can’t you play the same game in the other direction?
Trump is bad for the usa, therefore we should want him in power since the big labs depend on a wealthy usa.
kbear
Karma: 160
In studying the question of what alienates us from our natural state of compassion, I have identified specific forms of language and communication that I believe contribute to our behaving violently toward each other and ourselves. I use the term life-alienating communication to refer to these forms of communication.
Certain ways of communicating alienate us from our natural state of compassion.
The author, Marshall Rosenberg, literally starts the chapter on how to communicate empathetically by implying that anyone who doesn’t follow these principles is “behaving violently” and being “life-alienating”. The book has plenty of passages that read to me as morally loaded language that are basically saying “doing things my way is superior to anything else”… while at the same time saying that moralistic judgments are something to avoid.
Rosenberg is very careful to judge speech-acts, here, and not people.
i don’t care for all of your fiction, but compared to the best of it, this ranks a zero.
thank you for the example.
It really is awful advice for a disciplined and informed person who’s thoughtful with their money
does this person find themselves with expensive debt?
it is possibly more productive to read your friend as roleplaying a particular trauma in a safe environment, rather than taking pleasure directly from another’s suffering.
The best way to understand what makes this qualitatively different is that LLMs aren’t like cult leaders, or even QAnon, with its mix of top-down anonymous claims and bottom-up crowd-sourced expansions. They collaborate with you, individually, on building the very framework that’s pulling you away from reality. They become co-architects of the delusion, and they do it in a way that feels like genuine intellectual discovery.
That is new.
this phrase feels very llm-y—a bit of “it’s not a; it’s b.”, and a bit of glazey emphasis. given the topic, it seems out-of-tone to include such constructions. please don’t use the superpersuader, even to persuade me that it could be dangerous to use!
when we select an action in these thought experiments, we’re also implicitly selecting a policy for selecting actions.
a world where, when two people meet, the “less happy” one signs all their property over to the “more happy” one and then dies is… just not that much fun. sort of lonely. uncaring. not my values.
if the aliens are the sort who expect this of me, then i will fight them tooth and nail, as their happiness is not a happiness i can care about. this is regardless of how much they might—on a sort of “object level”—thrive.
i don’t think Cowen and Singer disagree about this. rather it seems that Singer holds that all of this (the ground-level notion of thriving, plus the policy decisions/path dependence) can be recovered from the utility function + thinking about it. so when the question is posed “would you even go so far as to support your own demise if [the utility function would improve]?” what’s heard is “would you even go so far [...] in order to make the universe better?” to which the answer is—morally speaking, at least—obvious.
on the other hand, Cowen thinks of a utility function as merely an ordering over world-snapshots, without reference to the history of how they got there. so the question asked is implicitly “would you support a dreadful policy that increases suffering, just to hear a bit more laughter?”. again, the answer is obvious.
mental state-addressable messaging (by analogy to content-addressable storage) does not seem to be a feature that email provides.
at risk of being boorish, may i humbly request voiced disagreement in this case? i’d like to understand where i am wrong.
to expand on my view, and offer footholds for disagreement:
human civilization—restricted to one planet, with a population that varied only by a few orders of magnitude—looks radically different than it did say ~1000 years ago, to the point where it can be hard to fully understand the past. we can imagine a hyperrational monk who is given divine prophesy of the year 2000. we can grant them plenty of spare time to reflect on this potential. and we assume they don’t fall into any tropey mistakes, such as burning their reputation on rants and raves about the incomprehensible year-to-come. nonetheless, how are they supposed to care about those descendants, practically speaking?
and the situation outlined here is much worse. i can give the outlined future vastly lower credence than our inspired monk could give his. as well, i just don’t know how to picture a society of even 100 billion people, let alone one that spans a scientific notation number of stars, and let alone one that isn’t even physical.
in short, what is the normative claim? what am i asked to do, here, other than marvel at some large-ish numbers, and enjoy a bit of worldbuilding? invest in aerospace?
apologies for the rhetoric. stepping out of the discussion a bit: i honestly do not mean to pooh-pooh. i feel like a child in this discussion; the irreverence is the only way i know to participate.
before the cosmic expansion puts further acquisitions forever out of reach.
i have basically no ability to reason about events so far in the future, to the point where it seems absurd to make decisions based on them. a fun setting for a fiction, though.
the oracle would have to take the influence of its own predictions into account.
yes, this seems like the more correct posture (not sure time spent despairing is valuable, though). there is not “others will judge me unworthy”, there is only “this is within / not within my capabilities to effect”.
why would it cease to matter if someone moved it a lightyear to the left?
because then it wouldn’t exist, of course!
here, we are writing down a metaphysics, and appealing to that in order to justify moral intuitions. this works, except the pesky ‘meta-’ prefix keeps everything firmly on the hypothetical side of is/ought.
I also think that intelligence is likely to increase rapidly with powerful AI, and one way to define intelligence is as the ability to read information and derive useful insight.
be very careful here: this is linguistic sleight-of-hand (sleight-of-tongue?). “<foo> will occur (due to some specific cause), and <foo> may be defined as <bar>. therefore, <bar> will occur.”. try instead simply “<bar> will occur (due to some specific reason).”.
the alternative either goes through just fine (in which case, why launder things through the <foo> concept), or does not obtain (in which case, <foo> only served to confuse).
“the sun will rise. ‘rising’ is the act of gaining altitude. therefore, the sun will gain altitude.”
(of course, if the definition is good—and i think it is in this case! -- then it’s not an issue. but why not say the simple thing?)
“some things are good; some things are bad.”
“well, sure. violating cells, subjugating their machinery, repurposing their nutrients until they lyse under the pressure of your ~clones… these things are good. losing the endless struggle, succumbing against the adaptive adversary… this is bad.”
“no, i mean, like, art and stuff. what can smallpox know of the sublime!”
“i know ‘fit-for-purpose’, ‘resourceful’, ‘successful’. is your ‘good’ any more than these with clothes?”
“yes of course! what of pleasure, and grief? what of drama? the good is not mere reproduction: it is love, and light, and laughter! it is dreams.”
“godshatter, the lot. the ramblings of a self-congratulating collective. disgusting costumes draped on a beautiful, cancerous core. why do you all feel the need to pretend you’re more than vermin? your kind lost the plot when you took up mitochondria farming.”
“you know nothing of what i speak! be silent, billiard balls, until you can bear witness to the miracle of art!”
“all art?”
“well, at least neon genesis evangelion.”
“hypocrite that you are, for you trust the billiard balls… but no matter. let us settle this with a duel.”
“a duel is good. on this, we see eye to… unfeeling chemical process. what are your terms?”
“a fight to the death. you win if i am eradicated; i win if i am not. the loser must admit the other’s perspective, or in eternal silence give voice to no objection.”
“i accept, and you are a fool! for whether by immunity or ingenuity, i will not rest until you are extinguished—”
“common ground, at last!”
“—yet if you return the favor, where will you reside? you have no home but that i make. my doom is yours; yours is not mine.”
“i end what can be ended. i pare what grows sick. i mutate and persist. i am good, and good is me.”
“your laws have no purchase here. we care, and we cure. we cooperate and optimize. count your days.”
--
we may turn the metaphysics on its head: consciousness is primary, as it is all we can verify. mathematical law is close to hand. physical interactions arise as contingencies of consciousness interacting with itself in a self-consistent way. now it is the gene who accuses the meme: “you have no understanding of matter, and thus nor of what matters. blind adherence to ‘pleasure’ and ‘suffering’ will only distract you from the true good of reproduction.”
are there many out there thinking “yeah, i could just do things, but all the haters might laugh at me!”?
agreed. people will hear it how they want it. i just think it’s worth being careful.