DELETE from their article.
Move their shit about themselves to the bottom, or into appendices, alongside the appendix of “their opinions about Star Wars (according to star wars autists)” and the appendix on “their likely percentage of neanderthal genes (according to racists)”, and flag what they write about themselves as possibly interested writing by a possibly interested party, or whatever… but don’t DELETE it.))
Now… clearly I cannot currently donate $100 to cause this to happen, but what if a “meta non-profit” existed that I could donate $100 to for three months (to pool with others making a similar demand), and then get the $100 back at the end of the three months if Wikipedia’s rulers say no to our offer?
The pooling process, itself, could be optimized. Set up a ranked ballot over all the options with “max payment” only to “my favorite option” and then do monetary stepdowns as one moves down the ballot until you hit the natural zero.
There is some non-trivial math lurking here, in the nooks and crannies, but I know a handful of mathematicians I could probably tempt into consulting on these early challenges, and I know enough to be able to verify their proofs, even if I might not be able to generate the right proofs and theorems myself.
If someone wants to start this non-profit with me, I’d probably be willing serve in exchange for a permanent seat on the board of directors, and I’d be willing to serve as the initial Chief Operating Officer for very little money (and for only a handshake agreement from the rest of the board that I’ll get back pay contingent on success after we raise money to financially stabilize things).
The really hard part is finding a good CEO. Such roles require a very stable genius (possibly with a short tenure, and a strong succession planning game), because they kinda drive people crazy by default, from what I’ve seen.

JenniferRM 27 Sep 2024 19:27 UTC
8 points
0
on: Is cybercrime really costing trillions per year?
I don’t know the answer to how much cybercrime is really costing, but I think your economic analysis is not accurately tracking “what GDP means”.
Arms length financial transactions of “money points for services or goods” operates on the basis of scarcity, monopoly pricing power, and other power concerns that are locally legible inside of bilateral exchanges between reasonable agents.
GDP does not track the “reserve price” of consumers of computational services, where conditional on a computing service hypothetically being monopolistically priced, the person would hypothetically pay a LOT for that service.
Various surveys and a bit of logic suggest that people would hypothetically pay thousands or in many cases even tens of thousands of dollars for access to the internet even though the real cost is much much less.
By contrast, GDP just measures the “true scarcity… and lawful evil induced scarcity” part of the economy (mushed together and swirled around, so the DMCA makes hacking printer ink cartridges full of producer-added malware illegal, rather than subsidizing such heroic hacking work, as would occur under benevolent governance, and so on).
Linus Torvalds is probably owed a “debt of gratitude”, by Earth, on the order of many billions, and possibly trillions, but he gave away Linux and has never been paid anything like that amount, and so the value he created and gave away does not show up in GDP. (Not just him, there’s a whole constellation of rarely sung heroes and moderately happy dudes who were part of a hobbyist ecosystem that created the modern digital world between 1970 and 2010 and gave it away for free).
On a deeper level, the inability to measure or encourage the “post-scarcity” or “public goods” part of the human “economy” (if you can even call it an “economy” when it doesn’t run on bilateral arms-length self-interested deals) is part of why such goods are underproduced by default, in general, and have been underproduced for all of human history.
Within this frame, it seems very plausible that the computational consumer surplus that cybercriminals attack is worth huge amounts of money to protect, even though it was acquired very cheaply from people like Linus.
Presumably humans are not yet in “private scarcity-based equilibrium” with the economics of computation processes?
In the long run it might be reasonable to expect the “a la carte computer security situation” (where every technical system becomes a game of whack-a-mole fighting many very specific ways to ruin everything in the computational commons) to devolve until most uses of most computer processes have almost no consumer surplus, because the costs of paying for a la carte help with computer security almost perfectly balances against the consumer surplus from using “essentially free compute”.
This would not happen if good computer security practices arise that can somehow preserve the existing (and probably massive) consumer surplus around computers such that “using the internet and computers in general in a safe way is very cheap because computer security itself is easy to get right and spread around as a public good with nearly no marginal cost”.
Like… hypothetically the government could make baseline “secure and super valuable” computing systems.
But it doesn’t.
A private ad-based surveillance and propaganda corporation “solved search and created lots of billionaires” NOT the library of congress.
The NSA tries to make sure that most consumer hardware and software is insecure so that the <0.5% of consumer buyers that happen to be mobsters or terrorists can be spied on, rather than putting out open source defensive software for everyone.
People like Aaron Swartz and Moxie did, mostly for free, the thigns that a benevolent government would do if a benevolent government existed.
But no actively benevolent governments exist.
In Anathem, Neil Stephenson (who is very smart, in a very fun way) posits a giant science inquisition that prevents technological advancement (leading to AGI or nukes or bioweapons or what have you) and lets humanity “experience the current tech scale” for thousands of years with instabilities factored out and only locally stable cultural loops retained...
...in that world it is just taken for granted that 99.999% of the internet is full of auto-generated lies called “bogons” that are put out by computer security companies so as to force consumers to pay monthly subscriptions for expensive bogon filtering software that make their handheld jeejaws only really good for talking with close personal friends or business associates. It is just normal to them, for the internet to exist and be worthless, like it is normal to us for lies in ads and on the news to be the default.
Anathem’s future contains no wikipedia, because wikipedia is like linux: insanely valuable, yet not scarce, with very few dollars directed to it in ways that ensures (1) it isn’t hacked from the outside and (2) the leadership doesn’t ruin it for personal or ideological profit from the inside.
Anathem offers us a bleak “impossible possible future” but not the bleakest.
Things probably won’t happen that way because that exact way of stabilizing human civilization is unlikely, but Anathem honestly grapples with the broader issue where information services are (1) insanely valuable and (2) also nearly impossible for the market to properly price.

JenniferRM 25 Sep 2024 7:42 UTC
6 points
0
in reply to: quiet_NaN’s comment on: How I started believing religion might actually matter for rationality and moral philosophy
I’m not sure about the rest of it, but this caught my eye:
if moral realism was true, and one of the key roles of religion was to free people from trapped priors so they could recognize these universal moral truths, then at least during the founding of religions, we should see some evidence of higher moral standards before they invariably mutate into institutions devoid of moral truths.
I had a similar thought, and was trying to figure out if I could find a single good person to formally and efficiently coordinate with in a non-trivial pre-existing institution full of “safely good and sane people”.
I’m still searching. If anyone has a solid lead on this, please DM me, maybe?
Something you might expect is that many such “hypothetically existing hypothetically good people” would be willing to die slightly earlier for a good enough cause (especially late in life when their life expectancy is low, and especially for very high stakes issues where a lot of leverage is possible) but they wouldn’t waste lives, because waste is ceteris paribus bad, and so… so… what about martyrs who are also leaders?
This line of thinking is how I learned about Martin The Confessor, the last Pope to ever die for his beliefs.
Since 655 AD is much much earlier than 2024 AD, it would seem that Catholicism no longer “has the sauce” so to speak?
Also, slightly relatedly, I’m more glad that I otherwise might be that in this timeline the bullet missed Trump. In other very nearby timelines I’m pretty sure the whole idea of using physical courage to detect morally good leadership in a morally good group would be much more controversial than the principle is here, now, in this timeline, where no one has trapped priors about it that are being actively pumped full of energy by the media, with the creation of new social traumas, and so on...
...not that elected secular leaders of mere nation states would have any obvious formal duties to specifically be the person to benevolently serve literally all good beings as a focal point.
To get that formula to basically work, in a way that it kinda seems to work with US elections, since many US Presidents are assassinated in ways they could probably predict were possible (modulo this currently only working within the intrinsically “partial” nature of US elections, since these are merely elections for the leader of a single nation state that faces many other hostile nation states in a hobbesian world of eternal war (at least eternal war… so far!) ) I think one might need to hold global elections?
And… But… And this… this seems sorta do-able?!? Weirdly so!
We have the internet now. We have translation software to translate all the political statements into all the languages. We have internet money that could be used to donate to something that was worth donating to.
Why not create a “United Persons Alliance” (to play the “House of Representatives” to the UN’s “Senate”?) and find out what the UPA’s “Donation Weighted Condorcet Prime Minister” has to say?
I kinda can’t figure out why no one has tried it yet.
Maybe it is because, logically speaking, moral realism MIGHT be true and also maybe all humans are objectively bad?
If a lot of people knew for sure that “moral realism is true but humans are universally fallen” then it might explain why we almost never “produce and maintain legibly just institutions”.
Under the premises entertained here so far, IF such institutions were attempted anyway, and the attempt had security holes, THEN those security holes would be predictably abused and it would be predictably regretted by anyone who spent money setting it up, or trusted such a thing.
So maybe it is just that “moral realism is true, humans are bad, and designing secure systems is hard and humans are also smart enough to never try to summon a real justice system”?
Maybe.

JenniferRM 23 Sep 2024 8:59 UTC
43 points
20
in reply to: Lao Mein’s comment on: The Sun is big, but superintelligences will not spare Earth a little sunlight
I appreciate your desire for this clarity, but I think the counter argument might actually just be “the oversimplifying assumption that everyone’s labor just ontologically goes on existing is only true if society (and/or laws and/or voters-or-strongmen) make it true on purpose (which they tended to do, for historically contingent reasons, in some parts of Earth, for humans, and some pets, between the late 1700s and now)”.
You could ask: why is the holocene extinction occurring when Ricardo’s Law of Comparative Advantage says that wooly mammoths (and many amphibian species) and cave men could have traded…
...but once you put it that way, it is clear that it really kinda was NOT in the narrow short term interests of cave men to pay the costs inherent in respecting the right to life and right to property of beasts that can’t reason about natural law.
Turning land away from use by amphibians and towards agriculture was just… good for humans and bad for frogs. So we did it. Simple as.
The math of ecology says: life eats life, and every species goes extinct eventually. The math of economics says: the richer you are, the more you can afford to be linearly risk tolerant (which is sort of the definition of prudent sanity) for larger and larger choices, and the faster you’ll get richer than everyone else, and so there’s probably “one big rich entity” at the end of economic history.
Once humans close their heart to other humans and “just stop counting those humans over there as having interests worth calculating about at all” it really does seem plausible that genocide is simply “what many humans would choose to do, given those (evil) values”.
Slavery is legal in the US, after all. And the CCP has Uighur Gulags. And my understanding is that Darfur is headed for famine?
I think this is sort of the “ecologically economic core” of Eliezer’s position: kindness is simply not a globally instrumentally convergent tactic across all possible ecological and economic regimes… right now quite a few humans want there to not be genocide and slavery of other humans, but if history goes in a sad way in the next ~100 years, there’s a decent chance the other kind of human (the ones that quite like the long term effects of the genocide and/or enslavement other sapient beings) will eventually get their way and genocide a bunch of other humans.
If all of modern morality is a local optimum that is probably not the global optimum, then you might look out at the larger world and try and figure out what naturally occurs when the powerful do as they will, and the weak cope as they can...
Once the billionaires like Putin and Xi and Trump and so on don’t need human employees any more, its seems plausible they could aim for a global Earth population of humans of maybe 20,000 people, plus lots and lots of robot slaves?
It seems quite beautiful and nice to be here, now, with so many people having so many dreams, and so many of us caring about caring about other sapient beings… but unless we purposefully act to retain this moral shape, in ourselves and in our digital and human progeny, we (and they) will probably fall out of this shape in the long run.
And that would be sad. For quite a few philosophic reasons, and also for over 7 billion human reasons.
And personally, I think the only way to “keep the party going” even for a few more centuries or millennia is to become extremely wealthy.
I think we should be mining asteroids, and building fusion plants, and building new continents out of ice, and terraforming Venus and Mars, and I think we should build digital people who know how precious and rare humane values so they can enjoy the party with us, and keep it going for longer than we could plausibly hope to (since we tend to be pretty terrible at governing ourselves).
But we shouldn’t believe good outcomes are inevitable or even likely, because they aren’t. If something slightly smarter than us with a feasible doubling time of weeks instead of decades arrives, we could be the next frogs.

JenniferRM 23 Sep 2024 2:36 UTC
4 points
0
on: World War Zero
This writeup is great. Very simple. Beat by beat. Motion by motion. The character of the writing makes me feel like anything was possible, and history was a series of accidents, which I think is a “true feeling” about history.

JenniferRM 17 Sep 2024 22:53 UTC
12 points
1
on: Did Christopher Hitchens change his mind about waterboarding?
I kind of love how this post is very very narrow, and very very specific, and about a topic that everyone was mind-killed on in the late aughties, but which very few people are mind-killed on in modern times.
It feels like a calibration exercise!
(Also, I wrote a LOT of words on related issues, and what I think this might be a calibration exercise for …that I’ve edited out since it was a big and important topic, and would have taken a long time to edit into something usefully readable.)
It is safe and easy to say: I appreciate the scholarship and care that was taken to figure things out here, and to highlight how rare it is for people to understand the specific subquestion, and not conflate subquestions with larger nearby issues, and (without doing any original research or even clicking through to read most of the links) I find the conclusion and confidence level reasonably convincing.
On mechanistic psychology priors (given that no smoking guns were found here) the thing I would expect is that Hitchens spent some time thinking that water boarding wasn’t really brutal or terrible torture that should be illegal… (maybe he published something that is hard to find now and felt guilt about that, or maybe he just had private opinions) and then he probably did some research on it and at some point changed his mind in private, and then he might have tried to experience it as a way of creating credibility using a story that would echo in history?
That is, I suspect the direct personal experience didn’t cause the update.
I suspect he intellectually suspected what was probably true, and then gathered personally expensive evidence that confirmed his intellectual suspicions for the sake of how the evidence gathering method would play in stories about his take on the topic.

JenniferRM 6 Sep 2024 19:06 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: tailcalled’s comment on: Executable philosophy as a failed totalizing meta-worldview
I read your gnostic/pagan stuff and chuckled over the “degeneracy [ranking where] Paganism < … < Gnosticism < Atheism < Buddhism”.
I think I’ll be better able to steelman you in the future and I’m sorry if I caused you to feel misrepresented with my previous attempt. I hadn’t realized that the vibe you’re trying to serve is so Nietzschean.
Just to clarify, when you say “pathetic” it is is not intended to evoke “pathos” and function as an even hypothetically possible compliment regarding a wise and pleasant deployment of feelings (even subtle feelings) in accord with reason, that could be unified and balanced to easily and pleasantly guide persons into actions in accord with The Good after thoughtful cultivation...
...but rather I suspect you intended it as a near semantic neighbor (but with opposite moral valence) of something like “precious” (as an insult (as it is in some idiolects)) in that both “precious and pathetic things” are similarly weak and small and in need of help.
Like the central thing you’re trying to communicate with the word “pathetic” (I think, but am not sure, and hence I’m seeking clarification) is to notice that entities labeled with that adjective could hypothetically be beloved and cared for… but you want to highlight how such things are also sort of worthy of contempt and might deserve abandonment.
We could argue: Such things are puny. They will not be good allies. They are not good role models. They won’t autonomously grow. They lack the power to even access whole regimes of coherently possible data gathering loops. They “will not win” and so, if you’re seeking “systematized winning”, such “pathetic” things are not where you should look. Is this something like what you’re trying to point to by invoking “patheticness” so centrally in a discussion of “solving philosophy formally”?

JenniferRM 6 Sep 2024 9:26 UTC
2 points
2
in reply to: Ape in the coat’s comment on: Executable philosophy as a failed totalizing meta-worldview
I think of “the rationalist project” as “having succeeded” in a very limited and relative sense that is still quite valuable.
For example, back when the US and Chinese governments managed to accidentally make a half-cocked bioweapon and let it escape from a lab and then not do any adequate public health at all, or hold the people who caused the megadeath event even slightly accountable, and all of the institutions of basically every civilization on Earth failed to do their fucking jobs, the “rationalists” (ie the people on LW and so on) were neck and neck with anonymous anime catgirls on twitter (who overlap a lot with rationalists in practice) in terms of being actually sane and reasonable voices in the chaos… and it turns out that having some sane and reasonable voices is useful!
Eliezer says “Rationalists should win” but Yvain said “its really not that great” and Yvain got more upvotes (90 vs 247 currently) so Yvain is prolly right, right? But either way it means rationality is probably at least a little bit great <3

JenniferRM 6 Sep 2024 9:14 UTC
2 points
−4
in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: What is SB 1047 *for*?
So Newsome would control 4 out of 8 of the votes, until this election occurs?
I wonder what his policies are? :thinking:
(Among the Presidential candidates, I liked RFK’s position best. When asked, off the top of his head, he jumps right into extinction risks, totalitarian control of society, and the need for international treaties for AI and bioweapons. I really love how he lumps “bioweapons and AI” as a natural category. It is a natural category.
But RFK dropped out, and even if he hadn’t dropped out it was pretty clear that he had no chance of winning because most US voters seem to think being a hilariously awesome weirdo is bad, and it is somehow so bad that “everyone dying because AI killed us” is like… somehow more important than that badness? (Obviously I’m being facetious. US voters don’t seem to think. They scrupulously avoid seeming that way because only weirdos “seem to think”.))
I’m guessing the expiration date on the law isn’t in there at all, because cynicism predicts that nothing like it would be in there, because that’s not how large corrupt bureaucracies work.
(/me wonders aloud if she should stop calling large old bureaucracies corrupt-by-default in order to start sucking up to Newsome as part of a larger scheme to get onto that board somehow… but prolly not, right? I think my comparative advantage is probably “being performatively autistic in public” which is usually incompatible with acquiring or wielding democratic political power.)

JenniferRM 6 Sep 2024 7:08 UTC
9 points
1
in reply to: Ape in the coat’s comment on: Executable philosophy as a failed totalizing meta-worldview
If I was going to steelman Mr Tailcalled, I’d imagine that he was trying to “point at the reason” that transfer learning is far and away the exception.
Mostly learning (whether in humans, beasts, or software) happens relative to a highly specific domain of focus and getting 99.8% accuracy in the domain, and making a profit therein… doesn’t really generalize. I can’t run a hedge fund after mastering the hoola hoop, and I can’t win a boxing match from learning to recognize real and forged paintings. NONE of these skills would be much help in climbing a 200 foot tall redwood tree with my bare hands and bare feet… and mastering the Navajo language is yet again “mostly unrelated” to any of them. The challenges we agents seem to face in the world are “one damn thing after another”.
(Arguing against this steelman, the exception here might be “next token prediction”. Mastering next token prediction seems to grant the power to play Minecraft through APIs, win art contests, prove math theorems, and drive theologically confused people into psychosis. However, consistent with the steelman, next token prediction hasn’t seemed to offer any help at fabbing smaller and faster and more efficient computer chips. If next token prediction somehow starts to make chip fabbing go much faster, then hold onto your butts.)