I’m bumping into walls but hey now I know what the maze looks like.
Neil
The smallest possible button (or: moth traps!)
If you are too stressed, walk away from the front lines
“Natural is better” is a valuable heuristic
Some rules for life (v.0,0)
You don’t get to have cool flaws
Consequentialism is a compass, not a judge
The Sequences on YouTube
[Question] How does it feel to switch from earn-to-give?
I’m French. Pétard is a very minor swear word, on par with “great Scott!”
It’s not meant as an insult at all. The most common French swear word is probably “putain” (used like “fuck” is) and pétard is used as an attenuated version, (like saying “fudge”).
(As a frenchman, I also admit to the existence of a writhing snake inside my gut telling me to downvote this heretical post which dares! compare French cuisine with German cuisine. Luckily, I have learned enough rationality to override my primal instincts.)
Privacy and writing
Taboo “procrastination”
Puffer-pope reality check
Politics are not serious by default
You can rack up massive amounts of data quickly by asking questions to all your friends
Detachment vs attachment [AI risk and mental health]
Very insightful post. Here are personal thoughts with low epistemic status and high rambling potential:
These all feel to me like corollaries to the belief “AGI is so important that I can’t gauge the value of anything else except in regards to how it affects AGI”. Hence: “everything else is meaningless because AGI will change everything soon” or “nobody around me is looking up at the meteor about to hit us and that makes me feel kind of insane. (*Cough* so I hang out with rationalists, whose entire shtick is learning how not to be insane)”.
As for other non-obvious effects: I personally feel some sort of perceived fragility around the whole field. There are arguments on this site for why AGI alignment should not be discussed in politics or why attempting to convince OpenAI or DeepMind employees to switch jobs can easily backfire (eg this post for caution advice). These make any outreach at all seem risky. There are also people I know wondering whether they should attempt to do anything at all relative to alignment, because they perceive themselves as probable dead weights. The relatively short timelines, the sheer scope, and the aura of impossibility around alignment seem to make people more cautious than they otherwise should be. Obviously the whole point of the field is to be cautious; but while it’s true that the tried-and-tested scientific method isn’t safe for AGI in general I’m not sure stressing the rationalist-tools solve-problems-before-you-experiment approach is healthy everywhere. So, caution is right there in the description of the field, but you have to make sure you contain it well so that it doesn’t infect places where you would do good to be reckless and use trial-and-error. I am probably quite wrong about this but I don’t see many people talking about it, so if there’s any reasonable doubt we should figure it out.
Alignment work should probably be perceived as less fragile. Unlike the AI field in general, alignment projects specifically don’t pose much of a risk to the world. So we can probably afford to be more loose here than elsewhere. In my experience alignment feels like a pack of delicate butterflies flying together, with every flap of wings sending dozens of comrades spiraling out of the sky, which might or might not set off a domino/Rube Goldberg machine that blows up the world.
Bonus song in I have been a good Bing: “Claude’s Anguish”, a 3-minute death-metal song whose lyrics were written by Claude when prompted with “how does the AI feel?”: https://app.suno.ai/song/40fb1218-18fa-434a-a708-1ce1e2051bc2/ (not for the faint of heart)
AI as a natural disaster
Interesting, thanks for posting that! One of the reasons I like this forum is because there are people running around on here who’ve read papers like “Salivary Digestion Extends the Range of Sugar-Aversions in the German Cockroach” and you get to talk to them for free.
So if I understand the abstract and skimmed paper so far, we’re seeing more saliva-based aversion to pure glucose because pure glucose is a superstimulus (the roaches still accept “complex glucose”), and human trap designs are fond of superstimuli, as cheap ways to radically increase the probability your trap works, so the traps are selecting for pure glucose aversion. Given how short insect reproduction cycles are and how many there are anyway, we’ll probably observe this kind of evolution everywhere, as well as every time we switch traps.
A functionality I’d like to see on LessWrong: the ability to give quick feedback for a post in the same way you can react to comments (click for image). When you strong-upvote or strong-downvote a post, a little popup menu appears offering you some basic feedback options. The feedback is private and can only be seen by the author.
I’ve often found myself drowning in downvotes or upvotes without knowing why. Karma is a one-dimensional measure, and writing public comments is a trivial inconvience: this is an attempt at middle ground, and I expect it to make post reception clearer.
See below my crude diagrams.