The time loop intersects the Madoka Magica one along an ill-specified hypersurface. In some iterations, Eliezer fights Homura over the future of the lightcone. In others, Eliezer dates Homura. In still others, one of the two does not exist, and the other has to create them (often by summoning them using the Astral Codex Kabbalah). In yet others, Eliezer does a fusion dance with Homura … and in most of those the resulting fusion immediately collapses into the Witch Durandal and everyone dies.
Karl Krueger
Karma: 1,723
A: “Hey neighbor. I’m sorry that my backyard burger grilling caused you to have an asthma attack.”
B: “Thanks. I’m sorry you have to choose between tasty grilling and your neighbor’s health. I’d rather we lived in a world with charcoal-grilled Impossible Burgers and no asthma attacks, but we don’t get to. Sucks.”
A: “Oh, to be clear, I’m going to keep on grilling burgers. I just wanted to acknowledge that it sucks that my grilling has a side effect that harms you.”
B: “Um, what good is your apology to me if you don’t change anything? I don’t value your having (or expressing) regret, I value being able to breathe in my own backyard.”
A; “Well, I’m … letting you know that I’m going to be grilling more, so you won’t be surprised?”
B: “Oh, so I won’t be surprised by becoming unable to breathe, because I’ll expect being unable to breathe?”
A: “It sounds kinda mean when you put it like that.”
B: “I hope you see why I am not terribly reassured by your apology.”
A: “Sorry about that.”
This sounds related to the concept of Bulverism, the fallacy of explaining how someone acquired such wrong views (e.g. their naïveté, bias, conflict of interest, etc.) without first checking whether their views are, in fact, wrong.
effective chrono-lucropia
A less overwrought expression might be “insensitivity to inflation”.
Yeah. I’m not even sure the “just cause” is an essential element there. It can just be about who wins, who’s better. That’s what it is in competitive sports too; which are often described as a sublimation of a warrior impulse.
I don’t know what violent video games y’all have been playing, but the ones I’m familiar with could not really be described as “serial killer fantasy” but rather “combat fantasy”. A serial killer doesn’t engage in combat against rival killers on a battlefield; they stalk and murder noncombatants in society. The impulse to do battle and triumph over rivals seems pretty different from an impulse to abduct and murder innocents.
Prediction: There will be no responsible AI policy in the United States unless & until the lawless Trump regime is removed from power.
Removing Trump & co. is on the critical path to responsible US AI policy.
In this way, AI policy is in the same boat as public-health policy, military readiness, energy policy, trade policy, and so on, and so on.
People in the AI-safety field who exercise any political influence, even if they do not care about national politics other than for AI-safety reasons, should therefore be using their influence toward removal of the regime, because that removal is on the critical path to responsible AI policy.
(Impeachment & removal seems low-probability? Sure, true. But getting responsible AI policy out of the Trump crowd is even lower-probability.)
Edited to add: Whether “remove” or “outlast” is the relevant thing here depends on timelines. And thus, so does the “critical path” claim. If you need the US to have responsible AI policy before 2029, you need the Trump admin gone. If your timelines are longer than that, you can instead just support having a fair election.
In kindergarten we learn the Golden Rule, which is as good of an approximation of TDT (or FDT) as you generally need in the terrestrial domain.
To the Renaissance alchemist, the reason that turning lead into gold is “hard” is that the problem is misunderstood. The alchemist knows that some substances can be converted into other substances, but doesn’t have a theory that explains which transformations can be accomplished using the techniques available to him, and which cannot. Lead to gold happens to be one of the latter.
To the modern physicist, the reason that turning lead into gold is “hard” is that the machinery needed for knocking some protons off of lead nuclei to make gold nuclei is expensive and doesn’t scale.
What the Renaissance alchemist wanted (bulk transmutation of base metals into gold) remains infeasible, even with modern knowledge and technology. But knowing this requires modern chemistry, physics, and engineering knowledge that the alchemist lacked.
Whenever you look to a different spot you go blind during the eye movement but your visual field doesn’t blur and come back.
I suspect that sort of thing is true not only of visual perception, but of consciousness in general. It is not continuous, but we don’t usually become aware of the discontinuities.
If you want to take over the Roman Empire starting in first-century Judea, it turns out that “start a militant group and try to conquer Judea back from the Romans” doesn’t work, but “start a network of illegal high-trust cooperatives that teach virtue, pacifism, and give-till-it-hurts local altruism” does.
(These being the strategies of the Zealots and the Christians, respectively. The Zealots got stomped; the Christians eventually took over the Roman Empire.)
It often seems to me that the hard problem of consciousness is equivalent to “Why are people dissatisfied with easy explanations of consciousness?”
You don’t keep honking, or even start honking, at somebody whose trunk is open. They’ll never figure it out.
An open trunk means an unsecured load, and an unsecured load is a safety problem. But yeah, a honk alone isn’t enough to communicate about it.
Trouble is, once someone forms the hypothesis “this is someone raging at me” they’re going to have a hard time updating to “this is someone trying to help me”.
Dude should maybe have turned down his music if he’s sincerely trying to communicate to another driver. In slow highway traffic it’s totally possible to holler “Trunk’s open!” and be heard … but not over chunky bass.
Hmm. My understanding is that a “polygraph screening” is an interrogation; conducted and judged by human interrogators; using a polygraph machine as a sort of interactive stage prop to put the subject under more stress. The output of the polygraph machine is not dispositive; the judgment of the human interrogator is. That is, whether you pass or fail is not a fact about the machine’s output; it’s about what you say, how you act, and whether the interrogator believes you.
Many stories of people “failing polygraph screenings” involve the subject confessing. If you do that, it is not going to matter what the machine output says!
So the question “Does polygraph screening work?” does not mean “Does the polygraph machine itself detect lies?” bet rather something more like “Does adding a polygraph performance to a human-conducted interrogation make the interrogation more effective?”
In the era of fire’s domestication, that would be the African savannah, perhaps half a million years ago; and the fire would be wildfire sweeping across the plain, as it does—the only natural fire there.
Lightning strikes.
Supporting Claim 2, while profound amnesia prevents recall, conscious experience is in the present tense.
The “present-ness” of conscious experience seems illusory, though? Experience points to the recent past, because it takes time for information to propagate from perception (and other sources) to conscious awareness. This includes reflection or self-awareness; see for instance the brain-scan experiments wherein a decision can be detected in brain activity before the subject can claim to be consciously aware of making it.
This enabled me to use Said Achmiz’s SDI approach[3]to make a final decision.
Just to be clear, I think you might mean Alicorn’s SDI approach?
The same structure appears outside mathematics. In biological and functional systems, we evaluate correctness in terms of how well something performs the role it has by virtue of what it is. A heart that fails to circulate blood is not merely different, but defective; it is not functioning as it ought to in a real sense. The normativity is grounded in the structure and function of the organism, not in an externally imposed preference.
Biology, though, is made of things that do not have a single function, but have multiple and overlapping roles in the overall health of the organism (or the environment). The heart gets help from the leg muscles in circulating the blood. The bones don’t just hold up the body, they also produce blood cells, store a reserve of calcium, etc. Eating food isn’t just about nutrition, and having sex isn’t just about reproduction; both are also about social bonds. In genetics, genes are involved in multiple different functions and exist in many variations. And neurodiversity is a thing; human culture and society would be impoverished if all human cognition conformed to a single norm of function.
Expecting things to have just one function, readily comprehended and convenient for moral-functional argument, is not how organisms or environments work.
Have you any particular disrespect to any present members? Answer. I have not.
Do you sincerely declare that you love mankind in general; of what profession or religion soever? Answ. I do.
Do you think any person ought to be harmed in his body, name or goods, for mere speculative opinions, or his external way of worship? Ans. No.
Do you love truth’s sake, and will you endeavour impartially to find and receive it yourself and communicate it to others? Answ. Yes.
Sounds like a great inspiration, but the name sounds like “junta” which means dictatorship.
Perhaps we should adopt that word “faith” as a shorthand for “hyperrationality”, and similarly “grace” as a shorthand for “when hyperrationality works; the positive outcome of successful hyperrational coordination.”
In this usage, faith isn’t “believing what you know ain’t so”; it’s acting as if a positive belief is true, in a way that coordinates to cause it to be true. It is cooperating with others on making it true. Grace is the resulting condition of the belief actually being true; not by miracle, but because enough people were in fact faithful.
As in:
Alice faithfully brought a dish to the community potluck; and by grace there was plenty of food for everyone. (Alice acts according to the belief that “we’re all bringing food”, and since pretty much everyone else does too, there is indeed enough food.)
If there’s a COVID outbreak, then I will test myself before going to the party, out of faith that others similarly situated to me may do likewise; so that by grace nobody will get exposed at the party. (If I faithlessly skip doing the test, then I should expect others to skip it too; no grace for us.)
By grace we were saved from nuclear war throughout the Cold War; and so we remember the faith of Saint Stanislav Petrov, whose belief “we are not having a nuclear war” led to us not having a nuclear war.