Kaj_Sotala(Kaj Sotala)

• Kaj_Sotala 26 Jul 2024 16:47 UTC

  3 points

  −2

  in reply to: Vaniver’s comment on: Univer­sal Ba­sic In­come and Poverty

  Agree that a real source would be better but I think a Claude-source is better than nothing at all, especially in a case where the point is just to get the rough magnitudes and the details don’t need to be exact. I’m not sure if editing my comment to just the first paragraph would be an improvement.

  We’ve all seen the reports on how LLMs get good results on standardized exams and tests of general knowledge, so on this kind of question I’d presume it to be basically reliable (again, as long as we’re talking just rough estimates and magnitudes, and take care not to ask leading questions). If my comment had instead included my own Fermi calculation or a random Wikipedia link, I’m guessing that that would have been more accepted, even though I doubt it would have been more reliable.

• Kaj_Sotala 26 Jul 2024 15:25 UTC

  11 points

  5

  in reply to: cousin_it’s comment on: Univer­sal Ba­sic In­come and Poverty

  Agree; also this post doesn’t seem to address e.g. the fact that the relative sizes of the social classes used to be quite different, and that today there exists a sizeable middle class rather than society being much more starkly divided into the poor vs. the wealthy.

  [EDIT: replaced Claude’s estimate of social class sizes with the following:]

  E.g. this paper cites economist Thomas Piketty’s research as the original source, shows the share of property owned by the middle 40% of the population in Britain going from 10% to 40% between 1780 and 2015, with the top 10% of the population had 85-90% of the property up to around 1940.

  

  Piketty (2020) has also been able to provide more distributional detail for the two most recent centuries, as shown in his Figure 5.4, reproduced here with permission (Piketty, 2020, p. 195). His estimates show that 1780–1800 saw a slight decline (from 89% to 86%) in the wealth proportion of the top 10% of private property holders, and an equivalent significant rise (from 10% to 13%) in the wealth held by the ‘middle 40%’, with the bottom 50% remaining at little more than 1% [...]

  From [1910], however, the wealth of the top 10% began a gradual (1910–42) and then precipitate (1942–90) decline. By 1990, their share of national wealth had been almost cut in half to 48%, while the share of the ‘patrimonial middle class’ – the next 40% – had risen to 42%. Even the lowest 50% now had a 10% share in the nation’s wealth, while the top 1% had ‘only’ 18%.

  So even if you buy the argument that there’s a meaningful sense in which poverty hasn’t been eliminated, the fraction of people who are middle class rather than poor has gone drastically up. And maybe a UBI won’t be able to push poverty down to 0%, just as past progress hasn’t, but it could quite possibly contribute another significant reduction.

• Kaj_Sotala 25 Jul 2024 15:14 UTC

  4 points

  2

  in reply to: Arthur Conmy’s comment on: You should go to ML conferences

  It sounded as if you were suggesting doing this for random papers,

  I presumed that Jan meant doing it for papers that had survived the previous “read the titles” and “read the abstracts” filtering stages.

• Kaj_Sotala 25 Jul 2024 9:02 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: Ap­ply now: Get “un­stuck” with the New IFS Self-Care Fel­low­ship Program

  (I was one of the people editing the post and I’m helping out with the course) Here’s my current take.

• Kaj_Sotala 13 Jul 2024 13:32 UTC

  7 points

  −4

  in reply to: Dweomite’s comment on: Pan­theon Interface

  Personally I like it and didn’t have the association to “demons” at all, probably because I’ve seen this comic go around enough times to make the distinction clear.

  

• Kaj_Sotala 13 Jul 2024 13:30 UTC

  10 points

  0

  on: Pan­theon Interface

  Whoa this is an amazing idea! Thanks for implementing it.

  • Is there some rule that determines which daemons chime in on which lines, or is it purely random?

  • Warning for others: don’t open Pantheon in two browser tabs at once and then go ahead to write stuff in one of them, expecting it to get saved—when you close the browser, it might also save the contents from the tab that you wrote almost nothing in, overwriting the storage that has more. (This is not a criticism, I imagine this to be tricky to fix and I should’ve thought of it myself.)

  • Viewing the chain-of-thought for some of the daemons, I felt like a lot of ideas they had come up with in the first stage were better questions than the ones they finally settled on. (Unfortunately, I can’t show examples because I lost the state.) Possibly this was because I was hoping to use it for brainstorming some ideas, and some responses that I would have found useful would have been the bots just asking follow-up questions about specific ideas I had. But since those questions were relatively obvious, they were ranked low on the “surprisingness” metrics. This makes me think that besides the choice of daemons, there could also be a setting for what kinds of comments you might find the most useful (that would swap between sets of chain-of-thought prompts) - in some contexts it’s useful to also hear the obvious comments/​questions, whereas in some other it’s not. For now I’ll just edit the chain-of-thought prompts manually.

Games of My Child­hood: The Troops

Links and brief mus­ings for June

In­de­ci­sion and in­ter­nal­ized au­thor­ity figures

• Kaj_Sotala 1 Jul 2024 21:26 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Daniel Kokotajlo’s comment on: Daniel Koko­ta­jlo’s Shortform

  I’m curious about the assertion that speed is theoretically unnecessary.

  Isn’t that the principle behind vertical takeoff aircraft? Or do you mean something else?

• Kaj_Sotala 6 Jun 2024 18:50 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Wei Dai’s comment on: Former OpenAI Su­per­al­ign­ment Re­searcher: Su­per­in­tel­li­gence by 2030

  See this post

  That link gives me a “Sorry, you don’t have access to this draft”

• Kaj_Sotala 4 Jun 2024 14:38 UTC

  4 points

  0

  in reply to: Cookiecarver’s comment on: Awakening

  I guess you could reap some benefits out of it even without actually believing in Christianity, but those seem much smaller than the ones you can get out of meditation. Also I think some of the happiness benefit Christians get is from being in a supportive community, and I already have non-religious communities that make me feel happy.

• Kaj_Sotala 4 Jun 2024 6:32 UTC

  6 points

  4

  in reply to: Cookiecarver’s comment on: Awakening

  I find that the day-to-day benefits in terms of suffering less already make meditation worth it. I’m not sure why rebirth would be necessary if my current life can already be made much better.

• Kaj_Sotala 4 Jun 2024 6:29 UTC

  3 points

  1

  in reply to: Mascal's Pugging’s comment on: Awakening

  Interesting. I’ve generally had the position that while the Buddha was no doubt a great innovator, he was still just one guy who lived thousands of years ago. And that it’d probably be a better use of time to read all the more recent meditation teachers who can draw on the thousands of years of progress since then, and can synthesize the most valuable pieces of Buddha’s teaching with the things that have been learned since then.

  Nevertheless, your challenge made me interested and I got a copy of “In the Words of the Buddha” now. It does seem interesting.

• Kaj_Sotala 3 Jun 2024 10:49 UTC

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: SpectrumDT’s comment on: Should ra­tio­nal­ists be spiritual /​ Spiritu­al­ity as over­com­ing delusion

  Ah that’s the one, thanks! Edited the link into the post.

• Kaj_Sotala 2 Jun 2024 11:47 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Links for May

  At this moment my best guess is that kindness is generally nice, but there is also such thing as too much kindness. I want my friends to be nice to me, but I also want them to be able to defend me and themselves from our potential enemies; and I need some credible signal that they could do that if necessary. (Or, as Jordan Peterson would say, “good” is not the same as “harmless”. A good person is one who could hurt you, but chooses not to.) There is “kindness” that is a choice, and “kindness” that is a strategy to survive by avoiding conflict. I suppose the former is attractive, and the latter is not. But to make it clear that your kindness is a choice, you must sometimes be visibly not-kind.

  Yeah this sounds right to me.

• Kaj_Sotala 2 Jun 2024 7:30 UTC

  4 points

  0

  in reply to: Tapatakt’s comment on: Awakening

  The book Altered Traits summarized some of the research on meditators (though if I recall correctly, it also caveated this with saying that most of the research wasn’t very high-quality), e.g.:

  Sticking with meditation over the years offers more benefits as meditators reach the long-term range of lifetime hours, around 1,000 to 10,000 hours. This might mean a daily meditation session, and perhaps annual retreats with further instruction lasting a week or so—all sustained over many years. The earlier effects deepen, while others emerge.

  For example, in this range we see the emergence of neural and hormonal indicators of lessened stress reactivity. In addition, functional connectivity in the brain in a circuit important for emotion regulation is strengthened, and cortisol, a key hormone secreted by the adrenal gland in response to stress, lessens.

  Loving-kindness and compassion practice over the long term enhance neural resonance with another person’s suffering, along with concern and a greater likelihood of actually helping. Attention, too, strengthens in many aspects with long-term practice: selective attention sharpens, the attentional blink diminishes, sustained attention becomes easier, and an alert readiness to respond increases. And long-term practitioners show enhanced ability to down-regulate the mind-wandering and self-obsessed thoughts of the default mode, as well as weakening connectivity within those circuits—signifying less self-preoccupation. These improvements often show up during meditative states, and generally tend to become traits.

  Shifts in very basic biological processes, such as a slower breath rate, occur only after several thousand hours of practice. Some of these impacts seem more strongly enhanced by intensive practice on retreat than by daily practice.

  lsusr’s review has more quotes.

• Kaj_Sotala 1 Jun 2024 21:41 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Links for May

  If they successfully get their preferences (a.k.a. “needs”, etc.) acknowledged and accommodated, that is a distinct advantage relative to the base case where they are just a regular person with no special needs! This seems very obvious!

  I mean, yes, but having that preference gives them no special advantage relative to not having it.

  Suppose that I have a gluten intolerance and need to have gluten-free food available. It’s of course true that getting to have gluten-free food is now a distinct advantage to me, compared to a scenario where I couldn’t get gluten-free food. But the fact that I have a gluten intolerance doesn’t make me better off overall. If I get accommodated, then at best I get to the same neutral level of “can eat food without getting terrible symptoms” that everyone else is at. And more realistically, I won’t even get to that zero level but rather will sometimes accidentally eat food with gluten, will miss out on tasty foods I’d enjoy, etc., so it’d be better for me to not have the intolerance.

  Likewise, if someone gets terribly upset about being told “you’re wrong”, then if that’s accommodated, at best they get to the same zero level as everyone who doesn’t get terribly upset about it. And it’s more likely that they won’t get perfectly accommodated, so not only will they gain nothing, but will also need to endure discomfort they wouldn’t need to endure if they didn’t have that sensitivity. So if they don’t already have that pre-existing sensitivity, there’s no incentive for them to develop it.

  I do not think that this is the least bit warranted.

  Why not? I know plenty of otherwise intelligent, creative etc. people who also have serious mental health problems.

• Kaj_Sotala 1 Jun 2024 21:09 UTC

  5 points

  0

  in reply to: romeostevensit’s comment on: Awakening

  That’s odd. (Note that while this excerpt was already present in the first edition, it was also retained in the second edition.)

• Kaj_Sotala 1 Jun 2024 21:05 UTC

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: Tapatakt’s comment on: Awakening

  I don’t have a complete model of what exactly is going on either. My current guess is that there are something like two different layers of motivation in the brain. One calculates expected utilities in a relatively unbiased manner and meditation doesn’t really affect that one much, but then there’s another layer on top of that which notices particularly high-utility (positive or negative) scenarios and gives them disproportionate weight. That second one tends to mess things up and is the one that meditation seems to weaken.

  It looks to me like weakening the second thing tends to make one’s decisions purely better, and more likely for the brain to just do the correct expected utility calculations. I acknowledge that this is very weird and implausible-sounding, because why would the brain develop a second layer of motivation that just messes things up?

  My strong suspicion at the moment is that it has to do with social strategies. Calculating expected utilities wrong is normally just bad, but it can be beneficial if other agents are modeling you and making decisions based on their models of you. So if you end up believing that an actually impossible outcome is possible, you may not be able to ever achieve that outcome. But your opponents who see that you are impossible to reason with may still give in, letting you get at least somewhat closer to that outcome than as if you’d been reasonable.

  I have some posts with more speculation about these things here and here.