Interested in math, Game Theory, etc.
Pattern
Karma: 2,110
You don’t want it to be relatively easy to an outside force. Otherwise they can lead it to do as they please, and writing weird behaviour off as ‘oh, it’s changed our rewards, reset it again’, poses some risk.
The initial statement seemed wrong.
awfully similar
I’ve seen stuff about this, but I don’t remember where. I remember stuff like (summarizing the idea):
How awfully convenient it seems to be, for the optimists and the pessimists.
The optimists say, the world is alright, or even, wonderful, awesome, and amazing! (We don’t have to do anything.)
The pessimists say, the world is awful, terrible, unspeakably bad—but we can’t do anything about it.
Either the work is done, or it can never begin.
I have more thoughts on depression.
In general, low-level boundaries will have lots of tiny interactions crossing them which don’t conceptually seem like “actions” or “observations”.
While this seems obviously true at a low enough level—wherefore art thou, nanotech? - viruses and the like mean that even if systems work well enough most of the time, sometimes they don’t keep interactions involving small parts from having big consequences. (Also, what causes cancer aside from smoke and ‘genetics’?)
I was just checking because the wording at the start:
We aim to make this paper
made me wonder if it already existed in other places and formats.
EDIT: I also read that and went, wow, this is going to be a long paper.
An error introduced in revision before posting, good catch.
Supposedly.
However, they don’t disseminate this art to all their citizens to the greatest possible extent. They teach it fully to just a select few, and teach everyone else a good chunk. Their reason for holding out on making most people into the best rationalists they can be … is that, as an unfortunate quirk of human psychology … becoming the best rationalist you can as quickly as you can is not the most fun path you can chart through your life.
Definitely not out of a desire for power, or a preference for created* a united technocratic elite, or selfishly securing fun for themselves.
*(preference for) creating, or maintaining. It’s also an ongoing process.
an unfortunate quirk of human psychology
Because everyone is exactly the same? No. (And that’s without getting into ‘do some people like math, and others dislike it, or does that have to do with the education system?’)
‘Holding out’ means that something is off.
Those who say “That which can be destroyed by the truth should be” may continue to walk the Path from there. But not uncommonly, even somebody who sets out along that Path, turns back at some point, and well short of becoming a Keeper.
This sounds like it was written by someone who doesn’t recognize that there are other purposes. (The argument being made is not that ‘there are diminishing returns’ - instead it’s that there are costs (and not from time).)
comparative advantages there—in how little they’ll be hurt by knowing themselves
If you never learn how to use a knife because you might hurt yourself, then
you are a danger. What happens if you get your hands on a knife?
Except a person who doesn’t know how to use a knife isn’t that dangerous.
You are a fool
and are grateful for winning the comparative-advantage lottery.
There’s this idea that this is better.
a little more human,
And also that Keepers are less human. Perhaps the two are in conflict.
That’s a sad tradeoff and I wish it didn’t exist.
What if there is a way beyond that?
What you are willing to trade off, will sometimes get traded away—a dire warning in full generality.
And What you trade away, may not be necessary to trade away, in general. (‘Alas! Campbell’s curse will strike us if we optimize!’ ‘Why?’ ‘Because of factors we don’t know.’ ‘So, why not just learn about more factors, so you don’t run into that problem?’ ‘It’s not that simple.’ ‘If you increase the amount you spend on things, and that increases the quality, then decreases it, then sharply increases it again and then decreases it, why not just make the jump to the best part you can reach, and avoid the worse regions, the dips?’)
*simon’s comments on the scenario listed only 40,000 denarii of interventions. His score here reflects only those. Sorry, simon. At least you saved the Emperor money while still hitting most of the valuable interventions!
So people were only able to use any type of protection for a given province once. (Like, no extra grain shipments?)
Does this paper appear somewhere else?
I’m interested if there’s a blog you write about this elsewhere, or if it’s in a pdf anywhere.
Edit: added word (see comments below for details).
I guess there’s not a lot of clickthrough? Wait, the link is to the EA forum. Okay, still, that’s weird.
That’s not where I expected this was going to go. (Wasn’t there some sort of microgrants project somewhere ahile back? I don’t know if that was EA, but...)
It’s also relevant when libraries keep copies of stuff, like newspapers. (If I disagreed with that as a solution, it might have less to do with the choice of newspapers, and more with ‘is this just physical media?’ At the same time, it can be hard to tell the size of a digital collection. The presence or absence isn’t clear at a glance.)
Now I’m wondering how this compares to stuff like Library Genesis.
I wouldn’t have connected breadth and recursion. (I’d have just thought, well, self-calling.)
How would public media outlets need to be governed to cover all political views?
This is an interesting question.
How could EU-funded public media be governed so that it will represent voices from the full pluralism of opinions of people?
Oh, public. Hm. How do libraries stay neutral?
Does GreaterWrong do any of those?
I do find the green-on-black a bit garish sometimes,
I feel like this is the case for red. I don’t know why people didn’t like that on gwern.net.
That’s funny, I remember getting that effect from trying to get dark mode using a tool before this (instead of the theme).
here’s how Dath Ilan works and why it’s good
It does not seems like there will be straight answers to that:
It’s the story of Keltham, from the world of dath ilan; a place of high scientific achievement but rather innocent in some ways. For mysterious reasons they’ve screened off their own past, and very few now know what their prescientific history was like.
What was the project which predicted deaths from covid?
If you don’t want all of that in the title, something like
RL with Human Feedback (RLHF)
makes it more clear what it’s about, and I think a lot of people will know what RL is here. (Although with and from may have different meanings and be different things in this space.)