niplav
I mostly agree with what you wrote (especially the “all real thinking on the internet gets done in essay form” is very interesting, though I might push back against that a bit and point to really good comments, podcasts & forecasting platforms). I do endorse the negative sentiment around privately owned social media companies (as in me wishing them to burn in hell) for any purpose other than the most inane shitposting, and would prefer everyone interested in making intellectual progress to abandon them (yes, that also includes substacks).
Ahem.
I guess you approach the tweets by judging whether their content is useful to engage with qua content (“is it true or interesting what those people are saying?”, which, I agree with you, is not the case), as opposed to approaching it sociologically (“what does the things those people are saying predict about how they will vote & especially act in the future?”). Similarly, I might not care about how a barometer works, but I’d still want to use it to predict storms (I, in fact, care about knowing how barometers work, and just spend 15 minutes reading the Wikipedia article). The latter still strikes me as important, though I get the “ick” and “ugh” reaction against engaging in public relations, and I’m happy I’m obscure enough to not have to bother about it. But in the unlikely case a big newspaper would run a huge smear campaign against me, I’d want to know!
And then think hard about next steps: maybe hiring public relations people to deal with it? Or gracefully responding with a public clarification?
I pledge to match the bounty with $500.
It’s a good reason to be very straightforward with your beliefs, and being willing pulling numbers out of your ass! I’ve had situations where I’ve updated hard based on two dozen words, which wouldn’t have happened if I’d been more cagey about my beliefs or waited longer to “flesh them out”.
I have weak-downvoted this comment. I don’t know what generated it, but from the outside it looks to me like ignoring a very important aspect of reality (public opinion on the words “AI safety”) in favor of… not exactly sure what? Protecting tribal instincts?
In this case the quoting feels quite adequate to me, since the quotes are not necessarily endorsed, but examined as a phenomenon in the world, and its implications.
Random samples are valuable, even if small, the first data point carries the highest amount of information. Public opinion matters to some degree, I believe it matters a lot, and Twitter is a widely used platform, so it is decently representative of the public opinion on something (at least more representative than Lesswrong).
I opted out as well.
Thanks! I expect this to become the go-to resource to refer people to, and I hope this gets properly rewarded (I’m surprised at the small amount of upvotes: is LessWrong really that video-agnostic?)
Proposal: Instead of using numerator/denominator let’s use “upper number” and “lower number” when talking about parts of fractions—the words are shorter (fewer or as many syllables) and easier to understand.
This is a great format for a post.
I’m pretty proud of this and will take the option to brag a little :-)
I’ve found an integer sequence that is both meaningfully generateable and doesn’t occur in the OEIS (and superseeker also doesn’t find any way to generate it).
The first six integers in the sequence are 1,2,8,144,10752,3306240, any further ones are (for me at the moment) basically impossible to compute.
I’d be interested if anyone finds some interesting structure in the existing numbers, I’ve only noticed that they have surprisingly small prime factors.
I have a pretty boring terminological comment: as far as I understand, what you’re proposing is not a method of aligning (“directing”) AI systems, but for opposing them.
The future is usually “absurd”—it is unstable in its surface rules over fifty-year intervals.
I believe this is glossing over a very interesting and not at all obvious question while already providing an answer: What aspects of reality are stable in their surface rules for which time intervals?
There’s been some research into that question, but not enough to warrant such a strong statement.
I wonder whether this framework allows for meta-preferences to play a role. Maybe first-order logic constraints on the graph edits, or penalties for specific edits (e.g. removing edges is 1.5 times worse than adding edges…)
Turning Some Inconsistent Preferences into Consistent Ones
I’m somewhat interested in this mainly for nerd-sniped reasons, so take that into account :-)
If the size set of path graphs with minimal graph edit distance for our current preferences is 1, we are lucky and we don’t have to worry about making our preferences consistent in the “wrong” way (whatever that would mean). Maybe a way to conceptualize the size of that set is that is a measure of how confused our preferences are: if we already have consistent preferences, we have 0 confusion about our preferences, if the set of consistent preferences that could correspond to ours has size (if we have nodes in our graph), we are maximally confused.
I’ll have to think about your last paragraph—from the data I’ve collected it seems roughly correct, so props to you :-)
As inconsistent values preferences become more complex, does it become easier or harder to find consistent variants of those preferences that retain the maximal amount of information from before modification? Or is there no clear pattern?
Let be the set of all directed node-labeled graphs with nodes (modeling inconsistent preferences). Let be the set of path graphs over the same (labeled) nodes (modeling the consistent versions of those preferences). Let a turning of a graph be the set of graphs that has the minimal graph edit distance from (where only adding and removing edges is allowed). Now let be the set of graphs with nodes that have a turning of size .
What is the behavior of ?
(For a slightly deeper explanation see this text).
The average graph edit distance (only adding/removing edges) from the set of all labeled directed graphs with n nodes to a similarly labeled directed path graph decreases monotonically with n. The average graph edit distance (only adding/removing edges) from the set of all labeled directed graphs with n nodes to a similarly labeled directed path graph increases monotonically with n. The average graph edit distance (only adding/removing edges) from the set of all labeled directed graphs with n nodes to a similarly labeled directed path graph oscillates with no clear pattern with increasing n. (I plan on writing code to test this, I don’t think I’m good enough at mathematics to prove anything about it)
I weak-down voted your comment, mainly because it has an underlying movement that is very should-y (beware other-optimizing!), based on at best medium information about the writer. I believe you probably wouldn’t have made a similar comment about someone spending two months learning the piano?
I would like it to be the case that Lesswrong stays a place where overly math-heavy video game discussion is socially allowed, and not where everything that doesn’t reduce x-risk is frowned upon. Let people play during the apocalypse, they should enjoy their remaining time.
epistemic status: speculation backed by ~no reading
Asteroid mining is under-valued as an application of better rocket technology: clear economic advantage (rare metals that on earth have mostly accumulated in the core), no gravity wells to overcome, high potential for automation.
Compare to space colonisation: No economic advantage (instead probably a giant money-sink & a titanic public good), health problems galore (or planetary gravity wells humans want to get into & out of).
A potential problem with asteroid mining would be getting the mined material back onto earth: if we mine as much rare earths on asteroids as on earth right now per year (~250 kilotons), and dropped these onto earth, would the resulting energy be large enough to cause significant climate change? Or is it okay if we just drop the stuff into shallow oceans somewhere?
“Security” for me has the connotation of being explicitely in relation to malicious adversaries, while “safety” carries the connotation of heavy industrial machinery that must be made as accident-free as possible. As an example, “boat security” would be preventing people from stealing the boat, while “boat safety” would be measures intended to prevent people from falling off the boat. AI alignment (which I consider a very good term!) strikes me to be more about the latter than the former (if you have a superintelligent adversary, it might already be too late!).