mike_hawke

Karma: 1,005

mike_hawke 29 Mar 2024 22:08 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: mike_hawke’s comment on: mike_hawke’s Shortform
Would I somehow feel this problem less acutely if I had never been taught Fahrenheit, Celcius, or Kelvin; and instead been told everything in terms of gigabytes per nanojoule? I guess probably not. Inconvenient conversions are not preventing me from figuring out the relations and benchmarks I’m interested in.

mike_hawke 29 Mar 2024 21:32 UTC
1 point
0
on: From the outside, American schooling is weird
It’s important to remember, though, that I will be fine if I so choose. After all, if the scary impression was the real thing then it would appear scary to everyone.
Reading this makes me feel some concern. I think it should be seriously asked: Would you be fine if you hypothetically chose to take a gap year or drop out? Those didn’t feel like realistic options for me when I was in high school and college, and I think this ended up making me much less fine than I would have been otherwise. Notably, a high proportion of my close friends in college ended up dropping out or having major academic problems, despite being the smartest and most curious people I could find.
My experiences during and after college seemed to make a lot more sense after hearing about ideas like credential inflation, surplus elites, and the signaling model. It seems plausible that I might have made better decisions if I had been encouraged to contemplate those ideas as a high schooler.

mike_hawke 29 Mar 2024 18:35 UTC
7 points
−4
on: mike_hawke’s Shortform
In measuring and communicating about the temperature of objects, humans can clearly and unambiguously benchmark things like daily highs and lows, fevers, snow, space heaters, refrigerators, a cup of tea, and the wind chill factor. We can place thermometers and thereby say which things are hotter than others, and by how much. Daily highs can overlap with fevers, but neither can boil your tea.

But then I challenge myself to estimate how hot a campfire is, and I’m totally stuck.
It feels like there are no human-sensible relationships once you’re talking about campfires, self-cleaning ovens, welding torches, incandescent filaments, fighter jet exhaust, solar flares, Venus, Chernobyl reactor #4, the anger of the volcano goddess Pele, fresh fulgurites, or the boiling point of lead. Anything hotter than boiling water has ascended into the magisterium of the Divinely Hot, and nothing more detailed can be said of them by a mortal. If I were omnipotent, omniscient, & invulnerable, then I could put all those things in contact with each other and then watch which way the heat flows. But I am a human, so all I can say is that anything on that list could boil water.

mike_hawke 25 Mar 2024 19:32 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Eli Tyre’s comment on: Vernor Vinge, who coined the term “Technological Singularity”, dies at 79
Presumably he understood the value proposition of cryonics and declined it, right?

mike_hawke 23 Mar 2024 19:45 UTC
1 point
0
on: Meta-Honesty: Firming Up Honesty Around Its Edge-Cases
If everyone in town magically receives the same speedup in their “verbal footwork”, is that good for meta-honesty? I would like some kind of story explaining why it wouldn’t be neutral.
Point for yes:
Sure seems like being able to quickly think up an appropriately nonspecific reference class when being questioned about a specific hypothetical does not make it harder for anyone else to do the same.
Point against:
The code of literal truth only lets people navigate anything like ordinary social reality to the extent that they are very fast on their verbal feet, and can respond to the question “How are you?” by saying “Getting along” instead of “Horribly” or with an awkward silence while they try to think of something technically true.
This particular case seems anti-inductive and prone to the euphemism treadmill. Indeed, one person one time can navigate ordinary social reality by saying “Getting along” instead of giving an awkward silence; but many people doing so many times will find that it tends to work less well over time. If everyone magically becomes faster on their verbal feet, they can all run faster on the treadmill, but this isn’t necessarily good for meta-honesty.
Implications: either cognitive enhancement becomes even more of a moral priority, or adhering to meta-honesty becomes a trustworthy signal of being more intelligent than those who don’t. Neither outcome seems terrible to me, nor even all that much different from the status quo.

mike_hawke 19 Mar 2024 17:43 UTC
5 points
3
on: How do you feel about LessWrong these days? [Open feedback thread]
One concrete complaint I have is that I feel a strong incentive toward timeliness, at the cost of timelessness. Commenting on a fresh, new post tends to get engagement. Commenting on something from more than two weeks ago will often get none, which makes effortful comments feel wasted.
I definitely feel like there is A Conversation, or A Discourse, and I’m either participating in it during the same week as everyone else, or I’m just talking to myself.
(Aside: I have a live hypothesis that this is tightly related to The Twitterization of Everything.)

mike_hawke 17 Mar 2024 15:25 UTC
1 point
0
on: Social Class
Glad to see some discussion of social class.
Here’s something in the post that I would object to:
Non-essential weirdnesses, on the other hand, should be eliminated as much as possible because pushing lifestyle choices onto disinterested working-class people is a misuse of class privilege. Because classes are hierarchical in nature, this is especially important for middle-upper class people to keep in mind. An example of non-essential weirdness is “only having vegan options for dinner”.

This example seems wrong to me. It seems like serving non-vegan options does in fact risk doing a great injustice (to the animals eaten). I tried and failed to think of an example that seemed correct, so now I’m feeling pretty unconvinced by the entire concept.
One contrary idea might be that class norms and lifestyle choices are usually load-bearing, often in ways that are deliberately obscured or otherwise non-obvious. Therefore, one may want to be cautious when labeling something a non-essential weirdness.
(Also maybe worth mentioning that I think class phenomena are in general anti-inductive and much harder to reach broad conclusions about than other domains.)

mike_hawke 16 Mar 2024 3:23 UTC
1 point
−6
on: Meta-Honesty: Firming Up Honesty Around Its Edge-Cases
- Most people, even most unusually honest people, wander about their lives in a fog of internal distortions of reality. Repeatedly asking yourself of every sentence you say aloud to another person, “Is this statement actually and literally true?”, helps you build a skill for navigating out of your internal smog of not-quite-truths. For that is our mastery.
I think some people who read this post ought to reverse this advice. The advice I would give to those people is: if you’re constantly forcing every little claim you make through a literalism filter, you might end up multiplying disfluencies and generally raising the cost of communicating with you. Maybe put a clause limit on your sentences and just tack on a generic hedge like “or something” if you need to.

mike_hawke 15 Mar 2024 0:47 UTC
12 points
8
on: ‘Empiricism!’ as Anti-Epistemology
Only praise yourself as taking ‘the outside view’ if (1) there’s only one defensible choice of reference class;
I think this point is underrated. The word “the” in “the outside view” is sometimes doing too much work, and it is often better to appeal to an outside view, or multiple outside views.

mike_hawke 14 Mar 2024 17:52 UTC
3 points
0
on: My Clients, The Liars
What do you think the internal experience of these liars is like? I could believe that some of them have gotten a lot of practice with fooling themselves in order to fool others, in settings where doing so is adaptive. Do you think they would get different polygraph results than the believer in the invisible dragon hypothetically would?

mike_hawke 12 Mar 2024 23:49 UTC
14 points
2
in reply to: Quintin Pope’s comment on: Counting arguments provide no evidence for AI doom
Damn, woops.
My comment was false (and strident; worst combo). I accept the strong downvote and I will try to now make a correction.
I said:
I spent a bunch of time wondering how you could could put 99.9% on no AI ever doing anything that might be well-described as scheming for any reason.

What I meant to say was:
I spent a bunch of time wondering how you could put 99.9% on no AI ever doing anything that might be well-described as scheming for any reason, even if you stipulate that it must happen spontaneously.
And now you have also commented:
Well, I have <0.1% on spontaneous scheming, period. I suspect Nora is similar and just misspoke in that comment.
So....I challenge you to list a handful of other claims that you have similar credence in. Special Relativity? P!=NP? Major changes in our understanding of morality or intelligence or mammal psychology? China pulls ahead in AI development? Scaling runs out of steam and gives way to other approaches like mind uploading? Major betrayal against you by a beloved family member?
The OP simply says “future AI systems” without specifying anything about these systems, their paradigm, or what offworld colony they may or may not be developed on. Just...all AI systems henceforth forever. Meaning that no AI creators will ever accidentally recapitulate the scheming that is already observed in nature...? That’s such a grand, sweeping claim. If you really think it’s true, I just don’t understand your worldview. If you’ve already explained why somewhere, I hope someone will link me to it.

mike_hawke 10 Mar 2024 15:21 UTC
6 points
0
on: mike_hawke’s Shortform
Foregone mutually beneficial trades sometimes provide value in the form of plausible deniability.
If a subculture started trying to remove barriers to trade, for example by popularizing cheerful prices, this might have the downside of making plausible deniability more expensive. On net that might be good or bad (or weird), but either way I think it’s an underrated effect (because I also think that the prevalence and load-bearing functions of plausible deniability are also underrated). People have prospects and opportunity costs, often largely comprising things that are more comfortable to leave unsaid.
(Continuing from this comment.)

mike_hawke 6 Mar 2024 1:11 UTC
4 points
2
in reply to: Nora Belrose’s comment on: Counting arguments provide no evidence for AI doom
EDIT: This is wrong. See descendent comments.
I spent a bunch of time wondering how you could could put 99.9% on no AI ever doing anything that might be well-described as scheming for any reason. I was going to challenge you to list a handful of other claims that you had similar credence in, until I searched the comments for “0.1%” and found this one.
~~I’m annoyed at this, and I request that you prominently edit the OP.~~

mike_hawke 5 Mar 2024 7:40 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: TurnTrout’s comment on: Counting arguments provide no evidence for AI doom
I followed this exchange up until here and now I’m lost. Could you elaborate or paraphrase?

mike_hawke 4 Mar 2024 22:11 UTC
13 points
4
on: If you weren’t such an idiot...
I will push against.
I feel unhappy with this post, and not just because it called me an idiot. I think epithets and thoughtless dismissals are cheap and oversupplied. Patience and understanding are costly and undersupplied.
A lot of the seemingly easy wins in Mark’s list were not so easy for me. Becoming more patient helped me a lot, whereas internal vitriol made things worse.I benefitted hugely from Mr. Money Mustache, but I think I was slower to implement his recommendations because he kept calling me an idiot and literally telling me to punch myself in the face.
If a bunch of people get enduring benefits from adopting the “such an idiot” frame, then maybe I’ll change my mind. (They do have to be enduring though.)
Here is a meme I would be much happier to see spread:
You, yes you might be able to permanently lower the cost of exercise to yourself if you spend a few days’ worth of discretionary resources on sampling the sports in Mark Xu’s list. But if you do that and it doesn’t work, then ok, maybe you really are one of the metabolically underprivileged, and I hope you figure out some alternative.
Side notes:
- It seems like this post is in tension with Beware Other Optimizing. And perhaps also a bit with Do Life Hacks Ever Reach Fixation? Not exactly, because Mark’s list mostly relies on well-established life upgrades. But insofar as there is a tension here, I will tend to take the side of those two posts.
- Perhaps this is a needless derail, and if so I won’t press it, but I’m feeling some intense curiosity over whether Mark Xu and Critch would agree about whether Critch at all qualifies as an idiot. According to Raemon, Critch recently said, “There aren’t things lying around in my life that bother me because I always notice and deal with it.”
- I find something both cliche and fatalistic about the notion that lots of seemingly maladaptive behaviors are secretly rational. But indeed I have had to update quite a few times in that direction over the years since I first started reading LessWrong.

mike_hawke 4 Mar 2024 19:50 UTC
4 points
0
on: Increasing IQ is trivial
Thirteen points?! If I could get results like that, it would be even better than the CFAR handbook, which merely doubled my IQ.

mike_hawke 3 Mar 2024 4:39 UTC
1 point
on: A dozen habits that work for me
I made this comment about Raemon’s habit update. Here is my own habit update.
1. Still going great.
2. Started using a bidet instead. Heard these were bad for the plumbing anyway.
3. Still going strong with these. I do have an addiction to slack and discord, which is less bad but still problematic.
4. I fell off of both of these. The list seemed good so I’m rebooting it today. The controversy burning was good too, but mentally/emotionally taxing, so I’m not gonna restart it without some deliberate budgeting first.
5. I fell off of this. It was easier to stay away from tempting snacks when I didn’t work at an office full of them.
6. Yup, still doing this. It’s just good.
7. I kept this habit until I replaced it with life coach sessions which are on net much more helpful.
8. Still going strong with this one.
9. Yeah, so low that I quit entirely.
10. Still technically true, but I’m doing this less than once a week now.
11. Yup, except that I memorized my laundry list so I don’t need that one anymore.
12. Yes, still using these.

mike_hawke 3 Mar 2024 1:20 UTC
1 point
0
on: Rationality Research Report: Towards 10x OODA Looping?
They also attempt to generate principles to follow from, well, first principles, and see how many they correctly identify.
Second principles?
========
I’m really glad to see you quoting Three Levels. Seems important.

mike_hawke 29 Feb 2024 21:31 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: Sunset at Noon
I am compelled to express my disappointment that this comment was not posted more prominently.
Habit formation is important and underrated, and I see a lot of triumphant claims from a lot of people but I don’t actually see a lot of results that persuade me to change my habituation procedure. I myself have some successful years-old habits and I got them by a different process than what you’ve described. In particular, I skip twice all the time and it doesn’t kill my longterm momentum.
And I hope you’ll forgive the harshness if I harken back to point #4 of this comment.
What links here?
- mike_hawke's comment on A dozen habits that work for me by mike_hawke (3 Mar 2024 4:39 UTC; 1 point)

mike_hawke 29 Feb 2024 10:09 UTC
1 point
on: Your Cheerful Price
Q: Wait, does that mean that if I give you a Cheerful Price, I’m obligated to accept the same price again in the future?
No, because there may be aversive qualities of a task, or fun qualities of a task, that scale upward or downward with repeating that task. So the price that makes your inner voices feel cheerful about doing something once, is not necessarily the same price that makes you feel cheerful about doing it twenty times.
I feel like this needs a caveat about plausible deniability. Sometimes the price goes up or down for reasons that I don’t want to make too obvious. Like if it turns out you have bad breath, or if my opportunity cost involves mingling with attractive people, or if you behaved badly yesterday and our peergroup has wordlessly coordinated to lightly socially embargo you for a week and I don’t want to be seen violating that. Anticipating some complication like that (consciously or not), I might want to hedge my initial price, or if that’s mentally taxing, just weasel out of giving the cheerful price at all.
This is maybe all accounted for when you say that cheerful prices may not work for someone if Tell culture doesn’t work for them. I think plausible deniability tends to be pretty important though, even among nerds who virtue signal otherwise.
What links here?
- mike_hawke's comment on mike_hawke’s Shortform by mike_hawke (10 Mar 2024 15:21 UTC; 6 points)

mike_hawke

Foregone mutually beneficial trades sometimes provide value in the form of plausible deniability.