Do not accept any of my words on faith,
Believing them just because I said them.
Be like an analyst buying gold, who cuts, burns,
And critically examines his product for authenticity.
Only accept what passes the test
By proving useful and beneficial in your life.
-- The Buddha, Jnanasara-samuccaya Sutra
When people ask me what philosophy is, I say philosophy is what you do when you don’t know what the right questions are yet. Once you get the questions right, then you go answer them, and that’s typically not philosophy, that’s one science or another. Anywhere in life where you find that people aren’t quite sure what the right questions to ask are, what they’re doing, then, is philosophy.
When reading old LW posts and comments and seeing I’ve upvoted some comment, I find myself thinking “Wait, why have I upvoted this comment?”
I don’t think this deserves its own top level discussion post and I suspect most of the downvotes are for this reason. Maybe use the open thread next time?
The site is lacking breadcrumbs so it’s hard to orient oneself. It’s hard to follow what section of the website you’re in as you dig deeper into the content. Any plans to add breadcrumbs (or some alternative)?
Funny you should mention that..
AI risk is one of the 2 main focus areas for the The Open Philanthropy Project for this year, which GiveWell is part of. You can read Holden Karnofsky’s Potential Risks from Advanced Artificial Intelligence: The Philanthropic Opportunity.
They consider that AI risk is high enough on importance, neglectedness, and tractability (their 3 main criteria for choosing what to focus on) to be worth prioritizing.
“Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.”
-- Charles Darwin
The trailer for the movie Transcendence is out.
Well, shit. Now I feel bad, I liked your recent posts.
how likely an AGI project is to doom us
Isn’t it more like “how likely a formally proven FAI design is to doom us”, since this is what Holden seems to be arguing (see his quote below)?
Suppose that it is successful in the “AGI” part of its goal, i.e., it has successfully created an intelligence vastly superior to human intelligence and extraordinarily powerful from our perspective. Suppose that it has also done its best on the “Friendly” part of the goal: it has developed a formal argument for why its AGI’s utility function will be Friendly, it believes this argument to be airtight, and it has had this argument checked over by 100 of the world’s most intelligent and relevantly experienced people. .. What will be the outcome?
The following stuff isn’t new, but I still find it fascinating:
“The lottery is a tax on those incapable of basic math.”
-- Ambrose Bierce
that which can be destroyed by the utility function of humanity should be
Almost true by definition?
I’m starting to wonder whether it might be useful to have a ‘Meta’ section, which is separate from Discussion (and Main) for meta threads of all kinds.
Eliezer Yudkowsky’s map IS the territory.
I offer my web design skills to improve the site design/code (for free). I can send you a redesign sample if you’d like.
Edit: it’s done.