Definitely.
katydee
Karma: 4,694
Winston Churchill was said to occasionally narrate his life in the third person from the perspective of a future historical text.
I’m skeptical of the claim that most authors don’t know that real humans are unluminous. The authors that I have met in person haven’t seemed particularly luminous to me, and I see no reason that they would think that people in general would be so. I suppose that they could all model their writing on other writing instead of on the world as it exists, and thus excess luminosity in fiction could quickly propagate, but this seems somewhat implausible.
Why would authors model fictional minds with unusual high-level skills that they do not possess and, in all likelihood, have neither heard of from other sources nor conceived independently?
I think I might not get it. How could someone be introspective but not luminous? I haven’t put any real effort into reading the luminosity sequence because it seemed so fundamentally obvious to me. It is possible that I am low-level and deceived in ways that I am totally unaware of, but it’s always been easy—trivial, even—for me to see through my brain’s “fake explanations” and understand the actual reasons behind my thoughts or traits.
What are the standard failure modes that you’ve encountered? I need to test myself more thoroughly.
Could we please not have white text on a black background?
This works great. Thanks for the link!
I understand why you might be angry, but please think of the scale involved here. If any particular post or comment increases the chance of an AI going wrong by one trillionth of a percent, it is almost certainly not worth it.
Sorry, forgot that not everyone saw the thread in question. Eliezer replied to the original post and explicitly said that it was dangerous and should not be published. I am willing to take his word for it, as he knows far more about AI than I.
“If such a technique is fast enough and reliable enough I would literally expect its development to solve all of the world’s problems within a half century in the absence of a Singularity before then.”
This seems like an incredibly strong claim, especially given the divisions and arguments even among Less Wrong posters. Perhaps WrongBot is merely low-level and misguided, and should listen to more advanced users and mend his ways—but what about Roko, for instance?
I see no need to limit that claim to the males.
I don’t see what that has to do with my post, and I also don’t think it’s true.
I might be interpreting Michael Vassar’s post incorrectly, but it seemed like an authentic, if radically optimistic, suggestion and not a hyperbolic or sarcastic one.
Thank you for continuing to engage after my rather silly reply; while in the process of writing a more detailed response to your latest post, I figured out what you meant originally. I now agree with your earlier interpretation of Michael Vassar’s post, though I am still skeptical of the jump between “dramatically expanding LW” and “solving all the world’s problems without a singularity.”
Interestingly, I actually had a specific female Death Eater that I had in mind when I wrote that post. The character in question, Bellatrix Lestrange, was played by Helena Bonham Carter, who does not strike me as unusually physically unattractive.
I think that depends entirely on particulars that should probably not be discussed here—suffice it to say that a male can be raped in multiple ways, just as a female can, and that rape involves emotional/mental pain as well as physical pain.
If I recall correctly, she was attractive—even beautiful—in the books until she was imprisoned, at which point she became a shadow of her former self. However, she was imprisoned for torturing two people into insanity (I can rot13 that if necessary, but I think it’s a very minor spoiler at best), so I think it’s fair to say that she was evil before she became unattractive and not the other way around.
I’ll redouble my efforts, then. This topic also probably deserves a thread of its own.
I have myself been accused of being an android or replicant on many occasions. The best way that I’ve found to deal with this is to make jokes and tell humorous anecdotes about the situation, especially ones that poke fun at myself. This way, the accusation itself becomes associated with the joke and people begin to find it funny, which makes it “unserious.”