Jozdien(Arun Jose)

Karma: 1,209

Jozdien 1 Apr 2021 13:22 UTC
11 points
in reply to: rasavatta’s comment on: Why We Launched LessWrong.SubStack
According to the post The Present State of Bitcoin, the value of 1 BTC is about $13.2. Since the title indicates that this is, in fact, the present value, I’m inclined to conclude that those two websites you linked to are colluding to artificially inflate the currency. Or they’re just wrong, but the law of razors indicates that the world is too complicated for the simplest solution to be the correct one.

Jozdien 24 Apr 2021 9:00 UTC
5 points
on: Covid 4/22: Crisis in India
I haven’t been tracking India, but I don’t have any reason to think there was a large behavioral change since February that could take us from static to doubling every week. What could this be other than the variant?
I’m putting it at about 85% that the surge in India’s primary cause is that the B.1.617 variant is far more infectious than their previous variant.
I don’t have much better data about how much to attribute the surge to the variant because as far as I’ve seen there isn’t any, but in the weeks before the surge began, there was a sizeable contingent of people predicting that cases would go up very badly in April even before news of the variant, because of religious festivals (Kumbh Mela in mid-April saw millions of people in crowds without masks after many of the priests tested positive) and regional elections (standard practice to have huge crowds of people surrounding candidates on the road as they pass by, most places didn’t stop this year) happening at the same time.
This article gives a bit of credence to the possibility that some countries had populations with higher prior immunity than others. I can’t say whether this is true or not, but if so, it’s possible that’s where the new variant differs. And because India was hit far less hard than people expected, many weren’t following mask and distancing protocols by April, which meant new viral loads would have been very opportune.

Jozdien 3 May 2021 8:29 UTC
45 points
on: Open and Welcome Thread—May 2021
I’m Jose. I’m 20. This is a comment many years in the making.
I grew up in India, in a school that (almost) made up for the flaws in Indian academia, as a kid with some talent in math and debate. I largely never tried to learn math or science outside what was taught at school back then. I started using the internet in 2006, and eventually started to feel very strongly about what I thought was wrong with the institutions of the world, from schools to religion. I spent a lot of time then trying to make these thoughts coherent. I didn’t really think about what I wanted to do, or about the future, in anything more than abstract terms until I was 12 and a senior at my school recommended HPMOR.
I don’t remember what I thought the first time I read it up until where it had reached (I think it was chapter 95). I do remember that on my second read, by the time it had reached chapter 101, I stayed up the night before one of my finals to read it. That was around the time I started to actually believe I could do something to change the world (there may have been a long phase where I phrased it as wanting to rule the universe). But apart from an increased tendency in my thoughts at the time toward refining my belief systems, nothing changed much, and Rationality from AI to Zombies remained on my TBR until early 2017, which is when I first lurked LessWrong.
I had promised myself at the time that I would read all the Sequences properly regardless of how long it took, and so it wasn’t until late 2017 that I finally finished it. That was a long, and arduous process, and much of which came from many inner conflicts I actually noticed for the first time. Some of the ideas were ones I had tried to express long ago, far less coherently. It was epiphany and turmoil at every turn. I graduated school in 2018; I’d eventually realize this wasn’t nearly enough though, and it was pure luck that I chose a computer science undergrad because of vague thoughts about AI, despite not yet deciding on what I really wanted to do.
Over my first two years in college, I tried to actually think about that question. By this point, I had read enough about FAI to know it to be the most important thing to work on, and that anything I did would have to come back to that in some way. Despite that, I still stuck to some old wish to do something that I could call mine, and shoved the idea of direct work in AI Safety in the pile where things that you consciously know and still ignore in your real life go. Instead, I thought I’d learned the right lesson and held off on answering direct career questions until I knew more, because I had a long history of overconfidence in those answers (not that that’s a misguided principle, but there was more I could have seen at that point with what I knew).
Fast forward to late-2020. I had still been lurking on LW, reading about AI Safety, and generally immersing myself in the whole shindig for years. I even applied to the MIRIx program early that year, and held off on starting operations on that after March that year. I don’t remember what it was exactly that made me start to rethink my priors, but one day, I was shaken by the realization that I wasn’t doing anything the way I should have been if my priorities were actually what I claimed they were, to help the most people. I thought of myself as very driven by my ideals, and being wrong only on the level where you don’t notice difficult questions wasn’t comforting. I went into existential panic mode, trying to seriously recalibrate everything about my real priorities.
In early 2021, I was still confused about a lot of things. Not least because being from my country sort of limits the options one has to directly work in AI Alignment, or at least makes them more difficult. That was a couple months ago. I found that after I took a complete break from everything for a month to study for subjects I hadn’t touched in a year, all those cached thoughts I had that bred my earlier inner conflicts had mostly disappeared. I’m not entirely settled yet though, it’s been a weird few months. I’m trying to catch up on a lot of lost time and learn math (I’m working through MIRI’s research guide), focus my attention a lot more in specific areas of ML (I lucked out again there and did spend a lot of time studying it broadly earlier), and generally trying to get better at things. I’ll hopefully post infrequently here. I really hope this comment doesn’t feel like four years.
What links here?
- Insufficient Values by Jozdien (16 Jun 2021 14:33 UTC; 31 points)

Jozdien 3 May 2021 10:52 UTC
2 points
on: Thoughts on Re-reading Brave New World
I’m far from calling Brave New World a utopia, but I also couldn’t easily describe it as a dystopia. People are happy with their lives for the most part, but there’s no drive to push average levels of happiness up, and death still exists. The best dystopian argument I can see is that there’s no upward trend of good associated with scientific advancement, but even this needn’t necessarily be true, because of the islands where only the most unorthodox thinkers are sent presumably without having to worry about their actions there. I think something approximating a utopia by our standards would likely involve mass genetic equalization (but you know, in an upward direction), controlled environments, and easy access to hedons.

Jozdien 3 May 2021 20:06 UTC
11 points
in reply to: Daniel Kokotajlo’s comment on: Open and Welcome Thread—May 2021
Thanks! 2006 is what I remember, and what my older brother says too. I was 5 though, so the most I got out of it was learning how to torrent movies and Pokemon ROMs until like 2008, when I joined Facebook (at the time to play an old game called FarmVille).

Jozdien 4 May 2021 18:17 UTC
6 points
in reply to: Rudi C’s comment on: Open and Welcome Thread—May 2021
80,000 Hours’ data suggests that people are the bottleneck, not funding. Could you tell me why you think otherwise? It’s possible that there’s even more available funding in AI research and similar fields that are likely sources for FAI researchers.

Jozdien 11 May 2021 10:08 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Nisan’s comment on: Challenge: know everything that the best go bot knows about go
How comparable are Go bots to chess bots in this? Chess GMs at the highest level have been using engines to prepare for decades; I think if they’re similar enough, that would be a good sample to look at for viable approaches.

Jozdien 11 May 2021 17:44 UTC
5 points
in reply to: DanielFilan’s comment on: Challenge: know everything that the best go bot knows about go
I’m not clear on your usage of the word “know” here, but if it’s in a context where knowing and level of play have a significant correlation, I think GMs not knowing would be evidence against it being possible for a human to know everything that game bots do. GMs don’t just spend most of their time and effort on it, they’re also prodigies in the sport.

Jozdien 12 May 2021 20:47 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Josh Smith-Brennan’s comment on: Challenge: know everything that the best go bot knows about go
That’s evidence for it being harder to know what a Go bot knows than to know what a chess bot does, right? And if I’m understanding Go correctly, those years were at least a significant part due to computational constraints, which would imply that better transparency tools or making them more human-understandable still wouldn’t go near letting a human know what they know, right?

Jozdien 14 May 2021 20:34 UTC
4 points
in reply to: Just Learning’s comment on: What Do We Mean By “Rationality”?
It depends from case to case, I would think. There are instances when you’re most probably benefited by trading off epistemic rationality for instrumental, but in cases where it’s too chaotic to get a good estimate and the tradeoff seems close to equal, I would personally err on the side of epistemic rationality. Brains are complicated, forcing a placebo effect might have ripple effects across your psyche like an increased tendency to shut down that voice in your head that talks when you know your belief is wrong on some level (very speculative example), for limited short-term gain.

Utopic Nightmares

Jozdien14 May 2021 21:24 UTC

10 points

20 comments5 min readLW link

Jozdien 15 May 2021 13:49 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Logan Zoellner’s comment on: Utopic Nightmares
I don’t think I see how Godel’s theorem implies that. Could you elaborate? Concept space is massive, but I don’t see it being literally unbounded.
Certainly not enough to be worth lobotomizing the entire human race in order to achieve some faux state of “eternal bliss”.
If we reach the point where we can safely add and edit our own emotions, I don’t think removing one emotion that we deem counterproductive would be seen as negative. We already actively try to suppress negative emotions today, why would removing it altogether be more significant in an environment where its old positives don’t apply?
Either we continue to grow forever, discovering new and exciting things, or we die out. Any kind of “steady state utopia” is just an extended version of the latter.
Why is a steady state utopia equal to us dying out? I can see why that would be somewhat true given the preference we give now to the state of excitement at discovery and novelty, but why objectively?

Jozdien 16 May 2021 12:34 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Alicorn’s comment on: Utopic Nightmares
I was thinking about less ideal variations more than explicitly harmful ones. If we’re optimizing for a set of values—like happiness, intelligence, virtuousness—through birth and environment, then I thought it unlikely that we’d have multiple options with the exact same maximal optimization distribution. If there are, the identical people part of it doesn’t hold yeah—if there’s more than one option, it’s likely that there are many, so there might not be identicals at all.

Jozdien 16 May 2021 12:34 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: Utopic Nightmares
We value new experiences now because without that prospect we’d be bored, but is there any reason why new experiences necessarily forms part of a future with entirely different forms of life? There could be alien species that value experiences the more they repeat them; to them, new experiences may be seen as unnecessary (I think that’s unlikely under evolutionary mechanisms, but not under sentient design).

Jozdien 16 May 2021 13:22 UTC
5 points
in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: Utopic Nightmares
My point was that we value new experiences. Future forms of life, like humans after we can alter our preferences at root level, might not find that preference as necessary. So we could reach a level where we don’t have to worry about bad possibilities, and call it “paradise”.

Jozdien 16 May 2021 20:03 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Logan Zoellner’s comment on: Utopic Nightmares
Hence, finding new axioms and using them to prove new sets of statements is an endless problem. Similar infinite problems exist in computability “Does program X halt?” and computational complexity “What is the Kolmogorov compexity of string X?” as well as topology “Are 2 structures which have properties X, Y, Z… in common homeomorphic?”.
Aren’t these single problems that deal with infinities rather than each being an infinite sequence of problems? Would that kind of infinity bring about any sense of excitement or novelty more than discovering say, the nth digit of pi?
It’s probably worth noting that my moral opinions seem to be in disagreement with many of the people around here, as I place much less weight on avoidance of suffering and experiencing physical bliss and much more on novelty of experience, helping others and seeking truth than the general feeling I get from people who want to maximize qualies or don’t consider orgasmium morally repugnant.
Out of curiosity, if we did run out of new exciting truths to discover and there was a way to feel the exact same thrill and novelty directly that you would have in those situations, would you take it?

Jozdien 16 May 2021 20:24 UTC
2 points
on: Against Against Boredom
My main point, though, is that I would consider eliminating boredom wrong because it optimizes for our feelings $R (t)$ and not our well being $V (t)$ .
I’d argue boredom is the element that makes us optimize for $R (t)$ over $V (t)$ . Boredom is why we value even temporary negatives, because of that subsequent boost back up, which indicates optimizing for $R (t)$ . Removing boredom would let you optimize for $V (t)$ instead.
One argument is Chesterton’s fence, i.e. until we are quite sure why we dislike boredom so, we ought not mess with it.
I agree. But this isn’t something I propose we do now or even at the moment we have the power to; we can hold off on considering it until we know the complete ramifications. But we will at some point, and at that point, we can mess with it.
Another is that if humans ever become “content” with boredom, we cut off all possibility of further growth (however small).
Yeah, that is a downside. But there may come a time at which growth steps diminish enough that we should consider whether the lost value from not directly maxing out our pleasure stats is worth the advancement.
On a side note, I really appreciate that you took the time to write a post in response. That was my first post on LW, and the engagement is very encouraging.

Jozdien 16 May 2021 21:22 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Logan Zoellner’s comment on: Against Against Boredom
Yep, that is precisely the point of simulated annealing. Allowing temporary negative values lets you escape local maxima.
In that future scenario, we’d have a precise enough understanding of emotions and their fulfilment space to recognize local maxima. If we could ensure within reason that being caught in local maxima isn’t a problem, would temporary negative values still have a place?

Jozdien 16 May 2021 21:24 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Logan Zoellner’s comment on: Utopic Nightmares
I would consider such a technology abhorrent for the same reason I consider taking a drug that would make me feel infinitely happy forever abhorrent.
What reasons are those? I can understand the idea that there are things worse than death, but I don’t see what part of this makes it qualify.

Jozdien 18 May 2021 11:35 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Aidan_Kierans’s comment on: Utopic Nightmares
If we hold diversity as a terminal value then yes, a diverse population of less-than-optimal people is better. But don’t we generally see diversity less as a terminal value than something that’s useful because it approximates terminal values?